Doug Henwood wrote: > Louis Proyect wrote: > > >>Right. Our "intelligentsia": Christopher Hitchens, Marc Cooper, >>Michael Berube, George Packer and all the others who would have been >>writing articles in 1914 had they been alive in favor of stopping >>the Hun. > > > Marc Cooper wrote this in the LA Weekly for August 16-20: > > <snip happens>
and for a different view of this nimble chameleon: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=4&ItemID=1387 Marc Cooper strenously criticizes Pinochet, but he supported both the Kosovo war and the attack on Afghanistan. Cooper was angry with William Blum for citing the "totally unverified and unscientific" body count by Mark Herold of over 3,500 Afghan civilian casualties of U.S. bombing raids. It is doubtful that Cooper made a serious study of Herold's methodology, and he expresses no anger whatsoever that once again the Pentagon has made no count of its own and in fact actively prevented verification on the scene. Cooper cites a figure of 500 for civilian casualties in Serbia, which is traceable to Kenneth Roth and Human Rights Watch; a figure at the low end of such estimates and made by a body increasingly funded by NATO governments and George Soros and with multiple U.S. official board affiliations (Roth's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Indict Saddam" [March 22, 2002] is an obvious and cynical bid for a closer alliance with the Bush human rights administration.) http://www.zmag.org/wisenaive.htm Or Marc Cooper, who recently suggested that antiwar protesters might suffer from self-hatred, and who accused us of claiming that the U.S. invited the attacks of the 11th, merely because we dare point out the truism that certain of our policies might have something to do with the motivation for flying 757�s into buildings. The difference between explanation and excuse apparently having escaped him, and the good counsel of a Thesaurus that might explain the difference apparently being out of his reach, Cooper insists that the left should embrace limited military action (the substance of which he leaves undefined) as a "moral imperative." http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1031-02.htm Even in the Bay Area -- the American left's base and home of the sole Congress member to vote against war authorization -- division is evident. The Berkeley City Council voted 5-4 to call for a halt in the war, but paper flags are pasted on the windows of many homes there. And even some left-wing journalists have criticized today's anti-war activists; Marc Cooper, in a recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, called the first major peace rally ``a self-caricature of an American left that has struggled unsuccessfully since the attacks to find its proper national voice and posture.'' So why does much of the left look, in Cooper's words, ``traumatized and dysfunctional''? Because anti-war absolutists cannot leave behind the melodramatic imagination of noble white hats in the ``Third World'' at war with imperial black hats. They have a hard time seeing America as a wounded party and seeing totalitarian Islamist groups like Al-Qaida as world-class menaces. http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2001-December/000970.html LA Weekly December 21 - 27, 2001 Who's Bin Smokin' What? Their blowback . . . and ours by Marc Cooper <...> In that vein, it was barely a month ago that my colleague Charles Rappleye wrote in these pages: "Our current military misadventure in the hostile environs of Afghanistan is bogging down on the eve of the holiest days of the Muslim calendar . . . The U.S. should seize the high ground and stop the bombing for Ramadan." Which means that the bombing would have been halted for 30 days - right up until last weekend. The U.S. military, fortunately, ignored his advice. Instead of a bombing pause, we have collapsed the Taliban, driven them from power and wiped out their military. Al Qaeda's operative base in Afghanistan has been dismembered, and its fighters have been defeated in their last holdouts. Just about every other dire prediction made by the anti-war folks has also failed to materialize: Fundamentalist demonstrations in Pakistan have withered, not grown, and that country's fragile government has not collapsed. The fabled "Arab street" has not erupted, and there are no new legions of pro-Osama fighters mushrooming in the region. Nor did the Afghan people rally to unite and defeat the American invaders. Instead, they came into the streets flying kites, unearthing their Tali-banned radios and phonographs, and sending their daughters to re-register in the medical schools from which they had been barred. So much for predictions of a "U.S. genocide." For the first time in more than a decade, the Afghan refugee flow seems to be reversing as the diaspora starts trickling home and sensing a scintilla of hope - or at least improved European and American economic assistance. <...> --------------------------- reading the last piece in its entirety (rather than just the section i have included above) shows that cooper attempts to present a reasonable view; except i am not entirely sure his reasoning is honest. he uses the unintended consequence of the US attack on afghanistan (i.e., some relaxation of the controls on the afghani people) as a justification for the illegal/immoral act itself. --ravi
