The Weblog: Adam Kotsko

Thursday, June 23, 2005

(8:11 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

From dissenting speech to undermining speech

There has been some discussion of late in conservative media circles about certain types of "liberal" or "left-wing" speech that cross the line from "dissent" to "undermining." I'd like to set the record straight on this matter.

As a card-carrying member of the ACLU (quite literally card-carrying), I think that I easily qualify as a bomb-throwing leftist for the purposes of this discussion. And I can testify that my friends and I were consistently disappointed that our scathing critiques of the war in Iraq consistently failed to affect the outcome. We had some of the scathingest critiques thinkable by the human mind, to wit:

1. President Bush decided to invade Iraq even before he was elected and shamefully manipulated a grieving and frightened American populace into a war that was completely unconnected to 9/11.
   
2. Every stated reason for the war, by the administration and by members of the mainstream media elite, is false -- in point of fact, it was motivated by a quest for vengeance against the rebellious former client Saddam, combined with a desire to tighten the US stranglehold on Mideast oil reserves in the face of explosive economic growth in China.
   
3. The war proceeded with the most slapdash planning available, ignoring the opinion of those who have spent their career studying and implementing military ventures, in favor of the outlandish fantasies of men whose intellectual nourishment consists of a heady cocktail of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss, and Tim LaHaye.
   
4. The government deliberately put the troops in harm's way without adequate armor and more importantly, without adequate knowledge of the goals of the occupation, which had to remain a secret, lest it offend the basic human decency of the majority of American citizens.
   
5. The administration promoted brutal and immoral policies of interrogation, characterized by arbitrary indefinite detention and tortue, even of those prisoners believed to be factually innocent of any crime.