From the left

[andrewducker]

Leftist critique of the anti-war movement.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm deeply unimpressed and see nothing original or worthwhile in this article.

Why this miserable response? In a nutshell, it was a displacement of the left's most fundamental values by a misguided strategic choice, namely, opposition to the U.S., come what may. This dictated the apologetic mumbling about the mass murder of U.S. citizens, and it dictated that the U.S. must be opposed in what it was about to do in hitting back at al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.

Of course, the author misses the fact that while getting rid of the Taliban was certainly not a bad idea, the heart of Al-Queda is its funding source, which lies firmly in Saudi Arabia, the (vastly wealthy) nation that is single-handedly responsible for funding extreme fundamentalist movements worldwide.

Similarly, people like this author whine endlessly about the evils of Saddam Hussein while ignoring the fact that today mass cannibalism is occurring in parts of Africa and large-scale death squads still operate in portions of Central America, and North Korea is surreally horrific. Hussein performed massive attrocities in the 80s and early 90s, but since the first war he's been far less bad than a good number of other world leaders. There are many monsters ruling nations today and compared to many he was a fairly minor one.

At this point, there are only to reasonable policies for the US (or any other First World nation):

1) Go after the worst monsters first and wipe out every horrific regime, replacing them all with at least tolerable regimes.

or

2) Don't attack any such regimes unless they directly threaten the US (or other first world nation) or start expanding beyond their borders. However, providing medical aid and occasionally even funding and giving supplies to rebels can be attempted if they rebels look like they have a chance at success and are likely to be an improvement.

Option 1) is both incredibly expensive and only worthwhile if it is possible to transform conquered nations into non-horrific places. Given that doing this requires a long-term presence in the nation, no single nation can afford to do this on any significant scale. Also, the track record of any conquering nation transforming despotism to democracy (or even to non-horrific governments) has been very poor. I consider alternative 2) to be the only reasonable one, especially since I'm far from certain that most so called wars of liberation do not kill more people than the despots they are designed to overthrow.

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

We have already killed almost as many people since the war started than Saddam was purported to kill each year, only we've done it in the last 5 months. Part of the death is a result of the sewage system we've worsened with the war, one that will be 18 months before it's back to merely pre-war conditions. Nowhere in the article are these points recognized.

Nor, also, is the fact that no one wanted Saddam in power, but some felt that there were less volatile ways of going about it. Sure, Baathists would have been in power a bit longer, but a smoother transition could have assured the Iraqi people a better esteem on the situation, less killed as a direct result of the invasion, and in general a more humanitarian way of getting people back in order. It really was possible.

I, on the other hand, have absolutely no interest in the bleeding heart nature of this crap. I'm a republican, and this just plain wasn't our business in my concern. Furthermore, I believe that the only way a people can truly achieve freedom and democracy is for them to revolt and choose it for themselves. Had they asked us to come in and help, that would have been a different story; but they did not.

We invaded, and no amount of "humanitarism" can evade that fact. We bombed them. We killed. Sorry. And now we're responsible for the aftermath, all $70B and counting of it, all 16 Million of them and their health, and all of their (volatile) neighborly relations. Is it really worth it? Or perhaps waiting for the rest of the world, or the Iraqis themselves, might have been a bit wiser?

[andrewducker]

Had they asked us to come in and help, that would have been a different story; but they did not.

Actually, they did.

First they rose up in 1991, when they were told that they would be supported by the US. The US abandoned them and the rebels were slaughtered and tortured to death.

And then, in the run-up to the recent war I read numerous articles by Iraqi refugees based in the UK saying "No, you don't understand, you _have_ to invade and save us."

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

It starts out with a plain untruth, asking "Why did so many on the left march to save Saddam Hussein?" when nobody did.

It continues with one of the standard lies of the war, claiming that the US/UK invasion of Iraq, with its massive civilian death toll and continuing civilian death toll thanks to the use of cluster bombs and ruthless attacks on civilian areas, is a "humanitarian intervention". (If we include in the deaths caused by US refusal to police looters, the civilian death toll goes even higher.)

Furthermore, it ignores entirely the present mess the US are making of "reconstruction" in Iraq: a "reconstructive" effort that is predicated on making vast profits for US companies, not on providing basic services for Iraqis.

No wonder the Wall Street Journal were happy to publish it.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

And then, in the run-up to the recent war I read numerous articles by Iraqi refugees based in the UK saying "No, you don't understand, you _have_ to invade and save us."

And there were also numerous articles by Iraqi refugees based in the UK saying "No, I don't want to see my country bombed."

Do you read blogs? There's a fascinating blog by an Iraq code-named "Raed" - his blogname is "Dear_Raed" - which expresses a lot of the ambiguity that Iraqis felt about the US/UK invasion of Iraq.

On the one hand, in only a few months the US/UK invasion killed as many civilians as the article you linked to claimed Saddam Hussein killed in a year (and I express it that way because I am taking this guy's figures as accurate, not because I want to deny that Saddam Hussein is a bloodthirsty tyrant). And one reason why so many were killed is because the US/UK showed little regard for civilian Iraqi lives as compared to the lives of soldiers in the invading armies. And the civilian death toll is still mounting, and will continue to do so, in part because the US is making a complete mess of reconstruction in Iraq, in part because the US has refused to take any part in clearing up the cluster bomblets that it dropped on Iraqi towns and cities. (Each cluster bomblet is the equivalent of an extremely lethal landmine. But because of a legal technicality, they're not included under landmines.)

Tony Blair said of invading Iraq that history would judge. What I assume he meant was that 20 years down the line, Iraq will look so different and so better than it did under Saddam Hussein that this would justify the thousands of people killed to accomplish it. (No one is counting the Iraqi soldiers.)

But the fact is, right now, and thanks to the US assumption that everything profitable has to be hived off to American companies, and any government has to be reliably and solidly pro-US, there is no sign that that's going to happen. There is no evidence that Bush and Co want it to happen.

To argue that it was a good thing to invade Iraq, kill people by the thousands, kill more people by destroying infrastructure and allowing hospitals to be looted, and leave Iraq in chaos for months, in order to install another dictator - who may not be as bad as Saddam Hussein, but who will not be appointed on any criteria other than "Is he pro-US?" - this is all criminal nonsense.

[andrewducker]

I wouldn't expect reconstruction to get anything vaguely positive done for at least a year, maybe two.

There may have been flag-waving optimists who expected reconstruction to instantly get Iraq into a decent situation, but even getting a very basic infrastructure into place will take a lot of time and energy, especially when guerilla resistance is ongoing.

[andrewducker]

I do find it terribly amusing that you talk about the ambiguity felt by Iraqis and say
on the one hand and then only mention the negative side, never coming back to the ambiguity or that other hand...

[andrewducker]

Aah, we can't solve all the world's problems at once, so we shouldn't try to solve any of them at all?

I'm going to have to respectfully take an opposing stance to that.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

*grins* I do find the slips I make in first-draft writing a cross between amusing and annoying: I really wish it were possible to edit comments on LJ. Sometimes, when a mistake is truly annoying (like an HTML unclosed bracket) or affects the meaning of a sentence, I'll go through the process of reposting the comment and deleting the original version. But I didn't consider it worthwhile in this particular instance.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't expect reconstruction to get anything vaguely positive done for at least a year, maybe two.

I think you're being optimistic. The way the US is going about it - if you've read what people who are safely out of the Bush administration and out of Iraq are saying about it - it will certainly take a very long time. Perhaps, if the Iraqis are fortunate, it may take as little as year or two, but it's been nearly that since the US invaded Afghanistan, and look at their progress there.

It could be done faster and better, but it won't be, because the current administration's objective is to make sure that American companies make huge profits, not to benefit the Iraqis, and to make sure that any Iraqi independence from the US gets thoroughly squashed. (Oh, and to keep the UN out of it.)

here may have been flag-waving optimists who expected reconstruction to instantly get Iraq into a decent situation, but even getting a very basic infrastructure into place will take a lot of time and energy, especially when guerilla resistance is ongoing.

Yet investing in a basic infrastructure is exactly what would minimise guerilla resistance. If the US want to make the Iraqis see that their occupation is a good thing, they have to do positive things. Right at the moment (for example) the Ba'athist army (most of whom probably have no particular loyal feelings for Saddam Hussein) are armed, unemployed, and unpaid.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

For example, here's (http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1010056,00.html) what could have been done had the Americans really been determined to provide services to the Iraqi people.

[diffrentcolours]

Agreed. I marched to protest against a near-unilateral invasion of one country by another with huge vested interests. I'm all in favour of removing evil undemocratic regimes who torture and kill people, like Iraq, Israel, North Korea or the United States, but I think that the argument of "We've got more bombs than you so you do what we say" is a horrific thing which goes against the nature of an international community. Especially since I don't agree with an awful lot of the policies of the nation with the biggest bombs.

I would have backed a war in Iraq with full UN support, which had more consideration for the civilians, and less profit motives for American Big Oil. I would have supported even after the invasion a pretence by the US that they give a damn about bringing Iraq's torturers and butchers to justice - there are dozens of reports from respected journalists about paperwork which could be vital in war crime tribunals being left to blow in the wind or be snarched from under the noses of the occupation forces.

I'm convinced that the American troops on the ground want to make Iraq a better place, and I'm convinced that the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam. But I'm also convinced that the invasion of Iraq was utterly, utterly wrong.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, me too. I wrote something last week on my personal wiki, and then asked a friend to proofread it.

I then updated it 14 times over the course of the day, largely because I realised that the individual paragraphs were ok in their own right, but the flow of the argument was _terrible_.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

Often there is no perfect solution to a problem, often there is not even a good one. Invading as the US/UK did wasn't a good solution. Sitting around waiting for a better solution to be devised wasn't a good solution. Being very invloved and staying in post war Iraq isn't a good solution, nor is leaving. Staying but not really helping isn't great, staying and interfering too much is also not great.

Sometimes there are no good solutions. Action may change situations, inaction probably will not.

The regime in Iraq was horrible. As rightly pointed out many other countries have regimes equally as horrible or worse. Some of them continue to pose a more credible threat to other countries (as well as the poor sods still in the place).

Logically then, we should sort out everybody else - but where do you draw the line? When is something a violation of decent human 'rights' and when is it a difference of opinion?
(e.g religion - I'm against all forms of it. Many of you may not be).

I think I comes back to what I was saying to a friend of mine at the weekend - I don't mind what you think or feel, I'll judge (in as far as I judge) you by your actions. I'll decide to eb for or against you based on what you actually do - not what I think you believe. I'm not sure how that would scale up....

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I think you missed the point.

It's not a question of not trying to solve the world's problems. It's a question of not trying to solve the world's problems by mass slaughter.

[andrewducker]

I agree that other methods should have been used.

But nobody seems to have come up with one that would have worked on Iraq.

[andrewducker]

Cheers, that's excellent.

I shall continue to hope that things get moving over there.

But no, I'm not at all hopeful that they're being done in an efficient manner.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Oh, come off it.

Plenty of people did come up with solutions. None of them were acceptable to the Bush administration/the pro-war types, so the persistent claim was "nobody but us is coming up with anything".

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Can you quote me some of these solutions please.

Cheers

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

1991 solution: support the Iraqi uprising to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Not supported, because (according to Colin Powell) the US would rather have had Saddam Hussein in power than have him overthrown and another radical Islamist state in the Middle East.

1990s solution, with UN inspectors already in the country seeking out and destroying WoMD: add UN humanitarian inspectors. Have UN inspectors empowered to report and to act on breaches of international humanitarian law. Not supported, because it was obvious that if you once concede the idea that the UN has a right to police international law/human rights in Iraq, you concede it for other countries, too. Saudi Arabia, for example.

2002 solution: Provide a convincing case to the UN security council or to the UN general assembly that the UN, acting collectively, ought to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime for humanitarian reasons. Not supported, because the US were not trying to make a claim on humanitarian grounds: they were claiming (falsely, as we now know) that Saddam Hussein had WoMD. Also, this option - if the US had chosen to support it - would have laid the US open to all sorts of challenges to its authority that the Bush administration did not want. The Bush administration is not interested in challenging the Treaty of Westphalia: they do not want to surrender their own national sovreignity: they only want other countries to surrender their national sovreignity to the US.

[adders.livejournal.com]

>It starts out with a plain untruth, asking "Why did so many on the left march to save Saddam Hussein?" when nobody did.

For goodness' sake, that's the whole point of the article. The argument he's making is that, despite the fact that they didn't mean to, the marchers ended up marching to save Hussein, even if they didn't mean to. That's certainly the way it was portrayed in the Iraqi media and across much of the Middle East.

Oh, and some people in the marches most certainly were marching to save Hussein. Go back and look at some of the banners in the photos.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

The argument he's making is that, despite the fact that they didn't mean to, the marchers ended up marching to save Hussein, even if they didn't mean to.

Which is as fatuous an argument as the argument that Bush ended up invading Iraq in order to create more support for al-Qaida, even if he didn't mean to.

Oh, and some people in the marches most certainly were marching to save Hussein. Go back and look at some of the banners in the photos.

*blink* *blink* I was at several of those marches, and I saw no banners whatsoever in support of Saddam Hussein. If you're claiming you saw some in photographs, please provide a link to those photos.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

No, I'm saying that overthrowing despots by conquest is unlikely to work and even if it does it still demands a massive and long-term commitment of resources. Funding rebels is far cheaper and if one funds relatively positive rebels the outcome is more likely to be positive. Also, economic aid weakens tyranny, just as economic embargoes aid it. The long-term embargo on Iraq was an excellent way to keep Hussein in power and it did just that. More specifically, I'm also saying that arguments like the ones the author made about Iraq are utterly specious.

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

1991 is not 2003, I don't count that. That is more of what I'm talking about, but we completely screwed that up then.

Yes, I'd read that about a lot of refugees, but it's easy to say, "Yes, go take it over," once you've left. That's not people in the country asking for that to happen. That's also not asking for *help*, which is a different thing. What I mean is like the USA asking France for help for their revolution, and vice versa. Liberia stacking dead bodies in front of the US Embassy to get help is a good modern example.

No, "Hey, go in and take my country over, I don't live there anymore," is not anything like the essence of what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people being able to gain their independence for themselves -- no matter what we've been told lately, going in and "liberating" isn't giving them any sense of independence, it's taking over for them.

[andrewducker]

Which is like saying the Allies shouldn't have invaded France at the end of WW2, because it did no good for the French, they should have liberated themselves.

There was no way they could have risen up and overthrown Saddam. They'd been shot and tortured into submission and had nowhere near the resources.

These weren't people who had ambled out for a holiday and then said "Oh, I don't mind if you invade my country." They were brutalised refugees asking for their home back because a madman had taken it over.

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

Which is like saying the Allies shouldn't have invaded France at the end of WW2, because it did no good for the French, they should have liberated themselves.

No, it's not. Not even remotely. First of all, France was actually invaded. Second of all, they were requesting help, and we'd have gotten nowhere without their underground system.

There was no way they could have risen up and overthrown Saddam. They'd been shot and tortured into submission and had nowhere near the resources.

Yes, which is why they needed help. However, we weren't helping them with their revolution, we were taking it over "for them". There is a very fundamental difference here.

These weren't people who had ambled out for a holiday and then said "Oh, I don't mind if you invade my country." They were brutalised refugees asking for their home back because a madman had taken it over.

Ok, by this rationale, when are we invading China?

[andrewducker]

China, thankfully, is liberalising. Has been for over 15 years now. The old guard is fading and the new guard has been turning to capitalism as fast as they can get their hands on money.

An awful lot of countries are doing this, and when they do there's no reason to do anything about it.

Even countries that aren't can frequently be democratised in the long term by using political and financial pressure.

Iraq wasn't responding to political pressure and wasn't economically presurrable, due to the large amount of oil it was sitting on.

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

Iraq wasn't responding to political pressure

Sure it was. It did get rid of the WMDs due to political pressure, and most of the atrocities cited it now are from the late 80's, early 90's. You could argue it's not that much, but you can't say it wasn't at all.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to recommend this, not least because despite having been "edited for typos" there are still a bunch in there. And some misplaced apostrophes. However...

A blogger called Hesiod deconstructs the argument that Iraq was a 'humanitarian intervention'. (http://counterspin.blogspot.com/2003_08_03_counterspin_archive.html#106000440402961644)