Unpleasantly self-absorbed suicide bombers

It’s a pity about the 72 virgins, though; what are they going to do meantimes?

Does anybody here feel they have some responsibility for people starving in Niger? I know I do. I also feel some responsibility for the sufferings of the Iraqi people. I’m not entirely sure the world is as pleasently morally symmetrical as the good folk here at Crooked Timber seem to think it is.

dglp

The distinction surely arises from accepting that it is wrong to kill civilians to no military purpose

Chris Bertram,
100,000 civilians murdered by occupying Japanese forces every month in Asia (This doesn’t include the millions who died from famine and disease do to the occupations). Allied prisoners of war were experimented on, tortured, beheaded, and worked to death. If you haven’t seen the Time article on the Rape of Nanking, look it up, and then maybe you can see that using nukes on Japan might not have been so unreasonable.

This ends your regularly scheduled detour.

Consider this scenario:

Country A conquers country B and forces the civilians of country B into slave labor. The civilians of country A become very rich off the labor of the civilians of country B. The civilians of country B, meanwhile, languish in poverty and misery. The civilians of country A invest a huge portion of their wealth to create a gigantic military, beyond anything the world has ever seen before. The civilians of country B decide to rebel against their oppressors in country A. They attack the civilians of country A. The civilians of country A respond with outrage–“How dare you attack our civilians! Fight like real men and go up against our gigantic army, you cowards!”

The world applauds country A for its great virtue and moral clarity and condemns the civilians of country B for their indefensible behavior.

Country A rewards its applauders with contracts and military aid.

Justice is done.

The collective-responsibility reasoning of terrorists (at least in their public statements) seems to be that their responsibility for their governments’ actions makes all citizens of a democracy wicked by proxy when their governments do bad things, and that punishing these people therefore becomes a positive good. If, in one’s crabbed little mind, one imagines the evils punished to be evil enough, eventually that positive good can outweigh the evil done by killing defenseless civilians. Never mind that nothing good, no redress of the original evils, seems to actually come of it.

Between this, and the justifications for invading Iraq and causing many thousands of deaths on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a bad man, and the justifications for torturing POWs on the grounds that it’s somehow payback for Sept. 11 (and I’m not really interested in arguing about whether all these things are morally equivalent or not; I’m just talking about the principle), it’s all made me terribly suspicious of the idea that punishing the wicked is a positive good in itself. It doesn’t seem as if the various implementations of the idea have a very good recent track record.

Chris Bertran,
Very simple. When it is going to cost millions of Japanese lives, a million US lives, and the ~100,000 per month of Asians living under Japanese rule, it severely changes this part “And every reasonable attempt must be made to minimize non-combatant deaths.” Compared to the ongoing carnage in occupied Japanese terrorties and contemplated US/Japanese casulties in a homeland invasion, it become unreasonable to minimize non-combatant deaths. It was 103,000 deaths vs. multiple millions. So either decision was a wrong one, but the lesser of two evils was chosen.

Don’t forget that the main reason civilians shouldn’t be targeted is because the other side will eventually respond in kind. If Germany bombs English cities, England will bomb German cities. And as we see in Chechnya, it surely backfires when one side can’t maintain the parity and one side ends up finishing what the other side started.

Argueing that US civilians are legitimate targets is an arguement for indiscriminate B-52 bombings of Al-Queda-esque countries.

“we as citizens should take responsibility for our governments (with which I agree) and the claim that this somehow turns us all into legitimate objects of attack (which is garbage).”

What about the situation where one believes that allowing oneself to be subordinated to this sort of (fatuous) demarcation is a form of slavery?

That is, who the f@#k is ‘we’? Who gets to say who ‘we’ are? Who gets to say who is in or who is out of ‘we’. The ‘we’ in the article appears to be predicated on some sort of bigotry: should people go along with this sort of ignorance? What happens if I don’t want anything to do with this ‘we’? Why doesn’t this ‘we’ go and live in the middle of the atlantic or some such and stop pestering the rest of us?

Chris,
“You mean if we knew they couldn’t do so then deliberately killing their civilians would be ok?”

I meant “another side”, not “the other side”. Attacking civilians would make your own civilians much more vulnerable. That being the point I was making about argueing that US civilians were acceptable targets.

Chris,

er, yeah. That. What you said.
.

It is the inability to recognize the circumstances and the gap between their stated version of circumstances and the actions of such (The Moores, Galloways, Pilgers et al. I need a word can anyone help?) is what is so offensive.

Not the rhetorical crossing of some abstract line.

If the fairy tale was true. If the third world would bloom a thousands blossoms if only the West would retreat behind some magical barrier. If the future of the world depends on a US defeat, if the Iraqi resistance are minutemen, if we are raping the daughters of the Arab world, then given the military circumstances blowing up US and British civilians is quite reasonable. (We might quibble over it’s effectiveness as a tactics but it would be a reasonable tactic.)

And certainly slaughtering the occupation’s accomplices and US military forces would be acceptable.

No. Not just acceptable but rather the duty of any goodly man. And so why do the Galloways and Moores shirk their duties? The only rational conclusion is that they are cowards.

D2Squared has it right. Galloway is the perfect Arab leader. He sits in his Western funded villa giving fine speeches about the horrors of the Arab daughters being raped outside his gates.

That Peter Wilby is confused and cannot quite jump into that pool is a good thing. That he teeters on the edge is troublesome.

@Daniel in 12:
The Japanese military were not going to surrender. They were going to throw as many civilians onto American bayonets as possible in order to make the US sit down at the bargaining table. The slogans in the Japanese media at the time were “Japanese people will eat stones.”

You forget that we were reading their codes, both military (how they fight) and diplomatic (why they fight). We knew where most of their troops were setting up to defend themselves from the upcoming invasion. What was “wrong” with Hiroshima? Nothing. It was the central command post for Kyushu, along with about 50,000 troops stationed in the city. Any invasion of the “home islands” would have to start with Kyushu, and taking out the leadership of those forces is both prudent and necessary.

Holy shit Chris. If Peter’s comments are correct then you just went from calling Hiroshima a war crime to calling it possibly justifiable. Farg’n hell, I should have known better than to take your “war crimes” bait.

“There’s a generally accepted rule of war that you don’t kill civilians just to save the lives of your own soldiers.”

Yes, there was a rule like that. It was a big part of the distinction between regular soldiers and insurgents. Real soldiers fought other real soldiers- while non-state fighters, insurgents and guerillas, who couldn’t hope to defeat an army, targeted civilian administrators and collaborators. This allowed the real soldiers and their civilian nationals to feel contempt for the cowardly non-state fighters, who didn’t stand up and fight like men.

But since the Lusitania it’s been impossible to maintain the distinction. Before submarines, navies tried to give enemy shipping a chance to surrender, and then evacuated passengers and crew. Subs couldn’t do that- they couldn’t seize an enemy vessel, only sink it. So they did.

And since WWI the technology of war, mainly in the air,has overridden the rule entirely, and with it the basis for the contempt. Planes make it impossible to target precisely enough to kill only other warriors.

So, let’s say you reject the concept that states have a right to monopolize violence for the purpose of maintaining order — that non-state violence is the very definition of ‘illegitimate.’ Then it becomes very hard to identify — apart from the political goal that the violence is intended to gain — a moral reason to distinguish between state sponsored violence and non-state sponsored violence. Using words like “legitimate” and “immoral” and “cowardly” and the like won’t do it if you can’t explain what content these words have. Otherwise you’re just saying “I don’t like it and it’s bad.”

All you need to do is to leave the third world people alone to take care of their problems; if you wish to help – mail them a check.

Just curious, how does this fit with immigration policies? Allowing unhappy and/or endangered residents of the third world to immigrate to first world countries would seem to be more than “leaving them alone”, in that liberal immigration policies offer lifelines or even just plain old opportunity to those foolish enough to be born in particular nations. Rather than “leaving third world people alone”, the immigration policy of the UK actively offers them assistance in bettering their lives.

This is perhaps somewhat tangential to the overall discussion, but certainly one of the key issues here is that people are coming from third world countries (because Britain allows them to, thus extending a helping hand), and are then, in the cases of some groups, actively rejecting democratic means in favour of violent ones, even to the point of arguing that it is fair to target anyone in the UK as a proxy for Blair and the war. This rightly sticks in many people’s craw, on both the left and the right.

It should also be noted that the innocent victims of the London bombings came from a total of 20 or so nations. Some had only been here a few weeks.

Sebastian, you can’t defend Muslim countries against Islamists, you just can’t. No more than enlightened Arabs in the Middle Ages could help against the Inquisition. You only create more of them.

And I don’t see any evidence that they have any plans outside of the Muslim world at the moment; if/when they do, that’ll be a different story, of course.

As far as the immigration policies, I don’t see any evidence of them being dictated by anything but economic needs of the developed countries, their need for cheap labor, for the underclass.

BigMac, again, how do you judge whether someone is better off or worse off? The only way I know is to ask the person, unless it’s a minor child or a retard.

Well, they’ve been asked, opinion polls have been conducted, we know what they want – they prefer freedom; freedom from the US, from the UK, from France, from the Westerners. So, why do you hate their freedom? Why do you think you know what’s best for them and have a right to impose it by coercion? No wonder they are thinking of killing you.

It’s really that simple, as I see it.

That should have been many of the particular distinctions drawn reflect…rather than “the” particular distinctions.

Albert,
I’m with you that the US has a responsibility to keep track of the harm done in Iraq so that there can be an accounting, but downplaying deaths is not justification to respond in kind. That would be like claiming the US could bomb Afghan civilians because Al-Queda claimed there were only soldiers in the Twin Towers (which, in reverse, is one of the arugments posed on this thread).

A Congressman speculating that the US should target civilians is just as despicable as a radical cleric. But so far the US isn’t targeting civilians, while without a doubt those who listen to the radical clerics are.

I was very surprised by dsquared’s message the it is going to be illegal in the UK to “glorify” terrorism. I have mixed feelings, of course. On free speech grounds it is abhorrent. On the plus side, if only we had such a law in place in the US during Reagan’s time in office he could have been jailed and hundreds of thousands of lives in Central America and southern Africa could have been saved.

Jet, here’s the CATO piece I always recommend on the subject of oil/ME: “Ancient History”: U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly Of Intervention

It was written in 1991, but sounds amazingly relevant:

…
The American people have not been well served by U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. They have been forced to pay billions of dollars to foreign governments, and that has cost them untold opportunities for better lives afforded by an undistorted consumer economy. Even when the foreign “aid” was used to buy American-made products, it was merely a politically contrived transfer from the taxpayers to politically connected corporate interests. U.S. policy has put the American people at risk of war several times, including the risk of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. American lives have been lost–in Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 war, in Beirut, and through desperate acts of terrorism. The people have even gotten a bad deal on oil. The true cost of oil includes not only the per barrel or per gallon price but also the cost of the overgrown military establishment and foreign aid budget. That cost is hidden, because it is not overtly added to the price at the pump, but it is real all the same. That fact was recognized in a 1953 statement by the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association, which said:

Although Middle East oil is so abundant that it can be developed at a fraction of the cost of our own, it is far from “cheap.” On the contrary, Middle East oil may already be the most expensive in the world market today when consideration is given to the fact that vast amounts of public funds are spent on the defense mechanism which is intended largely to protect American interests in the Middle Eastern oil fields.(227)

The statement goes on to note that the real price would multiply immeasurably if the policy began costing American lives–a point that is even more relevant today.
…

Chris seems to be arguing that targeting civilians is never right. The corrollary, then, is that all war must be fought soldier vs. soldier, tank vs. tank, bomber vs. bomber.

How convenient for nations with big, powerful armies!

The corrollary, then, is that all war must be fought soldier vs. soldier, tank vs. tank, bomber vs. bomber.

No, not exactly, my impression is that he doesn’t really mind civilians attacking tanks with sticks and rocks if they wish; that is not taboo at all.

Only one thing is absolutely forbidden – killing civilians like Chris and the rest of us.

Not a bad idea, I must admit, I’m all for it, but how ya gonna convince the residents of Haqlaniyah?

— 38 minutes ago —
…
Residents in the area said U.S. and Iraqi forces had cordoned off Haqlaniyah and were conducting house-to-house searches. U.S. warplanes circled overhead and a number of heavy explosions were heard. Witnesses said 500-pound bombs were being dropped in the area.

They might disagree, unfortunately.

‘BigMac, again, how do you judge whether someone is better off or worse off? The only way I know is to ask the person, unless it’s a minor child or a retard.

Well, they’ve been asked, opinion polls have been conducted, we know what they want – they prefer freedom; freedom from the US, from the UK, from France, from the Westerners. So, why do you hate their freedom? Why do you think you know what’s best for them and have a right to impose it by coercion? No wonder they are thinking of killing you.

It’s really that simple, as I see it.’

Quite a non-sequitor. I point out that either Pilger and Galloway are either spouting a load of unmitigated tosh or are cowards. I contend that it isn’t right to murder civilians in order to force the West to withdraw from the 3rd world.

You ask me why I hate freedom and conclude that of course third worlders want to kill me for my freedom hating ways.

The mind boogles on so many different levels.

The Iraqi people don’t seem to share your views. Why do you hate their freedom?

“The hapless Peter Wilby has a column … about how citizens of democracies share responsibility for the actions of their leaders.”

Chris Bertram agrees with the notion that “citizens should take responsibility for our governments”, but that’s slightly different from what Wilby said which is citizens sharing responsibility for the actions of the government. I’m surprised no-one has picked up on this.

Citizens of democracies aren’t responsible for the actions of their leaders. The whole system of representative government was deliberately set up in order to prevent this from being the case. We can choose our government in elections, but:

(a) once elected, they’re not under any obligation to do what they said they would do before the election, and

(b) once the government is elected, the people have no further part to play. They can vote out the government at the next election (once all the damage has been done), but until then the government can do whatever the hell it wants.

dglp talked about the influence of a “less-than-perfect democracy” on this form of argument. But that misses the point slightly. Our political systems are designed so the government can act independently from the wishes of the people, and as a consequence citizens are not responsible for the actions of the government.

I think purple state is makes a very good point. I’m sure many of us would differ on where we would draw the line, but at least these are standards that are based on values I agree w/: don’t kill innocents, minimize casualties where possible, etc. The question I have is, does Chris Bertram agree that the rules describing just war look like those purple state outlines or is it just black and white: you can never kill citizens, only soldiers? And if its the latter, what is the reasoning for that?

Re: Purple State’s comments.

I don’t think anyone is saying that “killing civilians is never acceptable”, the Laws of War say that civilians can’t be targets, and that the risk to them must be proportionate to the military objective pursued, and so on. The reason for this is an attempt to reduce the suffering of civilians from war. Civilians can be and are legitimately killed, but the rules are an attempt to place limits on the scale of this.

Purple State also says the “killing of civilians is justifiable only when … [the] killing is minimized”, which read literally is a contradiction in terms.

Nikolai . . .

Are you arguing that it is okay to kill citizens accidently (collateral damage) but not to specifically target civilians? If so, it seems like you’re accepting #2 of my four reasons for killing citizens, but rejecting #1, #3, #4. Fine to take that position, of course, but I disagree. If you reject #1, native americans would not have been justified in attacking civilian settlers on the Great Plains during America’s Manifest Destiny period. I think they were justified in doing so. If you reject #3, than Hiroshima is impossible to justify. I find Hiroshima very troubling ethically, but if it really did prevent deaths on a far more massive scale (and this is questionable, but possible) it was justifiable in my opinion.

Purple State also says the “killing of civilians is justifiable only when … [the] killing is minimized”, which read literally is a contradiction in terms.

We can edit that to say something like: “killing of civilians is kept to the minimum amount necessary to achieve one’s objectives.”

Minimizing killing–reducing it to zero–is of course the ideal. But the history of our species has so far fallen short of the ideal, and I suspect there’s some biological imperative that prevents us from ever reaching perfection. Or, if you’re religious, maybe we just took too big a bite of that damn apple.

Assuming that the broader aims of the attackers are morally just, we get involved in very difficult cost-in-lives/strategic-benefit analysis, which must be undertaken case-by-case.

I tentatively offer the following rates of exchange on peoples’ lives:

1 of your civilians is worth the same as 5 of your soldiers; 1 of your soldiers is worth the same as 20 enemy soldiers; 1 enemy soldier is worth the same as 5 enemy civilians.

So, assuming that it your aims have sufficient moral imperative to make the attack just, if you have the choice of killing 499 enemy civilians or 1 of your own, assuming that the strategic advantage would be exactly the same, then the 499 must die. But if it’s 501, then your guy must die. If it’s a 500, then toss a coin.

Balls… sorry for the duplication. I thought my first comment hadn’t got through. Go with the second.

Jet-
“Since oil is really the only reason the West pays much attention to the middle-east…”
Mmph. Hemh. Rumf. Ah. Errhh. Well…uhm…uh…

The indiscriminate bombing of civilians, where there is no military end in mind, is surely one such act.

That is certainly true, but unfortunately most terrorists do have a military (or at least political, which is really the same thing) end in mind.

As far as the victims of ‘the bomber’ not having an alternative – they sure do. Their alternative is quite simple: to rebel against their government that put them into this perilous position by oppressing the weak; to force their government to end the oppression. Indeed, that’s the whole point of terrorism.

Rollo,
Without oil most Middle Eastern countries would be overwhelmed by their horrible governments and wouldn’t pose international problems. I.E.Corrupt inept governments and no industrialization mean not enough money to fund international radical Islam, WMD programs, or mechanized wars.

I’m interested in big macs belief that the only thing that makes terrorism wrong is that in fact those things which ‘Pilger, Galloway etc’ (even if absurdly stated by Big Mac) are not true, whilst if they were true then they SHOULD carry out these attacks and would even have a duty to.

I’ve always thought that in the end all this stuff about ethics and violence is a load of huey. People who can cooly discuss incinerating hundreds of thousands of civilians on a cost-benifit analyses can hardly be objecting to relatively insignificant killing of a few hundred ‘on principle’.

In the end what divides us is what we think the world is like.

jr

“The complete or partial destruction of the enemy must be regarded as the sole object of all engagements. . . . Direct annihilation of the enemy’s forces must always be the dominant consideration”

Clausewitz – On War

James- “only protected by the restraint of the other side”
That isn’t full enough to be accurate. Yes there is some restraint, though it’s nowhere near the thorough application of integrity the P.R. machines would have us believe. And it’s vital that some remnant scraps of integrity be visible, to keep the social order from imploding.
Without moral restraint the other side, in this case the US, Israel, and Britain, won’t have any foundation for their sense of entitlement and superiority; not that they have one anyway but that the belief is necessary, especially as it concerns the public, especially as it concerns the American public who are funding all this bloodshed and economic oppression.
Americans need to feel right about what’s being done in their names or the whole society will start to fragment – as appears to be happening, again, and precisely for that reason.
Without the moral certainty of a just cause there’s nothing there but raw biologically-driven hunger for territory and resources.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
The con is to keep that vicious amoral grasping going full steam whilst placating the public with tales of derring-do and heroic defense of the innocent.
Thus false-flag terror. Thus brazen lies pounded into the public’s ears like hypnotic commands. Thus the complete suppression of articulate presentations of the “enemy’s” side of things.
Thus Iraq. Thus the buildup to an act of immoral and illegal aggression against Iran.
–
Jet-
That’s gymnastic how you did that. From “the only reason the West pays much attention to the middle-east” is oil, to “Without oil most Middle Eastern countries would be overwhelmed by their horrible governments and wouldn’t pose international problems.”
You left out the part about the reason the “West” pays attention is the “international problems” posed by the “horrible governments”. Which are able to pose those problems because their economies are fueled by oil, I guess is what you mean.
You could also say that without water, or air, they wouldn’t be able to “pose international problems”. But that would be absurd, wouldn’t it?
Though they do keep insisting, those horrible nasty men, that the killing and devastation being visited on Palestine and Iraq are what’s motivating them to acts of terror. While our leaders keep explaining, while enacting laws that remove our freedoms, that it’s because they hate our freedoms.

rollo – Democracies sense of entitlement derives solely from the belief that the citizens have some base set of rights that should be protected using any means. Democracies are more than willing to use drastic measures if threatend enough. The justification will always come down to defending the “us” from the preceived “them”.

abb1 – Logic would dictate that when fighting a superior force one at least maintian the appearance of fighting a limited war. Also, the point wasn’t that the bombers want to be in charge. The point was that there are individuals who verbally support the bombers even though they do not want them to be in charge.

James provides no evidence that if, for example, the insurgents succeded in forcing a withdrawel by British and American troops, this would result in Al-Qaida or their like, taking power, save from the fact that ‘they would like that’ (ie their intentions).

All the evidence suggests that the Al Qaida types are largely from outside Iraq, and all the evidence suggests that insofar as they are tolerated at all, they are tolerated only because of the presence of the British and the US (I doubt for example that the youths celebrating beside the bombed out British military vehicle in Basra were celebrating the ideology of Al Qaida for rather obvious reasons).

The argument relies on the complete denial of any agency at all to Iraqi’s, profound ignorence of Iraqi society and the political ideologies that exist within it, and the reproduction of unthought propaganda as fact. Much like the whole venture in fact. Do you really imagine that the Shi’a in southern Iraq would allow “Al Qaida in Iraq’ to take power following the withdrawel of US and British troops?

Do you seriously imagine that the whole network of informal power which has always been an important part of governance in the Post-Colonial Iraqi state and the players associated with it would allow Al Qaida to come to power?

The problem is that no one is a) willing to risk their neck in a situation where the British and Americans are still there or b) going to take any government seriously which only exists by virtue of the presence of the British and Americans. The endless bloodbath is going to continue, not to protect democracy in Iraq (which will not be the outcome of this present process), but to ensure that the US or Britain don’t look humiliated.

And for Iraqi’s that is NOT a price worth paying. Before you go on about the elections held remember that those voters were promised that the election would lead to a speedy exit by the coalition. The pictures around that burning jeep in Basra in a part of the country were the insurgency probably has least support (outside Kurdistan which does’nt really count given the fact that it had not been under Saddam’s rule for a decade prior to the invasion) speaks volumes.

If it was carried out by Zarqawi types then that means that people hate the occupation so much they’ll cheer anyway. If it was carried out by Shi’a militia’s….well its hard to know which is worse from the point of view of the occupation.

But I see thats two many facts. People are having a MORAL discussion.

The strategy of terrorism is, as I understand it, to persuade the population behind the enemy government that the cost of the enemy government’s policies are too high and that therefore the policies should be changed to something that suits the terrorists. This is different from conventional warfare, where the ideal is to set up a strategy that will allow you to win even if the enemy government doesn’t co-operate, by disabling soldiers, destroying supply lines, sinking navies, blowing up gun emplacements, etc.

Terrorism makes sense from the point of view of someone determined to change a government’s policies and who lacks the military force to carry out a conventional strategy. However, I do not think it requires killing civilians.

Consider the impact if the 19 hijackers 9/11 had instead set fire to themselves on the steps of the American Capitol building. Or if the 7/7 suicide bombers had set fire to themselves in front of Big Ben? (Or chosen some other, graphic, but less painfully horrible way of killing themselves). Or a continual stream of one person a day killing themselves in opposition to US/UK government policies, in significant locations but varying locations to reduce the chances of the police being able to stop them.

While the media impact would probably not be *as* great per single event, I cannot see the desire for revenge evoked being anywhere near as strong, which would be a plus in terms of getting the government to change its policies sooner rather than later.

Of course that sort of terrorism would not work in all countries. If a member of the French resistance had tried that, the Nazis would have just buried them and not allowed any mention of it in the newspapers. But occupied-France was a completely different media situation to the modern world.

So I cannot see how the actions of suicidal bombers in opposing US/UK government polices are morally justifiable despite the lack of military methods. A simpler policy of committing only sucide is available.

The argument that Al Qaida would build a base within a territory in which there is an on-going civil war is of course more plausible then the idea that Al-Qaida would ‘take over’ the Iraqi state or would be in a position to do so. The difficulty with this argument is that this is precisely the situation now and I would suggest that the presence of foreign troops has made Iraq a far stronger base then Afghanistan ever was.

Its also important to understand what Al Qaida is. It is not an organisation with a global hierarchical structure. It is an ideology embraced by various groups in different contexts (I here follow the arguments of Jason Burke which seem to me the best explanatory model. “Al Qaida in Iraq” is actually headed by someone who is politically a rival of Bin Laden). That ideology is immensely strengthened by the presence of American troops.

Arguments that Sunni’s ‘had power’ in Iraq are grotesquely overstated and are basically propaganda attempting to draw an equivilance between those areas strongly resisting the occupation and Saddam Hussain (where attempts to draw an equivilance with Al Qaida fail). They also dramatically understate the importance of local networks of power in both the south and the north on which Saddam relied for his power.

Falluja was a centre of resistance to Saddam Hussain and this resistance was centred on the mosque. Its worth remembering that even the Ba’athist regime was not capable of ensuring that it had a monopoly of armed force in any area of the country even at its most coherent. At its most incoherent (after 1991) it was forced to depend on the collaberation of various informal networks drawn from all sections of Iraqi society.

There is a great danger that US arguments about the connection between Sunni Muslims and the Ba’athist regime will be used to justify ethnic cleansing (already happening in many parts of the country) and that self proclaimed liberals will actually support this in the name of avenging the crimes of the Ba’athists. It is important at the outset to demythologise this view of the Iraqi State.

Communal conflict in Iraq has never been central to its modern history. This is rightly stressed by many Iraqi’s who point to the lack of symmetry between patterns of marriage, occupation, and power and confessional status. Tribal identities cut across these and were always more important in the excercise of power. However such arguments fail to understand that communal conflict is never ‘natural’. Its a response to changing conditions. And the coalition have created conditions were these divisions can emerge. They have hence become a clear and present danger. The ideology of communal division is one of the few things permitting the continued presence of coalition troops (a key moment was Al Sadr’s breaking solidarity with Falluja despite assurences to the contrary under pressure from Sistani who effectively rescued the coalition from its own blunders).

There is a minority of secular middle class Iraqi’s who like the idea of foreign rule to keep the unwashed away from power and see some form of facade democracy as their best bet. In the colonial days they supported the monarchy, a section of them came to identify with Ba’athism, and today large numbers have switched over to the occupation. They are the ones who appear on Newsnight mouthing platitudes from Fox News.

They are democrats by default. As is Iraq’s ‘democracy’. Iraq has no sovereignty (sovereign is he who decides the exception) and for that reason the real battle for power is unfolding outside of consitutional structures. No serious decision about sovereignty is ever going to flow from the constitutional arrangements devised by the Occupation.

I would ask you both to explain the scenes beside the British jeep in Basra and what they signify.

In Iraq I do not believe that commiting suicide would be more effective then the hundreds of attacks per day on coalition troops and the destabilization of coalition attempts at state building by the horrific actions now occuring almost daily. These are in fact very effective and have produced a grave crisis for the occupation authorities.

The bombings in London have in fact greatly aided western governments in justifying their failed strategy in Iraq and are, from the point of view of campaigning for the withdrawel of troops counterproductive. From the point of view of an ideology which wishes to see conflict between the west and something called ‘Islam’ they are of course highly successful. Its doubtful that Bin Laden in his wildest fantasies envisaged that his wishes would be fulfilled as they have been by Bush and Blair in such a short period of time, and given the obvious idiocy and short-sightedness of western politicians terrorism in the west is clearly a very successful, rational and effective means of pursuing the kind of ideology associated with Al-Qaida.

Thanks to Bush and Blair its a growth industry and we can expect more of the same.

JohnG – the morality of killing Iraqi citizens in order to destablise an occupation completely fails me. It’s as if the French resistance started killing their own people in order to encourage the Nazis to leave. It may be an effective way of causing problems for the occupying force, but there is such a thing as too high a price. And I can see how the insurgents may regard Americans or Brits as outside their moral circle (while completely rejecting that logic myself), but when they start deliberately killing Iraqi children …

Nor do I think that many readers of this blog would regard “encouraging conflict between the West and ‘Islam'” as a good reason for going to war, whereas “throwing off the foreign oppressor” or “stopping the US government from funding opressive dictatorships” are rather more morally defensible reasons for going to war.

So I still think that the targetting of civilians in this case cannot be regarded as morally justifiable.

Terrorism was escalating well before George Bush was elected, and September 11 happened before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, so I don’t think we can so confidently blame the growth in the industry on Bush and Blair. Of course we can’t prove the counter-factual, but the pattern was already established.