POLL: The repercussions of a US attack on Iraq

The tragedy of this unequal partnership

By opting to join the American hard Right, Tony Blair has made the gravest mistake of his political life

Will Hutton
Sunday March 30, 2003
The Observer

Will Hutton argues that, by opting to join the American hard Right, Tony Blair has made the gravest mistake of his political life, one from which he cannot recover.

Blair's drawn face, with its deepening gullies set in a near permanent hard frown, tells the story. This is the internationalist who is aiding and abetting, however unintentionally, the break-up of the UN system. The pro-European who is the trigger of the most acute divisions in the European Union since its foundation. The wannabe progressive whose closest allies are Washington's neo-conservatives and conservative leaders in Italy and Spain.

Worse, he is fighting a barely legitimate war that is already a military and diplomatic quagmire, where even eventual victory may not avert a political disaster. He knows his capacity to survive the diplomatic humiliations piled on him by the Bush administration is limited; you cannot long lead Britain's centre and centre-left from such a compromised position, wounding not only the country's profoundest interests but torching any linkage with the progressive project. For the first time his premiership is genuinely at risk.

It is a political tragedy, Shakespearean in the cruelty of its denouement. 9/11 accelerated trends in America that had been crystallising since the 1970s and which made the political structures in which successive British Governments have managed simultaneously to play both the American and European cards unsustainable. Blair was confronted with an invidious choice that nobody in the British establishment has wanted to make: Europe or America. Side with Europe to insist that the price of collaboration in the fight against terrorism had to be that the US observe genuinely multilateral international due process - and certainly say No to some of Washington's wilder aims. Or side with America insisting from the inside that it engaged in its wars multilaterally, and hope to bring Europe along in your wake.

Either choice was beset with risk, but it's hard to believe that siding with Europe, for all its evident difficulties, would have produced an outcome worse than the situation in which we currently find ourselves: a protracted war with no second UN Resolution, no commitment to UN governance of post-war Iraq, no commitment to a mid-East peace settlement. But Blair misread the character of American conservatism, its grip on the American body politic and its scope for rationality. He continues to do so, the miscalculation of his life.

The rise and rise of American conservatism is neither well documented nor well understood in Britain - but it's one of the pillars on which I build my case for Europe in The World We're In*. Ever since the pivotal Supreme Court judgement in 1973 legalising abortion (the Roe v Wade case) which marked the high water mark of American liberalism, it's been downhill all the way. American conservatism, an eccentric creed even within the pantheon of the western conservative tradition, now rules supreme. Domestically it offers disproportionately aggressive tax cuts for the rich and for business, reforms that shrink America's already threadbare social contract and a carte blanche for the increasingly feral, unaccountable character of US capitalism.

Internationally it is this philosophy that lies behind pre-emptive unilateralism and the wilful disregard of the UN. American conservatives are bravely willing to use force to advance democracy and markets worldwide - the exemplars of a civilisation the rest of the world must want to copy. No other legitimacy is needed, the reason for the wrong-headed self-confidence that could launch war in Iraq expecting so little resistance. Rumsfeld's exploded strategy is ideological in its roots. This conservatism is a witches brew - a menace to the USA and the world alike.

The conservative movement has deep roots. It made its first gains in the 1970s in reaction to economic problems at home that it wrongly claimed were wholly the fault of liberals, helped by the reaction of white working class Americans to the application of affirmative action: quotas of housing, university places and even jobs for blacks to equalise centuries of discrimination. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, outlawing the obstacles American blacks had experienced in exercising their civil rights from voting to sitting on juries, he famously joked that he had lost the Democrats the south. He could not have been more prescient; the uneasy coalition between southern conservative Democrats and the more liberal North was sundered - a political opportunity that Ronald Reagan was brilliantly to seize.

This laid the foundations for the conservatisation of American politics, helped by the growing economic power of the south and the west. The new sun-belt entrepreneurs, building fortunes on defence contracts and Texan oil, naturally believed in the toxicity of federal government and the god-given right of employers to cheap labour with as few rights as possible. Put that together with the south's visceral dislike of welfare, well understood to be transferring money from God-fearing, hard-working whites to black welfare queens, and the need for crime - again understood to be perpetrated by blacks against whites - to be met with ferocious penalties and you had the beginning of the new conservative constituency. Include a dose of Christian fundamentalism, and the building blocks of a new dominant coalition of Republican southerners and middle class, suburban northerners were in place.

What was needed to complete the picture was intellectual coherence and money. America's notoriously lax rules on political financing allowed the conservatives to outspend the Democrats sometimes by as much four or five times. Yet what opened the financial floodgates was intellectual conviction; a new generation of intellectual conservatives took on the apparently effortless liberal dominance, and beat it at its own game - the realm of ideas. The great right-wing thinktanks - the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute - became the intellectual inspiration of the conservative revival. The rich were virtuous and moral because they worked hard; the poor worthless and amoral because they had not boot-strapped themselves out of poverty. Welfare thus bred a dependency culture, they claimed, and made poverty worse. Taxation was an act of coercion and an affront to liberty. Markets worked like magic; choice was always better than public provision. Corporations spearheaded wealth creation. Conservatism was transmuted into a moral crusade. The rich could back it aggressively both in their own self-interest and America's.

The capture of universities by the rich and the lack of education for the poor has meant that social mobility in the US has collapsed. American capitalism, in thrall to the stock market and quick bucks it offers, has hollowed out its great corporations in the name of the hallowed conservative conception of share-holder value - the sole purpose of a company is to enrich its owners. Productivity and social mobility are now higher in Old Europe than in the US - despite a tidal wave of propaganda to the contrary. Ordinary Americans are beset by risks and lack of opportunity in a land of extraordinary inequality.

Yet it is internationally that the rest of the world feels the consequences. Even before 9/11 the Bush administration had signalled its intention to be unencumbered by - as it saw it - vitality sapping, virility constraining, option closing international treaties and alliances, whether membership of the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto accords on climate change. It intended to assert American power as a matter of ideological principle; 9/11 turned principle into an apparent imperative in order to guarantee the security of the 'homeland'.

There are only two possible rival power centres that champion a more rational approach to world order - in the US a revived and self-confident Democratic party, and abroad an unified European Union. Britain's national interest requires that we ally ourselves as powerfully as we can with these forces - both of whom are only too ready to make common cause. Blair has done neither. Either he is now a convinced conservative or the author of a historic political misjudgment. Neither the Labour party nor the country can indulge this ineptitude much longer.

 

What a long winded piece of rubbish.

I will restrict myself to only one point as I suspect that your eyes and ears are still blocked by the XXXX and I am very aware that even under the best of circumstances you have difficulty to handle just the one point.

You quote the writer as saying : 'This is the internationalist who is aiding and abetting, however unintentionally, the break-up of the UN system.'

The destruction of the UN was caused by France and its allies (each for their own particular narrowminded reasons), not by the U.K.

If one objectively takes a look at the situation it is clear that Blair of all leaders had the least to gain. Indeed he was very courageous taking the stance he took.

freealways

 

United they fall

Richard Perle bids farewell to the United Nations and its history of anarchy and abject failure Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony he will take the United Nations down with him.

Well, not the whole United Nations. The ‘good works’ part will survive, the low-risk peace-keeping bureaucracies will remain, the looming chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die in Iraq is the fantasy of the United Nations as the foundation of a new world order.

As we sift the debris of the war to liberate Iraq, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.

As free Iraqis document the quarter-century nightmare of Saddam’s rule, as we hear from the survivors able to speak from their own soil for the first time, let us not forget who was for this war and who was not, who held that the moral authority of the international community was enshrined in a plea for more time for inspectors, and who marched against ‘regime change’. In the spirit of postwar reconciliation that diplomats are always eager to engender, we must not reconcile the timid, blighted notion that world order requires us to recoil before rogue states that terrorise their own citizens and menace ours.

A few days ago Shirley Williams argued on television against a coalition of the willing using force to liberate Iraq. Decent, thoughtful and high-minded — like many of the millions who have marched against military action — she must surely have been moved into opposition by an argument so convincing that it overpowered the obvious moral case for removing Saddam’s regime.

No, for Baroness Williams (and many others), the thumb on the scale of judgment about this war is the idea that only the UN Security Council can legitimise the use of force. It matters not if troops are used only to enforce the UN’s own demands. A willing coalition of liberal democracies isn’t good enough. If any institution or coalition other than the UN Security Council uses force, even as a last resort, ‘anarchy’, rather than international law, would prevail, destroying any hope for world order.

This is a dangerously wrong idea, an idea that leads inexorably to handing great moral — and even existential politico-military decisions — to the likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France.

When challenged with the argument that if a policy is right with the approbation of the Security Council, how can it be wrong just because communist China or Russia or France or a gaggle of minor dictatorships withhold their assent, she fell back on the primacy of ‘order’ versus ‘anarchy’.

But is this right? Is the United Nations Security Council the institution most capable of ensuring order and saving us from anarchy? History would suggest not. The United Nations arose from the ashes of a war that the League of Nations was unable to avert. The League was simply not up to confronting Italy in Abyssinia, much less — had it survived that debacle — to taking on Nazi Germany.

In the heady aftermath of the Allied victory in the second world war, the hope that security could be made collective was reposed in the United Nations Security Council — with abject results. During the Cold War the Security Council was hopelessly paralysed. The Soviet empire was wrestled to the ground, and Eastern Europe liberated, not by the United Nations but by the mother of all coalitions, Nato. Apart from minor skirmishes and sporadic peace-keeping missions, the only case of the Security Council acting in a serious matter affecting world order during the Cold War was its use of force to halt the North’s invasion of South Korea — and that was only possible because the Soviets had boycotted the Security Council and were not in the chamber to cast their veto. It was a mistake they did not make again. With war looming, the UN withdrew from the Middle East, leaving Israel to defend itself in 1967 and again in 1973.

Facing Milosevic’s multiple aggressions, the UN could not stop the Balkan wars or even protect its victims. Remember Sarajevo? Remember Srebrenica? It took a coalition of the willing to save Bosnia from extinction. And when the war was over, peace was made in Dayton, Ohio, not in the United Nations. The rescue of Muslims in Kosovo was not a UN action: their cause never gained Security Council approval. The United Kingdom, not the United Nations, saved the Falklands.

This new century now challenges the hopes for a new world order in new ways. We will not defeat or even contain fanatical terror unless we can carry the war to the territories from which it is launched. This will sometimes require that we use force against states that harbour terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taleban regime in Afghanistan.

The most dangerous of these states are those that also possess weapons of mass destruction, the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that can kill not hundreds or thousands but hundreds of thousands. Iraq is one such state, but there are others. Whatever hope there is that they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with which they are confronted. The chronic failure of the Security Council to enforce its own resolutions — 17 of them with respect to Iraq, the most recent, 1441, a resolution of last resort — is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task.

We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the United Nations.

Richard Perle is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article....=current&issue=2003-03-29&id=2909&searchText=

 

One thing you can be sure of....

Wild will always post articles from "The Observer" "The Watcher" "The Viewer" "The Onlooker" "The Guardian"

.......but never from "The Participant"

 

Good point!

 

Brother msfe,

Stop slamming Ritchie Perle, you Arab-loving piece of camel turd... Perle is a true Israeli and American patriot...

Love,
Candle

 

HITCHENS: WE MUST KEEP OUR NERVE

By Christopher Hitchens

HERE we go again: first the phoney war and then the war of the phoneys. In Kuwait, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan - all of the post-Cold War conflicts against regional aggressors and terror-sponsoring states - it was necessary first to endure a lengthy period of apocalyptic warnings.

If the democracies stuck up for themselves or others, there would be intensified chaos and misery, uncountable civilian casualties, intervention from other states to widen the war, legacies of bad blood, massive alienation, etc, etc.

You have read it and I have read it.

The question is - do those who have written this tripe ever dare to go back and see how wrong they were last time?

The second element of the phoney war always takes the form of arguing about how much support a cause needs before it becomes a good one. Let's have Russia on side! Shouldn't we wait for China?

Since the Russians were the patrons of Serbia, it would have been impossible to overcome their veto on Bosnia and Kosovo and so the intervention had to be re-baptised.

Since the French government is in league with Saddam Hussein, the same applies in the present case.

But do you imagine for a single second that the professional "anti-war" scribblers would have changed their tune in the case of a united diplomatic front? In the case of Afghanistan, the vote at the UN was as near-unanimous as such a thing can be.

Yet still the streets filled with the same dreary chant of "Stop the War"(as if it hadn't already started - on September 11, 2001 to be precise). There were Syrian and Egyptian troops fighting in the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, which had a full UN mandate, but the same demonstrators showed up with much the same placards.

Just suppose that Vladimir Putin, whose regime is up to its neck in oil-deals with Iraq, had condescended so far as to endorse the intervention against Saddam Hussein.

WE would be hearing on all sides that the butcher of the Chechen Muslims was our bloodstained ally. How gratifying it is that this cause is now not disgraced, either, by the support of Turkey or Saudi Arabia, let alone the hopelessly-compromised regime of Monsieur Chirac.

Anyway, soon the delaying tactics run out and the despot shows that he isn't interested in a life-saving compromise.

At once, the plaintive, alarmist, phoney slogans shift to the human costs of war, and the blame is put only on one side. That's proved to be true even in the present very impressive case, when the "war" for all practical purposes was over as soon as it began.

Evidently betrayed by someone in his own inner circle, Saddam Hussein was at least badly shaken in the very first carefully-chosen moment, and it's been plain ever since that further Iraqi resistance is criminally futile.

The urgent task of the moment is therefore to make the war as brief as possible, and begin to bring in the food, medicine and reconstruction materials that the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples so desperately need.

(Incidentally, and for as long as it served as a change of subject from the vileness of the regime, the peaceniks were against the sanctions, too. Now they are hysterically against the only policy that can lead to the sanctions being lifted.) I object strongly to being addressed, by people with this track-record, as if it does not agonize me to see dead or wounded or bewildered Iraqi civilians.

Or soldiers for that matter - why do we employ the word "innocent" only for those out of uniform?

And I probably could not stand the job of knocking at some door in my old home town of Plymouth, to tell a family that their son or daughter had just been lost in some pointless accident of the kind that could have occurred on a training exercise.

There is no honour in killing Iraqi soldiers who are pointlessly fighting, leaderless and abandoned, out of fear.

And there is no glory in being hit by "friendly fire", as we ludicrously call it.

However, there is both honour and glory in being able to demolish the palaces and cellars of a murdering dictatorship, inflicting so few incidental casualties (and taking such obvious care to minimize them) that the propaganda of Saddam's goons can produce almost no genuine victims to gloat over.

I feel disgust for those who blame this week's deaths on the intervention and not on its sole target: Saddam Hussein.

A few days ago, a US Navy SEAL team allowed its whole attack to be watched live, as it went ashore and painlessly disarmed an Iraqi garrison with orders to blow up oil terminals.

Who would not approve the careful and humane pre-emptive strike that prevented such an atrocity with no loss of life? Who is going to report the numerous other unsung victories in a carefully calibrated conflict?

Is it too obvious to mention that Saddam's side in this war threatens the use of indiscriminate tactics, puts civilians in harm's way, and trashes the Geneva Convention the first chance it gets?

To make an exhibition of captives is a violation of all the known laws of war.

QUESTIONS ought to be asked in the House about the use of cluster-bombs and the employment of depleted-uranium (DU) weapons.

However, there has been a clear evolution towards more discriminating weapons on one side, even as there has been a desperate resort to unscrupulous tactics on the other. Not to see this is to miss one of the chief points of the new strategy. In Afghanistan, Mullah Omar was allowed to get away alive because Pentagon lawyers could not be sure enough about the convoy of SUV vehicles carrying him from Kabul to Kandahar.

In the end, the decision was made that it wasn't decent to take out the whole caravan.

But here's the point to keep your eye on, as you listen to panicky broadcasts and scan instant news, with its freight of immediate tragedies.

By every indication we have, the population of Baghdad was making a secret holiday in its heart as those horrible palaces went up in smoke, and this holiday will soon be a public holiday, and if we all keep our nerve we can join the festivities with a fairly clear conscience.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair

 

Hitch is The Man! Best part is that by his own claim he is on the liberal left. Let me add another favorite columnist of mine, the indomitable Ann Coulter:

THE ENEMY WITHIN Thu Mar 27, 2003

By Ann Coulter

Just five days into the war in Iraq and The New York Times was hopefully reporting that despite a thrilling beginning, American troops had gotten bogged down. This came as a surprise to regular readers of the Times who remembered that the Times thought we were bogged down the moment the war began. The day after the first bombs were dropped on Baghdad, The New York Times ran a front-page article describing the mood of the nation thus: "Some faced it with tears, others with contempt, none with gladness."

Apparently some people greeted the war with gladness: The stock market had its best week in 20 years. What people do with their money is a rather more profound barometer of how people feel than any stupid poll, much less bald assertions by New York Times reporters. The Times subscribes to Arab-style proclamations in defiance of the facts. Like Saddam Hussein, the truth for them has no meaning. They say whatever honor commands them to say.

Five days after the Baghdad Times* was morosely reporting that no one viewed the war with gladness, things had gotten even worse. In a single editorial, the Times said our troops were "faced with battlefield death, human error and other tragedies." The task "looks increasingly formidable." There were "disturbing events," and American forces were engaged in a "fierce firefight -- an early glimpse of urban warfare." There were "downsides," "disheartening events" and "grievous blows."

CNN's favorite general, Wesley Clark, has also been heard to opine that our troops are getting bogged down in Iraq. His competence to judge American generals is questionable since his command was limited to working for NATO. We prefer to hear from American generals. Clark's contribution to international relations consisted of mistakenly bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. In his zeal to prevent troop casualties, he ordered pilots to fly at such high altitudes that the pilots complained that they were being forced to incur unnecessary civilian casualties.

On MSNBC, Forrest Sawyer compared Iraqi forces killing our troops to American revolutionaries and said the war was likely to turn into a "nightmare." Liberals are like the Republican Guard. They never quit.

American forces have taken two-thirds of Iraq and are fast advancing on Baghdad. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers have surrendered or disbanded, thousands more have been captured, and thousands more have been killed. Meanwhile, American forces have suffered less than two dozen deaths. One can gauge the success of the war by the increasingly gloomy expression on Dan Rather's face. Indeed, Saddam's lieutenants are so demoralized that they have turned to lashing out at the Jews. Saddam's Vice Despot Tariq Aziz says the war is being fought only to "create something called greater Israel." Aziz seems to be positioning himself to run for Congress as a Democrat.

Most auspiciously, the Arab League has appealed to the United Nations Security Council to stop the war. One can only hope the Security Council will agree to intervene. How would they stop us? Would France threaten us with war? Young men across America would have to enlist as a matter of honor. The Army could use as its recruiting slogan: "Are you afraid to fight the French?" Even liberals would enlist as a way to pick up glorious service with no risk of injury.

Not surprisingly, The New York Times gave Saddam's recent speech more exultant coverage than they did Bush's State of the Union address. Since the first bomb hit Baghdad, everyone at the Times had been itching to use the word "quagmire." Somewhat surprisingly, Saddam beat even Maureen Dowd to the punch, thus allowing the Times to use "quagmire" with abandon the day after his speech. Not only that, but according to Saddam -- and the Times -- the invading forces are "in real trouble." The Times isn't afraid we'll do badly in Baghdad; it's afraid we'll do well.

After the Arab television network al-Jazeera repeatedly ran footage of U.S. prisoners of war over the weekend, the New York Stock Exchange threw al-Jazeera reporters off the trading floor. They ought to remove the Times.

[*Don't bother searching for the website Wild/msfe, she's talking about the NYT.]

 

Well what do you know, everyone, yes EVERYONE was caught napping.

When Msfe posted the article (on page 293) titled 'United they fall' which also mentions 'Richard Perle', everyone automatically turned off and obviously didn't bother to read the article seeing that it was posted by mentally handicapped Msfe.

The article is actually, surprise, surprise, making a case that the UN is an abject failure and that the present type of intervention is the world's chance to right things.

Do you see Msfe that long winded articles don't serve a purpose (especially the articles handpicked by you) other than making everyone fall asleep.

On the other hand, Msfe too appears to be in automatic pilot mode as he adopted the article without bothering to read it, obviously thinking it would automatically support his own cause.

Or is it that Msfe has thought the better of it and prefers to now be on the winning side ?

I for one would prefer not to rub shoulders with the likes of Msfe.

freealways

 

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/30/1048962645879.html

Wow, absolutely amazing.
Why didn't they do this earlier ?

freealways