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wrbones
03-30-03, 04:16 AM
Bad faith abounds in debate about the war


By Jonathan Zimmerman, 3/30/2003

FEW DAYS AFTER the United States attacked Iraq, I traveled to Chicago to address a group of high school history teachers. I urged them to conduct debates about the war, so that students could arrive at their own views of it. Afterward, one of the teachers pulled me aside. ''Thanks so much for your talk,'' she said, smiling graciously. ''Unless we debate the war, our students won't know that it's an enormous mistake.''


Like the teacher, I regard the attack on Iraq as an enormous mistake. But her comment contains its own cynical error: It presumes anyone who debates the issue openly and reasonably will come to share her opinions. Call it the ''Liberal Antiwar Fallacy.''

We liberals love to talk about debate, of course. Writing in 1927, the great liberal prophet John Dewey famously declared that ''the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy'' -- more discussion, more deliberation, more debate. But Dewey was honest enough to admit that equally reasonable people could arrive at different interpretations than his own.

This honesty seems absent from the antiwar movement right now. Especially among my liberal colleagues at the universities, there's a tacit assumption that any informed, good-willed person would oppose the invasion of Iraq. By corollary, supporters of the war must be ignorant or evil -- or both.

To be sure, some war supporters are ignorant. According to a Knight-Ridder poll taken in early January, for example, half of Americans said that some of the 19 hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks were Iraqis. It's fair to presume that most of the people who believe such nonsense also favor the war.

But it hardly follows that every prowar American is a prisoner of misinformation. Nor, for that matter, does every antiwar citizen have a full command of the facts. Last year, a National Geographic-Roper survey found that fewer than 15 percent of young adults between 18 and 24 could locate Iraq on a map. Well over 15 percent of this demographic opposes the war, so the antiwar camp must also include a generous proportion of geographical illiterates.

More to the point, though, people who do know the facts can -- and do -- disagree about them. Why? Here the antiwar movement will invoke morality, not knowledge: If war hawks aren't ignorant, they're evil. They want to rule the globe; they want to destroy innocent lives; they want to trade ''blood for oil.'' John Dewey declared that good people can come to different conclusions. But today's antiwar liberal says just the opposite: If you come to a different conclusion, you cannot be good.

Ironically, this position echoes the moral absolutism of the antiwar movement's own bete noire: President Bush. In his speeches and prayer sessions, Bush has repeatedly asserted that America is guided by providential destiny. Turn on so-called Christian radio, and you'll hear the nasty implications of this divine hubris: If God blesses America's war on Iraq, and God is good, then only bad people can oppose it.

In a less theological vein, meanwhile, many conservatives have insisted that antiwar demonstrators are actually anti-American -- or, worse, pro-Iraq. The New York Post even labeled 13 prominent musicians and actors ''Saddam Lovers,'' as if any skepticism about the war betrays a secret passion for a murderous Arab tyrant.

Both sides, then, are operating in profoundly bad faith: they each presume that decent, knowledgeable people will agree with them. But the true democratic faith, the one that John Dewey proclaimed, teaches us that decent people disagree -- often profoundly -- about the same knowledge. Now, more than ever, it's a lesson that all of us need to learn.


Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of ''Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools.''

This story ran on page D11 of the Boston Globe on 3/30/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.