International Politics

Slate has a round-table entitled “Liberal Hawks Reconsider the War”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2093620/entry/2093641/ with Jacob Weisberg, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria. It is definitely worth a look, though some of them are clearly smarter or more honest than others. Some of the reasons they advance for war are also better than others (with the human rights argument the strongest of all — whether conclusive or not). Thomas Friedman’s reasons, though, are indefensible, indeed criminal:

bq. The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the “terrorism bubble,” which had built up during the 1990s. This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as “martyrs,” and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it’s not very diplomatic—it’s not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

If I read that paragraph correctly, Friedman is advocating that a state kill people (including innocent people) for demonstrative purposes. He thereby shows complete disregard for the humanity and individuality of those who have died. It is a peculiar way to demonstrate the impermissibility of the very acts he deplores.

A few months ago I had lunch with a US army officer who told me that the Germans were “basically running Afghanistan for us.” No doubt having the “Germans in Afghanistan”:http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1432_A_1067481,00.html is somewhat useful when the US wants to get on with other projects. I was reminded of this when reading the “latest egregious anti-European outpourings from the Victor Davis Hanson”:http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200401090840.asp . The French come in for most of his venom, but the Germans get it too, and then this:

bq. We are in a race for civilization like none other since World War II. And yet, due *solely* to the courage and skill of an amazing generation of American professional soldiers battling in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are winning — as this difficult war is beginning to resemble 1944 far more than 1939.

Such gratitude! No wonder Hanson Davis finishes by calling for

bq. a much-needed honesty that will soon curtail both the deceitful rhetoric and hypocritical behavior that have insidiously warped us all in the West during the last 20 years.

Chris Brooke has “another snippet on Hanson Davis”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_01_01_archive.html#107374838360931087 .

I came across the following quote recently, the person uttering it is described by blogger Michael Totten as articulating a “moral dilemma” and the following words are uttered as part of the elaboration of that dilemma:

bq. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

Karl Marx expresses similar sentiments at the very end of his “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” (different Indians) but it isn’t him. And no, it isn’t Lenin or Stalin or Mao.

Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian intellectual and former PLO representative — whose book “Traditions of War”:http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-829407-7 reclaims a central place for Jean-Jacques Rousseau in thinking about the ethics and law of war and conflict — “writes today in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1118107,00.html about Rousseau, the Geneva accords and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Her piece points up a central problem in the politics of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: for all the neoconservative rhetoric about the centrality of democracy to progress in the Middle East, the sort of Palestinian leaders with whom Bush and Sharon want to deal are very different from those who would emerge from democratized Palestinian institutions.

It’s a common enough saying (and at least one of the CT collective, whose blushes I’ll spare, has endorsed it):

“If you have to choose between explaining something as a cock-up or a consipracy, choose cock-up every time”.

I’ve searched high and low for empirical evidence supporting this, but found rigorous studies to be surprisingly thin on the ground. Some people even go a bit further, suggesting that cock-up explanations rather than conspiracy explanations are correct 99 per cent of the time; I’ve found nothing to support this point estimate, still less any idea of what the confidence bounds on it are. What if the cock-up explanation was only right 75% of the time?

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History News Network has “a discussion”:http://hnn.us/articles/1882.html of whether Christopher Hitchens has sought to misrepresent his own reaction to 9/11 in the light of his subsequent political evolution (via “Au Currant”:http://www.jackieblogs.com/ ). When the Guardian article Sean Wilenz descibes as “particularly sickening” (available “here”:http://www.ucolick.org/~de/WTChit/Hitchens.html ) is re-read, I don’t think Hitchens has anything to be ashamed of or that there’s great inconsistency between what he said then and the positions he has adopted since. What has changed appreciably is Hitchens’s attitude to both the Bush administration and the Iraq war. On my old blog Junius, “I linked on March 2 2002”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_03_03_junius_archive.html to a “Hitchens article in the Daily Mirror”:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=11650232&method=full (subtitle: “On the peril of America’s muddled, ignorant hawks”) in which he attacks the Bush administration’s “axis of evil” approach and refers to “an overconfident superpower whose leaders appear to be making up foreign policy as they go along.” Hitchens has every right to change his mind about the issues of the day. What some of us find unsettling is the ease with which he is today able to denounce as lacking in moral intelligence people who agree with positions he himself spouted as recently as the spring of 2002.

Via Brad, I notice that what appears to have happened is that Iraq’s debt, so far from being forgiven by the French and Germans (shame really, just when I was looking forward to chastising American rightwingers for not giving credit where it was due), has been chucked into the Paris Club process. The what? Time for a mug’s guide, I think.

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I hope we all savoured yesterday’s sweet taste of success. Because as far as Saddam is concerned, it may be the only satisfaction we get.

Saddam quickly followed his craven capitulation with an unleashing of the barely lucid, self-aggrandising rhetoric we’ve come to expect of him and his ilk. Defiant words and cowardly acts – nothing new there. But Saddam being captured alive means that now that the party is over, the U.S. has to figure out what to do with him. Tricky.

It seems obvious that the next steps are to question Saddam for intelligence purposes and then submit him to a tribunal where he will be made accountable for his deeds. President Bush signalled as much when he said that Saddam would “face the justice he denied to millions.” But the conduct of the war on terror, which blends law enforcement and intelligence gathering in a way that undermines due process, will make forcing Saddam to take responsibility for his actions more difficult than one might expect.

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Just can’t get no satisfaction

I hope we all savoured yesterday’s sweet taste of success. Because as far as Saddam is concerned, it may be the only satisfaction we get.

Saddam quickly followed his craven capitulation with an unleashing of the barely lucid, self-aggrandising rhetoric we’ve come to expect of him and his ilk. Defiant words and cowardly acts – nothing new there. But Saddam being captured alive means that now that the party is over, the U.S. has to figure out what to do with him. Tricky.

It seems obvious that the next steps are to question Saddam for intelligence purposes and then submit him to a tribunal where he will be made accountable for his deeds. President Bush signalled as much when he said that Saddam would “face the justice he denied to millions.” But the conduct of the war on terror, which blends law enforcement and intelligence gathering in a way that undermines due process, will make forcing Saddam to take responsibility for his actions very difficult indeed.

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Saddam’s capture has all sorts of implications.

The biggest is that it will greatly accelerate the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. This is obvious enough if the resistance fades away and large numbers of troops aren’t needed. But suppose this doesn’t happen. It’s hard to see the US public putting up with a continued stream of casualties when the main objectives on which they were sold the war have either been achieved (get Saddam) or proved illusory (WMDs). The instant reaction Good. Can we go home now, is going to be fairly widely shared as time goes on.

On the Iraqi side, as Juan Cole points out, this will only strengthen the Shia demand for proper elections and a US withdrawal. Now that the fear of Saddam’s return is gone, the dependence of a future Iraqi government on the US is significantly reduced. Shias might well judge that they could do a better (because more ruthless) job of suppressing the insurgency on their own.

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From almost any viewpoint, including that of opponents of the war such as myself, the capture of Saddam Hussein, represents good news, made better by the ignominy of his surrender. When the Iraq war and its justifications , spurious and otherwise, are forgotten, the image of the great dictator being dug out of the hole in which he had hidden will remain, along with the inglorious ends of Mussolini, Hitler, Ceausescu, and others, as a warning to those who might plan to follow the same path.

“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_atrios_archive.html#107140956918560290 has further thoughts on Hussein’s capture – as he says, the capture of Hussein doesn’t change the fact that this was a war of choice, and was a mistake. But he then says

bq. it isn’t clear he’s any worse of a guy than some of the folks who are a part of our “Coalition of the Willing.”

which I find quite unconvincing. Even as squalid dictators go, Hussein was quite spectacularly nasty. I don’t know how many other rulers in recent history have deployed poison gas against their civilian population. Hussein’s capture is cause for unalloyed good cheer.

Great news that “mass-murdering dictator Saddam Hussein has been captured in Tikrit”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3317429.stm . With any luck the Iraqi people will get to try him for his crimes against them over so many years. One thing he won’t be charged with, tried for, or convicted of is involvement with 9/11, despite some reports in today’s Sunday Telegraph from the if-you-believe-that-you’ll -believe-anything department. As “one”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr114.xml of the “two”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/14/wterr14.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/12/14/ixnewstop.html pieces says:

bq. For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.

Leaving out the “appears almost”, I’d agree with that. And it gets better …

bq. In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta “displayed extraordinary effort” and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be “responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy”.

bq. The second part of the memo, which is headed “Niger Shipment”, contains a report about an unspecified shipment – believed to be uranium – that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.

In next week’s episode Instapundit excitedly links to an article alleging the discovery of a Post-it apparently connecting Jacques Chirac, Noam Chomsky and Stavro Blofeld to a Cuban bioweapons project….

[UPDATE: This should really have been two separate posts – I had started writing on the absurd Torygraph story when the news of Saddam’s capture came through and ended up adding to the beginning. But the effect on some readers of my combining the two things may be to suggest that I’m somewhat grudging in my reaction to the tyrant’s arrest. I’m not — it really is great news.]

I’ve put up a post on my other weblog on the general subject of anti-war leftishness. I’ve put it over there rather than on CT because it’s fair to say that there are a number of different schools of thought among CT contributors on the general subject of war, and it seems unfair to use the CT brand for views that not everyone might stand behind. Cheers.

Update: And now I’m going to hang it on the reasonably topical peg of this Christopher Hitchens interview.