Much as Norman Geras usually writes with considerable clarity and erudition there are times when even he succumbs to what is little more than spurious banter. Which is why his response to Jonathan Freedland’s Op-Ed piece [Guardian, Wednesday] on Blair’s speech to the Labour Party conference seems so very disappointing and lacking in substance.
It does serve, quite well, the purpose of reminding us that Geras is, at heart, an academic - Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester, no less - as short though his piece is it exhibits all the hallmark flaws that are all too common in academic criticism; from the narrowing of the argument to minor point of semantics to the questioning of the ability of the author [Freedland] to offer an authoritative ‘judgement’ on the matter at hand, which just so happens to be Blair’s efforts to characterise recent British military involvement in conflicts as diverse as Sierra Leone, Kosovo and, of course, Iraq as part of a single progressive cause - a subject close to his [Geras’] heart, as regular vistors to his blog will know well.
Except…
As a journalist writing for even the quality end of the newspaper market [The Guardian] its seems unlikely that Freedland would lay claim to the ability to offer an ‘authoritative judgement’ on anything other than his own opinion of events; he was writing an op-ed piece after all, by definition ‘opinion-editorial’, and not submitting a journal paper for peer review.
As for the semantic arguments surrounding Freedland’s use of the word ‘tendentiously’ - definition “Marked by a strong implicit point of view; partisan:” - to describe Blair’s
attempts to sell British intervention in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Iraq as part of a seemless strand of progressive policy, it strikes me that ‘tendentious’ is as good an adjective as any to use in the circumstances and rather more apt that Geras’s proffered alternatives; ‘debatably’, ‘controversially’ and ‘contentiously’.
Let’s not forget the context in which this speech was given; that of a Labour Party leader addressing a Labour Party conference. Was Blair, then, being partisan in his views? I should bloody well think so, even if I do disagree with him on Iraq. If a party leader cannot be partisan in addressing his own party then what’s the point of holding party conferences in the first place? Perhaps the worst that can be said of Freedland’s choice of adjective on this occasions is that it’s rather tautological to suggest partisanship in a speech given in such a context.
To cap it all Geras finishes with this:
“I’ve said it before, but not for a while now, so I’ll say it again. What can account for the fact that so many in the anti-war camp are unable to see (or at least publicly allow) that there were such progressive reasons? Might it be a discomfort with their own stance - that they were for a course of action that would have left a genocidal tyrant in place?”
… which is, in all respects, a quite remarkable paragraph for its success in constructing a straw man from a generalisation, two obvious logical fallacies [an argumentum ad consequentiam and a bifurcation] and a ‘bogeyman’ - all in a mere shortish three sentences. Now that is some going.
In all respects its rather easy to call out Geras for the obvious sophistry of his brief commentary on Freedland’s article [in the classical Platonic rather than modern sense of the term]; nowhere does he attempt to put up a reasoned critique of Freedland’s comments, preferring instead to attack [unfairly in my opinion] Freedland’s credentials as a commentator and his use of language while Geras’ own ‘progressive’ reasons for supporting the Iraq war become ‘not merely obvious, but glaringly so’.
And that last statement is really the nub of Geras’ own piece, an overt sensitivity, shared with others on the left who supported the invasion of Iraq, towards any suggestion that they may supporting something which may not be quite so progressive as they would like us to believe - perhaps evidence of his/their own discomfort with their own stance which has pushed Iraq into a state of near chaos and at a cost of many more lives than were lost during the invasion itself.
On that basis, there seems little to differentiate between Geras and others on the pro-war left [Hitchens, Harry’s Place, etc.] and those [Galloway/RESPECT/SWP] they profess to oppose. Both camps markedly operate from within defined and largely impermiable intellectual and ideological ‘bubbles’ which refuse to admit any possibility that the arguments of the other side might contain a grain or two of truth in amongst all the rhetoric.
Can the invasion of Iraq and the policy decisions which led to it really be thought ‘progressive’ or, as Blair tried to suggest, form part of a coherent strand of progressive foreign policy?
On the facts and events leading in to the invasion, certainly not.
The real politik of Iraq and of the region as a whole, including its relationship with key neighbouring powers, most notably Russia, offers a vastly different set of reasons for the conflict none of which relate to either practical concerns for the plight of the Iraqi people under Saddam or abstract ideological considerations like ’spreading democracy’. Rather Iraq found itself at the confluence of a series of Western, and indeed Russian, strategic, national and political interests which drove the agenda for war; the restoration of US influence in the region lost at the time of the Iranian Islamic revolution; the need to shore up the House of Saud in its blood feud with Al Qaida; the need for regional stability as a key to securing access to the oil and mineral wealth of the region, not just in Iraq and Saudi Arabia but across the entire Caspian Sea region and into the former Soviet Central Asia: these were the key drivers for war, not concerns for ordinary Iraqi citizens or abstract notions of democracy. Factor into the equation the Al Qaida attack on the World Trade Centre and the failure of US forces in Afghanistan to provide Bush with the prize scalp, Bin Laden or Mullah Omar, necessary to assauge US anger at the devastating attack on its own soil and you have all the conditions necessary for war - yet nothing which would justify such a war in terms of the stingent requirements of the UN Charter and international law.
There is no shortage of evidence to support this particular analysis:
The failure of the US to follow thorough and remove Saddam after the 1990 invasion or support the Shia uprising against him that followed - regime change in either circumstance would have been permissible under the UN resolutions which authorised the Gulf War, yet the US held back, fearful that it might result in the creation of a Shia-led Islamic republic aligned with Iran.
The rapproachment between the US, Russia and, to a lesser extent, China, without which the 2003 invasion would not have been possible - even in the post-Cold War era its unlikely in the extreme that the US would engage in military intervention in an area claimed by Russia as falling under its ’sphere of influence’ without, as a minimum, clear indications from Moscow that it would ‘look the other way’ and not intervene - a rapproachment driven by a mutual recognition of the importance of regional stability in opening up access to the resources of the Caspian and Central Asian states.
A series of public statements, policy documents and letters, notably this to Bill Clinton in 1998, from PNAC (Project for a New American Century) advocating regime change in Iraq solely in terms of US strategic interests and regional stability - note that amongst the signatories to this letter are key players in the Bush government, including Rumsfeld (now Secretary of Defence), Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretay of Defence, under Rumsfeld, and now heading up the World Bank) and Bolton (Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security from 2001 up to his appointment as US ambassador to the UN this year). Three key players in the Bush government, all with a direct role in the planning of policy on Iraq leading in to the 2003 invasion and all calling, some five years previously, for regime change…
…and not a single mention of humanitarian concerns, the Iraqi people or democracy to be found anywhere.
The most telling evidence that the invasion of Iraq was far from pregressive in either its intent or planning comes, however, from our own Prime Minister - and not, as it happens, from anything to do with the now wholly discredited claims as to Iraq’s weapons capabilities.
Of all the key public figures with an active role in the run in to the invasion of Iraq, Blair has to be the one most likely to have tried to put forward a progressive case for war, for military intervention in Iraq on humanitarian grounds and the benefits to the Iraqi people of democratic government; Blair having been the one to first expound the doctrine of humanitarian interventionism which bears his name in a speech to the Chicago Economic Club in 1999.
And, indeed, Blair did indeed put forward such a case…
…but not until a mere week prior to the invasion itself and mere 24 hours after to the formal presentation to the UN, by Hans Blix, of the UN weapons inspectorate’s report into Iraq’s alleged WMD programmes - a report which comprehensively destroyed what had been, up to that point, the Uk government’s entire publicly-expressed case for war.
Only then, in a speech to a Labour Party Spring Conference in Glasgow did Blair begin to talk of a moral case for war in Iraq, only when it was apparent both that Blix’s report failed to substantiate the case for war put to Parliament and that, as a consequence, a second UN resolution to back up the contentious Resolution 1441 would not be forthcoming in any cricumstances - to that point Blair made no effort to outline a moral case for war nor expressed any concern for the Iraqi people or support for bringing democracy to Iraq - only at the very last moment and with his case for war shattered did he revert to the progressive ideals outlined in Chicago and put into effect in Kosovo.
There is no factual basis for anyone to lay claim to the idea that the invasion of Iraq was mounted for progressive reasons and while it is certainly possible to claim to support the war now, and even to have supported the war prior to the invasion for such reasons, as does Geras and others, one also has to be clear that what is actually being supported are things which arise from this situation as a byproduct of the war and not as part of its primary objectives…
…Possibly. Maybe. Perhaps, with a fair wind and a bit of luck - so long as it doesn’t all go pear shaped in the mean time.
And therin lies the key source of discomfort experienced by the pro-war left, the cause of its obvious sensitivities whenever it’s claim to represent a progressive agenda is challenged, however obliquely, as was the case with Freedland’s article to which Geras took umbrage.
Their position is one sustained solely on the promise of ‘jam tomorrow’; rather like the plot device used in the TV series ‘Superman’ [the one with Dean Cain and Terri Hatcher] which relied on the premise that the world it depicted existed eternally ‘one minute in the future’, their position is sustainable only because the progressive outcomes on which they pins their hopes, and the validity of the claim to represent a progressive agenda, could be realised at some unspecified time in the future even though this is one of a number of possibile futures of which rather more - e.g. civil war, balkanisation, a Shia uprising and takeover, etc - represent far from progressive options for Iraq’s future.
Indeed, if history tells us anything then its that the chance that Iraq will develop into a unified and sustainable western-style democratic state is pretty slim, its history being that of a nation cobbled together from three provinces of the Ottoman Empire which were, themselves, delineated along the same religious/ethnic lines which are the source of much of the current internal tensions in the country before being handed over to Britain’s Hashemite allies, in the 1920’s, as weregild for their expulsion from the Arabian peninsula by the House of Saud, a regime which was then overthrown, beginning the era of totalitarian Ba’athist rule which culminated in Saddam Hussain. If ever there was an attempt to sow the seeds of western liberal democracy in stony ground then Iraq is it and the chances of failure, if not in the immediate aftermath of a withdrawal of western forces then shortly afterwards, is high enough to suggest that the pro-war left’s vision of a new and progressive form of internationalism taking centre-stage at the UN and in western foreign policy is tenuous at best, and unlikely to be realised.
If some of the claims of the single strand of the anti-war left represented by Galloway et al are faintly ludicrous; the characterisation of all current violence in Iraq as ‘resistance’ being the most obvious, then so too are the claims of this particular strand on the pro-war side to have occupied the moral ‘high ground’ with their self-styled progressive agenda, after all, if we omit from consideration the whole ‘Saddam was a tyrant’ argument as an obvious straw man then what we’re left with is merely the argument that the end justifies the means - presupposing that democracy and all the comes from it really does turn out to be the end which springs from the invasion of Iraq and not a bloody civil war, the balkanisation of the country or any of the other less welcome possibilities.
Where then does this leave the country and, indeed, the Labour Movement and the political ‘left’ more generally?
Well, for one thing, neither strand of thought on Iraq should really be thought of as representing the mainstream of the debate on Iraq. As loudly as both sides shout at each other across what they beleive to be an insurmountable divide each belongs to a fringe position which is largely sustained in the wider debate only by its opposition to the other. If the apparent animosity between Hitchens and Galloway can said to encapsulate the essence of this specific debate then it has to be recognised that what we are seeing is conflict between opposites only inasmuch as they are two sides of the same coin - each a chimera locked in a death grip with the other to the exclusion of any other point of view.
Outside the rarified confines of this fundamentally internecine struggle lies a more considered debate; one which centres on the practicalities of the present situation in Iraq and, on the anti-war side [where I come from], on questions of the accountability of our political leaders for their actions in taking us into a conflict which has rapidly escalated out of control and which, today, offers seemingly little prospect of a successful resolution any time in the near future.
While the boys in the bubbles continue to slug it out in increasingly irrelevant bouts of ideological point scoring, the rest of us, pro-war and anti-war, accept that whatever the rights and wrongs of the invasion itself, the mere fact that it happened places upon a moral imperative to try to set things to rights and straighten out the mess that we, in the west, created - not because democracy is good for the Iraqi people, though it may well be in the long run if it can be put in place and sustained, but because stability and security certainly is good for the Iraqi people; because if we cannot deliver that and with it the means for the Iraqi people to meet their basic needs; food, water, shelter, employment, basic healthcare, etc. then abstracts like democracy and human rights become entirely meaningless.
The only intrinsic difference between the pro and anti-war sides in the mainstream of the debate on the future of Iraq are the efforts of those who opposed the war to hold to account those who took us into war on what has now been proven an entirely false pretext (WMD’s) for the consequences of their actions, for the lies told in taking us into war and for the human costs of the war and of the current fight to win the peace - about the need to ‘finish the job’ in Iraq and deliver to the Iraqi people a stable and secure nation state free of terror and conflict in which they can rebuild their lives and pursue their own aspirations there is no disagreement whatsoever, except from time to time as to how best to proceed towards this goal.
Whether they realise it or not. Whether they, indeed, wish to accept it or not, there are clear risks to the Iraqi people in supporting Blair’s self-exculpatory fantasy that the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein form part of a consistent and progressive strand of foreign policy predicated on the so-called Blair doctrine, most pressing of which is the risk that our own responsibilities to the Iraqi people become subsumed in abstract notions of progressive intervention to the extent that Blair and others, particularly the US, come to believe that war can be justified on those grounds alone, irrespective of whether we succeed or fail in the task of rebuilding Iraq and providing the Iraqi people with a stable nation state in which to build a future.
“We were right in principle” cannot be allowed to become justification for a premature withdrawal from Iraq, leaving behind a job half-done and the chaos which would certainly follow, should political expediency enter the thinking of those politicians who will carry forward the responsibility for the rebuilding of Iraq when Blair and Bush depart the political stage; and our most effective surety against such an argument is not the unquestioning support of the self-styled progressive left but the hard-nosed realism of those, on both sides of the debate, that our government live up to the responsibilities it took on in supporting Bush. Accountability, above all else, is the whip that will keep our political leaders honest in their dealings with the Iraqi people, that and a clear understanding that never again will we permit a government, any government, to take us into war without clear, unequivocal and irrefutable proof that such a war is legal.
Above all, its time for the ‘left’ to move on, or rather for that part of it which can move on to do so - one despairs of the possibility that Galloway et al will ever manage that.
To be fair, even as one who opposed the Iraq war, the general principle of humantarian internvention and progressive internationalism is not unattactive nor is it something which may not, potentially, be of considerable benefit in the long term. However, for it to have real credibility it is essential that its supporters decouple it from the ongoing situation in Iraq and take a more realistic and pragmatic view of the situation there. One simply cannot defend the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds as, unlike Kosovo, such concerns were never part of the rationale for that war, although one can quite reasonably argue that a successful resolution to the conflict will provide clear humanitarian benefits - that some genuine good can, with effort, be derived from a bad situation. As a concept, as an ideological position, it certain has merits and deserves wider debate, merits sufficient to suggest that it would be a shame were its credibility to be squandered in defending the indefensible, the invasion of Iraq which was was mounted for an altogether different set of reasons.
For all that I’ve criticised Norman Geras in this piece, I’ve done so for what I consider good and sound reasons, given his disappointing commentary on Freedland’s article; Geras and others, notably Oliver Kamm, have much to contribute to this debate if only they can look past the expediency of trying to defend Blair’s position on Iraq and accept that a working doctrine of humanitarian internvention is, for all that it started brightly in ad-hoc circumstances in Kosovo, very much ‘one for the future’ and something which, of necessity, has to be embedded into reform of the United Nations and of international law if it is to prove effective in future.
And if there is an obvious starting point for such a debate, one marked out by rational discourse and intellectual rigour, than that starting point has to be to walk away from the ongoing and, frankly, unedifying spat with Galloway and his supporters, people who are little more than anachronistic distractions from the real issues which deserve to be debated in full by the Labour Movement.
Seriously, guys, we lost one seat to RESPECT at the last election. Get over it and move on, there’ll time a plenty to fight back in four or five years time when the seat next comes up for grabs. Why give him the oxygen of publicity by constantly getting into spats with him that serve no real purposed.
Likewise, let’s not pretend as some on your side have - Oliver Kamm being one who I’d except from such criticism - that a genuinely progressive approach to foreign policy can somehow override or ignore the influence of realpolitik - it can’t, which is precisely what Robin Cook meant when he referred to Labour having a ‘foreign policy with ethical dimensions’ rather than, as he often misquoted, ‘an ethical foreign policy’ - the latter being a misnomer if ever there was one.
If a viable progressive foreign policy is to be arrived at it needs still to be grounded in reality. Bush can rattle his sabres in the direction of North Korea as much as he likes but, realistically, there was never any chance of the US intervening there, ‘axis of evil’ or no ‘axis of evil’ - not with China next door and North Korea firmly established as being within their sphere of influence.
It also has to be remembered that the consequences of any internvention can be unpredictable and throw up both positive and negative results. Look at two of the spin-offs from Iraq for example. On the plus side of the balance sheet there was Syria’s decision to pull out of the Lebanon - a decision that cannot but have been influenced by the sight of US troops pouring into its next-door neighbour, Iraq. On the minus side, however, there’s Iran push to rekindle its nuclear programme - do we seriously believe this is solely for civil purposes? Of course not. After what happened in Iraq it seems perfectly obvious that Iran - which is hardly in the US’s good books - is going to try to develop its own nuclear weapons capability [in terms of tactical battlefield weapons not WMDs]. Let’s face it, with the US camped next door and led by a president who’s already made some pretty beligerent comments in your general direction, who wouldn’t be looking for something to even the odds a little; a battlefield nuke or two being just the thing to deter the US from piling in with its conventional forces. That’s the side of asymmetrical warfare that gets forgotten in all the talk of the ‘war on terror’, the bit where key regional players go looking for an ‘equaliser’ to offset US conventional military superiority either by cosying up to the one remaining viable competitor in the global power game - China - or by developing their own small-scale independent nuclear deterrent.
The world is moving on and just as we’ve already moved into an era of post-Clauswitzian warfare - asymmetrical warfare as its now called - so we’re also moving into an era of post-ideological conflict although, in truth, this is little more than a revertion to the prevailing conditions which existed towards the end of the 19th Century through to the end of the First World War, a revival of the ‘Great Game’ where conflicts are played out over access to and control of key resources and through age-old religious and ethnic enmities. Ideological conflicts [World War II, the Cold War] have turned out to be a mere blip, a short-lived phase in history - so ‘twentieth century’ as to be, now, passe.
The time is right, or at least fast approaching, where we genuinely will need new ideas in foreign policy which, if they don’t directly challenge the influence of realpolitik, at least mediate that influence in a somewhat less cut-throat direction which places greater emphasis on the collective responsibilities of the international community and more obviously identifies collective internation interests with strategic and national interests. Such policies and such thinking can only really come from the political ‘left’ such as it is and stretch far beyond issues of war and international relations to matters of the global economy, the environment, etc - they certainly won’t come from the right and its mistaken belief that free-market can fix anything.
If we are to tackle this agenda effectively then there needs to be some degree of rapproachment within the left on the issue of Iraq and the wider question of where and how we develop a clear, consistant and, dare I say, progressive approach to internationalism and intervention for the collective good; one which cannot happen fully so long as those who have been most vocal in pushing an interventionist doctrine remain wedded to a revisionist perspective on the Iraq war which seeks to justify that conflict in terms of humanitarian intervention rather than accept the reality that the humanitarian benefits to gained, if they can indeed be secured, derive as by-products of a war fought for altogether different and far less progressive reasons.
Whether, in considered analysis, the realpolitik of UK/US relations may provide the justification for British involvement in Iraq that is lacking in current arguments for a progressive interpretation of UK foreign policy is another matter entirely and one which may explain Blair’s actions, even if it does not excuse some of them. What the left cannot afford, however, is to allow the ethical uncertainties surrounding Blair’s position, and that of the UK government in the lead in to the Iraq war, to damage or even prevent what is otherwise a key debate about future foreign policy and the kind of world we would like to build for future generations.
