Without fanfare and with precious little attention from seemingly any of the core Eustonistas, it would appear that Norman Geras has quietly and self-effacingly recanted his once open support for the war in Iraq.

Still, there have been too many deaths; there has been too much other suffering. It has lately become clear to me - and this predates publication of the second Lancet report - that, whatever should now happen in Iraq, the war that I’ve supported has failed according to one benchmark of which I’m in a position to be completely certain.

That is, had I been able to foresee, in January and February 2003, that the war would have the results it has actually had in the numbers of Iraqis killed and the numbers now daily dying, with the country (more than three years down the line) on the very threshold of civil war if not already across that threshold, I would not have felt able to support the war and I would not have supported it. Measured, in other words, against the hopes of what it might lead to and the likelihoods as I assessed them, the war has failed. Had I foreseen a failure of this magnitude, I would have withheld my support. Even then, I would not have been able to bring myself to oppose the war. As I have said two or three times before, nothing on earth could have induced me to march or otherwise campaign for a course of action that would have saved the Baathist regime. But I would have stood aside.

Quite a revelation, one might think, although not one it would seem that (m)any of the more vocal supporters of the Euston Manifesto has thought worth commenting on – a quick and far from exhaustive scan through several of blogs most closely (and vocally) associated with the ‘Credo Eustonista’ (Harry’s Place, Oliver Kamm, Pootergeek, Shuggy, Paulie, etc.) reveals not a solitary musing on the subject of Norm’s muted volte-face, Nothing. Nada. Not a flicker of recognition, embarrassed or otherwise.

Which rather, to my mind, does Norm a major disservice.

Update/Correction: It seems I do Oliver Kamm a minor disservice that I am happy to correct in as much as it transpires that he has commented on Norm’s article, if only to indicate his disagreement with Norm’s conclusions and intention of responding fully in due course…

I respect but do not share the judgement that Norman expresses in this post. I believe our difference may be due, in part at least, to the fact that our grounds for supporting the Iraq War in 2003, while associated, were not identical. I will endeavour to explain why, in light of Norman’s reasoning, I do not agree with his conclusions.

Whatever one might have thought of Norm’s often unswerving support for the moral ‘rightness’ of the Iraq war, even as matters ran what were, to the war’s opponents on the rational left, their inevitable course; there remains a significant element of personal courage in any admission of error for which, on this occasion, Norm deserves full credit.

It is not easy to admit that one has got something badly wrong and in qualifying his repudiation of the war and the course its has followed since Bush prematurely declared himself and America the victor in 2003, Norm has said nothing that one could consider to be unreasonable mitigation for his views.

It is not wrong to express the hope that it may be possible to salvage something from the current shambles that is Iraq, nor to take the view that an immediate and unilateral withdrawal of Western forces would amount to no more than throwing the Iraqi people to the wolves, albeit that many of those wolves are of our own invention. Nor is it wrong to express principled opposition to the former Ba’athist regime in Iraq nor even the view that…

Sometimes there is a justification for opposing tyranny and barbarism whatever the cost. Had I been of mature years during that time, I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism come what may, and not been one of the others, the nay-sayers.

Norm’s error, such as it is, has been one of naivety. He has been that bit too concerned with ideals, principles and with the morality of situation in Iraq to the exclusion of considering its realities; but as faults go it is one that I can personally view with a measure of indulgence. There is always a need for someone to speak up for ideals, for principles and for moral values, but that need must be balanced by an understanding of their limitations along with their value. Such is the essential difference between spiritual/intellectual leadership and secular leadership and by his error in the matter of the Iraq war, Norm identifies himself as being more suited to the former than to the latter.

One has to wonder why it is that Norm’s rescission of his support for the Iraq war has received so little open attention is ‘decent’ circles.

Could this be a sign of embarrassment, perhaps? Or maybe it is anxiety that prompts the more belligerently vocal Eustonistas to look the other way while Norm executes his act of mild contrition; the fear that this might somehow serve to undermine the Euston ‘project’ as a whole.

If such is true, and who knows it may well be the case, then such fears and anxieties as may reside amongst supporters of the Euston ‘project’ are entirely miscast and predicated on a misreading of the real significance of Norm’s comments.

In admitting to an error of judgment on the Iraq war, Norm has opened the door to a possible rapprochement on the left between the Eustonistas and those left-wing rationalists who opposition to the war has gone unabated throughout but whose views have never tipped over into the anti-Imperialist dogma and naked communalism of RESPECT and the Socialist Worker’s Party.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong or at fault in the underlying ideals and principles upon which the Euston Manifesto is founded, indeed as an aspirational document for the left it contains much that is to be commended. That it has not commanded wider support amongst left-wing rationalists has stemmed in part from the, at times, rigid refusal of the vocal self-identified decents to concede the fact that the political and ideological basis upon which the Iraq War was entered into in reality in no way substantively reflects the values of the Manifesto, or even the core values of ‘the left’, if one can adequately describe ‘the left’ in terms of a single entity.

Put simply, if there is to be a template for a new left-wing internationalism then Iraq is not it, nor indeed is to be found within an alliance, however loose, with the doctrine of neo-conservatism that provided the actual political and ideological impetus for that war.

If one is to enter the struggle against totalitarism and remain true to one’s left-wing instincts then one cannot fall into the same trap that has engulfed the SWP and its supporters, that of believing that the enemy of our enemy must automatically become our friend. America is not the enemy, nor should it become so for as long it holds true to those values that are expressed in its declaration of independence and in its constitution, but nor is the present regime of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton Wolfowitz et al, our friend. Its agenda in professing to seek to ‘export’ democracy to those who suffer under the yoke of tyranny and oppression is not our agenda nor its preferred form of democracy, one that is supine in its gratitude to the military and economic power of the United States military-industrial complex, our democracy.

It has been said on numerous occasions that in opposing the war in Iraq ‘the left’ lost its ‘moral compass’. That may be true of those whose opposition takes the form of unthinking and uncritical support for the former Ba’athist regime in Iraq and for its monstrous former President, but it would also be true to say that the left’s moral compass is at least distorted, if not lost, on those occasions that it ceases to think for itself and view the world with a critical eye; and as it would appear that Norm has discovered with the benefit of hindsight, the Iraq war was one such occasion, much as the pacifism of the 1930s in face of the rise of Fascism in Europe was another.

Does this then mean that I have substantively changed my view of the Euston Manifesto?

No. Not as yet.

Much as Norm could rightly be considered the ‘conscience’ of the Eustonistas his admission of error in the matter of the Iraq war is but that of one man and it has yet to be seen whether others amongst the manifesto’s most vocal and strident supporters are equally prepared to avail themselves of the wisdom that hindsight brings. One swallow, after all, does not make a summer.

There is much that the Eustonistas must yet do to win over the left-wing rationalists who formed the real core of opposition to the Iraq war; open recognition of our very existence would assist matters greatly as would an end to the blanket use of the archaic rhetoric of the 1930s, i.e. ‘apologist’ and ‘fellow travellers’ as an ideological slur on the rationalist camp. The ‘rational’ left, that which opposed the war in Iraq with the benefit of foresight as to the disastrous situation in which one now finds the country, has never once swallowed the dogma and demagoguery that has been the hallmark of those, like RESPECT, who opposed the war for entirely ideological reasons, and, as would have been entirely apparent had the pro-war left even been minded to listen, both rejects and thoroughly resents such accusations.

The next step, for those Eustonistas who might be minded to take up the opportunity for rapprochement afforded, perhaps unwittingly, by Norm, must therefore come in the form of a clear acceptance both that the broad debate on Iraq amongst the left has never been about a mere two opposing ideological positions; the ‘decents’ and the ‘stoppers’ but that a third position, one that opposed the Iraq war and yet is by turns rationalist and realist in perspective, has existed throughout and still exists without it ever having due reference to the ideological-driven opposition of those ‘Trotskyists’ who have, since the demise of the Soviet Union, successfully transferred their own brand of negative and oppositional ‘nationalism’ to the United States – and if anyone is unsure of what I mean here or of my usage of the term ‘nationalism’ in this context, then check the side bar for a link to Orwell’s essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’, which will explain the background to these comments.

Beyond those first tentative steps, who can say how things might develop – all one can be sure of is that there would be scope for constructive dialogue and therefore a more realistic prospect of forging the kind of ‘fresh political alliance’ that the preamble to the manifesto proposes than could be realised by the Eustonistas going it alone.

Before signing off there are two substantive and interlinked points in Norm’s article that I believe deserve an explicit response, both of which raise the question of foresight amongst those who opposed the war:

It is noticeable, in this regard, that opponents of the war who were always confident its costs would be too high don’t avoid the difficulty; at any rate I’ve not seen judgements from their side of what costs they would have found acceptable, nor estimates of what the costs of leaving Saddam in power would have been - something which nobody really knows.

And…

Were we therefore wrong to support the war, those of us who did? In terms of what we hoped and what we thought likely, we obviously were - given how things have actually turned out. But on the basis of what could have been reliably foreseen, I think it’s harder to say that. Only if the disaster was always foreseeable as the most likely outcome would I be convinced of it. I’m aware, of course, that there are opponents of the war who claim it always was foreseeable, but there are other impulses at work there than a detached estimate of probabilities, and amongst these has been a desire not to dwell too closely on how bad things had been in Iraq over some three decades.

To which I can only respond in terms of my own personal judgment of the situation in Iraq leading into and since the 2003 invasion and how that, in turn, coloured my thinking on the war itself.

I make no great claim to predictive ability or prophecy in such matters. My opposition to the war was founded on no more than a weighing of different factors leading to a personal conclusion as to the most likely outcome of the invasion. It was a judgment call, no more and no less than would have be than which led Norm to support the invasion.

As regards what I would have considered an acceptable price in human life and human suffering for the successful excision of Iraq’s ruling Ba’athist regime, the only answer I have is that I genuinely don’t know. In my personal calculations, I  never did arrive at such a figure for no better reason than the fact that long before I even came to consider the human cost of the invasion I came to conclusion that the most likely outcome of such an invasion would be failure; not in military terms of course, but in terms of the long-term objective of constructing a free and democratic Iraq out of the aftermath of war, or to be more exact my conclusion was that the chance of success was so small as to afford no real prospect of such a future for the Iraqi people.

Does that sound clinical and a little inhuman, perhaps?

In truth, my sympathies lie closer to Norm’s than one might expect in this matter.

Seeing no prospect of a successful outcome, the question of what price in human life and suffering could be justified became entirely moot. Had I ever perceived the to be a chance of success, my thinking would have been very different, the ‘acceptable’ costs would have been quite high, in my own personal estimation, for the undoubted benefits of a safe and secure future for the Iraqi people within a free, independent, and democratic nation state of their own; although I have to say that only the Iraqi people, themselves, can truly judge precisely the price they would be prepared to pay for such a future.

As to why I concluded that failure would be not only the likely outcome but the only conceivable one, I could easily write a dissertation on that subject and still not cover all the factors that influenced my thinking.

If one factor in particular stands out, however it would be that expressed most clearly and succinctly by Gandhi…

The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.

Nowhere in my consideration of the many factors that I perceived as mediating against a successful outcome to the 2003 invasion; the many barriers that Iraq’s history of division on geographical, ethnic, religious, economic would put in the way of a successful exercise in ‘nation-building’, and all the deep-seated animosities that spring from those forces, did I ever see there to be the existence of a genuine democratic will amongst the Iraqi people of sufficient strength and scope to overcome those barriers.

The will to democracy was not, and is not, strong enough at present to provide the platform necessary for a free and democratic Iraq, in my estimation, and if that ‘spirit’ is lacking in the Iraqi people in sufficiebnt quantity to make such a future possible then it certainly cannot be imposed upon them by an external force, even one so overwhelming in economic and military terms as the United States.

In truth, I could see from the outset only two possible conclusions to this war.

One was the balkanisation of Iraq on ethnic and religious lines leading to a failed state, civil war and regional destabilisation, not least as the influence of neighbouring states, Iran, Syria and even Turkey (who wish to avoid the creation of independent Kurdistan at all costs in order preclude demands for secession for its own, heavily oppressed Kurdish minority) would inevitably be far from benign. This, in broad terms, is the developing situation in Iraq today.

The other was either a clerically-inspired coup d’etat or the emergence of a new ‘strong man’ leader, in either case coming from and initiated by the majority Shi’a population, with the result either a quasi-democratic/theocratic state after the fashion of post-revolutionary Iran or a new dictator and totalitarian regime, much after the fashion of the ‘big man’ politics of some African states, in which the occasional foray into democracy has amounted to little more than a convenient mechanism by which one chooses one’s next absolute ruler. The real test of democracy is never what happens when one votes someone into power, but what happens when one attempts to vote someone out of office, as several African nations, not least Zimbabwe, have so ably demonstrated over the post-colonial era.

There, for what its worth, is the basis of my own ‘powers’ of foresight – nothing more than logic, rational thought and appreciation of history and of the various social and political forces that tend to work against democracy if left unchecked.

There seems to be an interesting, if somewhat technical, discussion brewing over at the Graun’s ‘Comment is Free’ ont he subject of Darfur, Genocide and the legal obligations on the international community arising out of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which begins with this article by Brian Brivati and continues with this response from Conor Foley - in the comments of the latter article, Brian has promised a response, which I look forward to with some interest.

Conor’s article also provoked this response from A General Theory of Rubbish, describing Conor’s article as  ‘disgusting shit’, which provides a nice counterpoint to both this debate and the wider debate on the Euston Manifesto by exemplifying the problems which arise when one sets aside rational considerations in favour of amateur polemics and half-arsed emoting - a firly common problem amongst some Eustonauts it has to be said.

Will kicks off his response in what seems to be quite promising fashion:

Genocide evokes a human responsibility upon humanity as one, to act, while legally (as usual) the obligation is muddled through lawyerly crap.

All things being equal one would expect Will to continue his argument is a fairly straightforward and matter-of-fact fashion - sadly what follows dashes any such expectations:

Under The Genocide Convention Article 8 says "any contracting party may call upon competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide." Article 1 says that the contracting parties undertake to prevent and to punish genocide, but it leaves the undertaking inchoate, not legally specific enough to be binding. So far, no nation in the international community has "officially" acknowledged the truth - and the truth being composed of - the economic, political, societal, and historical fruitfulness of thought in practice. Without directional perspectives and individuals oriented towards high moral goals which derive their significance from meta-ethical frames of meaning, the political machine with its strategic rationality has become and maintains itself as a pointless, system-inherent and alienating reality.

You fucking what? If I can try and translate into English, I think what Will is trying to say here is:

1. The Genocide Convention creates a duty to act to prevent Genocide but doesn’t say precisely when that duty to act comes comes into force or what kind of action should be taken.

2. The question of what is, or isn’t, genocide is a moral one, not a legal one.

To some extent I can sympathise with Will’s point - once I’d worked out exactly what he was trying to say - however I do fundamentally disagree with him on when it comes to defining what is an isn’t genocide in purely moral terms and, in particular,  when he goes on to state that:

Genocide is not a disagreement between competing factions - it cannot be mediated away - it is one-sided mass murder. It’s time for us to stop saying "never again," and start saying, "not this time fuckers" and put it into practice.

The problem I have is that while genocide almost always entails mass-murder (and I’ll qualify the ‘almost always’ in a second) not all mass-murder is genocide and I believe that it would be wrong, for profound historical and philsophical reasons, to conflate the two issues.

The Genocide Convention actually defines genocide as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Point (e) is primarily where the ‘almost always’ on mass-murder comes in, as one can forcibly transfer children from one group to another without murdering anyone, as was the practice in Australia during the 1950s where children were shamefully removed from Aboriginal families and put into white-run orphanages in an attempt to eradicate Aboriginal culture. This same abhorrent practice was also used in parts of the US in relation to Native American families, which I mention here not simply to get a cheapshot at the US into this article but because many years ago, while travelling in the US, I spent some time on a Native American reservation and had the opportunity to speak first-hand to people who had been subjected to this practice, all of which makes this a little more personal for me than might otherwise be the case.

Anyway, getting back to the point after that brief digression, the defining characteristic of genocide, as opposed to simply mass-murder, lies in this qualifying statement:

committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part…

This is what raises genocide above mere considerations of mass murder by one, if not, several degrees of magnitude, genocide is predictated on a deliberate intent to eradicate a particular group, and intent that need not necessarily be present even in some of the most heinous cases of mass murder.

To explain precisely what I mean here, I think its worth constrasting the concept of genocide with its more recent ‘cousin’ - ethnic cleansing.

Since this latter term came to the fore, during the Balkan conflicts that arose out of the collapse of Yugoslavia, it seems to be pretty common practice to either conflate or confuse these two terms, which is perhaps understandable as ‘ethnic cleansing’ does sound for all the world like one of those appalling euphemisms that politicians, military leaders, and governmental press officers routinely trot out in an effort to obscure unpalatable truths, terms like ‘collateral damage - i.e. Oh fuck, we’ve just bombed a children’s hospital - and ‘friendly fire’ - I’ve never quite seen the fine distinction with this last one there being something fundamentally unfriendly about getting shot at regardless of who’s doing the shooting. However, there is an important different between ethnic cleansing and genocide in terms of the intent upon which each is predicated.

In ethnic cleansing, the basic intent is to remove a particular group/population from a particular territorial area. This may result in violence and even mass murder, but not always and not necessarily - in fact violence often only enters the picture where members of the group that are being ‘cleansed’ offer resistance to being moved on. In recent times, probably the most successful and least violent example of ethnic cleansing happened in 1972 when the then Uganda president, Idi Amin, summarily expelled a South Asian population of 50,000 from the country, many of whom came to the UK and now form the hub of many Britain’s own South Asian community.

I should say here that terms like ’successful’ and ‘least violent’ are used in a relative sense, i.e by comparision to the militarily-forced ethnic cleansings of the Balkans.

The point I am making is that the fundamental basis of ethnic cleansing is the displacement of a population, not its wholesale eradication - indeed one could readily argue that NATO was in part and inadvertantly responsible for one of the largest acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the last 20 years or so, given that its intervention in Kosovo resulted in near 60% of the Kosovan Serb population fleeing the country, the majority of whom (estinated at around 100,000) have not returned, but while one can argue about the relative merits and rights and wrongs of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, few but the most blinkered commentators would accept or even consider that NATO were deliberately following a policy of ethnic cleansing when they intervened.

That ethnic cleansing is not genocide does not make it any less morally reprehensible but it does complicate matters when one comes to consider the circumstances in which a duty arises on the international community to intervene by means of miitary force - could one, for example, have justified mounting a military invasion of Uganda in 1972 to prevent the expulsion of its South Asian community, or would that instead be considered a disproportionate response to a situation in which the use of violence was relatively limited? The moral judgment to be made here is pretty clear and straightforward, but justifying a particular type of response a much less simple and clear-cut matter.

Even where ethnic cleansing is accompanied by acts of egregious violence and mass murder, the judgment as to what might constitute a legitimate and proportionate response - how many people need to die in order to justify and UN Peacekeeping mission as opposed to a full scale invasion and removal of a government? What happens when the violence crosses national borders and boundaries, when one is dealing with insurgencies, partilcularly those supported or condoned by a neighbouring government?

Back in the 1980’s would, for example, the Soviet Union have been justified in intervening militarily in Honduras in order to put down the Contra insurgency against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government that was democratically-elected in 1984, despite the best efforts of the US to manipulate and discredit the election process, which was otherwise certified as having been free and fair by international observers? Can one even judge such a situation on purely moral ground or does the answer one arives at depend primarily on your political views and whose side your on?

One of the debates that crops up as a matter of routine every year in the run to Holocaust Memorial Day is that of whether there should even be such an event or whether, in order to be inclusive of other communities, it should be either replaced or supplemented by a more generic public memorial to the victims of ‘genocide’.

While I have no difficulty with the idea of an annual memorial event/day for historical victims of mass murder within reason - one can take such things a bit too far and end up dealing with events that are now so historically remote than any and all apologies and commemorations become entirely meaningless exercises in unnecessary moral self-flagellation - I would not support the idea of replacing HMD with a generic event for two basic reasons.

The first is purely a matter of historical context - the Holocaust is a part of European history and has shaped, to varying degrees, the collective identity of the continent. On that basis I see no problem in a specific memorial dealing with the Holocaust as unique historical event any more than I would object to Americans holding events on the 4th of July or the French holding events on Bastille Day - its our history and should not be lost or subsumed into global events simply because some groups who, by and large, weren’t around at the time, feel that they have no part in it.

More important than that, on a moral and philosophicl level, I see the Holocaust as being, if not a unique event then at least one that as near unique as makes no difference. History is littered with the most horrific examples of ethnic cleansing and mass murder and yet, as I see it, the Holocaust stands apart from most, if not all, of these events precise due to the circumstance in which it took place and - crucially - the intent of its perpetrator. Nazi Germany did specifically set out to eradicate the Jewish, and other, populations of Europe. not displace them and move them out of their territory but actually excise everything from their culture to their very genetic characteristic from the human race - and for me that raises the Holocaust itself, and indeed the whole concept of genocide above other forms of mass murder.

Morally, ethically, philosophically and legally, I believe that genocide, as it it defined in the convention in terms of the clear intent of it perpetrators, must remain distinct from other forms of mass murder, otherwise the very concept of genocide will become so diffuse and devalued over time as to become largely meaningless - and if we do devalue genocide as a concept then, by extension, we devalue the Holocaust and everything the proceeds from it.

I’m not suggesting here that this invalidates Will’s point about the situation in Darfur - the question of whether that merits or requires military intervention is a separate one and not what I wanted to get into here - but unless it can be shown that the intent of the Janjaweed is specifically to eradicate those it has, and still is oppressing and murdering, then what’s happening in Darfur is NOT genocide and should not be called genocide - in which case Will would be better served by putting forward rational arguments which extend or clarify international duties in respect of mass murder and not seeking to redefine the concept of genocide in order to justify intervention.

As today marks the public launch of the Euston Manifesto it comes as no surprise to find one of its authors, Norman Geras, popping up in the Guardian with yet another of his trite expositions on the ‘geography of the left’.

It would be unfair to say that the position of the Eustonauts hasn’t moved on somewhat in the six weeks or so since the first appearance of the manifesto - at the time of the Manifesto’s intial launch, John Lloyd had this to say on the subject:

What has, however, been horrifying to see has been the disappearance, or even non-appearance, of any consideration of the nature of the regime of Saddam Hussein that was destroyed by the invasion. That which had been a prime object of left politics - the removal of dictatorship, made more urgent in Iraq’s case by the mass murderous and sadistic character of the Saddam regime - has dropped from consideration, or is given only formal recognition. What had once been an imperative - an expression, and where possible more than an expression of solidarity with the suffering under such a dictatorship - has been vitiated by the main aim of much of left politics: a cultivation of anti-Americanism. In many parts of the left, that has meant close alliances with fundamentalist Islamic groups, whose policies on civil and human rights, including equal rights for women and gays, are deeply reactionary. It has at times seemed to mean rhetorical support for those seeking to terrorise Iraqi, and other, societies out of any move towards democratic rule.

The depth of the difference between those who adhere to this view, and those of us who see the decision to confront Saddam as the right one (if overdue) now forces an explicit recognition of two broad camps on the left. The first has developed a critique of western (especially US and UK) foreign policy, the records of the Blair and Bush governments, the war on terrorism and many other issues which is uncompromisingly hostile, regarding above all the British and American administrations as irredeemably imperialist and reactionary. We see in some of their actions - specifically in their willingness to confront tyrannous and murderous regimes - a progressive approach, which should be supported - even as other elements in their policies, including many of the decisions taken (or not taken) to prosecute the war in Iraq were wrong, even disastrously so.

Now we find Norman Geras taking a much more expansive view of the Great Rift Valley of the left:

But a longer answer is worth spelling out for what it reveals about the "geography" of the left in relation to the Iraq war, and how this is simplified by some of the war’s opponents. Their story is of a three-way division within left-liberal opinion, comprising: (1) those who supported the war, the "left hawks" or "muscular liberals"; (2) on the other side, but merely marginal, a small body of anti-war opinion - people in and around the Socialist Workers party and Respect - actually wanting America to come to grief in Iraq, supporting or making apology for the so-called resistance and its murderous methods; (3) in between these, the largest sector of anti-war opinion, opposing the war for a combination of reasons, prominent among these the belief that it was likely to turn out badly.

This mapping of the terrain underlies the mystification over how people who opposed the war could support the Euston Manifesto, and also the upset over criticisms directed at the left, when according to that map they apply only to a few souls on the far and hard left.

The real geography, however, has been different. Within the large "middle" sector of left-liberal opinion opposed to the war there has been, from the start, a differentiating subdivision - between those who opposed the war without being in denial about the considerations on the other side of the argument, and those who precisely have been in denial about them. This latter group extends well beyond the far left.

The signs of denial are abundant in the recent public life of the western democracies: in the banners and slogans for that Saturday on February 15 2003, from which one would never have known that Saddam’s Iraq was a foul tyranny; in the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, many indeed unable to comprehend, why others of us supported a regime-change war; in a constant stream of comment in liberal daily papers and weeklies of the left; in the excommunications issued and more recent calls for apology or recantation; and, most seriously, in the perceptible lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise given its origins in a war led by George Bush.

So, six weeks ago, the left was divided into two broad camps - the Eustonauts (comprising the forces of pro-war decency and the new-found anti-war friends who’ve now seen the light and agree that Saddam was a complete bastard after all) and the ’stoppers’ (Respect/SWP and their unauthentic in-denial fellow travelling useful idiots).

Now it seems that, having noted the existance of a sizeable strand of rationalist left-wing criticism of Lloyd’s over-simplistic view of the current geography of the left, Norm has come up with a revised set of boundaries which neatly divide the left into four broad camps - the pro-war decents, the anti-war left who’ve now seen the light and agree that Saddam was a complete bastard after all, the unauthentic anti-war left who’re still in denial and still fellow travelling useful idiots, and the hard core ’stoppers of Respect/SWP.

Ah yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

This is all very much in keeping with one of the more obvious subtexts to rationalist criticism of the manifesto itself, a view which sees its over-reliance on abstractions and platitudious statements of values as a sign of deliberate disingenuity on the part of its authors and main supporters; poorly executed disingenuity in many respects as most of the Manifesto’s biases are so obvious that authors could have saved themselves trouble of writing several sections simply by adding ‘America - Fuck Yeah!’ and ‘Israel - Fuck Yeah!” to the preamble.

To be fair, this is not an issue that is in any way unique to the Eustonauts. If you’ve been around the left for any reasonable length of time you’ll have seen it all before several times over, the latest ‘new democratic front’ to appear from nowhere clutching its shiny new (and carefully sanitised) manifesto and claiming to be the ‘authentic voice’ of the left - It’s sad to have to say this but left-wing politics tends to spawn these kind of set-ups with much the same frequency that Proctor and Gamble launch ‘new improved and best ever’ versions of the brand-leading washing powders and to much the same effect - you use them for a bit, find you can’t see any real difference between this new, improved version and the one you used to buy and then come to the conclusion that only new thing about it was that it said ‘New’ on the box.

Its long been one of the hallmarks of the hard-core ideological wing of the left that their values and ideals can turn on a sixpence and change overnight, but their methods and modus-operandi remain pretty much constant - which is not always such a bad thing as this odd character trait at least helped to spawn this classic piece of comedic dialogue:

BRIAN: Are you the Judean People’s Front?
REG: Fuck off!
BRIAN: What?
REG: Judean People’s Front. We’re the People’s Front of Judea! Judean People’s Front. Cawk.
FRANCIS: Wankers.
BRIAN: Can I… join your group?
REG: No. Piss off.
BRIAN: I didn’t want to sell this stuff. It’s only a job. I hate the Romans as much as anybody.
PEOPLE’S FRONT OF JUDEA: Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhh. Shh. Shhhh.
REG: Schtum.
JUDITH: Are you sure?
BRIAN: Oh, dead sure. I hate the Romans already.
REG: Listen. If you really wanted to join the P.F.J., you’d have to really hate the Romans.
BRIAN: I do!
REG: Oh, yeah? How much?
BRIAN: A lot!
REG: Right. You’re in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People’s Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah…
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters…
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People’s Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters…
LORETTA: And the People’s Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters…
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People’s Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We’re the People’s Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People’s Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He’s over there.
P.F.J.: Splitter!

Interestingly, while Geras seeming has no problem with making sweeping, inaccurate generalisations about
the nature of those left-wing critics of the manifesto who can’t quite so easily be shoved under the carpet or dismissed as hard-core stoppers, he’s pretty quick to try shoot down the idea that the manifesto is pro-war:

A third reaction is that of people who see the manifesto as pro-war - referring to the Iraq war. The short answer here is: no, it isn’t. This is stated as clearly as can be in the document itself, and it is a plain fact that a number of the original signatories opposed that war.

If Norm has a point here then its a minor one and one predicated on a very narrow reading of the nature of the real debate - and the real divisions over Iraq that do exist on the left -  and, to a considerable extent, it’s this deliberately narrow reading of the debate which forms the tell-tale heart of the manifesto. It may well be stretching a point to suggest outright  that the manifesto is ‘pro-war’ but not to point out that it, and its core supporters, are solidly anti-accountability on the question of whether the US & UK government acted illegally in prosecuting the war and/or lied to their respective legislatures and, of course, their respective citizens in putting forward a case in support of the 2003 invasion.

This is where the rational left most clearly diverges in its view of Iraq from most of the Eustonauts.

If anyone’s in denial here its Geras and the rest of internationalist Power Rangers of the People’s Front of Euston who seem incapable of accepting that the vast bulk of opposition to the Iraq War on the left was based on rational value judgments of the overall situation in Iraq and beyond, including the question of the impact on such an invasion on neighbouring states, regional stability and the terrorist threat faced by the West after the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre, the case - or in reality lack thereof - put forward by the US and UK governments in favour of the invasion, the motives, apparent and suspected, of those political leaders who pushed most strongly for the invasion and, yes, the likely impact of the invasion on the lives of the Iraqi people, taking in everything from the plusses - Saddam’s removal from power - to the potential minuses ranging from turning the country into a terrorist’s playground to the risk of ethnic and religious conflict, civil war, the balkanisation of the country and the possibility of this all winding up with a Shi’a dominated, pro-Iranian Iraq.

No I can’t say for certain to what extent individuals might have considered all these factors - and quite a few more besides - or what weight they may have placed on any particular issue but if one spends a bit of time tracking around the rationalist left-wing blogs, particular those that have been openly critical of the manifesto, one will find that all these issues and more have been worked through in some considerable detail, often to accompaniment of half-baked amateur pro-war polemicists explaining loudly in the comments that none of this matters but they’re right and everyone else is wrong and that’s the end of it.

It also matters to many, if not most of these people, that the primary case put forward in support of the invasion - an imminent threat based on the presumption that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction - turned out to be… well, not to put to fine a point on it, complete bullshit and that this whole shooting match was predicated on a series of lies, misinformation and fabrications. And not unsurprisingly, when people get to thinking that the political leaders have basically taken the country into a war on the back of tide of hogwash they get to thinking that the democratic thing to do is maybe try to hold some of these people to account for their actions and not just take the attitude that truth about how and why the invasion of Iraq came about doesn’t really matter because Saddam was a bastard and had it coming to him anyway, so it doesn’t really matter in the long run.

One of manifesto’s more obvious pieces of errant sophistry keys right into this point in stating that:

In connecting to the original humanistic impulses of the movement for human progress, we emphasize the duty which genuine democrats must have to respect for the historical truth.

Which would be fine were not for the fact that a fair number of the most enthusiastic Eustonauts have spent the last couple of years pitching the line that the Iraq War was a humanitarian venture and then even if, in reality, it wasn’t well then that doesn’t really matter as long they believed it was.

Throw in fairly standard lines like this one from Geras in the Times, last week:

“Understanding” noises about terrorist atrocities — in London or Madrid, but especially Tel Aviv and Haifa — as having their roots in poverty, oppression and injustice are equally common, though these voices are at a loss to explain why there have been movements in the past fighting these evils that didn’t resort to randomly blowing up civilians.

…which is, again, pretty typical of the kind of crap we’ve had to put up with from the ‘decent’ wing of the People’s Front of Euston for the last couple of years - as far a they’re concerned they can freely chuck around trite aphorisms and blatant straw-men all they like but try to put up a counter-argument that consists of anything less than a 10,000 word dissertation and you’ve got no arguments at all.

Quite why the Eustonauts are unable to accept or even acknowledge the existence of a mainstream left-wing position which holds that while we - meaning the US and UK in particular - have a moral and ethical duty to straighten out the mess that invasion of Iraq has created and generally get the country back into some sort of reasonable state before we fuck off and leave them to their own devices, this duty does not obviate the need to hold to account those who lied and dissembled in order to take us into this war in the first place is perhaps easily understood if one looks closely that the manifesto itself and recognise that, in total, it contains only one definitive ‘real-world’ policy statement - this one:

We stand for an internationalist politics and the reform of international law — in the interests of global democratization and global development. Humanitarian intervention, when necessary, is not a matter of disregarding sovereignty, but of lodging this properly within the "common life" of all peoples. If in some minimal sense a state protects the common life of its people (if it does not torture, murder and slaughter its own civilians, and meets their most basic needs of life), then its sovereignty is to be respected. But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue. Once a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed, there is a "responsibility to protect".

The Eustonauts position is not simply one in which they are in denial about the real ‘geography in the aftermath of the Iraq war or about the truth as to how and why the war came about in the first place but one in which denial is a absolute prequisite of their position because to acknowledge that they were wrong over Iraq and that they are wrong both in their characterisation of the real nature of mainstream left-wing opinion and in their dismissal of the need for accountability for the lies and fabrications that were used to justify the 2003 invasion would be to see the centrepiece of their manifesto and their very raison d’etre, disappear up its own fundament.

UPDATE: Very good article on this same subject by Curious Hamster, writing over at the Sharpener.

I’ve pondered for some time on putting forward a more considered and comprehensive response to the publication of the Euston Manifesto, which, as you might expect, I won’t be signing, but its taken this piece from Rob Newman to finally stir me of the general sense of torpor that accompanied its publication.

Tempting as it is to barrel heading into an exercise in picking holes in the manifesto itself, which I found to be rather bromidic exercise in intellectual prolixity, I think it much more interesting to look at some of the commentary put forward by its supporters, since publication, as much of this serve to crystalise my reasons for steering clear of the manifesto and some of those who profess to be its most enthuiastic supporters.

Perhaps it’s best to start by tackling on of the central and most misleading contentions put forward by some of the ‘Eustonites’, most notably here by John Lloyd:

The war in Iraq dramatised, but did not of itself cause, a split in the left - one which is becoming more pronounced with every passing day. Much of the left took the view that the American-British invasion of Iraq was wrong; a significant part of that saw the reason for the war as stemming from, or containing, one or more of the following elements: A rampant American imperialism; a move to control Middle East oil supplies; a strategy dictated by US support for Israel - or dictated by the "Jewish lobby" and/or by Israel itself; Islamophobia; and (on the part of the UK) a poodle-like dependence on the US.

Opposition to some or all of these has increasingly defined much of the left, especially the further left. In the centre-left and in political, intellectual and media opinion generally, a diluted version of that view is popular, one that implicitly or explicitly sees the Iraqi events as at best a series of blinders.

This is perhaps the single greatest fallacy promulgated by some of the manifesto’s supporter, the idea that ‘the left’ can be neatly divided up and packaged into two contending ideological camps - ‘the decents’ and ‘the stoppers’ - with all other divergent left-wing opinions being either, at best,  irrelevant or, at worst, a shallow reflection of the position adopted by the stoppers.

Such a markedly oversimplistic view of left-wing atttitudes to the invasion of Iraq is simply breathtaking in its intellectual conceit - it seems that to be considered part of the left these days, one must absolutely have an adjective or one is entirely unworthy of consideration.

In reality, the real situation is very different to that suggested by some of the core Eustonites - both they, the self-styled ‘decents’ and their mortal enemies, the Respect/SWP-led ’stoppers’, are mere vocal minorities within a broad canon of left-wing thought in which the mainstream is increasingly turnign away from blind adherence to ideology and adopting a rationalist worldview under which events, such as the invasion of Iraq, are considered and evaluated in terms of the actuality of the situation at hand and not merely on matters of abstract principle.

The Iraq war has not dramatised the ideological schism between the ‘decents’ and the ’stoppers’ - that schism, in various guises, happened long ago, certainly as far back as the 1930s and 40s - hence the rather quaint if all-too-often trritating over-depedence on the rhetoric of that era exhibited by some of the more prominant ‘decents’ when mounting a typically polemical attack on their mortal intellectual enemies.

Someone has to say this, so I guess it might as well be me - Stalin’s been dead for near 50 years, Mao Zedong’s been pushing up daisies for 30 and outside of the realms of the ‘decents’ and the ’stoppers’ most people simply swtich off at the point that each camp starts berating the other for being ‘apologists’ of some variety or other, except, maybe, for those few hardy souls who are sufficient well-versed in Orwell’s political essays - particularly ‘Notes on Nationalism’ - to observe that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Both the ‘decents’ and the ’stoppers’ display all the core characteristics that Orwell identified in his essay as belonging to ‘Nationalism’ - using, of course, Orwell’s extended defintition of the term. Indeed, if read (or perhaps re-reads) this essay and takes particular note of Orwell commentary on the Trotskyists of his day, one is hard pressed not to arrive at the conclusion that there is some curious quantum theory of left-wing politics at work in the relationship between the decents and the stoppers, so closely does each provide a mirror image of the other - for ’stoppers’ and ‘decents’, read ‘Trots’ and ‘Anti-Trots’, which turns out to be a rather unsurprising inversion of the Communist/Trotkyist schism of the 1930s when one notes that amongst the leading lights of the ‘decent’ camp one finds a fair old number of ex-Communists and recanting Marxists.

That being said, it may well be the case that a schism does emerge from the aftermath of the Iraq war, not between the ‘decents’ and the ’stoppers’ but between an overtly ideological/utopian minority, which encompasses both, and a mainstream ‘rational’ left which, quite frankly, is getting sick and tired of being lectured about principles it well understands and labelled as lackies and ‘useful idiots’ by the ideologues for simply daring to think things through for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions on the many rights and wrongs of a complex situation like Iraq.

As I mentioned at the start of this piece, it was a number of comments made by Rob Newman that finally shook me out of my previously torpid state on this subject, not least of which the comment given below:

I find that the manifesto is about a reaction to two things: hypocrisy, and betrayal. Those are both strong terms, but I think they are justified. The hypocrisy is that practiced by those who, for instance, supported the first Gulf War to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait — in identical language to that latterly used by Tony Blair to justify the 2003 invasion — but switched position to condemn the second Gulf conflict, and to call Blair a liar. This is tied in with the general feeling of anti-Americanism that has infected a great deal of the liberal Left. Diane Abbott was at the meeting last night and rejected the notion that opposition to the war equated to anti-Americanism; but the commentary which has been bandied around about the war and about Euston gives the lie to that. (For instance, consider the familiar argument: "We should go to war in Iraq." "No we shouldn’t — and Donald Rumsfeld met Saddam Hussein twice! The US supported Saddam against Iran!" etc.)

Rob’s comments here are fairly typical of the kind of gross oversimplifications and distortions that have been, and still are, in all too common usage in ‘decent’ circles and which serve primarily to support their mischaracterisation of what is the mainstream oppositional view of the Iraq War.

Rob’s charge of hypocrisy stands up only is one presumes that overall situation in relation to Iraq remained largely static between the Gulf War of 1990 and the 2003 invasion - this is neither my view nor the view prevalent amongst the majority of those who opposed the latter war. The 1990 war was predicated on Iraq’s violation of one of the clearest principles in international law, the sovereignty of an independent nation state. This entirely justified both the action taken to expel Iraq forces from Kuwait and, under international law, would have also justified the prosecution of that war to its logical end, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in order that he be brought before a war crimes tribunal - it seems to have been rather forgotten that the Nuremburg Tribunals, upon whose judgements are founded many of the core principles of modern international law, held, even in the face of dealing with the atrocities of the holocaust, that the single most heinous of all crimes against humanity was the unjustified and unlawful prosecution of war, itself.

Of course, the coalition of the day stopped short of removing Saddam from power, a decision primarily predicated on wider foreign policy considerations of which probably the most significant was the understanding that inevitable consequence removing the Ba’athist regime at that time - and maybe even now - would be an Iraq dominated by its Shi’a majority and directly aligned with Iran. This also explains why the US, in particular, deigned to support the Shi’a uprising in the south of Iraq that followed the first Gulf War, the irony of this being that the crimes for which Saddam is currently standing trial occurred during this very period and as direct consequence of his being permitted to put down the Shi’a revolt without intervention from the US-led coalition of the time.

I’m getting a little off the point here, so to pull things back it is enought to repeat that a charge of hypocrisy stands up only if one views the two wars as being fundamentally interconnected and predicated on a single sequence of events. If, on the contrary, one sees marked and very obvious difference between the situation as it existed in 1990 and that which existed in the run-in to the 2003 invasion, then one is no way hypocritical in having supported the Gulf War only then to oppose the more recent invasion as one see each as being very different events which took place for very different reasons. More than that, I would certainly contend that only if one subscribes to vastly oversimplified and static view of the strategic and political situation in the region during the period between 1990/91 and 2003 or if one disregards such things and places near eclusive emphasis on a single factor - as many ‘decents’ are wont to do in claiming that the 2003 invasion was justified solely on the need to remove Saddam to the exclusion of all other considerations - is it then possible to view both wars as part of single and uniform sequence of events.

What ideologues would consider hypocrisy, rationalists would consider to be merely a reflection of a complex and volatile situation that has changed markedly in the twelve years between the two wars.

Beyond this, Rob’s comments on ‘anti-Americanism’ are to say the least, glib, tendentious and an all too obvious straw-man, one that follows much the same pattern that has been all too evident in relation to Israel, where valid criticism of government policy and actions undertaken by the state have been deliberately conflated into what has then been presented as invalid and generic attack on the nation as a whole. Just as when one criticises the Israeli government for its actions one all too often runs the risk of being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’, so it seems one now faces the same risk if one criticises the present US adminsitration or even a single member of that administration - although, curiously enough, this same notion of ‘attack one, attack all’ which denies the possibility of making a clear distinction between America (or indeed, Israel) as a whole and incumbent administration at a particular moment in time seems not to apply on occasions where the ‘decents’ are talking about Islamic terrorism Islam, where it seems the distinction between Islam and Islamism is so clear-cut and obvious as to be immediately obvious to all.

Now that, I think, could more justifiably and accurately be considered hypocrisy, unless it is merely intellecual snobbery in which its a assumed that only those on the ‘decent’ left are capable of making, understanding and adequately expressing distinctions of this kind.

I have to say that I know of no one, certainly amongst 150-200 bloggers who’s work I regularly read, whose judgement of the rights and wrongs of the 2003 invasion is based on anything so crude and simplistic as Donald Rumsfeld having once shaken Saddam’s hand or the role adopted by the US in supporting Iraq’s war on Iran with arms sales. Such matters have certainly been cited as evidence of the US administrations hypocrisy in its stance towards Iraq, givng rise to understandable moral opprobrium, but not as conclusive grounds for opposing the war. Logically, if one opposed the war solely on the grounds that Iraq and the US once found common cause in their mutual opposition to Iran then one must take the view that the US should not have invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein because one believes that nothing has changed in the intervening years and that the US should still considered Iraq an ally - this is patently absurd and not a position I have seen expressed anywhere.

I’ll leave things there for now with the general observation that it is difficult, if not impossible, to ascribe any real credibility to the manifesto and, in particular its supporters, in circumstances in which the view they present of ‘the left’ amounts to a gross distortion of the truth about the real nature of the majority of left-wing opposition to the Iraq war, which for me, is one of the primary reasons why I cannot sign the manifesto - after all whether I agree with any of its its principles is immaterial as within the overall view of left-wing political thought being promoted by some of its supporters I don’t seem to have an adjective and therefore don’t exist.

I will return to the manifesto in due course, not least as someone, perhaps perversely, enjoys unravelling the complexities of foreign policy, in addition to having been well schooled in understand the principles of realpolitik, I want to look in more detail at the viability of the concept of humanitarian intervention and the Eustonites notion of a ‘new internationalism’, not least in the context of holding a commitment to the ‘historical truth’.