Johann Hari's Acolytes Strike Back... posted by Richard Seymour

Johann Hari is swamped with work, so is recruiting his many readers to respond to my polemical broadside. One person has taken up the challenge.

"Lenin brings up the old chess nut that the Taliban wanted to handover Bin Laden to a third country. But he surely must know that Mullah Omar was the guy who was in charge - not the tribal elders who apparently made the delaying tactic - er sorry, "offer" - and Mullar Omar made it clear that he had absolutely no intention of handing over anybody, Al Qaeda being so closely intertwined with his regime."

The most interesting thing about this is that it has any purchase with Johann whatsoever. In my initial e-mail to Johann , the article I cited only gave a brief indication of what was involved, so let me flesh it out. The negotiations were conducted by Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, not "tribal elders". The final stage of the negotiations was in Kandahar, on Mon. 1 Oct., when Qazi, and Maaulana Fazlur Rahman, head of the Jamaat Ulema-e-Islam, met Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar:

"The proposal, which had bin Laden's approval, was that within the framework of Islamic shar'ia law evidence of his alleged involvement in the New York and Washington attacks would be placed before an international tribunal. The court would decide whether to try him on the spot or hand him over to America." (Telegraph, 4 Oct., p. 9)

Nevertheless, it is suggested that even if this offer is taken as read, there are a number of problems with this solution: "It would not have dealt with the tens of thousands of Arabs who were training in Islamo fascism in that country; would have left the Taliban in power; and would have ensured the continuation of the civil war. And the millions of Afghan refugees on the border and around the world would not have been able to return home."

On the question of refugees, suffice to say that the crisis was hardly helped by the bombing campaign itself. Refugees may be returning to Afghanistan, but hundreds of thousands in fact did so under the Taliban. In 1998 alone, UNHCR was responsible for providing assistance to 107,000 refugees seeking to return to Afghanistan. Add to this the fact that there has been a policy since the war of forcible return of refugees by Britain and Afghanistan's neighbours (despite their reluctance to do so), and the picture is not quite as rosy for the occupation as one may think.

And what are they now returning to? According to Kate Allen of Amnesty International :

"With two thirds of the country unstable and covered in up to ten million unexploded bombs and landmines, and with no effective police force, Afghanistan is clearly not a safe country to which asylum seekers can be returned."

To turn to the issue of those training in "Islamo fascism", I wonder if our correspondent thinks they've suddenly disappeared from the planet? The Taliban regime vacated power, but largely because it did not fight. Their allies in Pakistan told them not to. At any rate, many others were easily bought, which suggests to me that the continuation of civil war would have led to its collapse at some point. At any rate, the civil war has continued if only one cares to look. But the warlords remain and the Taliban are returning . Numerous terrorist attacks since the bombing of Afghanistan in Bali, Turkey and Kenya ought to have told us that the diffuse and decentralised terrorist networks operating under the rubric of Al Qaeda did not rely upon a few rather moldy training camps in Afghanistan.

In other words, most of the evils imputed to my solution in fact continue under the occupation. Moreover, there is the small matter of several thousand deaths - several multiplications of 9/11 to be exact. Who shall avenge the misery of those families?

"Lenin decides to bring up the 'Saddam wanted to have an election' thing, which surprises me, as even the most ardent anti war critics tend not to talk about this one anymore, so lacking in credibility as it is. All you have to do is take 30 seconds to think about how this 'proposal' was made, and the implications of how it would be implemented, or just try saying it out loud with a straight face, to realise the ridiculousness of it. Would Richard Perle really be the guy to go see about this? Or would the floor of the UN be the right place?"

The proposals, of course, contained much more than the possibility of an election under Western supervision within two years. Since the proposals were to be made in secret, and not in full glare of the Arab world, the UN floor would seem a highly inapposite point of discussion. But since the proposal was apparently made, and emphatically conveyed to the CIA and presumably thence to senior officials in the government, it is curious that not even a finger was raised to use the opportunity to save thousands of Iraqi lives. Especially since everyone from Scott Ritter to Hans Blix will tell you that Saddam was cooperating with inspectors and apparently anxious to avoid war.

"From everything that we have learnt since the end of the conflict - the 300,000 mass graves that were created the last time somebody thought it was time for a change of leader; or the torture chambers that were used to deal with anyone who had the slightest problem with Saddam - does any of this do anything to back up the claim that the despot Saddam was about to have an election?"

If anyone was in any doubt that the US-backed crushing of rebels in post-Gulf War Iraq left hundreds of thousands dead, then I was not among them. Nevertheless, we obviously aren't talking about Saddam acting in circumstances of his choosing. We are talking about a nasty regime which had been isolated and weakened and was under international pressure.

Still, since we're talking about the possibility of Saddam Hussein remaining in power, recall that this was the position of the British government before war began - that Saddam may retain power if he 'gave up his weapons' which he didn't have. That, in fact, was exactly what Tony Blair told Charles Kennedy.

"Saddam flunked all his chances. There was no 'cold hearted' decison to proceed no matter what. As well has not complying with the inspectors after they first went back to Iraq, leaving Blix with no option but to tell the security council at his first meeting that 'even today Iraq has not faced up to it's responsibilities to meet it's disarmament obligations', Saddam then waited until just days before the invasion before finally handing over a list of the people who took part in the destruction of his weapons in the 1990s. By which time, of course, it was already too late."

Well, let us recall how the inspections-sanctions regime worked. Throughout the Clinton years it was repeatedly made clear that the inspections-sanctions system would stay in place until Saddam Hussein was removed. This eliminated any incentive for Saddam to cooperate with inspections, and it also showed that the inspections system was a cover for a quasi-hidden U.S. agenda. It has also been acknowledged by U.S. and high UNSCOM officials that the United States used UNSCOM to spy on Iraq in preparation for military attack. So, the notion that this was a regime intended to neutralise WMDs is perfectly laughable.

The point also assumes that Saddam was an actual, material threat:

"[I]n spite of well-known difficult circumstances, UNSCOM and IAEA have been effective in uncovering and destroying many elements of Iraq's proscribed weapons programmes in accordance with the mandate provided by the Security Council. It is the panel's understanding that IAEA has been able to devise a technically coherent picture of Iraq's nuclear weapons programme. UNSCOM has achieved considerable progress in establishing material balances of Iraq's proscribed weapons. Although important elements still have to be resolved, the bulk of Iraq's proscribed weapons programmes has been eliminated." ( http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/documents/Amorim%20Report.htm)

Former chief UNSCOM weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, has described how Iraq was "fundamentally disarmed", with 90-95% of its weapons of mass destruction eliminated between 1991-98. (Ritter and William Rivers Pitt, War On Iraq, Profile Books, 2002)

"And lenin finishes with a typically moral relativist line that all states should have the same moral authority....I suppose that depends on your view of the world, doesn't it. Personally I don't believe that the US only has the same moral authority as a country like North Korea."

Well, naturally, North Korea could not begin to achieve the level of death and destruction that the US has inflicted upon the world, so I gladly concede that point. Moral relativism is as alien to me as good taste is to the Guardian film critic.

"You only have to look at the way Russia's invasion of Afghanistan is forgotten while we hear never ending commendation of the US's folly in Vietnam. Or how Russia's crimes in Chechnya are barely ever mentioned by the anti war movement."

This point would make a great deal more sense if the antiwar movement were in Russia and could therefore influence that situation. And it is quite remarkable that our correspondent has nothing to say about the fact that Russian aggression against the Chechens is being conducted with the tacit approval of Putin's allies in the Whitehouse and Downing Street. Even more remarkable is the mention of the invasion of Afghanistan, almost universally condemned by every mainstream media outlet as imperialist aggression by a rapacious power, while the war in Vietnam (killing many, many more people) was described routinely as simply a mistake, a one-off. Current Senator John Kerry is a prominent example of this historical whitewashing.

At any rate, this particular correspondent has not started from the same assumptions as Johann. He has insisted on clinging to the WMD, Saddam-was-a-threat rhetoric, whereas Johann is purely concerned with the alleged humanitarianism of the mission. I look forward to his response when it comes.