On this thread, we’ve recently been treated to the spectacle of a self-proclaimed radical leftist commenter defending the Bush administration’s War on Iraq. Though I was familiar with the Euston Manifestists’ critique of the anti-war left, I’d had no idea that there were some who describe themselves as Marxists who view Bush as a progressive embodiment of the forces of history. This argument seems to be one put forward at a webpage called The Last Superpower, which believes, inter alia:
On the one hand capitalism is vastly superior to tribalism, feudalism and fascism. The achievements of advanced capitalism really are quite spectatcular. Nevertheless it holds back development and progress because it is based on wage slavery and is therefore incapable of fully unleashing human potential. So from the perspective of the past it is progressive – but from the perspective of the future it is reactionary and deserves to perish!
But also that:
the left has always fought against fascism. We therefore supported the overthrow of the fascist Baath Party in Iraq. The United States currently has no choice but to drain the swamps and support the democratization of the Middle East. We areglad about that!
The argument appears to be a species of determinist Marxism which sees “Islamism” as some sort of progressive force.
Writing at Open Democracy, Fred Halliday is crystal clear as to why the left should not align itself with Islamism.
It does not need slogans to understand that the Islamist programme, ideology and record are diametrically opposed to the left â that is, the left that has existed on the principles founded on and descended from classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and generations of experience. The modern embodiments of this left have no need of the âfalse consciousnessâ? that drives so many so-called leftists into the arms of jihadis.
In a reply to his critics, Halliday writes:
More important still, for all their difference of military strategy, these Islamist groups all share a common, socially retrograde, policy, on social matters across a wide arc of behaviour: from freedom of expression and political organisation, attitudes to women, gays, social interaction in general, to rights over cultural freedom, dress codes, and alcohol consumption. Furthermore, these groups espouse odious views on a theme that was historically a defining feature of the left: namely racism of all kinds, including anti-Jewish racism.
Halliday, of course, is writing against those who believe that opposing war in Iraq means supporting retrograde political movements which are opposed to all the principles of freedom on which the left project rests. No doubt he hadn’t contemplated that there would be those on the left who would support similar violent and illiberal movements but support Bush’s war. But his arguments against any complicity with radical Islamism have an identical force.
Update: Coincidentally, there’s an op/ed in the Oz on the left and Islam by Tanveer Ahmed.
Phwee, what a thread that was.
What does “phwee” mean, Rob?
Dunno, it’s a noise I’ve made since childhood to express awe and disbelief.
I think that no matter how one says it, it is always more polite to spell it as “phew”.
Perhaps it’s a comination of “phew” and “ewwww”?
No, it has to have the eeeeee sound to work.
“..I’d had no idea that there were some who describe themselves as Marxists who view Bush as a progressive embodiment of the forces of history.”
Why not? The Beacon of Light always was a liberal progressive, affirmative action policy. However it’s possible to have good motives and yet end up with ‘Saddam was the best option’. A bit like supporting Mugabe and black rule for Rhodesia, or ATSIC and the Dreamtime. Will we eventually have to admit that ‘apartheid was the best policy’ for South Africans too, or does the elapsing of a certain amount of time negate that? eg 30 years on and it looks like Vietnam is coming around to our way of thinking, but it wasn’t immediately apparent at the time of the Cold War. How will we judge Bush and Blair if Iraq looks and feels like Vietnam in 30 yrs?
So you’re a Marxist too now, obs?
Islamism is not a progressive force. It is a conservative, often reactionary one.
What is progressive is supporting the right of people to vote for Islamists, and supporting the right of Islamist parties to take power when they win elections. People have the right to choose their own governments, and they have every right to ignore my opinion about who to vote for.
If I want people to change their vote to someone I agree with, it is my job to persuade them, it is not their job to vote the way I think they should.
Mark appeared to imply, in the thread that he links to, that it would be a good idea to stop Islamist parties from taking power:
David, you’ll note that I’m not assimilating your views with those of patrickm. But I don’t agree that a majoritarian vote in the absence of constitutional and liberal safeguards is a good in and of itself.
Consider one of the responses of the Islamists to being denied power in Algeria:
http://www.arab.net/algeria/aa_independence.htm
That doesn’t give one much hope as to what the rights of freedom of speech would have been had they taken power.
You could also consider the considerable advances in rights for women in Morocco, and the fact that a popular vote would probably strip these away.
But I’m not defending the denial of electoral results either. Fundamentally these matters are matters for the people of these states to work out, and are almost always more complex than meet the eye. I don’t believe that the “West” has any right to shape their regimes by force. And I believe that “progressive forces” would be much better off supporting those who support democratic rights, not those who would deny people fundamental freedoms in the name of majoritarian “democracy”.
The debate’s been entirely weird hasn’t it? In a nutshell I think what we have here is some deranged version of the Popular Front. Maoists Neocons Islam Democracy Occupation=what exactly?
Well, anything you like I guess, but don’t mention the war. You know. Facts on the ground. A civil war that can’t be neatly pigeon-holed into ‘pro-government’ or ‘anti-government’, ‘pro-democrat’ or ‘anti-democrat’, or ‘controlled’ by Iran, Syria, the US, Israel, people with purple fingers or anyone else.
Leaving aside the ludicrous reasons for invading in the first place (the non-existent WMDs. And what was it? Missiles on London in 45 minutes?) I don’t think a lot of people would have had too many problems if the occupation had been handled properly. By which I mean sufficient troops and a post-war plan.
Get the place settled down. Ensure the provision of basic services. Have a functioning society.
But the evidence is in and there was no post-war plan apart from handing the whole show over to a bunch of utopians in the shape of J.Paul Bremmer, his 20-something Republican ivy-league underlings in the CPA, and the small crew who bought into the fantasies of the AEI back in Washington.
The ‘grown-ups’ – in this instance State and the Pentagon – were effectively sidelined. And now that everything’s gone pear-shaped even the boosters have departed to greener pastures, and let us never speak of Iraq again.
And yet we have ‘revolutionary socialists’ like patrickm and David Jackmanson buying into Bushworld.
DJ, who posts as ‘youngmarxist’ over at lastsuperpower, http://www.lastsuperpower.net/disc/members/56633303655?b_start:int=0#903313150933 has spent considerable time lecturing LP readers about democracy and Islamist movements in the Middle East.
Well, as a marxist, here’s his take on China, history, and the revolution in Australia:
But compared to patrickm, DJ’s an intellectual.
Christine, is that lengthy quote supposed to somehow DISCREDIT David Jackmanson? If it is meant to show he is a ditz, it does the opposite.
David, send flowers to Christine, even though I don’t quite understand the point she is making.
I don’t know that I’d want to live in Vietnam, I think even most Marxists would soon find it isn’t a workers paradise. South Africa is a long-way from Zimbabwe and while Mbeki is a long way from perfect, it still a long way from a totalitarian state.
To suggest that because one supports a democratic Iraq, one supports an Islamist Iraq, is to falsely imply that Islamism was not already the dominant mode of social organization there. While it is true that Hussein’s government paid lip service to a declaratory policy of secularism, his government in fact owed it’s continued existence to it’s allegiance with Sunni Islamists. Suggesting Iraq was in any meaningful way “secular” is just to repeat Ba’athist propaganda intended to suppress the majority Shia Arabs’ nationalism.
It seems to me that to collapse principled support for Iraqi democracy into support for reactionary Islamism is to condemn the Left’s opposition to Iraq’s democratization for the very same reason. And this is to say nothing about the Ba’athist fascism which itself descended from Nazi fascism, a point about which Mr. Halliday was also very clear.
I do not speak for Last Superpower, though I do post there; however, I believe that any truly democratic movement in Iraq will not, in fact, lead to the rise of reactionary Islamism in the long term. Many of the most progressive voices in the region belong to women. When they are heard, militant Islamism, as exemplified by al Sadr, must either oppress them at the barrel of a gun to maintain influence, or atrophy and die. I can therefore support the process of democracy in Iraq without supporting all of it’s outcomes – just as in any Western democracy.
Mark describes Halliday’s comments as “writing against those who believe that opposing war in Iraq means supporting retrograde political movements which are opposed to all the principles of freedom on which the left project rests.” But this is precisely the opposite of what he has suggested. In responding to Jacqueline Kaye and Fouzi Slisli’s criticism of his “The Left and Jihad,” in which they accuse him of mistakenly collapsing all Islamist political movements under the banners of al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hizbollah, Halliday writes that while politically disparate, among other similarities, they are all opposed to the Left. The comments Mark quoted refer specifically to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hizbollah.
He is in fact “writing against those who [DO NOT] believe that opposing war in Iraq means supporting retrograde political movements which opposed to all the principles of freedom on which the left project rests.” This is crystallized in the paragraph following the one which Mark has quoted: “True, not all elements of the left support such groups, but more than a few do; the undifferentiated backing given by the “anti-war” movement for the “Iraqi resistance” is indicative.”
Here Halliday links to a ZNet article in which the Socialist Worker interviews Tariq Ali, who – ostensibly in response to various bombings of women in bread lines and men waiting to apply for jobs with the Iraqi police, says:
So Tariq Ali understands that the Coalition is set against Islamists like al Sadr. Halliday realizes that Ali’s refusal to differentiate and discriminate between these “resistance” groups results in supporting groups which are “opposed to all the principles of freedom” the Left takes as it’s own. I think those of us who have attempted to differentiate between these groups realize that opposition to them is now a priority shared between the people of Iraq, Leftists, and indeed the Bush administration.
I’m sorry Lupin3, but if you read anything about the position of women in Iraq at the moment, you’d find that a lot are literally being oppressed by militant Islamists and not just those associated with Al-Sadr. And in many cases literally at the barrel of a gun.
The difference of course, in reference to your second sentence, is that the “processes of democracy” in many other nations (and not just in Western ones) do not include the formation of militias, the murder of innocents, ethnic cleansing, the destruction of property and infrastructure, and so on.
I’m not sure what you’re proving with your quote from Tariq Ali, to be honest.
And it would be appreciated if the assumption – shared by neocons and “revolutionary Marxists” alike it would seem – that opposition to the invasion of Iraq and what has transpired since under the false rubric of “democratisation” implies any support whatsoever for Saddam or Baathism were not made. Certainly in my case there is none, as you’d know if you read my previous writing on these matters.
Update: Coincidentally, there’s an op/ed in the Oz on the left and Islam by Tanveer Ahmed.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Actually, this debate has been useful in reinforcing my appreciation of the tendency that exists across ideological borders to regard human life as cheap when compared to the movement of history. It appears to apply equally to neocons, Maoists and Stalinists. Utopias of this sort are pernicious.
I’m not making any aspersions on any individuals. I’m glad to see David J emphasise freedom in his revolutionary vision. Perhaps he’ll cast off the ideological straightjacket of Marxism and reject the sort of utopianism that inexorably leads to mass deaths, whether it’s badged as Leninism or “spreading freedom and democracy”.
Well it’s all about some strange holdout of fundamentally discredited revolutionary politics isn’t it? Albert Langer, lastsuperpower founder in 2003: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/10635/20040412/www.onlineopinion.com.au/print4a40.html
Swamps. Mosquitoes. Sterner stuff. Modernity from the barrel of a gun.
You have to laugh.
Mark you write:
“The argument appears to be a species of determinist Marxism which sees âIslamismâ? as some sort of progressive force.”
I assume you meant to say “regressive force”, as this is what this Marxist chap is clearly saying.
Actually, this does make sense from a Marxist perspective.
As for myself, I supported the Iraq War up until about the middle of last year and made many comments to that effect on this blog. I now see that I was horribly wrong. I’ve sat down and tried to write a blog post on my change of opinion half a dozen times but haven’t been able to. Lord give me strength.
Where’s my other post?
Mark, thanks for your comments.
I think you are quite right in your concern that a casual disregard for human life in the cause of advancing history can lead to disaster. So too, I would say, can a casual disregard for those lives in the cause of maintaining stability. Unfortunately, Iraq left no other alternatives, and I believe the consequences of inaction would have resulted in much greater bloodshed and the prospects afterward would have been much more grim. The question is, what to do?
When you point out the dangerous conditions currently confronting Iraqi women, what do you think should be done? Should we hope for the return of stability by ceding their voices and their votes to the Islamists you rightly dread? But is that not to sacrifice the left’s principles on the very forces you suggested LS supports?
This is the danger Halliday used Tariq Ali’s comments to illustrate: the “resistance” the left seems to identify with as “anti-imperialists” are not forces the left can find any middle ground with. And to clarify, I used those comments to illustrate your misuse of Halliday’s comments.
I appreciate the distinction you wish to raise between opposing the Iraq war and not supporting Ba’athism. In the same way, I believe I can support the war without supporting imperialism. Nevertheless, the consequences of the policies we advocate have effects in the real world. One cannot escape that. In your case, the Ba’athists would remain in power. In mine, one form of imperialism has been replaced with another.
But the movement towards democracy and long term stability that has occurred because of this, is in my opinion the best outcome for principled leftists who recognize the human costs of either decision.
Christine, your payment will be in the usual locker at the train station.
But please try to be less obvious, Steve at the Pub is already suspects something.
The curious critters at Last Superpower appear to be almost the last faction of the pro-war left still standing, in the face of the disastrous outcome of Bush’s adventure in Iraq. Posters at the better-known British blog Harry’s Place seem to have given up on left-wing politics, or on the war, or on both, and the Drink Soaked Trots site seems to have descended into madness. Most of the journos who backed the war on ‘left’ grounds have recanted, retreated to other subjects, or followed in the footsteps of Hitchens and abandoned left-wing politics completely. The pro-war left may be the least successful political tendency in history.
These people have no chance of influencing public opinion in a positive way, but they do have the potential to reinforce some negative stereotypes about Marxism.
The argument for US imperialism as a progressive force is predicated on an amalgam of neoconservatism and Stalinist and – if you look further back – Second Interntionalist stagism. Iraq and similar societies are seen as partially or wholly ‘pre-capitalist’, and thus in need of capitalist development, even if it has to be enforced at the point of a gun, if they are ever to be able to aspire to socialism. The pro-war lefties play up Marx’s rapturous praise of capitalism in the first part of the Communist Manifesto, and ignore Marx’s subsequent revisions of his view in texts like the Grundrisse and the late writings on Russia, not to mention his wholehearted support for religious and pre-capitalist rebels against imperialism in his writing on the Indian Mutiny, for instance.
I’ve written about the origins and history of this nonsense here:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/04/peculiarities-of-pro-war-left.html
Stephen Marks explains how the world has changed since 1848, and why the notion of a progressive capitalism is such a fantasy in 2007, in his comments in this thread:
http://www.davidosler.com/2007/01/marxism_and_the_middle_east.html#comment-1438
“I don’t think a lot of people would have had too many problems if the occupation had been handled properly.”
Does we really believe that another 30,000 or 50,000 troops from Day 1 would have changed the course of the Iraq project that much by now? It’s a bit like saying Mugabe or ATSIC and the Dreamtime would have worked if only they were better resourced. Does anyone seriously believe that about liberal progressive, affirmative action plans these days? Is it the sculptor or the limitations of the clay they’re working with? That’s largely why Western electors are generally more magnanimous toward Bush and Blair than the usual critics. They understand the clay they’re working with is the main problem. Hence the ‘give it away guys’ attitude to Iraq and Iraqis now. The same analysis awaits Project Afghanistan of course.
Oh and if it’s the clay in Rhodesia, then we might expect that to turn out to be the case in South Africa. We’ll see what eventuates there after Mandela’s death, shall we? There are some worrying signs there now.
Oops!- “Do we really believe..”
Not so strange alignments
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IA13Ak02.html
Mark wrote that until he read material http://www.lastsuperpower.net he
Well now you do know, Mark (although I wouldn’t describe the stance we have taken on Lastsuperpower in exactly those words!).
he then goes on to quote a couple of things from the site from which he concludes that :
This is an incorrect conclusion. There is nothing progressive about Islamism in itself – just as there was nothing progressive about Puritanism in itself during the English revolution. Religion has clothed many social upheavals but we always need to look below the surface appearance in order to discern what really drives such movements.
In Iraq and the rest of the Middle East most people are Muslims. That’s the reality. And Islam is used to justifya whole range of backward attitudes -just as Christianity and all other religions have been used. Ultimately these backward attitudes arise from material conditions rather than from religious belief however. As democracy takes shape in Iraq and elsewhere, many battles will need to be fought – just as happened ine the West.
The agument put forward at Lastsuperpower is that neo-con policy in Iraq can be made sense of if one understands that in the 21st century the US has no option but to push for democracy world wide. This is an about-turn from its previous policy of maintaing stability by propping up dictators and backward regimes across the planet. The old policy is what we grew up with and it takes some time and effort to see that we have entered a new era – an era in which it is in the iinterests of the last superpower to support the ‘democratic impulse”. There’s nothing weirdly altruistic about it – it’s just what they have to do.
At the moment, many who supported the war from the right are panicking. When they initially supprted it, these pople didn’t really understand that democracy in Iraq would mean Islamists being elected. More and more people of this ilk now seem to be hinting that the people in that part of the world should not be permitted to have elections if that means they will elect Islamists. They clearly expected an easy transition to a pro-American government .
I don’t think that Bush et al are in a state of panic about this. On the contary, I think that they knew from the beginning that destroying the stagnant and fascist status quo in Iraq and opening it up to democracy would be a tumoultuous process. I doubt that they could have been up-front about this at the beginning however. (Read my Australian article (from September last year) for a concise account of the position we have taken on this.)
What surprises me consistently is that people, including most who write for LP find it easier to believe that Bush is either a lunatic or completely thick than to consider that US policy actually makes sense..
None of that answers the question of how Bush’s policy “actually makes sense” or why the US “have” to push for democracy throughout the world.
I don’t know either how you interpret the fact that Bush and the neocons have lost almost all support from the US foreign policy establishment. As Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed out, the true meaning of the Baker-Hamilton report was to provide political cover for the traditional power wielders to criticise Bush. Perusal of establishment publications such as Foreign Affairs and The National Interest would demonstrate to you how far the neocon democratisation push has now fallen.
And very clearly if you believe that Islamism is a necessary “stage” towards “modernisation” it’s ultimately progressive – your analogy apparently being Marx’s remarks about capitalism in the Communist Manifesto. (But note what Scott said above).
If you’d care to argue what the material causes for the socially reactionary agenda of Islamism are, rather than just assert that there are some, I’d be interested to hear what you have to say.
The overthrow of tyrranies by armed force is sometimes the way to go, David. But in the case of Iraq, this was never the goal. If it’d been you and Albert commanding the invasion force then maybe I’d have supported it, but, as it turned out, it was George Bush invading and for a very different reason.
As soon as the dust settled, and the occupation was shown for what it was, the situation in Iraq has spiralled into a bloody catastrophe for Iraqis – secular and religious. When will you look at the realities and give up on your pre-war optimism – it’s been 4 years now. Remove the rose coloured eye-wear.
Will you support an attack on Iran too? In the hope that it might push Iran a step up your preferred political hierarchy.
Guy Rundle opposed Langer’s position in a lecture in 2002 at an Australian Catholic University seminar by maintaining that armed intervention is only justified to stop immediate ongoing genocide or other serious violation of human rights. We cannot take it upon ourselves to help people skip two squares on the gameboard of political development if it means we break thousand of eggs in the process. First becuase that is murder, and second because we do not know which way is forward ourselves anyway.
wbb, is the text of Rundle’s lecture floating around the interwebs somewhere?
FAR be it from me to defend DJ, PM, Kerry et al’s thesis in toto, but it seems to me that they see Islamism as an unfortunate but necessary evil, in that it happens to be the dominant popular political force in the middle east, and is therefore the unavoidable stage for democracy to pass through.
This of course ignores the tendency of Islamism to more or less inevitably become Islamofascism once allowed free
reignrein.That’s the danger of seeing the world in wide historical sweeping narratives – so many chances to see “progress” and ignore the realities.
But there you go.
I’ve never seen the text if it is, Mark. It was a speech for a public gathering, rather than a formal seminar. Which explains how I got in.
Just had a hunt around – there is this page which seems to advertise the one I remember. In 2003 as it turns out.
FDB, I’ve got no problem with the assertion that Islamism is popular. I just dissent from the view that we should take it upon ourselves to lob cruise missiles into the region in its cause.
We have a very poor track record of intervening in true humanitarian crises – Rwanda, African AIDS epidemic, Zimbabwe starvation – and are far too quick to march into rather more strategically complex parts of the world under the banner of God’s little helpers.
brief reply as I only have 10 minutes:
Mark wrote:
So you don’t think that material conditions throughout the Middle East would have anything to do with the fact that modern ideas about such matters as the rights of women, minority groups, freedom of expression and so on have not taken root in people’s minds?
On lastsuperpower we’ve described the Middle East as a swamp. And that’s what it is. The whole region has been allowed to staganate for decades. And this has in large part been enabled by previous US foreign policy. Modern ideas have been unable to get a grip under those conditions. The socially reactionary agenda of Islam is a reflection of that rather than the cause.
Of course there is a sense in which Islamic ideology also has a life of its own. However the only way to weaken these reactionary idaes and eventually defeat them is for the battle for democracy and modernity to take place.
Mark also wrote:
Most of them don’t get it. They tend to want stability at all costs and are in far more denial about the nature of the current era than are Bush and his supporters. Yes, the neo-cons are isolated but that in itself is not an argument against them. As has been said several times in this thread (with regard to democracy), the majority is not always right (in fact it’s more often wrong).
I think I explained in my Australian article just why I think that the US has had no option but to push for democracy. Why don’t you read that and not only tell me why I’m wrong, but also tell me what you think a sensible US foriegn policy would look like (sensible from the perspective of the US, that is).
After 9/11 could the US have just left the Middle East as it was???
No argument from me WBB.
I just don’t think the lastsuperpower “position” is that Islamism is progressive, as has been suggested by detractors. Or that their “arguments” need in general to be exaggerated or misrepresented to be discredited. They do a fine job all on their own.
They do indeed, FDB.
Should Blair have left Birmingham as it was after the Tube Bombings? Should Australia have left Jakarta standing after Bali?
Why should the people of Iraq have to suffer untold slaughter because a few Saudi terrorists attacked Manhattan?
Because they are but dust in the winds of progress, silly!
Sorry, but turning around the question doesn’t answer it, Kerry.
I’m interested in what you think these “material conditions” are.
And also as to whether you think that the image of the Middle East as a “swamp” which you (collectively I assume) utilise at The Last Superpower might just be a tad patronising and offensive at the same time as you’re lauding the rise of people power in Islamism or whatever?
But I suppose since you think the US “has” to solve all the region’s problems (and why is the lack of democracy in say – Turkmenistan – not on your world-historical agenda?) you also assume that the regimes in the Middle East were all solely supported by the US. Which again ignores a complex reality – including as Halliday points out, the various forces working against secular nationalism and indeed Marxism in the region.
But then I suppose that goes with the territory of being in favour of imperialism.
If the great majority of the US establishment, politicians and indeed electorate “just don’t get it” – that is, the historical inevitability/requirement or whatever of the neocon agenda, you’ve got a problem, I’m afraid. Because the US is actually a democracy (however flawed) and your motor of history Mr Bush is going to be toast shortly and his agenda with him.
This particular grand narrative is heading nowhere, but as it cascades towards its end, it’s killing an awful lot of people.
I wonder what else it is? Maybe a desert. Floating on an ocean of oil. Or maybe just the ancestral home for a hundred million Muslims amongst a few million others.
Swamp just doesn’t do it justice somehow.
A question for Kerry, DJ and any other lastsuperpower type who would like to answer. How do you explain Indonesia?
You seem to be arguing (and I apologise in advance if I have got this wrong) that removing dictatorships will put an end (or at least severely reduce) Islamo-faccist terrorism and that Islamism, while not progessive in and of its self, is a step towards modernity.
Although it dosn’t smell like Sweden, Indonesia is relativly democratic and modern, and certainly miles ahead of anywhere in the Middle East. And yet it has continued to produce a most healthy crop of mosquitos, as had Malaysia.
What is more Islamism remains a potent political force in Indonesia. Rather than giving way to modernity, it aims to replace it and implement the same sort of destructive ideas as Islamists in the Middle East would.
Mark said:
Actually it was Noam Chomsky who widely promulgated the term “draining the swamps” in relation to the Middle East in an article published worldwide in Sepetmber 2002.
Noam Chomsky:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,788508,00.html
So, Barbara?
It doesn’t make it less patronising if Noam Chomsky said it.
Well Mark, I think that’s the problem right there. They’ve taken a few words from someone who’s pretty dodgy anyway (Chomsky) and constructed a cathedral over the grave of a dead analogy.
Rather than demonstrating the relentless course of history (these after all are “laws” which “must” be adhered to, and with which we must agree. And history can always be reduced to an inevitable, predictable, line) I’d say this was an example of the revolutionary left in its death throes.
Poor old Maoists. Sidelined and irrelevant, and no sensible arguments. I’m guessing Kerry’s husband said it plain as day:
“Modernity grows out of the barrel of a gun.” But this is what you lot have always been on about, isn’t it?
So that’s why LSP is quoting it. They are not intending to be patronising, they are answering Noam Chomsky.
Huh?
Chomsky didn’t realise that “modernity grows out of the barrel of a gun”?
What rubbish, anyway. Again it rests on outdated and discredited Marxist perceptions about the English Civil War which not even Marxist historians believe any more, because they look at actual evidence and scholarship, not dogma.
Indeed.
Contingency plays so much of a role. Hence the fact that Bush, whether anointed as the modern Napoleon by inverted Hegelians, has next to no chance of carrying out what he “must” do according to the role written for him in this little script.
I’ve done a lot of reading in historical sociology, and quite frankly the best you ever get when you try to force history into a theoretical frame is an approximation or a best guess. People who care about facts, and causes, and history, know that. People who only want comfortable dogmas to assure themselves that time is on the side of their cause wilfully ignore it. That wouldn’t matter unless so much death were involved in that active ignorance.
Chris said:
Well I don’t know about Sweden but Denmark, Holland, France and UK are also producing mosquitos at a fine old rate.
The primary, preferred target of the Wahabbist and other Jihadi groups has always been Muslim countries. Indonesia and Malaysia (and Phillipines) were penetrated well before 9/11 or before Indonesia was a democracy.
The Islamist parties which ran in the Indonesian 1999 and 2004 elections I gather were at pains to emphasise they were not proposing an Islamic state or Sharia law. The most vote any declared Islamic party attacted was 7.3%.
http://www.saag.org/papers10/paper981.html
.
The question surely isn’t that it exists, or what its aims are, but whether it is succeeding? Not so far and this might indicate that democracy is frustating the intentions of the Jihadis in those countries?
Interestingly, Indonesia’s multi ethnic population is served by a proportional representation vote for party lists – just like Iraq and South Africa.
Proportional representation seems be the way emerging democracies are solving the potential tyranny of the democratic “majority” that Mark has correctly identified elsewhere.
Mark, I’m just pointing out that LSP isn’t using the term to be patronising, which was your criticism.
Interestingly also, Indonesia’s democracy came about primarily through the actions of Indonesians themselves not through some sort of armed “gift” from the West as with the poisoned chalice Bush offered Iraqis.
Ah now I get it – Bonzo (GWB) is actually a highly trained Chinese deep cover agent, put in place in the sixties or seventies to promote Chairman Mao’s global agenda. Makes perfect sense.
I think I saw that in a movie once, Gummo.
Well Kerry, 9/11 was essentially conducted by Saudis, and yes, they left that pretty much as it was: an oppressive pro-Western monarchy which funds Wahhabism on the sly to deter terrorist attacks at home.
Oh except they quietly acceded to Wahabist demands by ceasing their military occupation of the Kingdom – leaving in the middle of the night for the UAE. To launch attacks on some nasty regimes, albeit completely unrelated to 9/11.
What’s LSP’s position on unintended consequences? Or do all consequences retroactively confirm the theory?
Memories are short. Actually it was the Asian economic crisis engineered by filthy American Imperialist free market economics engineered by the puppet World Bank that did for Suharto.
(several posts back) Mark wrote:
Of course contingency plays a huge role. I am not a determinist in the crude sense of denying contingency. Almost all of the details of history are contingent (ie accidental in the sense that any particular event didn’t have to happen). However the very fact that we have a notion of contingency implies that we think some events (in the broad sense of “event”) are necessary and will happen eventually. Otherwise history would indeed be a wild whirl of unpredictable events and we would be quite unable to act upon it.
GWB certainly did not have to be the one isntigating a turn around in US policy. But my position is that eventually it would have had to happen. As leftists we are glad that it has happened now rather than later. The longer the Middle East was left to stagnate, the more bloody the upheaval of changing it.
It’s not a matter of “forcing history into a theoretical framework” but of trying to work out where it can go, given current reality
Of course it may not go there right now. But that doesn’t mean that we should sit on the side lines rather than attempt to play an active role based on what we see as the general direction (ie the possibilities inherent in reality).
This is very different from the “realism” of those opposing GWB. Their position seems to be that current reality must not be disturbed. I think this can be characterised as “stability at any price”. I would say that there is far more death involved in refusing to see that it’s possible to seize the time in an historical sense. To me that is a clear case of “active ignorance”.
The main message coming across from those attacking us at lastsuperpower is that things should have been left alone in Iraq (and the region in general). No one has come up with any proposals for how that part of the globe could be liberated from tyranny and oppression. the general idea seems to be that it would be better just left to stagnate.
We are accused of being “patronising” but I think that is those who effectively support the stability of the old order in the region, those who are horrified of the voting in of Islamist governments etc who are in fact displaying a contempt for the people of that region.
carp diem!
Here’s one: the West could stop propping up dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Oh, suddenly worried about stability, the rise of Islamist regimes? Dont be so patronising.
Is it really that hard to understand that US policy is about knocking off anti-American regimes, and they couldnt otherwise give a fig about liberating the Arab / Muslim world?
I dont know why – every other Empire has operated on these same realist premises.
Interesting, isn’t it, that the Kerry is too embarrassed actually defend the view that people she doesn’t understand are mosquitoes, and that the best way to achieve democracy in Iraq is via military imposition from an outside state on the other side of the world.
Ihre Argumente sind ein Stapel von Scheiße.
And the Indonesian response isn’t worth mentioning? The Indonesian people had no part to play in determining their own destinies?
Kerry, you haven’t given us a skerrick of argument, despite requests, for why this is “necessary” which makes me suspect you are a determinist and what you’re not articulating is some sort of theory of “stages”. Yes? No? You tell me. All that’s happening so far is that we’re being lectured on the alleged necessity of these events without any justification whatsoever being advanced.
Piffle, I’m sorry. What obliges you to come up with your “proposals”? Which are indistinguishable from those of the neocons in all but the telos of your utopian path. It’s you who effectively show contempt for any notion of democracy by suggesting that democracy be imposed at the barrel of the gun Chomsky refuses to wield. Why not let the Arab peoples sort out their own destiny for themselves? And Barbara’s analysis denies all agency to Indonesians themselves and to the movements of Indonesians who sought democracy but again proposes some Western-centric narrative of evil global institutions. God knows why the World Bank isn’t lauded as some sort of avatar of revolution by the last superpower crew – was it because currency movements and strictures on bank accountability weren’t violent enough? Not enough missiles dropping to rally the troops?
There’s no distinction whatsoever between American imperialism and yours except that Bush’s version has some extremely adverse effects in the real world. Your moral bankruptcy in actively cheering on destructive war is evident. Perhaps you should contemplate who it is exactly that’s living in a swamp.
And, meanwhile, in the real world, Condi’s in Egypt avoiding using the “d” word:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/world/middleeast/16egypt.html?hp&ex=1169010000&en=c2375640fd8137b1&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Mark, don’t go clouding the issue with real events.
You are getting sleepy, very sleepy. I am going to count backwards from 10 to 1 cand you will fall asleep 10 your eyelids feel very, very heavy, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … You are asleep.
You will all now go and read The Last Superpower. You will agree with everything you read on the last superpower …
Excellent, I agree.
What could we do to help make this more likely, and what especially do we need to do to minimise the loss of innocent life?
Yes please.
I hope not. We want debate, not groupthink.
groan, it was a joke Doris! Of course the Indonesian people played a huge part in determining their own destiny. But nevertheless it was the Asian economic crisis caused by US driven capitalist free market economics that caused the collapse of Suharto which freed the people to take matters into their own hands.
And what if the remnant Suharto regime and the Indonesian army had then put down the people in the extraordinarily savage way the Baathists did the Shiite uprising in 1991, what would the Left’s solution have been? If hundreds upon thousands of Indonesians had had to flee the army as the Kurds had to in 1991, what would the Left’s solution have been?
I have absolutely no quarrel whatever with the Left’s vehement opposition to the war for all the grounds you and others give here. The absence of a clearcut UN resolution and the spectacle of the Lastsuperpower raining bombs on a defenseless third world country was odious at the time and still is. )
But this IS what does concern me: The Lefties (all the ones I know, all friends and erstwhile comrades) opposed the No Fly zones (protecting the Kurds and Shiites from more 1991 style attacks) and opposed the UN sanctions in the 90s, thus consistently opposing all non military efforts to overthrow the Baath regime – while at the same time protesting they didn’t/don’t support the regime. Give me a break. What kind of intellectual contortion is this?
At the anti war demo I attended in Melbourne not one banner, not one speaker called for Saddam to step down so as to prevent war, not one called for Baath to disarm so as to prevent war, not one called for compliance with the 16 or so UN reolutions to prevent war, not one expressed solidarity with the people who had suffered the most hideous of war crimes at the hands of that regime. Not one mention. And the Kurds are affiliated with the International Socialists. Even handedness? Forget it comrade.
Then, since the fall of Baghdad, the Lefties have consistently treated the jackboot Baath insurgents who had persecuted 80 per cent of the population for more than 30 years, ruling as an Afrikaner like minority, as though they are freedom fighters! And treated the 80% Shia and Kurdish populations as though they are the collaborators with the enemy and the Shiites as evil Islamists unworthy of protection. The Left raised not one word of protest as the Baathists continued their remorseless killing of Shiite civilians – tens of thousands who have now been blown up or otherwise murdered at their hands in the last 3 years. But that’s nothing new to the Shia of Iraq. And reading the columns of my old comrade P. Adams debunking the notion that any mass graves were really being found in Iraq or deriding the public trial of Saddam and his most bloodstained henchmen. How many of the self righteous Lefties, I wonder, watched or read the evidence of that trial?
And the sneering of the Lefties at the three Iraqi elections. Going back to the first one in January 2005, the violence, threats and intimidations were such that none of the candidates on the party lists were able to even put their names forward for fear of being assassinated. I listened to a BBC World anchor grilling a hapless Iraqi electoral official for ten minutes trying to get him to admit that elections were headed for total disaster. And was it an AP cameraman who just “happened” to be on the spot to film Iraqi electoral workers being murdered by the Baathists?
Well, the Iraqis turned out in millions, three times and vote they did. Working off the similiarity of the experience they shared with the SA blacks, they drew up a South African style constitution to ensure the future would be power sharing and not tyrannies of the majority or the minority. And what do they get from the Left? – nothing but contempt and cynicism because the Lefties didn’t like THEIR choices. Oh goodness. At least the unreconstructed maoists get points for absence of hypocrisy.
Well I didn’t oppose those steps, Barbara. Maybe you need to broaden your acquaintance of lefties!
Brilliant commentary from Barbara B. You could have added, Barbara, the near universal opposition of the left to the campaign to liberate Kuwait during the first Gulf War, and the fact that in the lead up to the war and its prosecution leftist demonstrators exclusively targeted US and allied missions in Australia for protest, not Iraq’s. And when the Scuds started to fall on Israel, well, bugger me, they went down the road and protested against Israel as well.
And Mark, with respect, I think you need to broaden your understanding of ‘the Left’.
In what way, Rob?
By the way, I was wondering what your take on pro-Bush Maoists would be?
I think, again with respect, the same could be said of the perspective you and Barbara are articulating. With which I don’t entirely agree, but these are all fair points:
Simon Crean spoke at the demo in Brisbane and was booed when he referred to the UN resolutions, which I think was disgraceful.
There are many, many, people on the social democratic Left who supported the actions Clinton took to contain Iraq and undermine the Baathist regime, and many who would have supported armed action if it had had UN sanction. I don’t know if I’m one of the latter (because I never believed that Bush was serious about it, and I questioned the motives involved in the international law case) but I’m certainly one of the former. The left is far broader than people who go to rallies, or Trotskyite groups.
Also, Rob, I thought you opposed the war.
I think it is entirely specious. My view (universally unpopular) is that the invasion of Iraq was a catastrophic mistake executed by an inexperienced Administration shaken to the core by 9/11, casting around for the next attacker, and mistakenly fixing on Iraq. But Marxists are determinists and teleologists who think that history marches to an ordained drum, with no room for error, impulse or happenstance.
Dear me, pyramids of piffle. Was is this last superpower bizo? (Ok, so maybe Ill take a peek).
Were you really at those demos? I dont recognise the left you’re hanging with, Barbara. Where do I start?
Huh? The lefties I knew were supporting the PRD throughout, and with money, resources, and Oz union support. We had em out here on speaking tours. I met a bunch. WHat were you doing?
And more pertinently, what was the US response in 1991? They hung the Kurds out to dry so as not to piss off the Turks, and let the the Shiite intifada be slaughtered. You’ll find any number of the survivors down the road in Broadmeadows – recovering from their imprisonment and stigmatisation by Australian government.
Bollocks. Never heard this line once. The lefties I knew supported Kurdish independence, and still do (with much tut-tutting from US apologists who start mumbling about ‘stability’ at this point. Ironic innit?). As for the sanctions, well, I gather AWB and Saddam made a packet. I opposed the impacts of the sanctions on the civilian population – and you know what – the impacts on civilian population of this descent into Bladerunner post-GW2 still worries me, and every Iraqi I know (do you know any Iraqis, Barbara? Why not have a chat with one sometime.)
Obviously you missed those refugee action collective meetings 1998-2005. To summarise: we advocated for Shia and Kurdish Iraqis, against the mistreatment of our own government, having fled Saddam’s depredations. Have you ever, like, actually done anything on the left? You dont seem very well informed. The ‘not one word’ came from the Right after declaring victory in GW1 and leaving the Shia to be slaughtered.
Jeez, at least you acknowledge they’re Iraqis. Most of left spends their time pointing that out the foreign terrorists are a mere 10% of the insurgency. I dont know anyone who calls them “freedom fighters”, but as we’ve seen, you clearly move in different circles to the rest of us of the left.
Mark, why the UN in particular?
I can understand a desire to have some mechanism for measuring the consent or otherwise of the Iraqi people for armed invasion against their dictator, but I would suggest that the UN is an organisation of governments, not people. It’s possible for actions that you might consider desirable to be blocked for self-interested reasons by UN reps.
Is it conceivable that there could be some other process that you would accept as a fair measure of consent?
This is a fideist argument completely unsupported by evidence, fact, real world events.
Indeed, I would argue that the people who are currently in charge of US foreign policy, i.e. a far right-wing faction of the Republican Party, allied with big business (a quasi-fascist construct if ever there was one), are not in the least bit interested in democracy except where it serves as a useful propaganda device. Like Peter Foster they’ll say anything to facilitiate policy.
To judge to what degree that element of the Republican Party has a vested interest in democracy we should look to their own bailiwick with myriad instances of unabashed vote machine tampering and wilful disenfranchisement of blacks and hispanics in two previous presidential elections as well as vote buying with “soft” money (illegal campaign funds solicited from big business) then laundered into “hard” money, i.e. cash donations from individuals.
Sir Henry, it is possible to think that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was correct, and still accept that the US political system is rotten to the core.
For instance, in most of the USA, the people who run each polling booth – yes, the people who check your enrolment, and hand you your ballot paper (if it is not a Diebold-friendly county), are members of the Democratic and Republican parties. Just that one atrocious practice shows that the US electoral system is clearly a ridiculously insecure and inherently biassed system, and should be cleaned out by angry Independents.
What the US has is an interest in the rest of the world becoming more like it, and less like, say, Saudi Arabia – which clearly does not necessarily mean fully democratic. Leftists who support the war generally don’t like or trust President Bush one bit. Personally, I loathe his wedge politics on gay marriage.
In the light of Barbara B and Rob’s comments on the past malfeasances of the left, I see it’s time for me to start keeping a daily journal where I note my political positions on a daily basis and any shifts therein. At least that way I’ll know whether I’m really the perfidious kind of leftie they’re talking about. Can’t say that I give a rat’s what anyone else thinks though.
David,
On what grounds was Bonzo’s decision to invade Iraq correct? Was it on the grounds that Iraq, Iran and North Korea together comprised an “Axis of Evil” which threatened the safety and freedom of western democracies (State o’ the Union 2002, if memory serves). On the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive self defence against rogue states (later that year in an address to the troops)? On the basis that Iraq’s WMD (since proved non-existent) posed a threat to security in the middle east? On the retrofitted basis that Saddam Hussein was a very bad man who didn’t deserve to have a country to run?
Examine the evidence, what has happened to Iraq – its infrastructure and it’s people – and it’s clear that the war and the invasion cannot be justified. The harm that’s been done far outweighs the harm that was to be prevented. The decision is only correct if you believe in some airy-fairy future wonderland where everything will be redeemed when the Sunni lies down with the Shiite and neither of them tries to top the other.
Oh Sir Henry, that just so totally ignores the well established swamp/mozzie theory of history I don’t know what to say.
“Examine the evidence, what has happened to Iraq – its infrastructure and it’s people – and it’s clear that the war and the invasion cannot be justified.”
Yet my understanding of the polling is that the Iraqi people disagree with you, Gummo.
Gummo, my general position is that the war was justified because it has in fact led to a fighting chance for democracy in the MidEast.
Since we disagree on that, you could go on denouncing me for being wrong, or you could pick one of the 3 recent comments where I have:
1) agreed with another commenter that there are other regimes that the US should stop propping up.
2) Quietly asked Mark if he could conceive of a possible alternative to the UN, as a way to measure the consent of a people to armed intervention on their behalf?
3) Admitted that the poltical system that threw Bush up is rotten, and needs changing
and say what you think about one of those things.
Ok, so I can accept there does exist this “left” that supports the decision to invade, and I should probably stop arguing with you as if you’re common or garden variety RWDBs.
While I do wish you were more familiar with the longstanding positions and activities of your comrades (frankly, you arent) I will accept for now that youre not all part of the “alleged ex-lefty recants and becomes high paid columnist” industry; thriving of late.
So, some questions, fellow lefties.
1 UN imperfect? Yes. But what criteria makes unilateral US action superior? In retropsoect, dhasnt the UNs more circumspect approach to inspections been entirely vindicated?
2. What “decision to invade” are you supporting? The bollocks WMD thesis? The discredited 9/11 connections? Or the post-facto “downing a dictator” line (i.e the one explicilty rejected by Howard at the time)? Arent you supportin g somehting that wasnt even part of the plan? Isnt that rather incoherent apologism?
3. If we’re downing dictators now, isnt it rather elitist of us not to support the domestic oppposition when they rise up eg 1991 – but take charge ourselves?
4. And what criteria are being employed? Who gets to decide who goes down in this new order?
I vote Mugabe. Oops, no interest from the US there! And no democratic forum to discuss priorities. Eqypt, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan. No interest, not on. Sudan – lotsa talk, no interest. UN should do somethin. Support that as well?
So… effectively you will just wait for the regimes the US find inimical to their geopolitical interests and then apply your alleged new “principles”? Selectively, that is – with someone else doing the selecting?
5. If, as seems abundantly clear, we can expect ‘liberation’ and ‘democratisation’ of anti-US regimes only (and only the weak ones without nukes) arent you at risk of just becoming auto-apologists for US foreign policy? Watch out: The US has previously, and will continue undermine democratic regimes if it suits their interests (Chile, Nicaragua); and you may end up in a rather nasty bind as a former apologist.
5. Do you support Kurdish independence? If not, why not?
I am curious (Red….)
Rob, I’ll repost the recent polling conducted by an Iraqi centre which was retained to do polling for the Coalition Provisional Authority – so presumably the Bremer regime didn’t think they were a shoddy outfit!
Their “democratic government” has even worse poll numbers than Bush:
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/01/06/10094619.html
“We have a very poor track record of intervening in true humanitarian crises – Rwanda, African AIDS epidemic, Zimbabwe starvation – and are far too quick to march into rather more strategically complex parts of the world under the banner of God’s little helpers.”
Err, would that be criticism of the overrated ability of mortal sculptors, or the vagaries of the quality of the clay at their disposal? Wouldn’t you love such leftist caution espoused here, to be exercised more often with affirmative action plans financed by our taxes? What say you all now lefties? Is affirmative action on the nose once and for all? That’s the bit that’s so galling about Bush for lefties. How dare he do in Iraq what we self righteous UN buggers have in mind for Afghanistan eh? And all the while Joe Public knows intuitively deep down, it’s the bloody clay stoopids!
Exactly.
And precisely.
Zimbabwe and Sudan both, it’s fairly clear, are instances where much more egregious human rights abuse – mass killings and enforced starvation, organised rape, etc, etc, – is occurring than in any of the regimes the Last Superpower has in its sights.
David, that’s a complex question and it’s too late at night for me to attempt an answer.
Yes, we’ve had this exchange before, Mark. I think that is the poll the reporting of which was skewed to show all the bad news first, then the good news (eg. the Iraqis by a sizeable majority still approved the invasion) that AP originally reported. If I manage to find the AP report I will link it.
David,
What I think is that there are three minor points of agreement and one big glaring point of disagreement where we’ll have to agree to differ.
Because frankly, much as I prefer democracy over the alternatives, bringing it closer in the MidEast as a whole doesn’t justify trashing Iraq. If the US had offered that as justification in the UN Security Council, they wouldn’t even have got the UK on side. That’s just international politics as “The Great Game”.
And with the insurgency, the failure to clean out the various gangsters and warlords in Iraq, democracy Iraqi style isn’t travelling well right now. In Iran, the government has become more hard-line Islamist. Two very big backward steps for democracy in the Middle East, I’d say.
Lefty E:
1/ The UN is “circumspect” about everything. (Stopped clock & all that…. occassionaly inaction UN style is the answer)
2/ Am not & never have been a believer in a direct link between 9/11 & Iraq, (although some disconcerting little discoveries re certain fugitives turning up in Iraq). Downing a dictator? Should have been done properly in GW1, & certainly Saddam had a few false starts, he pushed his luck with the Clinton & Blair for years, & was only saved by Kofi Annan (who deserves chaining to a block of concrete on the river bed for his services to humanity)
So it is the “WMD” (with 45 minute launch capacity) which I back as a reason for removing Saddam.
Turns out there wasn’t such a capacity in Iraq after all, tsk tsk, he really SHOULD have given those UN weapons inspectors more cooperation.
4/ the difference between Saddam & those other dictators you mention, is of course, his propensity to export his slaughter, & implied desire to export it even further. He talked big, & got smacked down by an even bigger & badder dude (rule #1 of the street)
5/ I support (passively) Kurdish independance. Due to the presence in my household of an actual Turkish citizen this topic doesn’t get much airing.
I asked Mark if an alternative structure for measuring consent could possibly be conceived of, so I am not committed to relying on unilateral US action in the future.
Based on the thesis that Bush wanted to overthrow Sadaam from the start, and that he lied about WMD because the ‘realpolitikers’ in the US Right would never have let him do it otherwise.
Well, Bush 41 should be brought to trial, in my opinion, for what he did to the people he betrayed in 1991 – when he called on them to rebel and then abandoned them. Unlikely, of course.
Given that Sadaam’s crushing of the opposition in 1991, aided and abetted by Bush 41, was so thorough, there is a case that Western leadership of the actual overthrow in 2003 was needed more than it would have been in 1991.
However, I don’t see the USA as being ‘in charge’ of Iraq today.
I agree that Mugabe, Mubarak, Musharraf, and Abdullah deserve to be overthrown on general principles, and that intervention in the Sudan would be a good idea.
Assuming you are correct that we can expect no help from the US, how do we decide what to do to help any oppositions in those countries? What can we and should we do to help them?
You ought to read the bit on Last Superpower where one member speaks of openly working for the victory of the Viet Cong, and the defeat of the USA and Australia in the Vietnam War.
For the record, we can’t trust the USA one bit.
If the Kurds want independence they will have to have it, but I understand they are keen supporters of the idea of a united Iraq.
Mark, despite what the newspaper report you link to says, the actual report of the poll, by the polling agency, does not necessarily support the statements in the newspaper report.
Click on that link and you will be presented with a pdf link to click on which contains the poll report
Two things that suggest the newspaper report does not give the full picture are:
1) 85% of the respondents were from Baghdad, and all the rest from Al-Anbar province and Najaf (whether the city or the province is not made clear) (p 4)
This was not a poll of opinion across all of Iraq, given that those areas are among the most violent.
2) Confidence in PM Maliki to improve the situation:
strongly or somewhat confident: 44.7%
strongly or somewhat unconfident: 50.4% (p9)
So, despite the 3% figure you were quoting, not all Iraqis appear to have lost hope yet
Correction, 81.9% from Baghdad.
Yes, it is possible to think that Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was a “correct” decision, while acknowledging that the US system itself is rotten to the core. I suppose. But it is extremely unlikely.
Anyway, that is not what I said. I was making a point that Bush, or rather, the cabal who write his script, wouldn’t be so ideologically wedded to the notion of democracy that they would be so willing to sacrifice 50,000 casualties (3020 dead) for a concept they are happy to trash at home just to bring the gift of democracy to Iraq.
If we follow your reasoning US will also shortly be bringing a brand new bag of democratic tricks to People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Eritrea, North Korea, Laos, Syria, Turkmenistan, Libya, Mauritania, Burma, Sudan, er, Fiji, Vietnam (well, maybe not there), Bhutan, Brunei, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland, UAE, the Vatican. Maybe Iran?
In any case, as it has been said ad nauseam in this thread and its neighbours, the pursuit of democracy was a cosmetic add-on objective for US foreign policy when all the other objectives fell apart.
To reiterate a previous posting, Dubya in National Security Presidential Directive “Iraq, Goals, Objectives and Strategy” set out US policy goals when invading Iraq: 1. Eliminate wmd, their means of delivery and associated programs; 2. Prevent Iraq from breaking out of containment and becoming a more dangerous threat to the region; 3. End Iraqi threats to its neighbours; 4. Stop Iraqi government’s tyrannizing its own population; 5. Cut Iraqi links to international terrorism; 6. Liberate Iraqi people from tyranny, and assist them in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy.
Note that tricky no.6. Democracy in this context is a subset of being “assisted in creating a society based on moderation, pluralism and democracy…”
I say tricky because when Iraqis go to the polls 65% will plump for some form of Shia theocracy, and with no love of the Hannafi Sunni, we have a democracy that does not spell pluralism. So what’s US about then? I’d say it’s just bullshit.
Why not do a reality check on your theory of Amerika’s mission to bring democracy to Iraq and do a bit of reading? Here’s a short list:
State of Denial by Bob Woodward; The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies by Ron Suskind; State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen.
If you haven’t the time, just skim through Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast.
Then come back and give me your thoughts.
I will buy Armed Madhouse and read it, but this may take a few weeks.
I will respond, assuming that the topic comes up again. (Fairly confident there)
Thanks for that, David. Rob did raise the question when I posted the same poll at Troppo of whether it had been misreported. I don’t know anything about the Gulf News, so it’s hard to judge. I wasn’t aware that the actual polling data was available. I’d suspect those who support Maliki are mainly Shi’a, though.
I don’t think that’s right at all, David.
Funny, I seem to remember a bloke called Hans Blix saying that he was quite happy with the co-operation he was getting. A UN weapons inspector as I recall.
I also have this vague memory that the weapons inspection process was thoroughly white-anted by the Bonzo Dog Doodah Administration, largely because it wasn’t tracking down the non-existent weapons they’d convinced themselves had to be somewhere in Iraq.
LeftyE said.
My question was: what would the Left’s solution have been had the Indonesian Army put down the people the same way as the Baath army put down the Kurds and Shiites in 1991.
Would you have supported Australian/US military action to save them (if it was on offer)or if not, what?
Indeed. For some reason the logic of which I’ve never been able to fathom, the Left uses this betrayal to justify their opposition to the US removing the Baath regime in 2003? Betrayal number 2, this time by Left? (There were many valid reasons why the Left would oppose the invasion, but this intellectual contortion wasn’t one of them unless you can provide enlightenment.)
Did you support UN sanctions against white South Africa, which the whites claimed ad nauseum impacted badly on the blacks, just as Saddam/Baath did? If so, what is the difference? What other measures would you have approved of to weaken/overthrow the regime?
With this great record of helping the refugees you have, again I don’t see the logic of using Bush1′s betrayal to justify opposing US action in 2003 and leaving the Shia and Kurds to their fate yet again?
btw, invariably when I discuss this with anti-war Lefties the explanation boils down to a variation of “it’s all about oil”, which again I don’t see the logic of when set against the war crimes continually committed by the Baath against the Shiite and Kurdish populations. Perhaps you have a different reason that makes logical sense?
.
“Freedom fighters” – “resistence”, “insurgency” – I often wonder what the Afrikaners would have been called by the Left had they mounted a “resistance” or “insurgency” against the ANC?
I had no doubt that the Baath would attempt a vicious counter revolution against the Shiites who they have treated as their bitches for more than 30 years now. Nor did I ever doubt they would spin this as being anti Occupation. What I didn’t figure, naiively, was that the anti war worldwide Left would so quickly adopt the propaganda line. The Bushies totally failed to anticipate how the Baath would react to their disempowerment, reflecting their wilfull Americo-centric ignorance about Iraq, the incompetence of their military from the top down which in turn was reflected by the apalling behaviour by many of their troops, especially in the first year. If they had anticipated it they would have brought in 500K troops to properly secure the country, or not invaded at all.
Your account of yours and others activities on behalf of the Kurds and Shia refugees is a fantastically positive moment in the unrelenting horror of this story.
I’d be interested to know if the refugees today would turn back the clock in Iraq, given the scale of bloodshed the Baath has continued to inflict on the Shia and which has reached these unimaginable levels of brutality since the Shia decided to fight back with Middle East rules?
As I suggested in passing on another thread, the Last Superpower website folks apppear to be a late revivification of the late lamented Mensheviks.
The Mensheviks sat round from 1902 to 1917 protesting the fact that “objective forces” (i.e., capitalism) had not yet done their historical task of making conditions right for the advent of the socialist millennium. Thus they opposed Lenin’s Bolsheviks as being “premature” in pushing outright socialist revolution.
In the same way, TLS applauds Bush for being the unwitting gravedigger of world capitalism. In effect, TLS is sooling the Bush Administration on to the destruction of the forces that created and sustain the political economy of the United States.
There are huge moral and empirical objections to this viewpoint.
Moral objections revolve around the old broken eggs and omelette trope. TLS is defending the destruction of innocent Iraqis in the bigger cause of historical “progress”. If TLS really wants the socialist millennium to be achieved by violent means, let them share in some of the physical dangers associated with that ambition rather than applauding the destruction of innocents.
Empirical objections may be more persuasive to such a heartless crew. TLS sees Bush as a latterday Napoleon imposing progressive ideas at bayonet-point. However, only the blindest ideologue can fail to perceive that Bush has achieved precisely the opposite result. “Progress” has not been achieved in Iraq. Rather, Bush’s cack-handed fumblings have produced a stunning victory for retrogressive Islamism.
Bush’s failure may have been forgivable if this outcome had been an utter surprise or some bizarre accident. But Bush cannot claim that expert opinion
did not warn him that the triumph of Islamism would be the likely outcome of his invasion of Iraq. Indeed, “W” only needed to consult his own father on this matter. Instead, and much to his subsequent regret, “W” listened to the rosy prognostications of the Neocons. Now everyone’s very upset and the world is treated to an orgy of finger-pointing.
In short, in common with the Neocons, TLS has mistaken the view through their rose-coloured glasses for reality. Moreover, they have hooked their world-historical wagon not to a latterday Napoleon, but to an incompetent ignoramus.
The Last Superpower’s views would be highly amusing were they not so pathetic.
I’ve been reading Sidney Blumenthal’s How Bush Rules.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Bush-Rules-Chronicles-Radical/dp/069112888X
It’s very readable – being a collection of his columns.
He points out that Bush rejected the 17 volume State Department post invasion Iraq study, as well as numerous documents predicting the insurgency, civil war and the dire consequences prepared by DOD, think tanks and the CIA.
Without reading any of them.
Wilful ignorance of the consequences of his actions is the methodology of this Napoleon.
He does share a total rejection of reality with many of the TLS crew.
I hope so, Katz, but there have been some signs to the contrary on this thread.
When you have some, please post them.
Get real DJ.
TLS shares with the Neocons a record of complete miscomprehension about realities in Iraq.
Let’s start with a simple one: How long did it take before TLS acknowledged a state of civil war in Iraq?
Pointing out the ignorance of TLS is shooting huge fish in a tiny bucket.
On March 2, 2006, the issue of a “civil war” was discussed at LS:
One piece of evidence that the Iraqi people, even after all the provocations of 2006, “continue to minimise their response to violent provocations” is from this poll (pdf link), which states, (p 16) that 96% of people reject attacks on Iraqi state facilities and personnel, and that 100% reject attacks on Iraqi civilians.
This same poll shows that 61% of Iraqis support attacks on US troops, indicating that Iraqi people are quite capable of approving of violence, and yet reject it almost universally against their own nation and people.
I just re-checked the definition of ‘empirical’, and, to my surprise, it doesn’t include using angry cheap shots because someone else doesn’t agree with you.
Kerry quite a way back now you wrote:
I think the suggestion that we (that is the west) are capable of successfully giving Iraq a good shove in the right direction relies far to much on the assumption that we are able to successfully manipulate the situation in Iraq, or to put it another way, that we are able to accurately determine the consequences of our actions.
The truth is Americans (especially American Presidents given to ignoring expert advice), not to mention Iraqi exiles, are always going to have a fairly limited ability to understand how Iraq works. Even if the Americans did understand Iraq much better than it now appears they did when they invaded there is still a great deal of room for unintended consequences.
As Robert Kaiser pointed out in the Washington Post the other day it is overestimation of Americas abilities to control the situation in other countries, to use the âshrewd application of U.S. power — pulling a lever here, pushing a button thereâ? to give history a shove in the right direction that lead us into Vietnam.
Given the potential for “playing an active role” to take us to places we never wanted to go, I would say there is at the very least a reasonable case for restraint.
David, I’m not sure why you find an opinion poll to be compelling empirical evidence. Opinion polls measure… opinion.
Objectively, when you have multiple groups who are armed contending violently for the control of a state, you have a civil war.
BTW I’m catching a plane today so it may take a while to respond to anything.
So people who want to write something possible to engage with, like (for instance) Sir Henry or Lefty E have, please don’t take it bad if a reply takes a while.
Chris’ comment is a good thoughtful one, but I’ll leave it to kerry since she was asked.
Since public opinion is a vital factor in whether a civil war can be carried out or not, I would suggest that a poll that measures that opinion, if it can do so accurately, could be a crucial piece of evidence, given that LS has asserted:
Well, I don’t know that LS gets to define what a civil war is in order to interpret things as it likes. “Asserted” is the right word.
Very clearly the violent groups in question do have sufficient support to continue contending for power.
LS gets to say what it thinks “civil war” means, then you get to say what you think, if you think differently.
Should we not try to say what we think the definition is?
Anyway.
Plane.
Sure, but I’d have thought it was sensible to look to how others have defined it on the basis of extensive studies.
If TLS’s semantical gyrations over the question of civil war in Iraq are any indication, then TLS is rivalling GWB in the level of denialism with which they approach facts that don’t fit in their cookie-cutter view of the world.
DJ’s helpfully provided extract from March 2006 TLS is a textbook example of this denialism. Only when DJ acknowledges that there is a fundamental mismatch between his theory of progress and the facts on the ground in Iraq will it be possible to engage with him on any sensible basis. This isn’t a cheap shot; it’s an ineluctable truth.
Robert Kaiser in the extracts so helpfully provided by Chris is making just this point about the consequences of GWB’s denialism.
And Chris’s retrospective counselling of restraint is, of course, utterly foreign to the arrogance and hubris of GWB and TLS.
Another question for TLS: when did they acknowledge the enormous authority and political acumen of al Sistani?
Mark,
In a comment where you cited poll results (since disputed by others) you referred to the Iraqi government as ‘ Their “democratic government” ‘.
I wanted to ask you why you place “democratic government” in inverted commas? I would see that as insulting to the purple finger stained Iraqi people who have voted for their government, at some risk, three times.
To clarify my question: On election day(s) in Iraq would you support the millions of Iraqis who voted or not? If not, then what would you say to them?
To clarify my positon: I support the Iraq elections and believe they have democratically elected their government.
link to Mark’s original comment
How many Sunnis voted, Bill?
How long did it take to form a government after the elections and on what basis was it put together?
Rob said:
Thank you. I didn’t want to revisit Kuwait because I believed then that the Left (and Thatcher) should have insisted on liberating Iraq as well as Kuwait. Had Thatcher, Hawke and some others done so as the price of their support, then I believe Saudi Arabia and Gulf States were so shit scared they would have caved in and gone along with it and Syria would also have capitulated.
What is not often recognised is that the Gulf War and Iraq war were actually phases 1 and 2 of the Iraq war and since the Baath are still fighting to get their power back we are presently in Phase 3.
If Thatcher and Hawke had insisted on moving on Iraq after Kuwait, the result would be that this whole debate would have happened in the eighties, without the benefits of the Internets. That’s all.
Bush the first made the correct call in not pushing on to Baghdad – he’d fought a limited war with a precise objective and achieved that. There had been no military planning for an invasion of Iraq with a view to removing Saddam and long-term occupation.
Maybe that’s a bit too foreign policy realist for some tastes – I don’t care. The idea of the Left demanding that a sociopathic conservative like Maggie should push their progressive agenda with the big guns is laughably absurd.
Bill Kerr,
The voting process was imposed by al Sistani on the Bush administration. Bush wanted a far more tidy and predictable process of puppetry than he got. This defeat was the first indication that Bush had lost the plot in Iraq.
Now, no democrat or anti-imperialist could legitimately be unhappy about the fact that the imperial occupier of Iraq was hoist upon the petard of its own insincere democratic rhetoric. Thus, a majority of those purple fingers were stained at al Sistani’s orders. They represented an act of clever resistance to the presumption of the American imperium.
However, the government thus formed represented a lamentable upsurge of theocracy that presaged a bloody and destructive civil war. As was noted by Mark above, plenty of US experts predicted this outcome. Bush failed to read their warnings.
As far the the US is concerned, they need a way to stabilise Iraq to the extent that a government can exert a credible degree of control over the country. Bush has achieved precisely the opposite and the coming “surge” is unlikely to make any difference.
But beyond expectations of viability, the Bush administration wants to ensure that any Iraqi government makes laws relating to oil only within the framework imposed by the Iraqi Constitution, which was written in Washington DC.
Without an independent judiciary and without any credible clients amongst the Iraqi political classes, Bush or any like-minded US President who may succeed him, is highly unlikely to be able to achieve an oil outcome in Iraq attractive to the oil minors (as opposed to majors) in whose interests the Iraqi constitution was written.
So to answer your questions:
Good on you for sticking it to Bush, and good luck in your approaching civil war.
However, is there no alternative to being either a province of the US or a theocracy at war with itself? Saddam didn’t think so, but I wish you could prove him wrong.
“Working openly for the victory of the Viet Cong & the defeat of Australia & the US”?
If this person is a citizen of either Australia or the US, then a courtyard at dawn, blinfold & firing party is the only decent way to handle them.
To add to what Katz said, I refer back to the argument I made about democracy on the earlier thread. It’s not just voting and it’s not majoritarianism where the aim of the majority is to seize power permanently at the expense of the minority. Sir Henry alluded to the fact that formal democracy doesn’t imply anything much of and by itself – and the irony is that Marx himself was one of the first to critique formal equality (in “On the Jewish Question” which is a problematic paper in respect of its anti-semitic overtones, but anyway…)
Democracies require active citizenship and the development of democratic capacities. These include, but are not limited to, a preparedness to put national interests and identities ahead of regional, sectarian and/or ethnic ones, strong support for freedom of speech, tolerance, and a willingness to entertain the alternation of power and an expectation that the state will conduct itself fairly as between majorities and minorities.
None of these are present in Iraq.
Enthusiastic Shi’a support for using a numerical majority to extract vengeance on Sunnis is not the expression of a democratic will.
Let’s please engage with realities, not neocon rhetoric and made up definitions which are trimmed to suit pre-judged ideological positions. As Katz noted also, the latter are worthless because it’s impossible to argue with an opponent who will shift their ground to maintain an ideological faith,
Again, this meta-narrative is far too simplistic. The former Baathists are only one element within the Sunni population. Much of what is happening now has developed its own highly complex dynamics as a result of American intervention and occupation.
Looks like the reason, denied at the time, for the invasion was oil after all.
Yes, the ‘former Baathists’ line is straight out of the US spin play book. Only bad guys oppose us. Its kindergarten fantasy stuff, Im afraid – and probably the main problem with the TLS line on all this.
The nationalist character of (much) of the insurgency is amply demonstrated by DJ’s poll showing 61% of Iraqis want the occupation to pack up and leave. But then, who wouldnt? This aint rocket science. Is it really only nasty implicated Baathists who object to foreign occupation? Course it aint – and in any case, there’s Baathists and Baathists: teachers had to be Baathists, nurses had to Baathists, etc.
Debaathification put a lot of people out of work – people who were hardly Saddamite henchman, but are now firing RPVs. Plus relations between Shi’a militia and the COW are hardly rosy, are they? Talking up a strike on Iran will no doubt be helping relations there.
Heh. This just in from the Arab Times, quoting a mysterious unnamed unverifiable source (they’re always the best) http://www.arabtimesonline.com/arabtimes/kuwait/Viewdet.asp?ID=9548&cat=a
I’m not agreeing with it, I’m just relaying it.
Bah. It’s of a kind with the story the Sunday Times ran a while back about the Israelis training special squadrons to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities — well debunked by Pajamas Media here.
It does have all the hallmarks of a story planted by someone doesn’t it? Just how many people could have been sitting in those meetings with George and Dick and Condi and Bob and then rushing over to Kuwait for a breathless interview?
Maybe George Brown made it up to piss Tony off!
Presuming that Ahmed Al-Jarallah, Editor-in-Chief of the Arab Times simply didn’t make all this up and that the suppossed “source” had sufficient credibility not to be thrown out of his office, whose interests are served by such a story?
I would suggest that the ultimate source is a Saudi who is attempting t oramp up the urgency of the US to confront Iranian powr in the region. It is a weather balloon to test Sunni Arab opinion on the question of confronting Iran.
The US does not want a regional war between Saudi and Iran and their clients. The Saudis are therefore keen to impress upon the US just how important it is for them to reamin in Iraq.
Very reasonable conjecture, Katz. Always, as you say, “Presuming….”
You’ve gotta love journalists. Make up a story from disparate facts, drum up a great headline, then wait for the government to confirm it by denying it.
What a job.
Mark said:
According to Wiki 2,340,179 voted for the two Sunni parties in the Dec 05 election. It is not known how many Sunnis voted for other parties, or how many non Sunnis voted for the Sunni parties.
Iraqi Accord Front: 1,840,216 – 15.1% – 44 seats.
National Dialogue: 499,963 – 4.1% – 11 seats.
A total of 55 seats and 19.2% of vote.
The Sunni parties standing for the first time took seats off the Shia, the Kurds and the Indie seculars (Ayad Allawi).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_legislative_election,_December_2005
From memory it took about 5 months from the declaration of the results to form the govt.
On what base? Not sure what you mean, but the Cabinet seats were allocated proportionately between the Shia party UIA, the Kurds and the Accord Front. I don’t think National Dialogue wanted to be part of govt. Much of the delay was due to wrangling over Interior and Security Ministers, mainly because all the parties had to agree. (One of the reasons decision making has always been a long process is that the parties insist on consensus.)
.
Agree with all this, but Iraq would have to wait a long time before all these conditions were fulfilled. What should they do in meantime?
Not sure what you mean by this, either? If you are referring to the government the Shia do not have a numerical majority in the Parliament or the Cabinet. They received 41.2% of the vote at the election and have 128 seats out of a chamber of 275. All significant decisions are made by absolute majority, not simple.
Therefore they are governing in coalition, and this will be the case unless the day comes they are elected to a clear majority in the Parliament. Interestingly they couldn’t even reach a clear majority in the election where the Sunnis weren’t standing.
Barbara, again we’ve got this faith in opinion polls and “official” descriptions of the system. Maliki himself is next to powerless, and the powers behind the throne are Al-Sistani and Al-Sadr. The ministries held by the Sunnis have zilcho input while those that count are stacked with acolytes and members of Shi’a militias.
How about some actual political analysis of the realities?
Mark -
Sorry, you’ve got me bamboozled. Where was I quoting opinion polls?
You asked how many Sunnis voted, I gave you a reference.
You asked a few other things and I answered to the best of my ability from what is on the record and what appears to be factual. I thought you were requesting information.
I’ll leave the analysis up to you. You may be right. Or you may be half right. Or you maybe wrong, or half wrong. Who knows?
Again, I would be interested in how your opinion of what might be a better system of government there?
Well this is the problem with anonymous “sources” isn’t it Katz? I’m sure the rotting corpse of Judy Miller’s career could attest to that (but Bob Woodward may disagree).
As to whose interests might be served:
1) The White House: A revival of Richard Nixon’s ‘madman theory of history’. “That George Bush, he’s just crazy! Patriot missiles! Another carrier group in the Gulf! Now this! We’re the Iranian government and I say we just spontaneously dissolve in the face of this massive threat.”
2) What you said about the Saudis.
3) The Iranians: “That George Bush, he’s just crazy! Are we Shia going to keep putting up with this shit?”
4) The Israelis: “The Iranians threaten Israel and it’s about time they were taken out. George is having a few problems at home and needs some encouragement.”
5) The Palestinians: “That George Bush, he’s just crazy, plus he’s a friend of the Israelis! We’re in the midst of a civil war and we need something to unify us, no matter how desperate!”
And so on and so forth.
Mark asked:
Katz wrote:
The Iraqi Constitution was not written in Washington DC but arose out of a democratic process in Iraq. The first election was for an interim parliament whose main role was to write the Constitution. The second election was a referendum on the Constitution.
Sunnis boycotted the first election but were co-opted into the process of writing the Constitution.
Before the first election Bremmer supported a single electoral constituency, with seats allocated through proportional representation (PR) based on national lists, which gave more power to the minorities (Kurds and Sunnis). This was a democratic process but not one liked by Sistani. In response Sistani wrote a fatwa and organised demonstrations against and as a result a more direct PR system was implemented.
The fact that Sistana did leverage a change of US policy supports the position that US is serious about democracy in Iraq. It does not support the position that Iraq is a client state of the US.
After the third election there were delays in forming government as a result of the PR system, which is setup to prevent one majority group (eg. Shias) from forcing through their policies against minority groups. Once again the delays are evidence that the system is a democratic one in which it is difficult for any one group to dominate proceedings.
The electoral process put in place by the US and their response to Sistani before there was an Iraq government provides strong evidence that the US is serious about democracy in Iraq.
Katz, your misinformation about the Constitution being “written in Washington DC” indicates that you have not investigated this issue.
wikipedia article on iraq constitution
Aarrgghhh!!!
Why, then is Bush on public record answering questions during the 2004 election campain by saying that he would make sure x, y and z went in the Iraqi constitution?
I’m getting extremely frustrated in this “debate” as either ludicrous ideological assertions are made with no attempt to justify them (the US “has” to do this at this time in history) or definitions are fitted to the ideology rather than the concept (as in DJ’s civil war excerpt from TLS – “mass support” evidently being some remnant of vulgar Maoism) and then we get what are effectively press releases from some Republican thinktank when we ask for empirical data.
Then we get this sort of relativist move:
My analysis is not made out of whole cloth, but based on extensive reading about the actual situation in Iraq.
And it’s not based on dogma of any sort – and certainly not Maoist or neocon dogma.
As to this question:
I’ve repeatedly emphasised that I’m not an imperialist and I do not believe that it’s up to me, “the West”, “the US” or historical world-spirits or whoever to determine the most appropriate form of government in Iraq. What is appropriate is that a solution be found that will enable people to live together in peace. The best way of facilitating this – although it would not bring an end to conflict immediately – would be for the COW forces to get out now.
I’m getting quite angry by the way this debate’s been conducted. The reason for that, and I apologise if I’ve sounded personal as that’s not my intention, is that I really cannot abide any view that casually accepts, condones and indeed welcomes massive bloodshed and human suffering in the name of some utopian teleology. It’s morally abhorrent.
Anyway, I think I’ll recuse myself from further participation on this thread. If it starts to get repetitive and go round in circles, I think we’ll close it.
I’m sure there’ll be endless opportunities to refine swamp/mozzie theory at TLS.
Hah! It’s really beyond parody. A ragtag bunch of leftist fantastists embracing a dead ideology, and expecting the imperial power to do all the hard work in getting the flapping penguin of the revolutionary project off the ground yet again.
A bit like Baldrick: “I have a cunning plan.”
I don’t see what’s to get upset about. We’re not DFAT or PM&C. We don’t make policy. We’re not the government. We’re just people with ideas and opinions. Sometimes their coalesce, sometimes they collide. It’s nothing to worry about.
Good on Barbara B for bringing a breath of fresh air into the place.
Mark said:
Don’t close the thread or recuse yourself, you were right about the above, obviously!
And I do understand why you might get upset by what must seem to be detached and souless cut and thrust amid all the horror of what’s happened over there.
This is an excellent site, btw, with v good contributors.
Besides, I have more to say on Tawney ……(just joking) …
Well all sorts of people having argy-bargy at cross purposes here. And Barbara B, while I’d just say that that your bit about Iraq War phase III is on the mark, I think you’re wrong about this ‘Baathist’ palava.
Anyway. What we haven’t got to is the basic idea behind LS. And that’s their pretty scummy and completely dishonest presentation.
Yes, the whole thing is wrapped in the comfortable woollen-rug of democracy. But that’s not what this lot are about.
As DJ quoted so approvingly above, one of their bloggers ‘worked for the victory of the VietCong’ (So brave. I actually doubt that it went beyond some doofus mouthing off at parties way back when) to justify, I suppose, LS credentials
Well what’s the line here? We support the US AND the insurgents? We don’t support the insurgents? Some insurgents are good and some are bad?
Well this lot proclaim themselves to be proud Maoists.
Bottomline? They’re frauds. Pretty happy to justify millions killed in the names of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot in pursuit of their own peculiar biblical ideas http://www.lastsuperpower.net/disc/members/56633303655?b_start:int=0#764991799866 (‘scientific socialism’, ‘proper historical perspective’, people’s war’ etc etc etc).
Now they’ve latched onto the most recent loser project and bundled it in some ridiculous ‘swamp’ theory.
What a crock.
mark says
Ever heard of Christopher Hitchens? Or Trotskyites, an ideological skeleton that rattles in many a neo-con closet, for that matter? Revolutionary Leftists of this ilk have always been natural supporters of militant democracy-promotion, from the French Revolution onwards.
Iraq attack was Old Leftist in revolutionary means and New Leftist in multicultural ends.
Conservative realists, such as Castlereagh, Metternich and Talleyrand, have always opposed these utopian projects. That is why Bush the Elder was dead opposed to Iraq War II.
If preventing the catastrophe that is Iraq required supporting Saddam then supporting, or at least tolerating, Saddam was the right thing to do. Never mind that he was a fascist, if secular fascism is required to crush sectarian fundamentalism then it is the lesser of two evils.
The civilised world supported Stalin during WWII. He was much worse than Saddam. Yet Churchill and Roosevelt did the right thing by making a pact with the lesser devil.
mark says:
Oh stop trying to cover your ideological ass! You spend every second post trying to square the ideological circle between Old Left Enlightenment and New Left multiculturalism. It cant be done. The Broad Left does not have a consistent ideological program.
Serious multiculturalism requires tolerating the pre-modern practices of some ethnic groups. These are illiberal – sectarian, sexist and racist – alright. Hence inconsistent with fundamental Enlightenment Leftist principles of liberty, equality and community.
You must choose between them. This is more important than the cleaving to the contemptible post-modern principle of having “Pas d’amis a la droit“
Bill Kerr:
1.
Allow me to add my “oh, dear, oh me” to Mark’s “Aarrgghhh!!!”
Here is a much better description than Wikipedia’s of the drafting process. I have nothing against the Wikipedia article per se, but it does not describe the drafting process, which for reasons of political manoeuvring was much more important than the subsequent referendum process, especially when Shiite leaders declared at the time that when the time was right the whole Constitution could be scrapped if the Shiite majority deemed that to be desirable.
2.
Bill Kerr has given my name to his strawman here. This is what I actually said:
My precise point is that the present Shiite-dominated Iraqi government is not a client state of the US. The Bush administration was stymied by al Sistani’s forces. The Bush administration had no reasonable choice but to accept the fact that their Iraq project had been derailed. Ever since, the Bush administration has been searching desperately for a way to salvage something from the wreck. Their last assets are the oil provisions of the Iraq Constitution, whose continued viability the day the US withdraws its troops from Iraq is highly dubious.
At least Bill Kerr’s contributions have served to expose the weak points and false suppositions of left-wing supporters of Bush’s Iraq Fiasco.
Jack, my high school French is too long gone for me to suggest what it should be, but I think that can’t be the phrase you’re looking for. Surely that translates as “no friends on the left” whereas you want to quote the tag “no enemies on the left”.
I have always condemned pre-modern practices where they infringe individual rights. So I’ve made my choice. It’s just that I don’t ascribe those practices to some sort of essence of the group who practice them, which is a tendency you have which couldn’t be more unEnlightened.
Mark on 17 January 2007 at 11:18 pm
No. The phrase means “No friends to the Right”. I coined it to describe the point of view of those Leftists whose ideological cowardice makes them reject David Goodhart’s sound advice. No names no pack drill this time.
mark says:
But you support a program (multiculturalism) which encourages and entrenches the systematic violation of individual autonomies. And it dilutes the communal authority which enforces common morality. If you will the end (constructive individualism) you must will the means (conservative institutionalism).
You cant have it both ways. That is ideological infantilism.
mark says:
Nope, youv’e fudged it.
I have made it abundantly clear that my epistemology is Hume-Galton-Stove inductive evolutionism. This is the exact opposite of Platonic deductive essentialism.
I look at individuals as complex and diverse agencies in constant state of flux. But populations present observable regularities, particularly when sampled en masse.
Statistical probability is the method of science. But it is the enemy of anecdotal identity.
No wonder the Wets, who love a reassuring bed-time story, are uncomfortable with it.
Another way of saying this is that any number of Bell Curves can be constructed for specified characteristics in different sub-populations. These curves may well show significant differences in range and variation.
But they may also overlap, and converge if isomorphic tendencies are encouraged. Inherited diversity can be countered by imprinted unity. That is possible if we all read off the same script and show some team spirit.
Put another way, the more multi-racialism you want the less multi-culturalism you can have. That is why the US’s more successful multi-racial institutions (churches, armies, football teams) are quite mono-cultural.
Sorry, my mistake. I’m very tired.
said David Jackmanson.
The Kurds have got, practically speaking, full if unrecognised independence already. Any lip service they give to the idea of a nation called Iraq is merely to keep the wolves off their tracks in the interim. But good for them, of course.
Yep, though the Sunnis are increasingly going after them too in mixed areas which were previously fairly peaceful (by contemporary Iraqi standards).
Thats right wbb – the Kurds just pretend to like Iraq to make the Yanks and Turks line in the region seems intact.
Suffice to say, they arent fooling the Turks.
On a lighter note – is the Euston Manifesto:
a) a bad and very very very long Xmas cracker joke;
b) written in sand on a beach where no one identified the high tide mark;
c) a sincere, thoughtful and well considered call to arms signed by many who now no longer return the drafters emails; or
c) a fortune cookie message penned by a fortune cookie factory prisoner with a very dry sense of humour.
NB: The term some may be looking for here is “push-polling” Or “petition guilt”. Ask PETA or the Euston Manifestoes how this works.
Also, what’s with this “the last superpower” crap. That’s an awfully historical determanism view of the world. What are China, India and Russia? Chopped curried gas-fired liver? That unWestern trio is all nuked up, into space, breeding up some pretty crisp elite military forces, got strangleholds on various different major global industries, lotsa other nations owe them big money and not vice versa, they’ve got education systems seriously focused around the hard sciences and they’re really gearing up their soft power sectors too.
Personally, I hope the Brazilians take over first.
Yay! Carnivale!
For all the ink that’s spilled about the world bank, the key financial datum in the world is the massive holdings of US bonds and dollars by Asian banks.
But how much discussion do we get about BRIC in terms of geopolitics? The Marxists/Maoists are still caught up in their own neo-imperialist post-colonial American-centric view of the world. Funny, ain’t it?
Marx wouldn’t have made that mistake.
“Marx wouldn’t have made that mistake.”
Hmmm, I wonder what he and many other big socio-economic thinkers would have made of the geo-politics of a world where Nigerians and Ukrainians try to scam eachother through South Pacific netbanks while Indians process US tax returns, Shanghai entreprenuers sell reconditioned Red Army motorbikes on eBay to retired Marines and French and Brit arms dealers ride Brazilian bizjets to megabuck meetings in petropoli like Dubai and Baku and then click onto Russian porn in their German-built hotel suites.
It’s not your mummy and daddy’s world anymore.
The name ‘last superpower’ roughly means that, in our opinion, no other power again will be able to dominate the world like the USA has.
The coming of the new economic powers does not mean they will be ‘superpowers’ in the way that the USA or the USSR were.
“The name ‘last superpower’ roughly means that, in our opinion, no other power again will be able to dominate the world like the USA has.”
Yeah, that’s sorta true now but why do you assume superpowers will always be nation based?
If we are wrong and superpowers continue to exist, they won’t always be, in my opinion, based on nations, because one day the idea of nations will probably die out.
But if more superpowers arise in the next, say, 25-50 years, it seems fairly likely that they will be nation-based, because nation-states don’t look to be on their way out any time soon.
I don’t have a clear idea of what sort of crisis would be big enough for people to start thinking along different lines, but I imagine it would have to be enormously disruptive to change something like the idea of a ‘nation’, that feels like such a given to so many people.
I bet you’re not much fun at parties Dave -wot with being all leaden, literal and devoid of imagination or grace.
See, now that’s snark unlike my comments on the other thread.
If you use one of the most common, boring insults that the pro-war left has had to put up with, expect it to be put down as snark.
Using the term ‘Decent’ will get the same.
Sorry if my writing style doesn’t appeal to you, I am trying to make myself clear.
I’ve never visited Harry’s Whatsit until your link. Also it was a different term you linked to.
And also why do you regard “muscular” whatever as an insult?
And also also, yes your writing style doesn’t appeal to me. Short on cogent arguement and very long on sophistry and tonsurial twaining circumlocutions.
However, I do find you make yourself all too clear when it comes to finding or offering insult without thought.
Because it is a sneer commonly used against anyone who supports the Iraq War from a Left position, as demonstrated by the first line of the Harry’s Place article.
And it obviously derives from the term ‘Muscular Christian’.
Faults? Faults?
The Totalization Period: 8.4 million killed
Collectivisation and the Great Leap Forward:
7.47 million victims killed
Great Famine: 10.7 million victims died
Cultural Revolution: 7.7 victims killed
Mass murder, i.e. democide of 34.7 million. The Chairman sure loved his people to a fault.
Katz said:
Very interesting to read the analysis in The Humanist but it was written very early in the piece and needs a comparable anaysis on the constitution adopted 18 months later. Do you have such a link?
It also seems to contain some serious mistakes.
The author says:
I’m not a lawyer, but don’t know how the author reaches his conclusion in the last sentence. Article 3 seems to me clearly designed to limit the powers of the Parliament that was going to be elected the following January to alter the transitional law arrangements BEFORE the constitution was drawn up and put to the vote. Isn’t this a reasonable course of action? (In the subsequent Constitution two extra limitations were added: amendment can only occur after 2 electoral terms AND a general referendum.)
Further on the question of sovereignity, the author goes on to state:
In fact, 59(c) actually reads:
In other words 59(c) empowers the future ELECTED government, NOT the existing appointed provisional (interim) government (Allawi) and Interim Governing Council! The author appears to be quite wrong on this point and if so it is a rather extraordinary misreading particularly as he claimed on the strength of it the Provisional Government would be empowered to bind the future elected government without a time limit!
The author is on stronger grounds when he critiques the proposals for federalism which, after all, was and is the major difference between the old Iraq and the new and is reasonably blamed for fermenting sectarianism etc.
However, given their long, bitter experience of the excesses of an all powerful centralised government, it is hard to see Kurds/Shia not insisting on a federalised system? The author doesn’t suggest it should have been imposed against their wishes. Does anyone here think it should have been?
In summary: interesting but possibly seriously misleading analysis since the author has apparently proceeded from an incorrect premise on at least two occasions. (I didn’t have time to check the rest of it.)
Nice analysis BB. Your criticisms of the article are correct in the light of subsequent developments.
My major point, however, was not the discussion of the substantive elements of the constitution, but the stated attitude of the majority of the Interim Governing Council members. Remember that these persons were foisted on Bush by al Sistani’s clever resistence. Yet they themselves were prepared to accept most of a constitution that was deeply uncongenial to them probably because they expected to overthrow it in the fullness of time. In other words, they really didn’t care all that much about what was in it. Shiite leaders simply wanted the reins of power. Here is the crucial bit:
The article identifies succinctly:
1. The actual origin of the draft constitution.
2. The nature of the IGC as a product of al Sistani’s clever intervention.
3. The attitude of the Shiite majority to the constitution they supposedly drafted.
4. The nature of Bush’s Iraq quagmire.
Not bad.
Anyway, a neo-conservative, a Maoist and a foreign policy realist walk into a bar …
Oh, that’s good. Keep talking. There won’t be any nations. There won’t be any superpowers. There will just be a single worldwide what exactly?
Good grief. Try peddling this bumpf to China, Russia, and the US. What absolute tosh. Do you actually have any contact with reality at all?
Katz – you seem to be making a lot of Jafaari’s proclamation and all the Shiite reservations and extrapolating from them a hidden intention to overthrow the whole kaboodle in the fullness of time. But this article you’re resting your case on increasingly doesn’t stand up to examination.
The author said:
All this moustache twirling. Yet the answer to his question is quite simple: the Interim Governing Council drafted the Basic Law. There was no mystery about the Shia reservations. Paul Bremer’s “My Year in Iraq” has a detailed account of them. As I recall the draft was agreed to after long, exhausting negotiations, the signing ceremony was organised, then a coupla hours before the ceremony was due to kick off Sistani/Shia changed minds on a couple of points. Political brinkmanship at its finest. The Press and the dignitaries were all assembled. However, what the Shia wanted was not acceptable to the Kurds. To wholesale embarrassment, the ceremony had to be postponed for a day or two while the sides wrangled it out but in the end the Kurds got their way. The Shiites had to settle for their proclamation of reservations.
No doubt it was all thrashed over again during the drafting of the Constitution, which is why I asked if you had a link to a similar analysis of the final product?
Katz said:
The trouble with using this specific analysis as the basis to come to an informed view is that the author has demonstrably misrepresented the basis of his key criticisms and actually published a false version of the original text. Did he deliberately do this confident his readers wouldn’t bother to check his text against the original? Was he seeking to destroy confidence in the Transitional Law for his own nefarious agenda? Is he a Sunni? (Actually the answer to the last is probably yes, as the author is n Egyptian lawyer and judge).
Of course far more likely he was just unconsciously reading into it what he wanted to read, as he was coming from a biased position. But illustrative how easy it is to impute sinister motives, as you continually do with Sistani and the Shia.
But you need to find a better source: if this author was so wrong on the points discussed here and previously how is it possible to have any confidence in the rest of his analysis?
BB:
I don’t impute sinister motives at all. I describe clever political manouevring, perhaps not as definitively as I would were I not slapping these posts together in the course of a busy day.
The important matter of the article for me — a description of the drafting process and a statement of the reservations of the Shiite majority — are footnoted in the article.
Here is some additional information from that Washington Post source:
This is a direct quotation which adds corroborative detail supporting my contention that the Shiite parties operating under al Sistani’s influence, have:
1. Not been the authors of the draft constitution.
2. Accepted the draft constitution with reservations that add up to repudiation of the legitimacy of the entire process.
If you accept the validity of these conclusions, then you are forced to concede that the Bush administration cannot rely upon the Shiite majority to honour the constitution. Moreover, it is likely that when they feel the time is right, they will repudiate it.
Yet, Bush states that US forces are in Iraq to assist the legitimate government of Iraq.
Therefore, Bush is surging more troops to Iraq to assist a government whose stated intention is to repudiate the constitution drated for them in Washington DC.
This reality quite undermines the rosy, pro-war theses of TSL.
Katz – dunno why that Washington Post story is eliding the leadup – ie the media conference for the signing ceremony where the media and dignatries were assembled and then nothing happened, and then it was postponed. As much as one can believe anything shown on televsion, I very much remember seeing the television footage lingering on the empty desk with all the pens lined up – and no-one there to sign it. The media was loving it. (Eventually they had to send the media away! It was hilarious. )
It’s possible the WP elided that part of story because they’d already reported it the previous week? As a former journo I know how this can happen and there’s nothing especially sinister about it.
On the other hand of course I also might be wrong in my recollections. I’ve lent out Bremer’s book which has a detailed account of all of this (it was a huge, huge embarrassment to the Americans). When I get it back I’ll have Bremer’s account of the last minute Shia objections in which case they will be there to be compared to what transpired 18 months later in the Constitution voted in by 77% of the electorate. Will let you know. With the proviso Bremer might have totally fabricated his account in his book for the public record … I mean, who knows?
If you’re now saying its all in the footnotes, why didn’t you quote them in the first place? Please quote the text of the footnotes to show your rationale? I think this is reasonable given that your source has proved so unrelible so far?
Alternatively just give in, say nothing, and wait for a better moment when you are on stronger grounds!
Finally the best advice I give anyone is never take a media report or analysis at face value and then quote it in debate without checking, especially, especially, especially if it is confirming your own prejudices.
BB,
There was a 77% vote of support for the constitution mostly because Sistani told the Shiites to vote “Yes”.
This is a blog post, not a refereed history journal. If I thought that you’d be so tenacious in denying what whould be a fairly uncontroversial historical point, maybe I would have found some more definitive sources. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have bothered in the first place.
Those statements of the Shiite leaders are fairly straightforward and permit only one legitimate conclusion. Only a person blinded by prejudice would argue otherwise.
This is especially true when it is clear that Shiite parties have followed a consistent line ever since.
Fair enough. Tenacious is the word. Put it down to my 1950s schooling where we all had to do a subject called Clear Thinking. Long out of fashion now, but can’t get out of the habit!
I remember standing up for God Save the Queen but I don’t remember a subject called Clear Thinking at school.
Bored now.
I suppose next you’re going to say something like “This is a dumb world. In my world there are people in chains, and we can ride them like ponies.”
Don’t forget the girl with the daisies!
Just sayin…
How come I missed all this by going on TEH HOLIDAYS?
NB – reference to LBJ ad.
Katz
Were you being serious when you stated I did not answer Wallerstein’s comments on Bush? My post was almost a chapter in a book!
Mark
I am only new here. It would not surprise me at all if many of my points agree with our resident “revolutionary Marixits!”
There is much that is profound and perceptive in marxism: my departure from marxism comes at certain points that might become relevant in future discussions. But I did disagree with David on the significance of the “Palestinian” issue.
Anyway, GREAT discussion!!
Sir Henry Casingbroke said:
Maybe was a Melbourne thing? T’is a heavy burden to carry in a post modern world let me tell you.
I did Clear Thinking too. Vic high school, 1970′s.
That pivotal moment when the Shiite majority in the IGC both accepted the draft constitution and announced their disregard for it merits further consideration.
1. The Shiite majority could have behaved like good little democrats and played their part in the script written for them by the Bush administration.
Bush would have been very happy and the world would have ben more convinced about the success of Bush’s democratic project in Iraq.
However, the Shiites would have been implicated as Bush’s puppets, thus causing internal divisions and allowing other groups condemn them as traitors to the Iraqi nation.
2. The Shiite majority could have been outright rejectionist, thus making themselves the major US target and denying themselves of the benefits of incumbency in ministries and in charge of an army being funded by the US.
The danger here would have been that the Bush administration might have courted Sunni and secular allies in Iraq.
This would have been a very stupid Shiite strategy.
3. The strategy the Shiites chose was acceptance of the draft constitution with major reservations.
Shiites took control of government and army funded by the US.
Sunnis were forced to play a role of enemies of the state of Iraq.
The US targeted the Sunni.
Shiites bought time by allowing the resolve of the US in its Iraq adventure to erode.
This strategy is an evolution of the North Vietnamese strategy. But it is much more clever. The North Vietnamese were forced to fight and die to erode US resolve. The Shiites, on the other hand, have allowed their enemies to do the fighting and dying in the task of eroding US resolve. Brilliant!
Henry Bolte ’tis of thee… I wonder if Frank Nicklin had Clear Thinking in the curriculum? That’s right, we didn’t have any of this pointy head rubbish in New South Wales. At school I learned useful things, such as how to shoot the .303 Lee-Enfield rifle, and strip a Bren LMG. I still remember the order: piston, barrel, butt, body, bipod. Also, why it was better to stop the Commos there than over here.
My main memory of “Clear Thinking” classes – it was a part of English – is that my Year 11 teacher very obviously played favourites – some kids would find themselves on the wrong end of an outpouring of scorn if he didn’t like the quality of their thinking, others were treated with kid gloves and even credited with more intelligence than they might have had.
Which group was I in? Not telling.
Them Clear Thinking classes got to be pretty fraught – it was more about sussing out what the teacher had picked as the “right” refutation to an argument (selected from the text, of course), than actually learning to think for yourself.
Not the way it was taught to me, Gummo. It was one of the best things I remember from high school
I want to propose that we engage in a little clear thinking over the latest cowardly attack on students and staff at a University in Iraq.
I believe this attack is just another little 9/11, and also believe that no one posting on this thread would offer any support for it. It is not any unfortunate mistake from a âbrave resistanceâ against a foreign occupation. This deliberate targeting of civilians is mass murder, pure and simple. People who perpetrate such crimes are the direct enemy of all progressives the world over. I am prepared to unite with other people who have disagreed with my views of history in order to defeat this enemy now. It will be a protracted struggle, and it urgently requires support from progressive people everywhere.
I argue that the Iraqi Government has every right to expect the full support of progressives everywhere in hunting down those who wage such a war on the democratic right of the Iraqi people to attend educational institutions. I believe the government of Prime Minister Maliki, quite correctly, will not surrender or engage in any form of appeasement by negotiating power sharing with these enemy forces. Rather they will, in cooperation with their willing allies, continue to develop a strategy for defeating these killers. Jihadis perpetrating these attacks must be fought, for as long as it takes to stop them.
There can be no time table to this âjust warâ and I recognize the Iraqi government must be and is the leading force in waging it. However this government, while constituting the leading force, does not yet, as a result of the ethnic divisions within Iraq, constitute the main force. That main force is still necessarily provided by troops from the Coalition who I suggest are generally accepted by the Iraqi peoples as non sectarian total outsiders. (I am not here denying that many Iraqis distrust the Americans for other reasons).
It is vital for the Iraqis to develop the non sectarian quality and quantity of their armed forces so that these forces will be able to constitute both the leading force and the main force and I think that the imminent U.S. escalation is (ironically) designed to bring about that change â that is, the Iraqis will become the leading force and the main force as well, over the next 1-2 years.
People prepared to unite in supporting the students and staff of Iraqâs Universities and schools are clearly going to be involved in a long war because âthe pipelines of deathâ that they are up against are firmly established throughout the Islamic world. The mostly young suicide bombers, the product of the madrassas from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan and all the rest, are now flowing freely (as was always planned by al Qaeda and others. There does not appear to be any shortage of the requisite 70 virgins per bomber in heaven either.)
Principled unity in the face of the current enemy is absolutely necessary – genuine progressive forces everywhere should refuse to stand aside while such outrages are perpetrated in Iraq.
The breadth of unity possible in this cause encompasses over 95% of humanity. What differences progressives have had in the past are not sufficient to prevent unity based on principles of peaceful coexistence under arrangements that provide for democratic norms of conduct and the preservation of minority rights as guaranteed by the Iraqi constitution.
If we are really seeking to unite, to defeat the enemy that has perpetrated this latest bombing outrage, we must not condone any attacks on the Iraqi Government or on the allies that they are prepared to unite with. It boils down to âwhich side are you onâ?.
Well look at me, I’m all fuzzy
I’m very confident. And I have a shiny coin.
“I want to propose that we engage in a little clear thinking”
About time.
“I am prepared to unite with other people who have disagreed with my views of history in order to defeat this enemy now.”
How? Now that “this enemy” has been handed on a platter the very conditions it requires to thrive and multiply, how are we to do this? All this talk of uniting progressives against a common enemy is just lovely, but what are you going to do?
“If we are really seeking to unite, to defeat the enemy that has perpetrated this latest bombing outrage, we must not condone any attacks on the Iraqi Government or on the allies that they are prepared to unite with.” [emphasis mine]
What if those allies are sectarian nutjobs?
Well, it’s quite nice for a crypt.
Anyway, a neo-conservative, aun unregenerated Maoist and a foreign policy realist walk into this bar …
It’s no fun when they don’t scream
I’m a God! You scurvous bad complexioned sweet minion…
What are you going to do, B? Throw me off the roof again?
And you! You’re gonna live forever, you don’t have time for a cup of coffee?
What about the ex-Demons?
I brought a candle. This one’s extra flamey
Re patrickm’s comment:
After three and a half years, the failure of Iraq’s universities “to go out” is indicative of the nil interest of the students in supporting the insurgency and one of the reasons why it should have been clear to anyone from the left that the insurgency does not enjoy widespread support in Iraq.
It was only a matter of time before the insurgents turned their attacks on the students. Iraqi blogsites reported last November and December that Iraqi universities and schools were being leafleted by Sunni extremeists with demands that they boycott classes or else. Now they’ve started to make good on their threats.
FDB you say;
Firstly not throw up our hands and say that nothing can be done now that the Sunni Baathist tyranny has been ended.
Even if youâre right that Pandoraâs box, has been opened by ending the lawful Baathist Tyranny of Saddam Hussein with the illegal liberation of the vast majority of the Iraqi peoples, it does not address the question of what is now to be done. There is no putting Humpty back together again and the answer lies in opening the box once more because thatâs where hope is.
The enemy cannot âdry up the seaâ by this type of bombing and thrive .
And when you say:
Then the answer is to expose them and deal with them as you go. It is the old problem Q) âHow do you eat an elephant? A) Mouthful by mouthful!â
However when I said âalliesâ? I was thinking first of the Coalition troops and thinking that they were the best circuit breaking forces for the Iraqi people who are being led into civil war as a blatant strategy of al Qaida. They (the Iraqi peoples) have a great interest in not being provoked by their enemy.
What I am saying is that the issue that immediately faces anti-racist activists, world-wide, is what stance to take on the ânewâ war in Iraq. The âoldâ war has essentially ended, so itâs only of historical interest and thatâs fine for those who are interested. But anti-racist activists have to address the ânewâ war to the extent that it has a racial or sectarian underpinning, and it overwhelmingly is so underpinned. The Iraqi government must be both broadly supported and held to account as areas of Iraq are handed over to that governmentâs control. (Look to the Kurdish areas and regain your hope.)
The various peoplesâ have voted under a constitution that they approved, and that has established the formal equality of all the peoplesâ, and both sexes, before the law.
A legitimate Iraqi government has now been established and this government has called for continued military and economic assistance. Progressives ought to support them.
Local and foreign racists and sectarians of the most vicious kinds from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and so forth together with residual Baathists (with a shockingly racist history) and Shia death squads (sectarian nut jobs) are now waging their vicious racist war against the majority of the Iraqi peoplesâ who are trying to build a country based on their non-racist constitution.
Anti-racist activists, irrespective of what our stance has been up-to-date, now have to come to terms with the new reality. It is as profound a turnaround for some as was the ending of the America First movement after 07/12/1942. But the first step is to join the correct side and not sit on any fence when the enemy bred in the schools of the Islamo-fascists is blowing up students and staff at schools they disapprove of.
That’ll put marzipan in your pie plate, Bingo.
Upside of shootin’ off your mouth and lookin’ stupid, what is it you actually propose to do patrickm?
Your whole comment amounts to nothing more than this: you want everyone to agree with you. And maybe toss in the odd “Rah-rah for Bonzo, manifest destiny and the inevitable coming of the great global whatchamacallit.”
Strike the pose
Strike the pose
Vogue, vogue, vogue
Vogue, vogue, vogue
(Apologies to Elmore Leonard fans for that first line)
I’m so evil and skanky. And I think I’m kinda gay.
Why is it that the lesbian characters either get killed by nerds or have dangerous destroy the world if we’re not sent to a hippy reeducation camp powers???
What? That happened on the L-Word?
Shane happened. And I want to marry her. Why, oh why, did she fall for that Latina dj chick with fake boobs?
<img src="http://www.afterellen.com/archive/ellen/TV/2006/photos/gender trouble l word/shane.jpg"
She could stop the Iraq war with a single pout!
<img src="http://img.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/060322/163922__kmoennig_l.jpg"
Shane will bring about world peace single handedly!
<img src="http://heykelley.com/twitch/foto/misc/shane.jpg"
Who cares about Maoism when there’s TEH SAPPHISM!!!
<img src="http://www.freewebtown.com/wow1/kikk/shane/Image12.jpg"
Just call me a fan girl.
<img src="http://static.flickr.com/22/32912649_f159c6f051.jpg"
Just sayin…
LOL. Welcome back Kim http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QDSjB4raR4
Sir Henry said:
Indeed. That’s why you gave us John Howard.
Katz said:
All true, if your premise was correct. However in the detailed account Bremer gives the Islamist Shiites last minute sticking point was reviving the issue of the Kurds insistence on the 3-Governorates-can-reject-constitution-with-a-two-thirds-vote clause.
Earlier, the Islamist sticking point had been wanting the use of the definite article “the ” instead of the indefinite “a” in the phrase “Islam will be a source of legislation”.
The Kurds, Sunnis and secular Shiites on the council all opposed the use of the definite article. They were adamently united against the notion of Shariah Law. Eventually it was solved by a SUNNI amendment adding the words “No law that contradicts the universally agreed tenets of Islam, the principles of democracy, or the rights cited in Chapter Two of this Law may be enacted during the transitional period.” But the Shiites lost out on the definite article.
The US targeted the Sunni? No, it was the Shiites who were being targeted. It went like this:
All sides on the IGC had finally come to agreement on the draft TAL (including the points above). Also Sistani had approved it. The Council broke for Ashura, a Shiite holy day and millions of pilgrims were in Najaf and Karbala. The signing ceremony was planned for after the holy days were over.
On the first day of Ashura the Sunni Baathist insurgents blew up 112 Shiite pilgrims outside a mosque in Karbala wounding hundreds of others and attacked another Shiite mosque in Baghdad.
When the Council reassembled the Islamists were intransigent – they had agreed to it before but now they would not allow an effective “veto” power to the Constitution. It’s not hard to see the reason for their wobble – if the Kurds could veto the Constitution with a 2/3 vote in three Governorates, so could the Sunnis. And the Islamists had just been given a reminder of who the Sunni Baathists were really targeting – and it wasn’t the occupation.
That’s why the signing ceremony didn’t go ahead.
The Shiites held their ground for several days negotiating in a caucus with the Kurds, but in the end the Kurds won out.
The Islamists settled for issuing their proclamation of reservations and gave notice they would fight another day.
Well maybe. But maybe not. The Islamists revisited the issue 12 months later when the new Govt was drafting the final Constituion. They got the phrase “fundamental source of legislation” in relation to Islam but the qualifying indefinite article “a” remains.
The full Article 2 reads:
First: Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation:
A. No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.
B. No law that contradicts the principles of democracy may be established.
C. No law that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this constitution may be established.
Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights of all individuals to freedom of religious belief and practice such as Christians, Yazedis, and Mandi Sabeans.
Well, accepting your vision of scheming, strategising Islamist Shiites far superior to the North Vietnamese, alas for them even if the US leaves tomorrow the Constitution will remain.
It can only be amended (a) AFTER the next term of the electoral cycle (b) on a general referendum and (c)their Grand Strategy can be vetoed by the Kurd and the Sunnis.
The Islamists so far have only be able to muscle up 42 per cent of the vote, the Kurds and Sunnis have 20% each and the remaining 18% are secular Shiites, Independents, Turkomens, Christians, Communists etc. (These are the figures from the last election.)
So it’s more than likely the Islamists would not even be able to carry the vote by a majority.
Short of overthrowing the Constitution by a coup, or another civil war the Islamists are pretty much stuck with it. And if they overthrow by means of violence they would run into a few problems of recognition from other countries and from the UN ..
I humbly suggest Ho would never have placed himself in such an individious position.
I think recent segues indicate this thread has outlived its subject matter. If anyone wants to continue debating these issues, the Saturday Salon provides a forum to do so.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/01/20/saturday-salon-86/
Thanks for the discussion, folks, some of it frustrating but much of it interesting.