You have nailed it. Right intentions for the most part but poor, bumbling results. Billions for reconstruction, a handful of millions actually spent, the rest tied up, delayed. Use of cluster bombs near civillian areas, the nonsensical, unjustified use of Iraq’s WMD remnants as the main reason for the war, and poor intel all around. From either point of view, the occupation is heading to failure. I supported our intervention and still do, and we need to stop the insurgency.

The desperate young men in the Iraqi Police and National Guard are mirrored by the desperate young men in the various Jihadist groups, they’re both trying to build futures for themselves. But, there is a difference, a choice that has been made by all of them. Radical, oppressive ideology, or a prosperous future. I know what side I’m on.

Nice Rand quote, btw. I grew so tired of people defending Iraq’s ‘sovereignty’ before the war…at that point, it was not a legitimate defense, this was the government that blatantly ignored the sovereignty of Kuwait, Iran, and Israel, and butchered people in numbers a decade of occupation could not reach. Good riddance.

January 15, 2005 @ 1:18 pm | Comment

Surprised to see an Ayn Rand quote here, but it’s one of her best, and then, she was no Republican.

Oddly enough, my permanent parting with the Left was over a similar issue long ago, when their opposition to Asian fascism dwindled to almost nothing (another topic, I know). If they couldn’t oppose butchering fascists, then they couldn’t stand FOR anything which was important to me.

Gratifying to see you take this stand, Richard.
.

January 15, 2005 @ 4:28 pm | Comment

The US invasion of Iraq was planned with one eye on the strategic situation of America’s No 1 ally in the region. And now despite the chaos in Iraq, the view from Tel Aviv looks much more promising. Two of the biggest threats – Arafat and Saddam’s Strong Iraq are no more.

So America may not gain the secure access to Iraq’s oil she sought, at least not in the short term.

Long term outlook: US forces will withdraw from the Sunni triangle, and leave bases in “free” areas of Iraq – Kurdish and Shia areas. Iraq will remain a weak and divided country, albeit with “democracy”. The US can claim it did the best to remove tyranny and bring freedom to those who wanted it.

January 15, 2005 @ 6:05 pm | Comment

Bravo, Richard!

How I wish we could have more such somber voice among progressives.

Will be my free textbook for writing 🙂

January 15, 2005 @ 8:00 pm | Comment

The Fountainhead is my all time favorite book.

January 15, 2005 @ 8:58 pm | Comment

I really appreciate the intelligent comments here. This was a hard post to write and days of thought went into it, and I was afraid it wouldn’t make sense, there were so many points I was trying to make.

Sam, I have almost as many problems with the left as you do — I just have even more problems with the right. Nothing makes me more frustrated than hearing well-meaning liberals defending Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he was a legitimate ruler of a sovereign nation. Such a statement goes counter to the true nature of Liberalism.

Mike, I think your scenario is exactly right. We’ll say that we gave them the tools to make their choice, and in that sense we succeeded — we gave them the freedom to choose, and if they went for an Islamofascist theocracy, well, that’s the price you pay for offering elections. And then we’ll high-tail out of there as fast as we can, trying to position the whole thing as a victory for freedom blah blah blah.

Damocles, sounds like your thoughts mirror my own.

January 15, 2005 @ 9:12 pm | Comment

I dont know whether Ayn Rand was too influenced with the American way of life, or whether the whole American outlook is derieved from her work.

But both are so blindly linked to each other that it seems like the worst case of tunnel vision. It’s impossible to see ANY other way than democracy.

Just because a country is NOT a democracy gives other countries the right to attack it? To “free” the slaves? That’s acceptable to a limit… anyone would agree, anything is better than slavery.

But this line of thought runs too close to the White Man’s Burden line of thought. THEY are black pagan savages, so WE must “liberate” them and bring them up to the level of civilized men, and might as well introduce them to Jesus.

Noble thoughts, BUT open to wrong doings.

Also, agreed democracy would be better than dictatorship anyday, no one is sorry to see Saddam go, BUT democracy is not the end cure.

Lke you said in the article, of course it wont solve everything…. but just Blindly promoting democracy as the cure is somethign that is VERY popular nowadays..

Look at India and China, both got established as nations at nearly the same time, one was the biggest democracy in the world, other was (i think) the biggest communist country in the world (both population wise).

The democratic system in India today is a joke. You’ll see the exact same things that were happening in pre-war Iraq, maybe a little less.. but all happening through the consent of the democratically elected governments. There were communal riots in which thousands are murdered/burnt alive/raped all the while the government looks away, because that’s the agenda they’ve been promoting.

Governance in India today is bad, corrupt and the elected officials put themselves on sales and favours are bartered as currency. Still, we’re proud to be the biggest democracy in the world.

Take china, not like it[s the perfect country, not by far.. but when comparing India and China, China comes on top in evrey way… from the conditions of the farmers, to agriculture, infrastructure… urban standard of living… everything! The one excuse India always uses for the slow progress is population. That’s ONE excuse we (Indians) cant use against China…. Inspite of a bigger population, the average chinese is living better than the average indians.

And yes, there have been many “human rights violation” allegations, but if you look into any country’s history you’ll find them.. The years during which a country is “made” are usually bad years I guess. But once it’s made, it’s there… Breaking an egg to make an omlete.

India never got MADE. They broke a million eggs and could never make a decent omlete.

Sorry if the discussion got a little too away from Iraq and into India/China, but I was just agreeing with your point that democracy is not the solution to all problems.

January 15, 2005 @ 10:15 pm | Comment

Saad:

Democracy in India is not a joke; it ensures Hindustan Times can have decent journalism while China Daily is a joke. It also makes sure that people like you can voice your criticism without fear of being persecuted and wanton arrest. As a Chinese I still have such fear when I speak of my mind. There is a difference.

January 15, 2005 @ 11:58 pm | Comment

Dear Richard,

I am both fascinated and very impressed with your discourse on why the world should now rally behind what the United States is now doing (trying to do) in Iraq. I, however, still disagree with your views, and so I stand firmly behind my original arguments – for there are a number of fundamental flaws to your views, only some of which I shall highlight.

Firstly though, let me say that I both fully respect and appreciate where you are coming form, and why. I understand that you are writing from the perspective of a moralist and a humanitarian, and I admire you greatly for this, but I must take strong issue with you when you say that “the insurgency in Iraq is wrong, it is bad and it must not be permitted to triumph. Any other point of view is immoral, unjust and unconscionable.”

As I say, I beg to differ – and I too, do so on moral grounds, and as a proud humanitarian.

Your entire view, that the US should now continue the occupation in an effort to crush the insurgency, is based partly on a number of incorrect assumptions and facts, but the entire moral foundation upon which you have chosen to rest your argument, is on the Aristotelian objectivism of the Russian-born American theoretician, Ayn Rand. Rand’s arguments can be seriously challenged in my ways, and on many fronts, but I guess for the purposes of this debate, we need to consider in particular her absolutist view of “value”. For Rand, it is possible for some things to be good, simply, or in an absolute sense; whereas agent-relativists like myself think that things can only be good for or relative to certain individuals, and that what is good relative to one individual need not be good relative to another. (This should not be confused with what is commonly called “moral relativism” or “cultural relativism.”) At any rate, you appear to be making this exact same error, every time you call the insurgents “evil” – you naively reduce this conflict in Iraq down to “good” verses “evil” contest. And that, I’m afraid, I just cannot buy.

Another way to put the issue is like this: absolutists think that value exists as a property of something – most likely, as a property of certain states of affairs, or of certain types of behaviour. For instance, if I say, “It is good that intelligent life exists on the Earth,” I am saying that the state of intelligent life existing on the Earth has a certain property: goodness. Agent-relativists like myself, however, think, instead, that value exists only as a relationship between a thing and a person. For instance, an agent-relativist might say, “It is good for me that intelligent life exists on the Earth,” and this would mean: the state of intelligent life existing on the Earth bears a certain relationship to me: it is good for me. But an agent relativist would not say it is good simply.

Rand bases her ethics on her absolutist position, but she offers no argument for it, only a bald assertion. She endorses a version of ‘ethical egoism’ too: the view that a person should always do whatever best serves his or her own interests But if ethical egoism is true, then if you could obtain a (net) benefit equal to a dollar by torturing and killing 500 people, you should do it. This is not irrelevant to our debate here, because essentially, Rand’s ethical egoism is being used to justify the argument that invading and occupying another sovereign country is morally justifiable on the basis that the net benefit (supposedly some form of democracy as opposed to an Islamic theocracy) will outweigh all of the death and destruction brought about by the invasion, and by the resistance to the occupation that follows. This argument is very simple, but that should not fool us into thinking it is therefore legitimate. For starters, such an argument contradicts Rand’s own claim that each individual is an end-in-himself or herself, and that it is therefore morally wrong to sacrifice one person to another. Now, Rand is a little vague here, I must admit. Either she meant that an individual life is an end-in-itself in an absolute sense – or she meant that an individual life is an end-in-itself in a relative sense – i.e., for that individual.

Assume she meant it in a relative sense. In this case, Richard’s life is an end-in-itself for Richard. But since Richard’s life is not an end-in-itself for Bellevue, there has been given no reason why Bellevue should not use Richard or sacrifice Richard’s life for Bellevue’s benefit. In fact, for Bellevue, Richard’s life can only have value as a means, if it has any value at all, since for Bellevue, only Bellevue’s life is an end in itself.

Now, assume Rand meant it in an absolute sense. In that case, she contradicted her absolutist conception of value. Furthermore, she has generated a general problem for ethical egoism. If the life of my neighbour, Bellevue, is an end-in-itself in an absolute sense, and not just relative to Bellevue, then why wouldn’t it follow that I ought to promote the life of my neighbour, for its own sake? But this is not what Rand wants – she claims that my own life is the only thing I should promote for its own sake. Go back and read all of her essays more carefully.

Her entire argument rests on this silly, outdated anachronistic idea that the end justifies the means – and this Richard, is also what you are now arguing!

Rand also supports the concept of monopoly government, and appears to do so along these lines:

a) Individuals have rights, the prerequisites of human life.

b) All experience, whether historical or day-to-day, shows that organised protection of rights is essential.

c) Protection of rights cannot occur without objective law.

d) Objective law cannot arise if `governments’ compete; agency A’s interpretation would differ from agency B’s, etc.

e) Therefore, protection of rights has to be a monopoly.

f) Coercive monopolies are per se wrong, but this monopoly is permissible because it is the only way to achieve the objective law necessary to protect rights.

g) To ensure rights are in fact protected, the state monopoly on the use of force will be retaliatory only, and will be rigorously controlled by a constitution.

h) Because our end is good, and our means constitutionally controlled, we can live with something which is, in all other circumstances, evil.

The problem is that this argument is no different from (e.g.): We don’t like Saddam Hussien because he is a cruel vicious tyrant. A country ruled in this way has no sovereignty, “has no national rights”, but the individual rights of its citizens remain valid, even if unrecognized by Saddam’s regime. Therefore, the invasion of this country is morally justified because we the conquerors plan to establish “a free social system, that is, a system based on the recognition of individual rights.” But one cannot defend the entire concept of sovereignty by destroying it, surely? One cannot respect the international “rule of law” by ignoring it, by violating it, by acting unilaterally, and one cannot recognize and defend the human rights of individual citizens by destroying these lives, by killing the very people whose interests you are claiming to protect (around 100,000 civilian deaths alone, to date) through “shock and awe” bombing campaigns, by poisoning the air and soil with depleted uranium, by destroying homes and water supplies and power grids, etc. The contradiction is blatant. If an action is morally wrong, it does not become morally right by being carried out for a “good” purpose. A is A, not B; there is no logical connection between them. Thus, if my analysis is correct, Rand’s politics are vitiated by an immoral “end justifies the means” argument.

Richard’s argument falls apart on both moral and legal grounds strait way, through is reliance on Rand. I for one, prefer to live in a world that respects and abides by the “rule of law” – the present United States regime doesn’t.

But Richard then goes on to say what really, to many, would sound seem rather laughable, if not cruel: “Of course,” he says, “we must ask who society [read: the global community] should entrust with this divine right to decide that this or that ruler is worthy of overthrow.” Fair question, but wait till you hear Richard’s answer: “I think the only answer is that if the ruler passes the ‘global test’ for being illegitimate as described by Rand – if they butcher and enslave, if they deprive their citizens of choice, if they eliminate freedom, if they set up a one-party dictatorship, then they have no claim to being legitimate sovereigns and the free nations are justified in freeing the citizens.”

Not only does this line of reasoning fall apart for the reasons I explained earlier, but not all countries in the global community considered Saddam’s regime to be bad enough to warrant an invasion and occupation. As the UN declared afterwards, the US invasion and occupation is illegal. The United States decided, unilaterally, that Saddam failed the “global test”.

Richard then goes on to say, and this is where many people may feel outrage by what he says, he then says, as a side note: “And, much as I hate Bush, I won’t allow anyone to argue that he meets these criteria; for all his evils, he’s not even close; he’s only in power because we idiots asked him to be.” O.K. Richard – you might not think Bush is as bad, as evil, as Saddam Hussein. But there are many others in this world who do. As I said, value is not absolute. Bush, for many, may be the more evil, relative to other individuals. And we cannot fail to examine, in detail, the imperial history of the United States, particularly since the ending of World War II. Look at all of the brutal, bloody dictators that the United States has financially, militarily, and politically supported over the years: Batista, Pinochet, the Shah, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein himself for quite some time even! Go ask a Mayan Indian in El Salvador who is the more evil, and you will probably find that many might say Bush. Most sane, well informed people who argue that the United States has consistently exercised a foreign policy since the end of WWII which has been unparalleled in terms of “evil-doing”. Amnesty International certainly thinks so: every year since 1996, they have claimed that the United States is responsible for more murders, more torture, more starvation and suffering and disappearances and dislocations than any other single country on Earth. Should the rest of the world launch an invasion of the United States to liberate you all? Should be bomb your cities with “shock and awe”, should we poison your soils and water supplies, target your power grids, and kill hundreds of thousands of you on the basis that we are there to help you all?

At any rate, Saddam was not, despite what Richard seems to think, thumbing his nose up at UN weapons inspectors. He destroyed all of his weapons of mass destruction ten years ago – a fact FINALLY acknowledged by the Bush administration as recently as last week. Ten years ago he destroyed all of his weapons of mass destruction! Ten years ago!

At any rate, the intention of the Bush regime is not to install a democracy. This should be clear to all well informed and thinking people. This is another area where Richard’s reasoning falls apart, even if we were to accept his Randian foundation.

So far, three reasons have been offered up by Bush and Blair for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Firstly, we were told, Saddam Hussein had been responsible for September 11, and that his regime was actively supporting Al Queda. This, of course, is nonsense, as most informed and intelligent people knew right from the very outset. Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with September 11, and it has little to do with Al Queda. The attack on the World Trade towers was orchestrated by a certain group of Saudis, and there is strong empirical evidence to support this – evidence which surfaced within only days after the Twin Towers collapsed.

The second justification offered up for the invasion of Iraq was that it was harbouring weapons of “mass destruction’ – another pathetic lie, which, once again, anybody with any intelligence could have seen through right from the very moment it was first touted from the pulpits of Washington.

Now that both of these justifications have collapsed, only the third one remains in use: namely, that the United States has “liberated” the people of Iraq from Suddam Hussein, and is now out to “help” the good people of Iraq to establish a wonderful and free democracy. Surely anyone with any intelligence can see this for what it really is!

I just cannot accept this view that the United States has invaded and is occupying Iraq for “noble” purposes – that they have a “righteous” cause, as you seem to claim Richard. Very few Iraqis will see it this way, and I can assure you, that most people throughout the rest of the world do not see it this way either. The attack on Iraq had been long planned. There just isn’t an excuse for it. Since George H.W. Bush failed to unseat Saddam in 1991, there’s been a longing among the extreme right in the United States to finish the job. The war on terrorism (fuelled by September 11) gave them that opportunity. The logic provided by Bush and Blair for this war of course, is convoluted and fraudulent.

The United States (with help from Britain and Australia) invaded Iraq so that it could further secure for the developed world the flow of oil from that country, and they wish to occupy it for quite some time so they can establish a system of government that they can be confident will protect their corporate interests. They are most definitely not out to introduce any real democracy to the people of Iraq. If they were, then they wouldn’t be trying to replace Saddam Hussein with somebody similar. The current regime in Washington also wants to make certain that all of the lucrative reconstruction deals that they have awarded (mostly to US companies), are actually going to be able to reach fruition. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is all about plunder. Nothing else. I see nothing “noble” or “righteous” in this Richard.

Even if the United States really did invade Iraq with such“noble” intentions as to introduce to them glorious “democracy” then so what? They nevertheless have no right to do so – legally, or morally. This idea that you can justify an invasion of another country as part of a civilising mission to introduce to them “democracy” is an outrageous one, and one which most of the world is quite rightly horrified by and concerned about. I have already explained by the theoretical foundations behind such an idea is flawed morally. And I have already mentioned elsewhere on this website just how stupid and unrealistic is the idea of being able to implant a Western-style parliamentary democracy by force into a developing country which has no history of such democratic traditions, and which for centuries, has been governed by a series of tribal clans based around religious and ethnic identities. The sheer arrogance of the Bush administration is both frightening and dangerous, as is their level of stupidity and ignorance.

This claim that the “noble” intention of the US is to set up free and democratic elections – well, that’s just a cruel farce. It was never an intention. Never. The pre-war memorandum to Tony Blair from senior UK government advisers, pointing out there was no certainty that any “replacement regime” in Iraq “will be any better” [than Saddam’s] (Observer, 19 Sept), provides in itself some empirical evidence that “democracy” was never an intention. Of course, Blair, like Bush, always publicly claimed otherwise. Blair, for example, claimed that the US-appointed Iraqi Government is “trying to create” a democratic [Iraq] that respects human rights. The reality couldn’t be more different. As the journalist Jason Burke notes:“the lineaments of a new nation are emerging. Ironically, much of it looks like Saddam’s Iraq. The new police see their job as maintaining order – in a brutal, often lethal fashion – not protecting citizens against crime. The government has responded harshly to media criticism [and] Allawi has even created a secret intelligence service and talked of ‘emergency powers’ to counter violence.”As many have already noted, a process of re-Nazification is now taking place, and with the help of the US – all largely funded in fact, by the CIA.

According to Newsweek (7 June), “no one is better equipped [to use official powers to influence the planned elections] than Iraq’s US-appointed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.” On 27 September, Time magazine reported the existence of “a secret ‘finding’ – proposing a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favoured by Washington.” Meanwhile the Economist (18 Sept) reports that the opposition groups that sided with the US before the war are discussing a so-called ‘monster consensus list’ of candidates – an idea which “could create essentially a one-party election – look[ing] uncomfortably like the plebiscites choreographed to produce 98 percent majorities under Saddam Hussein.”

I have already argued why I think the world is now relying on the insurgents to inflict some kind of a military and or political victory over the United States, so I will not repeat all of my arguments again here. Let me just say though, that I am of the view that the resistance is a popular one, and I have already provided evidence to support this claim, and that what they are resisting is a bloody and illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of their country. Not everybody is resisting violently – there is also a large number of Iraqis who are peacefully resisting. The resistance, as violent and as barbaric and as immoral as it is, must be seen for what it is: it is a response to the occupation itself. Who or what, is the main source of violence in today’s Iraq? The main source of violence is the occupation itself. It’s an occupation which I say should be ended. A lot of lives will be spared that way! Funny how moralistic and human that sounds, right? End the occupation, save lives, and try to prevent the US state from launching themselves and their allies into similar such atrocious acts again at some point in the future.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq has brought far more death, far more suffering and misery to the people of Iraq than what Saddam Hussein ever managed to achieve, or ever could manage to achieve. This alone invalidates all of Richard’s arguments about one country having the right to “liberate’ another.

Yes, the world is better off without him, the Iraqi people are better off without him anyway – but nobody can seriously say that, for the people of Iraq, the price they have had to pay has been worth it. And this is what is seriously WRONG with what Rand and Richard are trying to argue – this is what they could never succeed in justifying logically or morally or legally – it is the fact that the people of Iraq were not given any choice. They were not asked if they wanted to be “liberated”, nor where they asked if they would mind paying such a huge price in exchange for this “liberation” – around 100,000 dead civilians, countless numbers left traumatised and physically maimed, a devastated economy, a serioulsy poisoned environment which will go on destroying lives for generations to come, ad infinitum.

“One cannot claim to be a moral person and in the same breath say he wants to see the insurgents win,” asserts Richard. Yes you can, I say. Yes you most definitley can.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 16, 2005 @ 3:53 am | Comment

Sam,

I couldn’t agree with you more on this, those Asian fascists are still periodically visiting the Yasukuni Shrine after 60 years. The complete silence and the constant apologies show us again and again the moral deficiency and the lack of backbone of today lefties in America.

January 16, 2005 @ 5:54 am | Comment

Mr Jones, I couldn’t agree more with your assessment of the Bush administration’s reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. And I agree completely that the occupation must be defeated. The rest of your arguments, however, I find just as wanting as any other on this subject: Your arguments are based on as many irrational assumptions as any other, and this is betrayed by your reliance on the phrase “Most sane, well informed people” and it’s equivalents.

And Richard, I agree that the overthrow of Saddam was good and that much, if not most of what is said to justify the invasion and occupation is good. Trouble is, I knew from the beginning that the warmongers were lying through their teeth and had not respect at all for the liberal democratic values we would both like to succeed in Iraq (and elsewhere), let alone any desire to implant them anywhere outside of Middle America.

If it were possible to support the resistance, I would. If it were possible to support the occupation, I would. Trouble is, both are devoid of any moral justification for their actions, meaning I am caught between murderers on one side, and murderers on the other. What is a humanitarian to do?

January 16, 2005 @ 6:35 am | Comment

Richard,

To cut the long story short, do you now support Bush and his reasons for invasion of Iraq?

Yes or No??

There should be no ambiguity.

January 16, 2005 @ 7:54 am | Comment

Richard:

I will never defend Saddam and never sorry to see his fall from power. What i have trouble with is to topple Saddam’s totalitraian regime was not Bush’s real reason to invade Iraq, it was a convenient excuse to windowdress his war of greed and aggression.

Following the “liberation of Iraq” argument, the US would find herself fighting in Myanmar, Turkmenistan, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, Iran, North Korea. But why only Iraq? The truth is none other than strategic dominance and economic greed.

While Saddam’s fall is indeed a relief, but i would not credit it to America nor Bush. They did not do it altruistically but for themselves. And the people of Iraq are still suffering, as well as those innocent civilains who died under Rumsfeld’s bombs. They did not live to enjoy democracy.

January 16, 2005 @ 11:11 am | Comment

Bush and the Neo Cons illegally instigated this war, his first pretense for the war was Saddam had WMD hidden in Iraq. When they invaded the country and couldnt find the WMD, Bush shifted his tune quickly to the very moral~ we come here to liberate Iraqi people from the Saddam regime.

January 16, 2005 @ 12:01 pm | Comment

Mark, We need to clarify certain things. Your use of certain phrases is really misleading to readers, and puts words in my mouth. I’m just going to pick things at random where you need to be more careful — things that undermine your argument.

For example:

Your entire view, that the US should now continue the occupation in an effort to crush the insurgency,…

I do not say this. I never said we can crush the insurgency, nor did I say we should continue our occupation — show me where I say these things. I said we cannot hand over the keys to the Iraqi kingdom to the insurgents and leave. That is a very different statement. The Iraqi people want elections. We must let them hold the elections, and if they afterward tell us to leave we should do so.

At any rate, you appear to be making this exact same error, every time you call the insurgents “evil” – you naively reduce this conflict in Iraq down to “good” verses “evil” contest.

I nowhere say this is a good versus evil situation, as was the situation in Vichy France. What I do say categorically is that the insurgents are evil, and I will stick to that no matter how you want to parse it or analyze it. It may be evil vs. irresponsible or evil vs. bad — but I know that evil is the very worst of those choices in every way, and I don’t want to see Iraq go with the very worst possible choice.

Firstly, we were told, Saddam Hussein had been responsible for September 11, and that his regime was actively supporting Al Queda.

I would like you to show me one instance where the US public was told by high officials that Saddam was responsible for September 11. Just one, and I will concede that you are right. Until then, I maintain this is a falsehood. What they did was deceptively try to link him to al Qaeda. That is a far cry from saying he was responsible for 911.

Much of your response is in regard to what I said was an aside — the Rand quote. I made clear Rand is perhaps my least favorite philosopher but that I found some intelligence in her view what constitutes a legitimate country. As I feared, you parse this to death, numbing the mind of readers with fancy phrases that dance around the issue at hand: Saddam was murdering and maiming and terrorizing his people and they wanted him gone and they cheered and wept with joy when we got him out.

You sidestep what is at the very heart of my post, i.e., your comparison of occupied Iraq with Vichy France. Instead, you try to show how the US is just as bad as the real evil-doers. I say time and again our purposes were not pure and noble — but that we did have a chance of really bringing a better system and a better life to the Iraqi people. This is key, and you ignore it — the initial enthusiasm for our invasion, even after the brutality of Shock and Awe, even after all the horrors you chronicle — the Iraqi people STILL were thrilled and jubilant, greeting our soldiers with carnations and smiles and gratitude. But you don’t want to deal with that.

As predicted, you veer off into an anti-American screed, rounding up the usual Noam Chomsky accusations of the US being in cahoots with the Shah, Pol Pot, Batista, etc. In some cases, there is no denying this is true. America has done some dreadful things. America has hurt a lot of people, and we’ve supported some true bastards. And Bush is a nightmare and a friend only to big money and secretive operations that strenghten his power base. All true and all acknowledged.

And after all that, America still stands as one of the world’s very greatest countries, bringing far more good to the world than evil. As I have said to you before, the proof of a nation’s badness is the test created by your very own Lenin, the “vote by foot.” Precious few Americans are lining up fighting to emigrate to Mainland China, while thousands and thousands of Chinese risk their lives every year for even the slenderest hope of making their way to American soil. So yeah, we are atrocious fuckers, but we’re still pretty decent when you consider the alternatives. Demonstrations of man’s inhumanity to man can be found in every culture and history. In this area, the US is squeaky clean compared to most other nations.

Next misstatement: Saddam was not, despite what Richard seems to think, thumbing his nose up at UN weapons inspectors

Now, here’s what I actually said: I thought it was the right thing to do, especially after the butcher Saddam gave us the finger for years over weapons inspections. He was always asking for trouble, and it was trouble he deserved.

If you deny that for years Saddam did exactly this, then I must conclude you really don’t know the history of Iraq-US relations from 1991 on. During the Clinton years, Saddam did indeed constantly give the finger to UNSCOM inspectors who were there to make sure Saddam was keeping his agreements about weapons. Again and again, he blocked them from making inspections and used the inspections to demonstrate his ballsy defiance. He only opened up completely and invited the whole world in after Bush made it clear he was going to invade Iraq. It was back in the Clinton years that I decided it would be good to rid the world of Saddam Hussein.

We won’t come to agreement on this, but I stick as strongly as ever to my initial point, that anyone who hopes to see the insurgents triumph and hold the destiny of Iraq in their hands is immoral. Tragically, at this point there is no good solution. There is no good versus evil scenario, only evil versus less bad. Anyone who actively hopes for the evil must re-evaluate his moral standards. I believe that most in the world agree with me. I believe most intelligent, educated people who are well informed of what’s happening in Iraq qill agree that, while America may deserve to lose and must be reined in, the worst thing that could happen would be victory for the murderous, vengeful, freedom-hating insurgents.

If you respond, please go back to the important points you leave untouched: Your comparison of the insurgents to heros; the fact that the insurgents stand for the suppression of fundamental human rights; and the fact that they are willing to slaughter their own beloved Iraqis and friends of iraqis (like Ms. Hassan) with the most casual indifference.

Update: Just to reinforce an important point, how many Americans are doing this to get into China? 🙂

January 16, 2005 @ 12:12 pm | Comment

JR: Bush and the Neo Cons illegally instigated this war, his first pretense
for the war was Saddam had WMD hidden in Iraq. When they invaded the
country and couldnt find the WMD, Bush shifted his tune quickly to the
very moral~ we come here to liberate Iraqi people from the Saddam
regime.

All true. I know all about the WMD bullshit. I never even considered that as relevant to the invasion; I supported it, at least initially, strictly on humanitarian grounds. Now, I wish we never invaded, and I do not support our occupation in any way, since we have made such a mess of it. But we are there, and the last thing we want to happen is leave the people vulnerable to massacres and barbarism from the insurgents, who have proven their lust for bloodshed over and over.

Saad, I agree completely that democracy isn’t for everyone. I would say one-party rule in and of itself is not cause to overthrow a regime. If there are, however, a number of factors (for example, all four of the factors Rand lists), then I’d consider that regime a candidate. Hell, Singapore is basically a one-party country. Obviously they don’t pass the test for deserving regime change.

January 16, 2005 @ 12:17 pm | Comment

” the invasion of Iraq has caused far more deaths…’Eh?
The Iran/Iraq war and the slaughter of the Kurds/Shia before and after 1991 caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. BY SADDAM.
The Americans have killed hundreds of thousands?
By the way, I urge anyone to google the British Lancet study which actually said that BETWEEN 8,000 and 164,000 died.
Read The Daily Standard or Slate for a critique and draw your own conclusions.

We may in fact ‘lose” An evil hegemon has been humbled. The world will rejoice.
And yet there is this; During the last few years the Congo has sufferd over three million dead, Also Rwanda. Sierre Leone, Liberia, Cote de ivorie’ etc.
Where is the world and rule of international law?
Where is the UN?( Well, we know where 150 of them are. They have been “recalled” because of allegations of sexual misconduct)
I want the UN to be effective. I want the UN to be able to protect the inncoent and uphold international law. I also want to win the lottery and see the Phillies win the World series. What do you think my odds are?

The Balkans would still be a cauldron of ethnic cleansing if the US had’t gotten involved as civiliazed Europe sat on their collective asses and did NOTHING…

Whatever happens in Iraq the US will have lost the will and the means to intervene anywhere else in the world and no doubt this brings joy to many.
Will the UN/EU/NATO/China fill the void?
I hope so.
I hope humanatarians will find a way, short of violence, to protect the innocent.
I hope.
But then again, I am a nutter American.

January 16, 2005 @ 5:38 pm | Comment

Great post. I’ve just finished reading Ken Pollack’s book on Iran, and one aspect of that book that I found interesting is that Israel is at a tactical disadvantage to being able to strike Iran’s weapons facilities from the air without having a place to refuel along the way. I’m wondering how much that initially played into the Administrations logic and gameplan in this whole affair, and how much it continues to weigh on our decision of whether or not it’s worth staying there while everything goes to crap.

January 16, 2005 @ 8:22 pm | Comment

“Precious few Americans are lining up fighting to emigrate to Mainland China, while thousands and thousands of Chinese risk their lives every year for even the slenderest hope of making their way to American soil.”

This is not an argument for your country being “right” or inherently good. There’s a few million Chinese who would go anywhere and do almost anything for a better standard of living.

January 16, 2005 @ 8:52 pm | Comment

Dear Richard,

You say that you “never said we can crush the insurgency, nor did I say we should continue our occupation – show me where I say these things. I said we cannot hand over the keys to the Iraqi kingdom to the insurgents and leave. That is a very different statement.”

Look – when you say that the US cannot and should not hand over the keys to the insurgents, what you are really saying is that the US mission in Iraq should prevail – which, when it comes down to it, means that you want to see the in insurgency crushed. If I am wrong in reading you like this, then please explain to me the difference. You are being extremely ambiguous, to say the least!

Richard, you also say: “What I do say categorically is that the insurgents are evil, and I will stick to that no matter how you want to parse it or analyze it.” This is exactly why I criticized your use of Rand. When you say that the insurgents are “evil”, you are doing so in an absolute sense. I have a problem with this – which I have already explained in my earlier entry. You simply have not addressed this at all. Can we really say that killing 55,000 civilians in the initial “shock and awe” is any less “evil” than what the insurgents are doing? Or that it is any less of an atrocity? American soldiers might die be blown to pieces while they are sitting in their tent eating their lunch. But can we say that this is in any way different, in any way less of a crime, than the blowing to pieces of Iraqi civilians while they are sitting in their homes, eating their meal? I for one, certainly do not see a difference.

Richard, you say that “during the Clinton years, Saddam did indeed constantly give the finger to UNSCOM inspectors who were there to make sure Saddam was keeping his agreements about weapons. Again and again, he blocked them from making inspections and used the inspections to demonstrate his ballsy defiance. He only opened up completely and invited the whole world in after Bush made it clear he was going to invade Iraq.”

Look Richard, I was not denying that Saddam Hussein had never resisted UN arms inspectors – initially he did. But only last week the Bush regime was finally forced to admit what the inspectors themselves have been saying since the early 1990s – namely, that Iraq has had no weapons of mass destruction since about 1994. He destroyed them all, in compliance with UN regulations, ten years ago! Yet Washington has continually insisted on claiming otherwise, just as they insisted on maintaining the embargo on Iraq – which, quite shamefully, included medicines. It is estimated that somewhere around 500,000 sick children and elderly died between the two Iraqi wars, as an indirect consequence of this embargo. Some UNSCOM inspectors even resigned in disgust over this outrageous and callous lack of humanity.

Your problem Richard, is that you get all of your information from the mainstream corporate American press – which, for the most part, does little more than to repeat the line that is fed to them by Washington. Most serious commentators have been arguing, and for at least the last eleven to twelve years, that Saddam had been quite co-operative with UNSCOM. Many of the inspectors themselves have said this, and if you insist, I will quite happily provide you with all of the evidence for this.

Richard, you say: “I would like you to show me one instance where the US public was told by high officials that Saddam was responsible for September 11. Just one, and I will concede that you are right. Until then, I maintain this is a falsehood. What they did was deceptively try to link him to al Qaeda. That is a far cry from saying he was responsible
for 911.”

Well look, you are missing the point here. Well, Dick Cheney for one, tried to establish this link. His whole purpose in trying to establish a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda was to make people believe that Saddam was therefore somehow partly responsible what September 11. On September 19, 2003, the world’s newspapers reported on how Bush had been forced to distance himself from Cheney’s claim after the Democrats had accused his administration of creating the “false impression” at the heart of a widespread belief held by Americans that Saddam had a personal role in the attacks.

At that time, polls conducted by the Washington Post found that 69 per cent of Americans believed there was a Saddam link to the September 11 attacks – thanks not only to Cheney, but also to the mainstream media!

Cheney, interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press television program, continued to leave open the possibility of a Saddam link to the attacks, saying that “it’s not surprising” that the public would believe Saddam was involved in the attacks, blamed on the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, who has repeatedly praised the attacks.

Deroy Murdoch, writing for the NRO, also argued that Saddam was responsible for Sept 11 (Dec.15, 2003). There are hundreds of such examples like this Richard, if you look for them. On December 12, 2003, just to name yet another example, The Telegraph printed an article by Con Coughlin, author of Saddam: The Secret Life, in which he tried to convince us all of a link. Coughlin concluded by saying: “It is entirely conceivable, then, that Atta secretly made his way to Baghdad to undertake training with Abu Nidal a few months before the September 11 attacks. But as long as Saddam and his senior intelligence operatives remain at large, it is impossible to assess just how much they knew about, and were involved in, the planning and execution of the September 11 atrocities.” A careful examination of Coughlin’s argument will reveal the use of flimsy, circumstantial evidence and an awful lot of mere conjecture.

Now, I shall address with the most serious flaw in your argument.

You say that although Washington’s “purposes were not pure and noble… we did have a chance of really bringing a better system and a better life to the Iraqi people. This is key, and you ignore it – the initial enthusiasm for our invasion, even after the brutality of Shock and Awe, even after all the horrors you chronicle – the Iraqi people STILL were thrilled and jubilant, greeting our soldiers with carnations and smiles and gratitude. But you don’t want to deal with that.”

You acknowledge that the purpose of the invasion was not “pure” and “noble” yet you cling to this idea that, nevertheless, the invasion and occupation is justified by the “chance” of introducing to the Iraqis “a better system and a better life.” Don’t you realise how ridiculous this sounds? How morally outrageous this line of “reasoning” is?

I have already pointed out to you, in my earlier comments, that Washington is not out to introduce a democracy. I have provided you will numerous pieces of evidence to prove this – to prove that the intention is to simply replace Saddam with somebody similar – and I have provided you with all of my sources. If you want to continue with this line of argument, then you need to at the very least provide me with some evidence! Where is your evidence to show that Washington is serious about giving the people of Iraq a “better system”?

I have also already discussed the folly of trying to plant a democracy in a developing country like Iraq, which has no traditions of democracy, and which for hundreds of years has been ruled by a series of tribal clans based around a combination of ethnic and religious identities. This already impossible task most certainly could never succeed in the context of an occupation – especially one which has come about only after an initial “shock and awe” where much of the country’s basic infrastructure has been destroyed by the self-proclaimed “liberators”. This is what creates the breeding ground, the social conditions, for Islamofascism. The Taliban came into existence due to the creation of these very same conditions – the results of a war-torn country.

The Iraqi people were most certainly NOT “thrilled” and “jubilant” to see their country bombed into submission, nor are they thrilled and jubilant about the present occupation. Once again Richard, you are merely repeated the line that comes out of Washington, and which is echoed, unchallenged, by the corporate media.

Richard – like most Americans perhaps, you watched the television reports showing Iraqis cheering US troops, throwing flowers, and tearing down statues. Some footage captured Baghdad residents literally hugging and kissing US soldiers to show their appreciation. These images were sued to help “prove” that the US wer in fact, seen as liberators. The Iraqi people, it seemed, were desperate to break free of Hussein’s tyranny and they were ecstatic to see US troops drive him from power.

But what the American television reporters weren’t showing was the sight of Baghdad residents protesting the American presence – and in the very same area and at the very same time that those, more pleasant, more comforting images were being filmed. If you tuned into the television reports in other countries, you would have seen the other side to this story. As Canada’s CBC reported, crowds gathered in front of the Palestine Hotel, where international journalists were staying and where US Marines had established an operations centre, for “daily” demonstrations. “The tone of the protests were strongly anti-American, and included denunciations of Iraqi police as collaborators with Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The New York Times, to its credit, also noted that US popularity very quickly started to suffer, saying that “protests against the American forces [in Iraq] are rising by the day.”

The Times of London explained that “several hundred Iraqis” gather regularly in front of the Palestine Hotel. The paper quoted one teacher as saying “Down, down U.S.A. – don’t stay, go away!” and “Bush is the same as Saddam.” These protests occurred before the Abu Ghraib story broke. These protests began to occur daily almost as soon as the US troops rolled into Baghdad.

Sometimes Richard, up to 20,000 Iraqis were protesting at a time against the US presence.

On the one hand, it was fascinating to see people who had lacked free speech rights taking to the streets in the hopes that their pleas would be heard. On the other hand, while Iraqis seemed thrilled to be rid of Saddam, some MOST of the country was not particularly anxious to see American forces stay.

Some Iraqis (not the majority, but a sizable minority nevertheless – and particularly the Kurds) viewed the US troops as liberators, but not liberators with an open invitation to stick around to dictate the country’s new found “freedom”.

What’s also disturbing Richard, is that journalists in Baghdad were apparently being discouraged from covering these protests. As Agence France-Presse reported, “exasperated US military officials tried to hamper the media from covering [these] demonstrations in Baghdad…”

Even when Saddam’s statue was torn down, large crowds were protesting against the US presence. The AFP reported, “The crowd later moved to the nearby square where the statue of Saddam was toppled Wednesday to signal the end of the regime. As three of the marines’ armoured amphibious vehicles passed by, they chanted: ‘No, no, USA.’ Meanwhile, demonstrators marched to the centre of the predominantly Shiite southern city of Nasiriyah, chanting ‘Yes to freedom, yes to Islam, no to America, no to Saddam.'”

So Richard, the “key” to this argument, which you say I ignore, has just been lost.

At any rate, this is not the key to the argument. You have chosen to use Ayn Rand’s theory as a philosophical and moral foundation upon which to support you central argument – that the occupying forces must now succeed in preventing the “evil” insurgency from defeating it, both militarily and politically.

If you want to convince me that my stance is morally deviant and deficient – if you want to convince me that it is you who is speaking from the moral high ground, then you need to address the following THREE very serious flaws in your argument:

FLAW No.1 Your use of the absolutist conception of value and of sovereign government, via the ideas of Ayn Rand. The problem here is that this argument is no different from (e.g.): We don’t like Saddam Hussien because he is a cruel vicious tyrant. A country ruled in this way has no sovereignty, “has no national rights” but the individual rights of its citizens remain valid, even if unrecognized by Saddam’s regime. Therefore, the invasion of this country is morally justified because we the conquerors plan to establish “a free social system, that is, a system based on the recognition of individual rights.” But one cannot defend the entire concept of sovereignty by destroying it. One cannot respect the international “rule of law” by ignoring it, by violating it, by acting unilaterally, and one cannot recognize and defend the human rights of individual citizens by destroying these lives, by killing the very people whose interests you are claiming to protect (around 100,000 civilian deaths alone, to date) through“shock and awe” bombing campaigns, by poisoning the air and soil with depleted uranium, by destroying homes and water supplies and power grids, etc. The contradiction is blatant. If an action is morally wrong, it does not become morally right by being carried out for a “good” purpose. A is A, not B; there is no logical connection between them. Thus, if my analysis is correct, Rand’s politics are vitiated by an immoral the “end justifies the means” argument. Your entire argument rests on this very foundation, so you really need to begin by addressing this first flaw.

FLAW No.2 Flaw No.1 above holds that “the invasion of an enslaved country is morally justified only when and if the conquerors establish a free social system, that is, a system based on the recognition of individual rights.”

Now even if we were to accept your use of Rand as valid (which I don’t) – but even if we were to accept it, then you will need to prove that Washington really is trying to “establish a free social system” in order to sustain your arguments. To do this Richard, you need to provide good, solid, empirical evidence! So far you have failed to do that. I, on the other hand, have already provided you will numerous example, backed up with evidence, my sources all cited, to prove that Washington is simply out to replace Saddam’s with something similar.

Even if you can prove that Washington is sincere and genuine, your argument still falls short as far as I am concerned, because it rests on Rand’s absolutist concept of value, your Flaw No.1.

FLAW No.3 Richard, you ambiguously justify the continued occupation, on the basis that the insurgents must not be allowed to take over the country and to establish a theocratic state. This view rests on your acceptance of what I consider to be Flaw No.1. And one of the reasons why Flaw No.1 is a flaw, is because it fails to take into account what the people of Iraq themselves want. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has brought far more death, far more suffering and misery to the people of Iraq than what Saddam Hussein ever managed to achieve, or ever could have managed to achieve. This alone invalidates all of your arguments about one country having the right to “liberate’ another. Nobody can seriously say that, for the people of Iraq, the price they have had to pay has been worth it. And this is what is seriously WRONG with what you are trying to argue – this is what you could never succeed in justifying logically or morally or legally – it is the fact that the people of Iraq were not given any choice. They were not asked if they wanted to be “liberated”, nor where they asked if they would mind paying such a huge price in exchange for this “liberation” – around 100,000 dead civilians, countless numbers left traumatised and physically maimed, a devastated economy, a seriously poisoned environment which will go on destroying lives for generations to come, etc.

And as I have already pointed out, once again, backed up by evidence, is that, contrary to what you like to believe, most Iraqis do not want to be occupied by the US military. They never have! And they never will. Naturally, they will resist – some will protest peacefully on the streets, and others will resort to the use of violence and terror.

It is up to the people of Iraq to decide on their future, in their own way, using their methods, using their systems. We may not morally approve of their methods, but we cannot force our own systems and our own values on them. We have no legal or moral of philosophical right to do so, especially if the people we are supposed to be helping (a) do not want this kind of help, “offered” to them in the context of an occupation, and (b) if this means paying for it with such a deadly price.

Finally, I need to address what you say in the following quote: “America still stands as one of the world’s very greatest countries, bringing far more good to the world than evil. As I have said to you before, the proof of a nation’s badness is the test created by your very own Lenin, the “vote by foot.” Precious few Americans are lining up fighting to emigrate to Mainland China, while thousands and thousands of Chinese risk their lives every year for even the slenderest hope of making their way to American soil.”

Richard, I do not see the connect here between they way Americans treat themselves, on their own soil, within their own national borders, and how they treat others, in far away, developing countries. Amnesty International certainly does not agree with your assessment that America “brings far more good to the world than evil” – I have already pointed that out. Go read their yearly reports – every one of them since 1996. And what do you mean when you say “your very own Lenin”? I have never quoted Lenin to support any of my views. In fact, I do not agree with Leninism at all. Or Trotsyism, or Maoism, or Stalinism. They’re all very similar in fact.

Richard, unless you can convincingly address all three of these flaws, then it’s case of CHECKMATE as far as I am concerned.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 16, 2005 @ 9:25 pm | Comment

P.S. I’m very sorry for all of the typing errors that I made in my comments above – and I carelessly made numerous!

I am in a big hurry though, as I have a meeting to attend.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 16, 2005 @ 9:44 pm | Comment

Dear Chris,

You say in your comments above that, although you agree completely with my assessment “of the Bush administration’s reasons for invading and occupying Iraq'” you think the rest of your arguments are ” just as wanting as any other on this subject.” My arguments, you say, “are based on as many irrational assumptions as any other…”

Could you please engage more with me on this: just exactly which arguments of mine do you object to?

You say that you “agree completely” with me “that the occupation must be defeated.” If you read my original polemic, you will see that I make it very clear that I do not believe in fighting fire with fire. I do not applaud the terror tactics used by the insurgents. I know that they are not “freedom-fighters” and I have never claimed otherwise.

I do not support the insugents either – and I have never said that I do. Go back and read my original polemic very carefully.

What I do say, is that it is in the world’s interests for the Bush regime to suffer a political and military defeat in Iraq – otherwise, we may, in the future, see more such invasions and occupations, and with it, more widespread atrocities, more loss of human life and environmental devastation, etc. We seem to be in agreement on this, so I am wondering just eactly what it is that you object to in my arguments – since you have not, as yet, outlined them for me.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 16, 2005 @ 9:59 pm | Comment

Dear Richard,

I have NEVER, NEVER, EVER compared the Iraqi insugents to heroes, as you claim. NEVER! Show me where I have ever said this, or even implied it.

Many of the Iraqi insurgents, not doubt, are products of a patriarchal tribal semi-feudal society – and one that is inherrently theocratic. Who knows what kinds of regime may emerge to replace the existing one? Nobody really knows. It’s impossible to predict.

But whatever emerges in post-occupation Iraq, is up to Iraqis to decide and to fight over. You cannot impose a democracy on a society like this one, and especially during a military occupation. Its absurd to think that you could.

The source of all of this violence right now is the occupation iteslf. This is why I think the occupation should end. Of course, this would come as a huge political loss for Washington – and many would also see this as a military defeat too, but they deserve to suffer such a political loss. Had Washington not been so stupid, so arrogant, so callous, in the first place, by trying to occupy Iraq, then Iraq wouldn’t be in the bloody awful mess that it is.

You can try to blame the insugents for this mess – but their behaviour, as atrocious as it may be, is a response to the occupation itself. This is the real source of all of the violence – the occupation itself.

Regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 16, 2005 @ 10:11 pm | Comment

Dear RMH,

You argue, or at least suggest, that Saddam Hussein has been responsible for more deaths than that which has resulted from not one, but two US military conflicts with Iraq. Yoy say that “the Iran/Iraq war and the slaughter of the Kurds/Shia before and after 1991 caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.”

I agree that Saddam does have all of this blood on his hands, but who encouraged Saddam’s regime to invade Iran? Who financially and militarily supported him with this adventure? The United States government. Why? Because the US wanted to keep the Iranian revolution in check. They didn’t want it to spill over into neighbouring Iraq, so they supported Saddam all the way! The US must share in the responsibility for the Iran-Iraq war – which lasted for about eight years, I think, if I am not mistaken.

None of what I have just pointed out above suggests that Saddam’s crimes are in any way any less atrocious, of course. I’m merely pointing out that the US shares in the responsibility for this war.

You also “urge anyone to google the British Lancet study which actually said that BETWEEN 8,000 and 164,000 died.”

You imply that the figure of 100,000 civilian deaths is an exaggeration. The upper estimate for deaths made in the only serious scientific study to date, published in The Lancet, is 194,000 (not 164,000). Professor Richard Garfield – one of the authors of this report, which was conducted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on Iraqi casualties – has said: “The true death toll is far more likely to be on the high-side of our point estimate [98,000] than on the low side.”

The US corporate media has actually been quite silent about the Lancet report – which, as I said, concluded that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, mostly by US bombing. But what is also missing in the media is talk about the Iraqi children’s malnutrition rates which have apparently doubled.

The way the media treated this Lancet report is very interesting. I mean it was mentioned – it’s not that you couldn’t find it. But it was either ignored or downplayed. The standard reaction to it was well, that it was just a sample. How do you know it was accurate? they all asked, and maybe the number was smaller – and they [The Lancet] actually did give a spread, which was 8,000 to 194,000 (not 164,000, as you earlier claimed.)

Let’s look at how these scientists came up with their spread. The highest probability estimate was around 98,000. The immediate reaction has been well, maybe it’s much lower. Yeah, maybe it’s much lower – maybe it’s much higher. In fact they did it very conservatively. They excluded Fallujah because that would have raised the estimate, the extrapolated estimate, they included the Kurdish areas, no fighting there, which would reduce the extrapolated estimate, and in general they did a careful and rather conservative analysis.

But it has either been ignored or the silly claim has been made that, well it’s only an estimate, so maybe it’s too high – true, it’s only an estimate, so maybe it’s too low. In fact that’s the way every study is done of estimated casualties or health studies. But whatever it is, whether it’s 10,000 or 50,000 or 150,000, or 194,000, whatever the number might be, it’s obviously a major atrocity.

Regardless of whether 1,000 Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered or 200,000 – every human life is important. Only 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but just because the number was only 3,000, does this mean that it was any less of an atrocity than the “shock and awe’ that killed somewhere between 30,000 and 55,000 civilians? Are you going to judge the seriousness of these atrocities in this way, by comparing them according to the actual numbers of those murdered?

What happened in the US on September 11th is no more or less of an atrocity and a crime than what has occured, and what is still happening now in Iraq.

I believe in the sanctity of ALL human life. That is why I cannot accept this invasion and occupation as being in any way legitimate.

Furthermore, if you go back and read my original polemic, you will see that I also do not regard the terror tactics and violence of the insurgents as being in any way legitimate. But you have to understand why such violence occurs, why such people resort to this kind of guerilla warfare. It is a response to the occupation itself. It is the occupation itself which is the main source of all of the violence in Iraq.

Ending it will not only save lives, but will also represent a political defeat (and some would also see this as a military defeat) for the hawks in Washington – and this, I believe, would also be a good thing – otherwise the world might see more such invasions, more such attempted occupations, more such carnage and chaos.

Two wrongs never add up to be a right RMH. Never.

Regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 16, 2005 @ 10:54 pm | Comment

Robert Mugabe has training camps(according to the BBC)that have abducted young boys and girls to make an “army’ of thugs. The girls are raped and the boys are brutalized. It helps make them better brutes.
Uganda, is fighting a nasty little was with the Lords Resistance army that uses the same tactics
North Korea, the club med of Northeast Asia, is run by a family of tyrants. Its people starve. But not to worry, when enemies of the state are sent to the gulag, the whole family goes together.
and the list goes on….
And yet:
We have no moral, ethical, philosphical right to change those regimes. We have no legal right. It is up to the people of those countries to decide what kind of governance they want. Even if they are despotic regimes we must not interfere.
Indeed the UN proscribes such interference. Let them die. Let them suffer. Its not our place to decide which countries should exist or perish.
We must, at all costs, avoid violence. Violence begets violence. Blessed are the peacemakers.

And we all fervently hope that the evil hegemon, that scourge of humankind,(it must be true, Amnesty International says so)the United States of AmeriKa, is humilated and defeated. It must be taught a lesson. It must be shown the error of its ways. It must be punished for its arrogance, its hubris,its crimes against humanity.
Only then will we, the citizens of the world, be able to live in peace and harmony. (well, most of us,except…you know the list)
AmeriKa IS the font of all evil. It is the spawn of the devil.
Live live the freedom loving people of the world!!!
Damn that was fun. Brought back memories of those halcyon days of the sixties when folks really knew how to protest, Now Nixon was someone you could REALLY hate!!!!
Ok the sarcastic part of the post is done.
a personal note:
Its always difficult to know what the “truth” is.
We have a tendancy to find the facts to fit our particular bias. I know that even though I am a news addict and a history junkie I still have a problem ascertaining the “truth”
The comment section is a perfect example of this
tendancy. We can always find facts to back up our point of view…And we are chagrined to find out that some folks don’t believe our “facts” Imagine that.
Sooooooooo
Where DO you go to find the “truth”???

January 17, 2005 @ 12:34 am | Comment

Dear RMH,

I am not going to respond to this silly rant of a distortion to my arguments. I have better things to do with my time.

Regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 17, 2005 @ 12:55 am | Comment

Dear Richard (and to all my American friends),

Richard – there is one more facet to this discussion that I would like to explore, and this is with your use of language. I have noticed that, not only do you reduce everything to simplistic terms, like the struggle between “good” and “evil”, but that you also use the word “we” to refer to what the United States, as a nation state, is now doing in Iraq. For example, you say that I have said “time and again OUR purposes were not pure and noble – but that WE did have a chance of really bringing a better system and a better life to the Iraqi people. This is key, and you ignore it – the initial enthusiasm for OUR invasion, even after the brutality of Shock and Awe, even after all the horrors you chronicle….” [my emphasis]

Using the passive voice like this is always very helpful for people like Bush, Rumsfeld, et.al. Mind you, a lot of this propaganda English emanates from Imperial Britain. The British establishment has always used the passive voice. It’s been a weapon of discourse since the 19th century, so that those who committed terrible acts in the old empire could not be identified. Today the British establishment uses “the royal we,” as in, “We think this.” You still hear a lot of that, even these days. It erroneously suggests that those who are making the decisions to bomb countries, to devastate economies, to take part in acts of international piracy involve all of us.

Richard, you seem to internalise this yourself – you are so emotionally attached, you have invested so much of your own emotional energy into the concept of “America” as an imagined community, as a nation, that you cannot bring yourself to acknowledge the fact that the nation you stand for, as a political state, is in fact the world’s biggest and most dangerous terrorist. You ignore Amnesty International’s yearly reports – all of them since 1996, which point this out. Instead, you point to the way that American citizens themselves are treated by the American state, within the confines of US soil. You point to this as evidence that America is “one of the world’s very greatest countries, bringing far more good to the world than evil.” This claim is open to serious challenge Richard – the weight of historical empirical evidence to challenge this is just too overwhelming.

We would all like to be able to think of our own country as being morally good and productive, we all like to feel proud of our achievements, because we somehow imagine such achievements to also be our own. You see this especially with sporting events. The recent and generous response by Americans and Australians and Brits and so on to the victims of the tsunami disaster provide another good example of this. Many who have felt so uncomfortable or even ashamed of “our” policies on asylum seekers and the Iraqi invasion and occupation can feel that finally “we” are doing the right thing. We have not totally closed our hearts to other people’s misery and we are doing what we can with what we have – which is plenty. And we keep wanting to do more.

American is a good country, I have no doubts. I have relatives who live there, and they all tell me so. They say it really isn’t all that different from Australia, in most respects. I know too, that the United States is currently ranked as the 8th best country in the world in which to live by the United Nations Human Development Index – which ranks about 177 countries in the world in terms of general living standards. This is an impressive achievement.

But as soon as one starts to point out all of the atrocities that the US state has committed since, say, the end of WWII, and as soon as one attacks the policies of the US state in Iraq, then the response of many Americans is to rally together in self-defense – to accuse those responsible for such a critique of being fundamentally anti-American. You can witness this type of defensiveness in RMHs last response to my arguments. He distorts my arguments, and dismisses me as an American-basher. The idea that I might be right, or that I might have at least presented a legitimate argument, is just too horrible a thought for many to even contemplate. It challenges everything he has probably ever learnt about America, it challenges his entire “faith” in America, and in what America stands for. Nobody likes to be told that they are living a lie. He even challenges my “facts” – yet all I have ever presented in support of my views are points of evidence which I consider to be empirically verifiable. He can challenge them, if he can, but to date he has hasn’t. He simply chooses to dismiss them outright, because he doesn’t want to believe them. perhaps this is understandable of him.

In a groundbreaking study which is as thought-provoking as it is disturbing, Stanley Cohen’s book States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering deals with public reactions to information, images and appeals about inhumanities. He explores the various states of denial that exist in modern society. “Turning a blind eye” and “burying one’s head in the sand” are two expressions of denial frequently used at an individual and societal level. With worrying regularity, we are saturated with media images of atrocities and suffering from all over the world. These images have, for many, become normalised. They are commonplace. And so, too, is the apparent indifference of many.

Cohen examines how organised atrocities, such as the Holocaust and other genocides, are denied by the perpetrators – who use what Cohen describes as “interpretive denial”, claiming that what is happening is really something else. This is particularly evident in the euphemistic language used by organisations devoted to committing atrocities. The Nazi “euthanasia” programme for killing those with mental disabilities and other supposedly unworthy people was renamed the Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care. Such deliberate misrepresentation is not unique.

There is certainly a special vocabulary used by the politicians in Washington, their military and the media, developed to help render the unthinkable palatable: “incidents,” “vulnerability indexes,” “weapons impacts,” and “resource availability? and of course, our old friend from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, “collateral damage”. In George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” he describes the centrality of language in framing and informing debate. He was particularly critical of the use of euphemisms and the passive voice, so today we have, as I just said, “collateral damage,” “free trade,” and “level playing fields,” and such constructions as “towns were bombed,” “economically viable strike packages” and then of course we also have the personification of America’s weapons, as if they had minds all of their own, like these so-called “smart bombs.” You can compare the rhetoric surrounding the war on terrorism with the kind of language Orwell criticised.

And most journalists now working for the corporate media are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth. They simply cipher and transmit lies. They allow themselves to be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as “functionaries”? – they are functionaries, not journalists.

Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on “normalisation”, as I mentioned earlier. This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns, shells that use depleted uranium). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other “experts” and the mainstream corporate media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public. They banalise death, they work to make death and suffering a banality. And they even turn the act of killing itself into banality. In her well-known work on the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt spoke of the “banality of evil” Well, I’m now speaking of the “banality of murder”!

Rather than denying to yourselves what is happening, rather than wrapping yourselves up in the Stars and Stripes, and denying the realities of what is going on, and rather than launching into a defensive posture by dismissing all those who dare to challenge the American way as being inherently anti-American, it would be better, I would suggest to reclaim for yourselves the values that Americans quite rightly hold dear – the values that have been stolen from your name, as an imagined collective, by those who sit in Washington – who represent particular corporate interests, and who are prepared to kill in order to protect and to further those interest – people who are prepared to kill in your name, in the name of all Americans, financed by your tax dollars, and without even truthfully informing you of most of this, of the true extent and nature of their policies.

It tells us something quite profound about the extent of nationalism’s grip on our individual and collective consciousnesses, when people take such critiques of America’s imperialism as a personal assualt, as a personal attack. I know, and I have said on numerous occasions on this website already, that the overwhelming majority of Americans are decent people, often with hearts as big as gold. I know too, that Americans are desperate to be liked, to be loved, as are we all.

It’s time to break free, psychologically, from the grip that your national flag has on you, and to start seeing yourselves as global citizens rather than simply as Americans, and to start listening to what the rest of the world is trying to tell you all, as a collective.

It’s time to start liberating yourselves, and if you can achieve this, then you will also go a long way towards liberating the rest of us – and for that, you really will all be loved.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 17, 2005 @ 1:42 am | Comment

A small point, and not to throw the thread into a discussion of statistics, but the Lancet study used “cluster sampling”, which is most effective at estimating diffuse events, spread more homogenously through a population, like rates of cancer occurrence. For concentrated events like war deaths in Iraq (a few hot warfare areas, and much larger peaceful areas), it’s not very effective.

Cluster sampling at my apartment building right now would yield an estimate of about 100 occupants, with a confidence interval of 2 to 200, when in fact there are two occupants in the whole building.

What’s wrong with Iraqbodycount.com? At least they used actual reported deaths. I know under- and over-reporting are possible, but at least they are reports, not estimates by an inappropriate statistical method.

January 17, 2005 @ 6:18 am | Comment

Mr. Jones:
Apologies to you sir. It was an over the top, silly rant and an inexpert attempt at sarcasm. Please do not waste your valuble time in responding.
mea culpa.

January 17, 2005 @ 8:19 am | Comment

This is not an argument for your country being “right” or inherently good. There’s a few million Chinese who would go anywhere and do almost anything for a better standard of living.

Mike, you are absolutely correct. I was trying to make a broader point that, despite the volumes of cr4iticisms that can be hurled at the US, much of it justified, it is still the place where more people wanmt to be than any other. Now that doesn’t neutralize the bad things we (and every other country) do and a lot of our leaders are going to go to hell, but the bigger point is that in a shitty world, the US is a lot more of a haven and a pretty decent place compared to omost others.

January 17, 2005 @ 8:25 am | Comment

Mark, whether you know it or not you did indeed compare the insurgents to heroes:

What we have in Iraq right now is, I suppose, the equivalent of a kind of Vichy Government being set up. And historically, resistance to this type of situation has always been atrocious, has always been bloody. It has always involved terrorism.
You can imagine if Australia or American had been occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War, the kind of resistance there would have been, the kind of terror tactics that would have been employed.

By drawing these examples of free people subjugated by brutal dictators (the Nazis and the Japanese of WWII) and saying it is equivalent to the insurgents vs. the US, you are clearly positioning the insurgents as heroes who, whether they want to or not, must commit bloody atrocities to overcome their oppressors. If you can’t see this, you are being either disingenuous, confused or dense. I am guessing it is the second, as you are not dense and I don’t think you would be disingenuous, at least not intentionally so.

Of course I use “We” when referring to the Americans — I am an American. We lost in Vietnam, we won in WWII, we fucked up in Iraq — what on earth is wrong with saying “we” I would say 9.9 out of 10 Americans speak of America in the third person. Anything wrong with that?

Look – when you say that the US cannot and should not hand over the keys to the insurgents, what you are really saying is that the US mission in Iraq should prevail – which, when it comes down to it, means that you want to see the in insurgency crushed. If I am wrong in reading you like this, then please explain to me the difference. You are being extremely ambiguous, to say the least!

I would like to see the insugency crushed, as all moral people would. But I don’t believe America necessarily has to crush it. The Iraqis will ultimately prevail because they, the people of Iraq, do NOT want this insurgency of militant minority Sunnis to rule Iraq again. I’m hoping they will fight and overcome the insurgency, or it will die of asphyxiation once the Americans are gone.

I’m not predicting a successful democracy in Iraq, by the way. I think it’ll never happen, at least not in our lifetimes. But once they have a functioning government, probably a US-hating theocracy ultimately, they should be able to control the insurgents. The fuel driving support for the insurgents is the US. Once we’re out of the picture, they may well disintegrate.

Anyway, I won’t go through your comments and argue because it would literally take me all day. I will say this, however: Your arguments are in no way new. I started reading Noam Chomsky 20 years ago and I know the scripts. I know the charges. I know we (the US) did and do dreadful things. I don’t, however, classify us as the world’s biggest terrorist nation. You can show me spreadheets and flowcharts and elegant arguments proving otherwise until the proverbial cows come home. I know the arguments, as I said, and a lot of them are true and a lot of them are built on sand. I’ve read Chomsky’s critics, too, and I have seen plenty of examples of his sometimes very shoddy research, overstatements and generalizations.

As I mentioned in my post, you tend to quote people like Chomsky, Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk as though they are legitimate sources. They are not. They have as much of an agenda as you, and we always know in advance the conclusions they (and you) will reach: that the US is an international rogue nation responsible for much if not most of the world’s suffering. Fisk is so disrepuitable, so often wrong and idiotic that his very name has come to be synonymous with “error” (or BS). Thus, to Fisk an article is to go through it and show all the lies, err, errors. Using him as a primary source doesn’t speak well for your argument.

I will never win in my arguments against you. You have been schooled to be a first-rate argumenter and evangelist, and as a paid communicator I acknowledge your skill. I noticed in one comment to Lirelou you used his name nearly 10 times (“You see, Lirelou, what I’m saying is….”). This is a sign of a trained communicator; this is praise, not criticism. But it also tells me you’re well rehearsed and you know where the chinks in the armor are. So argument will be futile; you’ll always be able to pull something out of a hat to show you are right, at least to your own satisfaction. Again, a great skill, and if Bush could do this I’d respect him a lot more. But it makes argument something of a waste of time.

If you go through this blog you will see an unceasing criticism of our current government, a vertitable torrent of scorn, contempt and anger. I am no member of the “America, Love it or Leave it” contingent. But I am a deep believer in perspective. And I am always willing to change my viewpoint in the face of new evidence. I went to China as a true enthusiast for the CCP, and returned with, shall we say, a somewhat different perspective.

The irony is you say it is I who am painting the good/evil scenario, which I can only ascribe to a form of projection. I qualify every description of the Americans by stating that they did the wrong thing, they screwed up, they failed and they will lose. Am I really painting them as angels? Hardly. But the insurgents are evil, and I have never, ever read a rational person defend them — you are the very first. I have never heard or read a rational person (or, frankly, anyone at all) say they want the insurgents to win. You are the only one.

Now, that doesn’t make you right or wrong necessarily. Most people in Germany in 1939 would have told you Hitler was a gift sent from God, so the majority isn’t always right (look at our last election). But you are way over on the fringes, and I am happy to see that not a single reader of this blog has commented that they agree with you that the insurgents should win in Iraq. Not one. I strongly suggest you re-evaluate your position on this topic, because I am afraid it slots you in a place you don’t want to be and makes you look bad. I mean, like really, really bad.

And please, don’t respond with a polemic. I know the stories you have to tell. They are old news. They’re also full of holes and qualifiers, and many need desperately to be put in perspective. As I’ve said a million times now, America has screwed up beyond belief. But at least I am free to say that, and I can think of plenty of great things America has done, and I won’t allow the ugliness to blind me from the good.

If I sound a bit short, forgive me. I didn’t get enough sleep last night, and waking up to comments of infinite length isn’t the best way to start the morning.

January 17, 2005 @ 9:43 am | Comment

Hi, Richard. I completely agree with you, of course.
Just one point: how could you be a true enthusiast for the CCP? Didn’t you know the history of the country you went to? Didn’t you know what communism was? Or you were a child, perhaps…

Regards.

January 17, 2005 @ 10:15 am | Comment

how could you be a true enthusiast for the CCP? Didn’t you know the history of the country you went to? Didn’t you know what communism was? Or you were a child, perhaps…

I had stars in my eyes. I was dazzled by the economic recovery and convinced (based on hearsay and anecdotal evidence) that the new leadership was reform-minded and fair. My knowledge of China’s history after Tiananmen Square was fuzzy. I thought it was a new country and a new government. Live and learn.

January 17, 2005 @ 10:59 am | Comment

Well said!!!

I’m not sure about the “war for oil” angle, however. Afghanistan meets the bill of a nation without oil, and they were the first target. Moreover, Saddam was selling his oil, so from a market perspective unseating him brought greater uncertainty. Your logic on oil does apply to the First Gulf War, which of course triggered a massive U.S. presence in Arabia, which triggered Osama Bin Laden’s rise, etc. etc.

January 17, 2005 @ 7:33 pm | Comment

Thanks Lirelou. Of course, we had no choice but to invade Afghanistan. Any president following September 11 who would even hesitate to act on that inevitability would have been perceived as incompetent or worse. I seriously doubt we would have invaded Iraq if they had no oil, although the Bush family’s generations-old grudge against Saddam might have been enough.

I’ve read your own exchanges with Mark, whom I really respect but fear is under an almost cult-like spell. It was that dialogue that inspired this post to begin with, so thanks.

January 17, 2005 @ 8:00 pm | Comment

Dear Richard,

You say that “I am happy to see that not a single reader of this blog has commented that they agree with you that the insurgents should win in Iraq. Not one.” Obviously you did not read Chris’ earlier entry, above. Scroll up and have a look. Addressing his comment to me, he wrote: “I agree completely that the occupation must be defeated.”

Richard, you also say: “I have never, ever read a rational person defend them — you are the very first. I have never heard or read a rational person (or, frankly, anyone at all) say they want the insurgents to win. You are the only one.”

Obviously you do not read very much, or at least you do not read very widely. Let me list just a few of the people who have argued that it is in the world’s interest to support the Iraqi resistance, just off the top of my head:

* Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) – see his numerous articles in The Guardian.
* John Pilger – the Emmy-awarding winning documentary maker and print journalist.
Tariq Ali – author, journalist, film-maker and historian. See his essay published in The Guardian on November 3, 2003 – titled: ““Resistance is the first step toward Iraqi independence—This is the classic initial stage of guerrilla warfare against a colonial occupation.”
* James Petras – Emeritus Professor State University of New York, Binghamton. See his essay, “Support the Iraqi Resistance!” at globalresearch.ca
* Seamus Milne – the Guardian journalist – see The Guardian, July 1, 2004.
* Dr. Susan Watkins – see her essay, “Vichy on the Tigres” published in Harper’s
last December, and in the academic journal, New Left Review No.28 – July-August 2004.

Of course, Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn can be added to this list, but also bare in mind that thousands of people have written letters to the editor sections of various mainstream newspapers in support of these writers – though, many have also written in letters opposing their views as well of course!

Also bare in mind that large numbers of people, from all walks of life and from all age groups, have been taking to the streets protesting the occupation, and explicitly supporting the Iraqi resistance. In Rome, last December 13th, for example, thousands of people marched through the city centre in support of the Iraqi resistance.

A good number of US soldiers, serving in Iraq, have also expressed empathy for the Iraqi resistance. Such empathy does not necessarily indicate support, but it is meaningful and significant nevertheless. One US Marine Officer, for example, in response to a mortar attack on a US base, was reported in the New York Times on May 2nd as saying “we don’t begrudge them. We’d do the same thing if some foreign dudes rolled into San Diego and set up shop.”

Richard, you say: “As I mentioned in my post, you tend to quote people like Chomsky, Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk as though they are legitimate sources. They are not.”

What you fail to recognize here is that I not only quote from these three people, but also from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Amnesty International, The Lancet, and numerous others sources. I have rarely quoted Chomsky, Cockburn and Fisk at all. On some occasions yes, but I hardly rely on them. How carefully do you actually read any of my polemics?

Rather than trying to challenge my arguments empirically, you instead try to discredit my views by dismissing a few of my sources – sources that I don’t rely on very often anyway! Opposition to the war and the occupation , following a broadly Chomsky position, if you insist, is not based on hatred of the USA, but a broader historical view, a different analysis of US foreign policy. On the basis of that analysis the war cannot be supported because the war is simply a continuation of that foreign policy, which has little to do with democracy and human rights. The US implementation of a true democracy simply will not happen – such a democracy will inevitably challenge US supremacy in the area.

I have enormous respect for Chomsky partly because he is a first class debater. I once heard a debate he had with Richard Perle. He demolished Perle. Chomsky used example after example to back up his case, cited documents etc. Perle was left completely floundering, at which point he personalised it, attempting to smear or stereotype Chomsky.

This is what you are doing. Rather than challenging my arguments with good, solid empirical evidence, you try to discredit me by stereotyping me as a radical, and by stereotyping a small number of people whose views I have, at times, mentioned. I do not rely on Chomsky or Fisk as my sources. I use mostly primary evidence to support my views – NOT secondary sources.

Finally, I must reject this claim that I have been somehow treating the Iraqi insurgents as “heroes”. Not so Richard. I do indeed say that “What we have in Iraq right now is, I suppose, the equivalent of a kind of Vichy Government being set up. And historically, resistance to this type of situation has always been atrocious, has always been bloody. It has always involved terrorism” To say this, does not imply that I regard the insurgents, the resistance, as “heroes.”

What I am noting is this: that it has become ever clearer that the Iraqi resistance is in fact a classic resistance movement with widespread support waging an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the occupying armies. Their tactics are overwhelmingly in line with those of resistance campaigns throughout modern history, targeting both the occupiers themselves and the local police and military working for them.

I am not the only person who has compared the US occupation and its attempt to set up a client government to that of Vichy. John Pilger also argues this, and Dr. Susan Watkins, in her essay titled “Vichy on the Tigris”, argues the same. Watkims writes: “In June 1940 the French Army, like its modern Iraqi counterpart, collapsed in face of the German Blitzkrieg without a serious fight. Within a month French National Assembly deputies gathered at Vichy had voted, 569 to 80, in favour of a collaborationist regime under Marshal Pétain. The Vichy government was swiftly recognized by the US and other powers, and the majority of non-Jewish French settled down to life under the Occupation. It was two years before the maquis began to offer serious resistance. Elsewhere in Europe, the pattern was similar. The Germans were efficient in organizing indigenous support: Quisling in Norway, the Croatian Ustashi and SS-trained Bosnian and Kosovan regiments in Yugoslavia, Iron Cross in Romania, Arrow Cross in Hungary. In their classical form, twentieth-century resistance movements were slow to constitute themselves.”

Richard, you want to homogenize the Iraqi resistance, by putting them all in the same boat – by seeing them all as murderers, as “evil-doers”. This is a MISTAKE. The resistance is not homogenous. Politically, the Iraqi resistance has been heterogeneous and fragmentary, lacking the established party networks crucial to most previous anti-occupation movements. It includes Nasserites, former Baathists, secular liberals and social democrats, multi-hued mosque-based networks, and splits from the collaborationist Iraqi Communist and Dawa parties. American observers have commented on the social breadth of an opposition that draws on support from nearly every class, both urban and rural: “Its ranks include students, intellectuals, former soldiers, tribal youths, farmers and Islamists”. [This quote Richard, comes not from Chomsky, but from Ahmed Hashim, ‘Terrorism and Complex Warfare in Iraq’, Jamestown Foundation, 18 June 2004.]
Ideologically, nationalism and Islamism—‘for God and Iraq’—are potent calls, but there are ALSO elements of Third World anti-imperialism and pan-Arabism too. It remains to be seen whether these groups can establish some equivalent of a national liberation front, to unite religious and secular groups around the central demand for the expulsion of all foreign troops.

Watkins notes too that: “Externally isolated and internally unsynchronized, the Iraqi maquis nevertheless possesses a number of distinct resources. First, strong social networks: resilient clan and extended-family connexions; city neighbourhood quarters that retain some cohesion; mosques that offer a safe local gathering place, unimaginable in occupied Europe. Arab writers have pointed out the attendant weaknesses of these forms: particularism, local rivalry, lack of coordination, the treachery or opportunism of unaccountable demagogues, a fringe of criminality—though within this fluid, oral and highly mobilized environment, leaders can also be forced into taking more resolute stands, to retain their supporters.” Notice Richard, that she too, refers to the Iraqi resistance as “maquis”.

Richard, as Watkins and others have also noted, the Iraqi resistance also draw strength from their “vivid historical memories of battles finally won against the last imperial occupier. The modern Iraqi nation is a creation of the struggle against British colonialism, after London seized Mesopotamia from Istanbul in 1917. The countrywide uprising in the summer of 1920—small tribal sheikhs and sayyids along the Euphrates joining with ex-Ottoman officials in Baghdad and hard-hit northern merchants from Mosul—forced London to retreat from direct administration on the Delhi model. Its solution, ‘ruling without governing’ as the Secretary of State for the Colonies later defined it, was to set up a monarchy dependent on British arms for survival, backed by a League of Nations Mandate authorizing ‘all necessary measures’. The British High Commissioner remained the highest power in the land and, when the Mandate expired, the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty guaranteed British control over Iraq’s foreign policy, seaport, railways, airbases and, in times of war, security forces. Compliant local notables signed up to the Treaty, willing to forgo external independence—as one of them put it—as long as they had internal control. The majority of the population rejected it. When resistance broke out in 1922, the British High Commissioner arrested political leaders, banned nationalist parties and famously subdued rebellious tribes with punitive bombing and mustard gas.”

Richard, as in the German-occupied Europe of 1940–41, native collaborationist regimes typically offer an initial degree of relief, after the humiliation of foreign invasion, as well as lucrative business or administrative positions to servants of the new order. The client government in Baghdad today enjoys far less autonomy than Pétain’s regime in Vichy; in that respect it is closer to Quisling’s in Oslo. But it has a basis of support from an array of privileged groups in the post-invasion landscape—not just carpet-baggers on CIA or MI6 payrolls but technocrats, eyeing career opportunities; a large swathe of the semi-expatriate middle class and the sanction-busting nouveaux riches; traditionally collaborationist rural families like the Yawars, leaders of the Shammar tribe in the Mosul region, who sided with the British in 1920; and the large Kurdish population in the North. So yes, there are some who, for now at least, are supporting the US occupation, and who do have an interest in the up-coming elections. But they are hardly a majority.

Formally speaking, the Anglo-American invasion has been stripped of its original pretexts. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Human-rights violations have branded the “liberators”. The need to bring democracy to Iraq, let alone the rest of the Middle East, has become less pressing. It is the strength of the Iraqi resistance—and it alone—that has led to widespread uneasiness in the Western establishments. Washington think tanks have begun to debate exit strategies, estimating the costs to US political credibility (“high, or unacceptable?’”), assessing “indicators for withdrawal.” The American electorate has turned against the war since April 2004: 56 per cent of voters now think the invasion was a mistake

Yet those who shook their heads at the pre-emptive proclamations of the 2002 National Security Strategy have been unwilling to see it founder. With the upsurge of resistance in Iraq has come a flood of liberal imperialist advice on how to run the Occupation better. Richard, I think you fall into this category.

But anybody who believes that it is fundamentally wrong to invade and occupy another country, to colonise it, to plunder the resources of another, which, incidentally, will always entail the “necessary” curtailment of civil liberties and freedoms – which is why the US regime in Washington is simply out to replace Saddam’s regime with something similar – anybody who believes such imperialism to be morally wrong, to be fundamentally wrong, needs to take sides. Either you support it, or you don’t.

Graham Greene’s The Quiet American , is a work that is primarily about human beings involved in an ethical dilemma. His Sartrian Existentialism demands that “le culte du moi” (the cult of the individual) be honoured. Nothing can be accomplished without engagement accompanied by “angoisse” (anguish). No pain, no social change. And more. History will dynamically be superimposed, just as it is in The Quiet American, on the actions of those who go about business as usual in daily life. You can exercise your precious American freedom for only so long, if you’re evading responsibility. For Greene there is a “cowardice implicit in living an ‘uncommitted’ life in a world on the brink of destruction.” He likens Americans to dumb lepers who have lost their bells, “wandering the world, meaning no harm.” I wouldn’t be so kind. US soldiers and their supporters are committed cowards of a different sort, overwhelming “enemies” with the distance that new technology makes possible.

“Sooner or later … one has to take sides. If one is to remain human,” says Heng addressing Thomas Fowler in Greene’s The Quiet American.

Indeed we do Richard. Indeed we do. And because I am morally opposed to this sort of bloody murderous imperialist adventure, because I do not buy this Randian “the ends justifies the means” argument, I, like many, many others, like a growing number of others, I choose to lend my solidarity with the cause of national liberation in Iraq. The US-led forces have no business there. As Dr. Susan Watkins say, “the Iraqi maquis deserves full support in fighting to drive them out. “

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 17, 2005 @ 9:01 pm | Comment

Dear lirelou,

I thought it was common knowledge that the US invaded Afghanistan, and set up a client regime there, because they wanted to seize control over the massive oil and natural gas reserves in the Caspian Sea. The US, for many years, supported the Taliban because it originally thought they would be co-operative on this matter.

IN FACT, US TAXPAYERS EVEN PAID FOR THE ENTIRE SALARIES OF EVERY TALIBAN GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL UP UNTIL AS RECENTLY AS 1999.

There is a huge volume of articles about this, and a huge and overwhelming volume of empirically verifiable evidence to support this view.

Refer to, just to name but one article, “The New Great Game: US Imperialism and Caspian Oil” in The Guardian, February 2, 2000.

Lirelou – why do you think President Bush has appointed a former aide to the American oil company Unocal, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to Afghanistan? The nomination was announced on December 31, 2002, only nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul.

The nomination underscores the real economic and financial interests at stake in the US military intervention in Central Asia. Khalilzad is intimately involved in the long-running US efforts to obtain direct access to the oil and gas resources of the region, largely unexploited but believed to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf.

Lirelou, it is a well documented fact that a consortium headed by Unocal had for years sought to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad gas field through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. Later they put together a larger consortium, the Central Asia Pipeline Project, to carry oil from the Chardzhou oil field essentially following the same route.

John J. Maresca, vice president of Unocal, in testimony before a House of Representatives committee (February 12, 1998), spoke of the tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves in the Caspian region and promoted the plan to build a pipeline through Afghanistan as the cheapest route for transporting the oil to Asian markets. He stated that the Taliban controlled the territory through which the pipeline would extend. Pointing out that most nations did not recognise that government, he emphasised that the project could not begin until a recognised government was in place.

Yet a major reason for Washington’s support of the Taliban between 1994 and 1997 was the expectation that they would swiftly conquer the whole country, enabling Unocal to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. Pakistan, the US and Saudi Arabia “are responsible for the very existence and maintenance of the Taliban.”

In his book Taliban, Central Asian expert Ahmed Rashid said: “Impressed by the ruthlessness and willingness of the then-emerging Taliban to cut a pipeline deal, the State Department and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As recently as 1999, US taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official…”

Unocal had even secured agreement from the Taliban to build the pipeline, according to Hugh Pope, writing in the Wall Street Journal.
The Washington Post on May 25, 2001, reported that the US government “pledged another $43 million in assistance to Afghanistan, [the Taliban government] raising total aid this year to $124 million and making the United States the largest humanitarian donor to the country.” This was less than four months before the September 11 attacks.

In an article in the British Daily Mirror, John Pilger stated: “When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.”

“With secret U.S. government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from the Soviet Central Asia through Afghanistan. ..”

“Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush’s concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin … Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.”

An Argentine oil company, Bridas, was also in the bidding to build a pipeline. The same month Taliban representatives were being given red carpet treatment by Unocal in Texas, another delegation went to Buenos Aires to meet with Bridas executives. There was an intense campaign by Unocal and Washington to outmaneuver Bridas. The Taliban played one company against the other.

The Taliban and Osama bin Laden were demanding, as part of the deal, that Unocal rebuild the infrastructure in Afghanistan and allow them access to the oil in several places. Unocal rejected this demand.

Nevertheless, the Bush Administration held a series of negotiations with the Taliban early in 2001, despite the developing rift with them over the pipeline scheme. Laila Helms, who was hired as the public relations agent for the Taliban government, brought Rahmatullah Hashimi, an advisor to Mullah Omar, to Washington as recently as March 2001. (Helms is the niece of Richard Helms, former chief of the CIA and former ambassador to Iran.) One of the meetings was held on August 2, just one month before September 11, when Christina Rocca, in charge of Asian Affairs at the State Department, met Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salem Zaef in Islamabad. Rocca has had extensive connections with Afghanistan including supervising the delivery of Stinger missiles to the mujahideen in the 1980s. She had been in charge of contacts with Islamist fundamentalist guerrilla groups for the CIA.

“At one moment during one of the negotiations, US representatives told the Taliban, ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,”‘ said Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author of Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth.

When Washington decided to break with the Taliban, they took advantage of the fact that the UN had continued to refuse to recognise their government. Then, of course, the Taliban suddenly became more vulnerable after September 11, for “harboring” Osama bin Laden. Thus it became much easier to win international support for bombing them. Another compelling reason may have been that the Northern Alliance forces, with whom the U.S. would have to join forces, controlled the portion of the country near Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, whose governments were helping to support the Alliance. This offered convenience for the U.S. military to base troops in those countries. The Northern Alliance consists largely of ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks. The Taliban is made up of Pashtun tribesmen- along with large numbers from Pakistan, Arab countries, and elsewhere- who came to be trained and to fight in Afghanistan as well as in Chechnya, Kashmir, Bosnia, Kosovo, and former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

All of these disparate mujahideen forces, led by feudal landholders and warlords and Osama bin Laden’s organization, were incubated by the CIA in the 1980s when the largest-ever covert operation was carried out in Afghanistan. It was directed against the newly-born government of the Saur Revolution (which gave equal rights to women and set up health care, literacy, housing, job creation, and land reform programs) and then against the Soviets. The mujahideen, who had been trained and armed by the CIA, murdered teachers, doctors, and nurses, tortured women for not wearing the veil, and shot down civilian airliners with U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles.

The story sold to the public by the media is that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on December 24,1979, and then in response, the U.S. and some Islamic countries fought back to repel the invasion. Actually, President Jimmy Carter secretly approved CIA efforts to try to topple the government of Afghanistan in July 1979, knowing that the U.S. actions were likely to provoke Soviet intervention. Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration, confirmed this in an interview with the French publication Le Nouvel Observateur.

lirelou – a remarkable description of CIA operations in Afghanistan can be found in the book, Victory-The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union. The book carries many boastful accounts by William Casey, director of the CIA under President Reagan. It paints a vivid picture of how Casey, himself, convinced the Saudi Arabians to match CIA funding of the mujahideen, and how all the money, and, training were funneled through the Pakistan Intelligence Service (ISI).

According to the book, “The strategy [to bring down the USSR under Reagan] attacked the very heart of the Soviet system and included … [among several other key operations] substantial financial and military support to the Afghan resistance (sic), as well as supplying the mujahideen personnel to take the war into the Soviet Union itself … [and a] campaign to reduce dramatically Soviet hard currency earnings by driving down the price of oil with Saudi cooperation and limiting natural gas exports to the West…
We learn about the quantities of weapons that were delivered-including Stinger missiles and increasingly sophisticated armaments. “Tens of thousands of arms and ammunition were going through…every year” rising to 65,000 tons by 1985. Approximately 100 Afghans living abroad were schooled in the “art of arms shipping.” Two-week courses in “anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns, mine laying and lifting, demolitions, urban warfare, and sabotage were offered for thousands of fighters. Twenty thousand mujahideen were being pumped out every year by these schools dubbed ‘CIA U’ by some wags…
“Specially trained units working inside the Soviet Union would be equipped with…rocket launchers and high-tech explosives provided by the CIA. They were to seek out Soviet civilian and military targets for sabotage.” This is just a small taste of the details revealed in Victory.

The disparate warlord-led factions, including the Taliban, all part of the CIA-financed mujahideen, have continued to fight each other for years. As always, the ascendancy of one group over another inevitably leads to more fractiousness and warfare.

The newly established “interim” government of Afghanistan, conjured up by George W. and his entourage, purports to include all of these militias along with various Pashtun warlords who are linked with the Taliban.

This “interim” government is headed by Hamid Karzai who, according to the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, has been a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s, when he helped the CIA in Afghanistan. Karzai supported the Taliban and was a consultant for Unocal.

George W. Bush’s envoy to the new government, Zalmay Khalizad, as i pointed out earlier lirelou, also worked for Unocal. He drew up the risk analysis for the pipeline in 1997, lobbied for the Taliban, and took part in negotiations with them. After acquiring U.S. citizenship, Khalizad became a special advisor to the State Department during the Reagan Administration and a key liaison with the mujahideen in the 1980s. He was under secretary of defense in the administration of the elder George Bush; headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department; worked for the right-wing think tank Rand Corporation; and was placed on the National Security Council where he reports to National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. Rice is an expert on Central Asia, and is a member of the Board of Chevron. Both Khalizad and Rice had long advocated the establishment of U.S. military bases in the region.

The connections between the Bush Administration, the oil, energy, and military-industrial corporations, and intrigues in Central Asian and the Caucasus are very intimate ones. Here are only a few:
The proposed Baku-Ceyhan pipeline is represented by the law firm of Baker & Botts. The principal attorney is James Baker, former secretary of state and chief spokesman for the Bush campaign in the struggle over Florida votes.

In 1994, Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, was a member of Kazakhstan’s Oil Advisory Board and helped broker a deal between Chevron and Kazakhstan. Enron Corporation, closely linked with Bush and Cheney, conducted the feasibility study for the $2.5 billion Trans-Caspian pipeline-a joint venture with Turkmenistan, Bechtel Corp, and General Electric.

Moreover, Enron had a $3 billion investment in the Dabhol power plant near Bombay, India, one of its largest-ever projects constituting the single biggest direct foreign investment in India’s history. There was massive public opposition to the project in India, ultimately including the Indian government, due to the huge costs to consumers (700 percent more than other projects). Enron’s survival depended on getting a cheap source of gas and oil to save the project. This could be solved by building a branch of the proposed natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to terminate in Multan near the India border. In addition, in 1997, Enron announced it was going to spend over $1 billion building and improving the lines between the Dabhol plant and India’s pipeline network. In other words the gas would be piped from Multan, Pakistan, to New Delhi, thence to Bombay and the Enron plant.
Enron was expecting also to cash in on the main spur of the pipeline ending on the Pakistan coast from which hydrocarbon supplies would be exported to the other vast Asian markets. Clearly, developments in Afghanistan were critical of Enron. George W. became president just at the point when the India project was in serious trouble. One month later, Vice President Dick Cheney moved into action and held his first secret meeting with Enron CEO Kenneth Lay. The Bush Administration is refusing to reveal the details of this and subsequent consultations with Lay, even in the face of a General Accounting Office suit against Cheney for release of the papers. Nevertheless, it has been documented that the vice president’s energy task force did change a draft energy proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural gas production in India in February 2001. The amendment was clearly targeted to help Enron’s Dabhol plant. Later, Cheney stepped in to help Enron collect its $64 million debt during a June 27 meeting with India’s opposition leader Sonia Gandhi. These are but some revelations concerning the machinations by Bush and his cohorts to help Enron regarding the India deal. Some of the negotiations with the Taliban, such as those led by Christina Rocca, to promote the Trans-Afghan pipeline and thus help save Enron, coincidentally transpired just prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Brown & Root-a business unit of Halliburton Company where Vice President Cheney was CEO until taking office-will be upgrading the U.S. air base in Uzbekistan. According to an article in Stars and Stripes, “Brown & Root scouts traveled to Central Asia [including Afghanistan] to check out U.S. bases…. By mid-June [2001] the contractor is expected to take charge of base camp maintenance, airfield services, and fuel supplies. For troops’ welfare the company will run the dining halls and laundry service and will oversee the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation program.”

Brown & Root perform similar lucrative services at other bases, including those in Bosnia and Kosovo-most notably the giant and permanent Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo located (along with satellite bases) conveniently near the soon-to-be-constructed Trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline.

“If one looks at the map of the big American bases created for the war in Afghanistan, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipelines to the Indian Ocean,” says Uri Averny, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, writing in the daily Ma’ariv in Israel.
In the name of conducting the war, the U.S. also won agreement to station troops at former Soviet airfields in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and to build a long-term base in Kyrgyzstan. Kazakhstan is next.

The big payoff for the Bush Administration is the entrenchment of a permanent U.S. military presence in oil-rich Central Asia-which is also wide open to another coveted resource-rich region, Siberia. Thus, realization of other goals could be closer at hand: the further balkanization of central Asian and Trans-Caucasus nations into easily controlled emirate-like entities, lacking any real sovereignty; and further military encirclement of China. All of this is icing on the cake-the “cake” being the Trans-Afghanistan pipelines, with their access to and dominance of the South, Southeast, and East Asian markets.

Another major goal of Bush Administration policies appears to be to obstruct or control China’s access to the oil and natural gas of Central Asia. China has a rapidly increasing need for those sources of energy. It has relatively few reserves within its borders, the largest being in Tibet. China has joint partnership with US companies for the development of its oil. Nevertheless, as is always the case, those US-based oil conglomerates would much prefer to get their hands on the whole pie and not just a large slice. That includes unfettered access to Chinese consumers.

Potentially vast sources of petroleum and natural gas have been discovered in the South China Sea. A struggle is looming among the littoral states regarding jurisdiction over these offshore reserves, with China laying claim to a large portion of the sea including the Spratly and Paracel Islands. The Philippine government is one of the disputants over this territory. The Philippines are strategically located in this region and adjacent the critically important sea lanes through which oil and other goods are shipped to and from Japan, China, and Korea.

Brown & Root just built the largest offshore oil platform in the world for Shell Philippines. The current U.S. “war on terrorism” military operations in the Philippines are clearly linked to major oil considerations.

Bush’s perpetual war is already headed towards Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Iran-not so coincidentally, these are all rich in petroleum. So too, the ongoing U.S.-backed brutal Israeli war against the Palestinians continues to be about maintaining U.S. hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East. U.S. military support to Colombia is now openly admitted by the Bush Administration to be aimed at protecting pipelines and putting down the peoples’ insurgency. Similarly, the recent US-backed coup attempt against the Chavez government of Venezuela had much to do with controlling that country’s petroleum riches.

Lirelou (and Richard, if you areading) – please notice that I have not used or quoted or referred to Noam Chomsky – not even once! I use sources as diverse as The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and numerous other sources.

Lirelou – of course the present Iraqi invasion and occupation is about oil. Who are you trying to kid?

And Lirelou, I haven’t even got around to mentioning all of the death and suffering and devastation that the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has caused.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 17, 2005 @ 9:43 pm | Comment

Mark,
Minor footnotes, as I can hardly argue as well that which has been argued here, and you know where my vote lies whatever the shrub’s legion of faults.
One, You won’t find Mayan indians in El Salvador. The people are Mestizos, which in El Salvador’s case means persons of largely (but not exclusively) Indian blood who speak Spanish and whose religious practices generally conform to standard Spanish catholicism. While some Maya did inhabit El Salvador, it was culturally Aztec prior to the conquest. (As was Nicaraqua, both outposts of the Aztec empire) Thus the Nahuatl indigenous place names. Their next door neighbor, Honduras, was much more heavily Mayan, which has often prompted me to wonder just how far back in history their roots of mutual dislike go. (Aztecs versus Mayans?) Honduras too is Mestizo, and has a slightly larger (but very low) percentage of Indians. If you’re looking for Mayans in Central America, Guatemala is the place. (Although Belize has a few. Some years ago the editor of their local newspaper was an Aussie who had fought with an independent (commando) company in WWII)
Two, one of the reasons Batista fell is that the U.S. was NOT supporting him. Military support to the Cuban government had been cut off, and the press and popular feeling in the U.S. in the mid to late ’50s was far more favorable to Fidel.

January 17, 2005 @ 10:24 pm | Comment

Dear Richard,

I just remembered one other “credible” person who openly and explicitly supports the Iraqi resistance, which you should add to the list which I have already provided for you above. The well-know, very much loved Indian author, Arandhati Roy – winner of the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel, The God of Small Things, and winner of last year’s Sydeny PEACE PRIZE.

Roy donated all of her Booker Prize money to help the impoverished rural Indians of the Narmada Valley, which was being savaged by a long-term government project to build 3,200 dams along the Narmada River, altering its course 90 degrees and displacing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Their villages and homes were to be submerged in the name of ‘‘the greater common good”.

Last year she donated all $50,000 of the money that she received for winning the Sydney Peace Prize to Aboriginal activisits.

“Siding with the Iraqi resistance movement,” she argues, “does not mean endorsing every action it carries out in an attempt to defeat the foreign occupation forces or endorsing the political views of any individual or group involved in such a resistance movement.”

As Roy explained in her August 16 speech when she received the peace prize: “Like most resistance movements, [the Iraqis] combine a motley range of assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery and criminality. But if we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity.

“Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the US and its allied governments to withdraw from Iraq.”

In a television programme screened by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, she called on people to “become the Iraqi resistance”.

She said activists and resistance movements “need to understand that Iraq is engaging in the frontlines of empire and we have to throw our weight behind the Iraqi resistance”.

“We can’t assume that resistance means terrorism because that would be playing right into the hands of the occupation”

But she told ABC radio on Wednesday that she did not mean people should engage in violence against multinational forces.

“One wasn’t urging them to join the army, but to become the resistance, to become part of what ought to be non-violent resistance against a very violent occupation,” she said, adding that the term resistance needed to be redefined.

“We can’t assume that resistance means terrorism because that would be playing right into the hands of the occupation,” she said.

This is where another, a fourth serious flaw in your arguments lie Richard – you, as I said in my previous reponse, always try to homoginse the Iraqi resistance, you want to put them all into the same boat, and treat all of them as though they were Islamic fundamentalists who carry out acts of atrocities. As I pointed out to you from the very beginning, in my original polemic, there is also a great deal of peaceful resistance going on in Iraq – but it is rarely reported by the corporate media.

The other thing which I want to raise again Richard, is your attempt earlier to discredit my views by calling into question the legitimacy of my sources. You say that Fisk, Cockburn and Chomsky are not legitimate. Well look Richard, how often have I ever used Fisk? I have only ever used him to support my own views on ONE occasion to date on the pages of Peking Duck. Only ONCE! I have only ever used Cockburn on one occasion too! And as for Chomsky, well, how often do I use him as a source? Maybe what, five times altogether, at the most.

If you look at my sources, you will see that I draw from a very wide diversity. In fact, I use The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and even The Wall Street Journal more consistently than any other sources!

As I said Richard, your arguments are seriously flawed – morally, philosophically, and empirically. Unless you can address all four flaws, then I’m afraid it’s a case of CHECKMATE! And you need to address these using empirically verifiable sources – like I do.

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 17, 2005 @ 11:09 pm | Comment

Dear lirelou,

O.K. the El Salavadoreans that were butchered in genocidal numbers by the Reagan administration-backed death squads were Mestizos, not Mayans. I stand corrected!

But you distort the US relationship with Batista when you say: “one of the reasons Batista fell is that the U.S. was NOT supporting him. Military support to the Cuban government had been cut off, and the press and popular feeling in the U.S. in the mid to late ’50s was far more favorable to Fidel.”

True Lirelou, what you say here is correct. But you conveniently leave out the fact that, up until 1958-59, the US state had supported Batista.

Remember lirelou, that in the early 1900s, the US, while it did not annex Cuba outright, as it did Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, did instead install a governor, General John Brooke, and began a series of public works projects, building schools and improving public health, that further tied Cuba to the USA. US leaders did retain the legal right to intervene militarily in Cuba’s domestic affairs, and in 1903, the USA built a naval base at Guantánamo Bay that is still in operation today. In fact, most top US lawyers today, argue that the US occupation of Guantanamo is illegal, parlty because its lease was signed under duress. [I will discuss this point further at the end of this entry.]

By the 1920s, US companies owned two-thirds of Cuba’s farmland, imposing tariffs that crippled Cuba’s own manufacturing industries. Discrimination against blacks was institutionalised. Tourism based on drinking, gambling and prostitution flourished. The hardships of the Great Depression led to civil unrest, which was violently quelled by President Gerado Machado y Morales. In 1933 Morales was overthrown in a coup, and army sergeant Fulgencio Batista seized power.

Under Batista, Cuba remained a playground for rich U.S. tourists and gangsters who ran its hotels and casinos. After having lived in luxury in Florida for some time, Batista led a military coup (his second) and proceeded to rule Cuba with an iron hand. American mafia boss Meyer Lansky turned Havana into an international drug port, and Cuban officials continued to get rich even after a few years in government. Nightly, the “bagman” for Batista’s wife collected 10 percent of the profits at Trafficante’s casinos; the Sans Souci, and the casinos in the hotels Sevilla-Biltmore, Commodoro, Deauville and Capri.

Batista’s take from the Lansky casinos, the Hotel Nacional, the Montmartre Club and others, is said to be 30 percent. That was aside from his fair share of Cuba’s general funds that should have been going to education, public health and city maintenance.

For a price, Batista handed contracts to dozens of U.S. corporations for massive construction projects, such as the Havana-Varadero highway, the Rancho Boyeros airport, train lines, the power company and a strange plan to dig a canal across Cuba.

Due to popular unrest, and to appease his U.S. friends, Batista held a mock election in which he was the only legal candidate. He won, becoming president of Cuba in 1954. Cubans, however, had learned not to trust him, and were demanding new, legitimate elections.

U.S. sugar, nickel and citrus companies were making superprofits from the labor of the campesinos and workers. Cuba’s banks, telephone and electric systems and large retail stores were all U.S.-owned. Outside the glitzy city of Havana, most of the people were impoverished peasants. They had little education and few could read or write. Children’s bellies stuck out from hunger and parasitic infections.

Hence we had the social conditions that breed revolutionaries, and revolutions!

Anyhow – back to the issue of the Guantanamo Bay naval base. In November 2003, international law expert Professor Alfred de Zayas, from the University of British Colombia, gave a lecture on the state of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. He began this lecture by detailing the position of the US base in international law, and found that there are four main ways in which the lease and the treaty that created it can only be described as illegal.

1) The treaty was imposed by force
The 1903 Treaty that brought about the base at Guantanamo was invalid from the beginning, as it was imposed by force. After four years of military rule the United States decided against a complete annexation of Cuba, instead they wanted a system that would allow political and economic control, the answer was to grant Cuban independence under US terms.

The US administration made it clear that there would be no Cuban constitution unless it included an appendix, known as the Platt Amendment which demanded the right for US military intervention in Cuba and a naval base. Initially rejected in Cuba, the Platt amendment had also been unpopular in the US Senate, described by one Senator as an “ultimatum to Cuba” the Cuban government had no other choice but to yield to US pressure and agree to the lease if they wished to have any form of independence.

The Treaty was signed, supposedly granting Cuban independence, but merely transforming Cuba into a quasi-protectorate. Articles 51 and 52 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties say that any treaty signed under coercion is illegal, it could be argued that the Vienna Convention only came into force in 1980, yet international opinion was way ahead of this.

In 1947, Serge Krylov, a judge at the International Court of Justice said that any treaty “whereby an imperialist power imposes its will upon a weaker state” is invalid.

2) The treaty was binding in 1903, but is illegal in the post-colonial age.

After the Second World War the decolonisation process began and a new set of norms and principles based around the UN Charter meant that obsolete, unequal, colonial laws were being replaced.

3) The terms of the lease have been broken
The US administration should certainly be trying to negotiate the terms of the lease, as they have continually broke the terms set down in it. The 1903 Treaty permits a “base for naval and coaling purposes” and goes on to say that any commercial use would be illegal.

But it is well known that Guantanamo Bay now contains several commercial concessions, including a bowling alley and of course a certain well known fast food chain.

Other uses have included an internment camp for Haitian refugees in the early nineties, logistical base for the regime changing invasions of Grenada and Panama, numerous acts of provocation against Cuba as well as its present disgraceful use, all of which brake the terms of the lease.

4) The treaty breaks the rules of sovereignty

It is now absurd to think that any bilateral or multilateral Treaty can be lawful if it is based on anything other than the sovereign equality of the contracting parties. Yet in this case, countless US administrations have suggested that a disputed lease is more powerful than the sovereignty of one of its neighbours.

Article 56 of the Vienna Convention appears to provide an answer to this, as it allows for denunciation or withdrawal from a treaty containing no provision on an ending. Targeted at this kind of treaty or alliance, which may and often do lapse after a change of government.

To make it even simpler there is Article 62, that allows for termination on the grounds of fundamental change of circumstances. Once again Cuba is facing special treatment, it is quite unrealistic to say that a lease has no end, no other international lease has lasted for over 99 years, yet this one has lasted for over a hundred without an end in sight, despite the illegality of the situation.

Lirelou, don’t you think that the continued occupation of Guantanamo Bay is a rather unsubtle reminder of nineteenth century colonialism, completely at odds with the principles of the United Nations Charter, which highlights the right to self-determination and the right to dispose of a peoples natural resources?

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 18, 2005 @ 12:21 am | Comment

You know Mark, I always said you would “win” this argument, as you have every answer gift-wrapped and waiting in the wings, and it’s very well presented. Unfortunately — and I use that word only because it’s sad you don’t see it — you are literally the only person I have ever, ever heard take the craven view that the people who killed Margaret Hassan should triumph over the US. I have never read even the most left-wing bloggers say the insurgents should win. I have never read a liberal commenter or pundit say it. Only you. (And I’m sure you can google for more obscure quotes to justify this cause, but I really don’t care what a member of Monty Python has to say about it – are these really the best you can come up with? New Left magazine!?! Luckily, such endorsements are so few and far between, virtually none has surfaced to the mainstream, nor will they. Susan Watkins has been appropriately bashed by the American liberal community — her original allusion to the Vichy France analogy damned her. Anyone who will compare the US to the Nazis and the insurgent murderers to brave partisans fighting for freedom is doomed to ridicule. And I just read up on John Pilger, another Chomskyite. Far out on the fringe, to the point of being a joke.) I won’t argue it any more, because if you cannot see it there is literally no hope at this point. Virtually every commenter here has rejected your argument. Every one. And everywhere else, too. There’s a reason for that. But you don’t see it. And that’s scary to me.

Final point: America, as I said, will lose. There are no good options. There are only choices that are less dreadful or more dreadful. Out of all these dreadful choices, the very worst is for the insurgency to win and the people of Iraq to go back to where they were, and even further back. No moral person can wish for this. No moral person does wish for this. You can say “checkmate” if it makes you feel better and I’ll concede the game. But everyone here knows your rabid anti-Americanism, justified in some ways and in other ways not, has clouded your reasoning to the point where you can justify just about anything that will fuel your vision. Be careful — it was just this mentality that allowed Mao and Stalin to justify to themselves some of the most calamitous crimes in all of human history. But they were crimes they believed were committed in the name of “the cause,” so, well, you know, they had to be done. It’s awful that those insurgents will win and kill untold numbers of innocents in Iraq, but hell, America has to be defeated, so it’s just gotta happen. Thank God not a single person of character or morality that I know of has supported this mindset or anything even remotely similar. Whilst shrouded in fancy intellectual arguments and elegant theorizing, it’s simply another Marxist formula for mass slaughter and oppression.

You win, as I said. But as proprietor of this site I’m having the last word, invoking a power I’ve never used before but that is called for in this instance: Thread closed.

January 18, 2005 @ 6:48 am | Comment

As a courtesy to Mark, I’ve agreed to let him post a brief response, 250 words max, so we can get on to other things. Mark, you have 30 minutes, then this closes again.

January 18, 2005 @ 7:59 pm | Comment

Dear Richard,

As part of your effort to dismiss me as a lone radical, you have called into question the legitimacy of John Pilger, whose works I have sometimes referred to when presenting my arguments, and who I included in my list of well known and “credible” people who support the Iraqi resistance. In your comments above, you write: “And I just read up on John Pilger, another Chomskyite. Far out on the fringe, to the point of being a joke.”

Richard – how can John Pilger be considered a joke, when he is the winner of some of Britain and America’s most prestigious awards for journalism? He has twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of “Journalist of the Year”, and he has been “International Reporter of the Year” and winner of the “United Nations Association Media Prize”. For his broadcasting, he has won an “American Television Academy Award”, an “Emmy” and the “Richard Dimbleby Award”, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

I certainly don’t think anybody can seriously dismiss him as a “joke”, do you? His views are far from being inane. He regularly writes for a number of mainstream newspapers as well: The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, and The Sydney Morning Herald – so he is hardly on “the fringe”, is he?

The other thing which I object to is being labelled as a “rabid anti-American.” I object strongly to America’s foreign policies, yes, but this hardly makes me anti-American. Nelson Mandela has recently said, explicitly, that he considers the US state to be the word’s biggest terrorist, but it would be wrong to say he is anti-American because of this.

I would like to conclude by inviting everyone to read Sean Penn’s statement about what it means to be an American, printed in The New York Times, May 30, 2003. It is accessible online. One of the central issues Penn touches on is American patriotism. He returns to this theme several times, musing that the US flag reflects “sacrifice and heroism” and adding, “I am an American and I fear that I, and our people are on the verge of losing our flag.” He writes: “…that same flag that took me so long to love, respect, and protect, threatens to become a haunting banner of murder, greed, and treason against our principles, honoured history, Constitution, and our own mothers and fathers. To become a vulgar billboard, advertising our disloyalty to ourselves and our allies.”

The corporate media’s appeal to patriotism is aimed at lining the American people up behind US foreign policies – policies what express the class interests of a financial oligarchy, whose monopoly of wealth and power is rooted in the existing economic system. It is because of a blind patriotism that so many Americans are able to emotionally identify themselves with the “national cause” – it is why so many collude – why so many can think of this as “our” war, that “we” are “liberators”.

To reject the morality and legitimacy of these foreign policies, which I and many others like Penn and Chomsky and so on do, does not make any of us anti-American. In fact, it makes us more American!

Best regards,
Mark Anthony Jones

January 18, 2005 @ 9:26 pm | Comment

Mark, I said I was going to leave this thread open for 30 minutes, but instead I left it open for more than 14 hours to allow anyone else to have a say if they so wished. No one did, so it’s just you and I. And that’s why I’m going to close the thread — as much as I respect you, I fear this thread will go on forever for new genuine reason and to no one’s true benefit. (If any regular reader disagrees and wants me to re-open the thread, please e-mail me.) The question is, should this back-and-forth go on ad infinitum, even though we both know exactly where the other stands and we are saying absolutely nothing new or even interesting?

As to whether John Pilger is or isn’t a legitimate source, I ask the readers to decide for themselves. Simply Google his name and let me know if you feel he represents anything close to the mainstream. Now, people who are not in the mainstream (like myself, quite often) have legitimate and important opinions. But your whole point is that this is NOT just an opinion held by far-on-the-fringe lefties, but one that has broad acceptance (or at least some acceptance) by mainstream thinkers and pundits. And there, you have not made your case, even after many, many posts that go on at lengths utterly dreadful to contemplate.

So let’s come to an amicable conclusion and end it here, since we know where we stand and no one else seems to be interested. This is not an example of stifling free speech. As I wrote in my email to you:

I rarely if ever would close a thread, but in this case we weren’t arguing anymore, we were just quacking. It’s boring and it’s repetitive and the one perq I get from paying for my blog is that I get to have the last word if I want to.

So enough, and thanks for the robust dialogue.

January 19, 2005 @ 10:20 am | Comment