Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
December 8, 2003
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vincente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
December
8, 2003
Michael Ignatieff
Apostle
of He-manitarianism
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
Michael Ignatieff shares a few things with Thomas
Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Tony Blair, George Bush, and many others.
One is an extraordinary ability to reconcile warm concern with
insufferable smugness. Another is a plan. America is going to
kick some terrorist butt and assure its security by teaching
freedom and democracy to the inhabitants of 'failed states'.
This will be in everyone's interest.
Ignatieff's plan and its justification
are pretty much those of the US government's. What separates
Ignatieff from the others is largely his aura of masculine realism.
In substance, he distinguishes himself, not by what he defends,
but by what he concedes. He tries for engaging frankness, admitting
that
a) The US will act in humanitarian causes
only when and where those causes coincide with its interests,
strategic or material;
b) US policy is often hypocritical;
c) US occupations will usually be more
concerned to maintain control over an nation than to build democracy
and freedom there;
d) US efforts can get nowhere unless
it addresses fundamental regional problems, for example, in the
Middle East, the Israel/Palestine conflict.
e) US power is not unlimited and will
come to grief if employed with arrogant ignorance. Like other
colonial powers, the US frequently doesn't deliver on its promise
of spreading freedom, and this is politically dangerous.
But, says Ignatieff, the US is still
our best bet, and its mixed motives don't discredit its humanitarian
ideals (Empire Lite p.23, henceforth EL): "...imperialism
doesn't stop being necessary just because it becomes politically
incorrect."(EL 106) The new imperialism is not a pure power
grab; it is not designed to control territory. Despite America's
impure intentions and its mistakes, the fact remains that there
are "many peoples who owe their freedom to an exercise of
American military power." The very title of one his pieces
tells us to cut the moralistic crap: "The American Empire
(Get Used to It.)", New York Times Magazine, January 5,
2003.
Ignatieff's message hits a nerve. He
is right to reject the labored horror with which leftists discover
that American sometimes has more or less legitimate policy objectives
which call for force. He is also right to reject the endless
harping on bad American intentions. If the actions have good
outcomes, why is it so important that the intentions behind them
are bad?
Yet Ignatieff's position is built on
sand, or maybe slime. When he argues that America's imperial
designs are not immoral, he misses the point. The problem is
not that those designs might or might not be immoral. The problem
is that they are silly.  They presuppose a strength
and competence America quite obviously doesn't have, as well
as intentions it couldn't have.
Ignatieff's position is a web of foolishness,
error and confusion. His confidence in American power is so ludicrously
exaggerated, so unsustained by evidence, that it validates what
seems to be the wildest of left-wing accusations: his enthusiasms
are racist. And it is not the virulence of his racism that makes
it so dangerous, but its air of even-handedness, sophistication
and intelligence. It functions like a sprig of cilantro on the
nouveau-imperialist bucket of KFC, transforming Bush's blunderings
into a treat for liberal white folks the world over. Ignatieff
seeks to provide a last line of defense for American unilateralism,
and by now that last line is about all there is. It is high time
to test its strength. What perspective is Ignatieff offering
us? What is nation-building? Can America do it? Can anyone? Would
anyone want to?
Ignatieff's outlook:
Bringing a man's world to our doorstep
Ignatieff visits 'trouble spots' and
tells it like it is. His authority is the authority of the 'bulky
American in combat camouflage, multi-pocket waistcoat, wraparound
sunglasses and floppy fishing hat'(EL 77). Though this action
hero 'is not going to talk to me', Ignatieff mimics his sharp-eyed,
ready-for-anything stance, just like a lonely teenager coming
out of a Bruce Willis movie. This is no merely annoying quirk;
it is the key to his prejudices.
Ignatieff is one of those tough-guy intellectuals
who's always trying to prove he doesn't have anything to prove.
His boots-on-the-ground descriptions of Bosnia and Afghanistan
sound like a Car and Driver puff piece: "Big D and Teacher
Atta emerge... and jump into their black Audi and black Lexus....
the warriors in their Pajero flatbeds falling in behind."
(EL 87) We've already met the Audi and the Lexus in a 'warrior's
compound', 'purring in the driveway'. (EL 77) Likewise the Pajeros:
"....eyeing one another from the backs of their dusty Pajero
pickups, equipped with roll bars, fog lights and plastic flowers
on the dashboards, are about fifty fighters from each side..."
.(EL 78) And in Kosovo: "The Jaguars, Audis, and BMWs parked
outside the Serbian government building... would do a New York
night club proud." (EL 37) "Pristina's streets are
clogged with the tell-tale white Land Cruisers of the international
administrators... ". (EL 73) These vehicles reappear in
Afghanistan, where car-repair shops now cater to 'the passing
white Toyota Land Cruisers' (EL 95; you get more white Land Cruisers
at EL 98) Who are you gonna trust? Iggy, or some pussy who can't
even tell a Pajero from a Bronco? These images generously extend
Ignatieff's own authority to his readers. We, who are so used
to these fine automotive products, are the genuine article; the
Afghans are wannabees. It is our responsibility to see they grow
out of it.
Ignatieff wants Washington to be as manly
as he is, as we are. "Empires don't come lite," he
says, "They come heavy."(EL 79) Like some creep who
thinks his honesty about being a creep is disarming, Ignatieff
cooks up a testosterone-laced stew in which morsels of freedom
and human rights are seasoned with crushing violence, enlightened
greed, and calculated hypocrisy. His world contains three races:
the ballsy Anglo-Saxons; the Western European surrender monkeys;
and those hysterically dim-witted, childlike underachievers,
the natives. He avoids explicit racism only through studied obtuseness.
In "The Burden" (see also EL 106), he informs us that
"America's empire is not like empires of times past, built
on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden." Isn't
America run by white men? Aren't their burdens therefore white
men's burdens? The only difference seems to be that now the burden
falls, not on just any old white folks, but on the Anglophone
whites, the freedom-crème de la freedom-crème.
Now Ignatieff would probably reply that
the burden is no less real for falling on white men. But this
burden is, as he often reminds us, onerous; it's not a quick
in-and-out operation to rescue some refugees. Why then does Ignatieff
think that America, at present better known for its fine doughnuts
than for its decency, competence or wisdom, is up to the job?
And, while we're at it, what exactly is the job?
The project of nation-building
Ignatieff's notion of nation-building
is a constantly moving target.
For a start, one must beware of his bait-and-switch
tactics. Ignatieff likes to pretend that peacekeeping and nation-building
are indistinguishable; he hopes to advertise the former but sell
us the latter.(EL 79) Yes, humanitarian intervention--peacekeeping--would
have been a good idea in Rwanda. And yes, some governments are
thoroughly illegitimate, some societies are cancerously vile.
It would be prissy foolishness to treat such 'failed states'
as 'real countries' with real rights to sovereignty or independence.
But peacekeeping in such nations is still a matter of preventing
mass deaths. These justifiable, genuinely humanitarian interventions
cannot be the nation-building to which Ignatieff refers. They
don't require American empire, heavy or even lite; one of those
rinky-dink UN forces will do. So this can't be what Ignatieff
is talking about when he refers to nation-building. This is clear
from his not-so-faintly contemptuous treatment of the cheese-eater
Bernard Kouchner in Kosovo: "...the claim is not that Kouchner
is too autocratic; it's that he's not autocratic enough and that
the UN is too politically correct, too consultative... when it
should simply lay down the law... ."(EL 72f.) Worst of all,
Kouchner "does that Gallic shrug". (EL 74)
Another of Ignatieff's attempts to confuse
the issue of American empire is his sleazy conflation of nation-building
with nationalism. "Vietnam", he says, "was a titanic
clash between two nation-building strategies, the Americans in
support of the South Vietnamese versus the Communists in the
north." (E 117) For a start this is obscure. Does he mean
that the South Vietnamese were trying to build a nation with
American support? But America supported the South Vietnamese
government, not the South Vietnamese, who were in large measure
anti-government. As for "the Communists in the North",
weren't they Vietnamese as well? One thing, at least, is clear:
Ignatieff can't distinguish between the project of building your
own nation versus the project of building someone else's.
It is no coincidence that the first is generally regarded as
unobjectionable and the second as highly dubious.
Ignatieff also has trouble seeing when
a nation is already built. He says:
"Whenever it has exerted power overseas,
America has never been sure whether it values stability -- which
means not only political stability but also the steady, profitable
flow of goods and raw materials -- more than it values its own
rhetoric about democracy. Where the two values have collided,
American power has come down heavily on the side of stability,
for example, toppling democratically elected leaders from Mossadegh
in Iran to Allende in Chile. Iraq is yet another test of this
choice. Next door in Iran, from the 1950's to the 1970's, America
backed stability over democracy, propping up the autocratic rule
of the shah, only to reap the whirlwind of an Islamic fundamentalist
revolution in 1979 that delivered neither stability nor real
democracy." ("The Burden," New York Times Magazine,
January 5, 2003)
This is another clumsy evasion. To 'come
down heavily on the side of stability', one of the alternatives
must be instability, and one must then choose stability. But
in the examples Ignatieff cites, what happened was very different.
In Chile, there was no serious instability before the US fomented
it in order to back one of the worst torturers of modern times.
Something similar happened when the US got rid of Mossadegh in
Iran. These aren't even the worst cases: in Indonesia, for example,
the US made a clear choice, not between profitable stability
and unstable democracy, but between profitable mass murder and
stable nationalism. The US has never chosen stability over democracy--this
would oddly imply that the democratic choice was unstable. It
has quite often chosen the stability of the grave over independent-minded
régimes, some of them democratic. That Ignatieff has made
a really Herculean effort to deceive himself on this matter is
evident from his claim that the Islamist revolution in Iran "delivered
neither stability nor real democracy". The Iranian revolution
may not have delivered civil rights, but it is quite clearly
democratic in the core sense of resting on overwhelming popular
support. And despite wide-ranging US sanctions, Iran is stable
enough to attract precisely the sort of massive investment that
goes with economic advantage. (http://www.brookingsinstitution.org/)
If Ignatieff wants to advocate imperial
humanitarianism, he should at least present a consistently unvarnished
picture of what he proposes. His nation-building proposal, stripped
of self-deceiving claptrap, amounts to this: the US should, having
first consulted its own interests, occupy 'failed states' and
suppress disorder. Then, over what Ignatieff repeatedly emphasizes
is a long period of time, Americans are to teach these little
folks about judicial procedure, democracy, and human rights.
Then America will help their apt pupils to create sustainably
democratic institutions. (Don't worry, the little guys yearn
for a substantial American presence: see EL 90.) And one gets
the distinct impression that America needs to do this in regions,
not countries: the project is so ambitious that it will need
the Europeans and Canadians to do housekeeping chores. (El 10-18)
Humanitarian incoherence
Iggy's project--morality aside--has two
problems. The first is that no one would ever want to undertake
it. The second is that nothing remotely like it has ever worked.
The first problem involves a simple dilemma
that arises from the ambiguities of Ignatieff's project. Either
'humanitarian imperialism' eventually frees the people it subjugates,
or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's simply oppression built on
false promises. If it does, no sane imperialist would undertake
it.
This may be too difficult for Ignatieff
and many others, but not for those subjugated peoples to whom
he presumes to teach political realities. Ignatieff thinks the
imperialists can't be blamed as long as they sincerely try to
build nations: their motives may be impure, but their objectives
are on balance desirable. To what extent they fail to secure
those desirable objectives--that is, what actually happens--doesn't
appear to matter. Oh, he understands well enough that the subjugation
part of the project must actually succeed: "The key question
is whether empire lite is heavy enough to get the job done."(EL
3) But when it comes to bringing freedom and democracy, Ignatieff's
realism suddenly becomes the understanding that, well, we may
not get the job done after all: "Even with American help,
the best Karzai and his Kabul government can hope for is to appoint
the least-bad warlords as civilian governors to keep a rough-and-ready
peace and collect some taxes. This sort of ordered anarchy, among
loosely controlled regional fiefs, would provide ordinary Afghans
with basic security. This may be all that is possible, and it
may be all that American interests require." (EL 92)
Gee, what happened to "delivering
real democracy"? Was that an obligation only for the Iranians?
Is open-ended warlordism what Ignatieff meant when he said: "In
the new imperialism, this promise of self-rule cannot be kept
so distant, for local elites are all creations of modern nationalism,
and modern nationalism's primary ethical content is self-determination"?
(EL 22) What happened to: "In the end there cannot be order
in the world, and certainly no justice, without democratic self-rule"?(EL
126) What 'end'? The 'end' Ignatieff contemplates for Afghanistan
involves, by his own admission, none of these things. What it
does seem to involve--and this seems to be what he really means
by 'staying the course'--is permanent occupation in support of
undemocratic rule by pro-American warlords. When he speaks of
Karzai's "American help", he explains: "the only
help that counts in Afghanistan is troops." (EL 92) In fact
Ignatieff jumps from tantrums of impatience to sentimental gushing
like a spoilt child. After all his tough talk he has the gall
to tell us that "The nation-builders to bet on are those
refugee families, piled on the brightly painted Pakistani trucks,
moving up the dusty roads, the children perched on the mattresses,
like Mowgli astride the head of an elephant, gazing towards home."(EL
107) He is like no one so much as Phil Ochs' American soldier,
who offers you bubble-gum after killing your sons.
Ignatieff can indulge in these inconsistencies
because, for him, the actual result isn't important. It's enough
that the new imperialism embraces the *values* of democracy
and freedom. The nation-builders needn't even *intend*
to implement these values; that might not be 'realistic'. Instead
they should conduct an experiment to see if the natives can measure
up: "...the local people... should be the ones who decide
what kinds of democracy, rule of law and stability of property
can be successfully absorbed in their culture and context."(EL
24) This isn't even coherent: if there's no democracy already
in place, how can 'the local people' decide anything? But the
meaning is pretty clear: if they can benefit from our tutelage
and establish democracy, fine. If not, fuck 'em. They can look
forward to open-ended occupation and a puppet government.
But suppose, just suppose, that somewhere,
somehow, the occupiers *could* establish a free and democratic
state. They are now on the second horn of the dilemma: would
they actually want to do so? Ignatieff generates yet another
confusion to make the project seem plausible. He conflates the
individual freedom of citizens within a state with the freedom
of a people, that is, the freedom of a state which represents
them. Without the second, the first is simply a freedom to play
musical chairs in a colonial kindergarten. But this second freedom
is a little more threatening than having the natives vote for
their leaders.
Let's remember just what any free nation
can do, provided its resources and international law permit.
It can, for instance, develop weapons of mass destruction, including
nuclear weapons. They can opt out of non-proliferation agreements,
especially if an imperial occupation authority forced them to
sign. And a free country can develop any other sort of weapon
you can think of: for example, advanced anti-tank and anti-aircraft
missiles. It can buy and sell such weapons, to our enemies, just
as we buy and sell them to the enemies of other countries. It
can raise large armed forces. It can develop electronic warfare
capabilities. It can form alliances. Maybe a free Democratic
Iraq would ally itself with Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, a newly
radicalized Turkey, perhaps China as well. The rights of these
free nations would certainly include launching spy satellites
which orbited over the US, and acquiring long-range nuclear missiles.
So a free country, a really free country, can not only cease
to service our lust for raw materials. It can also get together
with other countries, with the express objective of challenging
our supremacy.
In other words, what is so unutterably
silly about Ignatieff's proposal is the idea that genuine self-determination
or 'freedom' could ever be the objective of an imperial power.
Building a free nation, if possible, is dangerous: why not take
on the much easier task of building an enslaved client state?
Ignatieff claims that imperialism's opposition to 'modern nationalism'
is a mistake.(EL 119) It is not. Imperial powers fight modern
nationalism because it threatens them, and because it can and
quite often is defeated. Vietnam was an exceptional case because
it had strong Russian and important Chinese support. When that
kind of support is lacking, the interest of all imperialisms--and
even Ignatieff admits that imperial powers pursue their own interests--is
to prevent rather than to foster nation-building. This is why,
for better or more often for worse, imperialism has always attacked
the real nation-builders, men like Abd-el-Krim in Morocco, Joshua
Nkomo, Castro, Lumumba, Gandhi, Bose, Ben Bella and other Algerian
revolutionaries, Janio Quadros of Brazil, Nasser, Sukarno in
Indonesia, Arbenz of Guatemala, Mossadegh and Khomeini of Iran,
Mao and Chou-en Lai. All imperialisms must oppose the building
of free nations as opposed to tame, subject 'democracies' like
our staunch allies, the Marshall Islands. So real nation-building,
even where it is possible, is nothing America would ever want
to sponsor.
Can America build nations?
Ignatieff is so juiced on American power
that the competence issue eludes him. Of course America can build
nations; the only issue is whether it has the will to do so.
Ignatieff encourages American 'hubris' even as he counsels against
it: America can do anything anywhere, just not everything everywhere
(EL 4f., 119) Is massive force required? Hey, no problem: "Terrorists
everywhere have been cured of the illusion, created by the American
retreat from Somalia in 1993, that the empire lacks the stomach
for a fight."
This is a firm assumption that is found
throughout the American political spectrum. It is doubly presumptuous.
There's no sign that 'terrorists everywhere' are under some illusion,
much less that they been 'cured' of one. For all I know, America
does indeed have stomach for a fight, but Ignatieff's invocation
of the Afghan campaign does nothing to establish this. It is
not the case that "the Americans do most of the fighting,
while the Europeans, who... don't like fighting, are only too
happy to take on the soft sides of nation-building...",
while "...the locals do the translating, cleaning and driving...".(EL
94f.) Ignatieff knows full well that Afghans do almost all the
fighting. His slip of the pen is no pure accident. Ignatieff
consistently forgets the real courage and intelligence of the
natives who must be cured of their illusions, and always overestimates
the courage and intelligence of the white folks. This certainly
clouded his crystal ball when it came to Iraq.
For generations, America has never fought
a war without crushing air superiority. Even then, it showed
little stomach for a fight in Vietnam, and lost. Since Vietnam,
America has dared to fight only basket cases; we have no idea
how it would fare against a non-microscopic country not crippled
by years of sanctions. Why is it therefore holy writ that America
has 'overwhelming military superiority'? Can Iran, for example,
be counted on (a) to concentrate its armor for the convenience
of the US air forces, (b) to renounce the next generation of
anti-tank, anti-aircraft missiles, and anti-ship missiles, (c)
to avoid developing useful air power, (d) to lose a guerilla
war? If not, what then? And is there anything at all in America's
military record--as opposed to the specifications of its weapons
systems--that suggests it could defeat countries like Pakistan
or North Korea at a cost--in lives, in dollars--that it would
be willing to pay?
What if America must rely on its ground
forces? Will there be an endless stream of heroes sprouting up
to take the place of those who fall in battle? Though Ignatieff
tells us that "The Roman parallels are evident..",
Americans are no Romans. Roman soldiers signed up for terms of
twenty to twenty-five years, and Roman armies sustained casualties
at a rate never imagined by American troops today. If 'terrorists'
think America has no stomach for a fight, this is no illusion
but at most a mildly optimistic conclusion drawing on considerable
though inconclusive evidence.
If America has not in fact shown the
stomach for a real fight, then there is no evidence at all that
it can win one. There is no good reason to believe that the US
has 'the stomach' even to maintain the bare military control
for the extended period Iggy thinks necessary to teach the natives
who's boss. Had he waited a bit before writing on Afghanistan,
he would have noticed this. The natives noticed it earlier, but
then they're less impressed with the white folks than the white
folks are with themselves.
Ignatieff thinks he has taken care of
this objection. He says that imperial power is no match for 'the
aroused power of modern nationalism'. (EL 117) The suggestion
here is that the natives can somehow rise above themselves if
they are swept into some religious or secular crusade. But the
Vietnamese communists, for instance, did not win, as Americans
love to believe, because they charged exultantly into the jaws
of death for the motherland. They won because they had good generals,
tight organization, brilliant logistics, and some pretty good
technology of their own: excellent artillery and an automatic
rifle that many American special forces still prefer to much
newer American models. Neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan is
there evidence of some unitary nationalist fervor. There are
a bunch of people, some of them bitter enemies, who for a wide
variety of reasons want to kick American ass, and do a good job
of it. It doesn't take collective fervor for tough, brave, intelligent,
rational calculators make whatever alliances suit them, and to
fight an ignorant, blundering army. But the idea that imperialism
might be dealing with individual human beings rather than delirious
masses never crosses Ignatieff's lordly mind.
Most telling of all, Ignatieff cannot
even assess military power except according to a double standard.
A country's military capabilities are normally judged by its
capacity to accomplish military tasks. To judge Israel more powerful
than its neighbors, for instance, is not simply to count up tanks,
planes, and missiles. It is to look at the actual functioning
of the military machine given training, intelligence, generalship,
morale, and every other factor that goes into military defeat
or victory. But for Ignatieff and many Western political commentators,
this standard applies only to the natives. For white folks, the
excuses are unending. So it is with contempt that commentators
tell us how the Iraqi army didn't make good use of its fancy
military equipment, didn't show fighting spirit, didn't have
comptent generalship, and so on. In short, if the Iraqis don't
use what they have effectively, that's weakness. However, if
white folks like the Americans don't use what they have effectively--if
their war plans are bad, if the troops' morale is low, if their
leaders want to do things on the cheap, if their intelligence
is, well, unintelligent, if their responses are clumsy, crude
and ineffective--*that's* not military weakness at all!
On no, it's as if the fearsome lion, still asleep, has not yet
girded its loins to display its awesome power. But you can't
have it both ways. Either the non-whites are also sleeping lions,
or the white folks are also weaklings. And no matter which way
you decide to go, the conclusion cannot be that America, despite
its consistently bad strategy, bad leadership, overhyped technology
and unwillingness to endure heavy losses, can play nation-builder
wherever it likes. American military power must be measured,
not by the theoretical capabilities of its forces, but by its
track record. That record suggests America is not powerful enough
to establish its empire and fulfill Ignatieff's dreams.
Real outcomes: the
imperial record
Perhaps American can change, and become
more competent. But change into what? Is there in fact some plausible
imperial model for nation-building? Does the historical record
suggest that such projects can succeed?
Once you dispose of Ignatieff's numbskulled
conflation of building your own nation with building someone
else's, you quickly realize that the latter has literally never
happened. Ignatieff's examples--the reconstruction of Germany
and Japan after World War II--prove only that he confuses nation-building
with nation rebuilding. Before the war, Germany already possessed
a full-fledged federal democracy which met or surpassed Iggy's
not-very-demanding standards. Even Japan emerged from the occupation
much as it had emerged from feudalism in the early 20th century--as
a country run by oligarchs on a feebly democratic parliamentary
system. The occupation did not build a nation in either case;
it tinkered with the political structures of two already existing
nations--very tight-knit, deeply ordered, highly advanced industrial
ones.
Beyond this, what do we have? The British
did successfully build two overgrown trade emporiums, Hong Kong
and Singapore. Even Britain's non-disasters certainly don't qualify
as anything Ignatieff could call a success. In Ghana, for instance,
which became independent in 1957, John Kufuor became the first
elected president to succeed another elected president...in 2001.
Colonial ventures have almost always produced catastrophes, from
the huge massacres that marked Indian independence to the Lebanese
civil war to the Indonesian genocide. Egypt, where colonial powers
were preceded and followed by strong indigenous 'nation-builders'
like Mohammed Ali and Nasser, is practically the only place the
British did not make a mess of things. And if the French did
not do quite as badly in North Africa, they too did not leave
behind them a single democracy, and wasted over a million lives
in a futile effort to hang on to Algeria. In fact it is quite
striking that the much-reviled Gulf states, dominated but never
colonized, have on the whole escaped the mass murder and crushing
poverty that followed in the wake of colonial attempts to build
nations.
It's not just that imperialism has virtually
never built successful nations. It's also that it failed to do
so in much easier conditions. Imperialists usually didn't construct
their empires in real 'trouble spots'--quite the contrary. Most
of these areas became trouble spots only *after* the imperialists
took over.
So Ignatieff's vision of nation-building,
in its idealistic version, is not something any imperial power
would ever undertake, nor is it something any imperial power
has actually accomplished. Its 'realistic' version does not in
fact even promise freedom and democracy. But non-imperial, non-white
powers have indeed built nations. For him, this somehow doesn't
count.
Alternatives to White
Imperialism
Ignatieff and others have recently discovered
that, before you can have freedom and democracy, you must have
something they call 'the rule of law'. This can't mean that you
have a nice state which guarantees human and civil rights, because
those rights are supposed to come when, or if, democracy gets
established. So the pundits' 'rule of law' simply means something
like 'law and order', and they have labored to produce breath-taking
triviality. Yeah, if you have people running around completely
unrestrained--if you have no state--you can't have a democratic
state. Who ever didn't know this?
But all this is part of Ignatieff's double-dealing.
When it comes to nation-building, even a weak version of the
rule of law is all he demands of the imperialists. When it comes
to anyone else's nation-building, the standards change. Anything
short of full-fledged democracy is a 'failure', or at best a
sort of unsuccessful success like Vietnam, "one country,
ruthlessly consolidated under an authoritarian leadership".(EL
117) Odd: wasn't Ignatieff worried that America's interventions
might not be ruthless *enough*?
Suppose, unlike Ignatieff, we apply one
standard for all races. That shouldn't be the standard of democracy,
because Ignatieff all but admits that no one is going to meet
it. (Remember how that Gallic shrugger Kouchner was 'too consultative'?)
So say that building a nation requires, first and foremost, civil
order and the sort of basic economic progress without which--as
even liberal thinkers like John Rawls agree--civil rights have
no value. It then becomes clear that the most successful nation-builders
don't need anyone's tutelage. They build their economies in the
face of great adversity, they keep public order, they educate
and feed the poor, they establish a working infrastructure and
public health system, and they have strong popular support. But
they are not Iggy's sort of people. They are communist, like
Cuba or Vietnam.
These countries, though undemocratic,
do not merely offer their people real independence from the imperial
powers, and from the deep misery and violence that besets 'democracies'
like Brazil or Mexico. They also far surpass the imperial powers
in their ability to perform humanitarian intervention and even
contribute to nation-building. Thus Cuba, when it defeated the
South African army in Angola, laid the groundwork for Angolan
nationhood and contributed substantially to the end of white
domination in South Africa. And there is no doubt that Vietnam's
intervention in Cambodia was one of the great humanitarian success
stories of our era, as fine a case of nation-building (lite)
as we've ever seen. These countries may have intervened largely
out of self-interest--Vietnam, at least, said it was acting in
its own defense--but of course this is something Ignatieff applauds
in white nations. Perhaps non-white nations might be permitted
the same mixed motives.
This is not to recommend communism, or
to deny that Stalin killed a lot of people. It is to state facts.
Though Ignatieff pretends to gritty realism, he is laughably
obtuse about the role of communists and imperialists even in
his stomping grounds, Afghanistan and 'the former Yugoslavia'.
In the former case, imperial powers quite correctly feared the
nation-building efforts of the Soviet client Najibullah, and
thought it clever to back Bin Laden and the Taliban. In the latter
case, imperial powers had fun breaking up the multiethnic nation
almost miraculously constructed by the communist Marshall Tito,
and then congratulated themselves on constraining the catastrophic
civil war they fomented. (Ignatieff with typically slimy ambiguity,
speaks only of 'the ruins of the Yugoslavia Tito had left behind.'
EL 118)) A Martian would have some trouble with the notion that
Karzai and Dostum are greater gifts to mankind than Castro. Shouldn't
we have some trouble with the notion that imperialism 'heavy'
is more beneficent than post-Stalinist communism? How then can
Ignatieff pretend that America offers the best available humanitarian
alternatives?
The last resort
When pressed, Ignatieff and his ilk make
a simple appeal to consequences. Look, he says, we have a terrible
régime like Saddam Hussein's. Are we going to do something
about it, or not? This question deserves three others: About
what? What do you mean by 'something'? and the classic "who's
we, white man?"
If there was a humanitarian emergency
in post-9-11 Iraq, it had to do with shortages of food and medical
supplies. It required doing less, not more: ending the sanctions,
not invading. Perhaps there was no such crisis, but then there
was also no humanitarian case for invasion. This is not leftist
cant but what emerges from the Human Rights Watch reports for
2000 and 2001 (issued 2001 and 2002). The reports describe what
are rightly called gross human rights violations committed by
the Iraqi government. But these violations affect dozens or hundreds,
not thousands or hundred of thousands. They cannot be compared
to what was and is happening in the Congo and probably in other
parts of the world such as Liberia, nor to what did happen in
Rwanda. Nor was worse to be expected: Saddam Hussein had consolidated
his power in those areas he still controlled; he was not about
to be suppressing any revolts. Intervention will do nothing for
those he had already killed, and no amount of killing ten or
twenty years ago makes for a humanitarian crisis in the present.
But suppose there actually was a case
for humanitarian intervention, for the relatively small-scale
military actions which are designed to stop a slaughter. This
is no case for war itself. Ignatieff, who clearly thinks the
American war machine is kinda cool, ignores what could not be
more obvious: war destroys the very things that humanitarian
interventions are supposed to protect. It destroys people, rights
and all. Often it destroys societies. World War II, the 'good'
war, cost about 50 million lives. It was forced on the Allies;
it was not their little stab at nation-building. It cannot be
invoked to justify an imperialism which, faced with tasks far
less demanding than what faced the Allies in 1945, decides that
open-ended occupation and warlordism is good enough for the natives.
But that's just what Ignatieff, in the end, recommends.
No doubt the ever-supple Ignatieff will
soon tell us that America messed up in Iraq. But Ignatieff's
own recommendations for 'empire heavy' suggest something like
a commitment of 500,000 troops for ten years, plus hundreds of
billions of dollars in Iraq alone, plus at least that much again
for dealing with ancillary problems elsewhere in the Middle East,
plus whatever the US might need for other adventures during those
ten years. Such an effort would produce rivers and lakes of blood.
It would require a wisdom and competence we have absolutely no
reason to expect. And what's the good news? For Ignatieff, it's
some humanitarian paradise which his 'realism' consigns to some
ever-receding future.
If Ignatieff were simply informing us
of harsh realities--if it really were up to strong, brave America
to build nations, if the Europeans really were wimps, if the
natives really were contemptible except when transfixed by the
hysterics of 'modern nationalism aroused'--then the charge of
racism would be as idiotic as he no doubt imagines it to be.
But his supposed realities are fantasies. His version of tempered
optimism amounts to the suspicion that, despite Anglo-American
moral and military supremacy, the natives may be too benighted
to taste the glories of white democracy. His smarmy overconfidence
and his obliviousness to non-Western, non-imperial alternatives
are all too familiar. There is nothing humanitarian about them.
They can be understood only as liberalized white supremacism,
no less vulgar for being confined to the Anglo-Saxon race. It
will lead to more misjudgments and more deaths.
Michael Neumann
is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those
of his university. His book What's
Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just
been republished by Broadview Press. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vincente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|