http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1995122,00.html
Don't you know your left from your right? Part II
Read Part I here
Nick Cohen
Sunday January 21, 2007
Observer
The disgrace of the anti-war movement
On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched
through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the
biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to
oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini's old capital of
Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of
Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000
marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest
demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In
Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought
demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to
remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece,
where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police
had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a
fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol
bombs.
The French protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime went off
without trouble. Between 100,000 and 200,000 French demonstrators stayed
peaceful as they rallied in the Place de la Bastille, where in 1789
Parisian revolutionaries had stormed the dungeons of Louis XVI in the name
of the universal rights of man.
In Ireland, Sinn Fein was in charge of the protests and produced the most
remarkable spectacle of a remarkable day: a peace movement led by the IRA.
Only in the newly liberated countries of the Soviet bloc were the
demonstrations small and anti-war sentiment muted.
The protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime weren't just a
European phenomenon. From Calgary to Buenos Aires, the left of the
Americas marched. In Cape Town and Durban, politicians from the African
National Congress, who had once appealed for international solidarity
against South Africa's apartheid regime, led the opposition to the
overthrow of a fascist regime. On a memorable day, American scientists at
the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record
books. Historians will tell how the continent's first political
demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.
Saddam Hussein was delighted, and ordered Iraqi television to show the
global day of action to its captive audience. The slogan the British
marchers carried, 'No war - Freedom for Palestine', might have been
written by his foreign ministry. He instructed the citizens of hdad to
march and demand that he remain in power. Several thousand went through
the streets carrying Kalashnikovs and posters of the Great Leader.
No one knows how many people demonstrated. The BBC estimated between six
and 10 million, and anti-war activists tripled that, but no one doubted
that these were history's largest co-ordinated demonstrations and that
millions, maybe tens of millions, had marched to keep a fascist regime in
power.
Afterwards, nothing drove the protesters wilder than sceptics telling them
that if they had got what they wanted, they would, in fact, have kept a
fascist regime in power. They were good people on the whole, who hadn't
thought about the Baath Party. Euan Ferguson, of The Observer, watched the
London demonstrators and saw a side of Britain march by that wasn't all
bad:
'There were, of course, the usual suspects - the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, the Socialist Workers' Party, the anarchists. But even they
looked shocked at the number of their fellow marchers: it is safe to say
they had never experienced such a mass of humanity. There were nuns,
toddlers, barristers, the Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists
Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women's Choir and
"Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against
Bristol would be Nice)". One group of SWP stalwarts were joined, for the
first march in any of their histories, by their mothers. There were
country folk and lecturers, dentists and poulterers, a hairdresser from
Cardiff and a poet from Cheltenham. I called a friend at two o'clock, who
was still making her ponderous way along the Embankment - "It's not a
march yet, more of a record shuffle" - and she expressed delight at her
first protest. "You wouldn't believe it; there are girls here with good
nails and really nice bags."'
Alongside the girls with good nails were thoughtful marchers who had
supported the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan but were
aghast at the recklessness of the Iraq adventure. A few recognised that
they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel
Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet's Chile,
published a letter to an 'unknown Iraqi' and asked, 'What right does
anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from
tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is
preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the
ousting of Saddam Hussein?'
His reply summed up the fears of tens of millions of people. War would
destabilise the Middle East and recruit more fanatics to terrorist groups.
It would lead to more despots 'pre-emptively arming themselves with all
manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to Armageddon'. Dorfman also
worried about the casualties - which, I guess, were far higher than he
imagined - and convinced himself that the right course was to demand that
Bush and Blair pull back. Nevertheless, he retained the breadth of mind
and generosity of spirit to sign off with 'heaven help me, I am saying
that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future
of your unprotected children'.
I don't think any open-minded observer who wasn't caught up in the anger
could say that Dorfman was typical. Jose Ramos-Horta, the leader of the
struggle for the freedom of East Timor, noticed that at none of the
demonstrations in hundreds of cities did you see banners or hear speeches
denouncing Saddam Hussein. If this was 'the left' on the march, it was the
new left of the 21st century, which had abandoned old notions of
camaraderie and internationalism in favour of opposition to the capricious
American hegemony. They didn't support fascism, but they didn't oppose it
either, and their silence boded ill for the future.
In Saturday, his novel set on the day of the march, Ian McEwan caught the
almost frivolous mood: 'All this happiness on display is suspect. Everyone
is thrilled to be together out on the streets - people are hugging
themselves, it seems, as well as each other. If they think - and they
could be right - that continued torture and summary executions, ethnic
cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they
should be sombre in their view.'
Most people, myself included, are not like Ariel Dorfman. In moments of
political passion, we are single-mindedly and simple-mindedly sure of our
righteousness. From the day of the marches on, liberal leftish politicians
and intellectuals kept up a vehement and slightly panicky insistence that
they were right and their goodness was beyond question.
In fairness to all of those who didn't want to think about the 'occasional
genocide' or ask heaven's forgiveness for recommending that the Baath
party be left in power, they were right in several respects. The
protesters were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them
into war. They weren't necessarily lying, in the lawyerly sense that they
were deliberately making up the case for war - nothing that came out in
the years afterwards showed that they knew Saddam had no weapons of mass
destruction and thought, 'What the hell, we'll pretend he does.'
But they were manipulating the evidence. The post-mortem inquiries in
America convicted the US administration of 'collective group think': a
self-reinforcing delusion in the White House that shut out contrary
information and awkward voices. Lord Butler 's inquiry in Britain showed
the Prime Minister turned statements that the Joint Intelligence Committee
had hedged with caveats into defi nite warnings of an imminent threat.
Before the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook resigned in protest against
the war, he pointed out to Blair that several details in his case that
Saddam had chemical weapons couldn't possibly be true. Cook told his
special adviser David Mathieson after the meeting that Blair did not know
about the detail and didn't seem to want to know either.
'A half truth is a whole lie,' runs the Yiddish proverb, and if democratic
leaders are going to take their countries to war, they must be able to
level with themselves as well as their electorates. If Blair had levelled
with the British people, he would have said that he couldn't be sure if
Saddam was armed, and even if he was there was no imminent danger; but
here was a chance to remove a disgusting regime and combat the growth in
terror by building democracy, and he was going to take it. Instead, he
spun and talked about chemical weapons ready to be fired in 45 minutes. If
the Labour party had forced Blair to resign, there would have been a rough
justice in his political execution.
The war was over soon enough, but the aftermath was a disaster. Generals,
diplomats and politicians covered their own backs and stabbed the backs of
their colleagues as they piled blame on each other, but for the rest of
the world pictures released in 2004 of American guards with pornographic
smirks on their faces standing beside the tortured and sexually abused
bodies of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison encapsulated their disgust. To
those who knew that the Baathists had tens of thousands of people tortured
and murdered at Abu Ghraib, the pictures were evidence of sacrilege. It
was as if American guards had decided to gas a prisoner in Auschwitz,
while their superiors turned a blind eye.
Just as dozens of generals, politicians and diplomats shifted the blame,
so journalists and academics produced dozens of books on the troubles of
the occupation of Iraq. One point demanded far more attention than it got.
Hard-headed and principled Iraqis, who knew all about the ghastly history
of their country, failed to understand the appeal of fascism. The y
worried about coping with the consequences of totalitarianism when the
Baath party was overthrown. They talked about how many people you could
reasonably put on trial in a country where the regime had made hundreds of
thousands complicit in its crimes against humanity, and wondered about
truth and reconciliation commissions and amnesties. They expected the
invaders to be met with 'sweets and flowers' and assumed Baathism was dead
as a dynamic force. They didn't count on its continuing appeal to the
Sunni minority, all too aware that democracy would strip them of their
status as Iraq's 'whites'. They didn't wonder what else the servants of
the Baath could do if they didn't take up arms: wait around for war crimes
trials or revenge from the kin of their victims? Nor did they expect to
see Islamist suicide bombers pour into Iraq. Despite vocal assurances from
virtually every expert who went on the BBC that such a pact was
impossible, Baathists and Islamists formed an alliance against the common
enemy of democracy.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, wasn't against
elections because he was worried they would be rigged or because he
couldn't tolerate American involvement in the political process; he was
against democracy in all circumstances. It was 'an evil principle', he
said, as he declared a 'fierce war' against all those 'apostates' and
'infidels' who wanted to vote in free elections and the 'demi-idols' who
wanted to be elected. Democracy was a 'heresy itself', because it allowed
men and women to challenge the laws of God with laws made by parliaments.
It was based on 'freedom of religion and belief' and 'freedom of speech'
and on 'separation of religion and politics'.
He did not mean it as a compliment. His strategy was to terrorise Iraq's
Shia majority. To Sunni Islamists they were heretics, or as Zarqawi put it
in his charac teristic language, 'the insurmountable obstacle, the lurking
snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the
penetrating venom'. Suicide bombers were to murder them until they turned
on the Sunni minority. He explained: 'I mean that targeting and hitting
them in [their] religious, political, and military depth will provoke them
to show the Sunnis their rabies and bare the teeth of the hidden rancour
working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of
sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as
they feel imminent danger and annihilating death.'
Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffi ng up Zarqawi's role
in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they
couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and
Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could
make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of
the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross
workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis
who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.
How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably
hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it
was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the
counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had
life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained
ferociously critical of the American and British governments while
offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed.
It is a generalisation to say that everyone refused to commit themselves.
The best of the old left in the trade unions and parliamentary Labour
party supported an anti-fascist struggle, regardless of whether they were
for or against the war, and American Democrats went to fi ght in Iraq and
returned to fi ght the Republicans. But again, no one who looked at the
liberal left from the outside could pretend that such principled stands
were commonplace. The British Liberal Democrats, the continental social
democratic parties, the African National Congress and virtually every
leftish newspaper and journal on the planet were unable to accept that the
struggle of Arabs and Kurds had anything to do with them. Mainstream
Muslim organisations were as indifferent to the murder of Muslims by other
Muslims in Iraq as in Darfur. For the majority of world opinion, Blair's
hopes of 'giving people oppressed, almost enslaved, the prospect of
democracy and liberty' counted for nothing.
How the left went beserk
When a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein came, the liberals had two choices.
The first was to oppose the war, remain hypercritical of aspects of the
Bush administration's policy, but support Iraqis as they struggled to
establish a democracy.
The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral
option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did
have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're
just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was
shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view
of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they
had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement
that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able
to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and
all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities
by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries
on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis,
who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence
on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to
accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one
to which they could and should make a positive commitment.
A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they
had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.
The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right
reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American
troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be
false, and to go berserk; to allow justifi able anger to propel them into
'binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism' as the Sixties liberals had
done when they went off the rails. As one critic characterised the
position, they would have to pretend that 'the United States was the
problem and Iraq was its problem'. They would have to maintain that the
war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted
region, but the bloody result of a 'financially driven mania to control
Middle Eastern oil, and the faith-driven crusade to batter the crescent
with the cross'.
They chose to go berserk.
--
We have an inveterate dislike of the profusion of safety devices with
which all automatic pistols are regularly equipped. We believe them
to be the cause of more accidents than anything else. There are too
many instances on record of men being shot by accident either because
the safety-catch was in the firing position when it ought not to have
been or because it was in the safe position when that was the last thing
to be desired. It is better, we think, to make the pistol permanently
"unsafe" and then to devise such methods of handling it that there will
be no accidents.
- Captain William Ewart Fairbairn and Captain Eric Anthony Sykes
