Iraq - five years on
by Shuggy, 23 March 2008
While it seems reflections are obligatory, mine are going to be limited for the time being. One of the reasons for this I gave in my very first post on this subject where I explained why I don’t really care to join the blogosphere ‘debate’:
“But there was a more melancholy reason: I didn’t want to be involved in a debate that I’ve found profoundly depressing at times; lots of jeering and sneering and a really quite unpleasant tendency to impute moral and/or intellectual failure to one’s opponents. Often, both camps have carried out what could only be described as a sort of intellectual scorched-earth policy towards the middle ground.”
Things haven’t changed much - if anything they’ve got worse. Did you know, for example, that once upon a time the bionically smug Chris Bertram used to describe himself as, “a non-supporter of the war rather than an opponent”? Pretty much the same place, as far as I can tell, as Norm ended up.
It should be obvious that people who like to pretend that those of us who supported the invasion of Iraq imagine it’s been a huge success are doing just that - pretending. There isn’t any of us who hasn’t adjusted their original position in some way. No-one argues now that the way the case was made for war was defensible. And hardly anyone argues that the conduct of the war was defensible.
But that’s all I’m willing to concede. I appreciate people will find this inexplicable. I astonished and disgusted many people who know me by my support for this war. I astonished myself. I’m no stranger to self-disgust either but I’d have to say that this never has anything to do with the positions I take on this or that issue. For this is part of a wider problem we have on the left - the idea that morality is a function of the stands we take on big geo-political issues. As if what we think matters a damn, as if this was important compared to how we quit ourselves as men and women in relation to our families, friends, colleagues and neighbours.
But I digress. There are a dozen different reasons why I’m not doing a Johann Hari. I might explain some of them in due course but here’s just one: Johann describes himself as having been a ‘cheerleader’ for the invasion of Iraq and now he feels terribly guilty about it. Fair enough in as far as this goes because I think cheerleading is a fairly accurate description of what he did. But don’t invite us all to do likewise because some of us didn’t do this in the first place. Some of us were more circumspect. Some of us backed the war even though we knew the outcome wasn’t certain. Some of us had misgivings about the whole enterprise from the outset and so felt less need to acquire them after the fact. Some of us were there for the first one and made all the clever anti-war arguments at that time. Then came over a decade of ‘containment’ over which time we came to the conclusion we’d been wrong. So when it came around a second time, we could do no other but lend our reluctant support. This forms part of the reason why some of us aren’t repenting today.
Monday 24 March 2008 at 0:56
Shuggy:
I suggest you check out what Norm had to say within the last week, rather than all the way back to 2006.
On March 20/08, he offered this critique of the Guardian’s “reflections”: http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/03/the-guardian-on.html
And on March 21/08, among several contributions to Slate on the 5th annivesary, he chose to Kanan Makeya’s piece in Slate: http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/03/kanan-makiya-fi.html
Kanan Makiya five years on
Among a number of writers - ‘liberal hawks’ - who supported the Iraq war, Kanan Makiya answers the question put by Slate, ‘How did I get Iraq wrong?’
“I know that I got many things wrong in the run-up to the 2003 war, but, in spite of everything, I still do not know how to regret wanting to knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
…..
[M]y biggest political sin is that in spite of nearly a quarter of a century of writing about the abuses of the Baath Party, I, and more generally the whole community of Iraqi exiles, grossly underestimated the consequences on a society of 30 years of extreme dictatorship. Iraqis were, it is true, liberated by the U.S. action in 2003; they were not defeated as the German and Japanese peoples had been in 1945. A regime was removed and a people liberated overnight, but it was a people that did not understand what had happened to it or why. Iraqis emerged into the light of day in a daze, having been in a prison or a giant concentration camp, cut off from the rest of the world to a degree that is difficult to imagine if you have not lived among them.”
The rest is here. http://www.slate.com/id/2186763/
Funny how all the blame for what went wrong after the removal of Saddam falls on the Coalition, primarily the US and the UK, and not to the toadie nations like France, Russia and China, all Security Council members who voted against removing Saddam because Saddam had them in his pockets with oil vouchers.
Not only did they not send in troops to help secure the piece, China and Russia in particular are propping up the regime in Tehran, a major funder and supplier to the “insurgencies” that keep massacring Iraqis who don’t favour the religious extremism of either Khomeinist Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood inspired Sunni jihaddists.
Monday 24 March 2008 at 9:48
Lynne - I’ve already seen all of these but they don’t represent a change in Norm’s position. My point was really about the tone of the debate, specifically the tone adopted by tossers like Chris Bertram. To read him now or in the last couple of years or so, you’d think he had been one of the war’s most strident opponents - and he did, on one occasion I recall, write some rather childish yah boo stuff in response to something Norm had written. But as the comment linked above shows, this was not always so.
Tuesday 25 March 2008 at 15:53
I don’t understand how you can write
“I didn’t want to be involved in a debate that I’ve found profoundly depressing at times; lots of jeering and sneering and a really quite unpleasant tendency to impute moral and/or intellectual failure to one’s opponents”
and then refer to somebody else as “bionically smug”, and one of the “tossers” - Either you don’t like jeering, sneering , imputations of badd faith, or you don’t. Or is it you just don’t like it when they are adressed at yourself and people you view sympathetically ?
Tuesday 25 March 2008 at 22:16
Or is it you just don’t like it when they are adressed at yourself and people you view sympathetically ?
Obviously - I’m only human. I suppose it depends on definitions. I’ll extent to invitation I’ve just set to the boys and girls over at Illiberal Conspiracy. Ok, jeering and sneering? Dunno if what I did there really qualifies but flinging insults across the blogosphere? Certainly I can get drawn into that. But I challenge you to find anything I’ve written that shows I imputed either moral or intellectual failure to those who opposed the war per se. Chris Bertram, on the other hand, imputes intellectual failure to his opponents on a regular basis. This from a man who has conveniently hardened his position in the hope that no-one would notice. I think “bionically smug” is a perfectly reasonable way to describe him - but I think he would be like this regardless of any moral or intellectual position he took.
Tuesday 25 March 2008 at 22:39
Are you sure you don’t know if “tosser” counts as jeering or not ? For example, if I wrote - “only a tosser would respond to the disaster in Iraq in the way that you do”, would you be unsure if this was a sneer or a jeer, or a persuasive argument ?
[apologies Shuggy - the bar-room casuistry is becoming tiresome … thought a bit of doodling might lighten the mood]
Tuesday 25 March 2008 at 23:24
On Ann is surely a prime example of tosspottery - and tosser is most certainly an apt appellation for the silly little fucker.
Thursday 27 March 2008 at 16:22
Shuggy - That is more or less how I have felt. I find it weird and disheartening to find that I support an American led war when I have detested and despised every other military action they have taken all my adult life (with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter’s doomed attempt to rescue the Iran hostages). Worse, this puts me on the opposite side of the argument to many of my friends and much of the rest of the ‘left’. But there we go.
However, can I add an argument of my own: The fuss about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ doesn’t die down, with all the stuff about Tony Blair being an inveterate liar and the rest of the whinging rubbish that goes with it. Now, I’m willing to believe Blair was persuaded those weapons existed (though not the nonsense about ‘45 minutes’) but I didn’t think they would ever be found. I thought, and said loudly (I have witnesses) that by the time the Inspectors got into Iraq any chemical or nuclear weapons they did have (and components, paperwork, etc) would be tucked away in a warehouse in Uzbekistan or some some place. So I didn’t think finding the things would be some kind of post-hoc justification for the war. It just wasn’t a relevant argument. The real argument was, and is, that Saadam’s previous attempts to build nuclear weapons proved he was had the capacity to build them if he was left alone for long enough, and his destruction of the Kuwaiti oil wells in the first war showed me, very clearly, how he might use them to his advantage. I asked my friends and other lefties what would happen if in, say, 2013, Hussain dropped a nuclear air burst over the Saudi oil fields, and I never got a sensible answer. When I got anything it was on the lines of “war for the benefit of Haliburton and Bush”, which is silly. I don’t argue with them that oil is part of the coallition of interests which promoted the war but the follow up question is: if Hussain did throw that bomb (or persistent chemical weapons across southern Iran, or whatever), who would starve to death - not me, and certainly not Haliburton execs - we would be inconvenienced but if Hussain could really get a choke on the world’s oil the consequent famines, new wars and all the rest would start in the poorest parts of Africa, and maybe spread to other poor places, while he sat back and took the profits. There is a counter-argument, which is that we could have waited until he showed signs of intending to do something really hideous before we took action, but I don’t (and didn’t) think that would wash, because the failure of the sanctions regime had already shown that he had the skill and resources to build his own alliances, keep secrets and wreck attempts to find out what he was really doing.
That, anyway, in the realpolitic. I think it is sufficient to justify that war by itself, and the realpolitic part of me says that this scenario, or any of the other serious possibilities which you can think of if you are cold blooded enough to put yourself into Hussain’s mind would be worse than all the horrors we have seen.
And besides, the non-realpolitic part (which is most of me) says that rejoicing at the death of tyrants is an essential part of being a decent human being.
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 17:06
[scumbag deleted]