Love to Johann Hari... "Tough Love", Of Course. posted by Richard Seymour

It’s all over, bar the shooting. John Simpson, the BBC’s man in Baghdad, is rarely comfortable without a flak jacket around his estimable girth and the ringing of distant bullets in his ears. He evinces such intimidating worldliness that when he and his camera crew were fired on and seriously injured by US jets during the first phase of the war on Iraq, he was able to flash his glittering eyes at the camera and announce that it was no more than a scratch. Such is his comportment on the news of late. Laconically, he explains that the situation (in Iraq) is really quite calm. There is sporadic gunfire, but nothing like a few days ago. People may be intimidated by the recent spate of kidnappings, but it’s nothing he can’t handle. The ebullient Mr Simpson is inured to war and turmoil, and one imagines blasts of shrapnel that could down a rhinoceros bouncing off his leathery hide.


"It's all pretty quiet, really."

I recall similar optimism about a year ago when Simpson appeared on Ruby Wax’s morning BBC show (in an indecent moment, the Beeb decided that daytime television could also be entertaining). He described Afghanistan’s recovery following the American ouster of the crazy Caliphs of Kabul. Would the Taliban make a resurgence, Ruby wondered, eyes agleam with fear of the bhurka-botherers. No! John laughed, with demonic mirth. They’ve gone. Like post-war Germany, no one has ever been a Talib, no one knows one, and few would deign to say they’d met one on the flight to Kashmir. He then recounted a surreal, but traumatic encounter with make-up wearing Taliban fighters who clacked toward him on high heels, pointing Kalashnikov rifles. Women wore the burlap sacks while their theocrat masters wore the eyeliner and spike heels, brandishing weapons and mascara as certain San Francisco dwellers are known to do. And suddenly, with a magical poof, they had disappeared into a thousand tanning salons and manicurists.

The Taliban, of course, are not gone. Instead, they fight pitch battles for control of the country with the old warlords, the very same who made the Taliban seem like a good idea in the first place. The lesson was clear. Words like “stability” are always relative terms, especially when uttered by someone who drifts to sleep to the gentle lullaby of conflagration. I feared a similar Panglossian streak had befallen Johann Hari until his recent confessional for The Independent. As it transpires, Hari has been tortured by doubt and worry, like a lapsed Catholic - he is nothing if not reflective. Hari reports that his decision to support a US invasion was consolidated in Kerbala in 2002, where he witnessed some of the bizarre cruelty of Saddam’s power. (I recall him telling an ITV news magazine show that he had known Iraqis who were ready to commit suicide if the war didn't come soon. I hope he knew a few who now no longer have that choice.) Having formerly believed that Bush was on the imperial road to Damascus, paved with malign intent, he now believed that liberation worked in mysterious ways. Whatever the motives, war would bring peace, and occupation would bring emancipation. Come 2004, the citizens of Kerbala are hearkening to a new redemption song. Armed and blessed, the Shi’ites of Iraq are belatedly giving Bush his devoutly wished for uprisings. Hari is aghast. The exact same square in which he had been touched by epiphany is now the scene of riot. The level of security and welfare is just south of that in Beirut during the wild heyday of Israeli expansionism.


Johann Hari: Glum.

Hari confesses his doubts to some Iraqi friends, ex-pats working for the Iraqi Prospect Group . One of them, a “feisty” lass, admits to similar feelings but cheerfully dispenses a pat formula for Hari to put in his column. You see, supporting the invasion doesn’t necessitate support for every US concoction and confection in Iraq. It has been, says Hari’s friend, an ABC in how to breed terrorists. One may be angered, depressed, appalled by what the United States has done to Iraq since emancipation yet still support the invasive surgery that cut out the cancer. Since the Iraqi Prospect Organisation was, according to Hari, "set up to convince the world that the Iraqi people wanted and needed Saddam's regime to be overthrown, even if that meant an invasion" and to "persuade people that the anti-war movement did not speak for the Iraqis or Kurdish people" it is not difficult to sympathise with this ideological gesture.

Would that it was so simple. Unfortunately for the imperialist internationalists of the liberal press, the consequences of this invasion were predictable to all but the congenitally purblind. The uneasy separation of motive from outcome, which Hari blithely assumes in theory, is inoperable in practise. Hari is disgusted by the extremist neo-liberalism being imposed on Iraq – the same, he notes, which has decimated much of Latin America and Africa. But did not the aggressors announce this intention quite plainly (hidden in plain view, as it were)? Hari is depressed by tales of US brutality in Iraq – should he really be cheering this on? He would like to say he doesn’t have to, but I’m afraid it is a well-established hallmark of imperial occupiers that they exert brutal authority over conquered territory if the population is not sufficiently compliant. These lessons were available in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia – the crucial difference being that there hasn’t been much of a resistance of any kind to the occupiers in these countries. Hari’s favoured outcome of a peaceful, post-war Iraq depends on Iraqi servitude.


Stay In Line, Motherfuckers.

Hari then stuns us with some “facts” which he hopes will save him from absurdity. No chance. He cites a claim from the Human Rights Centre in Khadimiyah that Saddam Hussein would have killed 70,000 people in Iraq over the next year if he had remained in power. They’ve found documents, you see. And since the occupiers have not managed to kill a total of 70,000 people over the last year, lives have been saved. Apparently, Saddam sat in his palaces, surrounded by courtiers, and with evil cackling crossed out names from the census. Further, extensive records were kept on who was to be murdered this year. We're in doubting mode, and strange to relate, I doubt Hussein’s murderous state catalogued its own sins, much less recorded exact figures for intended killings over the next year. I further doubt that if this figure is a statistical projection it has anything beyond speculative validity. I'm not saying that 70,000 is above Saddam's touch. But it would seem to contradict a trend toward diminishing human rights violations noted by Human Rights Watch recently. And it would certainly be a conspicuous jump on the previous year. (I did e-mail Johann while composing this article and asked him if there was any way of reading a first-hand report, or even an explication of these figures in some depth. He repeated that the figures had been "calculated by going through the newly opened Ba'athist archives". I had similar trouble getting answers out of John Sweeney when he made outlandish claims about Iraq's dead babies - he invited me to visit Iraq, which I took to be somewhat in the spirit of the spider inviting the fly to supper.) Still, taking the statistics at face value offers no help at all. Even if it is true, and "lives have been saved" in that dilute sense, we have yet to see what awaits us. It took a day for the US forces to kill approximately 400 in Fallujah - and the scary thing is that records are made to be broken. The trouble with utilitarianism, especially in such a heavy-handed guise, is that we are never done with consequences. The reductio ad absurdum of such a stance is the vapid phrase-mongering of Chairman Mao's CCCP chum Chou En-Lai who, asked about the outcome of the French Revolution, said "It is too soon to tell" .

Hari’s extreme utilitarianism sets him up for yet another pratfall. He reminds us of opinion polls taken in Iraq in which a majority of Iraqis say that their lives have improved since the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He suggests that the polls cannot be blighted by public apprehension of the coalition, forcing them to attenuate their criticisms of the new imperial masters because, after all, they do say a lot of bad things about the coalition. It would be odd if conditions didn’t improve somewhat upon the release of strangling sanctions. And, it is true that colonial despotism is more liberal than Ba’athist tyranny - sometimes. These axiomatic truths, Hari says, ought to be confronted by the anti-war Left. Of the former one need only say that it is over a decade too late. Of the latter, one is inclined to wonder if Iraqis might not have been better placed to liberate themselves in more propitious circumstances had the US not blocked their insurgency in 1991, then subjected them to a genocidal sanctions regime (quite on purpose, as DIA documents reveal).


Liberation.

Hari says that only 15% of Iraqis support an immediate end to the occupation. Those who marched to End the Occupation Now, he says, are supported by only 15% of Iraqis. He got this little canard from Harry’s Place, where he occasionally romps. True, some Iraqis would prefer the troops to stay until June 30th, or until security is achieved. He does not mention that most Iraqis oppose the planned long-term military occupation, or that in their overwhelming numbers they say the best way to achieve security – the number one priority – is to hand over power to an elected, accountable Iraqi government. (Not the IGC which, an Iraqi tells me, is “rotten to the bore” with corrupt nonentities with less credibility than Saddam Hussein, as Hari’s polls also reveal). But Hari is mistaken about the objection to polling evidence. It isn’t that Iraqis are simply afraid the answer negatively. It is that the poll involves a conditional – namely, the successful invasion and occupation of Iraq. Retrospective opinion polls are not a particularly good way to judge the merits of a war. Hari’s devout fidelity to what he selects as genuine Iraqi opinion becomes quite comical as he ends his confessional-cum-triumphal.

Most Iraqis, he says, don’t want the occupation to end right away. They do want a democratic Iraqi government. They don’t want Muqtadr. But they’d sooner not see him killed either. So, Hari tailors his opinion to fit theirs – or rather, tailors theirs to fit his. He speaks for “most Iraqis”. “Most Iraqis” speak through him. The war has generated good consequences, which over-ride the bad (“accentuate the positive!”). Motives are irrelevant. The occupation should hang in there, ride out the (desert) storm, and hand over the government to a free Iraq. Unfortunately, to draw on a meteorological metaphor, the tornado engulfing Iraq is the result of two fronts colliding. One must vanquish the other. Remaining in Iraq (indefinitely, it now seems) is unlikely to mean anything other than the annihilation of US opponents with extreme force – a fact which court ideologists like Hari must perforce avoid acknowledging. If only I had “doubts” as vanquishable as Hari’s! Like the bewitched Hansel, he takes many wonderful and frightening paths through the woods only to arrive back at the same damn gingerbread house.