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CounterPunch
March 8,
2003
Are We Sure We
Can Get Away With It This Time?
The Special
Treatment of Iraq
By PERRY ANDERSON
The prospect of a second war on Iraq raises a
large number of questions, analytic and political. What are the
intentions behind the impending campaign? What are likely to
be the consequences? What does the drive to war tell us about
the long-term dynamics of American global power? These issues
will remain on the table for some time to come, outliving any
assault this spring. The front of the stage is currently occupied
by a different set of arguments, over the legitimacy or wisdom
of the military expedition now brewing. My purpose here will
be to consider the current criticisms of the Bush Administration
articulated within mainstream opinion, and the responses of the
Administration to them: in effect, the structure of intellectual
justification on each side of the argument, what divides them
and what they have common. I will end with a few remarks on how
this debate looks from a perspective with a different set of
premises.
Taking an overview of the range--one
might say torrent--of objections to a second war in the Gulf,
we can distinguish six principal criticisms, expressed in many
different registers, distributed across a wide span of opinion.
1. The projected attack on Iraq is a
naked display of American unilateralism. The Bush Administration
has openly declared its intention of attacking Baghdad, whether
or not the UN sanctions an assault. This is not only a grave
blow to the unity of the Western alliance, but must lead to an
unprecedented and perilous weakening of the authority of the
Security Council, as the highest embodiment of international
law.
2. Massive intervention on this scale
in the Middle East can only foster anti-Western terrorism. Rather
than helping to crush al-Qaida, it is likely to multiply recruits
for it. America will be more endangered after a war with Iraq
than before it.
3. The blitz in preparation is a pre-emptive
strike, openly declared to be such, that undermines respect for
international law, and risks plunging the world into a maelstrom
of violence, as other states follow suit, taking the law into
their own hands in turn.
4. War should in any case always be a
last resort in settling an international conflict. In the case
of Iraq, sufficient tightening of sanctions and surveillance
is capable of de-fanging the Baath regime, while sparing innocent
lives and preserving the unity of the international community.
5. Concentration on Iraq is a distraction
from the more acute danger posed by North Korea, which has greater
nuclear potential, a more powerful army, and an even deadlier
leadership. The US should give top priority to dealing with Kim
Jong Il, not Saddam Hussein.
6. Even if an invasion of Iraq went smoothly,
an occupation of the country is too hazardous and costly an undertaking
for the United States to pull off successfully. Allied participation
is necessary for it to have any chance of succeeding, but the
Administration's unilateralism compromises the chance of that.
The Arab world is likely to view a foreign protectorate with
resentment. Even with a Western coalition to run the country,
Iraq is a deeply divided society, with no democratic tradition,
which cannot easily be rebuilt along postwar German or Japanese
lines. The potential costs of the whole venture outweigh any
possible benefits the US could garner from it.
Such is more or less the spectrum of
criticism that can be found in the mainstream media and in respectable
political circles, both in the United States itself, and--still
more strongly--in Europe and beyond. They can be summarised under
the headings: the vices of unilateralism, the risks of encouraging
terrorism, the dangers of pre-emption, the human costs of war,
the threat from North Korea, and the liabilities of over-reach.
As such, they divide into two categories: objections of principle--the
evils of unilateralism, pre-emption, war; and objections of prudence:
the hazards of terrorism, North Korea, over-reach.
What are the replies the Bush Administration
can make to each of these?
1. Unilateralism. Historically, the United
States has always reserved the right to act alone where necessary,
while seeking allies wherever possible. In recent years it acted
alone in Grenada, in Panama, in Nicaragua, and which of its allies
now complains about current arrangements in any of these countries?
As for the UN, Nato did not consult it when it launched its attack
on Yugoslavia in 1999, in which every European ally that now
talks of the need for authorisation from the Security Council
fully participated, and which 90 per cent of the opinion that
now complains about our plans for Iraq warmly supported. If it
was right to remove Milosevic by force, who had no weapons of
mass destruction and even tolerated an opposition that eventually
beat him in an election, how can it be wrong to remove Saddam
by force, a far more lethal tyrant, whose human rights record
is worse, has invaded a neighbour, used chemical weapons and
brooks no opposition of any kind? In any case, the UN has already
passed a resolution, No. 1441, that in effect gives clear leeway
to members of the Security Council to use force against Iraq,
so the legality of an attack is not in question.
2. Terrorism. Al-Qaida is a network bonded
by religious fanaticism, in a faith that calls for holy war by
the Muslim world against the United States. The belief that Allah
assures victory to the jihadi is basic to it. There is therefore
no surer way of demoralising and breaking it up than by demonstrating
the vanity of hopes from heaven and the absolute impossibility
of resistance to superior American military force. Nazi and Japanese
imperial fanaticism were snuffed out by the simple fact of crushing
defeat. Al-Qaida is nowhere near their level of strength. Why
should it be different?
3. Pre-emption. Far from being a novel
doctrine, this is a traditional right of states. What, after
all, is the most admired military victory of the postwar era
but a lightning pre-emptive strike? Israel's Six-Day War of 1967,
so far from being cause for condemnation, is actually the occasion
of the modern doctrine of Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by
a distinguished philosopher of the American Left, Michael Walzer,
in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal
philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples.
Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing
the vital preventive strike against the Osirak reactor of 1981.
Who now complains about that?
4. The Human Costs of War. These are
indeed tragic, and we will do everything in our power--now technically
considerable--to minimise civilian casualties. But the reality
is that a swift war will save lives, not lose them. Since 1991,
sanctions against Iraq--which most objectors to war support--have
caused 500,000 deaths from malnutrition and disease, according
to Unicef. Let us accept a lower figure, say 300,000. It is very
unlikely that the swift, surgical war of which we are capable
will come anywhere near this destruction by peace. On the contrary,
once Saddam is overthrown, oil will soon flow freely again, and
Iraqi children will have enough to eat. You will see population
growth rebound very quickly.
5. North Korea. This is a failed Communist
state that certainly poses a great danger to North-East Asia.
As we pointed out well before the current hue and cry, it forms
the other extremity of an Axis of Evil. But it is a simple matter
of good sense to concentrate our forces on the weaker, rather
than stronger, link of the Axis first. It is not because Pyongyang
may, or may not, have a few rudimentary nuclear weapons, which
we could easily take out, but because it can shatter Seoul in
a conventional attack that we have to proceed more cautiously
in bringing it down. But do you seriously doubt that we intend
to take care of the North Korean regime too in due course?
6. Over-reach. An occupation of Iraq
does pose a challenge, which we don't underestimate. But it is
a reasonable wager. Arab hostility is overrated. After all, there
hasn't been a single demonstration of significance in the whole
Middle East during the two years it has taken Israel to crush
the second Intifada, in full view of television cameras, yet
popular sympathy is far greater for the Palestinians than for
Saddam. You also forget that we already have a very successful
protectorate in the northern third of Iraq, where we have knocked
Kurdish heads together pretty effectively. Do you ever hear dire
talk about that? The Sunni centre of the country will certainly
be trickier to manage, but the idea that stable regimes created
or guided by foreign powers are impossible in the Middle East
is absurd. Think of the long-term stability of the monarchy set
up by the British in Jordan, or the very satisfactory little
state they created in Kuwait. Indeed, think of our loyal friend
Mubarak in Egypt, which has a much larger urban population than
Iraq. Everyone said Afghanistan was a graveyard for foreigners--British,
Russian and so on--but we liberated it quickly enough, and now
the UN is doing excellent work bringing it back to life. Why
not Iraq? If all goes well, we could reap great benefits--a strategic
platform, an institutional model, and not inconsiderable oil
supplies.
Now, if one looks dispassionately at
the two sets of arguments, there is little doubt that on questions
of principle, the Administration's case against its critics is
iron-clad. The reason for that is also fairly clear. The two
sides share a set of common assumptions, whose logic makes an
attack on Iraq an eminently defensible proposition. What are
these assumptions? Roughly, they can be summed up like this.
1. The UN Security Council represents
the supreme legal expression of the 'international community';
except where otherwise specified, its resolutions have binding
moral and juridical force.
2. Where necessary, however, humanitarian
or other interventions by the West do not require permission
of the UN, although it is always preferable to have it.
3. Iraq committed an outrage against
international law in seeking to annex Kuwait, and has had to
be punished for this crime, against which the UN rallied as one,
ever since.
4. Iraq has also sought to acquire nuclear
weapons, whose proliferation is any case an urgent danger to
the international community, not to speak of chemical or biological
weapons.
5. Iraq is a dictatorship in a class
of its own, or a very small set that includes North Korea, for
violation of human rights.
6. In consequence, Iraq cannot be accorded
the rights of a sovereign state, but must submit to blockade,
bombing and loss of territorial integrity, until the international
community decides otherwise.
Equipped with these premises, it is not
difficult to show that Iraq cannot be permitted possession of
nuclear or other weapons, that it has defied successive UN resolutions,
that the Security Council has tacitly authorised a second attack
on it (as it did not the attack on Yugoslavia), and that the
removal of Saddam Hussein is now long overdue.
On the same premises, however, it is
still open to critics of the Administration to take their stand,
not on principle, but simply on grounds of prudence. Invading
Iraq may well be morally acceptable, even desirable, but is it
politically wise? Calculation of consequences is always more
imponderable than deduction from principles, so the room for
disagreement remains considerable. Anyone who believes that al-Qaida
is a deadly bacillus waiting to become an epidemic, or that Kim
Jong Il is a more demented despot even than Saddam Hussein, or
that Iraq could become another Vietnam, is unlikely to be swayed
by reminders of the letter of UN Resolution 1441, or Nato's lofty
mission in protecting human rights in the Balkans.
Structures of intellectual justification
are one thing. Popular sentiment, although not unaffected by
them, is another. The enormous demonstrations of 15 February
in Western Europe, the United States and Australia, opposing
an attack on Iraq, pose a different sort of question. It can
be put simply like this. What explains this vast, passionate
revolt against the prospect of a war whose principles differ
little from preceding military interventions, that were accepted
or even welcomed by so many of those now up in arms against this
one? Why does war in the Middle East today arouse feelings that
war in the Balkans did not, if logically there is little or nothing
to choose between them? The disproportion in reactions is unlikely
to have much to do with distinctions between Belgrade and Baghdad,
and would in any case presumably speak for rather than against
intervention. The explanation clearly lies elsewhere. Three factors
appear to have been decisive.
First, hostility to the Republican regime
in the White House. Cultural dislike of the Bush Presidency is
widespread in Western Europe, where its rough affirmations of
American primacy, and undiplomatic tendency to match word to
deed, have become intensely resented by public opinion accustomed
to a more decorous veil being drawn over the realities of relative
power. To see how important this ingredient in European anti-war
sentiment must be, one need only look at the complaisance with
which Clinton's successive aerial bombardments of Iraq were met.
If a Gore or Lieberman Administration were preparing a second
Gulf War, the resistance would be a moiety of what it is now.
The current execration of Bush in wide swathes of West European
media and public opinion bears no relation to the actual differences
between the two parties in the United States. It is enough to
note that both the leading practical exponent and the major intellectual
theorist of a war on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack and Philip Bobbitt,
are former ornaments of the Clinton regime. But as substantial
policy contrasts tend to dwindle in Western political systems,
symbolic differences of style and image can easily acquire, in
compensation, a hysterical rigidity. The Kulturkampf between
Democrats and Republicans within the United States is now being
reproduced between the US and EU. Typically, in such disputes,
the violence of partisan passions is in inverse proportion to
the depth of real disagreements. But as in the conflicts between
Blue and Green factions of the Byzantine hippodrome, minor affective
preferences can have major political consequences. A Europe in
mourning for Clinton--see any editorial in the Guardian, Le Monde,
La Repubblica, El Pais--can unite in commination of Bush.
Second, there is the role of the spectacle.
Public opinion was well prepared for the Balkan War by massive
television and press coverage of ethnic savageries in the region,
real and--after Rambouillet, to a considerable extent--mythical.
The incomparably greater killings in Rwanda, where the United
States, fearing distraction from media focus on Bosnia, blocked
intervention in the same period, were by contrast ignored. In
full view of the cameras, the siege of Sarajevo appalled millions.
The obliteration of Grozny, safely off-screen, drew scarcely
a shrug. Clinton called it liberation, and Blair sped to congratulate
Putin for the election he won on the back of it. In Iraq, the
plight of the Kurds was widely televised in the aftermath of
the Gulf War, mobilising public opinion behind the creation of
an Anglo-American protectorate, without any warrant from the
UN. But today, however much Washington or London declaim the
atrocities of Saddam Hussein, not to speak of his weapons of
mass destruction, they are for all practical purposes invisible
to the European spectator. Powell's slide-shows in the Security
Council are no substitute for Bernard-Henri Levy or Michael Ignatieff
vibrating at the microphone. For lack of visual aids, the deliverance
of Baghdad leaves European imagination cold.
Third, and perhaps most important, there
is fear. Aerial retribution could be wreaked on Yugoslavia in
1996, and continuously on Iraq since 1991, without risk of reprisal.
What could Milosevic or Saddam do? They were sitting ducks. The
attentats of 11 September have altered this self-assurance. Here
indeed was an unforgettable spectacle, designed to mesmerise
the West. The target of the attacks was the US, not Europe. If
the European states, Britain and France in the lead, joined in
the counter-attack on Afghanistan, for their populations this
was still a remote theatre of war, on which the curtain came
down swiftly. The prospect of an invasion and occupation of Iraq,
far larger and closer, in the heart of the Middle East, where
European public opinion is uneasily aware--without stirring itself
to do anything about it--that all is not well in the Land of
Israel, is another matter. The spectre of retaliation by al-Qaida
or kindred groups for a rerun of the Balkan War has frozen many
an ardent combatant of the new 'military humanism' of the late
1990s. The Serbs were a bagatelle: fewer than eight million.
The Arabs are 280 million, and they are much closer to Europe
than to America--not a few of them indeed within it. Contemplating
the expedition to Baghdad, even New Labour loyalists ask, as
readers of this journal will have noticed: are we sure we can
get away with it this time?
Great mass movements are not to be judged
by tight logical standards. Whatever their reasons, the multitudes
who have protested against a war on Iraq are a whiplash to the
governments bent on it. They include, in any case, many too young
to have been compromised by its precedents. But if the movement
is to have staying power, it will have to develop beyond the
fixations of the fan club, the politics of the spectacle, the
ethics of fright. For war, if it comes, will not be like Vietnam.
It will be short and sharp; and there is no guarantee that poetic
justice will follow. A merely prudential opposition to the war
will not survive a triumph, any more than handwringing about
its legality a UN figleaf. Assorted justices and lawyers who
now cavil at the upcoming campaign, will make their peace with
its commanders soon enough, once allied armies are ensconced
on the Tigris, and Kofi Annan has pronounced an eirenic speech
or two, courtesy of ghostwriters seconded from the Financial
Times, on postwar relief. Resistance to the ruling dispensation
that can last has to find another, principled basis. Since current
debates so interminably invoke the 'international community'
and the United Nations, as if these were a salve against the
Bush Administration, it is as well to start from these. An alternative
perspective can be suggested in a few telegraphic propositions.
1. No international community exists.
The term is a euphemism for American hegemony. It is to the credit
of the Administration that some of its officials have abandoned
it.
2. The United Nations is not a seat of
impartial authority. Its structure, giving overwhelming formal
power to five victor nations of a war fought fifty years ago,
is politically indefensible: comparable historically to the Holy
Alliance of the early 19th century, which also proclaimed its
mission to be the preservation of 'international peace' for the
'benefit of humanity'. So long as these powers were divided by
the Cold War, they neutralised each other in the Security Council,
and the organisation could do little harm. But since the Cold
War came to an end, the UN has become essentially a screen for
American will. Supposedly dedicated to the cause of international
peace, the organisation has waged two major wars since 1945 and
prevented none. Its resolutions are mostly exercises in ideological
manipulation. Some of its secondary affiliates--Unesco, Unctad
and the like--do good work, and the General Assembly does little
harm. But there is no prospect of reforming the Security Council.
The world would be better off--a more honest and equal arena
of states--without it.
3. The nuclear oligopoly of the five
victor powers of 1945 is equally indefensible. The Non-Proliferation
Treaty is a mockery of any principles of equality or justice--those
who possess weapons of mass destruction insisting that everyone
except themselves give them up, in the interests of humanity.
If any states had a claim to such weapons, it would be small
not large ones, since that would counterbalance the overweening
power of the latter. In practice, as one would expect, such weapons
have already spread, and so long as the big powers refuse to
abandon theirs, there is no principled reason to oppose their
possession by others. Kenneth Waltz, doyen of American international
relations theory, an impeccably respectable source, long ago
published a calm and detailed essay, which has never been refuted,
entitled 'The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better'.
It can be recommended. The idea that Iraq or North Korea should
not be permitted such weapons, while those of Israel or white
South Africa could be condoned, has no logical basis.
4. Annexations of territory--conquests,
in more traditional language--whose punishment provides the nominal
justification of the UN blockade of Iraq, have never resulted
in UN retribution when the conquerors were allies of the United
States, only when they were its adversaries. Israel's borders,
in defiance of the UN resolutions of 1947, not to speak of 1967,
are the product of conquest. Turkey seized two-fifths of Cyprus,
Indonesia East Timor, and Morocco Western Sahara, without a tremor
in the Security Council. Legal niceties matter only when the
interests of enemies are at stake. So far as Iraq is concerned,
the exceptional aggressions of the Baath regime are a myth, as
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt--hardly two incendiary radicals--have
recently shown in some detail in their recent essay in Foreign
Policy.
5. Terrorism, of the sort practised by
al-Qaida, is not a serious threat to the status quo anywhere.
The success of the spectacular attack of 11 September depended
on surprise--even by the fourth plane, it was impossible to repeat.
Had al-Qaida ever been a strong organisation, it would have aimed
its blows at client states of America in the Middle East, where
the overthrow of a regime would make a political difference,
rather than at America itself, where it could not leave so much
as a strategic pinprick. As Olivier Roy and Gilles Keppel, the
two best authorities in the field of contemporary Islamism have
argued, al-Qaida is the isolated remnant of a mass movement of
Muslim fundamentalism, whose turn to terror is the symptom of
a larger weakness and defeat--an Islamic equivalent of the Red
Army Faction or Red Brigades that emerged in Germany and Italy
after the great student uprisings of the late 1960s faded away,
and were easily quelled by the state. The complete inability
of al-Qaida to stage even a single attentat, while its base was
being pounded to shreds and its leadership killed off in Afghanistan,
speaks volumes about its weakness. In different ways, it suits
both the Administration and the Democratic opposition to conjure
up the spectre of a vast and deadly conspiracy, capable of striking
at any moment, but this is a figment with little bearing one
way or another on Iraq, which is neither connected to al-Qaida
today, nor likely to give it much of a boost, if it falls tomorrow.
6. Domestic tyrannies, or the abuse of
human rights, which are now held to justify military interventions--overriding
national sovereignty in the name of humanitarian values--are
treated no less selectively by the UN. The Iraqi regime is a
brutal dictatorship, but until it attacked an American pawn in
the Gulf, it was armed and funded by the West. Its record is
less bloody than that of the Indonesian regime that for three
decades was the West's main pillar in South-East Asia. Torture
was legal in Israel till yesterday, openly sanctioned by the
Supreme Court, and is unlikely to have disappeared today without
an eyelash being batted by the assembled Western Governments
that have befriended it. Turkey, freshly off the mark for entry
into the EU, does not, unlike Iraq, even tolerate the language
of its Kurds--and, as a member of Nato in good standing, likewise
jails and tortures without hindrance. As for 'international justice',
the farce of the Hague Tribunal on Yugoslavia, where Nato is
prosecutor and judge, will be amplified in the International
Criminal Court, in which the Security Council can forbid or suspend
any actions it dislikes (i.e. which might ruffle its permanent
members), and private firms or millionaires--Walmart or Dow Chemicals,
Hinduja or Fayed, as the case might be--are cordially invited
to fund investigations (Articles 16 and 116). Saddam, if captured,
will certainly be arraigned before this august body. Who imagines
that Sharon or Putin or Mubarak would ever be, any more than
was once Tudjman before its predecessor?
What conclusions follow? Simply this.
Mewling about Blair's folly or Bush's crudity, is merely saving
the furniture. Arguments about the impending war would do better
to focus on the entire prior structure of the special treatment
accorded to Iraq by the United Nations, rather than wrangle over
the secondary issue of whether to continue strangling the country
slowly or to put it out of its misery quickly.
Perry Anderson
teaches history at UCLA. He is the author of
Extra Time: Global Politics Since 1989 and Lineages
of the Absolutist State.
This article originally appeared in the
London Review of Books.
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