Given the swamp of apologetics and obscurantism into which the Guardian newspaper has turned itself during the last decade, it may seem unfair to pick out one particular contributor to this ongoing journalistic enterprise as especially egregious. Over the years there have been so many voices to choose from in that regard: the Buntings, the Milnes, the Steeles, the Gopals; and then also all those occasionals who, just like the regulars, can't wait to put together some soft piece of advocacy to the effect that we, the Western democracies, are just plain no good - though, having nothing better to offer for the time being themselves, these commentators make what effort they can to excuse regimes and movements for which no compelling case could be made by anyone of mature moral sensibility.
It has to be said nonetheless that the swamp has now acquired its own special low point, the name of which is Glenn Greenwald. When it was announced last summer that he'd be joining the Guardian I said I thought that Greenwald would fit right in there. And, my, but hasn't he done that? No week passes without his letting us know, always most punctually, that however bad anyone else is we are the worst. The man is an almost bottomless pit of the genre.
I offer here a modest example of it, concentrating first on Greenwald's standard of reasoning. In a later post, I may go on to focus on what is more murky than this, about his moral standpoint. The example of Greenwald's logic comes from a week ago when he informed the readers of Comment is Free that Washington has now made it clear that its war on terror is permanent. Quoting officials from the Obama administration saying that the war might last another decade or more, Greenwald went on:
It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat.
I shall leave for a later occasion Greenwald's claim that the war on terror is endless because it is itself what fuels the terrorist threat ('incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US') - this is the murkier thing I have already signalled as due for separate treatment. However, do just dwell for a moment on the reasoning that precedes it: because the war on terror looks like being a long one, it has no purpose other than its own perpetuation, is not a means to any other end - this even though Greenwald himself manages to rise to the thought that it is 'justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism' (my emphasis). To a person of greater intelligence it might have occurred at this point that the purpose of the war on terror is defeating the threat of jihadist terrorism, with which the world has been living for longer than it should. But Greenwald prefers not to think about that obvious possibility within the logical field, opting instead for the Orwellian resonances of war for its own sake.
Well, we'll see. It is to be hoped - and I would certainly expect - the war on terror will one day be won. A movement with nothing to offer the world other than blowing people (Westerners or not) to pieces, eliminating music and such, may still do a lot of harm, but it can only incur the further contempt of humankind, at least that part of it not shaped in the Greenwald mould.