Monbiot's Charter. posted by Richard Seymour

I conducted an opinion poll in your street last week. 90% of respondents said I should douse it in petrol and set it alight. I hope you won't attempt to undermine this excursion in grass-roots democracy... George Monbiot is an honest radical. But I've always felt that he is too willing to bend toward the Establishment, too willing to accept their pleas of good faith on occasion. This is such an occasion .

George admits to being somewhat stumped by the Iraqi opinion poll which seemed to show, among other things, that most Iraqis felt that things had got better since the occupation began, and more Iraqis were prepared to say that they considered the invasion 'right' than would say it was 'wrong'. After all, we could easily acknowledge the cynicism with which Bush, Blair and Senor Aznar undertook this adventure while still saying that it had moral outcomes which it would be foolish to foreswear simply in the name of an abstract principle. Should the world's oppressed be "left to rot" simply because we distrust the motives of those undertaking the latest 'emancipation'?

On the other hand, George does acknowledge a rather stinging criticism of allowing oneself to accept the principle of 'humanitarian intervention' - it hands ready made excuses to empire-builders the world over. And this could indeed have even worse consequences than leaving the oppressed to rot. We simply cannot tell. If the choice is between two unpalatable evils, how do we make a decision that isn't morally obscene in some way? (George evinces something of Garton Ash's "tortured liberal" at this point). I suppose my thought has always been that you can't know the consequences of any action, although you may have a guess. What you can also guess at is the intent of the agent. Making a utilitarian calculation of likely consequences is unsatisfactory because our field of perception is limited both spatially and temporally.We can't know every transaction involved in the situation at hand, and we can't know how every contradiction will resolve itself. Omitting intent is also somewhat scandalous to our moral sense - we generally think that it matters if you meant to run over that small child or not, even though it makes no odds for the victim.

George doesn't say it, but he tacitly acknowledges that both consequences and intent must form part of our judgement of the legitimacy of a war. So, he proposes the following:

"We need a charter that permits armed intervention for humanitarian purposes, but only when a series of rigorous tests have been met, and only when an overwhelming majority of all the world's states have approved it. We need a charter that forbids nations with an obvious interest in the outcome from participating."

Well, who would write such a charter, who sign up to it, who enforce it? The power to create international law resides in the hands of the powerful. Law is not a set of principles to which strict adherence is the only valid response, but a process, and one in which the powerful always have a cumulative advantage. I'm not merely knocking this idea. I can identify with the aim of defining a moral basis for declaring one's position on a war, and also with the desire to give it the legitimacy of a legal form. I simply think it is so abstract and so unlikely as to not merit the effort that we (the antiwar movement, the Left) would have to divert to it.

I also have some problems with the ramifications of Monbiot's response to the poll. Few deny that polls give us some kind of information - just what kind is a matter of debate. Politicians consider opinion polls to be snapshots of material to be worked on, not final judgments to be passively accepted. Only we, the public, are invited to or expected to simply take it as read and get on with our lives. At the same time, the interpretation of the poll is too important a task to be left to government spinners. For example, I noted that the BBC was presenting and high-lighting only those parts of the survey which appeared to bode well for the occupation. Equally interesting, I thought, were the findings that the bulk of Iraqis opposed the occupation and considered the best way of bringing security to the country an end of the occupation and a full handover of Iraq to the Iraqis. The BBC mentioned 'negatives' under the forlorn heading, "But it wasn't all positive for the coalition...".

How to assess the central contention, that life has got better for the majority of Iraqis? One would have thought that the removal of sanctions and the opening of trade had something to do with this - both attainable without war. This is another flaw with the utilitarian stance. Judging an action by its outcome precludes any discussion as to whether other courses might have led to similar outcomes with perhaps less disastrous immediate effects. Removing the cruel burden of sanctions from the Iraqis, allowing them food and medicine, facilitating the revival of Iraqi civil society (which, as the post-war record shows, was remarkably resilient) and pursuing the diplomatic paths open to reducing Saddam's capacity either to threaten the world or his own people would have been the option of any government genuinely dedicated to the well-being of Iraqis.

And finally, this. One thing the opinion poll underscored, which I have pointed out before, is that no result will settle this argument. When Iraqis said in their overwhelming numbers that they considered the US motive for invading Iraq to be connected either to a desire for oil, or to help Israel, which of the warniks considered that debate settled? When a poll showed that only 15% of Iraqis considered the occupation army a force for liberation, did the Cruise Missile Liberals recant? And now that they indicate their opposition to the occupation, how many warniks think they have got this right? I'll quote myself, since noone else is saying this:

"[W]hat is the value of these opinion polls in terms of deciding what we think about the invasion and occupation of Iraq? ...

If Iraqi wants and needs are paramount in Washington and were at the fore of considerations as to whether war should be waged on Iraq, then what opinion polls did they consult to validate their occupation? It was impossible to know what Iraqis were thinking, although I think it's fair to say they were at the very least trepidatious about yet another foreign intervention into their country. They could have asked the ex-pats, but it seems that the only ones who were prepared to support the war were those already in the employ of the CIA (Chalabi and his bande a parte). They certainly didn't consult Arab opinion.

In addition, those who adduce these polls as evidence for their claim that Iraqis were crying out for occupation all too easily dismiss the other half of the population. We knew before the war, and we now have empirical proof provided by the pollsters, that the Iraqi public is significantly divided over the invasion and occupation of their country. That it is so divided is perhaps remarkable. But since we know that both the antiwar coalition and the warniks can cite a group of Iraqis who validate their arguments, isn't it a piece of intellectual subterfuge to duck behind the nearest Iraqi who supports you?"

To isolate this war, and to pretend it can only be judged on the narrow parameters set by those who waged it is to do serious violence to the truth:

"The War on Terror, in both its proximate effects and theoretical explication, is a war for global domination - not by a benign hegemon (a "behemoth with a conscience" as Kagan calls it), but by a self-interested, hypocritical and violent state with a history of support for Third World Fascism. It must be opposed for what it is, not for what opinion polls say about it."