The Vicar of Cynon Valley. posted by Richard Seymour

Spot the Difference

or...

If the Vicar of Dibley is the nation’s third favourite comedy (appropriate enough, as it’s a third rate show), Ann Clwyd’s sermons ought to studied more carefully by scriptwriters and cast members alike. Comedy abounds in her latest Guardian elegy to Iraqi "freedom" , a dazzling commixture of imprecation and implication, hosannah and high praise, invocation and intimation. Clwyd, in a curious way, makes the war on Iraq seem the result of desperate appeals by Indict, the commission she headed to try and get Saddam Hussein and his band of thugs nailed in an international court of human rights, in absentia. Those attempts, she explained, were blocked by Russia, China and France – and further adds (perhaps with a Welsh cackle?) that Hussein is now to appear in court, defended by a French lawyer. French and a lawyer! Where will the perfidy end? Well, even the devil must have an advocate you know.

Clwyd leaves a lot to implication but if we leave that aside, the structure of her argument is obvious enough. She suggests that the 270 mass graves USAID claims to have discovered in Iraq provide vindication enough for the invasion of that country. USAID is not a non-governmental organisation, but a body of the US government, so perhaps we might treat those claims with some scepticism. Nevertheless, the suggestion merits consideration on its own terms - because it is, in fact, a perfect non sequitur. Presumably Clwyd would allow that there are important questions of agency, of motive, of means and method, and of the alternatives. These have all been outlined in ample detail by critics of the war, and I won’t repeat this beyond suggesting that one way to stop the suffering of Iraqis would have been to stop contributing to it. An end to the sanctions may well have given the Iraqis enough medication, food and comfort to develop and nurture their own civil society opposition to the regime. Human Rights Watch has suggested that there was a steady and marked decline in the level of internal repression in Iraq through the Nineties which disqualified, in their view, any contention that the bombing of Iraq was a humanitarian war. And, why not, the withdrawal of sanctions and the release of aid could have been tied to democratic reforms, just as human rights improvements are tied to EU entry for Turkey. No. Of course not. We can never negotiate with dictators (except when we do) and anyone who says otherwise is an appeaser. One might also note in passing the curious logic that says the discovery of crimes committed in the past with ample support from the West may retroactively legitimise an invasion by the West.

"Most Iraqis now see the moral and political imperative for the war as overwhelming", Clwyd avers. This is an interesting fabrication, since it suggests that even if Iraqis were never consulted, their concerns never actually discussed in the Pentagon and the War Room, the idea that they "now see" the justice of it validates imperialist aggression. Perhaps Clwyd will also make similarly imaginative use of those same polls to suggest that “most Iraqis now see that the Zionist Crusader alliance is a corrupt alien occuper whose main candidate for President has less credibility than Saddam Hussein”. Of course, “most Iraqis” have never communicated anything of the sort that Clwyd suggests. The much-touted poll for the BBC showed the Iraqi public evenly split on whether the invasion had been a humiliation or a liberation. And of the 48% who said that overall the invasion had been worth it, half said the invasion was "somewhat right" and the other half said it had been "completely right". Not exactly "overwhelming", then.

Clwyd is most entertaining when playing ventriloquist. "The Kurds remind us" that WMDs were a conventional tool of repression for Saddam, which he had used more than 200 times and they had "every expectation" that they would be used again. I wonder if these expectations developed before or after Jalal Talabani kissed Saddam Hussein on the cheek? Before or after Massoud Barzani invited Saddam into his turf to kill his opponents in the PUK? And where are these WMDs now that we’re on the subject? Whatever happened to that "human shredder" , Ann? (Interestingly, Ann checked that latter story with Paul Wolfowitz and was told it was a "spot-on piece". She was even invited to go talk to him about it, which she did).



The crimes of Saddam are energetically built up, constructed into a vast apparatus of demonology so that no doubt may remain as to what the absence of war has meant. "The regime cost the lives of at least two million people through its wars and its internal oppression", Clwyd tells us. Well, let her hang by her own rope, because the logical corrollary of this is that other regimes, responsible for far worse loss of life through war and repression, ought to be toppled from without. A UN force, for example, could overthrow the US government, with the territory secured by mercenary bands working with foreign armies. Resistance could be attributed to loyalty to the old regime, or "fascism" – accurately enough, since there would unquestionably be those elements powerfully at work in any resistance to the occupation. No. Don’t be silly. We don’t apply the same standards to them as we do to ourselves.

Most importantly of all, Iraq is now "free". In less than a hundred days, Iraq will be in the hands of Iraqis. By which we ought to mean, Iraq will be in the hands of a puppet government, a government of quislings and collaborators, a government of pullovers and pushovers. The Kurds, she says, are no longer to be driven from Mosul and Kirkuk – I’m happy to defer to the future on that one. For, just as much as the pro-war liberals enthuse about "liberated" Iraq, the soldiers on the ground can report a daily, non-stop wave of rocket/shell/bomb attacks. Most of these go unreported. Only when a few soldiers are killed or perhaps a massacre goes down in the city centre are we entitled to know about it. The IGC discusses the implementation of Shari’a law, of federalisation, of Clause 24, and Iraqis are left to puzzle over how much they will have left to vote on if and when elections come.

Clwyd's touching faith in US power would merit an essay of itself, but as I mentioned Wolfowitz before, allow me just to sample one conversation of hers with The Guardian on a conversation between herself and the Vulcan:

"What came out during that discussion is that Mr Wolfowitz himself had been a campaigner on Iraq since the end of the 1970s and that human rights in Iraq was a major concern of his - which I'd never realised before, obviously. I had a very interesting hour and a quarter of conversation with him, on Afghanistan, and also on Israel-Palestine."

This would certainly come as a bit of a shock to his employers in Washinton. From 1977 to 1980, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs, where he helped create the force that later became the United States Central Command. He then spent years as head of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff (1981-82), before becoming Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (1982-86) and finally Ambassador to Indonesia (1986-89). In the latter post, he oversaw US support for human rights atrocities being carried out by the Suharto junta - a regime every bit as bloody as Saddam's. She also claims he's a bit of a wet on Israel-Palestine. (See pic below). But Clwyd is not, at any rate, very choosy about where she garners political support from. Cynical politicians, drenched in blood, flash her a smile and a cheque and she's happy. In 1997, her organisation pocketed $3m from the US Congress to pursue its cause - on account of an Iraqi Liberation Act pushed by some of the same people who had rained misery on the Iraqis for years. Clwyd also found that Donald Rumsfeld had "a great line in self-deprecation" - which I suppose you'd have to have if you happen to have shook hands with a dictator whose abuses you're now pretending to be worked up about.



Naturally, no canard is eschewed in the service of Clwyd’s war, and the Rwandan genocide makes an appearance to warn against the evils of non-intervention. (Curiously, she never mentions the Congo). Noone, surely, doubts that this cruel negligence should never be repeated? I have my doubts about the ability of a Western force to adequately handle a civil war of any kind – the record in Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo is not encouraging. But, fortunately, I don’t have to tender such a tough judgment since no such similarity exists. Genocide involves the attempted extermination of a race, ethnicity or nationality through premeditated slaughter. This accusation may have been levelled at the Ba'athist regime in 1988 when many human rights groups did refer to the massacre of Kurds as genocide, but not in 2003. No matter, for Rwanda, and cases like it, bespeak the need to end the over-riding status of national sovereignty in international law. A new UN, Clwyd says, is needed that can act in the face of atrocity, and curtail human rights abuses where they emerge.

Would that we had come so far. Would that the UN was ever likely to become a reliable agency for freedom, human rights and all of the other lovely epithets Clwyd invokes in the service of Bush Almighty. But perhaps what she means is a UN that will not attempt to thwart the benign ventures of her boss and mentor, the Prime Minister. For what Clwyd’s article boils down to is an off-key hymn ripped out of the PM’s book of praise. The devil is identified, as are his minions and his appeasers (France, Russia, the tolerance of "liberal opinion"), while God is only known through those acting on his behalf in the Whitehouse and Downing Street. And, what’s more, for all the talk of Honest Ann being manipulated by people unworthy of her good name, the way she argues displays a cynicism and a dishonesty characteristic of the Hitchens-led wing of neophytic imperialists. Clwyd has forfeited her right to claim she argues in good faith by her wilful distortion of facts, her amplification of untested claims and her omission of central facts. Pretending to speak for Iraqis, she speaks only for Bush and Blair. Making great fist out of her reputation for compassion and dissent, she makes the case for cold-hearted disregard for the victims of our crimes, and absolute conformity with it. Pack her off to Dibley, I say. Let her placate the locals with her soothing hymns and platitudes.