Human rights, and "the Devil". posted by Richard Seymour

Col Qadaffi is "statesmanlike" whereas Saddam Hussein is "the new Adolf Hitler", "Stalin" , "the Devil" . The difference is that Col Qadaffi voluntarily gave up the weapons he didn't have, whereas Saddam Hussein didn't give up any of the weapons he didn't have. I hope that's clear.

Some of the arguments for the war were utterly flimsy, risible, deluded, myopic and perverted. The rest were just fucking nuts. But for the purposes of ejecting some boiling black bile on my Slop Idols in the quality liberal press (and by "quality", I mean "expensive"), I'd like to concentrate on the former category. The most obvious ideological manoeuvre of the liberal pro-war zealots is to overstate Saddam's powers as both an international threat and a dictator in his own right. Certainly, he was one of the worst, but Hitler, Stalin and the Devil rolled into one? The Late Christopher Hitchens, may God rest his drinking arm, insisted prior to the war that Saddam would be free to "go nuclear" if the US didn't immediately invade. To be fair to him, he probably didn't believe it then any more than he believed it after the war when he decided that the search for WMDs had always been "iffy" . He was merely telling us what President Bush, Colin Powell, Ari Fleischer and others claimed.

The claims about Hussein's apparently enormous and scary weapons have dissolved to the extent that the government is reduced to searching for a "logical reason" why WMDs were not discovered in Iraq that would not include the possibility that Bush and Blair were merely spouting Texan horseshit. The claims about terrorist connections, too, have fallen by the wayside. In fact, all that remains of the famed "threat" from Saddam Hussein was the very real one he posed to his own citizens, which our governments care deeply about all sudden. Incidentally, David Aaronovitch promised to retract his support for the war if WMDs were not discovered - a promise which I expect will remain unfulfilled, since ten years from now he'll be saying "give it more time, for fuck's sake!" It isn't difficult, therefore, to understand why some liberal defenders of the war have pretended that the war is a crusade for Iraqi human rights. Johann Hari, Nick Cohen and others have taken up the cause of the Iraqis as if they had invented internationalism, as soon as it became clear that a war would happen. Hitchens was initially wary of invasion, preferring a vague "confrontation", but later lapsed into outright Col Blimpish hectoring on the American government's behalf.

But while Johann Hari has adopted an "older brother" style of persuasion, Nick Cohen has nurtured a snide cackling which has since become his speciality. For Cohen, the anti-war movement is "ethnocentric" and "hypocritical" , failing to listen to Iraqi "socialists", a dishonest ploy since he knows perfectly well that if the Iraqi Communist Party had not colluded in the occupation, he would be denouncing them as crypto-Stalinists who had once colluded with Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, the ideological gesture is interesting since it smacks exactly of the "prolier than thou" attitude he once mercifully scorned in New Labour acolytes as a cover for reactionary programmes.

The presupposition of liberal interventionism in this form is that the United States-United Kingdom axis is the kind of agent which could well be entrusted with the disposal of the vital task of liberating oppressed people. Indeed, whatever its countless past crimes, it is now developing a record of humanitarian intervention (according to Johann Hari, citing Sierra Leone and Kosovo). Moreover, the presupposition is rarely examined - understandably so, since it doesn't stand up to the most rudimentary analysis. To bolster his assertions that the US has changed the habit of fifty years or so of supporting vile dictatorships in the Middle East, Christopher Hitchens cites "conversations I have had in Washington" . Hari asseverates that US policy has changed after 9/11, as they have recognised that continued support for such regimes is untenable. The falling towers, apparently, turned the Pentagon into the vanguard of a global democratic revolution. I think, however, that what is more likely is that neoconservative intellectuals and blowhards have gained more influence. Interestingly, those calling loudest in the Bush administration for the democratisation of the Middle East are hardcore neoconservatives such as Michael Ledeen, and former LaRouche backers like Laurent Murawiec . But I hope it's transparently obvious that their notion of democracy is probably at variance with that of the vast majority of the human race. On the other hand, I don't think strategic considerations changed that much after 9/11. Donald Rumsfeld, we now know, took the opportunity afforded by the collapse of the twin towers to demand that his underlings find a way to pin this on Iraq - pursuing a policy that he and his intellectual colleagues (if I may speak loosely) had been dreaming up for years. The Project for the New American Century is absolutely eloquent on this point, and also quite specific in its aims and intentions ("to fight, and decisively win, a series of major theatre wars").

Another version of this argument is to ponder on the "choice" between US power and Saddam Hussein. Christopher Hitchens noted this specious form of argument after the Gulf War pointing out that those who claimed to support the war because they preferred imperialism to fascism now no longer had to choose - the war was just sending its last vapours of human flesh into the Baghdad sunset, and meanwhile the tyrants of both Iraq and Kuwait had been restored to their former positions. There is no "choice" of course, because there has never been a pure antagonism between the exercise of US imperial power and tyranny, as anyone who studies the history of the US intervention in the anti-Saddam uprising in 1991 will note. Once, the US preferred a strongman who would rule Iraq with an iron-fist in an iron-glove, just like Saddam Hussein but with a different name and face, according to Thomas Friedman. Now, Daniel Pipes recommends a "democratic-minded autocrat" should rule Iraq. Leading neocon Newt Gingrich complains that Bush should have installed a dictator immediately the invasion was complete . Brent Scowcroft admitted at the time of the first Iraq war that when George Bush called for 'the Iraqi militaryand the Iraqi people' to rise against Saddam, the US actually meant a coup, because it was presumed that a popular uprising would end with a pro-Iranian government: 'We clearly would have preferred a coup. There's no question about that.' (Interview on ABC news 26 June 1997 quoted in Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam. The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (London: I.B. Tauris,1999), p. 19.) This would explain why General Schwarzkopf allowed Iraq to fly helicopter gunships in areas with no coalition forces, violating no-fly zones, effectively freeing them up to crush the uprising, while at the same time occupying arms depots so as to prevent Iraqi insurgents from reaching them, (Andrew & Patrick Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession, Verso, 2000) . And General Sir Peter de la Billiere obviously understood this when he said: ‘The Iraqis were responsible for establishing law and order. You could not administer the country without using the helicopters.’ (Graham-Brown, op cit). John Major put the matter even more succinctly: ‘I don’t recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular insurrection ….We hope very much that the military in Iraq will remove Saddam Hussein.’ (John Major on ITN, 4 April 1991).


This is crucial. The words, stated intentions and past actions of the US decisively militate against the presumption of a humanitarian impulse behind their actions. The output of the Project for the New American Century , an institution whose chief luminaries include Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Eliot Abrams, makes it perfectly plain that the number one priority of the new policies which they had been pressing for over some years was to assert US global hegemony, to sieze a "window of opportunity" created by the absence of a rival superpower to "deter potential rivals". The National Security Strategy expresses the same priorities in more diplomatic language, (although it evinces a marriage of idealism and realpolitik with a great deal of self-serving rhetoric). It specifically grants the US government the power to "preempt" threats, even to act in the case of mere "defiance", an unprecedented move. According to Harvard Middle East historian Roger Owen, the new policy required a war of "exemplary quality" , and Iraq was that exemplar.

In other words, supporters of the war are prepared to grant the US an extent of blind faith they would not dream of allowing other states. Even to examine their own stated intentions is too much effort for the liberal warniks. Small wonder that they have nothing to say about US atrocities in Iraq, human rights abuses inflicted by the occupiers who are, (they must be), placing their vast wealth, military, technological investment, and human lives at the disposal of the oppressed of the world. Harry's Place , the blogging site of Johann Hari among others, insists that "Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". Wonderfully put. In Iraq, liberty means nothing .