As with Libya in 2011, and even Iraq in 2003, there is always a leftist around to argue that opposing the latest war waged by the big western powers is a betrayal of people who are desperate for military assistance. David Graeber, a U.S. based leftist who was very involved with the Occupy movement, recently made this argument in the UK Guardian referring to Kurdish areas in Syria that are in danger of falling to ISIS. In exchanges with readers he stated

“I’m opposed to U.S. military intervention in Syria and elsewhere. I do say that in the immediate tactical situation, where the U.S. is ALREADY there, I would defer to the defenders of Kobane what they’d like to see those forces do – basically, take out the IS tanks and artillery which they could easily do and then get the hell out of there. Anyone who says that as a matter of principle one should not even call for that, but that the population of Kobane should be all allowed to be killed, raped, or enslaved because we know better than they do what’s good for them, is the real arrogant imperialist as far as I’m concerned.”

I wonder if “we” should also “defer” to millions of Syrians who want Assad’s government militarily strengthened. One can scoff at Syria’s presidential elections this year for the same reasons one can scoff at elections in Afghanistan and in Iraq, but it is clear that millions support Assad’s government even if often out of fear of the alternative. Do the lives and fears of those Syrians matter, or can we forget them because they are not, as Graeber claims of the Syrian Kurds, led by progressive Zapatista-inspired leaders? And should “we” similarly “defer” to those in the East Ukraine who would welcome Russian military intervention?

Graeber recycles an analogy used in 2011 to argue that leftists should not oppose NATO’s “no-fly-zone” in Libya.

“If a fascist is about to kill your comrade, and there’s a cop a block away, only an absolute heartless puritanical ideologue would say ‘I will not urge the cop to intervene because I am against the existence of cops.’”

Gilbert Achcar similarly accused the anti-war Left of lacking decency if it opposed NATO’s military involvement in Libya because civilians in Benghazi were at risk of being massacred by Gaddafi’s troops. He even suggested that his position would offer a “powerful argument” to counter Israel’s Western-backed atrocities in the Occupied Territories, as if powerful arguments have not always been in abundant supply.  Jump ahead to May of this year and Benghazi is being bombed from the air. Urgent debates among western leftists about how to stop it have vanished. Seumas Milne is one of the very few now willing to mention that the “clashes and atrocities” that have “engulfed Libya since Nato’s ‘liberation’: including bombings, assassinations, the kidnapping of the prime minister, the seizure of oil terminals by warlords, the expulsion of 40,000 mainly black Libyans from their homes, and the killing of 46 protesters on the streets of Tripoli in one incident — ignored by the states that supposedly went to war to protect civilians.” Ignored also by the corporate media, and the Left has followed suit.

U.S.-led violence in Iraq has killed 1-2 million Iraqis since 1990. The appropriate analogy for the U.S. and its rich allies is not a corrupt and brutal police force. They are more like an incredibly powerful and out-of-control mafia. It requires no heartless and puritanical principle, in fact no abstract principle at all, to oppose legitimizing their violence. Moreover, ISIS, like the Khmer Rouge during 1969-1973, is a creation of that violence as John Pilger recently reminded us.

Graeber struck an optimistic note in one response to readers:

“It looks now like things will be turning and U.S. airstrikes are actually targeting IS outside Rojava. If so, our next step should be to work with the Kurdish revolutionaries to get the U.S. out, and ensure they are not subverted, overwhelmed, or coopted by foreign influence.”

I couldn’t help but be reminded, as I read this, that in July the U.S. Senate voted 100-0 in full support of Israel’s massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.  Work to get the U.S. military out of Rojava? The U.S. Left is too weak to compel a single U.S. senator to vote against Israel’s U.S.-funded savagery even though about a third of the U.S. public views Israel negatively.  In Canada, where the majority of the public views Israel negatively, the Left has been similarly ineffective.

Another very basic thing that western leftists haven’t been able to do is inform the public of the human costs of their governments’ aggression. In May of 2013, a poll of UK public revealed that 59% percent believe 10,000 or fewer Iraqis died as a result of the war that was launched in 2003. The poll was done two months after the war’s ten-year anniversary – therefore after a great deal of retrospective media coverage. Scientific studies substantiate a death toll of between 500,000 – 1 million from that phase of the West’s twenty-four year assault on Iraq alone. Only 6% provided an estimate in the range of what scientific studies support. The poll was very effectively buried by the UK media even though its significance should be obvious to anyone with a bit of respect for human life.

The USA (and key allies like Canada who seldom get the blame they deserve) have been on an incredibly murderous rampage for the past half century. Top Democrats like Hilary Clinton are openly saying that it will go on for decades more.

Western leftists presently have, to put it generously, a very limited capacity to restrain U.S.-led violence. Closely related to that, they have demonstrated a negligible capacity to inform the western pubic about the consequences of such violence, and zero capacity to hold Western political leaders legally accountable for the gravest of crimes. Leftists who want to make a good faith effort to distinguish between short-term tactics and dangerous fantasies need to bear those facts very much in mind. They should be very careful not to be used, as some Leftists inevitably are, to provide niche marketing for perpetual war.