Dinner party imperialists. posted by Richard Seymour

Parse the following :

Iraq is the bellwether state. It's the only Muslim country in the Middle East with a chance to choose its own destiny. Baathism will never come back. The hated ancien regime couldn't be any more discredited than it already is. But Iraqis may decide that after decades of secular totalitarianism they want to swing the other way into the arms of religious totalitarians. Moqtada al Sadr's Shi'ite insurgency was a bad omen. Here we go, I thought. Iraqis who don't know any better think Iran is the way to go.

I'm not going to comment on it except to say that it is by way of a preview into the purview of Michael J Totten, a 'liberal' blogger and columnist on the other side of the Atlantic. I put the word liberal in scare quotes because although the usual fixtures of dead-centre post-Cold War liberalism are evident, he does link to a rather dubious hard right propaganda website . But aside from that, like I say, the cynosures of centrist liberalism punctuate his text with tic-like frequency.

To the point. Here is a snippet from his report of a dinner party he had with Christopher Hitchens and some pro-occupation Iraqis:

Christopher Hitchens said to Ghassan Atiyyah: “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power.” And of course he was right. We didn’t invade Iraq so we could midwife the birth of yet another despicable tyranny. “One man, one vote, one time” isn’t anything remotely like a democracy.

But Atiyyah would have none of that. He exploded in furious rage. “So you’re my colonial master now, eh?!” You have to understand – this man’s voice really carries.

Suddenly, Atiyyah did have defenders at the table. I could see that coming in the shocked expressions on the faces of the other Iraqis when they heard what Hitchens said. Ahman al Rikaby, intriguingly, was an exception. He just looked at Atiyyah with a cold and sober stoicism. But Hitchens had a defender, too. He had me.

“I agree with Christopher,” I said. “We didn’t invade Iraq to let it turn into another Iran.” I knew damn well all the Iraqis at the table were staunch opponents of religious fascism. This shouldn’t have been a point of contention. But, boy, was it ever.

“Who the hell are you?” Atiyyah said to Hitchens as if I weren’t the last one to speak. “Some Brit who lives in New York!”

“I beg your pardon, sir, but it wasn’t up to me where I was born,” Hitchens said.

“What do you mean when you say we?” Hassan Mneimneh said to me.

“I mean the US and Britain,” I said, “along with – hopefully – everyone here at this table.”

“Who are you to tell us what to do!?”

Totten smells the burning sulphur, and intervenes:

“First of all, it is our business if Iraqis or anyone else wants to put a Taliban government into power. People like that murdered thousands in our country and thousands more in countries all over the world - including Iraq. Second, I can assure that you Christopher and I would do everything we possibly could to prevent any Taliban-like force from taking power in our own country, as well as in yours. This has nothing to do with us telling you what to do and everything to do with fighting fascism wherever in the world it exists. And as long as Iraqis aren’t our enemy, I don’t care what they do. It’s none of my business. I certainly don’t want to rule over you or anyone else.”

There's more, and a rather sickening moment ensues in which Totten, after agonising about whether these Iraqis could tell the difference between American military might and past imperialists, emotes about how "They are not servile people. They will never, ever, be anyone’s puppets..." No, they aren't servile people, but they won't after all be in charge of their own future if Hitchens gets his way.

I'm less interested in Totten's post-prandial bloviations than the situation which prompted them, but I will note that Iran, which is the more relevant point of comparison, has had nothing to do, as far as we know, with terrorism in the United States. In fact, as near as I can tell, it was a non-state formation (dubbed 'Al Qaeda' by US intelligence) that carried out the attacks on American soil on September 11th 2001.

However, there are a couple of points to make about that exchange. Hitchens and Totten both speak as if they do so on behalf of the United States government, although I sort of feel they don't have much of a say in these matters. There will, very probably, be some kind of Islamic jurisprudence in Iraq - which has been a mainstay of political Islam for some years. There may well be a government formed in Iraq which is pro-Iranian and inclined to derive its legitimacy from religion (although, much like in Iran, its decisions will be driven by more quotidian concerns).

Since Hitchens and Totten are not ventriloquising on behalf of President Bush, we have to deal with their asseverations as recommendations. Hitchens recommends that, if Iraqis vote for a theocratic government, the US military should step in and deny the government-elect access to power. Does he know what he is recommending? The resistance in Iraq now is a storm in a tea-cup compared to the tsunami of violence and civil strife that would be aroused if Iraqis saw that they were to be subjected to permanent occupation. (Interesting that Totten references the political and military investment that the US has already made in Iraq - 'we didn't come this far to...'. Lesson one of imperialism: the more one kills and maims, the more one is obliged to kill and maim). I confidently expect that Hitchens is replaying the Algerian civil war in his head, in which the military preempted a likely electoral success by the Fronte Islamique du Salut (they had already done exceptionally well in first round of elections) and promulgated martial law. The FIS was banned in 1992, and the subsequent civil war claimed 100,000 lives. Hitchens has said that "if we hadn't won that war, and thousands of refugees had fled to France as a result, Jean Marie Le Pen would probably be the President of France today." 'We' again. Suffice to note that quite a few refugees did make it to France, which had supported the junta, and some of them brought nightmarish explosions to the capital.

There are lessons in that, and lessons in this as well: someone who prefers dictatorship to democracy because of the risks that democracy entails, and would rather see civil war and mass murder than chance anything but strictly secular governance is not exactly what I would call an opponent of fanaticism. I'll put it no more strongly than that. There is an inherent connection between national independence and individual autonomy; in colonial situations, the self-determination of peoples is contiguous with the self-determination of people. It is a sad reminder of how far we have fallen back that it is necessary to disinter these elementary lessons of Empire.