John Howard’s attack on General Peter Gration reproduces yet again one of the silliest argument made by supporters of the Iraq war. He points out that Gration, like many other opponents of the war , made statements in the course of 2002 accepting the presumption that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The same point has been made with respect to Bill Clinton and many others.
Those making this claim seem to have erased from their historical memory banks the period from December 2002 to March 2003. During this period, UN inspectors went all over Iraq, inspecting all the sites where Bush, Blair and Howard had claimed to have evidence of weapons programs. They found nothing[1], for the very good reason that there was nothing to find. They interviewed scientists, inside and outside Iraq and got the same (correct) story every time – the weapons programs had been abandoned years ago.
By the time the war broke out, it was clear to any reasonable observer that Saddam had no nuclear program, no large-scale programs for producing chemical and biological weapons, and, in all probability no biological weapons at all. More intensive searching would have been required to determine that there were no carefully hidden stockpiles of chemical weapons, and if Bush had not gone to war, followed by Blair and Howard, these searches would have taken place and (as we know now) found nothing.
This is glaringly obvious, and yet supporters of the war, almost without exception, keep parroting the same line, or some variant, such as the claim that, in the light of the evidence, the UNSC was unreasonable in not passing a second resolution favoring war.
Given the gross mismanagement of the situation in Iraq after the war, explicable only by a willingness to ignore obvious facts in favor of political fantasies, I lean more and more to the view that support for the war required a degree of detachment from reality that guaranteed subsequent failure.
fn1. More precisely, they found some missiles that had a range marginally longer than that permitted, and had begun their destruction when Bush declared war. They also found a handful of leftover chemical shells, of the kind that have turned up on a couple of occasions since.
John Quiggin 
I won’t bother to go over old ground again. However, Chris Hitchens last night and on the repeat of late night live this afternoon, I think deals with the arguments against the war thoroughly. One point he noted is that many on the left are now isolationists rather than internationalists. Having argued for years that the west should intervene to get of oppressive regimes they now argue that the US should not intervene. Which is not to deny that Bush is an idiot and it would be better all round if Blair – a true internationalist and impressive leader -was calling all the shots.
And, of course, it was perfectly possible to believe both (a) Iraq has weapons of mass destruction; and, (b) an invasion of Iraq would be a very bad idea.
Hitchens might reflect on why it is that so many on the left who had backed previous interventions (including Clinton in Kosovo and Bush in Afghanistan) opposed this one. Might it be because the costs were obviously going to much greater, the risk of failure much higher, and the justification for immediate action much weaker?
Michael,
you are making the assumption that all people who were against the war were on the left.
You forget that in the USA the Bush Senior conservatives were against the Bush Junior conservatives.
In Australia you had people like Owen Harries , Austrlia’s leading Foreign Affairs right wing intellectual and also the Sydney Anglican Diocese for petes sake. A no more devastating critique against the war was delivered than by Andrew Cameron from Moore College on the Just War criteria.
People who opposed the war were more than the usual suspects.
If the Sydney Anglican Diocese was against the war, then I am retrospectively changing my position to favour it.
Well, may be not, but it’s a strong temptation. Speaking of Hitchens, correct me if I am wrong, but my recollection is that he was against the first gulf war.
And speaking of oppressive regimes, the current Iraqi regime isn’t shaping up all that well either.
What the historical revisionists consistently avoid is the fact that the US/Western intelligence on Iraqi WMDs was already clearly discredited before the war. Some limited “WMD” capability was still a possibility – the inspection team was requesting additional time – but a significant mass of western (so-called) intelligence had already been put to the test by the team and had clearly failed.
The war was undertaken on the basis of spin. Arguably criminal, clearly immoral. Really serious evils like initiating war may be justified sometimes, but that justification requires facts, not PR.
One of the revealing aspects of the response by Howard and his supporters to the criticism of Gration & Co. is that, whilst they obviously realised they would be sending themselves up if they wheeled out the phrase “anti-American Left” to describe this group, they have still been unable to rise above name-calling and shit-potting, this time on the grounds of age (e.g. De-Anne Kelly, Paddy McGuinness and, implicitly, Howard) or alleged base motives (e.g. Gerard Henderson).
This is symptomatic of the descent of right-of-centre public discourse in this country into what (with apologies to present company) might be called Blogspeak and e-Groupthink.
It is a style of discourse embodied in its purest form by young or youngish men who run right-wing blog spots, and approximated by right-wing newspaper columnists and talkback hosts. It is characterised by a mistaken identification of snideness with wit, incivility with passion, recitation of selected facts and factoids from right-wing thinktanks with erudition, and name-calling and point-scoring with rigorous intellectual critique.
Further, whilst the practitioners of Blogspeak and e-Groupthink congratulate themselves and each other on their superior rationality, they show little sign that they have ever subjected a single one of their own positions and assumptions to a rigorous and deep self-analysis.
Most of all, the sort of stuff Blogspeakers and e-Groupthinkers come out with is deeply satisfying to other Blogspeakers and e-Groupthinkers to the point of intoxication, but is radically unpersuasive and often needlessly offensive to anyone who isn’t already convinced, but whose support is ultimately necessary for the success of whichever cause the Blogspeakers and e-Groupthinkers are supporting. And the BSs and eGts don’t seem to recognise the unpersuasiveness and offensiveness of their output.
Two recent historical examples of e-Groupthink and Blogspeak come from 1999. One was the choice of the slogan “Jeff F-ing Rules” for the Victorian Liberal Government’s campaign for re-election. Such a slogan could only appeal to a certain type of mind which was either incapable of understanding how repugnant such a slogan could be to people who would normally be a natural constituency for the Liberal Party, or so far gone in hubris that it couldn’t imagine losing the election no matter how badly it campaigned. The other was the mutual self-congratulation by minimalist republicans on chat-sites, in letters pages and at meetings of like mind prior to the republic referendum, punctuated with references to direct election supporters as ignorant fascist traitors who would elect Skippy the Kangaroo as Head of State if given a direct vote.
A more current example is the comparison of the Greens with the Nazis by Andrew Bolt and George Brandeis. I have not felt moved to respond to this claim because I doubt that it would impress a single person who wasn’t already cholerically anti-Green.
The point may be clearer by comparison with another hypothetical example. Many democratic political actors in Australia have a position on this or that issue which coincides with a position advocated by the Nazis (and which people may have good grounds for supporting or opposing irrespective of its historical associations). For example, the views of Brian Harridene and Ron Boswell on abortion coincide with those of the Nazis. Now, imagine what effect a “right-to-lifers are Nazis” slur on Harridene and Boswell (similer to the Bolt/Brandeis “Greens are Nazis” slur) would have on an audience.
A certain type of excitable young trot would love it and get a fix from it. A convinced right-to-lifer would be offended and angered. Intelligent pro-choice advocates (of which I hope I am one) would be annoyed by the tactical stupidity of the statement, and ashamed at such a slur on two basically decent democratic politicians. Most importantly, ordinary people of uncertain views on abortion would be repelled by it, and politicians with moderate or uncommitted views on the issue (like Peter Beattie) would see such inflammatory nonsense as proof of their wisdom in not committing firmly to one side or other of the issue.
Am I alone in thinking that the grip of Blogspeak and e-Groupthink on the thinking and language of the Howard Government’s supporters may prove decisive in this year’s Federal election?
Dave, I didn’t know you were against the Just War doctrine.
Actually I didn’t know you even knew of it.
Paul, I wish you were right. But swinging voters in marginal seats are not tuned in to blogs and e-groups, so you must be assuming they read Bolt, Ackerman and other newspaper columnists who channel right-wing slogans to a mass audience. I hope the tone of these writers is as repulsive to the voters in question as it is to you and me, but how would we know?
I had lunch with one of the signatories at the time Australia was commiting to the war and it was clear he opposed the war. As I supported the effort I asked him ‘What about the possibility of weapons of mass destruction?’. His response was to say something along the lines ‘That’s not a question, we know Iraq has them since the US sold them these weapons’. He then launched into an attack on US duplicity.
Its hard for me to understand now how this person can sign a statement suggesting John Howard lied about the issue of the existence of such weapons.
Harry, I don’t follow this. Are you suggesting that because someone makes a somewhat incoherent/evasive argument they are disqualified from stating the obvious fact that the Howard government lied about the war (or, if you prefer, chose to listen only to that evidence that would support a predetermined view).
Harry is confusing two issues. The first is whether a person who before the war believed there were WMDs can later call Howard a liar for saying there were WMDs. The answer is yes, of course, if Howard – having access to the intelligence – was better placed to know the truth. In fact many of us who believed there were WMDs believed so because we trusted Howard, Blair and Bush (at least to that extent).
The second issue is whether this particular individual – Harry’s dining partner – is a person of sufficient calibre and authority that his opinion by itself matters. Well, if I feel unable to form my own opinion, I might rely on his. And if I subsequently find out from Harry that this particular sage had a vision in which a two-headed wildebeest revealed to him that Saddam had WMDs, I might reconsider whether I will be guided him in future. But this has nothing to do with whether Howard lied.
I assume he was refering to the claimed supply of chemical weapons to Iraq when Iraq was a US ally in the war against Iran.
But there were other facts too: that Saddam did use these weapons against his own people. Fact.
To then claim that there were no reasonable grounds for supposing Saddam had such weapons and that Howard lied to Australians to get them into a pointless war is either ex post wisdom or about on par with the claim that Howard sold out Australia in the FTA deal to benefit a few of his mates in the pharmo business.
I don’t believe this latter story either.
Harry, it is not ex post wisdom to say that were no reasonable grounds for supposing Saddam had such weapons. Hans Blix was saying it in early 2003, before the war, after he had gone into Iraq and searched for them.
The charge against Bush, Blair and Howard is that (at best) they chose to ignore Blix and listen to the intelligence officials who told them what they wanted to hear because they were going to war anyway, which would make them duplicitous knaves, or (at worst) they chose to ignore Blix and ignore the intelligence officials who told them Blix was right and there were no WMDs, because they were going to war anyway, which would make them duplicitous liars.
I’d like to respond to the sweeping generalisation about left isolationism by making another. The left is internationalist, but believes that internationalism should be expressed through established, broad based international institutions (at this time the UN.)
It’s certainly not, by this definition, internationalism to find a few agreeable countries and go invade another despite the opinion of those institutions. The US had one major ally in the war – the UK. You might humour the populations of Spain and Australia, if you really wanted to stretch the argument, and say they had four. (The argument becomes even more tenuous when you consider the real commitment in terms of troops, equipment or money for those four.)
I’d argue that it’s the recent redefinition of internationalism, not internationalism as defined after WWII and the next 50 years that the left objects to.
If we decided that invading another country were legal and moral after signing up, say, at least four countries with a population of at least 300 million, there’d be an awful lot of countries (including our own) that were potentially at the wrong end of a lawful military action.
Most intelligence reports were saying that on balance Iraq probably had some WMD. There was some evidence from exiled Baathists that the WMD program had been abandoned, although that could not be proven beyond doubt.
It was equally unclear whether what WMDs remained (if any) were enough to amount to a threaten to any country.
That is where the fibbing and misrepresentation came it. It was talked up constantly that Iraq did constitute an immediate threat, and that pre-emption could be justified. But it couldn’t. Not without a lot more porkies.
The aluminium pipes, the Niger deal, the plagiarised (and outdated) ph.d thesis paraded as current intelligence, the ‘strike within 45 minutes’, and of course the deliberate attempt by the Bush Admin to link Al Qaeda and 9/11 to Saddam (thankfully not duplicated by Blair and Howard) were all part of it.
Howard at least stayed away from the worst of these lies, but to claim that Saddam’s WMDs posed a threat to peace and could easily end up with terrorists was false.
If the coalition had any faith in their allegations (as distinct from wanting a rationalisation for the invasion) they would have allowed Hans Blix to complete his work.
The fact is, they didn’t want to wait. Some cynics have said this was because they’d then have had no excuse. That might be true, but it is more likely that a delay was not wanted because of the US election schedule.
Whatever way you look at it, it was a con. And not just that. It was dumb policy which hasn’t worked. According to Juan Cole and Robert Fisk the US coalition and its installed government control barely more than Baghdad itself.
It is a bad setback in our real battles with terror such as JI in our region.
The abuse of the eminent group of gentlemen who have criticised the Howard government for leading us into war, has only highlighted Howard’s own age and his lack of credibility. No wonder his supporters have come out swinging.
The government of the day told us in unequivocal terms that there were weapons of mass destruction and that regime change was not the issue. That others accepted this is only a sign that they weren’t given time to find out the truth and they were not in a position to name the lies.
Those who have written the letter of condemnation were too polite to use the word lie but that hasn’t stopped them being maligned.
To paraphrase the government it is very offensive to have those who present opposing views presented as not worthwhile considering because they are “Doddery” or “left wing” or any number of other evils. If the government had listened to the voices of caution rather than those of a gung ho Bush administration we might not have given radical Islamists a platform to expand and develop a world platform.
Falkner in the Senate today said they were going through the ages of the 43. So far they had found 13 younger than Howard.
Hitchens said he spotted that Islamic Jihad was going to be problem from the Salman Rushdie affair (1989) onward. He put forward very cogent arguments that Saddam had wider ambitions and had to be dealt with some time.
What I think he missed was that Saddam had already been stalled for a decade, was getting older and could no longer aspire to pan-Arabic leadership he once desired. He had been effectively contained and was going nowhere. Certainly his neighbours were a good deal less worried about him than some folks on other continents.
One of the arguments that impressed me against the war was put by James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly (‘The Fifty-first State?’). He argued that there was no way of knowing how the war, once started, would eventually turn out, especially as Iraq would be ungovernable by Americans.
It seems to me you do need to be able to make a costs v benefits argument before you can begin to justify a war. This was impossible in the case of Iraq.
I beleived Wylkie and Ritter. They were right all along.
What a load of crap by the howard gang,again.
Call me a bluff old traditionalist but I remember the sixties and the cuban missile crisis, when the whole of the world’s population could have been blown to kingdom come.
And in the sixties we fought in the vietnam war,and we fronted the chinese,the vietnamese and the russians.And we we went to war against indonesia in borneo.I worked with an anglo/bornean electrician recently who remembers as a child seeing truckloads of dead indonesian solders being carted away in north borneo in the sixties.
Yeah,the world has changed,but probably for the better.These liberal stooges are stupid and ignorant to claim otherwise-but what would you expect from kelly and entsch,those suckholes.
What a load of crap by the howard gang,again.
Call me a bluff old traditionalist but I remember the sixties and the cuban missile crisis, when the whole of the world’s population could have been blown to kingdom come.
And in the sixties we fought in the vietnam war,and we fronted the chinese,the vietnamese and the russians.And we we went to war against indonesia in borneo.I worked with an anglo/bornean electrician recently who remembers as a child seeing truckloads of dead indonesian solders being carted away in north borneo in the sixties.
Yeah,the world has changed,but probably for the better.These liberal stooges are stupid and ignorant to claim otherwise-but what would you expect from kelly and entsch,those suckholes.
What a load of crap by the howard gang,again.
Call me a bluff old traditionalist but I remember the sixties and the cuban missile crisis, when the whole of the world’s population could have been blown to kingdom come.
And in the sixties we fought in the vietnam war,and we fronted the chinese,the vietnamese and the russians.And we we went to war against indonesia in borneo.I worked with an anglo/bornean electrician recently who remembers as a child seeing truckloads of dead indonesian solders being carted away in north borneo in the sixties.
Yeah,the world has changed,but probably for the better.These liberal stooges are stupid and ignorant to claim otherwise-but what would you expect from kelly and entsch,those suckholes.
What a load of crap by the howard gang,again.
Call me a bluff old traditionalist but I remember the sixties and the cuban missile crisis, when the whole of the world’s population could have been blown to kingdom come.
And in the sixties we fought in the vietnam war,and we fronted the chinese,the vietnamese and the russians.And we we went to war against indonesia in borneo.I worked with an anglo/bornean electrician recently who remembers as a child seeing truckloads of dead indonesian solders being carted away in north borneo in the sixties.
Yeah,the world has changed,but probably for the better.These liberal stooges are stupid and ignorant to claim otherwise-but what would you expect from kelly and entsch,those suckholes.
Matt, the UN is an organisation controlled by undemocratic countries that elect the likes of Sudan, Cuba and Libya to their human rights committees and routinely condemn Israel (more than any other country). It was the US and the UK who lead the way in saving Muslims in Kosovo and in getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan. So let’s have a bit of realism where this dysfunctional organisation is concerned.
“the UN is an organisation controlled by undemocratic countries”
Really? First, the security council is controlled by the five countries with veto power, which are US (democratic), UK (democratic), France (democratic), Russia (sort of democratic) and China (not democratic).
Second, most of the countries in the general assembly are democratic: every country in Europe is a democracy, ditto North America, ditto South America, ditto the Pacific. Asia is a mixed bag. Only Africa and the Middle East are substantially not democratic.
The world has moved on. Democracy is dominant.
Third, the UN was not designed to be a collection of nicey-nice countries who you would gladly have as your friends. It was designed to be a forum for all countries so that they could work out their differerences without going to war.
It’s not perfect, but it’s the best thing we’ve got. For a small country like us, it’s especially the best thing we’ve got.
More later, but this for now. Harry Clarke is mistaken when he writes ” Saddam did use these weapons against his own people. Fact.”
The thing is, Saddam Hussein’s own people were always well protected. Clans, remember? He only gassed people who were not his own. It’s just that they all look the same to outsiders, but Kurds were hardly his own people.
That’s not an apology, except in the apologia sense – I’m only trying to show what the facts on the ground were.
Dave Ricardo – Many so-called newly-democratic countries (e.g. Russia) are hardly democratic in the sense of Western countries. I notice you don’t address the issue of the likes of Sudan and Cuba getting elected on important UN committees. Basically, like many naive individuals masquerading as progressives, I suspect that is because you have lost so much perspective that you see Western governments, especially the US, a bigger threat to world peace and the protection of human rights than the lies of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Saddam – shades of the cold war I think when so many so-called progressives hated the US more than they hated the Soviet Union.
Michael, you’ve got me. I am nothing but an Al Qaeda fellow traveller. Your ability to read my mind is uncanny.
Really, you are quite ridiculous. Read what I wrote. The US was the first democratic country that I listed – does that sound like I think the US is a bigger threat to world peace etc ? (Which is not to underestimate the threat to world peace posed by the current temporary inhabitant of the White House).
I said that Russia was only a sort of democracy.
But this doesn’t invalidate my main point. Most of the world is now democratic, or is it your view that Hungary, Slovenia, South Korea, Argentina etc are only sham democracies?
On Sudan and Cuba, I agree it would be more aesthetically pleasing if only those countries whose governments respected human rights to, say, the Scandinavian standard, were admitted to UN human rights committees (though this would exclude a certain country that starts with the letter I). But, as I said before, the UN is a collection of nearly all countries, not just those with spotless human rights records. And once they’re in the club, they get to take their turn on the various committees, distasteful as this may be.
Dave, while I agree with your characterization, I think it’s possible to look forward to a situation where non-democracies only get some sort of second-class membership in the UN. But before that can happen, China has to become democratic.
John, that sounds impractical. Sure, it would be easy to say: Canada in, Syria out (happy now, Michael?). But what about Russia?
And, besides, the original, and in my opinion still most important, purpose of the UN is as a form of collective security and as a way of settling international disputes without going to war. Since democracies (historically at least) have had nothing to fear from each other, excluding non democracries (and second class membership would be effective exclusion), would be pointless.
There are plenty of international clubs where you can hang a sign outside that says, “non democracries need not apply”. The UN shouldn’t be one of them.
I have posted an article by William Shawcross which I think deals with the bastards lied argument.
WMD did pose a threat
Wednesday July 21 2004
The Guardian
Tony Blair was quite right yesterday to say that it was “absurd” to claim that anyone reading the prewar intelligence reports could think that Iraq’s weapons were not a problem.
Last week, Lord Butler said in his important report there was no evidence of “deliberate distortion or culpable negligence” by the government. But he was critical of the way some intelligence was presented and that caveats had been omitted. In many cases, Butler was supportive. For example, he concluded that the assertion that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium from an African country, Niger, was “well founded”.
The truth is that we still do not know what Saddam’s WMD capabilities were in 2002-03, nor exactly where he was heading. But as Blair said yesterday, that does not mean there was no threat.
Too little attention has been paid to the preliminary report of Charles Duelfer, the new head of Washington’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG). He testified to Congress in March that “we must determine what Saddam ordered, what his ministers ordered, and how the plans fit together. Were weapons hidden that were not readily available? Was there a plan for a break-out production capacity?”
It may be that, despite the prewar intelligence, Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the time of the war in March 2003. But to assert that there was therefore no WMD threat is to trivialise the issue. Intelligence has to look at form. Saddam’s history over the past 14 years was one of attempting to obtain and conceal WMD. During the Gulf war he fired 39 missiles into Israel. They had conventional warheads, but they might not have done.
According to Duelfer, Saddam’s deception of the UN inspectors “continued right up until war in 2003”. Sensitive sites could be sanitised at 15 minutes notice.
The CIA had not one single human agent in Iraq and Britain’s agents, according to Butler, were fallible. But even if there had been more agents, it is not certain they could have found the truth about WMD. Strict compartmentalisation is a feature of such regimes. According to Duelfer, “We know from high-level debriefings that Saddam conveyed his most sensitive messages to particular individuals orally. Moreover there were explicit instructions not to repeat such conversations.”
Duelfer told Congress that Iraq’s illegal military procurement budget increased 100-fold from 1996 to 2003 to $500m annually, most of the money coming from illicit contracts under the UN’s Oil for Food programme.
The Tuwaitha Research Centre had equipment suitable for producing biological agents and “was conducting research that would be important for a biological weapons programme”. In the nuclear area, Duelfer believes that Iraq was “preserving and expanding its knowledge to design and develop nuclear weapons”, and suspects that one laboratory “was intentionally focused on research applicable for nuclear weapons development”.
The ISG has also discovered “a very robust programme for delivery systems that were not reported to the UN”. Saddam had already developed missiles “that easily exceeded the UN limit of 150km”. Iraq was discussing with North Korea the possibility of importing a 1,300km missile system. Foreign missile experts were working in Iraq in defiance of UN sanctions, and had helped Iraq redesign the al-Samoud missile.
Intelligence agencies have to make judgments on the basis of past behaviour, current evidence and future planning. Given all we knew of Saddam by 2003, the conclusion had to be that he still possessed a residual WMD capability and was determined to restore his original capacities – but it was not possible to determine how far he had got. The combination of international terror and WMD poses an existential threat to the world. In Iraq’s case, even if the possibility of a non-conventional attack was low, the price to be paid if it did take place was so high that the threat had to be taken very seriously. Saddam may not have been an immediate threat, but he was an inevitable one.
Blair has accepted the criticisms and recommendations made by Butler. Many of the other attacks on the intelligence agencies, and on Blair’s decision to meet the threat from Saddam, are trivial and dangerous.
“Let us rejoice that Iraq is liberated,” Blair said yesterday. Yes, indeed. What really matters now is to build upon the first opportunity Iraqis have ever had to create a decent society. It is a cause to which all British politicians ought to be dedicating themselves. It is tragic that they are not.
I find it hard to believe that anyone would take this set of weasel words seriously. A bunch of rhetorical questions and insinuations, and the only substantive point is the one I noted in my footnote. Even here Duelfer and Shawcross can’t lie straight in bed. A generous estimate puts the range of the Al Samouds destroyed before the war at 180 km as opposed to the UN limit of 150, and this is called “easily exceeding the limit”.
The only way that Bush got this report was by sacking David Kay, who held the job previously and who started out as a true believer until the facts convinced him otherwise.
If you want to rely on this kind of thing, Michael, why don’t you just take John Howard’s word for it that everything he says is true.
John
Are you and I reading the same testimony?
Tipper, I think the money quote from that testimony is
There’s more detail here and here. The second report even has Duelfer preparing the ground for saying what Bush wanted to hear, despite his earlier admission that there were no weapons.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Kay talking about the activities of the Iraq Survey Group after the invasion?
So doesn’t that quote mean that there were “innumerable analysts” who believed that there were WMD in Iraq, presumably advised their agencies/governments of that belief, and didn’t change their minds until after the invasion, despite the pre-war inspections?
With hindsight, those analysts were wrong, but wasn’t it reasonable for people to believe they were right?
Kay is indeed asserting that the post-invasion forces genuinely expected to find weapons. But he doesn’t give a single concrete example of intelligence that would have justified such an expectation, or justified the Administration in discounting the conclusions of the UN inspectors.
In any case, I think John was invoking Kay to rebut Shawcross’s argument that even now ‘we still don’t know’. This is a much stronger claim than ‘we only know with the benefit of hindsight’. It ranks in audacity with Max Moore-Wilton’s continued assertion, months after Rieth’s deceit had been exposed, that the jury was still out on whether the refugees had thrown their children overboard.
In relation to taking Shawcross’ weasel words seriously, I don’t think it is helpful to refer to one of the worlds most renowned journalists this way. His views, after all, are supported by other prominent and clearly well meaning individuals such as Jose Ramos-Horta and Thomas Friedman.
Actually I think Shawcross’ most relevant words are
‘Let us rejoice that Iraq is liberated,” Blair said yesterday. Yes, indeed. What really matters now is to build upon the first opportunity Iraqis have ever had to create a decent society. It is a cause to which all British politicians ought to be dedicating themselves. It is tragic that they are not.’
This of course is the core of the issue. Most so-called left wing hawks like myself primarily supported the war because we hate dictators who murder and torture their own population as well as the population of other countries (e.g. invasion of Kuwait and support for Palestinian suicide bombers – about as low a form of child abuse as there is). I simply cannot comprehend how many who claim to be interested in social justice and human rights do not applaud the removal of such an odious regime and, at best, were only lukewarm in their support of the US/Tony Blair lead intervention in Kosovo and Afghanistan.
On the broader issues relating to regime change, those such as myself and Hitchens and Shawcross, might not like many aspects of our own societies but we are not so-obsessed with its faults that we do not recognise where the real evil in the world lies – and where the real threat to world stability lies. As for how Iraq fits into the international Jihad picture it is possible for rational and decent people to disagree on the wisdom of intervention. However, what disturbs me is that most critics of intervention are not particularly rational but are motivated by either mindless pacifism or they are unable to put aside their reflexive dislike of Americans, especially republicans, and examine the issue carefully.
Also, so-called progressives simply cannot get away from the fact that liberal voices in the Middle East and liberal Muslims in the west actually overwhelmingly support intervention and other opposed actions. Americans in Iran, for example, have a constant stream of young people coming up to them asking when the US will intervene in their country. Many of these people, John, cannot hope to achieve the privileged lifestyle of western academics but they are, at least, entitled to have fun, go to a disco or wear what they want without having some religious crazy throwing acid in their face.
Everybody believed that Iraq had some left over chemical weapons which are technical WMD’s but which can’t be named weapons which can massively destruct with any straight face. You also have to realize that making chemical weapons isn’t that hard. The germans did it in 1915 and i don’t think anyone would claim that the Iraqi’s were in 2003 less advanced than the germans in 1915
Michael, I’m pretty sure Friedman retracted his prewar claims about WMDs quite some time ago. I don’t know if Horta ever made any such claims. And I don’t think Shawcross’ status as “one of the world’s leading journalists” constitutes a defence against criticism.
If you want to argue about the benefits and costs of intervention in terms of human rights, do so – there’s a respectable case there, though not one I agree with on balance.
Trying to defend the WMD line only makes you look silly, along with anyone you quote in support, whatever their status.
Horta’s support of the war was always couched in human rights terms. Unlike some others we might name, he didn’t retrospectively change his reasons for his support, after the original reasons were found to be bogus.
Contrast with John Winston Howard, who on March 14 2003, at the National Press Club, said that regime change was not his objective, and as far as he was concerned, Saddam could stay in power as long as he gave up his WMD.
I think I’ve posted before on the morally important difference between unilateral humanitarian intervention against odious regimes by self-appointed fighters for freedom, and humanitarian interventions sanctioned through some process of collective global (or at least regional) agreement in accordance with clear and strict rules. This distinction becomes especially important if we’re talking about general rules for how international affairs should be conducted, as even unilateral interventions which have positive benefits in a particular case can lead to worse long-run consequences if vigilante justice becomes the norm.
The other thing to say is that the humanitarian or democratic benefits of particular military interventions have to be set against both its humanitarian costs (e.g. immediate casualties), and the “opportunity cost” of the forgone humanitarian benefits of alternative uses of the resources devoted to the intervention.
A lot of people in developing countries could have been fed, had toilets installed and had good jobs and enterprises created for the cost of the war and occupation in Iraq.
Is Howard rattled?
The repudiation of the Howard government’s foreign policy, especially the Iraq war, by 43 of Australia’s former military chiefs, department heads and senior diplomats is, perhaps, new in the sense that the range of authority behind the protest has surp…