On 9/15/13 10:22 PM, ken hanly wrote: > This would still show that the author of the article is mistaken in > thinking that the GLobal Left always opposes any sort of intervention. > Perhaps few people dispute with you because they do not find it > worth while.
A large part of the problem is terminology. Naiman described the Russia-USA agreement as a form of intervention but the Global Left, whatever that amounts to, views it as a victory for non-intervention. I doubt that someone like Phyllis Bennis is going to be up in arms over Syria's right to stockpile sarin gas, etc. The overwhelming consensus is that there has been a partial victory for those who advocate "non-intervention", which for most on the left is equated to cruise missile strikes, B-52 bombings, etc. But to avoid confusion, I should not have included the paragraph he seized on since that was not the sort of analysis that I found striking in the article. I was far more interested in this: >>Perhaps most disturbing of all, some have attempted to “apply” the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the Syrian situation, or at least read the latter through the lens of the former. It has evidently escaped this group that the very same discourse at the core of George W. Bush’s ideological mantra has been reconstructed to the letter by the Syrian regime and its allies. It has gotten to the point that you can find a full sentence from one of Bush’s speeches on the war against terror in the mouth of either Hizbollah’s Secretary-General (who, at long last, is obsessed with the “takfiris”), or select leaders of the secular Arab left. In the name of resistance to the military strike, the Bush discourse thus flutters between lines spoken by leftists who fought the Iraqi invasion tooth and nail. Perhaps the neoconservatives’ spirit has finally possessed them.<< I observed the same phenomenon as early as July 2012 when I wrote a piece titled http://louisproyect.org/2012/07/23/libya-syria-and-left-islamophobia/. Here's a snippet: In his brilliant analysis of leftist hostility to the revolutions in Libya and Syria titled Blanket Thinkers, Robin Yassin-Kassab described the way that the Syrian rebels are viewed in those quarters: "They are also depicted as wild Muslims, bearded and hijabbed, who do not deserve democracy or rights because they are too backward to use them properly. Give them democracy and they’ll vote for the Muslim Brotherhood, and slaughter the Alawis and drive the Christians to Beirut." Exactly. This has been on my radar screen ever since the struggle against Qaddafi got off the ground, but Yassin-Kassab’s article persuaded me to investigate a bit further. Basically what seems to be taking place is a hatred for Islamism that is reminiscent of what we heard from Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman during the heights of the war in Iraq, but deployed on behalf of an “anti-imperialist” narrative. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
