While Andrew Sullivan laments that Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett might be correct in their analysis of the strength and resilience of the Iranian regime vis-a-vis the Green movement, Sullivan nevertheless accuses the pair of being ”gleeful” in tone while mustering evidence of the soundness of their predictions as compared to those of their critics and opposing viewpoints. Daniel Larison rejects the accusation and insinuation.
Jim Henley, however, provides insightful, honest, explication of the relevant phenomenon – one of a fine writer’s finer efforts of late. I would excerpt it all if etiquette allowed, but instead I’ll provide a taste:
I agree that Sully’s critique is of a piece with anti-anti-war complaints after the Iraq conquest went sour, and that’s to his discredit. Some lessons, and Andrew has learned a lot about jingoism over the last decade, are hard ones. That said, I don’t think Larison offers a complete account of the complex of emotions involved in these kinds of disputes.
We doves got accused of glee-like emotional activities a lot from 2003-7, for the offense of demonstrating that hawks were fools and knaves. Hawks prated about “glee” because they didn’t have any better arguments. All they could do was slander their opponents. It had always been their core competence anyway.
But it would be a lie to pretend we doves never enjoyed our work. Do you think I didn’t have any fun at all explicating the absurdity of the arguments for starting and continuing the conquest of Iraq, digging into the monthly electricity statistics, cataloguing the endless examples of RSN Syndrome or explicating the government’s transparent lies about torture and treatment of civilians? People. I did that for six years. Nobody puts that much effort into something that isn’t satisfying on some level. Of course it was fun, for certain grim and bitter kinds of “fun.”
The above is the paragraph that hostile critics could excerpt out of context if such people still bothered to read me. Here’s the rest of the story. The kind of “glee” I discuss above is inescapably endemic to intellectuals, where an “intellectual” is merely someone who cares enough about ideas to bother arguing about them on a sustained basis…There is nothing, nothing, quite like the combination of satisfaction and aggression that comes from being right about something you care a great deal about, and we were right. You bet your ass that was “fun.”
This is not praiseworthy, because what we were right about was human evil, folly and suffering, so our satisfaction necessarily stemmed from a record of failure and misery. In Christian terms, it’s a sin of pride. (In secular terms, it’s just obnoxious.) But it’s how intellectual work ever gets done. And it not only “isn’t the whole story,” it’s not the whole story in important ways.
The reason doves engaged this particular issue was because doves wanted to prevent war crimes and the moral degradation and human waste that attend them, and then to contain and curtail those things – to prevent an illegitimate and stupid war in Iraq; failing that, to end it and avoid repeating it elsewhere. Doves did not want soldiers to be reft from their families, civilians gunned down at checkpoints, cities gutted by artillery shells and white phosphorus, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted or stolen, millions of people displaced from their homes, one nation devastated and another manic with aggression and self-pity. All this will come to pass, doves warned, and were laughed at, and then it came to pass. The petty satisfaction of “I told you so” was real, but bitterly inadequate to the grief and rage at seeing what we’d tried to prevent, happen.
Do read the rest.
(Larison’s response is also fitting)
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