There is a whole range of actions the ‘decents’ could attempt as individuals to satisfy their conscience without becoming cheerleaders for the worst kind of militarism and imperialism.

“…since I am responsible, I feel I ought to do something about it”

What is funny is him signing up with a statement dismissing the discussion whether war against Iraq was justified as “picking through the rubble”.

“We are also united in the view that, since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been [yada bla di da] — rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.”

Walzer as the binman of the decents.

Well, if Iran had a historical record like this, I’d certainly say you couldn’t trust Iran:

http://www.zmag.org/crisescurevts/interventions.htm

1. Resort to armed force is governed by the Charter of the United Nations and other international law (jus ad bellum).

2. Conduct of armed conflict and occupation is governed by the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 and other international law (jus in bello).

3. Torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of any person in the custody or control of a state are prohibited by international law from which no derogations are permitted.

4. Prolonged, secret, incommunicado detention of any person in the custody or control of a state is prohibited by international law.

5. Standards of international law regarding treatment of persons extend to all branches of national governments, to their agents, and to all combatant forces.

6. In some circumstances, commanders (both military and civilian) are personally responsible under international law for the acts of their subordinates.

7. All states should maintain security and liberty in a manner consistent with their international law obligations.

Probably CB would sign up to that without hesitation, while the decent left would certainly have reservations. It all comes down to differing tastes in apple pie.

If you start from a nonsense premise like that, everything else you ever think or do is going to be right only by coincidence.

Is that kind of ultra-essentialist thinking really any different from reciting the crimes of some old-school Muslim conqueror like Tamurlane and saying ‘can you trust Iran?’

The point is certainly not the opposite, that no americans or muslims commit crimes. It is simply that some vague cultural ties are simply not a useful basis for predicting military, economic and political outcomes.

In other words, it is not merely wrong, it is nonsense, something with no connection to the truth at all.

[not if you deliberately insert misleading information or abuse CB]

I am totally opposed to Arab domination of southern Sudan. However, the point I was making is that it is pure folly to look to US and European imperialism to remedy the situation since they were the ones who cobbled together the Sudanese state on the basis of divide-and-conquer.

This of course applies to Iraq as well, a state whose bloody civil war is the direct result of British calculation after WWI and Lawrence of Arabia in particular.

Asking the American military, which is really the continuator of the British Empire, to intervene on behalf of human rights in a place like Sudan or Iraq is like asking Rupert Murdoch to chair a governmental commission on the quality of network television.

I don’t quite see the point being made here. There is advocacy for two state and one state solutions on both sides. The only difference between Hammas and Likud is the nature of the one state solution being sought.

In the past the mainstream left backed a two state solution, then the PLO was persuaded to accept the two state solution in return for Arafat being allowed to rule one of the states.

At this point there is no point in pursuing the two state solution, neither side is willing to honor such an agreement. Israel will never allow a sovereign Palestinian state, nor will it withdraw from the bulk of the settlements. Hammas has no intention of settling for half a country when time and demographics will give them the whole lot.

At some point Hammas will give up the terror tactics, start demanding one person one vote, a universal franchise and the end of all institutionalized discrimination in favor of any group, whether Palestinian or Jew. That is the day that Sharon genuinely feared.

Just because no country currently takes its responsibilities seriously does not mean that those responsibilities do not exist.

This issue has very little to do with the Iraq war, which is more conclusively covered under the rules against aggressive war, which are also binding and that the US is almost definitely in violation of.

Louis Proyect,

Why is Arab imperialism visited upon non-Arab peoples forced into a state with Arabs through the idiocy of British imperialists fine and dandy? Why is Muslim prosyletization somehow more pure than Christian prosyletization?

In all the thousands of references liberals have made to the Sudan on the Internet (especially those anxious to see a war on 3 fronts—Iraq, Iran and Sudan), there is a dearth of historical context. Sudan, like so many other countries that “benefited” from the sort of American or British colonial administration hailed by Christopher Hitchens or Niall Ferguson, is a classic example of divide and rule.
—-
After finally taking control over the Sudan, the British created a civil service, railways, taxation, police and all the other accoutrements of colonial rule. Except for occasional nationalist outbursts, the British kept order in the country in classic “white man’s burden” fashion. They made sure to utilize all the time-tested methods for keeping their subjects in line, including divide and conquer.

They sought to deepen racial divisions that had existed in the past. Understanding that the southern tribes felt alienated from the north for obvious historical reasons, the British made sure to impose political-geographical obstacles that would deepen the divide. Muslim northern Sudanese were banned from the south by law. While excusing the British as being protective of the victimized southerners, the eminent scholar P.M. Holt is forced to admit:

“The work the British administrators in opening up and pacifying the Southern Sudan, their devotion to duty at the cost of health and life, cannot be too highly praised. Yet there was an insidious danger in their position. Their isolation, the great burden of their individual responsibilities, and their immunity from criticism by the people they ruled, tended to confirm the idea that the system of administration they represented was the only possible system, and must endure indefinitely. The personal rule of the British administrators was in its origin beneficent; the mistake was that it went on too long.” (A Modern History of the Sudan, p. 149)

Too long, indeed.

The other tried-and-tested method involved sending in Christian missionaries to the southern Sudan. Although “proselytization had, from the outset, been forbidden in the Muslim north,” the “pagan south, on the other hand, was opened to the missionaries.” Holt describes a situation that not only is too familiar for students of colonial rule, but one that anticipates Sudan’s current-day problems:

“The missionaries were entrusted with the development of education in the south. This made possible the early, if limited, organization of schools at a time when the government’s meagre resources were needed for the north. As time went on, however, the defects of missionary education began to appear. The sectarian differences of Europe and America were incongruously transported to the marshes and forests of central Africa. The language of instruction at the higher levels was English; Arabic, except in a debased pidgin form, was unknown. A new barrier of language and religion seemed to have been added to those already existing between north and south. The missionaries, for their part, had reason to fear that the admission of northern Muslims into the region would endanger the permanence of their work.”

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/mahdism.htm

This is actually false, and blatantly false, although it seems to be quite commonly believed by the decents, who specialise in believing ‘ten impossible things before breakfast’. In actual fact, countries which have signed up to the UN convention on genocide are yada yada yada. In actual fact it’s not even that simple because some evil totalitarian states only signed up once it had been established that they themselves could never be called to the ICJ unless they gave their consent. Evil totalitarian states like Vietnam, Yemen, Singapore and….er….the United States.

Moreover even then it’s not that simple. The key fact about the convention is to establish legal norms for setting up courts to try people who committed and planned genocide, not to create excuses for the United States to invade other countries.

Moreover, it has to be agreed upon by the UN that genocide has actually taken place (or is taking place) for the convention to ‘kick in’: something which has yet to happen in the Sudan.

This is hardly to provide a reason for the UN (NOT ‘the West’ or ‘us’ or ‘the US’)not to intervene and do something about genocide. But it does mean that outside the Tolkienish world of the ‘decents’ (in which evil doers have dark swarthy skin, beards, and mutter dark threats under their breath before escaping from our clutches with one might bound laughing ‘Mwah ha ha ha ha! You thought you had defeated me but you will be hearing from me again Luke Skywalker, I mean Tony Blair!’) life is complicated, international law is tedious, slow, and needs international agreement to function, and life can be complicated with shades of grey on both sides.

Luckily, however, outside the complexities of the Sudan, there is another situation where life really is a lot simpler and where we can achieve ‘good’ relatively easily. It is where we are causing the evil. And in that situation all we have to do is……stop.

The fact is (and all you cynical readers of CT might find this slightly ironic) that the Decents do not, in actual fact, believe in Universal Moral Standards. In reality, they are cultural relativists. It’s just that their cultural relativism works the other way round. The believe (and rightly so) that when Iran and China and Syria commit human rights violations, these are objectively bad or evil. But when it comes to similar (or in some cases identical) crimes by the US or the UK or the ‘west’ then some excuse must be found, the events must be contextualised, we must ‘understand’ the ‘difficult situation’ ‘our boys’ find themselves in….and what is it? Oh yes. ’ we (must) reject the double standards by which too many on the left consider the violations of human rights perpetrated by ‘them’ to be more serious than far worse infractions committed by ‘us’ – about which they have little to say.’

This is cultural relativism in its purest form.

One last point. Despite all the crap about the Euston Manifesto, and ‘bloggers’ and the ‘left’ and all that: the Euston Manifesto promotes one political ideology and one only. The Euston Manifesto promotes the foreign policy of New Labour: no more no less. It is a Blairite document. Lenin’s Tomb has shortened the Manifesto for comic effect, but actually you can shorten it further: shortened version of the EM: ‘Vote Labour’. And in fact if you look at the political ideology of the ‘decents’ it has not, at any point, deviated from the foreign policy of new Labour. In other words, the anti-establishment rebels of the ‘decents’ have devoted huge amounts of time to rewriting a political document which already exists. It is called the Labour party manifesto.