Remora

LI hasn't commented much about Bush's war fever because we find it so depressing. We find it depressing because the United States has no cause to go to war with Iraq. Or rather, its causes for going to war with Iraq would work just as well for going to war with Pakistan -- or even Israel, which, after all, is the nation with the greatest (illegal) nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, and the one nation that has shown, time and time again, that it will take any pre-emptive action it deems necessary to protect itself -- not necessarily a good thing from the point of view of U.S. interests. After all, no law says our interests are aligned with Israel in the Middle East.

We find the peace side preferable, insofar as the argument is against the U.S. mounting an armed force to overthrow Saddam Hussein's government. On the other hand, we do think that government should be overthrown. It is unnecessary to rehearse the wickedness of the current government in this post -- we've done it a lot in previous posts. We'd prefer, of course, a velvet revolution, but that isn't going to happen. The Iraqi people deserve a representative government, one that guarantees them their rights -- that goes without saying. Unfortunately, the reality is that there might not be an Iraqi people -- rather, there might be a number of peoples gathered together in this colonial era contraption who want to get out.

Still, US policy up to now has been miserable and criminal. It rests on enforcing an economic blockade to encourage revolt, while at the same time refusing to support any democratic elements that would wish to make that revolt. In other words, we want an uprising of prisoners that would conveniently install another jailor, one to the American taste.

There's an essay in the guardian by David Clark that makes the very good point that it is not a moral option to simply let Hussein stay on, unopposed. The Left's point should be war is not the right way of dissolving the Ba'athist state structure, and should not be that that state structure is a good one, or a just one, or a justified one:



"The political and military risks of a ground invasion may be disproportionate to the nature of the current threat, but there is an equally dangerous fallacy that has gained ground in recent weeks. It is the assumption, latent in much of the anti-war commentary of the British left, that the notion of an Iraqi problem is nothing more than a figment of George Bush's imagination. Many of these voices seem to regard Saddam as a sort of Middle Eastern version of Fidel Castro: an authoritarian, but essentially harmless figure, to be admired, in a sneaking sort of way, for his ability to tweak Uncle Sam's nose. This view took its most egregious form in George Galloway's recent eulogy about Saddam's supposedly Churchillian qualities.

"It is a travesty of the real picture. There was a time when the British left was clear about the nature of the Iraqi regime and the moral obligation to take action against it. In the aftermath of the Halabja massacre, when Saddam murdered 5,000 Kurdish civilians with mustard gas, Jeremy Corbyn MP spoke for most of us when he denounced the regime as "fascist" and demanded the imposition of comprehensive sanctions; "no trade, no aid and no deals while the present repression continues against people in Iraq". Nowadays he signs motions denouncing those very same sanctions as an act of genocide against the Iraqi people."

Christopher Hitchens pitches in, too, in Sunday's Guardian, but Hitchens is so attached to his Jeremiah of the left role that he seems, lately, to be a poseur. It isn't the case, and has never been the case, that any serious figure on the left likes Hussein (while, of course, that was the case when old S. was supported by the Reagan/Bush folks). Why would they like him, particularly? The old third world-ism that developed a crush on any third world dictator that came along with a beret was long passe by the time Saddam murdered his way to the top. Hitchens reports on the use of poison gas in the Iraq - Iran war as though he broke the scoop, but in fact he didn't -- Andrew Cockburn has been there long before him. The other problem with the Jeremiah routine is that Hitchens was much more concerned, in the 90s, with Clinton's fellatio, than with whether the sanctions against Iraq were designed to liberate the Iraqis or to encourage them to, see above, exchange jailors. The immorality of the blockade came down to that. The immorality of the end of Bush I's war came down to that too -- the encouragement of an uprising, the standing aside while it was crushed, the hope that some American leaning Ba'athist would come along, whose gas attacks we'd be quite prepared to allow -- that was what was awful. That is what is still awful. The same people who crafted that piece of criminality are busy, today, making war plans to the greater glory of Bush's presidential chances in 2004. Even Jeremiahs should sometimes figure out a trick or two.