THE LIBERAL BOMBSHELL. posted by Richard Seymour

Nick Cohen offers a defense of the liberal war agenda in the form of a spirited attack on Robin Cook this Sunday . I would not wish to waste any time on the red herrings, venomous spiels and casuistries that he bestows on naive readers, so I will restrict myself to the minute nut for which he constructs such an elaborate shell.

Let's take Cohen's central argument. Regardless of everything else, no matter what lies were told, we are invited to celebrate because "the British Army was the armed wing of Amnesty International, whether it knew it or not."

Leaving aside the tricky issue of Amnesty's actual opposition to this intervention, isn't this yet another example of a complex political situation being denuded of context and content and reduced to a simple humanitarian urgency. Noone has any interests, there are only bad people doing bad things to good people. And we have the capacity to intervene and sort it out.

Yes, Hussein was a shit. Yes, we are all glad he is gone. No, that doesn't entitle us to be blase about the circumstances under which he departed. For, apart from anything else, this wasn't a simple stark humanitarian situation. It was a premeditated aggression launched by a highly interested state into a country which itself was not simply composed of evil overlord and cowering subjects. Many Iraqis had been fighting - or trying to fight - Saddam for years, and they were damned if they were going to let the Americans come in and take their operation over. They did not trust the Americans or the British, did not want them there and do not want the occupation to continue.

The trickiest issue for supporters of the war who are allegedly asserting their stance on behalf of the poor oppressed Iraqi is precisely the resistance of the Iraqis to the US-led occupation. Colonists, in order to justify an intervention with humanitarian intent, need to be able to reckon their subjects little better than children in need of some good looking after. Hence the talk of taking Iraq's oil supply "into trust" as if Iraqis are incapable of determining their own fate, an attitude not unknown in past imperial interventions .

The Iraqis have not exactly proven themselves inclined toward being mollycoddled. Apart from anything else, the occupiers cannot mollycoddle anyone because they can't supple electricity or water for regular intervals. They do not even have to remnants of a state to work with. The Iraqis are taking fresh occupying corpses every day.

So now, the Americans are appealing for troops from India, Pakistan and Nepal. Doubtless the Indian army will be very happy to be shooting Muslims again. The Nepalese government have always assisted imperial adventures, but since half their country is under the control of Maoist rebels who could easily take the remainder, they may be a little trepidatious about this one. The US are bringing in Filipino workers to do their menial work for them, because they cannot trust ordinary Iraqis who are apparently so elated at their liberation.

So, where is all this liberal crap about "ending years of tyranny", "freeing an oppressed people", "an end to despotism"? How quickly these lapidary phrases are crumbling around their feet! How quickly the ungrateful Iraqi smacks their loose chops! With barely months gone, Iraq is now undergoing a dramatic cross-pollination between a variety of groups - the disbanded army, the southern Shi'ites, the communists, the trade unionists, the Sunnis, some disaffected Kurds. The liberal response, provided by one Labour MP in a debate handsomely won by the antiwar speaker, is that the Iraqis cannot now have democracy just for the moment. If they did, they might elect someone not congruent with American interests. Someone who was anti-American, inclined toward religious extremism, nationalistic, unwilling to liberalise the Iraqi market. Someone who would preserve the corrupt, nepotistic oligarchies under which the economy has suffered for far too long. Someone who would align with religious fanatics in Iran, just as the reformers are doing their best to fight the fundamentalists. Oh yes, there are many honourable reasons to deny a people their autonomy.

And these people fighting the Americans, don't you know they're nostalgic for Hussein, they're Ba'athists or fedayeen. They're religious extremists or anti-American maniacs. They don't represent the ordinary Iraqi. The ordinary Iraqi, as the non-Arab speaking Western commentators can assure you, is desperate to eat his first McDonald's, embrace the free market, suspend his struggle for freedom yet longer in the hope that the Americans will simply deliver it for the asking.

Apart from that, the country is ruined, the people are brutalised, the economy needs to be repaired. Only the Americans can do that. And, just like Bosnia and Kosovo, occupation becomes a moral duty, not just an extension of war. The people can't look after themselves, and there are so many fine reasons why they cannnot, so we may need to stay for several years and arrange things for them.

Our morality and their neediness. That is the liberal paradigm through which every political conflict is seen. It would be a good framework if slightly amended. Our government's utter lack of morality and the Iraqis' desperate need to be rid of us. Or, as I put it in an e-mail to Nick Cohen, to which he failed to reply for some curious reason:

"To proceed from the foreplay straight to the cigarette, here's the crucial point:
Anyone who can scan the history of US foreign policy up to the present day and
draw the conclusion that the Whitehouse has suddenly become the vanguard of a
democratic revolution in the Middle East is a pure sap.

Thanks."