Rethinking Things

In a reflection on last year’s politics, Rahul Mahajan posted over on Empire Notes that

‘we must reinvigorate a disoriented antiwar movement’. His thought was that:

We needn’t concentrate so much on telling people what they already know, or on debating the specifics of withdrawal plans with Nancy Pelosi and Donald Rumsfeld; rather, we need to use the occupation of Iraq to show what is wrong with U.S. political culture and with the U.S. role in the world – and also, most crucially, to start articulating a different vision for both of those things.

It’s no doubt true that the antiwar movement could use a radical rethink. Why was it stronger before the war began than after it started? Why has it fizzled out and split up? Is/was its come-one-come-all approach a beneficial way of expanding numbers, or did it lead to a certain message and organizational paralysis? These are all serious questions.

But there is perhaps a more fundamental question, which Mahajan’s post raises. Why start with the occupation of Iraq, and what, exactly does it mean to ‘show what is wrong with U.S. political culture’? Mahajan is taking these starting points for granted, when they are what needs to be challenged. The occupation of Iraq has become almost a distraction from the kind of serious rethinking Mahajan is talking about because it is so easy to trot out shopworn anti-imperialism critiques. The problem is not so much that it is wrong to object to imperialism, but that falling back on old categories short-circuits real thinking about the present. All the attention on Iraq is actually diverting attention away from the real political pressure point: the war on terror. If we are going to ‘show what is wrong with U.S. political culture’ it is not our excess consumption, or addiction to oil, or nationalism, or any of these things. Rather, it is the elevation of security to a political ideal, and the willingness to sanction any form of government intervention so long as it reduces even the most infinitesimal threat. That is what the war on terror is about, and what the Iraq War is a moment in. It is this tendency that is worth challenging, not just the Iraq war and its ostensible imperial pretensions.