Basra: withdrawal symptoms posted by Richard Seymour

Already, the stupid establishment consensus is settling, coagulating around public discourse and choking the life out of it. You can't listen to the television news for five minutes without being informed, yet again, that withdrawal is now a no-no. Ever-present and ready-to-hand are a weird collection of spokespeople called 'security analysts', who will repeat in a twenty-second soundbite that as security is deteriorating it would be delinquent to leave now. If the counsel of the antiwar crowd is listened to, they aver, some awful thing would ensue. Civil war, partition, apocalypse now or in the near future.

And yet, no one can bring themselves to ask what on earth two SAS men were doing shooting at Iraqi policemen. Only Iraqis have anything to explain - how dare they not give our boys back when ordered to do so? Never mind for now that the client regime in Baghdad has not confirmed that any such order was given, and that the claim originates from the MoD. Official 'facts' are being created on air by a mass of pundits. The BBC's Paul Wood, standing outside the Ministry of Defense, tells us that "everyone agrees" that the Iraqi Interior Ministry gave such an order. The same Iraqi Interior Ministry that he went on to report accused the MoD of 'acting unilaterally'. The ease with which inconsistencies can be edited out of the story or glided over without question is a tribute to the power of coercion by 'consensus'. For instance, the BBC reported MoD claims yesterday that the tanks had only rolled in 'insurgents' intervened in a negotiated handover to try to take the men. I linked to the story here. The article no longer reports this, although Google has cached it here. Dear Beeb, you might try raising the odd question or two if the government changes its story so rapidly and frequently, rather than tactfully editing it out.

But back to this withdrawal business. Let me just try an obvious point: since the invasion of Iraq, the human rights situation has deteriorated. And by 'deteriorated', I mean to say that it has plunged into the kind of grotesque barbarity that characterised Saddam at his worst. Simon Jenkins reports in today's Guardian that "more people a month are being killed than at any time since the massacres of the early 1990s". Saddam Hussein did not need death squads, naturally enough: he had ownership of a functioning state, and could simply send out his army or the mukhabarat to do his killing. The occupiers need and have used death squads, just as they have borrowed every vile method of tyranny and reshaped it in their own image. Torture, rape, the destruction of cities, the withholding of water and electricity, the use of weapons that are designed for maximum, indiscriminate killing, like cluster bombs, the fencing off of whole towns and cities, arbitrary arrests, extra-judicial executions. The list goes on. Yet some people, who should properly be furiously blushing with ungovernable shame, will still tell you that, all the same, we cannot abort the mission or surrender to the "men of violence". I'll try another obvious point, then: when Saddam Hussein was doing this, no one was in any doubt about what to make of resistance.

It is as if, to borrow an analogy, having violently raped someone you then insist that you can't withdraw because of the bloody mess you've created. And then you might say to your victim, "don't worry, dear, I shan't abandon you. I won't cut and run like the rest". If you had even more cheek than that, you might add that you were doing it for women's liberation. In for the long haul and out for the loot haul - we are expected to entrust the 'security' of Iraq to imperial pirates, liars and thieves, and we are encouraged to do so by a curious route of triangulation. That is, there is nothing too atrocious that could happen under the rubric of occupation that would not immediately become a justification for continuing it, if it were not simply ignored. And there are a troupe of formerly left-wing, well-versed casuists without whom, as Tariq Ali once remarked while reviewing a Hitchens book in the 1980s, the conservative movement wouldn't have got half as it has. Well, the apologists have shamed themselves too much, have sold their intellects too promiscuously, have contorted and lied and slandered too far, to be taken all that seriously any more. All that remains is what we can do to break this stupid consensus as it forms. This morning the newspapers carry stories of military families demanding the return of the troops. This Saturday, they will march from Parliament Square to Hyde Park to demand the same thing.