>Meanwhile younger leftists dislike him because he correctly identifies our current leftist and youth cultures as obsessed with the mechanics of identity categories and privilege,
I'm sorry but that's simply absurd, his treatment of people like Sam Harris and Majid Nawaz shows that he himself is deeply in bed with identity politics and other SJW BS.
Yea, I was around when Greenwald was devoting much of his time writing against New Atheism's anti-Muslim slant [1]. I am not sure what about criticism of U.S. warmongering is "SJW BS" but I'd be interested to hear the connection. Identity animus can be co-opted by powerful factions just as easily as identity politics...
Only put something in quotes if the person actually said it. Sam Harris never claimed the Iraq war was noble or well-intended. He never supported the Iraq war, though Greenwald initially did. From Greenwald's preface in How Would a Patriot Act?[1]:
> 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.
Greenwald was also rather supportive of US foreign policy in 2005.[2]
What you're most likely referencing are Sam Harris's arguments about morality and intentions. In his 2007 book The End of Faith, he discusses the Iraq war in a few paragraphs:
> What we euphemistically describe as “collateral damage” in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons—weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their property. What would we do with such technology? ... A moment’s thought reveals that a person’s use of such a weapon would offer a perfect window onto the soul of his ethics.
> ... How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether or not you admire the man’s politics—or the man—there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently.
Later in the section, Harris uses the reversal test:
> Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human shields? (What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers? What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily? You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a mounting column of zeros.
None of this is expressing support for the Iraq war. Harris is simply arguing that different societies have different levels of ethical development.
That people have to go back to 2005 Greenwald to attack 2020 Greenwald is always a treat. And they can't even get it right when they do [1]! The Harris quotes speak for themselves. The article I linked upthread has some more.
I'm not the one who brought up Greenwald's lies about Sam Harris. That was two other people. I'm simply trying to set the record straight.
Regarding Greenwald's claim that he never supported the Iraq war: He redefines "support" to mean using a platform or role in politics to publicly profess support for the war. By that definition, my hawkish uncle didn't support the Iraq war because he never published anything on the matter. I agree with Greenwald that his beliefs at the time were reasonable. And I know the Iraq was a big reason why he changed many of his political views. But unlike Greenwald, Harris never even implicitly supported the Iraq war. At the time he thought it was, "...a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan." In hindsight, he admits it was a disaster.
In The End of Faith, Harris uses the Iraq war as an example of the US being utterly abhorrent, but still being more ethical and moral than many other societies on the planet. He argues that the reason those societies haven't caused more harm is because they lack the capability, not the will, and that it's crucial to make that distinction. Now it's quite possible to disagree with that argument, but it takes an extremely uncharitable reading of Harris to get support for the Iraq war out of that text.
> but it takes an extremely uncharitable reading of Harris to get support for the Iraq war out of that text.
I hate to get Goodwins-law on you, but that argument is nonsense for 2 reasons. The first one is that it is assuming the enemy would behave worse than you in your position (with no proof whatsoever) so it is extremely cynical in that regard. Using that template you could use Nazi Germany instead of the U.S and the argument would be exactly the same.The second reason is that even if assuming the enemy(let's say Hussein) would be a monster against Americans if only he had the power, THAT DOES NOT JUSTIFY AT ALL to invade Iraq (A country that did nothing to the US and presented 0 actual threat) and kill hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians. To me Harris is a genocide apologist and no acrobatic sophistry will convince me of the contrary.
6-7 paragraphs that may be condensed in "We are good, they are bad". According to Harris world, the hawk governments of USA and Israel would only kill the "terrorists" , it is just a shame that the weapons are not perfect (they are still good enough to continue killing), but if it were the other way around those brown people would kill and eat our babies (source: "Harris prejudices")
I'm sorry but that's simply absurd, his treatment of people like Sam Harris and Majid Nawaz shows that he himself is deeply in bed with identity politics and other SJW BS.