You Gotta Own That
I’ve never actually read How Would a Patriot Act, or assessed the claims that Glenn was pro-Iraq War, until today:
During the lead-up to the invasion, I was concerned that the hell-bent focus on invading Iraq was being driven by agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks. The overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak, particularly given that it would lead to an open-ended, incalculably costly, and intensely risky preemptive war. Around the same time, it was revealed that an invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein had been high on the agenda of various senior administration officials long before September 11. Despite these doubts, concerns, and grounds for ambivalence, I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration. Between the president’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.
It is not desirable or fulfilling to realize that one does not trust one’s own government and must disbelieve its statements, and I tried, along with scores of others, to avoid making that choice until the facts no longer permitted such logic.
Setting aside the obvious, overwhelming contradictions in the first paragraph, I gotta wonder; why should anyone ever take seriously a person who wrote the sentence “I believed that the President was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country?” It’s actually quite a bit worse than “I thought Iraq had WMD,” or “I believed in the possibility for Iraqi democracy,” or “I believe we need to throw a little country against a wall every now and then.” All those are wrong, but they at least involve independent, engaged political thought; “I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to” is, in effect, an abdication of the duties of citizenship. Glenn insists that the claim that he supported the Iraq War is a lie; seems to me that “deferred to” and “accepted his judgment” rather clearly indicate support. You gotta own that shit, Glenn.
The first paragraph is also rich; a seventh-grade belief in the notion that the American Republic was fine, dandy, and largely self-balancing until the “creeping extremism” of the last decade. I suppose I’d find this less irritating had Glenn not spent the day delivering tirades against fellow Iraq War supporters with characteristic bombast.
By the way, how’s that “swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan” thing doing?
That jumped out at me too. Apparently the Taliban is out of Afghanistan, why are we still there?
But more damning, isn’t “. . . it was revealed that an invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein had been high on the agenda of various senior administration officials long before September 11″ enough to trump any vague bullshit about entitled trust that should be given? Going to war was the case that Glenn decided to dump his strict, logical approach to inquiry and instead appeal to blind patriotism? WTF?
This is the second most annoying ‘I was wrong about Iraq’ thing I’ve ever read finishing well behind Sullivan’s condescending piece of shit where he basically said even though I was wrong I’m a better person than those who were right. Btw, anybody who has a link to Sully’s piece (the very first one he admitted his error) please post — new computer a few years ago and lost the bookmark.
I’d like to nominate Jon Chait (who I usually quite like) for most obnoxious “I was wrong” piece. It’s all about how he was wrong for the right reasons and how the folks who rightly(!) opposed the war were soft headed and unserious.
Hey, if you’re grading on a curve, a twelve-year attempt without clear success is “swift”…
You mean the Good War, Lee?
And does Glenn Greenwald gotta own this, too?
GOD DAMN YOU, GREENWALD!!!
~
You’re giving him too much (little?) credit.
He’s speaking about it this way in the past tense for a reason. He probably had better reasons for supporting it now but he’s using a stupid lawyer’s trick where basically he sets his own past self up as a straw-man of his current opponents. The point isn’t to be an honest assessment of his judgement but to attack the people he disagrees with as naive drones while appearing to be humble.
Basically this passage just demonstrates that he has always been as dishonest as he is now.
You’ll see, once we capture Uday and Kusay, we’re gonna turn this thing right around.
attack the people he disagrees with as naive drones
I see what you did there…
I would agree that this is probably what he is doing, but I think that it’s a miserable failure of a performance. Because the main thing I get out of this passage is that if I take it at face value, it’s hard to see how I could possibly view Greenwald as someone with opinions worth paying attention to.
a stupid lawyer’s trick
Being somewhat familiar with those, I suspect that beneath much of his present-day disclamers is some subtle distinction between “supporting” and “not opposing” the war
This has always been a major problem with Greenwald. My frazzled brain can’t remember the name of this particular logical fallacy, but it’s the one that says small differences in situation can support massive differences in attitude. Greenwald’s always held that the English language is best used in the most precise and pedantic manner possible, unless you’re Glenn Greenwald.
I’m neither a fan of splitting hairs in language, nor of overblown rhetorical bombast, but it’s Greenwald’s refusal realise the two are mutually incompatible that can make him so difficult to read.
Reading the opening of that excerpt, I’m inclined to say that the real problem is that Greenwald is not a very good writer. Here are the first sentences:
I suspect that he wants us to intuit a particular attitude, on the part of the GG who’s writing now, toward the GG who (supposedly) thought that way. But he doesn’t successfully indicate that attitude. Is he saying, “I was right to believe as I did”, or “I was mistaken”? Justified false belief, or unjustified false belief? I don’t think you can tell. He’s typing too fast to care.
So he’s gone from “Voting doesn’t matter because both sides are equally good” to “Voting doesn’t matter because both sides are equally evil”?
You can’t tell from reading that passage. “Voting doesn’t matter” is certainly part of the attitude he’s describing (whether advocating or regretting, who can say).
“The first paragraph is also rich; a seventh-grade belief in the notion that the American Republic was fine, dandy, and largely self-balancing until the “creeping extremism” of the last decade. I suppose I’d find this less irritating had Glenn not spent the day delivering tirades against fellow Iraq War supporters with characteristic bombast.”
Basically, Naderite sh*t.
Worse than a Naderite, at least they recognize that there’s real problems that our political system should try to solve.
To put it another way: “pre-9/11 Greenwald? Fuck me. Say what you will about the tenets of Naderism, at least its an ethos.”
you know, if the guy can’t be fucking bothered to vote, then he’s not even a good citizen, let alone a ‘patriot’
Amen.
This. I’m not sure there’s been a concise point Greenwald can’t blow up into a several thousand word post endlessly circling back and back, repeating the same language in multiple forms.
I went to see him at a civil liberties speaking tour last year with two other speakers, and while the others both held roughly to the promised 15 minute/speaker intro length, Greenwald blazed a filibuster that might have been nearly an hour long. Couldn’t help but smile at how closely the real-life Glenn tracked his online persona.
You can tell pretty easily actually? It’s clear that his attitude is that his past self was mistake. What else could phrases like “it seemed to me” imply?
But who can take seriously a person who thought this way in 2003? I’m not sure I really believe that Greenwald thought this way in 2003, but if he did, that’s just a massive condemnation of his political judgment. If he didn’t, he’s completely disingenuous and untrustworthy. Either way, why should I care what he has to say?
Right, but what’s his attitude now towards the mistake? Was it reasonable for someone to feel that way in 2000? I happen not to think so.
The purpose of this paragraph is plainly not to accurately describe GG’s state of mind prior to the civil liberties abuses following 9/11.
Its obvious purpose is to lend credibility to his current position by suggesting that Glenn Greenwald is a reasonable moderate person and that therefore his current “extreme” position is achieved honestly.
I am pretty sympathetic to most of Greenwald’s civil liberties stances but there is simply no other way to read that paragraph than as a purely craven attempt to establish himself as being radicalized by 9/11 civil liberties abuses.
Its a variation of the Mickey Kaus/David Mamet/Dennis Miller “yoosta bee” schtick and, like Kaus/Mamet/Miller it is transparent BS
Kaus/Mamet/Miller were always pretty conservative and Greenwald has always been devoted to civil liberties. He was a constitutional and civil rights litigator for crying out loud! You don’t do that job if you believe that “our democratic system of government was sufficiently insulated from any real abuse, by our Constitution and by the checks and balances afforded by having three separate but equal branches of government.”
I would agree, but if the whole thing is just a rhetorical maneuver, it’s a massively misjudged one.
Well, at least it’s SLIGHTLY better than “Everyone who opposed the war was right, but they were right for the wrong reasons. So I win!!!”
Yeah, that’s crazy. The president has to make his case. He has a huge advantage in that he controls the apparatus of intelligence. If he can’t make his case convincingly, given that advantage, he should be restrained by what powers are available.
I think there used to be a deference to the idea that the president was being honest about the intelligence used to make national security decisions, possibly misplaced considering Johnson and Nixon, and maybe non-existent now due to the incredibly massive dishonesty of the Bush administration.
It is not desirable or fulfilling to realize that one does not trust one’s own government and must disbelieve its statements
It may be more fulfilling when a journalist trusts authorities and believes its statements. Stenography is certainly more career-enhancing. But how in the name of feck can anyone describe distrust as undesirable?
Undesirable for whom?
Really. Is this nostalgia for a prelapsarian trusting self?
And how the hell could a gay man in America, speaking about his views pre-2004, say:
I firmly believed that our democratic system of government was sufficiently insulated from any real abuse, by our Constitution and by the checks and balances afforded by having three separate but equal branches of government. My primary political belief was that both parties were plagued by extremists who were equally dangerous and destructive, but that as long as neither extreme acquired real political power, our system would function smoothly and more or less tolerably
You’d think being perssonally a member of a discriminated-against minority would have given him a clue. Hell, that system functioned so smoothly and tolerably that he ended up living in Brazil .. .
It really is a stunningly naive way to look at the world.
I read the book back when it came out, because at the time I really enjoyed his columns (oh, oh so long ago), but that part stood out for me at the time too.
But I think I didn’t truly give up all hope for him until he compared some woman who had photos of Obama on her website to Leni Reifenstahl.
This struck me too. But also, here’s a constitutional lawyer with a supposed deep love of the constitution who doesn’t care to vote.
But also too, here’s a constitutional lawyer with a supposed deep love of the constitution who wasn’t roused from his political indifference during Bush v. Gore.
And, you know, where the hell was Greenwald when poltical indifference to a “gay disease” was killing off members of his community by the tens and hundreds of thousands?
At least Sully, for all the things he’s wrong about and all the obnoxious shit he sometimes spews, was in the streets with ACT-UP during all that.
People can change for the better, and I wouldn’t find Greenwald so irritating if not for the hypermoralistic smug way he appears to regard anyone who disagrees with him or doesn’t place the same weight on his favorite causes. How can you be so smug toward others when you’ve failed so much yourself over the years?
At least Sully, for all the things he’s wrong about and all the obnoxious shit he sometimes spews, was in the streets with ACT-UP during all that.
Was he? I seem to recall he spent a lot of time criticizing ACT-UP and mainstream gay rights groups for being all liberal and anticlerical and politically correct and confrontational and sex-crazy – it was a key part of his GayToryCatholic special snowflake shtick.
He thundering denunciations of bathhouse culture did nothing to prevent him from taking full advantage of it when it suited him, of course.
Excellent points!
I tried, along with scores of others, to avoid making that choice
“Other people did it too” is up there with “following orders”.
“The other kids all did it!” wasn’t considered a valid reason when I was 5 and it certainly hasn’t improved with age.
And we have a winner! You can collect your Godwin trophy at the door.
Anon is right, stupid thing to say.
I can only say in self-defense that other people were OOPS
Maybe you were referring to Ollie North.
“I believe we need to throw a little country against a wall every now and then.”
It’s crucial that it had to be “a *crappy* little country,” dammit. You don’t think Tom considered, even for a moment, Saudi Arabia or Qatar, do you?!
Er, actually that was a Ledeen reference, not a Tom “Moustache of Wisdom” reference… We regret any injury to the historical legacy of confusingly similar war apologeticists.
Suck on this! Watch this drive!
Ledeen via Jonah Goldberg. I believe Ledeen has denied the attribution.
Christ, I cannot believe that I used to read his blog daily.
I’m with ya.
Christ, what an asshole!
(not you, him)
Well, me too.
“I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to…..”
this would be the very same president, who couldn’t be bothered to read the security briefings that specifically identified the distinct possibility of 9/11 happening? yeah, a guy i definitely want to defer to.
i questioned the invasions of both afghanistan & iraq, for pretty much the same reason: neither country’s gov’t represented a direct threat to the US. that the taliban gov’t demanded some actual evidence of osama bin laden’s involvement in 9/11, before they would agree to round up him and his gang, as required by the then existing extradition treaty between the two countries, hardly constitutes reason to invade. the odds of saddam, after 12 years of rigorous sanctions, having any functional WMD, were pretty slim, at best, and i’m no national security expert. apparently, the people that were, shared my disbelief.
i assume mr. greenwald is too young to have been aware during vietnam, had he been, he would know what an incredibly stupid statement that was to make.
But they had smallpox labs in the back of Winnebagoes man. We had the pictures!!!!
“Where Would a Scoundrel’s Final Refuge Lie?”
The epigraph for “How Would A Patriot Act” is a quotation from Abraham Lincoln: “I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.”
In 2003, Glenn Greenwald was a 36-year-old full time litigator, managing and growing his own small firm in New York. Do you have any idea how much work that requires? An ordinary thirty-something litigator in New York can expect to be in the office 10 to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. A lawyer running his own firm has all the management responsibilities on top of that. It’s pretty clear that politics was a low priority for him, as it is for most Americans.
I have no difficulty at all believing him when he says that he did not “support” the Iraq war. He wasn’t writing a blog at the time. He didn’t make any public statements about it. Greenwald says, and there’s no evidence to disprove him:
“I never once wrote in favor of the Iraq War or argued for it in any way, shape or form. Ask anyone who claims that I “supported” the Iraq War to point to a single instance where I ever supported or defended it in any way. There is no such instance. It’s a pure fabrication.”
To to say, for example, that Glenn Greenwald and Thomas Friedman both “supported” the war would be misleading.
This is, btw, what you do when you write how irritating it is that Greenwald spent the day yesterday “delivering tirades against fellow Iraq War supporters.” The people he wrote about about yesterday were David Frum, Richard Perle, and Richard Cohen – two members of the Bush administration who lied and smeared in support of the war, and one national columnist who cheered them on.
I don’t find it irritating at all to read someone who can say, “Like all Americans, I was lied to. Like most Americans, I was hoodwinked. And these are the liars who betrayed us.” I don’t view that as a tirade against “fellow Iraq war supporters.”
Precisely.
Yep, exactly. LGM’s jihad against this dude is crazy. I honestly don’t understand it. (Erik Loomis, for instance, is about as leftier-than-thou as it gets and all of a sudden he turns into Pinochet whenever Greenwald’s name is mentioned).
Here’s a thought, Corey: maybe there are other ways of approaching questions than settling on the position that best demonstrates your loyalty to the leftist tribe.
New York is out in the sticks; no news media there and there certainly weren’t big protests in which a couple hundred thousand people took up First and Second and Third Avenue.
I’m glad he woke up in time to move to some more connected place in the Americas.
The Times was for the war, lobbied for it, lied for it. Judith Miller. Tom Friedman. Bill Keller.
The fucking New Yorker was for the war. Both NY senators – Clinton and Schumer – were in favor of the war. There were no prominent moderate or moderate liberal voices against the war.
Oops, that was me. I’m not trying to create a sock puppet here.
It isn’t believable. You’re living in a city with a big hole in it and the government blames that hole on X. The city with large ongoing protests. News of the coming war is everywhere. And your profession concerns constitutional law and civil rights.
And unfortuantely, New York is a one-newspaper town.
Sheesh.
Look at how he terminated that Straw-Substance!
Yup, a guy who couldn’t be bothered to vote in 2000 and 2004 is definitely the sort of man whose opinion I should highly value on matters of politics.
Greenwald refuses to read the motives of anyone who disagrees with him in anything but the worst light. He doesn’t get, or deserve, any breaks that he’s not willing to give to others.
Let’s see – intellectually dishonest; omits inconvenient facts; twists the words of people that he disagrees with; doesn’t own up to his own mistakes; engages in very personal attacks on the motives of people who disagree with him. Are these sufficient reasons to find him despicable?
Yeah, this is the real point, to me. He just refuses to accept the possibility of good-faith disagreement. He reminds me, ironically (or not), of Ayn Rand. If you ever read her stuff, one thing about her was that in her worldview, any conclusion different from hers ultimately traced back through a chain of logic to a difference in fundamental premises. Hers was accepting life as the ultimate good, anyone else’s was death. I am not oversimplifying. And thus anyone who disagreed was not merely of a different opinion, or wrong, but evil. GG has a lot of that in him.
Bullshit. It’s conceivably impossible that just about anyone, but let alone someone like Greenwald, could have been wholly unaware of such major news stories as the 2000 election and the run up to the Iraq war. It’s also wholly inconceivable that someone with the radical political personality Greenwald now puts out there could have realistically concluded that the George W. Bush of the 2000 recount episode deserved any sort of benefit of the doubt for trustworthiness.
At the very best, Greenwald’s defense is that he’s simply too blazingly ignorant to deserve to be taken seriously on anything.
I’d have tons more respect for Greenwald if he tried to connect his criticisms of Bush then Obama to the broader context in which our assumptions regarding American foreign policy are manifested. The notion that Obama, in particular, is uniquely bad in his use of a president’s war-making powers and on civil liberties issues in general reflects an adolescent’s take on the history of American foreign policy.
Until the debate shifts to the costs and benefits of our role as global military hegemon, repeatedly saying that this or that president sucks doesn’t add much to the conversation. Add in all of the really obnoxious qualities of his online persona that have been noted in this thread, and one can only reach the conclusion that reading Greenwald for an insightful, substantive critique of American foreign policy is a complete waste of time.
No, his defense is that in 2003 he was too blazingly ignorant to be taken seriously on anything but First Amendment issues. That was ten years ago. As he explains, the Padilla case – which was as grotesque an abuse of law as this country has ever seen, and to this day I choke with anger when I think about it – radicalized him. It makes sense to me that a civil libertarian who put his faith in the courts and didn’t much care about electoral politics had his eyes opened by what was done to Jose Padilla.
So a “civil libertarian who put his faith in the courts” wouldn’t have had a problem with the re-institution of the death penalty in the late 70′s? Or the Drug War? When he was sitting in court waiting for his cases to be called, didn’t he notice all the poor people of color being sent away to prison?
I guess it’s cool that he’s now seen the light, but a little more humility might be nice.
You know, all the way back in aught-three, there were these things called “newspapers” that contained stories of the day, like what the government was doing. It was true in 2003, 1903, and 1803. If Glenn Greenwald had been a busy lawyer in 1703, this might have been a valid excuse for why he had been so oblivious to the War of the Spanish Succession. And the Duke of Marlborough was so trustworthy, too!
You know, back in aught-three these things called newspapers published lies by lying scum like Judith Miller, and beat the drum for war in grotesque, lying columns by people like Michael Kelly. You had to be a very hardened cynic willing to spend an enormous amount of time reading and sifting in order to resist the solid wave of propaganda that swept over this country.
In fact, it’s a mistake to underestimate the effectiveness of the propaganda. Today, everyone agrees how stupid the war was and only a fool or a knave would have failed to oppose it, right? That’s a prescription for allowing the same sort of propaganda to be effective in the future.
they also printed op/eds by people like robert wilson who, at the request of the cia, went to africa, to check out the claims that saddam had attempted to purchase yellow cake (ostensibly, for the production of weapons grade uranium), and could find no evidence of purchases or attempted purchases. this put the lie to that part of the claim of wmd production.
if i recall correctly, mr. wilson’s wife was some kind of cia employee, and there was some kind of kerfufle involving her and the administration. can’t quite recall what that might have been though.
I don’t see how the slant of coverage has anything to do with anything…since Greenwald’s defense is clearly not “I wrongly believed the pro-war coverage in the papers.” But points for effort.
Greenwald’s defense comes down to, “I didn’t think about his much and I believed pretty much what everyone else believed.” Against Greenwald, we have people here saying, “Anyone who read the newspaper or watched TV would have known the war was a put-up job.” Really? The Times? The Post? CNN? NBC?
The best writing on how the press lulled the country into war was by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books. His article “Now They Tell Us” is a damning indictment of the propoganda campaign the media ran in the months before the invasion,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/feb/26/now-they-tell-us/
So if you were an ordinary person of good will and you thought that the Times and the Post and CNN and NBC were reasonably trustworthy sources of information – well, then, you believed that Saddam was busily at work building centrifuges with aluminum tubes to enrich yellowcake into weapons-grade uranium. Because that’s what the press was telling you.
Greenwald tells a perfectly believable conversion story: He didn’t really have any views, he says, until something that mattered to me personally happened. The thing that happened to him was the Jose Padilla case. And it was personal because he was a civil liberties lawyer who believed in the courts. Unlike the rest of the country, who really didn’t give a shit that a Hispanic ex-con could be held incommunicado without habeas corpus in military solitary confinement for three years, Greenwald understood that Padilla was a test case for turning the US into a fascist police state. He saw that the whole point of Padilla was to make the courts irrelevant.
I believe him when he says it changed his life. And I honor him for doing something about it – unlike, say, me, who goes on doing what I’ve always been doing, except that now I waste my time writing about it on blogs.
It’s also just not plausible. As someone elsewhere noted in the thread, we’re supposed to believe that civil libertarian champion Glenn Greenwald was totally ignorant to the basic fact that war is bad for civil liberties? That a fucking lawyer thinks the courts and the government are super awesome and without flaw? That his inate liberal sensibilities weren’t AT ALL shaken by Bush vs. Gore?
I mean, I’ll just come out and say it: I find the whole exercise of parsing these words tedious because I find them to be simply and wholly unbelievable at the moment. If Greenwald would care to devote 10,000 words or so to answering these rather obvious questions then I’ll re-evaluate the belief, but until then I’ll continue to think that Greenwald is just flat out lying about all of this.
Not really. I found it to be quite effortless, actually, since the propaganda was transparent bullshit from the start.
Mobile bio-weapons labs!!!!!
I was 17, laughed at the “blood for oil!!!!” protesters but still saw right through the bullshit pro-war propaganda without a whole lot of effort, and I was politically a centrist liberal at best back then.
You just had to be the least bit skeptical about the claims to spend a few hours over those several months reading any of the criticism to resist the solid wave of bullshit. Not that it would have changed anything, of course, but at least you wouldn’t have to rely on these terrible non-apology apologies that GG etc. have been trotting out.
You’re wrong, Glenn Greenwald is obviously history’s greatest monster and the sole reason we invaded Iraq. I’m glad Robert is focusing on the REAL villains.
Well, you’ve certainly got Greenwald’s style of argument down pat.
It’s kinda funny how what started as a “gotta smear Greenwald because he bad-talks the pres during an election” campaign has transformed over the years into “gotta smear Greenwald as a libertarian because god forbid we actually engage his arguments”. Seriously guys; you talk a good game about being principled and holding the party’s feet to the fire, but your little grudge with Greenwald makes you look like a bunch of DC media shills. If you disagree with him then refute his arguments; this bullshit character assassination that anyone with an internet connection can disprove in 5 minutes is just shameful.
And what the hell is this bullshit about people not being allowed to be naive? How many over-achieving suburbanite kids who’ve been chasing the law track as fast as they can their whole lives do you honestly think know one red farthing’s worth of American politics? Of course a kid who grew up to be a technocrat, wanting never to be anything but a technocrat, was going to have a stupidly trusting and uninformed view of the world. Those first years under Bush were what changed his mind; what made him stop hiding his head in the sand of blind faith in our legal system and start noticing just how unjust this country really is. If you’re standard for “true” liberals is going to be “always having held appropriate opinions since the age of 18″ then guess what; you aren’t going to find any.
Another thing; not everybody on the left has to be a communist. Greenwald didn’t come to his convictions through Marx and guess what; neither did most of us. Yeah, it’d be great if he’d take some time to talk about labor issues or call out the class warfare the wealthy have been waging in the US for -well- forever more often, but he made a clear decision to focus on calling out stupid, amoral militarism and Constitutional abuses when he first started blogging and it isn’t for anyone else to decide what it is “proper” for him to use or not use his platform to write about. Get over it and put this childish nonsense behind you.
It’s blatant special pleading to take Greenwald off the hook for being a naive greenhorn at age 36 in 2003. It’s like Henry Hyde’s “youthful indiscretion.”
Good point. We must hold his feet to the fire for…uhh…apparently thinking things that weren’t correct at one point in time and then volunteering this information later.
For shame Greenwald!
Greenwald annoys me, but these lickspittle defenses of the guy’s every statement are far worse still. I mean, seriously, poor Glenn was just too busy and naive, too devoted to other people and too little to himself, to understand the complexity of politics in 2003? He wasn’t 11 years old.
And these are the same people who condemn writers like Yglesias, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum for supporting the war until right before it started.
Yeah, we know that once you reach a certain age, reason and political acumen get installed into your head. Hey, most Democratic representatives that voted for the war were older (they weren’t 11 years old), had a job that required them to be aware, and actually did something that enabled the war.
I’m surprised at how hard it is for some people to grasp the difference between disinterested thought and action. It’s like saying that someone who doesn’t own a gun and who says they once thought that shooting a rifle in the air isn’t dangerous is the same as someone who shot said rifle into the air and killed someone.
I’m surprised at how easy it is for some to believe that a guy who became the raging ideologue Greenwald is now was totally disinterested in politics up until 8-10 years ago. Not like there were any monumentally important political events between, say, 1996 and 2002, right?
Sure, maybe that paragraph is a lie. And if it is, why do you believe that he supported the war at all? After all, isn’t it hard to believe that someone who has raged against the war so much was supportive of it only a few years before?
Sure, you can take the stance that everything Greenwald writes in that paragraph might be used to defend him is a lie and everything in it that makes him look bad is the truth. Knock yourself out. I’ll let other people decide the amount of bias needed to do such a thing.
I don’t care if he supported the war or not, and I’m totally willing to believe that Greenwald lied about supporting it for the purpose of constructing a strawman of his rhetorical opponents.
Let’s peel away the distractions in his original statement.
What this boils down to is that Greenwald ’06 wants Greenwald ’03 to seem not exactly credulous but trusting in the particular area of “national security.”
I think what he means is that he was uninterested in meta-issues of executive power until he realized that the rush to enter the Iraq war was not only about war but also about war powers, which get used when the populace feels that sense of trust by default.
He overplays the naivete card along the way because that way he can project his Greenwald ’03 self onto his opponents. You are naive like I was. You don’t see what I now see. I think Greenwald ’13 would join Greenwald ’06 in saying that Greenwald ’03 was a mindless Bushbot.
We do?
I believe that when people here agree with Greenwald they say so and when the disagree they say so too. When Greenwald was expressing approval of progressive Paul curiosity, there was plenty of refutation, but little acknowledgement.
Just out of curiosity, how is this little screed advancing any debate? I mean, what high minded argumentative purpose do you imagine it serving?
Nothing like this has been remotely suggested. But I think it’s forgivable to read more than a bit of self-exculpation into Greenwald’s reflections of his (mid thirties) salad days as a youth callower than Young Matthew Yglesias blogging from Harvard. Most people are just pointing out that Greenwald was more culpably apathetic than most, on the one hand, and, on the other, it’s reasonable to be concerned about what else he is missing now. He certainly doesn’t seem to extend the charity you so wantonly lard upon him to others, so it’s a reasonable question whether we need endorse your (seemingly singular) standard.
Greenwald is a diminishingly interesting figure who never hit a huge peak of interestingness. This is a bit distinct from his correctness. The angry torrent of ranting and condemnation does get old, esp. of you don’t really vary it much in any dimension. The analytic content of his work seems particularly low, esp. around media criticism.
“was more culpably apathetic than most,”
“Culpably apathetic.” Now that’s an interesting phrase.
I suppose I was “culpably apethetic.” I was against the war, but I didn’t do much about it. I went to a couple of rallies. And I had conversations at work, or with friends – more than one – that wound up with me screaming at people so that I had to go apologize to them afterward. What good did it do? Am I any less “culpable” than Greenwald?
Yglesias is a different story. Yglesias set himself up as a pundit, and he actively tried to persuade people to be in favor of the war. He claimed to have special insights and he misled people. Greenwald misled no one. He admits that he himself was misled.
I mean it along the lines of “culpably ignorant”. Sometimes being ignorant is an excuse. Sometimes, you had a duty to know. Greenwald seems to be offering his apathy as a kind of excuse (certainly some of his defenders here are taking it that way). In particular, he is trying to defend his current judgment. “Oh that bad judgement call from before? That was just because I was apathetic. Now that I’m engaged, it’s all good.” But that only works if the apathy doesn’t implicate his judgment. But, what I think Rob is pointing out, that the specific content of his apathy as express here is damning for his judgment.
In other words, he needs more that “I was aroused from my apathetic slumbers” to justify his current judgment.
How is this apathetic? It certainly isn’t so in the sense that Greenwald describes of himself. It also doesn’t implicate your judgement. Your comments her do implicate your judgement, but that’s a different issue.
I will carry no water for Yglesias. His judgment was poor then and it continues not good now (e.g., on education). However, he really does have the excuse of being young and stupid and, frankly, not as bizarre as Greenwald describes of himself.
Eh. This, again, is a thin reed for a defence esp. when you look at his own explanation of why he fell for it (which is the point of this post).
More to the point, it means that his schtick of insulting, belittling, and making accusations of bad faith against people who were right when he was wrong suggests that he hasn’t actually change his extremely narrow minded worldview.
This is what really rubs my rhubarb. I was politically engaged in 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004, from varying points along the left side of the American political spectrum. Yet a NYC attorney who didn’t engage with politics throughout that time; who couldn’t see through the most transparently mendacious right-wing war propaganda imaginable; who thought Grover Norquist could be a useful ally; and who thinks that Rand Paul is anything but a blowhard reactionary racist dumbshit acting entirely in bad faith; repeatedly presumes to sneer at and belittle my progressive credentials because I considered Obama to be at worst the lesser evil in 2008 and 2012. Or because I agree with Noam Chomsky about the PPACA, for fuck’s sake.
Have you ever run into those new religious converts who run around acting all holier-than-thou than the people who have spent their lives working for their church? Yeah, those converts are usually ignorant assholes too.
I feel the same. Marching or not marching in the end seemed to make little difference in connection to the war. But what would have? What was an individuals responsibility? It’s all well and good for the people who were right side to point out the mistakes of the other side. But there seems to be very little discussion our own actions. And that seems to be a much thornier issue.
We keep reducing this to “people who were right bashing Greenwald…” which is interesting enough to me since I wasn’t right about Iraq myself!
“What was an individuals responsibility?”
Well, one individual I’m aware of, who acknowledges that he didn’t understand what was happening in 2003, afterwards quit his job in order to devote his life to researching and writing against the evils that he believes led or resulted from the war.
That individual, of course, is Glenn Greenwald. I didn’t do that.
Good point. Though to be honest, I usually discourage people from doing things like that. I’ve seen a lot of people that spend too much time working on political issues get burned out, and sometimes people push potential recruits too much and scare them off. There also seems to be the problem of spreading yourself too thing by getting involved in too many issues. Most of the local activists I know are working on five different things at once (since there just aren’t enough people).
What was the cost to Greenwald of quitting his job?
I ask honestly. My impression is that he found himself able to make a living writing so pursued it. That’s not terribly surprising. There’s clearly a lot of rewards for being a pundit both tangible and intangible.
That he makes a living at it doesn’t suggest anything unworthy about his work but neither does it imply a great sacrifice.
Greenwald wrote (via Wikipedia):
This seems not terribly different than his leaving his first job to found his own firm (i.e., bored with it and wanting to do something more interesting; to be fair, what was more interesting in these switches is also morally superior).
So, I don’t see the great sacrifice worthy of italicising “quit is job”. He quit his job to so work he found more interesting that a lot of people would like to do.
It’s a special kind of comment that simultaneously accuses the blog of being the equivalent af DC media shills and purging ‘the left’ of those who are insufficiently communist. Probably best to choose one bad motive theory and stick with it.
’twas I
My problem with Greenwald – don’t know about anybody else’s – is not that he was uninformed and wrong about things. Everybody has been (I certainly have). People can change for the better. My problem is that he went from being very wrong about a lot of things to being a hypermoralistic purity troll who accuses anyone who disagrees with him of bad faith. You’d think knowing that he was wrong in good faith about a lot of things before would give him some insight into how good people can be badly wrong in good faith. But it doesn’t seem to. And so I read Adam Serwer for my civil liberties commentary instead.
Yes. Exactly. He gives nobody the benefit of the doubt that he now requests for himself.
How many high powered litigators do you think there are who have no political opinions and don’t vote? Greenwald is either presenting a damning portrait of a man whose political opinions are so naive that nobody should take him seriously, or else he is a disingenuous liar who thinks that he is somehow making a stronger point by presenting his past self this way. Either way, he shows that he’s not worth listening to.
I appreciate much of Greenwald’s work. He wasn’t a full-throated, hippie-punching war supporter, and that’s to his credit. But of course he supported the war. I remember reading his preface when the book came out. I had some of the concerns about him mentioned already (BS detector, naiveté about political power, unawareness of political history and important differences between the parties, lack of political engagement, etc.). Still, I respected that he owned up to his mistakes. I thought it was a positive thing. He certainly wasn’t the only one who achieved his political awareness thanks to the Iraq War.
Now he’s engaging in implausible hair-splitting, and I don’t see any benefit to it. He’s arguing, what, that he didn’t actually support the Iraq War – instead, he supported the people who pitched the war, and supported the decision to go to war, and supported the right to make the decision to go to war – and in every one of these slight variations, while he had some misgivings, he was mostly passive and uncritical in accepting the decision to go to war. If he wants to call himself a soft supporter of the war, or a largely uncritical supporter of the war, or a defacto supporter of the war (versus a frothing McCarthyite or chickenhawk or Andrew Sullivan or whatever), that seems fair. But instead, he thunders, “Ask anyone who claims that I “supported” the Iraq War to point to a single instance where I ever supported or defended it in any way. There is no such instance. It’s a pure fabrication.” Um, again, I thought his admission in the preface was a positive thing – although I suppose it clashes with the relentless infallible prosecutor mode. His current contention is that it’s preposterous that anyone could read that preface and think he supported the Iraq War. Ya gotta be kidding me. It’s a completely fair, justified and even charitable reading by reasonable adults, some of whom actually thought better of him as a result. (Also too, Occam’s razor.) I respected him ‘fessing up; I can’t respect the current balderdash. Who’s he kidding? Just own up to it.
Are you kidding? The high-powered, insanely busy litigators I know also hold some of the strongest political views of anyone I know. And strongly held opinions on damn near everything else, too.
And in any case, running a firm is no excuse for having no policy preferences.
Speaking as a low-to-medium-powered, moderately-but-not-insanely-busy litigator, I second this point. As a class we litigators are pretty much over-opinionated assholes.
So a lawyer who says he looked at our recent political history and saw the impeachment and 2000 supreme court installation of Bush as part of a smoothly functioning government is someone whose judgment is to be thought highly of?
How about the problem with GG is that he’s an arrogant prick who’s unable to consider opposing opinions with sufficient intelligence?
I used to read him every day, for the record, just like most of his critics here. If anything it makes me question my own judgment and once again remember that righteousness is not a good form of argument.
” If anything it makes me question my own judgment and once again remember that righteousness is not a good form of argument.”
Exactly! I too, have responded to my own change in opinion on Greenwald by being more mindful of liking an argument/writer simply because it supports my existing opinion and is delivered in a way that I find enjoyable. I don’t, however, assume out of hand that any such argument is by definition false. Because political identity isn’t actually just a matter of changing the direction of your cartoonish extremism.
For the typical person, claiming that you supported the war because “I thought Iraq had WMD” is the exact same thing as saying that you were deferring to the adminstration’s judgment — it just sounds better (unless we’re to believe that the average citizen is able to come to a conclusion on the question that would somehow be based on evidence derived independently from the US and its allies). To me, Greenwald’s decision not to hide behind such a claim and admit to what he was really doing is a point in his favor.
In the realm of “process vs. results,” I think it’s pretty unfair to castigate people for assuming that Iraq had some non-zero amount of WMD’s somewhere, given that it had been assumed as such not that far prior and by the Clinton administration as well. Now, whether fighting a war over that amount of (likely chemical) weapons was a good idea, on the other hand…
Sure it’s fair. The inspectors at the time were saying they hadn’t found any in years, that they needed more time, and that there was no evidence that he’d made more. It’s entirely fair to call those people out for that entirely erroneous belief, particularly when we all know that the real reason must be shilled for that war was idiotic jingoism; not some deep intellectual conviction as to the makeup of Saddam’s weapons stockpiles.
As many other people have noted, there’s an awful lot about this obfuscation that doesn’t even make sense when taken in conjunction with Greenwald’s own bio…which leaves me even more convinced that Greenwald is really a libertarian pretending to be a Real True Progressive for the money/attention/ratfucking.
You’re looking really spruce in that tin foil hat.
Right. It’s just CRAZY to think someone who clearly has high ambitions in media might affect a much more outlandish persona for the purpose of getting noticed/gaining an audience/getting better paychecks. Where the flying fuck would that ever happen, right?
It’s pretty crazy to think he’d try to advance those alleged ambitions by becoming a lefty civil liberties and foreign policy bombthrower. I know I haven’t watched CNN in years, but I assume Noam Chomsky still doesn’t have a show?
Give the guy credit for exploiting a market inefficiency, I guess.
I’ve never seen any particular evidence that Greenwald holds libertarian views on economic policy. What seems likely is that he basically doesn’t care about economic policy and views it completely instrumentally.
No. Ref. item 2.
“There already is a “closed sign on the border” when it comes to illegal immigration. It’s called the law. The problem is that the “closed sign” isn’t being enforced because the Federal Government, which has its interfering, power-hungry hands in virtually everything else, has abdicated its duty in one of the very few areas where it was actually meant to be: border security.”
Sounds like bog standard Ron Paul (what a coincidence!) wingnuttery to me. As does basically the rest of the piece:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/gop-fights-itself-on-illegal.html
That is pretty damning. I love Greenwald’s ridiculous disclaimer, where he three times uses the term “Obama cultist.” Obviously the dude is preaching only to the converted at this point.
Is this maybe Glenn’s idea of satire? Like, no one ever would have known about GG’s “support” or whatever unless he brought up today. Is he joking? Is there some variant of Poe’s law at play here?
I see you’re administering facts as therapy for Greenwald Derangement Syndrome, but you’re wasting your time: it’s quite resistant to reason and fact as palliatives and, in fact, incurable.
This was intended as a reply to Bloix. Also badly edited.
Not to mention silly.
How many times do we have to say “Glenn Greenwald” before he shows up in this thread to defend himself?
Say his full name three times while looking into a mirror
He’s the modern version of Kibo.
Now let’s see who gets that reference.
You’re allowed.
Sir, I have met Kibo, in the flesh; and you, sir, are no Kibo.
I no longer follow Greenwald, so I may be wrong about some of this, but he still doesn’t seem to follow or care about a wide-number of political issues. If he failed to focus on and think critically about the Iraq War, then maybe he’s making the same mistakes by ignoring certain major issues today.
Among other things: The Democrats and Republicans may not differ a ton on some of the National Security and Civil Liberties issues (though they do differ on some), but they’re actually really different on their readiness to go to war. If McCain was President, we likely would be occupying Libya with full ground forces (based on his statements at the time). Who knows where else we’d be with respect to the Arab Spring? What would be happening with Syria and Iran? What about a Romney presidency? The Republicans still haven’t purged their neoconservatives, and they still are in a hurry to deploy troops abroad.
Democrats may not be perfect on war, but they’re a lot less likely to get us wrapped up in huge occupations of foreign countries where we’re basically running the government. That’s a huge difference, and the Iraq War is major evidence of it. And, at least during the election, Greenwald still didn’t seem to get it.
Interestingly enough, the range of issues that Greenwald seems to pay attention to overlaps almost perfectly with the ones on which the Obama administration has been disappointing by liberal standards. Hell of a coincidence, huh?
I’m not sure Greenwald is a good match for liberalism, though. Based on what he seems to care about most, I’d tag him as a small-r republican or a civic humanist, always on guard against domination by central authority and the corrosion of citizen virtue.
At the end of the day, I think Greenwald is very much first and foremost an affluent, white, male, asshole.
Well at least he has the gay, what are you left with?
FTFY
Oh, no, I think all of the other characteristics are important to understanding why his worldview is what it is, and why he seems to have precious literal concern for trivialities like womens/minority/labor rights. Those people just aren’t like him, so they just don’t matter as much.
I don’t know if it’s that so much as ignorance. He doesn’t ever personally experience those issues, so he doesn’t think about them and doesn’t find them important.
That’s not an excuse or a justification, but I think assuming that he even gives the amount of consideration necessary to conclude that “those people just don’t matter as much as me” goes too far. And I think that’s broader than just Greenwald.
But I don’t experience those things either (well, labor issues I guess), but I still care about them because that’s the fundamental aspect of being a progressive!
1, He was writing about the same issues when Bush was president
2. Someone is going to happen to specialize in whatever area Obama is worst in
I don’t recall him being so worked up over drones during the Bush Administration. And it’s not like they weren’t using them.
Greenwald doesn’t give a fuck about politics. He cares about civil liberties.
Obama has been god-awful on civil liberties. From Bradley Manning to Aaron Swartz, from covert surveillance of American citizens to entrapment of Muslim “terrorists” to deportation of undocumented immigrants, he’s been on the wrong side. Okay, he’s been better than a Republican would have been, but he’s a terrible disappointment nonetheless.
A lot of people, including me, are concerned about his civil liberties record but think that on balance he’s a pretty good president and in any event he’s a hell of lot better than the alternative.
But Greenwald doesn’t care about on balance and he’s not interested in better than the alternative. He cares about one thing and on that one thing, Obama sucks.
I’m happy Greenwald is writing with passion and intelligence on a very important subject. I don’t need to agree with his point of view in order to value the contribution he makes to the debate.
A lot of us supported Obama precisely because he had the right answer on Iraq, unlike Glenn. Glenn doesn’t value this, and has made clear in published columns that he can’t tell the difference between Obama and the neocons on other topics like Iran.
Greenwald writes hostile propaganda on the subject of Obama and deeply hates the man. This makes him the opposite of valuable – in fact, if you care about civil liberties you lose credibility by quoting or trusting Greenwald.
He has a long track record of dishonest argument. A Krugman will state, correctly, the underlying motives of his opponents before explaining why he disagrees. Greenwald will omit any facts that hurt his case. He will parse and distort the words of his opponents and attribute the worst motives to them. He habitually smears anyone who disagrees with him. The man never admits error, instead resorting to word games. And he has very thin-skinned defenders who are quick to adopt his tactics in dealing with anyone who dares to disagree with Saint Glenn.
I have the same attitude towards someone who quotes Greenwald that I do to someone who quotes Fox News as their information source. They share an inability to recognize propaganda as what it is.
The problem is that a) this doesn’t really address the central problem with Greenwald (which is the lying, bullying, and self-assuredness), and b) if anything, it only further damns him. I mean, if Greenwald and his fanboys are going to pull out “he isn’t interested in politics!!” when it’s convenient, wouldn’t it follow that Greenwald should be, at the least, a good bit more reserved in criticizing other liberal blogger types who disagree with him on, say, the BULLY PULPIT? Instead, not only does he not show any deference to people it’s fair to assume no more about the matter than he does (given that he claims to have only begun paying attention to politics in roughly the last decade and “doesn’t care” about domestic political stuff), he launches right into verbosely claiming that anyone who disagrees with him is a dirty OBot who won’t allow for any thought in Dear Leader (because, ya know, North Korea references are totally cool, right).
So is he lying about his ignorance, or is he just that laughably arrogant?
Stopping wars and occupation are key to preserving civil liberties. First, wars and the accompanying jingoism are corrosive to civil liberties. They provide the government with motivation to violate civil liberties, and they create an attitude of subservience among the public.
Second, wars and occupation fundamentally undermine civil liberties in occupied nations. You can’t ask the military to occupy a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan and then be surprised if they search homes without probable cause or kill people without due process. Some violations of civil liberties are avoidable in war (torture, indefinite detention), but some are just natural consequences of occupying a foreign nation.
Third, wars and occupation fundamentally undermine the self-determination, freedom, and democracy of occupied people. It is very, very difficult to help a nation transition from despotism/fascism to democracy through occupation, and at this point, we have strong reasons to assume failure.
Thus, even if it was legitimate to care about only civil liberties (very narrowly defined), then you also have to care about the likelihood war and occupation. So, my problem is that his “focus” fails on its own terms.
Finally, wars lead to mass death. 100,000+ of Iraqis are dead, millions have been displaced and turned into refugees, and thousands of Americans are dead. If a fixation on civil liberties blinds you to those consequences, then people shouldn’t take you seriously. And, as noted, that was precisely my original point.
Exactly this. Greenwald being a cranky, uncompromising asshole is a good thing, given that his value is as a civil liberties and foreign policy scold.
No, it quite clearly isn’t. Being an asshole who constantly attacks anyone and everyone is simply not a good way to advance any sort of message. Which is why Greenwald has painted himself into a position where the only people who pay him any mind are his devoted fans, whereas everyone else mostly ignores him at best.
Yet this thread has over 200 comments.
Having trouble with the “at best” part, are you?
Which is why, of course, he wrote about how there was a progressive case for Ron Paul.
Projecting views that are implausible for the young thirty something naïve Greenwald onto the hard bitten cynical ideologue we know and love today with a track record isn’t very persuasive.
Don’t forget that Greenwald was a total wingnut on plenty of other stuff within the last decade too!
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/11/gop-fights-itself-on-illegal.html
I thoroughly dislike Greenwald and think he argues with sleight of hand all the time. That said, I think he’s doing something different here than is being discussed. I think he’s working very hard to set up a reversal that he thinks is quite the coup: he wants to say, “boy, was I naïve to trust the sovereign power of the state, and so I resolved that I would never again be a party to it, and that’s a pledge I shall forever keep.” It’s the use of the word “trust” that makes the whole thing fit together, and squares it with all the hobbyhorses he’s been riding ever since.
Now, since I’ve praised with faint damn for a bit, let me tack back the other direction. The fact that a grown human being in 2003 still would profess to trust the government in that kind of simplistic way… That strains credulity. The whole raison d’être of The X Files, not to mention real events like Iran/Contra, Watergate, etc., would seem to suggest otherwise. He wasn’t a child at the time. So I don’t know why he wants to tell the story this way, but it doesn’t ring true, and it sets up a number of rhetorical and political gambits (about trust and insufficient skepticism) he has been using ever since.
Funny thing, that. I was a child during the Watergate years, and learned from them that the government is not always trustworthy. That was maybe the singular formative event of my political consciousness.
Of course, I was the kind of hopeless nerd who would spend a perfectly fine summer day indoors, watching a bunch of wrinkled old men bloviating on television.
My parents have told me that when I learned to talk, I talked about Watergate, because it was all over TV in my formative years.
In those years, when I was first learning to speak, my dad tried to teach me how to say “Nixon’s a fascist.”
I’m told it came out “Nixon’s a fishface.” Either way, I guess.
Fishface FTW
I don’t have a problem with someone having a political Come to Jesus moment after realizing the Iraq War was a colossal mistake. However it’s somewhat amazing that he apparently learned no humility from the experience, and despite giving at least tacit approval for the entirety of the Bush administration’s policies before 2004, treats everybody who disagrees even slightly with his conception of civil liberties and the national security state as war criminals.
This sums up the fundamental problem with Greenwald. There were lots of good people who supported the Iraq War (not me, thankfully). So I accept that people can change their minds. The problem is that Greenwald is a colossal prick when he has no right to be so given his own background.
From all appearances, Greenwald and I both seem to have been broadly sympathetic to the Republican Party up until roughly the same time. The two main differences between us, so far as I can tell, are:
1. My belief in the inherent awesomeness of white dudes compared to everyone else began unraveling about the time I got halfway through high school, and by roughly the time I turned 20 (give or take a few months), I had abandoned conservatism altogether.
2. My own past deep belief in bog standard wingnuttery causes me to often remember that something is not true just because it happens to reinforce the things I already believe about the world and want to be true (the concern trolling in that affirmative action thread being a good example). Greenwald, on the other hand, just changed the flags he’s flying.
See, this is the kind of argument that is based entirely on the ambiguity inherent in the word “support.”
On the one hand, we have lots of “good people” who actively shilled for the war, got paid for spreading lies, made their careers by failing to investigate, failing to tell the truth, failing to do their jobs. Now these “good people” say, hey, I was wrong, sorry about that. Whatcha gonna do?
On the other hand, we have an ordinary guy who didn’t pay much attention, devoted himself to his career, kept his head down, and thought the conventional thoughts that almost everyone else thought. Then, he became enraged at the way the government imprisoned and tortured a possibly innocent man for years, and spat in the face of the courts who ordered that he be tried or released. And so he quit his job and devoted his life to writing about that case and others like it.
And we’re supposed think of these people as moral equivalents.
Greenwald is an absolutist, and like all absolutists he’s a pain in the ass. William Lloyd Garrison was a pain in the ass. But he was necessary. Greenwald is necessary.
It is really worth remembering here that we have absolutely no evidence as to what Greenwald thought in 2003. All we know is what Greenwald reports in 2006 about what he thought in 2003. That is not the same thing.
And, I’m sorry, but it’s inherently implausible that a *constitutional lawyer* would have no opinions about politics.
The naive, apolitical Glenn Greenwald of 2003 is a fictional creation of 2006 Glenn Greenwald whose purpose is to advance some rhetorical argument that 2006 Glenn Greenwald wants to advance. We have absolutely no reason to believe that this self-description bears any strong resemblance to 2003 Glenn Greenwald’s actual beliefs.
Absolutely, John. But the OP is premised on the assumption that this is, in fact, an entirely accurate portrait of Greenwald in 2003. As I say downthread, there’s plenty worth criticizing Greenwald for. But taking him to task for what he believed in 2003 based on this passage seems, at best, silly.
Well, I do think it’s perfectly fair to go after Greenwald for this passage, because it’s horribly misjudged. I’m not sure why Greenwald would want to portray himself in this way, but I think taking it at face value makes him look very foolish. It seems fair to criticize somebody for crafting a self-portrait that (unintentionally) makes him look like a fool. It suggests someone who does not have a very clear vision of himself.
To elaborate on this, and tie in with another post, Glenn Greenwald’s self-presentation is basically as the kid who thought everything about American history was swell until Howard Zinn knocked him on his ass.
That’s all very well and good, but those of us who were well aware of the dark side of American history without the need for Howard Zinn’s tendentiousness have no reason to listen to anything the newfound Howard Zinn acolyte has to say.
Yes, I totally agree with this. It sets up a way for him to say “I used to be trusting in the government, and regretted it, and now I will castigate anyone who shows signs of trusting the government the way I once did before I learned better.”
Well, it’s not just because he’s an absolutist that he’s a pain in the ass. He’s also a pain in the ass because he tends to misread things people write, and then to attack them in high-handed ways on the basis of his misreadings. Add to that his lawyerly penchant to regard any evidence that speaks in favor of the claims he wants to make as decisive (even if the evidence is anecdotal and the claim he bases on it is fully general), and to minimize or ignore evidence going the other way.
If I had to guess, I would suppose that the real source of Robert’s and Erik’s dislike of Greenwald is that he has on one or more occasions misinterpreted something they wrote, and then wrote an obnoxious critique of them on that basis.
I agree with Bloix about the in-principle-value of someone who focuses in an absolutist fashion on civil liberties, and on Obama’s dreadful record thereon. But because people tend to recoil from unfair, debating-club-style criticism, and then to tune out entirely those who offer it, I wish we had someone in that role whose approach to public conversation was rather different than Greenwald’s.
construed fairly narrowly.
It is in this way that I think he’s most problematic qua progressive. It’s also in this sense that I get the libertarian vibe from him. It’s not entirely the specific content, it’s the sharp divide between what’s critically important and what’s nothing much when the latter are life and death for large swaths of the population.
This. There’s no hint that Greenwald’s definition of “civil liberties” includes women/minority/labor rights at all, while he devotes maximum hysteria to the sorts of civil liberties violations that nuts like Ron Paul get outraged about. It’s certainly…curious.
Yes, very good point. Anyone who was attracted to the Romney/Obama-are-the-same take in the last election season doesn’t give a fig about abortion rights, among much, much else. It was depressing to see people like Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber follow Greenwald’s lead in this.
…I wish we had someone in that role whose approach to public conversation was rather different than Greenwald’s.
The closest commentator that comes to mind is Adam Serwer, who is a strong civil rights/civil liberties guy. He has not hesitated to call out the Obama administration on things like infinite detention or targeted killing, while also praising them on, for example, reviving the DoJ Civil Rights Division. And he manages to do all of this without assuming that anyone who disagrees with him about either priorities or substance is a terrible person.
+1. I’ll add that Adam also understands the tension between strong advocacy for civil rights and strong advocacy for civil liberties. Maintenance of civil rights often requires the kind of coercive state action that makes libertarians twitchy and nauseous.
To show that this is true, you’d need to give an account of either (i) how things are better now he’s saying the things he’s saying or (ii) how things would be worse if he wasn’t saying the things he’s saying.
To make either of those arguments would be really quite challenging. Particularly as Mr Greenwald appears to repeatedly conflate ‘the failures of this Administration on civil liberties’ with ‘the performance of the Executive branch in general and historically on civil liberties’.
I feel comfortable in saying that no one is necessary. It’s certainly a better default.
Is Greenwald particularly useful, even? In what way? I know he had a PAC for a while…how’d that work out? What is his net effect?
(I don’t read him anymore because I don’t get a lot from him. I sort of enjoy the spats because they are good theatre and sometimes prompt me to poke deeper about something.)
Don’t you know? Thinking in your head that the war is a good idea and doing nothing about it is the same as writing articles in support of the war. Actually, the former is worse, since we don’t see articles like this about Yglesias here. Though Ezra Klein is guilty of the former as well, and we don’t see mention of him…so I suppose the moral is “don’t be Greenwald.”
Except, in the case of Yglesias, at least, being wrong about Iraq seems to have led him to wholly rethink the way he thinks about, at least, foreign policy. Greenwald, on the other hand, is seemingly incapable of allowing that he could be wrong, with the “don’t count” exceptions of all those times he was wrong in the past. That’s an important difference.
As for the idea that no one here ever criticizes Yglesias at all: are you serious?
You do realize that the point of the book is how things lead him to wholly rethink his point of view, yes?
As for “no one here ever criticizes Yglesias at all”, yes, that would be a silly thing to say. Which is why I didn’t say that.
That’s great…except I don’t see any evidence that Greenwald actually did learn any meaningful lessons from it, no matter what he says.
Of course not. Greenwald still thinks that the president is entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to and that invading sovereign countries increases American security.
That’s not learning anything meaningful, it’s just being the sort of extreme reactionary who flits from one viewpoint to another. It’s akin to driving to the store with a blindfold on, getting involved in a massive accident, and coming away thoroughly convinced that driving a car is insane and that we should ban all driving of cars because of your accident.
So…he hurt your feelings, and you’re gonna lash out with the enraged virulence of a shamed toddler, so help you.
You copy the style of your Dear Leader Glenn well. Congratulations! You’re just as persuasive to the non-gullible as he is.
Wouldn’t it on the whole be more productive to take the Obama administration to task for its civil liberties record than obsess about a guy who has precisely zero power to directly influence my life? And no, the argument “oh but the Republicans would be even worse” is a non-argument.
More “productive?” No, probably not, actually. Any more concern trolling from you or any other apparatchiks here to defend Lord Glenn?
Well, we seem to have a very different view on how important Glenn Greenwald is. And if you think my concern for civil liberties is “trolling”, fine by me.
Yeah, he is so obsessed with Glenn that he got just got around to reading his best-seller from seven years ago.
And this is precisely my point. Who cares about what Glenn Greenwald wrote seven years ago? It is not like he publicly advocated for the war. Take him to task him for his man love for Ron Paul. Criticize him for his obsession with a single topic. Or maybe wonder why nobody who actually started the war was prosecuted.
Because it is totally beside the point that a guy who argues from the standpoint that he is never wrong and anyone who can’t see that is either tremendously dumb or evil was actualy spectacularly wrong once upon a time?
I say this as someone who never supported the war and who doesn’t read Glenn Greenwald’s blog – this post is pathetic and the Greenwald Derangement Syndrome among some liberals I usually agree with is not a good look.
Maybe if you tried reading his blog, you’re realise why people have such an issue with him :)
So you admit you have no idea what this conversation is really about. You just don’t like the tone of it.
Got it.
Um, no. I don’t read his blog because I find his writing style borderline unreadale and I think he’s completely uncharitable with people he disagrees with. I see the irony in that and I’m not generally a Greenwald defender, I just can’t figure out for the life of me what the implications of this argument are supposed to be. That we should disregard his criticisms of Obama because he once deferred to the judgment of the president on national security issues before changing his mind?
What’s the point? Go after Hiatt and Kristol and the unapologetic hawk dead-enders if you want to shame people who are morally culpable for the Iraq war. Plenty of people bought the Bush administration’s arguments in good faith because there was an enormous asymmetry of information that the administration took advantage of to drive the country into war. That doesn’t excuse their judgment, but let’s keep a little perspective here.
1. That you should disregard his work because, by any reasonable interpretation of his excuse, he’s not particularly qualified to be analyzing these things now and there are plenty of far more qualified people you could read instead.
2. That you shouldn’t pay any attention to him because he still apparently refuses to challenge his own assumptions and beliefs, or to allow for the possibility of good faith disagreement, even though he’s had to acknowledge that he has, indeed, been wrong about at least Iraq and illegal immigration within the past decade.
Well, just as I think it’s very appropriate to beat up on Yglasias and Klein for supporting a freaking war because they didn’t like hippies (really? I mean, what the freaking fuck), it’s equally appropriate to beat up on Greenwald for supporting a war because America is great and good and balanced and whatever voting? who me? meh!? Presidents should get their way about foreign policy.
It’s esp. apropos when, as many people have pointed out, the core of his thinking (meh! the parties are the same but they suck) hasn’t really shifted.
He’s a commenter in this space. We talk about progressive labeled commenters. This is a surprise or problem?
This is just such an irrelevant attempt at a gotcha post. Who here had heard of Greenwald in 2003? Who was using his arguments as a basis for their support for war? Apparently no one, since the only evidence of his support comes from him volunteering that information in a book published three years after the war started. But clearly his thinking hasn’t shifted since he’s spent the past decade arguing that we should defer to the wisdom of the executive branch on national security issues, right?
I agree that Greenwald approaches issues as if there is no possibility of a good faith disagreement, and that this is particularly misguided because he himself has been wrong in the past about some major issues. I’d probably be more inclined to read him if that weren’t the case.
I don’t particularly care what Klein or Yglesias thought about the war when they were small time college student bloggers. I’m glad they changed their mind when it became clear that the war was a mistake and that the administration made the case for war in bad faith. I’m glad Greenwald did too. Should we ignore everything that comes out of Media Matters because David Brock was once a conservative? Is Krugman not worth paying attention to because he engaged in hippie punching in the 1990s?
How is it either irrelevant or gotcha?
What does this have to do with evaluating what he wrote in the book?
No one has argued that. Indeed, Rob has pointed out that it’s not the being wrong, but the particular way he claims to have been wrong that is what’s interesting.
Plenty of comments have pointed out how the structure of bad judgement claimed for 2003 seems to persist.
So your position is that if someone is (seriously) wrong once, you should never listen to them again? That it’s impossible for people to learn and improve?
I don’t get this at all. GG abandoned his duties of citizenship–I don’t think he’d disagree. Then…he took them up again? So why criticize him for the past? His responsibility for the Iraq war is just the same responsibility nearly every American has (that of not actively opposing it); it’s not like he was one of the instigators. Moreover, unlike a majority of the people who once supported the war and later changed their minds, he didn’t just change his views on the specific conflict but also the underlying views that lead him in that wrong direction in the first place.
I’m with you tt.
Farley’s post is not really a criticism of Greenwald’s having been wrong, but is in fact a criticism of Greenwald’s admission to/acknowledgement of the same.
Someone admitted to having been mistaken and subject to irrational thinking in the past? Never listen to what that person has to say ever again! [Plus Farley says he hasn't read the book, just picked a couple paragraphs out of the intro to piss and moan about, which is about as unserious as one can be.]
At LGM, Greenwald is regarded in the same manner as Nader, only to a greater degree b/c Greenwald has a platform at the Guardian and Nader is largely obscure.
On rereading Farley’s post, I’ll retract the following portion of my previous comment:
[Plus Farley says he hasn't read the book, just picked a couple paragraphs out of the intro to piss and moan about, which is about as unserious as one can be.]
The key bit is “owning that shit”. If you are to be taken seriously after the, to put it politely, absurd views he claimed to have held, then you have a pile of work to do. And that work isn’t purely “Doing good works now”, but figuring out what went so very wrong.
I think this is an issue for many kinds of strong about faces.
At the very least, he should perhaps me more empathetic to people who are disengaged with his issues now.
Indeed. I remember a spat a while back over Kevin Drum saying something similarly naive (though not, in fact, as bad) regarding President Obama, and Greenwald just laying into him, likening his political intelligence to Britney Spears. If he’d likened Drum’s current thinking to his own 2003 thinking, it might have led to something slightly more useful than the latest edition of Glenn Greenwald Thinks You’re Stupid.
This I agree with.
I don’t think it’s correct to call this a “strong about face.” There are a fair number of people who publicly supported the war (and attacked those who disagreed) and later came to the conclusion that it was wrong. And I agree that, for most of these people, there has not been sufficient examination of where they went wrong. But GG (according to himself) just wasn’t paying attention to politics much at all during the run-up to the war. He had no position that he thought deeply about and fiercely defended. His problem was ignorance, not an entrenched false worldview. So I would call his changing views (taking what he says at face value) as, not a strong about-face, but a political maturation; a maturation that happened to many of us much earlier, but that’s ok, we don’t all have to develop at the same rate. And I don’t see how else he can “own” this other than admitting how late he came to some fairly obvious conclusions.
I don’t think it’s correct to call this a “strong about face.”
Oh, hell no, it’s not a “strong about face”. It’s exactly how Greenwald approaches poltical issues to this day. He’s still indifferent to the differences between the two parties, and would cheerfully have seen Romney win the election.
Well, in one sense, as rea points out, it’s the same thinking but with a different tone and target. In another, it’s “the positions I supported before were wrong and you are evil if you support like positions now”. That’s not owning it, is it?
And given the continuity of the structure of his thought, what makes you think he’s sufficiently analysed what made him wrong. Why is this equivalence of the parties the right one?
What?
Let’s just ignore the “the two sides are roughly ok and balanced” which, as others have pointed out, you have to be bonkers to have thought after Bush vs. Gore (ESPECIALLY if you are constitutional lawyer! I mean, holy hell on a stick), he claims to have believed that it was required to defer to the president on a case that weak for stakes that high. Esp. when he also claims:
Piffle. The facts didn’t permit that logic before the invasion. That’s not owning anything. That’s pretending there was still a reasonable case.
The “equivalence of the parties” accusation is way overstated. Greenwald has talked in the past about more and better Democrats, using the primary system to improve Democratic party behavior, etc.; i.e. very basic and sensible tactics for progressive to increase their power in our system. He has never claimed that the parties are the same in any general sense.
Don’t see how you read GG as “pretending there was still a reasonable case”–his whole point is that he was totally wrong about everything! Greenwald didn’t have to bring all this up. He has no public record of defending the Iraq war that he needs to apologize for. He’s not making excuses for himself, he’s using himself as negative example.
The article about how liberals had no reason other than tribalism to prefer Obama to Ron Paul sticks in my mind. If you want to argue that that’s not characteristic, go ahead. Show me.
He claims that there was a point before which the facts made it impossible to fall for the pro-war crap since he was turned by the facts reaching that level. Thus, there was a reasonable case before then, at least for apathetic soul such as himself.
That’s what you’re getting from the quoted passages? I don’t see it. Compare with John Cole:
Greenwald is very dissembly.
No, it’s not okay in the least. I was less than half Greenwald’s age at the time we invaded Iraq. I knew it was a terrible idea and I knew why it was a terrible idea. If the majority of voting adults had been able to muster up the civic engagement to question the Bush administration’s rationale, we may not have gone to war. Apathy like Greenwald’s towards war and peace is never okay.
Well, unlike the majority of voting adults Greenwald has actually learned the right lessons (no longer apathetic, opposes wars). I don’t really see the point in condemning someone who’s on the right side now when so many people haven’t.
This is a blog…there’s room to condem everyone!
More seriously, is it not the case that Greenwald is some sort of figure of note? Esp. for progressives? He puts stuff out there for us to examine…and, strangely, we examine it. There are lessons, positive and negative, to be drawn and, of course, we generally want to evaluate the credibility of people we read.
This is one reason I, myself, spend more time thinking about people on “my side”. I’m in no danger whatsoever of falling for anything Rumsfeld, the Pauls, or other right wing known liars say. (This rejection has become way easier over time as they all’ve become ever more naked in their lying.)
But it’s important to be careful analysing people who often say things you agree with (I believe Brien made this point well in this thread).
Finally, even putting aside what you might want to say about Greenwald, I think Rob is very right to point out that this particular move he made is bonkers. Putting aside its implausibility, if it is a straight up correct description derived from his diary of the time, “Got up; read the constitution and shivered and the sheer genius of it; someone tried to talk to me about some Supreme Court case that decided the presidency on naked political grounds — stupid boring politics.” then it’s a very striking thing. It might indite his now judgment (as people have suggested). It might suggest that he should consider better how to reach people in a similar state (as he often diagnoses).
This doesn’t seem that hard, really. Greenwald’s defense isn’t that he was wrong in the sense that someone who believed the WMD stuff or “democracy promotion” stuff or who was just young and dumb was wrong: but that he, as a full grown damned adult and successful professional, just didn’t know anything about politics (which makes you wonder why he’s getting paid now, dunnit?) and put blind trust
And, okay, you can get over that. But you can’t get over that while, a) holding yourself out as the absolute leading authority on any topic you choose to write about and b) impuning people who disagree with you as self-evidently wrong for disagreeing with you (even though they showed better judgment than you in the past!), to the point that their wrongness must have nefarious reasons.
I guess the difference between us is that I don’t see Greenwald as guilty of either a or b. I haven’t read him much since he moved to the Guardian, but in the past, at least, he regularly linked to experts on whatever he talked about; he’s never claimed some unique knowledge or insight on the topics he writes about. And while Greenwald accuses lots of people for disagreeing with him for reasons of partisanship or tribalism, those aren’t “nefarious” reasons; when he does actually accuse someone of “nefarious” motivation, he usually has pretty good evidence. And he always gives arguments; nothing is claimed to be “self-evident.”
Oh dear God please. Since at least 2009, Greenwald’s default rhetorical stance is that once he writes on a topic the matter has been settled, and that anyone who disagrees with them is by definition stupid and/or evil. As the OP says: at least own that shit if you’re going to defend it.
In my experience, usually Greenwald’s links turn out to lead to old Glenn Greenwald posts.
This calls for empirical observation. In the latest Greenwald article (“The FBI’s anticipatory prosecution of Muslims to criminalize speech”) I count 14 links. Three are to past Greenwald pieces. The others are about evenly split between news reports and people Greenwald is citing for their specialized expertise (e.g. a law professor to comment on a court case).
Really, not as many flying monkeys, nor half so rabid as in days of yore.
Greenwaldammerung?
I guess it’s dirty pool to suggest that Greenwald isn’t anything but pure and could never be concerned about such things as advancing himself or making money. Anybody who would suggest such things is just a blind Democratic follower.
When the Afghanistan war started, I was glad to be rid of the Taliban, and although I disapproved of imperialist intervention due to what I like to think of as marxist principle, I couldn’t see how this one could be made any worse.
I don’t think that makes me a war supporter any more than Greenwald was over Iraq. Get a grip.
Adherence to international law, perhaps? The opposition of people who knew a thing or two? Nothing?
He’s talking about Afghanistan, not Iraq.
The essence of Greenwaldism is to do nothing and carp and complain incessantly. It gives Greenwald too much credit to state thathe “supported” the war. He is not capable of anything so consequential as “support” or “opposition.” He is manifestly capable of yipping.
Yes. Good thing other bloggers on the left have been doing so much consequential stuff, eh?
He’s a writer, so he writes. What’s he supposed to do, according to ploeg?
You judge a writer from what he writes.
If Farley can find some writing where Greenwald encouraged people to support the Iraq war, he has a point; if not, he should can his nonsense.
Well, yeah. This is more of LGM’s Judean People’s Front nonsense. As far as the Iraq War goes, Greenwald had a lot of company, including among so-called progressives, in credulously accepting the claims of the government in pushing the war. Like with John Cole (and to a lesser degree with the ever excitable Andrew Sullivan), I’m less interested in whether a guy was wrong but more in whether he realizes it and drew the appropriate lessons. Whatever you want to say about Greenwald (the #2 hate object on this site, next to Nader, ahead of any conservative), I’m not sure that you could characterize his approach in recent years as credulous acceptable of whatever anyone tells him on national security and civil liberties. But don’t let that interefere with the latest rant – it may be slightly less pointless than conducting a feud with another site about navies (!?) or with anyone and everyone about Ralph Nader, but it seems to provide endless emotional satisfaction.
“I’m not sure that you could characterize his approach in recent years as credulous acceptable of whatever anyone tells him on national security and civil liberties”
One could easily characterise it as the refusal to listen honestly to any opinion that might cause a shift in stance. The fact that the last ten years have seen Greenwald shift from not listening at all to just twisting countering opinions so that he can have a nice rant doesn’t particularly strike me as progress.
Let me suggest, before you accuse us of firing the first shots in the Lefty Circular Firing squad, that you take a look at Glenn’s blog and twitter feed and evaluate how often he attacks conservatives relative to how often he attacks progressives. Let me also suggest that you take account of the fact that many of the shots we launch against Greenwald, Sirota, Stoller, et al involve the latters’ defenses of conservative heroes of the moment such as Rand Paul.
Just checked his Twitter feed right now–and most of the attacks (if they can be called that) are on the media, mostly of the “war is good” sort. Since the latter is, I suppose, conservative, I’d say (based on one of your own criteria) that Greenwald attacks conservatives more than liberals.
Feel free to do a count and disprove me, but (a) you won’t do it and (b) you’ll find I’m right.
Farley: you may not be the first shooter in the circular firing squad, but that does not change the fact that the mere being part of such a squad is idiotic.
Where’s the circle?
conducting a feud with another site about navies
It was a good-humored discussion, accompanied by a lot of jokes about a feud.
Not only that, but I care about whether or not what a writer writes is accurate. It doesn’t matter to me if, say, a science writer thought inside their head that the dark side of the moon was caused by the earth’s shadow a decade ago when they were an entertainment writer. What matters to me is if, when they do write about such things, their work is well informed and accurate.
”
Not only that, but I care about whether or not what a writer writes is accurate.”
This is ridiculous. Being “accurate” from a factual standpoint is either very easy to do (just getting facts correct), or very murky (to wit, you perceive Greenwald as “accurate” because he complies with your preconceived notions). The value a good writer adds is with their insight, which means that not being pig-ignorant is in fact a basic qualification for being a useful public intellectual.
And the characteristic Greenwald ploy is to assemble the big pile of facts, then say that the facts prove something (often with a “The only possible explanation can be” flourish), then refer anyone who questions the conclusion to the big pile of facts. He doesn’t seem to admit that there can be other ways to interpret the big pile of facts. Indeed typically offering any other interpretation of the big pile of facts is a sign of wrongthink.
This is always most evident when Greenwald begins a sentence with the phrase “does anyone seriously believe/disagree…”
Reminds me of the takedown of Bob Woodward by way of his piece of shit book on Belushi.
Sure, it’s very easy to do. Which is why we don’t see posts saying, for example, that the Keystone XL pipeline has been approved or that Iran is going to get a nuclear bomb. Eh eh.
It’s not only an issue with the facts, but also whether their analysis (insight, if you will) turns out to be in line with the facts and with future events, as well as whether or not they give an accurate representation of things. For example, if someone writes a post about how silly an article suggesting Obama use OFA post-election to help with political initiatives is, it’s rather telling when they become silent when Obama actually does that.
Yes, I think it’s important to judge writers by what they write, not what they privately thought in their head a decade ago. Ridiculous, I know.
Between the president’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t share the collective hate-on for GG…truth be told the only time I think about him is when LGM does one of these posts.
That said, what the hell was it about Bush’s “performance” in the wake of 9/11 that could have bolstered his credibility? He looked good with a bullhorn? He didn’t immediately round up all the Muslims and put them in camps, pace Michelle Malkin?
If you read things being written during the months immediately after 9/11, a lot of folks were writing in moderate praise of Bush for not being as godawful as he might have been expected to have been, i.e. in specifically saying this wasn’t a war against Islam. In retrospect, this judgment seems far too generous, but it was anything but unusual.
Similarly, the idea that the War in Afghanistan was a fine thing was also ubiquitous. There was extremely little opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan. I think Barbara Lee was the only person to vote against the AUMF in Congress. Only groups on the extreme far left opposed it.
Even when things started going badly in Afghanistan, the failure was blamed on Iraq emerging as a distraction (i.e. the war was going well until 2003). See the 2004 Kerry and the 2008 Obama campaigns, which both emphasized the need to refocus on Afghanistan.
Full disclosure: I opposed the Iraq War from the get go. But to my eternal shame, the War on Afghanistan was the one US war in my lifetime that I didn’t oppose, though I didn’t exactly support it either. I can say I was shell-shocked by 9/11. But that’s a pretty weak excuse.
You know, if we’d gone into Afghanistan, caught bin Laden at Tora Bora, and gotten out again (leaving behind a significant economic aid package) the whole thing would have been acceptable.
Bush specifically said it wasn’t a war against Islam … right after he expressly called it a “crusade.”
It was obvious — at the time — that we were being led to war by, at best, a profoundly ignorant and careless person. Whatever expectations he might have exceeded, he was godawful enough, by a long shot.
This is absolutely true.
This analysis suffers from a serious anachronism: describing the initial action in Afghanistan as “the invasion of Afghanistan.”
Just to refresh people’s memories: there were a few hundred Americans in the entire country on the day the Northern Alliance captured Kabul. We had so few people in country in December that we had to hire some Tali-buddies to guard the back door at Tora Bora.
The “invasion of Afghanistan” did not happen in any meaningful sense until the Bush administration was already in full-court-press mode for the Iraq War. That invasion was not the policy that was implemented after the AUMF; it was a consequence of the failure to successfully implement that policy.
Bush’s speech in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 was impressive. I hated the guy, didn’t trust him, didn’t want him as president, but listening to that speech caused me to very briefly imagine that maybe he could rise to the occasion.
I’m just a regular person with regular knowledge (who always always votes), and I had no way of knowing, in those first months, how rigged the whole process was. What I did know was that this terrorist attack warranted the biggest law enforcement operation in world history. I just fucking assumed that we would cooperate with law enforcement officials everywhere, and that the sympathy of the rest of the world might enable us to conduct an unrelenting investigation that would track down and arrest the perpetrators.
And when he announced a War on Terror, I thought, damn, this is not good. You can’t have a war on terror. It doesn’t have an address or a legislative body or borders. And when the focus turned to Iraq, I was bewildered and incredulous. Why weren’t we engaged in an investigative international police action? Why did we seem to ignore the UN weapons monitors? Was Congress gonna pack picnic baskets and head to the Kuwaiti border to watch and cheer?
I didn’t support the war. But I also didn’t join the groups of protesters at street intersections around my town. Those were the People In Black, with their noisemakers and signs and costumes. They seemed like the kind of anarchist-socialists who always show up at demonstrations and mess them up for everyone else. So they were right and I was publicly silent and thus wrong.
I also did not know Colin Powell was lying, that there had been a warning memo, that Saudi officials were hustled out of the country without being questioned first, that there was no fucking post-war plan, that Joseph Wilson was played, that Valerie Plame’s career was ruined for no reason, that Cheney was even more monstrous than he initially seemed.
I don’t know Greenberg’s work well enough to weigh in, but I do know that it wasn’t that easy to see into the heart of things back in 2001 and 2002. By the time 2003 rolled around I was heartsick and dispirited. I’m well aware that being heartsick and dispirited and living in Northern California is enviable when compared to living in Baghdad, or being posted anywhere in the region. But in regard to what action I might have taken, I surely came up short. There’s just no way to feel good about yourself in recalling the last 13 years.
Any white Republican male standing behind a podium and making noises about a War on Terror would have seemed impressive to a credulous people fed by a credulous media in those days.
I have a certain sympathy for the view that nobody who supported the Iraq War should ever again be taken seriously. In more measured moments, I amend that by saying nobody who supported the Iraq War who has not expressed a fundamental change in his or her political attitudes should be taken seriously. Claiming that one was wrong because of some minor detail (e.g. the particular incompetence of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war) ain’t enough. The invasion of Iraq was not wrong merely in its details.
Greenwald writes plenty of things that deserve to be criticized. For example, the fact that Greenwald went from thinking “it doesn’t matter whether or not you vote for the D or the R, ’cause it’s all good” to thinking “it doesn’t matter wehter or not you vote for the D or the R, ’cause they’re both awful” is telling and quite worthy of criticism. And, as has been noted upthread, he suffers from one of the web’s worst and most chronic cases of logorrhea.
But if your new rule is that anyone who once supported the Iraq War should never be taken seriously ever again, kindly stop taking Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry seriously…all of whom, incidentally, actively beat the drums of war in the public sphere (unlike Glenn Greenwald) and none of whom has expressed as fundamental changes in belief as Greenwald does in the very passage you quote.
In short, there’s a tremendous double-standard in the way you’re treating Greenwald’s erstwhile support for the Iraq War here.
No.
There is no claim embedded in this argument that Iraq War supporters should be dismissed en masse. Rather, the argument is that anyone making the argument on the terms Glenn makes it (“I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to”) should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, especially if this person was a 36 year old attorney rather than a 19 year old college student. Go back and revisit the major events of American politics between 1985 (when Glenn came of voting age) and 2003 (when he supposedly had his conversion), and tell me that his position is defensible. Say what you will about Klein and Yglesias, they both came to understand the need to be skeptical of the government well before Glenn; if Ezra were Glenn, we’d still have another eight years to wait before he noticed that sometimes maybe the government lies about stuff.
Moreover, Yglesias and Klein have been very upfront about how and why they were wrong (Drum as well). Glenn dissembles, evades, and lies about what he wrote in this book; note the above link where he tries to squirm out of his support. As the title implies, he’s gotta own this, and saying “well, I really didn’t pay attention to politics (except insofar as ” I was concerned that the hell-bent focus on invading Iraq was being driven by agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks. The overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak, particularly given that it would lead to an open-ended, incalculably costly, and intensely risky preemptive war”) really isn’t sufficient.
Finally, I know of no war supporter who is less generous to his ideological foes than Glenn. You would think that making an error of this magnitude would incur a degree of humility, but of course in Glenn’s case you’d be quite wrong.
So no, there isn’t a double standard. Glenn is being judged on the metrics that he’s helped established for himself.
Sorry.
Greenwald quite plainly isn’t making an argument for the Iraq War in the quoted passage. He’s describing his past views for the rhetorical purpose of emphasizing how naive he was and how much he’s changed. And he’s trying to appeal to people who had a reflexive support for President Bush in the wake of 9/11, which, sad to say, was tens of millioms of Americans.
Ezra Klein’s explanation for his support for the war, at least initially, had to do with his distaste for the antiwar culture of UC Santa Cruz, hardly a more noble explanation than Greenwald’s.
Buried in the comment I’m replying to are two much more substantive criticisms of Greenwald: the uncharitable way he reads his opponents and his refusal to now acknowledge his support of the Iraq War in 2003. I totally agree with you about the first. I’ve seen the second asserted repeatedly, but always without evidence. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that GG now denies that he supported the Iraq War at the time it began, I’m 100% on board criticizing him for that.
But the passage you cited is an intentionally unflattering, retrospective self-portrait. GG entire point is to suggest that he no longer thinks this way. People do, indeed, go through political awakenings. And yet more people present themselves as having done so (people love conversion narratives). I’m hardly a major fan of GG, but given the many things he says that are worthy of criticism, I remain puzzled by some of the things that LGM chooses to go after him for.
Please read the link in the post where Glenn attempts to explain that what he said about supporting the war didn’t really mean that he supported the war.
I just did.
Though it’s always a chore to hack thru GG’s verbiage (he’s a living advertisement for the need for good editors), here’s the nub of his current description of his erstwhile views on Iraq:
He then quotes himself from the preface of his book, saying pretty much the same thing:
As I, and others, point out upthread, we don’t actually know what GG thought in 2003. He wasn’t a pundit or a politician and appears to have left no record of his views at that time. What we have is a series of retrospective self-portraits that seem to me to be internally consistent.
Where I agree with you–and disagree with GG–is about whether this “passive acquiescence” ought to be described as support for the War. I think it should. But GG is quite plainly not hiding what he wrote in 2006 or presenting a fundamentally different portrait of himself in the past.
“Ezra Klein’s explanation for his support for the war, at least initially, had to do with his distaste for the antiwar culture of UC Santa Cruz, hardly a more noble explanation than Greenwald’s.”
You don’t think it’s the slightest bit ridiculous to excuse a middle aged man on the grounds that he really wasn’t any different than a college kid in his way of thinking?
I actually think that people change in many ways at different times in their lives and I am, in general, willing to at least listen to their accounts of why they changed, however ridiculous their earlier views or however old they were when they held them.
Okay, but how in the world does “I was the intellectual equivalent of a 20 year old college student when I was a mid-30′s professional litigator” not lead you to some…concern about said person’s judgment?
Here’s the problem: Greenwald claims mitigation and explanation for his past views, but offers only accusation and denunciation for the present views of those who disagree with him. If the evolution of political awareness was a general revelation to him rather than an egocentric one, he would behave more as a teacher instead of a preacher. Why are born again Christians the biggest assholes? Because before they were born again it was all about them and after their conversion it’s still all about them, but now with righteous.
Yep, exactly. The particulars change, but the worldview remains the same.
Ezra’s youth at the time acts as a mitigating factor in his case. Same with Yggy, in my opinion (though I do have a whole lot of other problems with his overall body of work).
The connotation of “war supporter” is someone who actively supported the war in some way, not someone who mentally deferred to the president’s judgement while doing absolutely nothing to promote it. There are many actual war supporters who still have tremendous power in our government and media; it seems very strange to associate GG with this group.
No, the connotation of war supporter is someone who thought the war would be beneficial. Doing something is not required to be a “supporter” or an “opponent.” Plenty of “war opponents” did nothing but talk about it.
I just want to note that Yglesias, Drum and Klein are all careerist hacks who shouldn’t be listened to anyway. I am sure that there must be someone who supported the Iraq war and changed their mind, and is now worth listening to, but these three are all really bad examples.
Josh Marshall?
Yes, saying that anyone who supported the war is forever wrong isn’t what’s happening.
Glenn seems to be preserving his “I’m always right” attitude by claiming he didn’t support the war, and thus he can continue never being wrong unlike the rest of those dumb people who got sucked into it.
In fact, Glenn is admitting he was wrong about Iraq. He’s just refusing to be labelled a war supporter. I think he’s splitting hairs and that his own description of his 2003 views would have made him a war supporter then. And I agree that this is a fine example of GG’s refusal to give an inch in a fight (in this case over whether he deserves to be labelled a former war supporter). But former war supporters are, in fact, a dime a dozen. And GG seems perfectly willing to own what he wrote in 2006. He’s just refusing a label. This is hardly a mortal sin (though it is, I agree, pretty typical of his style or argumentation).
I think he’s not admitting he was wrong about Iraq, because if he wanted to do that he wouldn’t have that long list of all his misgivings and suspicions right at the beginning of the passage. Instead he’s trying to narrow the discussion so as to admit only that he was wrong about the idea that the president deserves deference and “trust” when it comes to waging war. It’s reminiscent of the John Kerry ’04 line about how he still believed that the president had the _authority_ to go to war.
Neither would he shamelessly try to draw an analogy with MLK where one doesn’t exist and which depends on an intentionally false reading.
No, he’s admitting that he essentially put little thought into it. This is distinct from having put effort into coming to a position and later realizing that you were wrong. It allows him to pass off the blame to ignorance and not to his own thought processes.
“Finally, I know of no war supporter who is less generous to his ideological foes than Glenn.”
I can think of plenty of them, actually, but all of them are obvious Republican partisans. What makes Greenwald so irritating so much of the time is his combination of bargain-basement-conservative-style bad faith arguments and his insistence that the American left’s main problem is that it lacks more people who can reason the way he can. At least every other purveyor of uncharitable mendacity has the decency to label us the enemy by definition.
Here. Double clutch and roll around on the floor.
This is quite clearly not what anyone is saying. I mean, I might take Greenwald’s own defense to the point of saying it proves he shouldn’t be taken seriously on anything (which is mostly because I find it so implausible as to be almost transparently false), but clearly no one is reaching the conclusion that simply being wrong on Iraq means you can’t ever be right about anything.
Oh look, more Greenwald troll bait. Gotta get those clicks up baby!
As someone who saw through all the bullshit about WMDs in 2002 from my own little window seat on the internet, I’m not impressed with Greenwald’s rather mealy-mouthed deference to Dubya.
Me neither. I didn’t support the war and said so to anyone who’d listen at the time, but that was mostly just a few idiots on the internet and my co-workers. But, in retrospect, I took the liberal humanitarian case for war a lot more seriously than I should have. My wife is generally liberal but apolitical, but when I mentioned some gloss of the idea that we had to invade Iraq for its own good, she told me that was pretty fucking stupid.
But I don’t think past stupidity should be held against Greenwald, even assuming it’s genuine. He’s not making the same mistakes twice as far as deferring to authority and that’s all I feel like it’s reasonable to ask of people.
“He’s not making the same mistakes twice as far as deferring to authority and that’s all I feel like it’s reasonable to ask of people.”
But he is making the same mistake of failing to listen to people who don’t agree with him and challenge his own opinions. Being a reactionary who happens to be right here and there isn’t actually something that deserves to be praised.
Yes, this.
10 years ago I was a very busy 33 year-old software developer and I was able to understand that we were being fed a bunch of lies. I was able to figure this out by being naturally curious and generally skeptical (I mean I knew about Iran-Contra as a teenager, where the fuck was Glenn then?) and simply reading some easily-available non-US media. It was available on this technology some of you might of heard of: the Internet. Quite a bit of it in the very paper Glenn writes (wrote?) for.
Glenn’s excuse rings pretty fucking hollow.
That seventh-grade belief, as others have pointed out, is a construction; the Greenwald straw-man of Greenwald past. A retrospective pose of naiveté and innocence, no matter how absurd they may sound, plays better than political indifference and civic indolence. Plus it allows Greenwald to make an “admission” that deflects blame to others more than it reflects blame on himself. Hence:
If only they had been good and honest men, Greenwald’s guileless trust wouldn’t have been broken! He takes full responsibility for his inherent good nature.
But it’s not enough for Greenwald to simply create a straw-man of his own past in order to explain away his lack of political awareness. Sometimes he has to go bigger, as in this comment he left on Chris Floyd’s website (my bold):
Dissent pretty much began when Greenwald became conscious of it. Or at least that’s when it really began to matter.
Well said.
To reiterate, a blogger/opinion leader/pundit worth is measured by the quality of his *public* production: newspaper articles, public speeches, blog posts…
Not by his private opinions, especially if those opinions predate his engagement with the public.
Moreover, being an asshole, while unpleasant for those who are on the receiving end, is not a reason for dismissing his arguments.
Saying “Greenwald is mean to his opponents” as a good reason to attack his opinions make you (and I mean most if not all of the bloggers at LGM) look like whiny teenagers.
“Moreover, being an asshole, while unpleasant for those who are on the receiving end, is not a reason for dismissing his arguments.”
Perhaps not, but seeing someone constantly assume bad faith in people who disagree with them and refuse to entertain the idea that they could be wrong and challenge their own assumptions is, indeed, a reason to question their thinking abilities, judgment, and insight.
Greenwald challenged his assumptions once, and it shook him so much he became the person he is today. So I don’t think he feels like going through all that again. It would be like going from pupa back to larva.
Yep. It’s not that Greenwald is an asshole, nor even that he seems to go out of his way to be an ssshole and then tell people they’re only pissed off about it because they can’t beat his superior logical arguments. It’s that the guy has repeatedly proven unwilling or unable to argue with others the way he insists people argue with him. The cognitive disconnect between how he wants people to treat his output and how he treats others is so great that it’s only possible to conclude he’s either wilfully mendacious or has serious gaps in his logical thinking. Either of those are serious problems in someone claiming to speak truth to and about power.
True. And although some people are under the impression that Greenwald never lets a criticism of his work go unanswered, anybody who spent time over at Salon (I don’t frequent his Guardian blog) knows that if you offer a substantive critique which leaves him no out except to admit that he got something fundamentally wrong or exposes that his premise was false, you will be ignored. I summed up this condition in a comment at the sad red earth, where A. Jay Adler has engaged in some masterful deconstruction of Greenwald’s work. Here’s the comment:
Greenwald 2003: My dad is awesome! He’s got the best car! I totally want to be like him when I grow up.
Greenwald 2013: Fuck you, Dad! I just read this book by this guy Zinn, and now I’m getting a tattoo!
Mr. Greenwald is going through his political adolescence a coupla decades too late.
You might check your facts, jerk. As far as anyone who has pursued these facts knows, Greenwald spent his youth underprivileged, asshole. Did you bother to check whether “Dad” had a nice car? Fool.
When was the last time I saw a metaphor so poorly interpreted? BIGFOOT ISREAL?
I’d ask this guy if he felt a whooshing sensation on his scalp when he read my comment, but I’m afraid he’d say, “No, I’m wearing a hat.”
The President’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was very meh. People glommed onto him and thought they were looking at Churchill because they really, really wanted to believe.
The toppling of the Taliban government was very low-hanging fruit. We provided air support to a strong, established, indigenous fighting force and got the Taliban’s major foreign backer to kick them to the curb.
Neither of these justifications make sense without the Britney Spears logic that follows them.
Also, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar walked out of the back door at Tora Bora in December 2001. To still be citing Bush’s awesome judgment and leadership in Afghanistan to explain one’s faith in Bush in March 2003 is not a good sign.
“…and got the Taliban’s major foreign backer to kick them to the curb.”
That is not a mean feat.
Fair point.
Even after 9/11, getting the ISI to back off was a big deal. Backing the Taliban was a core national security interest for them.
Exactly. Personally, I think the start of the Afghanistan adventure (up to the toppling of the Talibans) was well executed (which is different from saying that it was a good idea to start with); unfortunately, they soon lost interest in it (but still left an occupying force).
Not just “left and occupying force.” “Inserted” an occupying force.
Let’s keep the timeline straight:
1. US backs Northern Alliance with intel and air strikes.
2. Northern Alliance (not US, not NATO) topples Taliban, captures Kabul.
3. US builds up forces in the country.
Thanks for the correction.
Looking at it this way, I don’t understand why they occupied the country, if they were not interested in running it.
I think it comes down to two possibilities:
1. They recognized that they failed at Tora Bora, and responded by throwing troops at the problem.
2. They considered the presence of American troops in a hostile country to be, in and of itself, a boon for American security interests.
Well, I opposed both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the start. I have the linguistic, cultural and local expertise of the Middle East and South-East Asia to know it was going to be massive failures from the get-go. So, I pretty much find everyone on this web-site to be nothing more than a bunch of whiny teenagers.
That’s the underlying lesson: knowledge. The US needs to get actual experts of these countries to guide them in understanding what to do and what not to do.
You didn’t need expertise in the region to know that starting a war of choice was a crime.
True. But irrelevant, because nobody (who mattered) gave a damn. But perhaps if we had experts pointing out how badly this was likely to bite us in the ass, some people would have listened. Although Cheney and co. probably wouldn’t have cared. The war itself was their objective, and they were spectacularly successful.
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