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Friday, April 29, 2005

Kennedy talks tough. posted by Richard Seymour

I'm not a fan of the Liberal Democrats, which Dead Men Left aptly describes as "yellow Tories" , and their position on the war was remarkably opportunistic. There are many other reasons why I won't be voting Lib Dem, the planned abolition of the right to strike for key workers being among them, but that made Charles Kennedy's performance on Question Time last night all the more surprising. I've just caught the clip on the BBC, which you can watch here .

Kennedy is not a cunning speaker, and is not up to dealing with heckles and hectoring. David Dimbleby was surprisingly hostile at a number of points, especially given his own support for the Lib Dems. Yet, after batting away some ubiquitous queries about council tax and his own apparent bafflement about Lib Dem economic policy, Kennedy dealt with questions about the war with unusual robustness. For instance, Dimbleby - when he saw that Kennedy's remarks were going down well - tried the "If you had your way..." gambit, as if the war was the only way to bring down Saddam. Kennedy replied, no, not necessarily. After all, the Iraq Survey Group had been into Iraq, studied it closely and found that the regime was ripe for implosion. It would have been sufficient for Iraqis to see how weak Saddam's weapons systems were. He had no more chemical weapons to dump on his people, and his army was a shambles. The Emperor, thus found without his clothes on, would in all likelihood have rapidly fallen on the sword of popular insurrection. Similarly, asked about the prospect of removing troops from Iraq, with the usual complaint that doing so would result in more Iraqi deaths (tenner to anyone who can tell me the ratio of troops to Iraqi deaths at the moment), Kennedy was stoical. Yes, he would withdraw the troops after a year (why not now?), and no it was unlikely to result in increased deaths, since the main cause of civil strife at the moment was the presence of the occupation. Further, the British government had no cause to be talking about civilian deaths in Iraq, since it could not even be bothered to take a proper count of them. "And it's not just that I disagreed with the Prime Minister on the policy here - it's that I'm ashamed of what this government has done."

Tough words from a walking jelly. It is a pity that Kennedy had none of that moral fibre while the war was taking place, and that he only finds it again now that the war is so unpopular and Blair in such trouble for it. And Kennedy admitted that he had favoured the interventions in Afghanistan and Kosovo which could have been exploited for all sorts of inconsistencies, (of which Dimbleby pointed out one or two).

And, of course, the liberal infatuation with 'international law' ought to be reproved by all principled anti-imperialists. I finally picked up a copy of China Mieville's book Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2002) yesterday, the rough contents of which I have regurgitated on this blog more than once. I don't want to reiterate too much, but what do the UN-fetishists say about Haiti, where a UN-endorsed multilateral hit-squad took the country over after the US kidnapped Aristide, and where the imposed government of neoliberals and former genocidaires has been ruthlessly murdering its opponents with US-supplied weapons ? Imagine a mission that has been conducted with the full mandate and protection of international law that also happens to be a classic imperialist venture.

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