Liberalism with a Grenade Launcher [RI6]
Liberal interventionism in popular culture
(What is this? I explain here. You’re reading Chapter 6 in a whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture. You can go back to Chapter 5 here, or go on to Chapter 7 here)
There is not a neat mapping, at least not in the UK, between the various politico-ideological tribes of foreign policy and domestic policy. But insofar as humanitarian interventionism can be associated with any domestic ideology it is centrist liberalism (which is frankly unfortunate), and so I think it makes sense to look at some explicitly liberal films and shows, particularly those set during the time of the War on Terror — a war which seemed to do funny and lasting things to many liberals’ brains.
Let’s start then with the holy bible of modern centrist liberalism: The West Wing (1999). West Wing took the format that ER (1994) had perfected for the medical drama and applied it to politics[1]. A constant background hum of technobabble is kept up[2], but you are neither required nor expected to understand it; and in this manner a veneer of intellectualism is placed over what is in effect a melodrama about the personal travails and love lives of the cast of characters. It is a soap opera that snobs can allow themselves to watch.
Everything about West Wing is designed to be unchallenging and inoffensive: the cast are pretty but not threateningly so, the banter is witty but not threateningly so, the politics is progressive but not threateningly so, the plot moves swiftly but not threateningly so, the foreign policy is … extreme and violently imperialistic. Huh.
Depressingly, that is not a contradiction. Such politics are apparently not challenging or offensive to liberal audiences, particularly not in the 00s, and particularly not when playing (implicitly) that classic liberal card: “the invasion of Iraq was wrong … but”. [3]
One of the hilarious and weird things about the West Wing is how it mixes fact and fiction. It makes very serious allegations against real countries, sometimes surpassingly (the West Wing is aggressively anti-Saudi, it’s about the only way in which it differs from real life US foreign policy — although this too can perhaps be best understood as liberal wish fulfilment: what Foggy Bottom would like to say to the Saudis if only they could, and please ignore the fact that they can), sometimes very seriously (as when positing war between India and Pakistan) and sometimes in incredibly poor taste (such as when the US tries its hardest to prevent a coup in Haiti, not something the US is known for). But then it will occasionally throw in fictional countries as well.
Most famous of the real event references was the laughably heavy handed Very Special Episode in the aftermath of 9/11: Isaac and Ishmael (2001). Shot in just a fortnight and airing just three weeks after the twin towers fell, it is generously reviewed by Time Magazine as being, “earnest in its tone, admirable in its charitable intent and God-awful in its condescending pedantry — if irony had been dead, it has by now clawed itself out of its coffin and is roaming the moonlit countryside looking for revenge”. The episode poses the question of the hour as: “why do the Muslims want to blow us up?” and then falls over itself repeatedly in a series of contrived “I’m not racist but…” speeches.
Although to be honest, Isaac and Ishmael is an easy target. It is nowhere near the worst thing the West Wing has done, which would be their unbelievably crass plot arc where a bunch of domestic policy aides who couldn’t point to Gaza on a map solve the Israel Palestine crisis in an afternoon.
But where the West Wing really lets rip is when it comes to its fictional countries, especially Qumar and Equatorial Kundu.
Qumar is grosstopically Hormozgan Province in Iran, but geopolitically functions as either Saudi Arabia or Iran as the script demands. In this respect it is almost Qatar, or Iraq had the Hashemite monarchy not fallen.[4] This allows the show to play with, but not conceptually challenge, the Kirkpatrick doctrine: what if we thought a country was merely authoritarian and sold it a bunch of guns and then it turned out it was actually an autocracy? Perish the thought.
Qumar serves two primary functions. The first is to suggest that for the US to assassinate world leaders is definitely morally OK and largely consequence free. In fact in the end, as a two series arc makes abundantly clear, it all works out for the best. It’s definitely illegal, but do it anyway. Donald Trump was clearly making careful notes, and the decision to assassinate Qasem Soleimani can be fairly directly traced back to Aaron Sorkin’s scripts. [5]
This is really dangerous nonsense. Assassination is an awful foreign policy tool: at best ineffective, at worst likely to lead to appalling unintended consequences. They got away with it in the West Wing. Trump sort of got away with it with Soleimani. Smoking in a petrol station doesn’t become a good idea just because you got away with it twice, once in a work of fiction.
It is though not surprising that it is a foreign policy tool beloved of liberals since it requires the same 19th century whiggish big man version of history as liberalism to think that assassination can change the course of it.
The second thing Qumar does is allow liberals to fight a better version of the war on terror: thus allowing liberals to indulge their boys-own armchair general fantasies while still airing their qualms about Actually Existing Counterinsurgency. Qumar allows someone who supported the Iraq War a way of acknowledging that the Iraq war turned out to be wrong without having to say that they were wrong. Qumar gives someone who opposed the Iraq War a way of reassuring themselves and others that their masculinity is intact.
Equatorial Kundu is even stupider than Qumar.
Equatorial Kundu is a fictional country that is grosstopically Equatorial Guinea but serves as a stand in for the Rwandan Genocide as understood by Americans — yet even more straightforward and conveniently fictional, and thus with an even more obvious response. In an episode (Over there — urgh — 2003) which is, in its own less obvious way, every bit as heavy handed as Isaac and Ishmael President Bartlett “invents” the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and leads a military invasion to prevent a genocide. This works perfectly and instantly and the matter is barely mentioned again.
Is there any harm in this kind of inane masturbatory liberal wish fulfilment? I think so. It reinforces the tired orientalist and racial tropes to an audience that considers itself above such things, but is not remotely. And it facilitates a misdiagnosis of the problem — suggesting that the problem with acts of intervention is a lack of competence and thoroughness. The suggestion is that the problem with the forever war isn’t the forever war bit, but that we just need better generals. It is fundamentally ok to impose your will on others through force in the interests of the greater good, just don’t screw it up.
And as ever with liberalism what’s missing is an analysis of power. Because actually I do think it’s ok to use force to bend the will of those stronger than you towards a greater good, but it’s not ok to use force to impose your will on the weak — for any reason. Liberals don’t understand this language of punching up or punching down because their conception of right and wrong is unrelated to their conception of strong and weak, and they can never imagine themselves being the bad guys, despite being proud supporters of a global order that commits unspeakable acts by design.
This cynicism free liberalism is definitely at its worst in The West Wing, other liberal stories are more world weary. Jason Bourne — at least in his film incarnation — is James Bond for left wing people[6]. This means that the premise is that the western military industrial complex is evil. This is potentially subversive, but also redemptive. Bourne and stories like it are about fixing the problems with bad western militarism so that a good western militarism can emerge. It does not allow that western militarism itself could be a problem.
Funnily enough this is exactly the same logic as the more torture-friendly 24, especially during the two best series (two — the first one produced post 9/11 — and five). As such it serves to remind us that another really odd thing about the war on terror is the unholy alliance it created between ostensibly centrist liberals and a hard right agenda of denying civil liberties in the name of countering security threats.
Click here for chapter 7.
[1] The format has been transposed onto many different genres but was a particularly successful import to politics since politics is already packaged up for the general public in a very similar way: deeper understanding of the issues is not expected — they’re just scenery for the interpersonal drama.
[2] If you know enough about the subject to understand it you will be aware that the technobabble tends to be in equal thirds trite, nonsensical, and factually incorrect, but no one cares what colour the wallpaper is on these shows.
[3] This isn’t the only way the West Wing is exceptional. It’s also one of the most extraordinarily sexist TV shows of recent times, but the bar for female representation on TV is so low it gets away with this too.
[4] The feted showrunner of the West Wing Aaron Sorkin is nothing if not impressed with himself, thus not only is Qumar a near homonym of Qatar but a near anagram of Iraq, particularly in any of the regional scripts in which both would presumably be spelt with some combination of alif, ra, aiyn, and qaf.
[5] An even more egregious example of this happening in a mid 00s show beloved of liberals occurs in House (2004): the cold blooded murder of a head of state prevents a genocide and has nothing but positive and short-lasting political consequences — although it does put a strain on two white people’s marriage.
[6] This means that he is miserable. Right wing James Bond gets cards, cars, martinis, suits, gadgets and casual sex; left wing James Bond gets torture, pain, sadness, cold, shards of broken glass and his only relationship is with someone who is quickly murdered. To care is to suffer.
Actually, Daniel Immerwahr has made the compelling case that the left wing James Bond, or at very least the left wing Ian Flemming, is Frantz Fanon. Or at very least Flemming is the right wing Fanon.
