Read Online Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges - Free Book Online

Republic ’s Peter Beinart, joining the calls for war by the liberal class, wrote a book called The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again .
     
    At the start of the war, Slaughter, then dean of the Woodrow Wilson School and president of the American Society of International Law (as of this writing, she is now director of Policy Planning for the U.S. Department of State), wrote in Foreign Affairs that “the world cannot afford to look the other way when faced with the prospect, as in Iraq, of a brutal ruler acquiring nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction”:
    Addressing this danger requires a different strategy, one that maximizes the chances of early and effective collective action. In this regard, and in comparison to the changes that are taking place in the area of intervention for the purposes of humanitarian protection, the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough. 17
     
     
     
    Ignatieff told the Guardian newspaper at the start of the war:
    I still think that Bush is right when he says Iraq would be better off if Saddam were disarmed and, if necessary, replaced by force. . . . Ideology cannot help us here. In the weeks and years ahead, the choices are not about who we are or what company we should keep nor even about what we think America is or should be. They are about what risks are worth running, when our safety depends on the answer, and when the freedom of 25 million people hangs in the balance. 18
     
     
     
    Ignatieff, defending the invasion on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross in March 2003, laid out the classic arguments of the liberal class. He insisted that war was a humanitarian action, that he supported the war with a heavy heart, but that there was no other option. This humanitarian and moral coloring to war, the insistence that the motives of the war-makers is virtuous, is the primary function of the liberal class, the reason the power elite tolerates its existence.
     
    The liberal class played the same function during the war in Vietnam. War becomes a necessary evil. The rhetoric of the liberal class, however, mocks the brutal reality of war. Most liberals, including Ignatieff, have never been in combat. Their children rarely serve in the military. They neither know nor understand the destructive power of modern weaponry or the propensity on the part of armed combatants, whose fear and paranoia are raised to a fever pitch, to shoot any person, armed or unarmed, or obliterate whole villages in air strikes, if they feel threatened. Ignatieff’s assertion at the time that “the only real chance that Iraq has to become a decent society is through American force of arms” is, when juxtaposed with the reality of industrial warfare, little different from the cruder propaganda disseminated by the Bush White House. 19 He and the liberal class joined the Bush administration in carrying out a project that under international law was illegal and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, far more than had ever been slaughtered by Saddam Hussein, and thousands more Afghani and Pakistani civilians. The wars in the Middle East have also driven several million Iraqis, Pakistanis, and Afghanis into squalid displacement and refugee camps. War and violence, as instruments of virtue, are a contradiction in terms. But you can’t fully grasp this unless you have been in combat, and combat is something the liberal class has been able to hand off to the working class since World War II.
     
    The solitary voices of dissent that condemned the war at its inception were attacked as fiercely by the liberal class as by the right wing. When documentary filmmaker Michael Moore accepted the Oscar for his film Bowling for Columbine on March 23, 2003, he used the occasion to denounce the war, which had begun a few days earlier, as well as the legitimacy of the Bush