The Giggling Game. posted by Richard Seymour

I haven't had a word to say about yer man Norman Geras for some time now. I've been awaiting his promised series on why it was right to go to war with Iraq - proposed some months ago, it appears to have been put on hold. Nevertheless, we are graced with this rib-tickler :

It isn't my intention to try to catch up with the important news items I've missed, but I cannot forbear to note the verdict of the Senate investigation: that there has been a global intelligence failure. I know I haven't always put it quite so succinctly, but this, essentially, is what I've been arguing on my blog from day one. The world hasn't been very clever during the last 18 months or so. It could have rallied behind the seeing off of a monstrous and criminal regime; or, having failed to do that, at least behind the effort to rebuild a democratic Iraq in the face of a murderous insurgency. But its attention has been strangely deflected, towards just about every other possible concern. Even now, one senses a gearing up towards the re-discussion - in the nth variation - of the statement: 'So, you see, no WMD.' No, really? I hadn't heard that.

Do you see? "Global intelligence failure"? Geddit?

Well, anyway, I'm starting to wonder about the vast gulf between the quality of Norman Geras' more considered written work and that which pertains to his blog. I know we can't always be as thorough and fair as it would behoove us to be when maintaining a daily stream of more or less unfiltered commentary as well as juggling a career and various commitments. But I defy anyone to read The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, or even this and this , compare it to his blog and conclude that it really is the same mind at work.

The quoted passage is glib, enthymematic and wearisome. Suppose it is actually of some importance whether there really really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Not because it impacts very heavily on the 'humanitarian' case for going to war (although most of those who deployed such reasoning chose to buttress it with concerns of this kind, pace Hitchens and Aaronovitch), but because it really matters whether our political leaders told the truth and whether we can trust them with the disposal of such a vital task as the emancipation of an oppressed people? Indeed, if the Prime Minister and President did misrepresent the facts about Iraq, we have reason to question their motives - and since motive cannot be easily dissociated from consequence, we are entitled to wonder if the present disgrace in Iraq has anything to do with their reasons for invading. And what if "the effort to rebuild a democratic Iraq" is precisely what is being thwarted - whether intentionally or not - by the continued presence of "coalition" troops whose record, to be honest, has not been glorious.

Geras can pretend, if he must, that "the world" has not been interested in the fate of Iraq since the war, that it has been fixated only on the issues of WMDs (this, insofar as it has any purchase, has largely been because those who waged the war have been so intransigent and insistent upon their fibs); but surely he, as a mover-on , would not be wasting too much time if he pondered on the possibilities mentioned above. Perhaps the answers will divulge something of what he is moving on to.