Inside the Current Issue

The 'War on Terror' and the Class War at Home

Book Review: Blood in the Sand: Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy by Stephen Eric Bronner. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. 207pp.

Jason Schulman

There has been a plethora of books on U.S. foreign policy since 9/11, but Stephen Eric Bronner - Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and German Studies at Rutgers University - has written what may be the best. Few Advocate readers will argue with most of Bronner's judgments regarding the hollow nature of Bush administration's rhetoric about "democracy" and "freedom" and the entirely predictable results of its imperialist adventure in Iraq. Few of us are likely to dispute Bronner's understanding of the neoconservative agenda, both in theory and practice. What makes Blood in the Sand a particularly worthwhile read are its insights regarding the dominant American political culture, its description of life in Baghdad shortly before the U.S. bombs began to drop, its traversing of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and its outlining of a "democratic understanding of foreign policy."

One wonders how many Americans still believe that "9/11 changed everything." Bronner makes clear that it didn't change anything geopolitically significant, save that it congealed and legitimated "the most reactionary and militaristic tendencies of American history." Without justifying Al Qaeda's assault on the World Trade Center, or Political Islam generally, Bronner decries how the moment for critical reflection on "why there are some who do not view the United States as the land of liberty" passed so quickly. The Bush administration was quick to manipulate public fears - remember how the colors of the terror alerts kept shifting? - in order to whip up support for an interminable "war on terror" and to both justify and obscure a domestic war on civil liberties and social welfare. As Bronner rightly notes, not enough people (the GC's Frances Fox Piven aside) have explained the intertwining of Bush's agendas at home and abroad.

Most of the chapters of this book originally appeared in the online journal Logos. In one online article, reprinted here, Bronner gave "provisional support" to the U.S. military attack on Afghanistan, which he argues was a legitimate response to the World Trade Center attack, given that the link between the Taliban and Osama bin Laden was "crystal clear" and "negotiations were not being carried on in good faith." Perhaps not. But I believe that Bronner offered too much faith in the likelihood that this particular "police action," as he calls it, would do much to curtail terrorism. (Ironically, he does this in an essay that discusses Ghandi.) Terrorist operatives are extremely decentralized and their cells, if American intelligence is correct, are extremely autonomous; as Joseph Schwartz once put it, "sleeper cells" do not wait for orders from Al Qaeda central. Hence, it was never likely that military force in Afghanistan was going to contribute to American safety. Bronner himself notes the revival of the Taliban "amid the armed conflicts between tribal chieftains and drug lords" and the lack of a deep American commitment to reconstruction. And a repeat of the USSR's experience - where the Soviets and their allies rapidly conquered the cities in 1980, only to lose control via guerrilla war in the countryside - is hardly out of the question.

Of course, Bronner, like most of the Left, opposed the "liberation" of Iraq, and was correct to do so. His "Baghdad Memories" essay, written after a weeklong trip to Iraq with U.S. Academicians Against War, is both moving in its account of a country ravaged by war, sanctions and dictatorship, and sagacious in its expectation that U.S. invasion would lead to "a maelstrom in the region." As Bill Gallagher of the Niagara Falls Reporter recently put it, there is no "good news" in Iraq. The Iraq war becomes a greater tragedy, and a greater crime, with each passing day. The much-vaunted recent Iraqi elections - which resulted in the pro-Iranian-mullah Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq assuming office - can provide no retroactive justification for the war and occupation. Over 2,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed and, according to Andrew Cockburn of the British Independent, the "conservative" estimate is that 180,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. As Bronner notes, all of the Bush administration's assertions and expectations regarding Iraq have proven wrong, the CIA has acted as a "foreign ministry of spin" protecting Bush from domestic criticism, while Congressional Democrats have largely refused to serve as a source of significant opposition. Bronner is right to point out that the Democrats' pathological fear of appearing "soft" or "weak" will not help them to win a single national election; all it can do is undermine the loyalty of their base. And as the U.S. appears more and more like what Bronner calls "a one-party state ruled by shifting administrative factions," the Democrats are largely complicit.

Of course, the Democrats are traditionally the "pro-Israel" party, even as much has been made of neoconservatives as supposedly representing a wing of Likud in the Republican Party. Bronner is no Zionist, but his belief that any negotiated solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict "will undoubtedly use the Geneva Initiative as its framework" and will not sit well with certain quarters of the Left and the Palestine solidarity movement. But Bronner, taking into account left-wing criticism of the Geneva Initiative, believes that there is no way to make the dream of a binational state real. Sadly, he is probably right, even as Israel's status as a "Jewish state" becomes increasingly untenable as its Arab population continues to rise and Israel's refusal to discuss the Palestinian right of return, as well as its refusal to retreat to its pre-1967 borders, prevents the possibility of a just peace.

The most enjoyable chapter of Blood in the Sand is co-written by Kurt Jacobsen, author of Maverick Voices: Conversations with Political and Cultural Rebels (2004), and it deservedly rips the liberals and social democrats who supported the Iraq War to shreds. Given how obvious it was to most Leftists that the war was going to be a humanitarian disaster, one wonders where these ostensibly critical-minded intellectuals - a number of whom, it must be said, belong to the editorial board of the erstwhile socialist journal Dissent - lost their intellectual faculties. For most of these "liberal hawks," Al Qaeda and Hussein - regardless of the presence or absence of a connection between the two - represented the barbarians at the gates: it was 1939 all over again. Never mind that any sane Leftist understood that the idea of the Bush administration liberating anyone was a cruel joke. Never mind that Islamists will never, ever come to power in liberal-democratic societies (least of all the United States!). And never mind that all the fuss about the "new" anti-Semitism is really so much blather. Bronner, who knows a little something about anti-Semitism (he wrote A Rumor About the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"), makes it plain: "there is no anti-Semitic movement in any of the democracies with any serious possibility of attaining power." To argue otherwise is to end up in bed with reactionaries in both the U.S. and Israel.

Admittedly, Bronner has no grand strategy for beating back hard-right governments in the U.S. or Israel. Here in the U.S. the immediate task is to hammer the Democratic Party from the left to prevent it from selling out its base and to demand transparency in the making of foreign policy, and in our political institutions generally. But Bronner's explication of this need for transparency - for the subordination of foreign policy to democratic norms, as he puts it - is alone enough to justify Blood in the Sand. If nothing else, in a world filled with "cruise missile liberals" and "socialists" making alliances with Political Islamists, it represents an anti-imperialist worldview which is both genuinely democratic and Leftist.

Jason Schulman is a Ph.D. student in the Political Science program and is on the editorial board of New Politics (newpol.org).