Geras vs Hitchens. posted by Richard Seymour

The other day, Norman Geras raged at a "revealing" sentence in a Guardian leader:

For me, in any case, the most revealing component in the above passage is the claim that:

"The US and Britain are rightly held up to a higher standard of behaviour..."

Oh really? Why is that, then? Since what we're talking about here is the little matter of respecting the dignity of persons, not abusing them, not violating their bodily or mental integrity, not torturing them, not randomly targeting them outside the context of legitimate means of warfare, and so forth - a matter in which there are universal standards codified in the laws of warfare and in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, amongst other legal instruments - why are the US and Britain not just to be held to the same standard as everybody else, a high one indeed, peremptory, inviolable? What this argument unwittingly reveals in the thinking of the leader writer is the double standard regularly to be found in the pages of the Guardian.

In his latest article (on the torture), Christopher Hitchens gives an answer (though not directed at the Norm):

If anyone wanted to argue that torture is a matter of routine in many of the countries whose official media now express such shock, they would have to argue by way of double standards. This case would collapse at once and of its own weight if the standard was to become a single one, or if one torturer became an excuse for another. This point doesn't completely apply to the media themselves, who have yet to show the video execution of an Italian civilian kidnapped by Iraqi jihadists, or indeed many other lurid atrocities. But there's no hypocrisy in holding self-proclaimed liberators to a higher standard.

If this reveals anything, I don't know what it is. My own view is that perhaps the Norm is right on this one. Clues, anyone?

UPDATE: I finally got round to noticing this on Norman Geras' blog, which is a rebuke to Hitchens' logic. I have to hand the case to him, although it does seem to me that Hitchens' championing the argument at least demonstrates that there is no anti-war sentiment attached to The Guardian line - I'd have thought the opposite, in fact. Moreover, I have to wonder about this:

One might try, I suppose, to give the suggestion an uncontroversial interpretation by taking it to mean simply that we should hold the US and Britain to a higher standard than was actually observed by Saddam Hussein's regime. But such a reading of it backfires horribly. The US and Britain have been operating according to a higher standard than that, but what the Abu Ghraib revelations demonstrate is that the standard hasn't been anywhere near good enough.

The US and Britain have pounded tens of thousands of people to an early grave. If that is a higher standard than was actually observed by Saddam Hussein's regime, it is only because there is nothing supererogatory in it (until recently). It is purely instrumental violence. (I don't accept for a second that it had some virtuous goal attached to it). Also because the scale of "coalition" violence has a long way to go before it matches Saddam's (which most coalition supporters share responsibility for). However, if the best that we can say for the "coalition" is that it is not quite as bad as Saddam, I must say it is a miserable defense and a miserable position for supporters of the "liberation" to be in - as Geras acknowledges.