Casuistries of Peace and War Good Reading

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

For IP if you think it deserves the circulation.

Yet another run-down on the run-up to war; this one, by Perry Anderson,
will make everyone uncomfortable.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n05/ande01_.html

Anderson's main (and to me most outrageous point) is that on principle the
Bush administration has the better of the argument with its critics.

His follow-on claim is that the Security Council has never worried about
nuclear arms, territorial grabs, or human rights violations by the US or
its allies. So why now?

His rather astringent perspective is sort of the photographic negative of
the National Security Strategy.

As to our strategy (if you want to do the side-by-side):

http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html


Dw
-- 
dweightman () radix net  ||   202.544.1458
http://www.dswlaw.com
News from a Far Country: http://www.dswlaw.com/News/index.htm


Casuistries of Peace and War

Perry Anderson 


The prospect of a second war on Iraq raises a large number of questions,
analytic and political. What are the intentions behind the impending
campaign? What are likely to be the consequences? What does the drive to war
tell us about the long-term dynamics of American global power? These issues
will remain on the table for some time to come, outliving any assault this
spring. The front of the stage is currently occupied by a different set of
arguments, over the legitimacy or wisdom of the military expedition now
brewing. My purpose here will be to consider the current criticisms of the
Bush Administration articulated within mainstream opinion, and the responses
of the Administration to them: in effect, the structure of intellectual
justification on each side of the argument, what divides them and what they
have common. I will end with a few remarks on how this debate looks from a
perspective with a different set of premises.

Taking an overview of the range - one might say torrent - of objections to a
second war in the Gulf, we can distinguish six principal criticisms,
expressed in many different registers, distributed across a wide span of
opinion.

1. The projected attack on Iraq is a naked display of American
unilateralism. The Bush Administration has openly declared its intention of
attacking Baghdad, whether or not the UN sanctions an assault. This is not
only a grave blow to the unity of the Western alliance, but must lead to an
unprecedented and perilous weakening of the authority of the Security
Council, as the highest embodiment of international law.

2. Massive intervention on this scale in the Middle East can only foster
anti-Western terrorism. Rather than helping to crush al-Qaida, it is likely
to multiply recruits for it. America will be more endangered after a war
with Iraq than before it.

3. The blitz in preparation is a pre-emptive strike, openly declared to be
such, that undermines respect for international law, and risks plunging the
world into a maelstrom of violence, as other states follow suit, taking the
law into their own hands in turn.

4. War should in any case always be a last resort in settling an
international conflict. In the case of Iraq, sufficient tightening of
sanctions and surveillance is capable of de-fanging the Baath regime, while
sparing innocent lives and preserving the unity of the international
community.

5. Concentration on Iraq is a distraction from the more acute danger posed
by North Korea, which has greater nuclear potential, a more powerful army,
and an even deadlier leadership. The US should give top priority to dealing
with Kim Jong Il, not Saddam Hussein.

6. Even if an invasion of Iraq went smoothly, an occupation of the country
is too hazardous and costly an undertaking for the United States to pull off
successfully. Allied participation is necessary for it to have any chance of
succeeding, but the Administration's unilateralism compromises the chance of
that. The Arab world is likely to view a foreign protectorate with
resentment. Even with a Western coalition to run the country, Iraq is a
deeply divided society, with no democratic tradition, which cannot easily be
rebuilt along postwar German or Japanese lines. The potential costs of the
whole venture outweigh any possible benefits the US could garner from it.

Such is more or less the spectrum of criticism that can be found in the
mainstream media and in respectable political circles, both in the United
States itself, and - still more strongly - in Europe and beyond. They can be
summarised under the headings: the vices of unilateralism, the risks of
encouraging terrorism, the dangers of pre-emption, the human costs of war,
the threat from North Korea, and the liabilities of over-reach. As such,
they divide into two categories: objections of principle - the evils of
unilateralism, pre-emption, war; and objections of prudence: the hazards of
terrorism, North Korea, over-reach.

What are the replies the Bush Administration can make to each of these?

1. Unilateralism. Historically, the United States has always reserved the
right to act alone where necessary, while seeking allies wherever possible.
In recent years it acted alone in Grenada, in Panama, in Nicaragua, and
which of its allies now complains about current arrangements in any of these
countries? As for the UN, Nato did not consult it when it launched its
attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, in which every European ally that now talks of
the need for authorisation from the Security Council fully participated, and
which 90 per cent of the opinion that now complains about our plans for Iraq
warmly supported. If it was right to remove Milosevic by force, who had no
weapons of mass destruction and even tolerated an opposition that eventually
beat him in an election, how can it be wrong to remove Saddam by force, a
far more lethal tyrant, whose human rights record is worse, has invaded a
neighbour, used chemical weapons and brooks no opposition of any kind? In
any case, the UN has already passed a resolution, No. 1441, that in effect
gives clear leeway to members of the Security Council to use force against
Iraq, so the legality of an attack is not in question.

2. Terrorism. Al-Qaida is a network bonded by religious fanaticism, in a
faith that calls for holy war by the Muslim world against the United States.
The belief that Allah assures victory to the jihadi is basic to it. There is
therefore no surer way of demoralising and breaking it up than by
demonstrating the vanity of hopes from heaven and the absolute impossibility
of resistance to superior American military force. Nazi and Japanese
imperial fanaticism were snuffed out by the simple fact of crushing defeat.
Al-Qaida is nowhere near their level of strength. Why should it be
different?

3. Pre-emption. Far from being a novel doctrine, this is a traditional right
of states. What, after all, is the most admired military victory of the
postwar era but a lightning pre-emptive strike? Israel's Six-Day War of
1967, so far from being cause for condemnation, is actually the occasion of
the modern doctrine of Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by a distinguished
philosopher of the American Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked
by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly
entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no
more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak reactor
of 1981. Who now complains about that?

4. The Human Costs of War. These are indeed tragic, and we will do
everything in our power - now technically considerable - to minimise
civilian casualties. But the reality is that a swift war will save lives,
not lose them. Since 1991, sanctions against Iraq - which most objectors to
war support - have caused 500,000 deaths from malnutrition and disease,
according to Unicef. Let us accept a lower figure, say 300,000. It is very
unlikely that the swift, surgical war of which we are capable will come
anywhere near this destruction by peace. On the contrary, once Saddam is
overthrown, oil will soon flow freely again, and Iraqi children will have
enough to eat. You will see population growth rebound very quickly.

5. North Korea. This is a failed Communist state that certainly poses a
great danger to North-East Asia. As we pointed out well before the current
hue and cry, it forms the other extremity of an Axis of Evil. But it is a
simple matter of good sense to concentrate our forces on the weaker, rather
than stronger, link of the Axis first. It is not because Pyongyang may, or
may not, have a few rudimentary nuclear weapons, which we could easily take
out, but because it can shatter Seoul in a conventional attack that we have
to proceed more cautiously in bringing it down. But do you seriously doubt
that we intend to take care of the North Korean regime too in due course?

6. Over-reach. An occupation of Iraq does pose a challenge, which we don't
underestimate. But it is a reasonable wager. Arab hostility is overrated.
After all, there hasn't been a single demonstration of significance in the
whole Middle East during the two years it has taken Israel to crush the
second Intifada, in full view of television cameras, yet popular sympathy is
far greater for the Palestinians than for Saddam. You also forget that we
already have a very successful protectorate in the northern third of Iraq,
where we have knocked Kurdish heads together pretty effectively. Do you ever
hear dire talk about that? The Sunni centre of the country will certainly be
trickier to manage, but the idea that stable regimes created or guided by
foreign powers are impossible in the Middle East is absurd. Think of the
long-term stability of the monarchy set up by the British in Jordan, or the
very satisfactory little state they created in Kuwait. Indeed, think of our
loyal friend Mubarak in Egypt, which has a much larger urban population than
Iraq. Everyone said Afghanistan was a graveyard for foreigners - British,
Russian and so on - but we liberated it quickly enough, and now the UN is
doing excellent work bringing it back to life. Why not Iraq? If all goes
well, we could reap great benefits - a strategic platform, an institutional
model, and not inconsiderable oil supplies.

Now, if one looks dispassionately at the two sets of arguments, there is
little doubt that on questions of principle, the Administration's case
against its critics is iron-clad. The reason for that is also fairly clear.
The two sides share a set of common assumptions, whose logic makes an attack
on Iraq an eminently defensible proposition. What are these assumptions?
Roughly, they can be summed up like this.

1. The UN Security Council represents the supreme legal expression of the
'international community'; except where otherwise specified, its resolutions
have binding moral and juridical force.

2. Where necessary, however, humanitarian or other interventions by the West
do not require permission of the UN, although it is always preferable to
have it.

3. Iraq committed an outrage against international law in seeking to annex
Kuwait, and has had to be punished for this crime, against which the UN
rallied as one, ever since.

4. Iraq has also sought to acquire nuclear weapons, whose proliferation is
any case an urgent danger to the international community, not to speak of
chemical or biological weapons.

5. Iraq is a dictatorship in a class of its own, or a very small set that
includes North Korea, for violation of human rights.

6. In consequence, Iraq cannot be accorded the rights of a sovereign state,
but must submit to blockade, bombing and loss of territorial integrity,
until the international community decides otherwise.

Equipped with these premises, it is not difficult to show that Iraq cannot
be permitted possession of nuclear or other weapons, that it has defied
successive UN resolutions, that the Security Council has tacitly authorised
a second attack on it (as it did not the attack on Yugoslavia), and that the
removal of Saddam Hussein is now long overdue.

On the same premises, however, it is still open to critics of the
Administration to take their stand, not on principle, but simply on grounds
of prudence. Invading Iraq may well be morally acceptable, even desirable,
but is it politically wise? Calculation of consequences is always more
imponderable than deduction from principles, so the room for disagreement
remains considerable. Anyone who believes that al-Qaida is a deadly bacillus
waiting to become an epidemic, or that Kim Jong Il is a more demented despot
even than Saddam Hussein, or that Iraq could become another Vietnam, is
unlikely to be swayed by reminders of the letter of UN Resolution 1441, or
Nato's lofty mission in protecting human rights in the Balkans.

Structures of intellectual justification are one thing. Popular sentiment,
although not unaffected by them, is another. The enormous demonstrations of
15 February in Western Europe, the United States and Australia, opposing an
attack on Iraq, pose a different sort of question. It can be put simply like
this. What explains this vast, passionate revolt against the prospect of a
war whose principles differ little from preceding military interventions,
that were accepted or even welcomed by so many of those now up in arms
against this one? Why does war in the Middle East today arouse feelings that
war in the Balkans did not, if logically there is little or nothing to
choose between them? The disproportion in reactions is unlikely to have much
to do with distinctions between Belgrade and Baghdad, and would in any case
presumably speak for rather than against intervention. The explanation
clearly lies elsewhere. Three factors appear to have been decisive.

First, hostility to the Republican regime in the White House. Cultural
dislike of the Bush Presidency is widespread in Western Europe, where its
rough affirmations of American primacy, and undiplomatic tendency to match
word to deed, have become intensely resented by public opinion accustomed to
a more decorous veil being drawn over the realities of relative power. To
see how important this ingredient in European anti-war sentiment must be,
one need only look at the complaisance with which Clinton's successive
aerial bombardments of Iraq were met. If a Gore or Lieberman Administration
were preparing a second Gulf War, the resistance would be a moiety of what
it is now. The current execration of Bush in wide swathes of West European
media and public opinion bears no relation to the actual differences between
the two parties in the United States. It is enough to note that both the
leading practical exponent and the major intellectual theorist of a war on
Iraq, Kenneth Pollack and Philip Bobbitt, are former ornaments of the
Clinton regime. But as substantial policy contrasts tend to dwindle in
Western political systems, symbolic differences of style and image can
easily acquire, in compensation, a hysterical rigidity. The Kulturkampf
between Democrats and Republicans within the United States is now being
reproduced between the US and EU. Typically, in such disputes, the violence
of partisan passions is in inverse proportion to the depth of real
disagreements. But as in the conflicts between Blue and Green factions of
the Byzantine hippodrome, minor affective preferences can have major
political consequences. A Europe in mourning for Clinton - see any editorial
in the Guardian, Le Monde, La Repubblica, El Pais - can unite in commination
of Bush.

Second, there is the role of the spectacle. Public opinion was well prepared
for the Balkan War by massive television and press coverage of ethnic
savageries in the region, real and - after Rambouillet, to a considerable
extent - mythical. The incomparably greater killings in Rwanda, where the
United States, fearing distraction from media focus on Bosnia, blocked
intervention in the same period, were by contrast ignored. In full view of
the cameras, the siege of Sarajevo appalled millions. The obliteration of
Grozny, safely off-screen, drew scarcely a shrug. Clinton called it
liberation, and Blair sped to congratulate Putin for the election he won on
the back of it. In Iraq, the plight of the Kurds was widely televised in the
aftermath of the Gulf War, mobilising public opinion behind the creation of
an Anglo-American protectorate, without any warrant from the UN. But today,
however much Washington or London declaim the atrocities of Saddam Hussein,
not to speak of his weapons of mass destruction, they are for all practical
purposes invisible to the European spectator. Powell's slide-shows in the
Security Council are no substitute for Bernard-Henri Lévy or Michael
Ignatieff vibrating at the microphone. For lack of visual aids, the
deliverance of Baghdad leaves European imagination cold.

Third, and perhaps most important, there is fear. Aerial retribution could
be wreaked on Yugoslavia in 1996, and continuously on Iraq since 1991,
without risk of reprisal. What could Milosevic or Saddam do? They were
sitting ducks. The attentats of 11 September have altered this
self-assurance. Here indeed was an unforgettable spectacle, designed to
mesmerise the West. The target of the attacks was the US, not Europe. If the
European states, Britain and France in the lead, joined in the
counter-attack on Afghanistan, for their populations this was still a remote
theatre of war, on which the curtain came down swiftly. The prospect of an
invasion and occupation of Iraq, far larger and closer, in the heart of the
Middle East, where European public opinion is uneasily aware - without
stirring itself to do anything about it - that all is not well in the Land
of Israel, is another matter. The spectre of retaliation by al-Qaida or
kindred groups for a rerun of the Balkan War has frozen many an ardent
combatant of the new 'military humanism' of the late 1990s. The Serbs were a
bagatelle: fewer than eight million. The Arabs are 280 million, and they are
much closer to Europe than to America - not a few of them indeed within it.
Contemplating the expedition to Baghdad, even New Labour loyalists ask, as
readers of this journal will have noticed: are we sure we can get away with
it this time?

Great mass movements are not to be judged by tight logical standards.
Whatever their reasons, the multitudes who have protested against a war on
Iraq are a whiplash to the governments bent on it. They include, in any
case, many too young to have been compromised by its precedents. But if the
movement is to have staying power, it will have to develop beyond the
fixations of the fan club, the politics of the spectacle, the ethics of
fright. For war, if it comes, will not be like Vietnam. It will be short and
sharp; and there is no guarantee that poetic justice will follow. A merely
prudential opposition to the war will not survive a triumph, any more than
handwringing about its legality a UN figleaf. Assorted justices and lawyers
who now cavil at the upcoming campaign, will make their peace with its
commanders soon enough, once allied armies are ensconced on the Tigris, and
Kofi Annan has pronounced an eirenic speech or two, courtesy of ghostwriters
seconded from the Financial Times, on postwar relief. Resistance to the
ruling dispensation that can last has to find another, principled basis.
Since current debates so interminably invoke the 'international community'
and the United Nations, as if these were a salve against the Bush
Administration, it is as well to start from these. An alternative
perspective can be suggested in a few telegraphic propositions.

1. No international community exists. The term is a euphemism for American
hegemony. It is to the credit of the Administration that some of its
officials have abandoned it.

2. The United Nations is not a seat of impartial authority. Its structure,
giving overwhelming formal power to five victor nations of a war fought
fifty years ago, is politically indefensible: comparable historically to the
Holy Alliance of the early 19th century, which also proclaimed its mission
to be the preservation of 'international peace' for the 'benefit of
humanity'. So long as these powers were divided by the Cold War, they
neutralised each other in the Security Council, and the organisation could
do little harm. But since the Cold War came to an end, the UN has become
essentially a screen for American will. Supposedly dedicated to the cause of
international peace, the organisation has waged two major wars since 1945
and prevented none. Its resolutions are mostly exercises in ideological
manipulation. Some of its secondary affiliates - Unesco, Unctad and the like
- do good work, and the General Assembly does little harm. But there is no
prospect of reforming the Security Council. The world would be better off -
a more honest and equal arena of states - without it.

3. The nuclear oligopoly of the five victor powers of 1945 is equally
indefensible. The Non-Proliferation Treaty is a mockery of any principles of
equality or justice - those who possess weapons of mass destruction
insisting that everyone except themselves give them up, in the interests of
humanity. If any states had a claim to such weapons, it would be small not
large ones, since that would counterbalance the overweening power of the
latter. In practice, as one would expect, such weapons have already spread,
and so long as the big powers refuse to abandon theirs, there is no
principled reason to oppose their possession by others. Kenneth Waltz, doyen
of American international relations theory, an impeccably respectable
source, long ago published a calm and detailed essay, which has never been
refuted, entitled 'The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better'. It
can be recommended. The idea that Iraq or North Korea should not be
permitted such weapons, while those of Israel or white South Africa could be
condoned, has no logical basis.

4. Annexations of territory - conquests, in more traditional language -
whose punishment provides the nominal justification of the UN blockade of
Iraq, have never resulted in UN retribution when the conquerors were allies
of the United States, only when they were its adversaries. Israel's borders,
in defiance of the UN resolutions of 1947, not to speak of 1967, are the
product of conquest. Turkey seized two-fifths of Cyprus, Indonesia East
Timor, and Morocco Western Sahara, without a tremor in the Security Council.
Legal niceties matter only when the interests of enemies are at stake. So
far as Iraq is concerned, the exceptional aggressions of the Baath regime
are a myth, as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt - hardly two incendiary
radicals - have recently shown in some detail in their recent essay in
Foreign Policy.

5. Terrorism, of the sort practised by al-Qaida, is not a serious threat to
the status quo anywhere. The success of the spectacular attack of 11
September depended on surprise - even by the fourth plane, it was impossible
to repeat. Had al-Qaida ever been a strong organisation, it would have aimed
its blows at client states of America in the Middle East, where the
overthrow of a regime would make a political difference, rather than at
America itself, where it could not leave so much as a strategic pinprick. As
Olivier Roy and Gilles Keppel, the two best authorities in the field of
contemporary Islamism have argued, al-Qaida is the isolated remnant of a
mass movement of Muslim fundamentalism, whose turn to terror is the symptom
of a larger weakness and defeat - an Islamic equivalent of the Red Army
Faction or Red Brigades that emerged in Germany and Italy after the great
student uprisings of the late 1960s faded away, and were easily quelled by
the state. The complete inability of al-Qaida to stage even a single
attentat, while its base was being pounded to shreds and its leadership
killed off in Afghanistan, speaks volumes about its weakness. In different
ways, it suits both the Administration and the Democratic opposition to
conjure up the spectre of a vast and deadly conspiracy, capable of striking
at any moment, but this is a figment with little bearing one way or another
on Iraq, which is neither connected to al-Qaida today, nor likely to give it
much of a boost, if it falls tomorrow.

6. Domestic tyrannies, or the abuse of human rights, which are now held to
justify military interventions - overriding national sovereignty in the name
of humanitarian values - are treated no less selectively by the UN. The
Iraqi regime is a brutal dictatorship, but until it attacked an American
pawn in the Gulf, it was armed and funded by the West. Its record is less
bloody than that of the Indonesian regime that for three decades was the
West's main pillar in South-East Asia. Torture was legal in Israel till
yesterday, openly sanctioned by the Supreme Court, and is unlikely to have
disappeared today without an eyelash being batted by the assembled Western
Governments that have befriended it. Turkey, freshly off the mark for entry
into the EU, does not, unlike Iraq, even tolerate the language of its Kurds
- and, as a member of Nato in good standing, likewise jails and tortures
without hindrance. As for 'international justice', the farce of the Hague
Tribunal on Yugoslavia, where Nato is prosecutor and judge, will be
amplified in the International Criminal Court, in which the Security Council
can forbid or suspend any actions it dislikes (i.e. which might ruffle its
permanent members), and private firms or millionaires - Walmart or Dow
Chemicals, Hinduja or Fayed, as the case might be - are cordially invited to
fund investigations (Articles 16 and 116). Saddam, if captured, will
certainly be arraigned before this august body. Who imagines that Sharon or
Putin or Mubarak would ever be, any more than was once Tudjman before its
predecessor?

What conclusions follow? Simply this. Mewling about Blair's folly or Bush's
crudity, is merely saving the furniture. Arguments about the impending war
would do better to focus on the entire prior structure of the special
treatment accorded to Iraq by the United Nations, rather than wrangle over
the secondary issue of whether to continue strangling the country slowly or
to put it out of its misery quickly.

Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA.

From the LRB letters page: [ 20 March 2003 ] Kate Soper, Dick Pountain,
Oliver Pretzel.


-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/