Author: Helena

After yesterday’s quick post here on a topic Juan Cole had raised that seemed to me to equate participating in antiwar marches was the equivalent of “marching for Saddam”, Juan sent me a well-expressed and thoughtful e-mail in response. Then he put a reference to this discussion up onto his blog. Right down at the bottom of this post today, he wrote:

Helena Cobban took umbrage at my saying originally “march to keep Saddam in power” because she felt it was a slur against anti-war protesters, implying that that was their goal. I wasn’t, however, talking about other people; I was talking about my own ethical stance. I knew for a fact that Saddam was not going to be overthrown by internal forces and that he was committing virtual genocide against people like the Marsh Arabs. For me, marching against the war would have been done in knowledge that it would result in Saddam staying in power. She wants me to apologize. I’m always glad to apologize. I don’t see what it costs you to say you are sorry about hurting someone’s feelings inadvertently. But I didn’t mean, in my own mind, what she read me to mean, in the first place. I think an anti-war position was ethically defensible; it just wasn’t the position I was comfortable with. I think it mattered, too, whether you actually knew and interacted with Iraqi Shiites and Kurds very much.

I am certainly happy to accept his explanation, viz., that he was talking about his own choices not anyone else’s. Maybe I’m overly sensitive. There have certainly been many slurs thrown around to that effect against opponents of the war.
I’m not so happy to be described as “taking umbrage”. I grew up in a family where people were constantly accusing others of “taking umbrage”. I take it to mean some kind of a passive-aggressive hissy-fit, which I think belittles the seriousness of the points that I raised. “Offense”, maybe I took. “Umbrage”, no.
Also, I notably didn’t ask Juan to apologize (though I gracefully accept the apology he offered.) I suggested he might want to enact a little remorse over the affair. A small point, maybe. But I am very interested in the mechanistics of how people get beyond differences, and I tend to think that a process of remonstrance/reproach followed by discussion, (preferably enacted) remorse, and then reintegration is more effective at building or repairing longterm relationships than the traditional western sequence of accusation, confession/apology, and forgiveness.
Anyway, back to the larger issue: I have known and interacted with many Iraqi Kurds and Shi-ites, though probably not as many or as closely as Juan. It was a terrible dilemma, fuguring out how to be effective as non-stakeholders (outsiders) in helping them throw off the yoke of Saddamist, authoritarian misrule. Just as it still is, regarding the people of Burma, or North Korea, or a number of other rights hell-holes around the world. Juan says he “knew for a fact” that Saddam wasn’t going to be overthrown by internal forces. I can’t be quite as definitive about that as he was; but certainly, it looked highly unlikely that that would happen anytime in the foreseeable future.
But he seems to assume it was internal rebellion– or externally launched war. That there was, in other words, no other alternative.
I wonder if he says that about North Korea or Burma?
Maybe I know war better than he does. I have lived as a mother of small kids through one, for a number of years. And I have studied wars and their tragic sequelae in a number of places throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world. My main conclusions? War is always (a) massively harmful to the rights and even lives of large civilian populations, and (b) unpredictable.
Now I happen to agree with Juan that, broadly speaking, it was unwise (and possibly also, given their level of terrorization, unfair) to insist that the Iraqi people should be left with the total responsibility of liberating themselves. But still, the only alternatives were not between war (= infliction of massive rights abuses from a distance) and doing nothing. If we ever come to a point in human affairs where those are the only choices, it’ll be a truly tragic day.
But no, there were other options available–theoretically, at least. So what we need to do is start working hard to persuade people to make those theoretical options a real possibility. Like my suggestion of having the UN create a robust UNMOVIC-style operation devoted to “monitoring, observing, and verifying” the compliance of various autocratic regimes with the UN’s own human-rights instruments. Or perhaps, through the rapid expansion and upgrading of something like the new Nonviolent Peaceforce.
Goodness! If human ingenuity can invent the atom bomb, theater missile defense systems, “Daisy Cutter” heavy ordnance, and all those other whizz-bang instruments of death and destruction, surely we can design and start implementing their nonviolent equivalents in short order– and for a fraction of the cost!
Meantime, I’m sure Juan won’t take amiss my reminding y’all of this: the casualty toll in Iraq continues to grow.

In his “Informed Comment” blog, Juan Cole recently wrote:

I wasn’t exactly for the war, I was just unable to bring myself to march to keep Saddam in power.

I don’t think that implication is at all a fair one to make. As someone who marched and undertook a lot of other activities to try to prevent Bombs-Away Don and his cronies from launching that disastrous war, I never for one moment thought I was “marching to keep Saddam in power”.
I think Juan should know my work and my writings well enough to know that. And he probably knows enough other people in the anti-war movement that, on a moment’s reflection, he would recognize that his blanket charge against all the anti-war marchers/protesters/activists is unfounded and unfair.
Juan has been so wise on so many issues in the Middle East that his slur hurts. I know he shares with me an strong commitment to the wellbeing of the peoples of the Middle East. In that same post he gives as the reason for his support for the war (which he admitted was “tepid”), Saddam’s record of iterated genocides against Iraq’s Kurds and Shi-ites. Unlike the whole elaborate constructs of fabricated nonsense about Iraq’s alleged WMDs, or its alleged links with Al-Qaeda, the argument about Saddam’s appalling and incontestable record of human-rights abuses is a serious one to which opponents of the war need to give intense consideration.
I have started to do this. Back at the end of June (and again at the end of July), I argued here on JWN that yes, we should all–governments, NGOs, and the global citizenry–have dealt far more effectively with the Iraqi human rights situation all along, but that, crucially, there were certainly ways of doing this other than, and probably much more effectively than, the launching of a war.
The one I have proposed is the creation– for Saddam’s Iraq, or perhaps for North Korea, Burma, or other grossly rights-abusing totalitarian regimes today– of a human-rights UNMOVIC.
I would love for Juan to retract his slur and (as a way, perhaps, of enacting his remorse over expressing it) to join with me in brainstorming ways that the rights situation of people living under totalitarian dictatorships can be improved in ways other than the unleashing of that unfailingly destructive and harmful instrument, war.
What d’you think, Juan? All that and a new semester of teaching, as well?