World Politics

I’m just back from Germany where I’ve been to a very interesting interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Bremen ‘s Sonderforschungsbereich “Staatlichkeit im Wandel”:http://www.staatlichkeit.uni-bremen.de/ on Trade Governance, Democracy and Inequality. As usual in such cases, the bringing together of philosophers and practitioners was both stimulating and revealing of how little we know about one another. Starting my own, basically normative, paper, I asserted that a central purpose of trade rules should be to promote justice. I was informed that “justice” was one word that would never pass the lips of a WTO negotiator. Which, doesn’t show, of course, either that I’m wrong about what should happen or that concerns about justice aren’t lurking in the shadows somewhere. But it suggests a startling disconnect between the public rhetoric about global inequality and the concerns at the negotiating table.

I’ve been noticing a more and more frequent theme in the writings of the pro-war “left” recently, but no-one, I think, has managed to achieve “the narcissism and self-pity of John Lloyd”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/63736aa8-2fc4-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8.html in the Financial Times:

bq. The great betrayal of liberalism and of the left was not opposition to the war but the insouciant, opportunist, morally indignant denunciation of those who, for diverse motives to be sure, sought to give force to the rhetoric of liberation. They have been so content to denounce that they think nothing of what they damage. It is the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself.

Good intentions should count for nothing here. You backed a disastrous project, mismanaged by morons, sold by lies, and it has turned into a bloody mess. But those who point this out attack “freedom itself.” Sheesh!

Gary Bass in the NYT comments on the possibility that Saddam could be sentenced to death and executed for a 1982 massacre of about 100 villagers, without ever being brought to trial on the main array of charges against him, including killing political rivals, crushing the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, invading Kuwait in 1990 and waging the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, including gassing Kurdish villagers at Halabja. As Bass says,

 A thorough series of war crimes trials would not only give the victims more satisfaction but also yield a documentary and testimonial record of the regime’s crimes.

But looking at this list raises a more basic question. Why hasn’t Saddam been charged with any crime more recent than 1991?[1]. In the leadup to the war, and in its aftermath, it was routinely claimed that Saddam’s regime, at the time it was overthrown was among the most brutal dictatorships in the world. Even among opponents of the war, hardly anyone doubted or doubts now that the regime often practised murder and torture. Why then aren’t there any charges covering this period? Presumably both documents and witnesses are more readily available than for a crime committed more than twenty years ago.

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Before the Iraq war began, Yale economist William Nordhaus estimated the likely cost at between $100 billion and $2 trillion. At the time most of the interest lay in the fact that the bottom end of the range was twice as much as the $50 billion estimate being pushed by the Administration. But with a couple of years’ experience to go on, Nordhaus’ upper range is looking pretty accurate. Assuming that Bush ‘stays the course’, it’s safe to estimate that the war will cost the US at least $1 trillion by the time all the bills come in, and it could easily be closer to $2 trillion.

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Alan Johnson of Labour Friends of Iraq emails to tell me of a new online journal he’s editing, “Democratiya”:http://www.democratiya.com/default.asp . It won’t be any great secret around here that we’ve not exactly seen eye-to-eye recently with people who call themselves the “pro-liberation” left (or similar). But Demokratiya includes writings from some people who didn’t think the war was such a great idea, such as Gideon Calder (who has an “interesting review of Walzer on war”:http://www.democratiya.com/details.asp?id=2 ), and involves some others whom I continue to like and respect. And I certainly share with them the hope (against hope) that Iraq somehow turns into a flourishing democracy. So surf over there and take a look.

Tom Stafford points to academic publisher Elsevier’s involvement in the international arms trade. Even the legal aspects of this trade are deplorable, given the excessive readiness of governments and would-be governments to resort to armed force, but the boundary between legal and illegal arms trade is pretty porous. For example, there’s evidence that the arms fairs organised by Elsevier subsidiary Spearhead are venues for the illegal trade in landmines. Tom has a number of suggestions for possible responses.

The NYT has a great story on “how Western-style reality tv is spreading to Iraq”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/international/middleeast/28television.html?ex=1282881600&en=b3af8927364796d4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss .

bq. Reality TV could turn out to be the most durable Western import in Iraq. It has taken root with considerably greater ease than American-style democracy. Since spring 2004, when “Materials and Labor” made its debut, a constellation of reality shows has burst onto TV screens across Iraq. True to the genre, “Materials and Labor” has a simple conceit at its heart – Al Sharqiya, an Iraqi satellite network, offers Baghdad residents the chance to have homes that were destroyed by the war rebuilt at no cost to them.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

The September Project was launched last year to encourage libraries to engage citizens in discussions related to freedom and democracy on September 11th. This year the project continues its mission and has already attracted hundreds of libraries from 20 countries to participate. The organizers are hoping to attract even more. This map shows participating libraries in the US (e.g. the entire Chicago Public Library system has signed up), this one shows international venues (e.g. libraries in Cuba, India, South Africa, Singapore, New Zealand, etc.). Any CT readers in the vicinity of Universidad Cienfuegos? I’d be curious to hear a report from that discussion.

The site offers a description of the events that occured at libraries on 9/11 last year. The Project has a blog where people can follow updates.

Britain, France and Germany are busy trying to persuade Iran to abandon efforts to develop nuclear weapons, so far with little success. Cajolery and bribery having tried and failed, how about a bit of leadership by example? Two of the three parties in this effort have nuclear weapons of their own, even though they don’t face any conceivable threat of invasion[1]. Perhaps if they agreed to disarm themselves, the Iranians would be impressed enough to follow suit.

OK, I’m joking about Chirac and France. There’s no way that France is ready to admit that it is no longer a Great Power, and certainly Chirac is not the man to start the process. But, why shouldn’t Blair do something like this? It’s a perfect example of the non-ideological willingness to embrace radical alternatives to established dogma that New Labour is supposed to symbolise. And even if it didn’t produce any immediate payoff with Iran it would have to help the cause of non-proliferation in the medium term.

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Eugene Volokh “responds”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_08_07-2005_08_13.shtml#1123863417 (or so I take it; for some reason he doesn’t provide a link) to Ted’s post below by requesting that his readers send in instances of “Western commentators who defend the Iraqi insurgents, or at least justify their actions as being a supposed campaign for self-determination, allegedly justifiable rage at Western misbehavior, and so on.” Fair enough, to an extent. As one of his commenters notes, he’s moved the goalposts from Taranto’s quite specific “those Westerners who side with the ‘Iraqi resistance’ against America and its allies” to a much more ambiguous category of statements, but perhaps he feels that there’s a “slippery slope”:http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.htm leading from the latter to the former style of argumentation. In any event, in the spirit of Eugene’s appeal, I’d like to put out one of my own. I’d like instances in which commentators make egregious claims that a substantial section of those who opposed the war are, in fact, rooting for the other side. As per Eugene’s rules, please provide the name and brief description of the person (who should be a journalist, official or famous person), the exact quote, and the URL at which the original article is to be found. This _Dolchstosslegende_ style hitjob on the vast realist-liberal-internationalist-conspiracy, by famous neo-conservative intellectual, Norman Podhoretz in the February 2005 issue of _Commentary_, URL “http://www.commentarymagazine.com/special/A11902025_1.html”:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/special/A11902025_1.html is the kind of thing I’m looking for.

bq. Before November 2, some realists had feared that Bush’s reelection would, in Hendrickson’s words, “confirm and ratify the revolutionary changes he has introduced to U.S. strategy.” Having calmed down a bit since then, they are now hoping to avert the apocalypse through another possible outcome that some of them envisaged before November 2: namely, that “once revolutionary zeal collides with hard reality, . . . the Bush policies . . . will end in tears.”

bq. One can only admire Hendrickson’s candor in admitting what is usually hotly denied: that even many leading realists, along with many liberal internationalists, are rooting for an American defeat. Direct action not being their style, they will not participate in the “mass demonstrations and civil disobedience” advocated by Tom Hayden, who advises following the playbook of the “peace” movement of the 60’s (of which he was one of the chief organizers) as the way to get us out of Iraq. But neither will they sit back passively and wait for “hard reality” to ensure that the Bush Doctrine “ends in tears.”

bq. Instead of taking to the streets, the realists and the liberal internationalists will go back to their word processors and redouble their ongoing efforts to turn public opinion against the Bush Doctrine. Mainly they will try to do so by demonstrating over and over again that the doctrine is already failing its first great encounter with “hard reality” in Iraq.

(Podhoretz is here patching together quotes from a review article in a deliberately mendacious fashion to make it appear as if the article’s author is saying things that he very clearly is not. For the article which he is abusing, see “here”:http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj04-1/hendrickson.html and especially the last two paragraphs; for a response by the article’s author to Podhoretz, see “here”)

Christopher Hitchens in Slate “asks”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2124157/ :

bq. Isn’t there a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq, after three decades of tyranny, war, and sanctions and now an assault from the vilest movement on the face of the planet?

Needless to say there isn’t a mention of the fact that they wouldn’t be under assault from “the vilest movement on the face of the planet”, nor would that movement be as strong as it presently is, but for the policy that Hitchens and his co-thinkers promoted in the first place. Oh, sorry, I didn’t notice at first, but Hitchens doesn’t believe that since he claims:

bq. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

The “steadying influence of coalition forces” …..

Nick Cohen has a column today entitled “I still fight oppression”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1544111,00.html . The theme is the familiar one of the moral failure of “the left”.

What to say? If, by Cohen’s lights, supporting the war in Iraq counts as “fighting oppression”, we can say that Cohen got round to it “eventually”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,665073,00.html . On the other hand, thanks to that reckless war, there’s a great deal more oppression around, whether it is of “ordinary Iraqis slaughtered by Al Zarqawi and his friends”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4714601.stm , or of the “women who are to be subjected to the new Iraqi constitution”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1537387,00.html . And, of course, Cohen actually opposed the overthrow of the Taliban. So maybe that “still” in the headline is a tiny bit misleading.

“Matthew Turner”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/ has been doing a sterling job of digging up past Nick Cohen columns. Some of them are, in the light of recent scribblings, simply priceless. So, for example, “this one”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,587483,00.html , which contains the line:

bq. He [Blair] has – and there’s no point being prissy about this – pinned a large target sign on this country.

As “Matthew writes”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2005/07/nick-cohen-in-2001.html :

bq. Cohen is within his rights to change his mind. What he’s not within his rights is to attack [in his “UAT statement”:http://www.unite-against-terror.com/whysigned/archives/000028.html ] as “morons”, and call their views “sinister”, people who didn’t make such cack-handed predictions (and get taken in by conmen) but who still believe some of what he used to.

The hapless Peter Wilby has a column — “The Responsiblity We All Share for Islamist Shock and Awe”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1542996,00.html — in the Guardian today about how citizens of democracies share responsibility for the actions of their leaders. Wilby it was who famously answered his own question about whether the victims of September 11th were innocent with a ‘yes and no’, as if somehow some of them were deserving of their fate( ‘In buildings thought indestructible’, New Statesman, 17 September 2001). There’s more of the same today, with a similar slide from the notion that 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). Of course Wilby doesn’t actually say this, he sort-of says it and then he sort-of takes it back (well sort-of, in a Guardianish sort-of way).

It is hard to pick out a low point from the article, but if I were pushed I’d go for:

bq. … a home-grown suicide bomber, dreaming of 72 virgins for himself and “a painful doom” (in the Qur’an’s words) for his victims, seems an unpleasantly self-absorbed figure.

I googled the phrase “unpleasantly self-absorbed” and found it variously applied to a book by a management consultant, some characters from _Die Fledermaus_ , and the protagonists in Lars von Trier’s _The Idiots_ .

I recently criticized the New Republic, so I should point out that this week’s cover story is really very good. It collects the most forceful criticisms of the Bush Administration’s anti-terrorism program, and puts them into a larger framework. Scoblic argues that the Administration’s focus on regime change led them to target Iraq in large part because it was the least painful to overthrow. At the same time, their logic led them to de-emphasize, or even sabotage, efforts to reduce the threat from Iran and North Korea.

Unfortunately, regime change was not only the administration’s preferred end in Iraq, but its preferred means everywhere else, as well. If negotiating with evil regimes equals appeasement, then diplomacy to resolve rogue-state nuclear threats is out of the question. But, aside from military action, conservatism suggests few courses of action, and, with the bulk of our combat forces tied up in Iraq, forcible regime change was not an option in North Korea or Iran. So, not only did conservatism lead us to war against a nation that was not threatening us, it paralyzed us from dealing with those nations that were.

I don’t see that the faults that Scoblic identifies are endemic to conservatism as such- I could imagine a very different course, pre- and post-9/11, under a different Republican President- but it’s still worth the cover price. The critique of Bush’s approach to North Korea is especially maddening.

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