Comments on: Responsibility

By: dan

dan — Fri, 21 May 2004 00:33:38 +0000

thanks for the juvenile clarification, Nick. Turns out I understood you well enough. You don’t worry about the threat of sarin gas attacks on Coalition troops or even consider such worries a part of “reality.” Further, you think worrying about sarin gas attacks even after Coalition troops have suffered such an attack remains “delusional”…because no troops became ill or died in that attack. We’re apparently communicating from very different “realities,” and as strange and unprecendented as that is, the law of diminishing returns has set in. Besides which, you’re really creeping me out now.

By: nick

nick — Thu, 20 May 2004 13:51:11 +0000

dan: The comment about pig-wrestling comes to mind, but let’s just summarise here. You said: ‘Coalition troops are at this very glib moment confronting the ugly reality of elusive WMD worries.’ This ‘ugly reality’? Two soldiers were treated and released on the same day. Had they been dealing with a high-explosive shell, they’d be missing limbs, or dead. The coalition command is not redeploying NCB suits (the DoD thinks the shell dates from the late 80s) and so the people on the ground seem uninclined to accept your Cassandra act. Based upon what’s happening in Iraq, I simply suggest that you’re summoning up an ‘ugly reality’ from your imagination that demeans the actual ugly reality. That’s to say, you’re a delusional cretin.

By: dan

dan — Thu, 20 May 2004 12:41:22 +0000

NICK: Just to ensure that I’ve grasped your argument, here’s a summary of it: you consider it “dense” to worry about sarin gas (one drop of which is lethal) being unleashed against Coalition troops, and consider it “intellectually dishonest” to refer to sarin gas as a WMD, because it isn’t as massively destructive as a nuclear bomb? And, further, because no Coalition troops have yet been killed by exposure to it? If the above is an accurate summary of your thinking, I’m sorry to inform you that your thinking is deranged. I hope, more for your own sake than mine, that I misunderstood you.

By: nick

nick — Wed, 19 May 2004 13:48:25 +0000

if you can’t imagine any difference in the degree of harm unleashed by WMDs, versus the harm unleashed by conventional explosives (as horrible and craven as they are), then I honestly don’t know how to persuade you that there is a difference—and therefore a legitimate reason to fear the former even more than the latter. You really are very very dense, aren't you? In the simplest terms: Degree of harm actually unleashed by 'WMDs' in Iraq since last April: not all that much. Degree of harm actually unleashed by conventional weaponry in Iraq: a fuckload. I don't need to imagine that, since it's all factual. You appear to be projecting Day After Tomorrow-style consequences on the figurative equivalent of a light shower in June. And that's why you're ridiculous. What next? Are you going to say 'But what... what if that artillery shell had been a nuclear warhead? What then?' Get a fucking grip. [To elaborate: the Hutton hearings pointed out the limited range and effectiveness of 'battlefield' chemical weapons. It's not a new thing to point out the inadequacy of the collective term 'WMDs' when it covers things as disparate as mustard gas and nuclear warheads, meaning that the 'degree of harm' associated with a Hiroshima or a pandemic gets mis-applied to weaponry that had its heyday in the days of trench warfare. But, for dan to expand that loose, baggy and deceptive collective term to further include a cack-handedly detonated shell of 1980s vintage, with the devastating capacity of a can of Mace, is just intellectually dishonest.]

By: armando

armando — Wed, 19 May 2004 10:51:38 +0000

Dan, sure. The claim was made before the war that Saddam posed a great threat in terms of WMD: Blair assured us that the evidence to support this claim was strong. Somehow, to see this as flawed and, in my view, either incompetent or deliberately misleading is to think the worst of the Blair. By this rubric, I can never criticise the government, because even when they are clearly mistaken, one can always say that Saddam was worse. But perhaps you are right. The position that coalition troops engage in torture and Saddam didn’t have WMDs is so loony, barking and anti-american that we should dismiss anyone who even suggests it.

By: dan

dan — Wed, 19 May 2004 02:32:34 +0000

John Quiggin wrote: "dan, the doctrine that governments should do as they please, subject only to the constraints posed by election, is a dangerous one." Absolutely. And I certainly didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I'd assumed we'd been discussing the particular (and difficult to prosecute) case of misleading statements uttered by governments, rather than governments generally doing "as they please." (In the case of speech, as I'm sure you'd agree, prosecuting elected officials based on dubious or exaggerated statements they've made would end with the world's entire elected political class in the dock.) After all, if you can lie and get away with it (or administer up a system in which you are served up with convenient, but false, information) the electoral check is subverted. Since politicians of whatever party "lie and get away with it" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 356 days a year, on any number of subjects--from fudging economic statistics to engaging in rabid partisan hyperbole--I'm assuming you meant only "lie and get away with it" regarding something as exceptionally serious as, say, war. And I couldn't agree more. If anyone ever provides credible--by which I mean credible to the disinterested, as well as the impassioned--evidence that any Coalition government actively lied about its reasons for invading Iraq, I'd be among those clamoring for that government's head. Such damning evidence hasn't been provided, however. (As of today, at any rate.) What has been provided is evidence that many governments (in and out of the Coalition) assumed the worst of the monstrous regime of Saddam Hussein, and, further, that at least one of those assumptions has since been proved incorrect. On a side issue, I find it difficult to treat entirely seriously the arguments of someone who doesn’t bother to spell my name correctly, when it’s printed in front of them I'm sorry that I mispelled your name, John. I'm even sorrier now that I recognize just how debilitating someone mispelling your name is to your rational faculty. I'll try not to make things difficult for you in future.

By: dan

dan — Wed, 19 May 2004 02:29:04 +0000

Armando We'll apparently have to agree to disagree about more than one thing if you truly see no difference between assuming the worst about tyrants like Saddam Hussein and assuming the worst about the British military. In my case, I think it's incumbent upon governments to assume the worst about the former, and disreputable for newspapers to assume the worst about the latter. Weird it may be, but there you go.

By: armando

armando — Wed, 19 May 2004 00:39:47 +0000

Dan. We can disagree about the threat posed by Saddam (and the international perception of it), but the implication of your argument seems to be that the higher the stakes, the less accountable people should be. Which seems…unconvincing. As for this wierd invocation of moral equivalence, I’m afraid that you’ve lost me. Some people tell untruths. It is even possible for someone to tell an untruth without being as evil as Saddam Hussein. Its a subtle point, I realise, that a lie told by a good man is still a lie. I might give the good man the benefit of the doubt, sure, but I don’t judge whether something is true by simply looking at the characters of the people involved. And I think both cases have easily passed the stage where we are just giving the benefit of the doubt.

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 18 May 2004 23:51:58 +0000

I still have a problem with your equating government intelligence dossiers and newspaper photographs. As soon as the photos came out they were recognised as false – no such thing happened with the dossiers. Even the axis of weasels pretty much agreed that they were an accurate account of what was known. If any government official needs to resign it’s Chirac for promising to veto a second enabling resolution UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 18 May 2004 23:24:52 +0000

dan, the doctrine that governments should do as they please, subject only to the constraints posed by election, is a dangerous one. It’s particularly and glaringly dangerous when it comes to misleading the public and Parliament, which is why there have traditionally been rules about this sort of thing. After all, if you can lie and get away with it (or administer up a system in which you are served up with convenient, but false, information ) the electoral check is subverted. On a side issue, I find it difficult to treat entirely seriously the arguments of someone who doesn’t bother to spell my name correctly, when it’s printed in front of them

By: dan

dan — Tue, 18 May 2004 20:52:18 +0000

Armando, Since neither I, nor the "international community" (including the UN and those nations which objected to removing Saddam Hussein's monstrous and deceptive regime by force), would agree with you that the threat Saddam Hussein's regime represented should be described as "the smallest risk" or a "rhetorical threat," your characterization of my comments is inaccurate. It's exactly what and who the Daily Mirror and the British Government were assuming the worst about that's at issue here. If you believe that an infamous mass murderer and pathological liar should rightly be given the very same benefit of the doubt as the British military--if you see no substantive difference between those two objects of suspicion--you'll naturally concur with John Guiggen's comparison between the two. If you don't, you won't. None of the above, by the way, has anything whatsoever to do with demanding that elected governments are held accountable for their actions. That's what elections are for. There's no such check against libelous journalists. Only the marketplace and the civil law courts offer any remedy for the actions of newspapers like the Daily Mail. Which is why recognizing precisely who and what they've chosen to assume the worst about is so important.

By: armando

armando — Tue, 18 May 2004 20:15:11 +0000

So what you are saying Dan is that the British Government, due to the seriousness of the war and WMD, should be held to a much lower standard of account than the Daily Mirror? This involves something like a precautionary principle, I suppose. It is better to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis than even take a smallest risk that there might be WMDs in Iraq? And the more serious the rhetorical threat, the less acceptable it is to hold governments to account for their innacuracies (never mind the near treasonous suggestion that they may be lying)?

By: dan

dan — Tue, 18 May 2004 18:34:14 +0000

MFB wrote: “it’s pretty clear that your interest in the well-being of Iraqis or American troops is insignificant as compared with your interest in transmitting conservative propaganda.” That was particularly uncharitable, MFB. You could, after all, have entertained the possibility that anyone still worrying about WMDs being unleashed against Coalition troops in Iraq (whether amateurishly or not) is simply misinformed or alarmist. Instead you instantly assumed I was more interested in transmitting “conservative propaganda” than I was about the lives of my own friends and relatives deployed in Iraq. That’s unfortunate. Especially since at no point did I make light or confess wanting to “laugh” about the danger of conventional I.E.D.s. As for the explanation that Nick was merely making fun of my (apparently sidesplitting) worries about WMDs being unleashed against Coalition troops, as opposed to making fun of WMDs actually being unleashed against Coalition troops, I’m afraid I feel only marginally better. But I appreciate the thought. NICK: if you can’t imagine any difference in the degree of harm unleashed by WMDs, versus the harm unleashed by conventional explosives (as horrible and craven as they are), then I honestly don’t know how to persuade you that there is a difference—and therefore a legitimate reason to fear the former even more than the latter. dsquared: I did indeed compare “printing a photograph” libeling British troops with “starting a war”—with the monstrous regime of Saddam Hussein. As did John Guiggin, in case you’ve forgotten. We may certainly disagree about the wisdom of initiating that war, but don’t, in your eagerness to reaffirm your aged opposition to its initiation, entirely overlook the point of my original comment—which was that the ominous assumptions of the Daily Mirror and the British Government were employed against very different objects. Equating those two objects, after all, does a deep disservice to one of them.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 18 May 2004 15:03:39 +0000

Our politicians constantly remind us the great responsibilities that their position entails, and make liberal use of the associated powers, but they have totally failed to assume the counterpart of these responsibilities, as you point out. Responsibility is SO last century.

By: nick

nick — Tue, 18 May 2004 13:40:49 +0000

Thanks, mfb: you managed a piece of straightforward reading that dan did not. dan: like I suggested, it’s a bit ridiculous of you to have a Eureka moment over the supposed ‘ugly reality’ of those two shells, when, had said shells been like 99.9% of those used in roadside bombs since the occupation began, they’d have led to the twisted-metal and broken-bodied reality that results from the detonation of high explosives. A plight that truly sickens me. And had Ezzedine Salim been confronted by your ‘ugly reality’, the result would have been a somewhat embarrassed suicide bomber heading to Abu Ghraib, for whom I wouldn’t have shed many tears.