Reuters reports that

The Palestinian parliament ratified the new post of prime minister on Tuesday, drawing U.S. praise coupled with disappointment over President Yasser Arafat’s retention of key powers …Bush had said the release of the long-awaited peace plan to end Israeli-Palestinian violence and establish a Palestinian state by 2005 was conditional on the appointment of a prime minister with “real authority.”

Asked if the newly created office met the standard Bush had set, a senior State Department official in Washington said: “Yes.”

Arafat is an obstacle to peace both because of his actual record of failure and because the Israelis won’t deal with him, so assuming the expected appointment of Mahmoud Abbas goes ahead, that is one obstacle out of the road. On the other hand, Sharon is an equally serious obstacle and there has so far been no US reaction to his rejection of the roadmap for peace. I don’t know what to make of endorsements of the Palestinian move by an unnamed “senior State Department official”. If this is Powell, it seems as if he’s unwilling to go on the record with the endorsement even though he did go on the record about ‘disappointment’.

It seems incongruous to be discussing such a pacific philosophy as liberalism in the context of imminent war, but liberalism as an idea will outlive both Saddam Hussein (not that that’s saying much) and George Bush.

The basic range of meanings associated with liberalism were set by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty which, fortunately is in the public domain. Reading Mill, we can distinguish three separate arguments associated with liberalism, listed in order of the importance Mill attached to them
(a) An argument for freedom of speech, thought and discussion, based not only on the rights of the individual speaker but on the social and intellectual damage done by restrictions on freedom of speech. As Mill observes, our own beliefs are weaker if we need to protect ourselves from counterarguments
(b) An argument that individuals should not be ‘protected from themselves’ in relation to ‘self-regarding’ acts such as taking drugs
(c) An argument for free trade (in the broad sense of laissez-faire) economic policies, based on classical economic theory. Mill says that doctrine of Free Trade,‘rests on grounds different from, though equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this Essay.’ Mill observes that market transactions are social acts and may therefore be regulated without infringing individual liberty.

It follows that there is no logical inconsistency in accepting Mill’s arguments for individual freedom while rejecting or modifying the economic arguments for Free Trade and in fact, late in his life, Mill himself announced a commitment to a rather abstract form of socialism. Most of those whose thought descends directly from Mill’s liberalism similarly accepted substantial modifications to the classical theory of Free Trade, so that, in economic terms, most “liberals” in the US and UK are social democrats of one form and another.

However, beginning with Hayek, there has been a resurgence of versions of liberalism which focus on free markets. Hayek rejects Mill’s ranking arguing that freedom of action (most notably, freedom of contract) is at least as important as freedom of speech and thought. Radical versions of the Hayekian position are commonly referred to as ‘libertarian’.

More significant in practical terms has been the trend of thought often called ‘neoliberalism’, and also given a range of more-or-less pejorative labels such as ‘economic rationalism’ (in Australia), ‘Thatcherism’ (in the UK) and ‘the Washington consensus’ (in relation to less-developed countries). Just to confuse things, neoliberalism is also used in the US to describe a specific subgroup associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. I’ve given a lengthy discussion of neoliberalism here.

Until now, most of the big questions in the debate about Iraq have remained unanswered. The decision to go to war has answered a few, and I’ve been proved wrong on at least one. I thought Blair would refuse to go without at least majority support from the UNSC, and was wrong. The next big question relates to the main casus belli for the war, that Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” represent a threat justifying war. Unless Saddam accepts Bush’s demand that he go into exile, he will, if the argument for war is valid, certainly attempt to use his weapons, either against the invading armies or against Israel. The question of whether he is “deterrable” is now moot, since by staying on he is accepting almost certain death.

It follows that, if no WMDs are used during the war, but such weapons are “discovered” afterwards, the discovery must be presumed fraudulent. Frequent commentator, Derrida Derider, has been predicting such a discovery for some time.

In terms of hoping for the best, namely a short war with as few casualties as possible, I obviously hope no WMDs will be used.

Update A pro-war Op-Ed piece is of interest. Writing in the NYT, the unfortunately-named Anne-Marie Slaughter says

Soldiers would go into Iraq. They would find irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime possesses weapons of mass destruction. Even without such evidence, the United States and its allies can justify their intervention if the Iraqi people welcome their coming and if they turn immediately back to the United Nations to help rebuild the country (emphasis added).

As I’ve already pointed out, the second part of this is complete nonsense. Saddam has shown his ability to turn out cheering crowds, and so will the practitioners of “shock and awe”. In the absence of free and fair elections (clearly not contemplated for the foreseeable future) the views of the Iraqi people will be a matter of conjecture. And despite what was said (obviously to keep Blair on-side) in the Azores, the idea of “turning immediately back to the UN” is equally nonsensical. Does anybody suppose that the victorious Americans are going to let someone of Kofi Annan’s choosing administer Iraq? If not, why should anyone outside the “coalition of the willing” do Bush’s dirty work for him?

Further update 19/3 On the WMDs, the analysis in today’s Fin points out that, in military terms’, the “best” time for Saddam to use them is before the US attack commences, which means almost immediately. This is obvious enough – as Ken Parish points out, a massive US attack in the opening days will greatly reduce Saddam’s capacity for counterattack. And I’ll restate the basic point. If, in the face of an invasion aimed at killing him or seizing him for a war crimes trial, Saddam still refrains from using WMDs, only two conclusions are possible:
(a) there were no weapons; or
(b) they were not, even in the most drastic circumstances, a threat to the US

On the capacity to turn out cheering crowds, I’ve pointed out in the comments thread that Bush’s PR teams are capable of spinning an upsurge of grassroots support out of nothing in domestic US politics – it’s called Astroturf. With vastly greater resources at their disposal, they won’t need threats of terror to do the same thing in Baghdad. If the supporters of war believe their own case, why aren’t they advocating an Iraqi provisional government and free and fair elections?

Last week, I noted the mysterious absence of Jason Soon from Catallaxy. Now he has returned from a two-week unannounced hiatus, with a post that only deepens the mystery, hinting as it does at blog-related romance. Maybe it was that photo!

Anyway, welcome back, Jason!

Since war now appears inevitable, we can only hope that it’s short and relatively bloodless, and hence must hope that the US military planners have got it right. The only way this can be true, it seems to me, is if the much-leaked “shock and awe” strategy, involving the largest bombardment in history, directed in Baghdad in the opening days of war, turns out to be one of those pieces of misinformation of which military planners are so fond. Such a strategy must surely cause massive casualties, both among civilians and among the Iraqi conscripts who are just as much victims of Saddam as anybody else.

Of course, if this strategy is adopted, we’ll probably never know. Saddam’s government will claim massive civilian casualties, the US will deny it, and when they reach Baghdad they’ll conduct an inquiry which will report that Saddam was lying. Unless there’s a repeat of the incident last time, when hundreds of people were killed in an air-raid shelter, it will be impossible to determine who, if anyone, was telling the truth.

But regardless of the number of casualties, the ‘shock and awe’ approach seems guaranteed to lead to disaster in the long run. The idea that, entering Baghdad after a bombardment of this kind, the US (or perhaps Anglo Alliance would be a better term) troops will be greeted as liberators seems nonsensical to me. I’m not saying they can’t arrange crowds with flowers – Saddam has no trouble doing this and neither will an occupying army – but the chance of any real popular support will be lost on the first day.

As The Age reports, Sharon has wasted no time in dumping the ‘roadmap’ for peace in Israel-Palestine, and explicitly rejecting the idea of an independent Palestinian state. Bush has yet to respond, but from his point of view there’s no need. This was a plan with a 72-hour shelf life – the time it took to get Tony Blair over the line for war with Iraq. Having served its purpose, it’s unlikely to be heard of again.