A few notes and update on the last post. posted by Richard Seymour

Alphonse is splendid. From thoughts on Islamophobia & Edward Said to Goethe's theory of colour, Alphonse ranges over contemporary debates with a fine combination of literary flair and theoretical competence. Don't let the mandarin tone and content put you off, it is a generous read. (Alphonse has responded with a becoming blush and a beautiful speech that occurs in Tony Kushner's wonderful plays Angels in America and Slavs!).

US journalist Tim Shorrock has an excellent post on the Bush administration's attempts to restore full military ties with the Indonesian government. He has finally, it seems, sorted out his blog format, and everything looks fabulously neat and tidy. Please pay a visit to the man.

Doug Ireland has a cautionary post for naive leftists who might be taken in by the fraud, charlatan and anti-Semite, David Icke. It seems that the lizard-gazer had taken a liking to one of Doug's posts and assumed he agreed with the politics of the mammalist far right. I have always hated the unctuous, preening Icke, and am happy to see him get the kicking he is due.

Chris Brooke has a very nice little ditty for everyone to sing along to, while Marc Mulholland is back in the motherfucking house .

Responding to the last post, Norman Geras dissented from my presentation of his views on the war:

Come on, Vlad, you're not playing straight here. You're strongly implying that the post of mine which you link to says there can only have been one reasonable view about the war. But it doesn't say that. Brad DeLong already tried to pin that one on me, and I answered him here .

Re-read the post of mine that you link to; read my reply to Brad DeLong. No, you don't agree with my positions. But don't suggest I deny the possibility of legitimate disagreements on the left about the war.

To which I responded that my implication was no more than what was implied in the original post from Normblog that I linked to, which was that Norm believed there was only one morally reputable view on the war, (approvingly citing a suggestion from Kamm to that effect). Norm responded that his point had still not been met, and that he hadn't actually said that. So, here I am.

To be fair to Norm, what he actually says is this:

There was no persuasive moral case against the Iraq war. There were creditable moral reasons for entertaining doubts about it.

Which then becomes this (inter a great deal of alia):

There was no moral case against the Iraq war, though there were creditable moral reasons for having doubts about the moral case for it.

He does not specifically say that there is no morally reputable case against the war; he does say that one can have morally creditable doubts about it (which is not the same thing as there being a morally creditable antiwar position). It is not Norm's position that one cannot be opposed to the war in morally creditable ways, but it is his position that such opposition cannot be persuasive.

Nevertheless. Geras, I feel, has not articulated the argument properly. Of course there was a morally persuasive case against the United States waging war on Iraq. It was that the Iraqis would pay a terrible and unnecessary human cost in the process of the war and would have little at the end of it to repay their patience. But what is at issue is not, if you ask me, morality. It is politics. The antiwar Left, if I may ventriloquise for it, simply does not accept that the US - with a record abroad that is worse than Saddam's domestic record - is to be entrusted with the fate of oppressed people. We do not accuse the pro-war Left (at least not all of it) of being morally deficient. It is their political analysis we question. One other remark I'd like to make is that Norm complains about the clamorous certainty of the antiwar movement, its unwillingness to concede a good case to 'the other side'. If 'the other side' is the US army, all I can say is that there are good reasons for this cynicism.