War Myths... posted by Richard Seymour

Myths About the 'War on Terror'

The most prevalent myth about the ‘war on terror’ is that there is any such thing. An earnest glance at the world will demonstrate that the term is an abuse of the English language, and not merely because it involves (as Terry Jones put it) “the bombing of an abstract noun”. It is because the phrase suggests we are at war with a tactic, a specific kind of political action – that which uses violence, discriminate or otherwise, to yield political rewards, sow confusion, provide frightful object lessons in history or divert the enemy’s precious resources. In fact, the most obvious sense in which the United States, as the main actor in this war, is fighting against this tactic is also the sense in which it makes a mockery of its own rhetoric. By fighting two wars of aggression in almost as many years, the United States has repeatedly used violence, discriminate or otherwise, to yield political rewards…
At the same time, however, the US government has been channelling funds to Colombian far right militias and to Venezuelan putschists via the National Endowment for Democracy, (a CIA front whose many esteemed luminaries include Condoleeza Rice). It has been assisting the state terror of the Indonesians against Acehnese villagers. It has been lending vocal support to the vile coup-merchants in Haiti, who just happen to America’s former allies. It has maintained good relations with the worst state terrorists, especially one Islam Karimov, a particularly disgusting despot who likes to boil his opponents to death when they get mouthy.
And why ought any of this be surprising? Has not the United States been the world’s leading terror state for over fifty years? Do we really need to go through the record? Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Brazil, Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Lebanon, Greece, South Korea etc? Need we recall that the awesome slaughter across Central America involved not only the Contra terrorists, Iranian weapons, neo-Nazi Argentinean Generals and so on – it also involved some of those in high places in the Bush administration. Decades of mass murder ought to enjoin a certain scepticism about US power and its use, especially when it is described as “humanitarian”...

The ‘Benign Intentions’ Myth.

It hasn’t escaped notice that Tony Blair and George W. Bush used the ideology of humanitarian intervention developed over some thirty years or so and deployed in its completeness during the war on Serbia as a fall-back when the WMD argument appeared to disappear in its own mushroom cloud. It would be worthwhile examining, cursorily, the roots of this ideology before dispensing with it for good. During the Biafran war of the late 1960s, non-governmental organisations for the first time began to drop their associations as semi-official bodies with information-gathering and charitable intentions, and to adopt a more politicised approach. In the early 1970s, a group called Medicin Sans Frontieres (MSF) was formed by Bernard Kouchner , a former member of the French Communist Party (PCF) , in alliance with a number of former leftists and Maoists. Its doctrine, subsequently immortalised as the "Kouchner Doctrine", was that doctors had a right to cross international boundaries to administer humanitarian aid to suffering victims. This right superseded that of the state, in their view, so that no appeal to national sovereignty could reasonably prevent them from carrying out their work. All of the leading participants in this movement were among the wave of former leftists who took a sharp turn to the right when the detumescent revolutionary fervour of post-1968 produced general disillusionment and resigned scepticism.
But with this came a general trend in NGOs, at first toward politicisation, and then in the 1980s toward depoliticised campaigning. The vicissitudes of raising finances pitted charities against one another in often fierce competition. One major source of funds was the government, because foreign aid was increasingly privatised, and this was an important dynamic in forcing charities to abandon political critique. Another factor was state repression. Famously, Oxfam was taken to task by the UK Charity Commission in the early 1990s for "prosecuting with too much vigour" its campaign to prevent Western administrations from allowing the Khmer Rouge to return to Cambodia as part of a deal with Vietnam. But something else came into play – besides demanding the right to cross international borders in defence of victims of human rights abuses, some NGOs began asserting the right to be protected by the military while doing so. The first such instance was in Somalia , where the notion was appropriated by the US government to allow it to intervene in a disastrous way in the civil war taking place. The resulting debacle saw anything up to 10,000 Somalis killed and some US soldiers knocked off for their efforts.
Kouchner himself turned to the Socialist Party and was a minister in the Mitterand governments of the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the Jospin ‘plural left’ administration of the late Nineties. He supported the bombing of the Balkans, and became the UN Special Representative to Kosovo after the war was over. A movement, then, from doctors without frontiers to bombers without frontiers.
Now, this isn’t merely a historicist critique of the ideology of humanitarian intervention. I actually think there is something suspicious in the idea from the start. To reduce, for instance, a dense mesh of national, political and geo-political interests to a straightforward, stark humanitarian crisis, has unpleasantly racist connotations. Coming from Northern Ireland, I’m familiar with the gesture – those poor children who died today had no idea what this crazy war was about and didn’t care … the ‘divided communities of Northern Ireland’ must come together, overcome their ‘bitter hatreds’ and so forth. As if there weren’t obvious rational motivations behind the war, as if there weren’t serious material gains and losses to play for, as if it were merely a matter of irrational hatreds and atavisms. This gesture bears a close family resemblance to that deployed during the Balkans wars of the mid-Nineties and subsequently during the NATO assault of Spring 1999. In fact, the ultimate voice of the victim during that war was the Kosovar woman interviewed by the New York Times who insisted she had no political views, felt sorry for the Serbs, and just wished for her family to return to their homes in safety. She was the ideological stand-in for the US government, for NATO, for George Robertson (the pudgy, red-faced Defence Secretary who later became the head of NATO). She could ventriloquise what Bill Clinton would have loved to say. We should read the interview not as an honest account of the average oppressed Kosovar (whose views are likely to be a good deal more intemperate) but as the voice of those waging war. Imagine NATO saying “we have no political views, we sympathise with the Serbs, we just want to return safely to our homes …”
Suspicion should always be aroused, therefore, when a situation is reduced to a pure humanitarian crisis, of villains and victims whom a disinterested superpower (Superman?) may try to save.
Okay, how does this apply in the concrete situation of Afghanistan? Christopher Hitchens once mockingly remarked that “the progressives” were “silent” on the issue of whether the West should intervene to relieve the people of Afghanistan of the terrible burden of their oppressive tyranny, even preferring to talk about the environment over such pressing issues. Evidently he lives in a parallel universe where a spate of best-selling books, packed meetings, vast demonstrations and intense debate and scrutiny count as ‘silence’. Nevertheless, the ideological gesture is instantly identifiable. Abstract from the concrete prior situation of overwhelming US power in a multipolar world and ask the audience to reflect purely on the pressing need of this or that oppressed people for the emancipation the West promises to bring. We need not delay ourselves either with the motives of those pretending to be freedom fighters, nor with the fact that they seem singularly discriminating as to who they choose to free. The US, for instance, did not place its vast military and economic apparatus at the disposal of Uzbeks living under the tyranny of Karimov. But what really matters is that ‘we’ will act on behalf of the oppressed. Unsurprisingly, this argument has great purchase on the minds of Johann Hari, Nick Cohen and others.
Suppose you were then to suggest that there has been no emancipation, that the country is scarcely more free, more fair, more democratic or more stable than before? The answer would be ready that, after all, the solution of those who opposed war would have left the Taliban in power, terrorists in their caves, and women under the veil. In other words, the ideology is self-confirming – even if the venture fails, it was ultimately benign, from the best of motives. Of course, this is specifically not the case. There were home-grown forces in Afghanistan dedicated to the overthrow of the Taliban who decried the US assault on their country, and urged the killing to stop. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is one such force. The other was represented by the approximately 1,000 Afghan leaders who gathered in Peshawar during October 2001 to call for both the end of the bombing and a national movement to dislodge the weakened Taliban regime, in what the New York Times described as "a rare display of unity". Even the former US ally, Abdul Haq, called for the bombing to cease and criticised America for punishing Afghanistan when it was they who had brought the "Arab fundamentalists" to Afghanistan in the first place. In short, the forces most hostile to the Taliban were also those most hostile to US aggression. But we cite these facts to no avail. They can always be played down, ridiculed, countervailed if necessary, so long as the central point that ignoring these calls involved the deaths of thousands is ommitted. I suggest that even the most exhaustive rendering of the salient facts about US terror, about the past of some participants in the Bush administration, about the ongoing terror campaigns in Latin America etc, would not yield a single solitary dent into the idea of benign intent.

The Myth of ‘Benign Outcome’

The question of moral judgment seems to be suspended between Aristotle and Mill. Mill famously advanced a nuanced utilitarianism, in which the principle of greatest happiness included the caveat that there were qualitatively distinct kinds of happiness. Ultimately, a dilemma could be resolved by the outcome – regardless of the agency behind the action, or the intent, consequences were all. If a greater happiness for a greater number of people was obtained, one could determine that the correct course of action had been followed. The trouble with this view has always been that ‘outcome’ is a rather indistinct quality – how far down the line are we allowed to proceed before we decide that this is the ultimate consequence? Human lives are finite, after all. Will we be reduced to Mao’s ridiculous aphorism on the outcome of the French revolution (“It’s too soon to tell”).
The Aristotelian view included the consequentialist concern, but also had something to say about character, and intent. An action had to be judged, in part, by the attitude and intent of the actor. If someone deliberately electrocutes you in order to cause permanent harm, if not death, we do not cover the action in glory just because the outcome is that your subsequent epileptic fit relieves you of an enormous weight of anger, fury and resentment at the world. We tend to think that, regardless of the outcome, the intent was dangerous especially if replicable. Unsurprisingly, Marx drew his morality (which he thought he didn’t believe in) from Aristotle, and augmented it. To the charge that Marxism contained a vulgar utilitarian ethic that the end justified the means, however horrid, Trotsky responded (in “Their Morals and Ours” ) that only certain ends could achieve certain means. He referred to the manner in which a revolutionary party should interact with the class it sought to galvanise, to the fact that a party which routinely lied to the working class could not depend on its prolonged support. But the applicability of the logic to the current situation is obvious – if the end is supposed to be emancipation, the means cannot be coercive. Some nations are born democratic, some achieve democracy, but none can have it thrust upon them.
And if the means are coercive, this suggests that the ends are not exactly as advertised. Aside from the simple matter of record, US governmental declarations and the ideological projections of the neoconservatives in it are evidence enough, if anyone cares to examine it. I’ve said enough about the National Security Strategy and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) before, but let’s recall the brute, cynical way in which Donald Rumsfeld sought to exploit the tragedy still unfolding not more than metres from him in the Pentagon:

“Judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time. Not only UBL. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related, and not.” (Randeep Ramesh, “The War We Could Not Stop: The real story of the battle for Iraq”, 2003, page 18).

"Good enough"! Rumsfeld was in similar form the following day, when he asked President Bush and his senior advisors:

"Why shouldn’t we go against Iraq, not just Al Qaeda?" (Washington Post, 28th January, 2002).

The project which was announced by the PNAC was re-launched with a vengeance while bodies were still being recovered from the rubble. Supposing therefore that the outcome of this vile mission had been much happier than it is today. No suicide bombings, no Resistance, no Shi’ite demonstrations demanding direct elections, no mass unemployment, no massive casualties. Certainly, this would have been much more propitious for the New American Century and its ideologues, but would it therefore make the mission just? Or would it not instead make it more dangerous by inviting the illusion that the US has both the desire and the capacity to remake the world for the better?
One of the least morally appealing aspects of the warnik’s case has been the suggestion that, at least if the US government is cynical, it is no worse than other states and probably a good deal better, and at any rate we should be happy that the outcome was not as disastrous as it might have been. If the war was fought for US hegemony, then hundreds of thousands of lives have been placed at the mercy of ideological fanaticism – not a desirable situation, whatever the outcome.

The Myth of ‘Confluence’

At least if a war is fought on less than creditable grounds, the interests of the aggressive party may coincide with those of the oppressed – pace Kosovo, pace Sierra Leone. Yes, the British government wanted to retain a pro-British administration in Sierra Leone. Yes, it was concerned about the diamond trade. But after all, it did curtail the extreme violence of the RUF with its limb-chopping proclivities. And therefore, the interests of the people of Sierra Leone and those of the UK government overlapped. Indeed, NATO was concerned to expand its field of operations, yes it wanted to demonstrate its "credibility" as Clinton inelegantly put it. But it did put the Kosovars back in their houses, and may have contributed to the weakening of the Milosevic regime, ensuring it finally gave way to a popular uprising. Therefore, the interests of NATO were confluent with those of both the Serbs and the Kosovars. You may not like the intentions of the imperialists, but you would have to be foolhardy or hard-hearted to decry the outcome.
This argument is fraudulent in many ways, but mainly in the way that it speaks for the Sierra Leonians and the Kosovars, as if there weren't many different 'interests' in those countries. One cannot derive the morality or legitemacy of an action by the fact that a number of the alleged beneficiaries may accept the action. In the case of Kosovo, the argument is even more fraudulent since it suggests that the war waged by Clinton and the centre-left powers of Europe actually solved the problem it claimed to be solving. In fact, the immediate effect was to aggravate a grievous situation into a disaster zone. The rate of expulsion and murder of Kosovo Albanians dramatically increased. At the same time, barely a tank in Milosevic's arsenal was dented, and the war ended with a deal negotiated by Martin Ahtisaari of Finland and Victor Chyrnomirdin of Russia which was remarkably similar to that proposed by Milosevic at the beginning of the war. Naturally, this constitutes a victory for Nato as far as mainstream liberal commentators are concerned, because to call it a negotiated settlement would be to call into question the necessity of using military force in the first place.

Problematising the Prior Situation

Let me end by applying Perry Anderson's useful Marxist method of questioning "the entire prior structure" of global geo-politics . In specific, let's make Sierra Leone our test case. The standard liberal apologist will rehearse the movements I have described above - depoliticise the situation, turn it into a humanitarian crisis, neutralise questions of agency and power, and at the very last resort, plead for attention to be directed at the 'good' outcomes of the intervention and adopt it as a test case for future wars. If we reverse that gesture, inspect the situation in its political and economic totality, some interesting illusions begin to dissolve.
When Britain sent troops to Sierra Leone in 2000, it dispatched 800 of the most cruel, vicious bastards created in the laboratory of Britain's deprivation. The Parachute Regiment, whose members consider the SAS pussies, are notoriously brutal - these were the men who shot dead 13 unarmed civilians in the Bogside, Derry, Ireland, near the Rossville flats on January 30th, 1972. It was initially described as non-combatant intervention purely to excavate British citizens from a growing crisis. It then became "military diplomacy". In fact, the underlying reality was that the SAS were being deployed to crush anti-government units in a fantastically bloody way . The civil war between the corrupt and brutal former government of Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, and a corrupt and brutal 'rebel' force is crucially over control of the country's rich diamond resources, the bulk of which are controlled by the RUF and which were until recently sent to the world's dealers through Liberia. The government, elected in 1996 in a stage-managed affair, was ousted in an RUF coup in May 1997 (apparently inspired by New Labour's sweep to power). The Nigerian junta along with a number of surrounding countries sent in a "peacekeeping force" while the British employed the mercenary outfit, Sandline International , to protect the diamong mines and try to wrest them back into the control of Kabbah. Kabbah returned to power in 1998 Economic Community of West African States, but when the British government's involvement with mercenaries was publicly exposed, Sandline International had to pull out and the West African intervention force became a joke. It was left to Jesse Jackson, of all people, to negotiate a peace deal with the 'rebels' again in 1999, a deal known as the Lome Agreement. However, Foday Sankoh of the RUF had been made Minister of Mines, and was unwilling to relinquish his control of these. Atrocities, murders and rapes continued.
In 2000, Britain dispatched a number of troops to Sierra Leone to curtail the power of the 'rebels', working with the former coup-plotter and brutalist, Johnny Paul Koroma. Sankoh was captured, and imprisoned, while RUF activity was dramatically curtailed. As Mark Tran wrote in the Guardian, "It needed a bit of British steel".
The trouble is, of course, that the civil war was itself the legacy of British imperialism's continuation through the post-colonial era. The British government has acted constantly through proxies to destabilise successive governments in Sierra Leone since it first won its indepdence in 1961. And when the civil war raged from 1991 onward, causing famine and enormous casualties, the British government proceeded to flood the country with military aid - more than was given to any other African country in that decade. British guns flooded the country under the Labour government (violating the Conakry peace deal of 1997), and often ended up in the hands of small children.
In fact, most of the large-scale civil wars in Africa (Angola, Congo, Sierra Leone and Liberia) revolve around the diamond trade, and the Western desire to control them. The head of the DeBeers diamond company was one of the highest profile backers of the UNITA forces in Angola, besides the United States government. They have also not been averse to employing mercenary companies like Sandline International to protect their interests in these countries. "During the 1970s and 80s the old-guard politicians systematically looted the country’s resources—in partnership with Lebanese, British and other foreign businessmen" according to the BBC.
Sankoh himself had been trained by the British colonial army. He had formed the RUF as an instrument of national liberation, attracting "a wide range of frustrated intellectuals and youths, whose first demand was the education the incompetent state denied them, and a social justice that Sierra Leone had never known." One of the crucial problems the state had in fighting the RUF was that its army recruits were abused, low-paid and often shared the same outlook and circumstances as those who joined the RUF. As the civil war became a strategic battle over diamonds, and as the RUF turned to more and more brutal methods, becoming allied with elements of the Sierra Leonian ruling class, the Western powers became concerned enough to have Bill Clinton give Sankoh a phone call, send Madeleine Albright over to meet him, and even have Jesse Jackson dot the 'i's and cross the 't's on a peace deal.
And when the intervention was deemed complete, and a peace accord reached, the British re-equipped the brutal army, incorporating such despicable elements as the afore-mentioned Koroma. The corrupt Kabbah has been touted as the peace candidate and has won national elections. Unsurprisingly, fully 70 percent of the police and army voted for Johnny Paul Koroma in the parliamentary elections. The civil war may not yet be over, and yet another element has been added to the fray - the collapse of Charles Taylor's pro-RUF regime in Liberia resulted in violence between the government and scattered rebels which threatened to spill over the border. The British government last year sent 300 ghurkas into Sierra Leone to manage the situation. In fact, according to the International Crisis Group (IGC) the break-out of the civil war in Liberia is partially to be explained by the British intervention in Sierra Leone, displacing the boundaries of an altogether larger war. "...As the situation in Sierra Leone has improved, it has become painfully evident that the war is not its own, but rather part of a larger conflict that began in Liberia, engulfed Sierra Leone and Guinea, and is now back inside Liberia."
The civil war is over for now. But the history of the country, of countless interventions (mainly clandestine), of mercenary forces and coups and counter-coups suggests that the war was an expression of endemic crisis. Kabbah is no more likely to deliver peace, security and prosperity under the IMF regime than Robert Mugabe did (oh, you know, before he became a bad guy?). His regime is already earning a reputation for viciousness , especially in his deployment of the British-trained police force. The British interventions have at various times exacerbated the civil war and attenuated it. The West African forces have at various times acted as proxies for the US and Britain, and will presumably continue to do so. Companies which supply mercenary outfits will undoubtedly find new business there as the diamond trade re-opens and mining corporations seek security. In relation to diamonds, a British "anti-corruption" boss is to be appointed to supervise the police and army patrols of mining areas and allow only the "legal" mining of diamonds on land parceled out by the government and subject to taxation. Africa Confidential reports, "Britain will lend the president an official for a year to give advice [on diamond mining] and take the blame for unpopular decisions." (The Lord works in mysterious ways). There are indications that a new civil unrest may break out. The people of Sierra Leone are, of course, not merely inert victims. They have at times struck against their regimes, taken action against the civil war, and fought together for an improvement in their miserable conditions - doubly unjust since their country is so rich in mineral resources. In other words, the former colonial powers and their superpower ally are far from being the saviour of degenerating African states - they are, in fact, among their worst tormentors.

Finale

There is no progressive case for imperialism, and no capitalist war which is fought for ideals. That this much is self-evident to even liberal apologists for imperialism accounts for all the delaying tactics and procrastination. Yes, of course, they didn't fight out of humanitarian impulses, but then neither was World War Two fought for such ideals. And after all, the situation is now better than it was before, and even if it is all as you say it is, I prefer imperialism to fascism. Well, brothers and sisters, take a look into your hearts and heads and ask yourself - whoever said you would have to choose?