The Baker Temptation

DeLong links to Joshua Micah Marshall's essay "The Orwell Temptation." Again. It sort of sums up the left's anti-war/peace faction's  views. I'll quote the last three paragraphs.

For intellectuals, however, there is always a temptation to take momentous, morally serious questions and make them out to be slightly more momentous and world-historical than they really are. Call it the Orwellian temptation. George Orwell not only epitomized what an intellectual can and should be. He has also become the symbol of the role the best intellectuals played in those critical mid-century years. Along the way, however, the image he cast--or rather his ghost, or his shade--has also become part of the pornography of intellectuals. Berman has given way to this craving.

Terror and Liberalism ends with an injunction to stamp out the bacillus of nihilism and totalitarianism in the Muslim world because our safety is incompatible with their continued existence. "In the anti-nihilist system," Berman writes, "freedom for others means safety for ourselves. Let us be for the freedom of others." Given the increasingly small, integrated world we now live in, this may well be correct; our safety and well-being, let alone the perpetuation of our values, are probably incompatible with abandoning a large swath of humanity to a field of poverty, fanaticism, and oppression that is a breeding ground for virulent extremism which can, in turn, lash out against the rest of the world.

Recalling those vivid images of the Twin Towers' collapse, it is uncomfortable to have to argue that someone is overstating the danger of radical Islam. Nevertheless, to confront the very real threat we face, nothing is more important than seeing that danger for what it is--not through the distorting prism of our grandparents' world. We have now toppled one of the worst regimes in the region. We have a foothold in the heartland of Islam. We have to decide how to proceed. Do we declare all-out war with much of the Muslim world or craft an approach more narrowly tailored to secure our safety and advance their freedom? Grandiose visions beget grandiose actions, which often end tragically. And grandiosity is a sin of intellectuals, too.

This past week, Glen Greenwald linked to Digby who noted mainstream commentator Fareed Zakaria said something many in the peace faction believe:

Since the resignation of General Stanley McChrystal as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan and CIA Director Leon Panetta's admission a week ago that there may be no more than fifty to a hundred al-Qaeda members in that nation, there have been increasing signs of a loss of support for the Afghan War.

Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek's international editions and CNN host, criticized the war in his strongest terms yet on his CNN program Sunday. "If Al Qaeda is down to a hundred men there at the most," Zakaria asked, "why are we fighting a major war?"

Noting that there were more than a hundred deaths among NATO soldiers last month and that the war is estimated to cost the US more than $100 billion this year alone, Zararia wondered again,"Why are we fighting this major war against the Taliban? ... If al-Qaeda itself is so weak, why are we fighting against its allies so ferociously?"

"The whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate," Zakaria remarked, "a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem."

It could be that they're down to those low numbers because of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. McChrystal certainly killed a lot of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Marshall suggests there's an "all-out" war against the Muslim world, but that's not the case. There's a civil war in the Muslim world.

For the past two years Pakistan's troops* have been fighting the Taliban in North Waziristan, after success in South Waziristan and the Swat valley. "Much like the challenge facing American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, an absence of Pakistani civilian authority has made it nearly impossible to consolidate military gains."

Coincidently, a story in the New York Times today reports on the discovery of a hidden cache at General Mladic's Belgrade home.

The find -- 18 notebooks of General Mladic’s wartime military diaries, 120 sound recordings, cellphone cards, computer memory sticks and a pile of documents -- provides some of the most compelling evidence yet of the close, top-level coordination of the Bosnian Serb Army and Serbia, a connection both parties always denied.

...

Inevitably, they would also serve the trial of General Mladic, if there is one. On the run for more than a decade, he is reported to be in Serbia, moving among different hiding places, protected by loyal followers.

But the diaries offer no details of Srebrenica, according to Frederick Swinnen, an adviser to the prosecutor. Fifteen years ago Sunday, Bosnian Serb troops under General Mladic’s command, assisted by Serbian Special Forces, overran a small contingent of United Nations peacekeepers there and seized the Muslim enclave. Over the following days, they deported women and children and executed close to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

I distinctly remember the anti-war/peace faction at the time arguing that the Bosnian Muslims should be left to their fate, that we shouldn't offend Russia, that we shouldn't risk another quagmire like Vietnam. So if it's true that some intellectuals can suffer from the "Orwell Temptation" what would you call it's opposite or inverse?

I would suggest calling it the "Baker Temptation" after Poppy Bush's Secretary of State James Baker - the man who adroitly won George Bush's election in 2000 - who in reference to the Bosnian wars famously said "we don't have a dog in this fight." But pace the anti-war/peace faction, we do have a dog in the fight occurring  in the Muslim world, a civil war between the more liberal, moderate modernizers and the extremists like al-Qaeda. Yes, the extremists aren't a threat on the scale of a Hitler's Germany, so of course we shouldn't overreact and, say, legalize torture and transform into a paranoid police/surveillance state devoid of civil liberties.
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* "More than 2,000 troops have been killed in the last two years fighting the Pakistani Taliban, the military says."