Vincent

Steven Vincent was the journalist killed a few days ago in Iraq. Here's an excerpt from Vincent's blog, excerpted in the Guardian. From the accounts I've seen, the guy was well-enough respected by other journalists, mainly not for his views and support of the war, but for his intrepidness.

"But should we really get involved in choosing one political group over another?" the captain countered. "I've always believed we should not project US values on to other cultures - we should let them be. Who is to say we are right and they are wrong?" And there it was, the cultural-values-are-relative argument. That, I realised, was part of US naivety: the belief, filtering down from Ivy League academia to Main Street, USA, that our values are no better (and usually worse) than those of foreign nations; that we have no right to judge "the Other" and that imposing our way of life on the world is the sure path to the bleak morality of empire.

"No, believe me," Layla exclaimed. "These religious parties are wrong. Look at them, their corruption, their incompetence, their stupidity. Look at the way they treat women. How can you say you cannot judge them? Why shouldn't your apply your own cultural values?"

It was a moment I wish every college kid and western-civilisation-hating leftist could witness: an air force captain quoting chapter and verse from the new American gospel of multiculturalism, only to have a flesh and blood representative of "the Other" declare he was incorrect, that discriminations and judgment between cultures are possible - necessary - especially when it comes to the unacceptable way Middle Eastern Arabs treat women. I couldn't resist. "You know, Captain," I said, "sometimes American values are just ... better."

It's not fair to be critical of someone who can no longer answer back, but this cultural relativism critique is wearisome. Vincent is just one other mouthpiece for this cliche. He also carries the kind of arrogant know-it-all-ness that many travelers, journalists, war reporters, and those who go through devastating events can have. I know the sentiment and have been guilty of it in the past. The problem with it is its blindness. And, yes, blind arrogance can come (and often does) from the Ivies -- where pretty much all the planners of this war went to school, by the way -- or anywhere else.

Vincent was wrong on the war. It's wrong for the Iraqis because a lot of them are dead and/or tortured and their country is a long-term mess. It's wrong for Americans because a lot of them are dead (though a lot fewer than the Iraqis), the American population was tricked into supporting the war, and they're paying a large price in monetary terms too. I don't say this because I'm a "cultural relativist" nor because I think America is inherently "bad." These kinds of trite claims about the critics of American policy are based in intellectual laziness and political muddle-headedness. They regurgitate the story about some mediocre and uninfluential academic with poorly conceptualized relativistic political views as representative of all of academia. Vincent was wrong on the war because the convoluted or ill-formed or bogus values that went into justifying this war are and were wrong. The battle is over which values are better, not between having them and not having them. Since that battle is won philosophically and morally and those who were and are against the war are correct, many of those who have supported the war have had to resort to all sorts of moral and rhetorical contortions to hold onto their position.

We'll give them this: they're tenacious. Hopefully this tenacity will see them through to cleaning up the awful mess they've created in some satisfactory way. But we won't grant them their rhetorical claim to values. These people are the relativists, changing their reasons and justifications for the war on a daily basis to suit the occasion, adjusting how they represent realities or facts for political reasons and hardly ever good policy or ethical reasons, and plain old-fashioned lying to the American public, the Iraqi public, their supposed allies, and sometimes to themselves. Steven Vincent bought it all. Yes, of course American values are sometimes better, even often better. But not these people's American values, wherever the shifting political and rhetorical winds ultimately take them.