the double face of illegitimacy

In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, LI quoted a phrase of Benjamin Constant’s that seems to haunt the whole misadventure: “When villains violate the forms against honest men, one knows that this is just one more crime. One is attached to the forms exactly insofar as they are violated; one learns, in silence, and by misfortune, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and preservers of the social order. But when the honest men violate the forms against the villains, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves now as obstacles to justice.”

Constant was active in the French revolution, and he saw the price paid by violating the “forms.” Unlike Burke, he was on the side of the revolution. Young as he was, he saw, as Burke did not, that the French monarchical system had decayed past the point of salvage. But he also appreciated, as Ste Just never did, that the republic is built on forms. As Paine once put it, while monarchy is based on will, the Republic is based on justice. Not on the guillotine, and not on God.

LI has persistently pointed out that the scandal at the heart of this war, and the reason the conversation about it in this country compulsively returns to its origin is that its origin was a brutal violation of the forms by the “honest men” against the villains. The French phrase “hommes honnêtes” is not an assessment of private moral character, but of social position – and in this case, the Bush administration plays the role of honest men. The more modern term for the forms, stemming from Weber, is legitimacy. The illegitimacy of this war has been, from the start, the thing within it which has worked against it, silently unraveling every plan and every defense of this war.

The crime against legitimacy has a double face:

On the one hand, the illegitimacy of the tactics used to promote the war, from cherrypicked intelligence reports to slander to half truths to the contemplation of open frauds, such as Bush’s suggestion that a U.N. plane be shot down over Iraq by the U.S. military disguised as Iraqis. The followers of the Bush administration in the press, the whole tribe of belligeranti, carried into the argument a foul atmosphere of libel, of derision, and of disguise. The latter was particularly important. The war’s very dimensions were disguised. From the disgracing of Shinseki to Wolfowitz’ painful testimony about the cost of the war to the refusal to even discuss the occupation, the war’s press followers existed largely to block any inquiry into what the war would entail.

On the other hand, there was the ragged band of adventurers, half Garibaldi, half Lucky Luciano, that the American government evidently intended to put in place as the native Iraqi government. The most prominent of this band, Ahmed Chalabi, is a notorious thief. And indeed, from the reports of the massive defrauding of the Iraqi people, both directly, in terms of the funds seized from Saddam’s government after Baghdad collapsed, and indirectly, from the use of American reconstruction money, it is apparent that the spirit of Chalabi like thievery has presided over every move the American’s made in “reconstructing” Iraq, right down to the military’s publication of false and unchecked numbers about schools repaired (in which the money for the repairing vanished, and the school’s employees are using the same, unreconstructed structures) to the libraries and monument restored. As importantly, the cohort of exiles, save for some of the SCIRI and DAWA politicians, had no roots in Iraq and quickly became unpopular there. A country that had seen Saddam Hussein was in no mood to support another set of thieves.

Interestingly, Constant’s dictum is so correct that support for the war, collapsing in tandem with the supposed American plan for “victory” in the war, is simply a response to the initial violation of forms. For that initial violation requires infinite covering work, thus perpetuating the violence. And this, in itself, points to a constitutional neglect which we have inherited from the Cold War. Among other things, the Cold War suspended the constitutional duty of the legislature to validate American military action. This duty wasn’t an arbitrary whim of the founding fathers. They knew too well that an executive can use a nation’s resources, its taxes and fighting men, to wage wars to its own personal advantage – in effect, making the military the mercenary force of the executive. George III’s use of Hessian soldiers was a vivid instance. The pretence that an elected executive would have more legitimacy doing the same thing was scotched by the Constitutional Convention’s skeptics. They were right. There’s been an argument – well propounded by Paul Craddick – that the U.S. was already at war with Iraq in March of 2003. That war was the result of legislative resolutions passed in 1998, as well as resolutions passed at the U.N. in 1991. In a sense, this is true – but this simply shows, in a bold way, how the forms for war have fallen into disrepair. Your average American citizen was so unaware that he lived in a nation at war in 2000 that the issue never even surfaced in the election. In fact, it was not a war so much as a sporadic hampering action. The Bush administration knew that it did not have political carte blanche to invade Iraq because of some obscure legislation passed in 1998. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if they did – surely the rotten fabric of post-constitutional warmongering would have been brought down with a resounding crash. This would have been, all things considered, a good thing. That the U.S. Congress couldn’t even formally declare war on the government of Afghanistan after 9/11 shows how fearful both the executive and legislative branch are of resurrecting the old Constitutional curb on military action. Its use would call into question future military actions, not so legitimized.

One consequence, of course, of the failure to declare war on the Taliban and the failure to officially enact a policy that called explicitly for the capture or death of Osama bin Laden is that the outrageously negligent military campaign against OBL, culminating with Tora Bora (which, given a competent administration, would certainly have resulted in Rumsfeld’s resignation, since OBL’s escape was the direct result of Rumsfeldian policies in Afghanistan), was allowed to go forward with no ending, and to turn into a campaign in Iraq, as though all wars desired by the President are connected.

It is puzzling that supposedly sharp political reporters and commentators – the tribe of the belligeranti –were so blind to the consequences of violating, repeatedly, the forms – of advocating actions that were, on the surface, illegitimate. The puzzle is that no long war can be fought in this way. The conviction that a war is legitimate is a necessary condition for pursuing a long war. There is no way of whistling around this. As the invasion was being mounted, the belligeranti mouthpieces were still mouthing the credo that the war would be short, and were still covering up questions about the occupation with fantasies about flower strewing natives. From their own point of view, this was really suicidal behavior. A long war or a long occupation would inevitably be compared to their rhetoric, and found wanting. As the means were rotten, so would the reaction be violent.

And so it has come to pass that the crisis in Iraq is a double crisis. The group of American proxies in Iraq has been on a continuous retreat, mitigated, perhaps, by the untold wealth that said proxies have deposited in banks in England and America and Switzerland. American strength in the country now depends, oddly enough, on an alliance with an increasingly theocratic Shi’ite majority. And though American papers and politicians look hopefully at “free market” theocrats, like the NYT favorite, Mahdi, it is hard to imagine that the looting of Iraq’s oilfields by opening them up to foreign ownership could really be contrived by any party. The Americans can fall back on the warlords in Kurdistan, but this, too, looks infinitely riskier than it did in 2003. Meanwhile, of course, the Bush administration and its press followers are sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of evasions that materially weaken support for continuing this war – already a minority position, according to most polls, for more than six months now.

Yet also peculiar to this war is the passivity and foolishness of the organized anti-war faction. In LI's opinion, this is also an interesting sign. Much of the opposition to the war seems to come not from liberals, but from leftists. This is problematic. How can leftists complain about the neglect of the forms and at the same time blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeois ideology? It makes the opposition seem either childish or Machiavellian.

This should, then, be the hour of liberalism. Liberals do not blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeouis self interest. At the same time, liberals do not believe that the orienting points of legitimacy are absolute and unchanging. In fact, the illegitimacy of this war results from lies that were acceptable means of promoting wars at other times. The war of 1898 was promoted exactly the way the war in Iraq was promoted. But 1898 is not 2003. The difference in civil rights, in the ower of the state, in our expectations about justice and equity, is considerable. It is the liberal idea that one can push those expectations, and thus reorient what is and what is not "good form." This seems to be a good time for pushing -- alas, just as there seems to be an absense of prominent liberals, save for the mayor of New York City.

Which simply means, to LI -- grassroots work. As Paine said, We have it in our power to make the world anew.