Part 1.
When I was in Oxford this past March, my wise friend and colleague Avi
Shlaim reminded me that back in February 2003 he had been one of
several historians who predicted that George Bush’s military adventure
in Iraq would turn out no better than the analogous military adventure
that Britain, France, and Israel all launched against Egypt, in Suez,
in 1956.
It is worth re-reading the whole of
this excellent article that the Guardian’s Ian Kershaw published
in February 2003. In it, Kershaw compiled the judgments that Avi and eleven
other historians offered on the question of whether what Bush (and Blair)
were facing in Iraq was another “Munich”-type challenge, or the first
act of a Suez-type debacle.
Avi was firmly in the “It’s a Suez” camp. Here’s what he wrote
then about British PM Anthony Eden’s decision-making in 1956:
Eden thought that he was applying the
lessons of the 1930s in
dealing with Gamal Abdel Nasser and the result was a fiasco that
brought his own career crashing down. Eden demonised Nasser,
personalised the issues, and went to the length of colluding with
France and Israel with the aim of knocking Nasser off his perch. The
chiefs of staff had deep misgivings about the war. One senior officer
exclaimed: “The prime minister has gone bananas. He has ordered us to
attack Egypt!” Britain attacked Egypt without the authority of the UN
and it was roundly condemned for its aggression. There is, however, one
important difference between 1956 and the current crisis. Over Suez,
the US upheld the authority of the UN and led the pack against the
law-breakers. Today, the Bush administration is hell-bent on the use of
force to topple Saddam, with or without UN sanction.
He also, quite rightly, noted this:
war brought to an end Britain’s moment in the Middle East. Eighteen
months after the attack on Egypt, Britain witnessed the defenestration
of her royal friends in Baghdad. A war on Iraq today could go badly
wrong, result in heavy casualties, fuel terrorism and end up by
destabilising the entire region…
To which all I can add today, four years later, is that now we can see
that the destabilizing effects of the invasion of Iraq have by no means
been confined to the Middle East, but they already extend to the whole
of the world’s security “system” as it has been configured since the
end of World War 2.
Of course, the debacle that George Bush’s invasion of Iraq represents–
for Iraqis, for their neighbors, and for the US political system– is
still unfolding, and it is still too early to answer such questions
as:
to take the US forces out of Iraq, or will it be left to his successor
in office to do so?
* How many more Iraqi civilians must die and be maimed before the
US occupation of Iraq ends and the US’s responsibility under
international law for those civilians’ welfare thereby comes to an
end?
* How many more US soldiers will be casualties of a war now already
doomed to failure?
* What will be the manner of the US forces’ final exit from the
country– will it be negotiated and relatively orderly, or will it be
chaotic and marked by one or more large-scale security incidents?
* Will it be accompanied by a US (or US-Israeli) air assault
against Iran?
* Will the Iraqi political forces be able to find a way
relatively fast to negotiate a new, post-occupation political order for
their country, or will major parts of Iraq remain mired in the internecine
conflict the US presence has thus far engendered?
* What will be the regional and international political “shape” of
the body that frames the US’s departure from Iraq (given that there is
no way the Pentagon can organize this departure in the absence of some
such broader framework)?
These are all extremely important questions, and as the answers to them
emerge over the months ahead, the answers to them will certainly affect
the total impact that George W. Bush’s ill-conceived military adventure
in Iraq will have, over the longer term, on the shape of the world’s
overarching strategic/security structure.
However, it is not too early for us to say now that if, as Avi Shlaim
wrote there, “The Suez war brought to an end Britain’s moment in the
Middle East,” then Bush’s Iraq war of 2003 will most certainly bring
much closer the ending of “America’s moment in the world.”
We can leave aside for a moment the exquisite irony of the situation
wherein the huge success that the partisans of the “Project for a New American
Century” registered in 2001, when they captured all the weightiest
centers of power in Washington, will probably prove only to have
brought forward the end of their beloved “New American Century” by
around nine decades… But now, the rest of us (non-PNAC-ers)
need to start working together to figure out: what comes next? The
Bushist project for Iraq was also, of course, a first test-run for the
Bushist project for the whole world, as spelled out in the openly
aggressive, unilateralist National Security
Strategy of September 2002. So as the “Iraq” part of the
project continues to unravel, dragging the broader global part of the
project down with it, what
will replace it over the years ahead?
My contention is that humankind is at a crucial turning point. We
have all of us muddled along in a very unclear way since November 1989,
the month that the demise of the Berlin Wall also brought crashing down
along with it– over the few years that followed– not only the
artifical division of Germany that the wall represented but also the
entire Warsaw Pact, the USSR and the Federal republic of Yugoslavia as
those political systems had operated until then– and beyond those
structures, too, the entire strategic “structure” of a global system
that until then had been given its shape by the broad sinews of the
global Cold War.
No-one really thought hard enough about what could and should replace
the Cold War System. Like many other people, I got caught up in
dreams and ideals of a soggy universalism that I now judge to have been
too unconsidered and too soggy. Soggy, because within the discourse of
that universalism I failed to do a rigorous enough analysis of the
systems of ‘north’-dominated structural violence that have continued to
dominate the world order; and I failed, too, to do enough effective
work to counter the idea that grew up in ‘pro-universal human rights
circles’ throughout the 1990s to the effect that ‘righteous’ warfare
could, when judiciously waged by well-meaning ‘northern’ powers,
improve the wellbeing of significant subsets of humankind and
contribute to– or in some versions even spearhead– the building.of a
more just and sustainable “new world order.”
Some disclosure here: It was during the 1990s that I became a convinced
pacifist. In 1990-91 I gave qualified support to the US-UN war to
liberate Kuwait from the grip of Saddam Hussein’s military. I was
definitely ambivalent about the US-NATO campaigns in/over Bosnia in the
middle of the decade. Then in 1999 I forthrightly opposed the
US-NATO campaign over Kosovo which itself clearly precipitated the very
campaign of broad ethnic cleansing of Kosovars that western leaders had
claimed they sought to forestall.
It was in and over Saddam’s Iraq, however, that the arguments of the
liberal hawks were put to the severest test; and this one they have
very evidently failed.
As I understand them, the arguments of the liberal hawks ran something
like this:
(generally but not always state actors) in distant countries are
abusing the rights of people under their sway so badly that “something
has to be done” to stop them.
(2) “We”, who are well-meaning citizens of generally
“righteous” and (internally) rights-respecting countries, have our
sensibilities so exquisitely attuned to questions of human right and
wrong wherever they occur that we are uniquely positioned to discern
and understand these situations; and moreover, our governments– which
represent our sensibilities– therefore have a unique responsibility to
“intervene” to suppress and reverse those distant wrongs.
(3) It “just so happens” that among the many instruments of
policy at the command of our respective governments some of the most highly developed (in the US, certainly) are their military instruments; and thanks to the development of these
militaries’ high-tech fighting capabilities these instruments can now
allow standoff strikes of pinpoint accuracy that are alleged to have the following
attributes:
strikes that can rapidly destroy an enemy;
(b) they can meanwhile limit to an absolute minimum the risks of
“collateral” damage to that other country’s civilians, and
(c) they also obviate the need for “our side” to throw into the battle
any large numbers of ground forces such as might be expensive to raise
and maintain in the field, and might later be expected to come back as
broken people into our own society.
(4) And meanwhile, though “we” the righteous liberals continue
to pay lip-service to all kinds of ideals about human equality and the
need for global institutions like the United Nations, still all those
institutions are deeply flawed; they are riddled with inefficiencies
and corruption and pay far too much homage to the gods of a national
sovereignty that “we” see as serving only to shield dictators…
Therefore….
(5) We need to conclude, with or without a lingering
scintilla of regret, that the only way those distant wrongs about which
we are so concerned can be fixed in a timely fashion is through a
military “intervention” to be undertaken by our own country’s
military– and on a unilateral or otherwise non-UN basis, if need
be. (And how much better if at the same time we can redefine our
language’s longstanding vocabulary to the extent we feel comfortable
calling this military action a “humanitarian” intervention…)
Each stage of this argument is important, and is worthy of close
engagement. In this recent
post on JWN, I started to engage with point 3. But the other four
are all equally intriguing. Re #1, we might ask why it is that
‘northern’ liberals seem so much to want to go to distant countries to
look for evidence of lethal wrongdoing by perpetrators there when there
is ample evidence of it in many of the policies pursued by actors
inside our own countries. Don’t the subsidies that our
(democratically elected) governments give to farmers at home end up
killing just as many members of once-thriving farming communities in
the ‘south’, by wiping out their livelihoods and thrusting them into
deep poverty, as do the most heinous of those ‘southern’ tyrants whose
actions we feel so shocked by? Don’t policies of protecting the
profits and alleged intellectual ‘property’ of northern drug companies
also lead to the widespread incidence of quite preventable deaths in
the countries of the south? Why don’t we see big campaigns
mounted about those issues in ‘northern’ countries that seem
transfixed instead by developments in distant Africa. (But even then, only
selectively so: in Darfur but not in the DRC. Another good question to ask… )
And while we’re about it, shouldn’t we insist on a few
‘interventions’ closer to home that would end and punish the wrongs
perpetrated by our own agricultural subsidy-junkies and pharmaceutical
companies, and hold those perpetrators accountable?
Re #2, the question of the allegedly superior powers of discernment of
moral issues by ‘northern’ liberals likewise bears further
examination… And so on…
But the invasion of Iraq really was the biggest test imaginable of the
arguments of the liberal hawks. And now, four years later, those
arguments have been punctured more evidently than ever before.
The idea that the power of the ‘northern’ nations– including,
specifically, the military power of the US, pulling a few other
militaries along in its wake– can make a constructive contribution to the
establishment of a stable, rights-respecting world order for the
decades ahead has been severely disabused.
Over the years ahead — whether the next two years or the next ten
years is at one level only a minor detail– we most certainly shall be
seeing the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, and following that the
retraction of most of the strategic influence that the US has possessed
in the broader Gulf region– and far beyond there, too.
This really will be like what we saw happen to the British Empire in
the years after Suez; but it will be even more truly global a shift in
the power balance. We don’t yet know the details of how it will
happen, and who will step in exactly when and where to “pull the plug”
on US power in a more or less brusque fashion. I would guess, in the
first instance some combination of Chinese and European bankers along
with Iranian and other petrocrats… Interestingly, all these
actors have a strong interest in minimizing the disruptions caused by
the transition out of the US-dominated world There will likely not be a single successor
power, but a combination of different condominions in different parts
oif the world. And US power will not be ended completely.
The crucial change will be the ending of Washington’s bid to exercize
hegemonic power in many strategically crucial parts of the world.
Since, however, the coming years will be ones of great fluidity in the
world system, this gives those of us who are truly dedicated to
building a caring, human-equality-based world a unique chance to work
together to discuss strategies, to organize on a worldwide level, and
to ‘intervene’ effectively to build the kind of world we seek…
I hope you’ll be addressing the “responsibility to protect” concept, adopted by the UN and some middle size powers and advocated by the International Crisis Group. They are trying to elaborate some of the answers in this.
As a person who profoundly mistrusts the tendency of “we northerners” to think we know best and should be able to enforce our best, I’ve opposed every overseas adventure by the US since the Korean war. But I do think all this has be rethought — the nation state system itself seems to be reaching its limits or simply not establishing itself in parts of the world. Is it possible to envision a set of concepts to enable the entities that actually exist and their peoples to co-exist without slaughter? We don’t have to like each other, but we can’t be shooting at each other and the strong can’t forever steal from the powerless.
war on Iraq today could go badly wrong, result in heavy casualties, fuel terrorism and end up by destabilising the entire region…
After five years of invasion and occupying Iraq slaughtering Iraqi, inviting the terrorists from around the world with 100,000 Bush’s Shadow Army (Bush’s Shadow “>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070402/scahill_vid
There is no wonder those terrorism are used well and controlled looking to the region after five years all regimes in the region well behaved and obeying the guidelines that set by US, so the only casualties is the Arab citizens as usual and Muslims if we add other countries like Pakistan Afghanistan in the ME Arabs states.
Today there is article in alriyadh by Dr. Mohammad Al-Qwaiz there are many things looks true in his conclusions about Iraq war, occupation of Iraq and the future development, with US gaining by this war of chose whatever the casualties which form US side very miner comparing with Vietnam war.
“Project for a New American Century”
Oooh yah may you can read this…
A Matter of Pride
Helena,
Our Suez indeed, and no prospect of real relief in sight. The Democrats bid fair to give us their own neoliberal trope on Woodrow Wilson. Tony Smith is good on all this and has a must read new book out, A Pact with the Devil. He gave a good precis of it a couple of months back in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030901884.html
Helena, thanks so much for this post.
hey, I have some answers for you:
“Of course, the debacle that George Bush’s invasion of Iraq represents– for Iraqis, for their neighbors, and for the US political system– is still unfolding, and it is still too early to answer such questions as:
* Will President Bush be the one to take the US forces out of Iraq, or will it be left to his successor in office to do so? SUCCESSOR
* How many more Iraqi civilians must die and be maimed before the US occupation of Iraq ends and the US’s responsibility under international law for those civilians’ welfare thereby comes to an end? IT IS, AND WILL REMAIN FOREVER, A GENOCIDE.
* How many more US soldiers will be casualties of a war now already doomed to failure? WAY LESS THAN IRAQI CASUALTIES
* What will be the manner of the US forces’ final exit from the country– will it be negotiated and relatively orderly, or will it be chaotic and marked by one or more large-scale security incidents? CHAOTIC
* Will it be accompanied by a US (or US-Israeli) air assault against Iran? NO
* Will the Iraqi political forces be able to find a way relatively fast to negotiate a new, post-occupation political order for their country, or will major parts of Iraq remain mired in internecine conflict the US presence has thus far engendered? MIRED
* What will the regional and international political “shape” of the body that frames the US’s departure from Iraq (given that there is no way the Pentagon can organize this departure in the absence of some such broader framework)?
This last one I cannot answer.
If you want to read something sick, go to the CSM and read “the case for strikes against Iran” or something like that. the author has decided that Iran has nuclear weapons, or will soon, and we are there lawful in doing a preemptive strike –
I guess some folks are just beyond reason and morality, no matter how high their education level. Sad that they get published.
The CSM column Susan speaks of is truly astonishing. Why would any responsible newspaper publish such tripe? The author is listed as a professor of international law at Purdue University. Hard to believe after reading such a nonsensical column filled with generalities, banalities and outright falsehoods. But the scary part is that this seems to be part of another MSM campaign to create support for another ill-conceived and even more disasteroous war. Unbelievably stupid as it sounds, I believe that Bush has one final disaster up his sleeve to leave as his “legacy.” I firmly believe that this will be George W’s parting gift – a “surgical strike” to take out Iran’s nuclear program and air defenses.
Helena,
Take in account this further development in near future
Helping a NATO ally address a terrorist threat seems to many Turks the least the administration can do. Yet when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the White House in 2004 and last year, Bush rejected his requests for U.S. military assistance on the border because U.S. “assets” in Iraq were busy elsewhere.
Turkish-Kurdish Dispute Tests U.S. Strategic Alliances
Susan,
I guess some folks are just beyond reason and morality, no matter how high their education level.
The work started in your the house
Several members of Congress addressed a gathering today of hundreds of Iranian exiles who the government considers terrorists.
Reps. Bob Filner, D-Calif., Tom Tancredo, R-Col., Ted Poe, R-Texas, Dennis Moore, R-Kan., and staffers for Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas, and James Talent, R-Mo., spoke to MEK supporters at a convention hall just four blocks from the White House.
The MEK has been listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department since 1997, but some in Congress and close to the Administration want the group to be removed from the terrorist list. Even President Bush has called the MEK a “dissident group.”
http://agonist.org/story/2005/4/14/173853/410
Re liberal hawks: afew thoughts…
After the “northerners” took military action over Bosnia, Serbs were finally stopped from committing the war crimes they were perpetrating on the Muslims and Croats and now many of those criminals are being prosecuted.
After northerners took military action over Kosovo the tyrannical Milosevic regime fell and was replaced by a representative democracy.
After northerners took military action over Iraq, the Saddam/Baath regime that had invaded two neighbouring countries and persecuted 80 per cent of its population for decades was replaced by a democratically elected government based on the proportional representation system favoured by northern Europe (not the US).
The “northerners” did not take action in Rwanda, nor have they in Darfur or Zimbabwe.
Questions: Should Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq been left to the same fate as Rwanda, Darfur and Zimbabwe? If so, why?
For instance, are the Dutch UN forces to be applauded by liberals for stepping aside and facilitating the massacre in Sebrinica?
These the corrupted guys and ladies working on “Global security after Iraq”!
Any good come from them? Nooooooo……more corruptions
According to the Volcker report, surcharges on Iraqi oil exports were introduced in August 2000 by the Iraqi state oil company, the State Oil Marketing Organization. At the time, Condoleezza Rice, now secretary of state, was a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.
bb, there is not much point in arguing the toss about Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. We all understand that the situations which you caricature were a lot more complex. But supposing that they were not, the business of “interventions” would still prove indefensible. Consider the “northern” intervention in Cambodia alone and the terrible consequences which that produced. You must put these matters into historical perspective, it was in the last century or so that “intervention” from the north smashed African societies, intervention by King Leopold in Congo led directly to millions of deaths and during the twentieth century, right up until today, to millions more. And that is just one African country. Consider Zimbabwe where as recently as the 1930s the indigenous population was being driven off the kland to make way for European farmers. Consider Kenya. Look at Mogadishu in Somalia where this week it is reported that in the order of half a million refugees are in flight after an “intervention” by the United States’ agents. Unfortunately the list is long, almost endless.. the crimes of colonialism since the sixteenth century constitute much of the world’s history. And every one of these crimes,every episode of genocide, every unjust war, even the opportunistic seizure of one of the last independent “states” in Africa, Darfur, in 1916, was accompanied by a more or less specious “humanitarian” justification.
In much the same way as the crushing of the last embers of Titoism in Yugoslavia was justified by “northern” spin doctors.
Those who insist that NATO has the right to impose its will on any population in the world are laying the groundwork for the occupation of NATO countries by armies from the south before the end of the century. The last country to arrogate to itself this power was the Third Reich which left the world no choice except to submit or crush it.
In answer to my questions “Should Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq been left (by liberals) to the same fate as Rwanda, Darfur and Zimbabwe and if so, why?” Bevin has given a yes and has provided comprehensive arguments as to the reasons why.
All the arguments are valid and up until the 90s would have been the consensus position of the left. It was the war crimes of Bosnia and Rwanda that led to the development of the “liberal hawk” position, as personified by Al Gore, Clinton and Tony Blair. (I put Gore first because he was the earliest liberal hawk in the Clinton Admin at the time of Bosnia and according to Halberstam’s book on Clinton’s wars was the major influence on Clinton and Blair. He also campaigned in favour of interventionism in 2000)
So when Helena asks “why is it northern liberals (hawks) seem to so much want to go to distant countries to look for evidence of wrongdoing by perpetrators there ..?” I would suggest that as liberal idealists their first choice the UN proved instituionally incapable of stopping genocides or tyrannical ethnic cleansing, secondly, as a consequence they felt impelled to act since they had the power to do so and thereby “save” people from tyranny and thirdly because they were under increasing clamour from their liberal constituencies to do something. As a result, it is hard to buy the argument that Clinton, Gore and Blair were motivated by colonialism.
Another aspect of Helena’s thought provoking post was her reference to the “ending of America’s moment in the world”. I wonder how this gells with the development that the three major northern European and American governments – Germany, France and Canada – who so bitterly opposed US/Brit interventionism in Iraq, have now been replaced by their electorates with pro US and pro UK governments when the Iraq war is still going on?
I wonder how this gells with the development that the three major northern European and American governments – Germany, France and Canada – who so bitterly opposed US/Brit interventionism in Iraq, have now been replaced by their electorates with pro US and pro UK governments when the Iraq war is still going on?
This is not a linear set of developments at all. Meantime we’ve had electrions in Spain and Italy that replaced pro-US, and pro-war governments with anti-war governments. (Also, notably, neither Merkel nor Sarkozy support the US war effort, tho they are more pro-US than their predecessors.) And meantime, outside the coccoon of NATO, anti-US political swings have been large…
Yes, I would add that Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister here in Canada, is running a minority government. He was elected largely because of a corruption scandal involving the former Liberal government. His positions on foreign policy are not very popular and have tended to cost him support.
In particular, his support of the Iraq invasion when he was leader of the opposition has been an ongoing liability that he must continually downplay. His unqualified support of the Israeli offensive in Lebanon last summer also cost him support, especially after several members of a Lebanese-Canadian family from Montreal were killed in Israeli airstrikes.
To achieve a majority government in the next election, Harper will likely have to gain many more seats in Quebec, the province that was the locus of opposition to the Iraq war.
Harper’s support for keeping Canadian troops in Afghanistan is also hurting him in the polls, especially in Quebec.
For me the key is Helena’s penultimate paragraph. It proposes a revolutionary overthrow of US hegemony, in a more “qualitative” change than the demise of the British Empire.
It would be useful, then, to look at some of the theory and history of revolution. I’m afraid that the brusque, plug-pulling moment of bouleversement may only arrive after a long period of difficulty, or, in fact, bloody war.
The incumbent power is more sensitive to, and quicker to act upon the circumstances that place it in danger, which are noted here by Helena. It is by far the best armed. And it has prepared for this showdown over generations.
In that sense the revolution has long been under way. In this case the reactionary war is preceding the overthrow.
I’m afraid that the reactionary Imperial power could literally “stop at nothing” to forestall what otherwise appears inevitable. That could include slaughter and destruction on a scale never seen before, and for a greater lenth of time than before.
Indeed, everyone has an interest in minimising the disruption; with the exception of the reactionaries themselves, as we have already seen in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Development of tactics to deal with a ruling class driven mad by the prospect of its decline could be developed, but only if the danger is first seen and understood in this way.
If people expect the fruit of revolution to fall into the hand of its own accord, or by the actions of better-placed (we like to imagine) others, then I am afraid that counter-revolution is all that the world may get.
So yes, let’s get together, srategise, and work out tactics.
Thanks for commenting Helena. I would suggest that had “anti Bushism” been a factor in the minds of the electorates in the French, German and Canadian elections then the liberal parties would have made an issue of it. That they didn’t, despite that fact that W is still there and the Iraq war is still going, quite disastrously, indicates that those electorates see their interests as elsewhere now and have moved on – but not in the direction of seeking to diminish US influence, quite the opposite. That surprises me, but there it is.
Re Spanish and Italian – the anti war constituency is still strong, but these are southern, Mediterranean countries, not the “north” which was the basis of your great post which got my brain cells working!.
Mean’t to add “braincells working in v early hours of an Australian morning”. No mean feat.
Hello Helena,
I take issue with your burlesque of ‘liberal hawks’ and their reasoning. You’ve collapsed an unbelievably complex story into
several points in a diatribe. More, you’re not describing the motives of those who made the war but those who simply failed to
resist it.
Those who made or strongly motivated the war – the Cheneys, the Kristols, the Perles, etc. – had very different motivations
from those which you list here. Their motives either had to do with a millenarian dream of control of oil regions or it had to do
with the supposed security of Israel as seen through a Likud prism. These two motives have always been directly opposed to
each other but, for a period, they were made to appear as though they were instrumentalities to the same end.
There were additional motives among this top tier of war supporters. These included things such as a desire to use Iraq as
a test case for Supply-Side economics as Trudy Rubin has so ably demonstrated. The desire to reward Republican apparatchiks
with sinecures in Iraq was also a motive at this level.
Nor should we discount the fact of simple personal corruption among the most powerful movers and shakers. These are
people who obviously see the deaths of American soldiers as means of lining their own pockets. I defy anyone to say that
this is too harsh.
The list which you’ve actually provided does not describe those actors. It does apply to those among the, shall we say it?,
intelligentsia; those whose occupations required them to write about the war in newspapers, magazines, and journals. These
are those who wrote, blogged or spoke about the war before veterans groups, foreign-affairs-oriented clubs, womens’ groups,
and service clubs. I’m referring to the powerless opinion makers of every stripe who used moral grounds to sell the US’s
invasion of Iraq.
In this list you identify various aspects of that meliorism which, like it or not, stems historically from the undoubted success
of the western powers in opposing and then rolling back the physical and moral destruction of Europe caused by Naziism.
Among the rank and file of everyday Americans, those who had, as individuals, no power either to support or oppose the
war through any other means than their individual votes, a third set of justifications was assembled. Those justifications reduced
to simple fear. Fear of the Other, fear of Islam, fear of violence on the part of people with brown skins, fear of terrorism, and
fear of nuclear weapons. Those who had the power to make the war created this third tier of arguments in order to pacify the
broad mass of Americans. You know this quite well as you have often alluded to it. These justifications, in their simplest and
original form, consist of the continual irresponsible statements of Cheney, Rice, and Bush (‘the smoking gun’ statement and
many others) which began right after 9/11/01 and continued with increasing frequency and vehemence right up to the actual
invasion of Iraq on 3/18/03.
Therefore the list which you’ve provided applies only to a very small number of people and had no role in creating the war
but it did have a role in quieting and pacifying the class of opinion makers. In any case these motivations were supplemental
to the much more powerful motivation of simple fear.
You can barely conceal your contempt for this catalogue of motivations. Let us see if that contempt is deserved. In his book,
The Rise of the Vulcans, Jim Mann describes the motivations of Wolfowitz in planning and facilitating the invasion of Iraq.
Mann makes it clear that Wolfowitz saw the war as a noble effort to liberate an enslaved people from a mad tyrant. In his
mind it was all one with the Holocaust and Saddam was Hitler. Let us go back to that time, 2002, and look at it from his
perspective. Here’s Wolfowitz, the perfect example of your points 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5. Now answer this question
honestly: was he wrong? No hindsight allowed. Was Wolfowitz’s meliorism wrong? Like the Likud or hate it. They see
Israel’s survival as the same as opposing Hitler; opposition to Arab regimes is the same as opposing the Holocaust. You
adduce all sorts of hypocrisies inherent in your catalog of justifications.
You’re right.
It’s irrelevant.
If you can put yourself in Wolfowitz’s shoes and honestly answer that Wolfowitz was wrong then your catalog is sensible.
I personally don’t know how anyone can answer that way, not even you. Looking back at it he was obviously wrong. That’s
not the point. At the time no one could say that that was not a noble effort. And Wolfowitz’s meliorism is based on that simple
fact.
Where do we go from here? We can say, as you imply, that meliorism is wrong tout court. That’s fine. We can live as
Jesus intended us to live when he said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ No invasion of Iraq. No invasion of Afghanistan (a
harder case). No bombing of Kosovo (a much harder case). No Vietnam (an easy case).
No WWII.
Britain today is a German protectorate along with France. We rethink our whole post-war history and get used to the idea
of Fascism and race purity as major components of the modern Western political experience. Good. We also get used to the
idea of the slaughter of all the remaining Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and babies with birth defects in Europe. European
societies will be run along strictly ‘Scientific’ lines. Catholic and Protestant churches are tamed along with their archaic moral
attitudes. Liberal democracies are a thing of the past, even in America, since they so disastrously failed in the between-wars
period.
What makes meliorism good in some circumstances and not good in others? No one knows. There is no decision principle.
That’s why all this is so hard, Helena.
Or, rather, I should say ‘no one person knows’. The experience of mankind has tended to confirm the greater reliability of
decisions made on the basis of free exchange of views. That is, political structures founded on the idea of open exchange of
views tend, over the long run, to be a bit more stable than those regimes committed to a strict hierarchical flow of information
and decision-making. This is not a panacea, of course. Decisions made freely and in the open have been failing since at
least the time of the Athenian’s Sicilian expedition and, probably, from long before.
Let us re-phrase your catalog in terms of an immediate situation which we may all understand.
(1) Sometimes a person is drowning and something has to be done to stop it.
(2) “We”, who are well-meaning citizens of societies that don’t believe in drowning have our sensibilities so exquisitely
attuned to questions of whether drowning is right or wrong whenever it occurs that we are uniquely positioned to discern
and understand these situations and we have a unique responsibility to ‘intervene’ to suppress and reverse the drowning
process.
(3) It “just so happens” that among the many instruments of policy at our command is to don bathing suits and get on
the diving board and use all the technology we have which allows for:
(a) rapid entrance into the water for a knock-out strike that can rapidly arrest the drowning process.
(b) they can meanwhile limit to an absolute minimum the risks of “collateral” damage to other swimmers.
(c) they also obviate the need for “our side” to throw into the battle any large numbers of life guards such as might be
expensive to raise and maintain in the field, and might later be expected to come back as broken people (or drowned themselves)
into our own society.
(4) And meanwhile, though “we” the righteous rescuers continue to pay lip-service to all kinds of ideals about human
equality and the need for global institutions like the United Nations, still all those institutions are deeply flawed; they are riddled
with inefficiencies and corruption and make it difficult to get to the pool in time to rescue actual drowning persons.
Therefore….
(5) We need to conclude, with or without a lingering scintilla of regret, that the only way those drownings about which we
are so concerned can be prevented in a timely fashion is through an “intervention” to be undertaken by us (me) — and on a
unilateral or otherwise non-UN basis, if need be. (And how much better if at the same time we can redefine our language’s
longstanding vocabulary to the extent we feel comfortable calling this anti-drowning action a “humanitarian” intervention…)
Stated like this your points are not only correct but obvious. Would you let a person drown if you had the power to prevent
it? Would you let Saddam’s thugs torture random Iraqis if you thought it could be prevented? Would you lift a hand to save
the dying Jews of Poland? Would you…? Would you ….? The questions are endless and none of them were ever easy to
answer. I might let Saddam’s thugs continue to torture if, in order to prevent it, I had to institute a draft. I might allow the
murder and deportation of all Kosovars continue if to prevent it will cost more than 100 billion dollars. Or maybe 50 billion; it’s
not certain. I might be willing to do something for Darfur if the cost is fewer than 100 military lives and 10 billion dollars. But if
it’s 11 billion all bets are off. Stated this way it seems immoral but that’s life. Every moral action has a cost and if the cost is too
high it threatens to disable the entire moral system. For example, how much should a National Guard family in Arkansas suffer
in order to relieve every 150 inhabitants of Darfur? An infinite amount? Should that family in Arkansas be destroyed? After all,
it’s the right thing to do. Or maybe not. Maybe Darfurians have been driven off their lands since the dawn of time. If the cost to
save them is less than 150 dollars per Arkansas Guard family then maybe it’s doable.
Nor do we even get into Kierkegaard’s elaborations of the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical. E.g., when is it justifiable to
break the law (violate ethical principles) in order to prevent a greater evil? Hmmm? Kierkegaard thought that we could violate
the Ethical itself. For Kierkegaard all the Darfurians could go and hang themselves and we should assist them in that – if it was
God’s will that they should do so. Wasn’t that the story in Rwanda?
All these decisions are fraught with considerations and costs. All these decisions are heavily laden with complex historical
antecedents.
To be forced to make such decisions is the cost of being human.
We must always make decisions in doubt and ignorance; we must mitigate the costs and increase the benefits. If we can.
To make a mistake is pardonable. To fail to predict the future and lives be lost as a result is pardonable. What’s not
pardonable – and this, I think, is what you’re angry about (along with all the rest of us) – is to refuse to look the truth in the
eye and learn from disaster.
But that’s a different list.
Robert H. Consoli
rconsoli@yahoo.com
Robert H. Consoli ,
Cheneys, the Kristols, the Perles, etc. – had very different motivations
from those which you list here. Their motives either had to do with a millenarian dream of control of oil regions
Hard to Deny: Iraq Is All About the Oil an article recently written by Michael Schwartz is a professor of sociology and faculty director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University. He well gives us real story of this war and dream of control of oil regions.
Would you let Saddam’s thugs torture random Iraqis
Robert H. Consoli, Not to defending or justifying the regime crimes, Saddam did not “torture random Iraqis” lets be careful putting words when writing what he done to Iraq.
Whatever he was its gone now five years after what going on now definitely far far more than what he done with 35 yeras of his regim life, whoever we blame here US or Iran proxy or those Saddam loyalist who lost their power holding during his time, or those 100,000 thousands criminals that Saddam free them from Iraqi prisons before the war, let not forgot those Bush shadow Army and those Backwater killer who protected by Bremer orders from any prosecutions of their crimes against “random Iraqis”
Robert, I don’t think Helena is referring to a powerless intelligencia with her term “liberal hawks.” Otherwise her posting wouldn’t have make sense. As you indicate, without power there is little meaning.
She (I presume deliberately) didn’t use the term neo conservative (Kristol, Perle, Wolf etc) or hard right (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush etc)none of whom could be remotely described as “liberal” hawks, although Wolf might think he is one.
Liberal/Labour hawkism came into being when the baby boomer liberal/Labour generation, Clinton, Gore, Blair, Brown – New Democrats and New Labour – finally came into power and were confronted by the difficult moral choices you describe.
My Dear Salah,
You’re right.
This posting of Helena’s doesn’t make sense.
I’ve been following Helena’s blog for several years and I’m second to none in admiring her complete dedication to peace and her actual efforts to further that process in those several spheres in which she’s taken an interest.
Helena is a good, a reasonable, and a rational person. And yet … sometimes good persons project that goodness onto other actors and misread the situation. Sometimes reasonable persons project their reasonability onto the world and deceive themselves about the nature of those who actually wield power in this naughty world of ours.
In this post Helena has taken some positions:
a) Meliorism is always wrong.
b) The invasion of Iraq was made by “liberal hawks”
Both of these positions are nonsense.
It’s clear that meliorism is not always wrong (as I was at some pains to demonstrate in my overly long post). What’s difficult to determine is WHEN it’s right and WHEN it’s wrong. As I said, there’s no decision principle to help us. Our computations about it are governed by our personal histories, our personalities, our educations, and the past histories of the entities involved. To a considerable extent our opinions are controlled by the opinions that other people have about it. Definitive judgments are always ex post facto.
The invasion of Iraq was NOT made by “liberal hawks”. Of course this argument is somewhat hampered by the fact that there are no liberal hawks. This coinage is a boogey man of Helena’s own. If a person is a hawk (let us call them by their true names: they are warmongers) then he’s NOT a liberal. As Jesus says, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ If you, Salah, think that there are such people as “liberal hawks” then tell us who they are. Name them. You’ll find this a more difficult exercise than you think.
That brings me to my final point. One of the more irritating things about Helena is her insistence that other people are like her (rational, good, etc.) and that History is an information-theoretic exercise. Once we know the truth we’ll act accordingly. This causes her continually to offer meaningless palliatives for very complex situations. To begin with, other people are not necessarily rational nor good nor do they care about other people’s conclusions that a certain course of action will be disastrous. The people I mean are greedy; they’re narcissistic; they’re mean; they’re haunted; they have grandiose ideas about either the world or themselves. Greedy: Perle. Narcissistic: Cheney. Mean: Rice. Haunted: Kristol. Grandiose ideas: Bush. Some of the characters in the Bush administration are simply devoted to the overthrow of the American Republic on no better grounds than that they personally dislike it.
I see no evidence in Helena’s writings that she really takes the destructive power of such individuals seriously. Helena’s blog often reads as though it were written by someone who knows a great deal about Political Science but very little about History. If she were better grounded in History she would know that these violent characters have often disturbed the sleep of mankind. Our living in ‘modern’ times does not protect us from the Genghis Khans of the world. Consider Cheney, a Cardinal Richelieu but without the talent. Or Richard Perle, Al Capone in a better suit. George W. Bush, a fainéant King for our time.
Helena can talk about grand strategies for getting together and re-planning our approach to the world; she can agitate for truth commissions all she likes. There will be no Truth Commissions or Peace Commissions or Amnesty proceedings or anything else in Iraq (or anywhere) until the dominant (and diseased) personalities that foment these events have decided that they’ve milked every last dollar out of the mess that they’ve created. Only then will Helena’s palliatives be even remotely possible. In the meantime such superficial ‘cures’ are just pernicious nonsense because they don’t accurately diagnose the problem.
To all this Helena answers with appeals to liberals and right-thinking peoples. Helena wishes to unite the peace-makers of the world. But, to paraphrase Tolstoy, she is like a deaf man who answers questions that no one has asked. To all these calls for peace commissions, study groups, and other liberal institutions mankind is willing to say ‘amen’. But it is not what was asked. Nor is it relevant.
I would like Helena’s blog better if there was some consideration on her part for the sport, the outsider, the diseased, the egomaniac in History. Mobilizing les bien pensants are not ever going to be the answer. And it doesn’t help that you, and others among her correspondents, unthinkingly echo her nonsense about ‘liberal hawks’.
Well, Salah, wishing you the best,
Bob Consoli
..and Salah, your argument about the Baby Boomers would be just as hard to demonstrate as most other things in this particular post.
Bob Consoli