British youth and their perception of the Iraq War
Tom Harper | 15.02.2005 18:25 | Analysis | Anti-militarism
The Iraqi elections have seemingly gone rather well and the anti-war lobby is taking a bit of a bashing from Michael Gove et al. In my experience, it was opposition to the invasion that re-politicised my generation. Is their re-awakening based on false premise?
‘Wonderful are the cleansing waters of democracy’ extolled Simon Jenkins in a Times editorial following the Iraqi elections. Indeed, one cannot be anything other than delighted that the embryonic political process went as well as it did – regardless of what one thought of the war. But with this feeling of relief comes a pang of guilt.
An episode of Newsnight broadcast on the Tuesday following the elections saw Jeremy Paxman attack Menzies Campbell, one of the leading anti-war orators and a man whose views I have admired greatly in recent years - I was virulently against New Labour’s moral imperialism. But when Paxman turned to Campbell and said: ‘If we had listened to you then these people would not be voting’, I started to question much of what I had come to believe. Worse was to follow as I found myself largely siding with the odious George Galloway who appeared on the same programme. The Respect party member also failed to revel in the democratic glory of the elections appearing almost pro-insurgent. Paxman had had enough: ‘Do you feel even the slightest unease when making political capital out of this?’ he scorned. I switched off with troubled thoughts.
I am 22 and before September 11 I was relatively apolitical. I have older siblings who are in their mid thirties and they and their friends often labelled my peers as being ‘bought-off’: the ‘Playstation generation’ muted by an age of comfortable consumerism. But then came September 11, and Iraq. Parents’ friends who had lived through the sixties counter-culture looked at me with shining eyes and predicted ‘interesting times’, and my generation sensed it too. A life of benign contentment seemed to be over.
But apparently this view is not shared by many: I recently read that New Labour’s election pollsters believe the issue is relatively trivial to most voters and is the preserve of a few ‘headbangers’. This is not the case in my experience: the unprecedented turn that Britain’s foreign policy has now taken is a topic high in youth discourse. Young adults are more political than they have been for years, as was demonstrated by the Prime Minister’s recent interview with June Sarpong and a bunch of teenagers on T4. The first questions put to Tony Blair were about failures in Iraq, before anything on licensing laws, top-up-fees and sex education.
But is the re-politicising of my generation based on false premise? Does the success of the elections mean we were right to follow the United States into Iraq?
Tom Beedham, 23, works for a political think tank in London. He says he is still left with a bad taste in the mouth.
‘The original reason we were given for going to war was that Iraq was a state-sponsor of terrorism,’ he said. ‘But this allegation couldn’t be proved and ever since the public has been in the dark over Iraq. Now we are hearing almost exactly the same rhetoric on Iran yet people recognise the greater dangers of fighting a war against an organised and well-equipped military outfit.’
‘The Hutton and Butler reports in conjunction blatantly prove that the 45 minute claim was rubbish,’ he said. ‘Butler’s summary was that the intelligence was, for want of a better word, ‘sexed-up’ by members of the intelligence service close to politicians, and that MI6 had serious doubts about its validity. The fact that this answers the question that everyone wanted Hutton to answer, instead of his very narrow analysis of Andrew Gilligan’s journalistic technique, needs to be emphasised. We were lied to. It is as simple as that.’
Whether we should really care if we were lied to or not is another matter. Some, like Michael Gove from the Times, would say that the reasons for going to war are largely immaterial. Blair simply had to get us there to spread freedom and democracy and had to use any method he could. Gove attacked the anti war lobby by saying that September 11 ‘hadn’t really changed’ liberal Britain enough. It was too sated by its own comfortable situation ‘as it proved by its opposition to the effort to change (the world) for the better’. As it was the partial truths that allowed this country to go to war one assumes that Gove readily forgives Blair for using them.
But was it just the extension of democracy and human rights that motivated the Coalition of the Willing? The war was not solely driven by rich Texan companies vying for increased access to Iraqi oilfields, and some conspiracy theorists have taken this too far. But the role of oil and US conglomerates in determining policy needs to be examined for its influence cannot be ignored.
There have been countless stories linking firms such as Halliburton and the Carlyle Group with contracts for Iraq (some were even being sold off before the invasion took place). But special mention has to go to a report published in early February 2005 by the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. It is an audit of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. It found that in just 14 months, $8.8bn was unable to be accounted for. Since then there have been reports of bribery, corruption and deliberate over-payments. George Monbiot reported in the Guardian that more than half the money the CPA was giving away did not belong to the US government but to the people of Iraq. Most of it was generated by the coalition's sales of oil.
Alan Stewart, 22, a student of hospitality management at Manchester Metropolitan University, feels the human cost of the Iraq war outweighs the benefits. ‘I don’t think that the civilian casualties justify what has happened to Iraq over the past 18 months’, he said. ‘As we are yet to really see the outcome of the elections for the Iraqi people I don’t think I’m going to change my mind.’
The point about civilian casualties is important. The Lancet published a report last October saying 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed since the invasion. The government response to this was not only incoherent but indifferent. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary both quoted numbers of 3,000 and 15,000 civilian deaths respectively when questioned about the findings; the first figure was based upon hugely contentious statistics released by the Iraqi ministry of health (who at the time recognised problems with its methodology), the second comes from the website www.iraqbodycount.net whose numbers the Ministry of Defence has scorned in the past. Furthermore, it has been reported that the Iraqi ministry of health's latest statistics show that in the last six months of 2004 coalition troops killed almost three times as many people as the insurgents did.
When one considers such evidence, it is hard not to feel mistrustful of the manner in which we have dealt with Iraq and its people. But should the manner of the invasion really bother us at all? In Stuff Happens, David Hare’s excellent play about the Iraqi invasion, a pro-war British journalist spits:
‘How spoiled, how indulged we are to discuss the manner….from what height of luxury and excess we look down to condemn the exact style in which even a little was given to those who had nothing’.
Pretty damning stuff, and a perspective that certainly made me wonder if I was wrong all along. These people are voting for the first time in fifty years, ‘no other story obtains’. I can just see the posturing of Michael Gove and others if they read this piece thus far – it fits perfectly with the ‘woolly liberal’ portrayal of the anti-war movement, hell bent on dissecting the manner of the occupation rather than trumpeting its results.
But Hare’s play, overall, is far from positive about the invasion of Iraq, and when the dangers inherent in such a policy are considered, one can also reject the notion that we were wrong all along.
The inconsistency of western foreign policy is galling and one can only wonder how its hypocrisy must endanger British interests. When questioned why he was acting in Iraq and not Zimbabwe or elsewhere, Tony Blair replied that the popular belief at the time allowed him to do so: there was a will. This is an important tenet of neo-conservative philosophy: when circumstances allow action, do not hesitate. This is trotted out in the government’s defence when questioned on coherence and consistency, they would if they could but they can’t. But Toby Pragasam, 22, a student of international public policy at University College London, highlights a problem with this.
‘The US often says that Iraq is a stepping stone and they will continue to spread “democracy” and “freedom” whenever possible,’ he said. ‘But this is rubbish: when geo-political and economic situations suit America they have no qualms about promoting corrupt regimes that diametrically oppose the values Bush’s administration supposedly upholds.’
‘Look at Bush’s State of Union speech, Iran was vilified and directly threatened with military action,’ he said. ‘But repressive states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt who defend US interests got off scott free. There was no suggestion whatsoever that either would face any consequences if they did not change.’
A Foreign Office report in November listed 52 people executed by the Saudi government in 2003. On 10th February 2005, Saudi Arabia embarked on a men-only, no-parties election. But Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest markets for British arms. One can draw their own conclusions.
One of the greatest anomalies in British foreign policy was brought to the public’s attention by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. In April 2002, a UN report concluded that Islam Karimov’s regime was guilty of ‘systematic’ torture. The same year Murray reported that the leader of the opposition, Muzafar Avazov, was boiled alive for refusing to abandon his religious convictions.
But Uzbekistan allowed the US to launch attacks against Afghanistan from its own soil. For its troubles, Uzbekistan was rewarded in 2003 personally by President Bush. Its failure to improve its human rights record should have led to a marked decrease or cessation in aid. Bush docked it a token 20%. In February 2004, Donald Rumsfeld visited Karimov and declared the two countries’ relationship as ‘strong and growing stronger’. According to the latest estimates Uzbekistan has 10,000 political prisoners. Incidentally, Murray was sacked for pointing out the incongruity in Britain’s approach to Uzbekistan compared with other countries. His exit was engineered by the Foreign Office who tried to justify the decision by bringing 18 disciplinary charges against him. All were dismissed as unfounded.
The sense of unease deepens when one ponders the historical implications of the Iraqi intervention. For years the British empire sustained itself by backing native elites keen to collaborate with the Colonial Office; the US now matches all the criteria of an imperial power despite its readiness to portray itself as otherwise. As Niall Ferguson has pointed out, how can a nation with 750 military bases in three-quarters of the countries on earth considered to be anything else? Like its British predecessor, this American empire needs its janissary politicians, hence the new breed of Washington-backed, neo-liberal politicians who have been trained and educated in the West.
This is not to say that the previous regime in Iraq was more favourable to the Iraqis or the geo-political situation. But we should not be helping to perpetuate America’s empire, for empire has no place in the world today. The calls for a global effort to end poverty are mounting and serve as a frank reminder of how appallingly at least one of the continents were treated by colonial powers in the past. As Tariq Ali pointed out recently, ‘the symbiosis of neo-liberal politics and a neo-liberal media helps reinforce the collective memory loss from which the west suffers today’. Should we therefore be waging a war that is seen by much of the world – and not just the extremists - as imperialist?
Bush and Blair have made another sizable ripple in the pool of history: the era of the ‘pre-emptive strike’. There is no denying that the UN is encountering a difficult period but its commitments to multilateralism and military force as a last resort have seen relatively little global conflict since its inception. At the Nuremberg trials Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister was charged with providing the justification for Hitler’s pre-emptive strike against Norway. This rejection of such a policy has continued throughout the post-war era. Do we really want to resurrect it?
So why should we have gone to war? We are still searching for a justification. A common validation is that Islam is resistant to democracy and this view is proferred by both sides of the political spectrum. It is this philosophy, together with the flippant refusal to learn history’s lessons which constructs the obvious reason why the war should never have happened. It is no coincidence that al-Qaida favoured belligerent Bush over compromising Kerry in the US presidential elections. The war in Iraq is fuelling the war on terror, not winning it.
In Adam Curtis’ eye-opening BBC series The Power of Nightmares, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is traced from the early 1980s. Curtis believes extremists hi-jacked Abdullah Azzam’s CIA-backed jihad against Soviet intervention into Afghanistan and spawned a more militant version. The fundamentalists were intent on rejecting all liberal concepts such as democracy (which they believed to be the fault of the west) and ushering in a Pan-Islamic conversion to the Koran as the state’s absolute law.
Their efforts were thwarted throughout the 1990s. Countries such as Algeria and Egypt rejected radical, religious regimes and by the end of the decade the movement looked to be on its last legs. It mobilised for one final attempt and struck at the heart of all they despised: democracy, freedom, civil rights. It is cruel that America can be proud she was targeted in this way. She should not be proud of her response; the success of September 11 for the extremists knows no bounds.
Since the neo-Conservative led response to September 11, the ranks of the fundamentalist movement have swollen beyond recognition. Muslims all around the world are angry about the West’s heavy-handed tactics. This is not to say that Islam rejects democracy - Indonesia and Turkey, two of the world’s largest Muslim nations, are fledgling democracies. But every time politicians and the media imply as such, another moderate will become militant. (And domestically, another vote will go to Robert Kilroy-Silk.)
Yes, what implication domestically do we have in Britain, apart from the increased threat of terrorism from abroad that the war in Iraq has created? Tom Beedham is also worried about what is happening to closer to home.
‘We now have a reduction in civil liberties without precedent,’ he said. ‘When you add this to the mix, it becomes even more unsavoury - the rights of the individual are what hold the state to account. The government seems intent on waging a war without public backing and, at the same time, launches a domestic attack on the very mechanisms which can keep them in check. It’s very worrying.’
The official line is that the security threats we face today are so challenging to society at large that the curtailment of civil rights is justified. The defence academic and former air marshal Lord Garden believes otherwise.
‘The threat of a nuclear war did not appear to generate much repressive governance in Western nations,’ he said. ‘The period of McCarthyism in the early 1950s in the United States was perhaps as extreme as reaction in democracies became, and did not persist. Today there is a long list of security challenges, but none carry the same risk of immediate global mass casualties.’
Michael Gove and others should take a closer look at the Iraqi elections. The results have not even been announced yet; the much-heralded turnout of 60% is but a figure. Debka, a pro US-Israeli website puts the turnout at closer to 40%. The Carter Centre which monitors elections worldwide, refused to send observers. Jonathan Steele’s insightful analysis of the elections in the Guardian points out a further inconsistency. During Condoleezza Rice’s recent whirlwind tour of Europe and the Middle East, she denounced Iran as ‘totalitarian’. The reason given was that candidates at one end of the political spectrum were off the ballot.
‘If Iran qualifies as totalitarian because it holds an election in which voters had only a limited choice, then the same is true of Iraq,’ he wrote. ‘Parties and movements which want an immediate end to the occupation were off the ballot.’
Tom, Alan and Toby all remain opposed to the action taken in Iraq. They all stressed that the relative success of the elections was a crumb of comfort to be taken from the last two years. But serious doubt remained.
‘I don’t know how viable a democratic process can be when it is triggered externally,’ Toby said. ‘When the wish and the means for change do not come from within I would imagine there will always be problems.’
Indeed, it seems almost Machiavellian of the west to think of democracy not as a process, but as an end. Anything goes if you eventually reach your final goal, no matter if your methods make the world a more dangerous place to live in. Seamus Milne put it succinctly in the comment pages of the Guardian: ‘As a 21st century Madame Roland might have said: “Oh democracy, what crimes are committed in your name”.’
An episode of Newsnight broadcast on the Tuesday following the elections saw Jeremy Paxman attack Menzies Campbell, one of the leading anti-war orators and a man whose views I have admired greatly in recent years - I was virulently against New Labour’s moral imperialism. But when Paxman turned to Campbell and said: ‘If we had listened to you then these people would not be voting’, I started to question much of what I had come to believe. Worse was to follow as I found myself largely siding with the odious George Galloway who appeared on the same programme. The Respect party member also failed to revel in the democratic glory of the elections appearing almost pro-insurgent. Paxman had had enough: ‘Do you feel even the slightest unease when making political capital out of this?’ he scorned. I switched off with troubled thoughts.
I am 22 and before September 11 I was relatively apolitical. I have older siblings who are in their mid thirties and they and their friends often labelled my peers as being ‘bought-off’: the ‘Playstation generation’ muted by an age of comfortable consumerism. But then came September 11, and Iraq. Parents’ friends who had lived through the sixties counter-culture looked at me with shining eyes and predicted ‘interesting times’, and my generation sensed it too. A life of benign contentment seemed to be over.
But apparently this view is not shared by many: I recently read that New Labour’s election pollsters believe the issue is relatively trivial to most voters and is the preserve of a few ‘headbangers’. This is not the case in my experience: the unprecedented turn that Britain’s foreign policy has now taken is a topic high in youth discourse. Young adults are more political than they have been for years, as was demonstrated by the Prime Minister’s recent interview with June Sarpong and a bunch of teenagers on T4. The first questions put to Tony Blair were about failures in Iraq, before anything on licensing laws, top-up-fees and sex education.
But is the re-politicising of my generation based on false premise? Does the success of the elections mean we were right to follow the United States into Iraq?
Tom Beedham, 23, works for a political think tank in London. He says he is still left with a bad taste in the mouth.
‘The original reason we were given for going to war was that Iraq was a state-sponsor of terrorism,’ he said. ‘But this allegation couldn’t be proved and ever since the public has been in the dark over Iraq. Now we are hearing almost exactly the same rhetoric on Iran yet people recognise the greater dangers of fighting a war against an organised and well-equipped military outfit.’
‘The Hutton and Butler reports in conjunction blatantly prove that the 45 minute claim was rubbish,’ he said. ‘Butler’s summary was that the intelligence was, for want of a better word, ‘sexed-up’ by members of the intelligence service close to politicians, and that MI6 had serious doubts about its validity. The fact that this answers the question that everyone wanted Hutton to answer, instead of his very narrow analysis of Andrew Gilligan’s journalistic technique, needs to be emphasised. We were lied to. It is as simple as that.’
Whether we should really care if we were lied to or not is another matter. Some, like Michael Gove from the Times, would say that the reasons for going to war are largely immaterial. Blair simply had to get us there to spread freedom and democracy and had to use any method he could. Gove attacked the anti war lobby by saying that September 11 ‘hadn’t really changed’ liberal Britain enough. It was too sated by its own comfortable situation ‘as it proved by its opposition to the effort to change (the world) for the better’. As it was the partial truths that allowed this country to go to war one assumes that Gove readily forgives Blair for using them.
But was it just the extension of democracy and human rights that motivated the Coalition of the Willing? The war was not solely driven by rich Texan companies vying for increased access to Iraqi oilfields, and some conspiracy theorists have taken this too far. But the role of oil and US conglomerates in determining policy needs to be examined for its influence cannot be ignored.
There have been countless stories linking firms such as Halliburton and the Carlyle Group with contracts for Iraq (some were even being sold off before the invasion took place). But special mention has to go to a report published in early February 2005 by the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. It is an audit of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. It found that in just 14 months, $8.8bn was unable to be accounted for. Since then there have been reports of bribery, corruption and deliberate over-payments. George Monbiot reported in the Guardian that more than half the money the CPA was giving away did not belong to the US government but to the people of Iraq. Most of it was generated by the coalition's sales of oil.
Alan Stewart, 22, a student of hospitality management at Manchester Metropolitan University, feels the human cost of the Iraq war outweighs the benefits. ‘I don’t think that the civilian casualties justify what has happened to Iraq over the past 18 months’, he said. ‘As we are yet to really see the outcome of the elections for the Iraqi people I don’t think I’m going to change my mind.’
The point about civilian casualties is important. The Lancet published a report last October saying 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed since the invasion. The government response to this was not only incoherent but indifferent. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary both quoted numbers of 3,000 and 15,000 civilian deaths respectively when questioned about the findings; the first figure was based upon hugely contentious statistics released by the Iraqi ministry of health (who at the time recognised problems with its methodology), the second comes from the website www.iraqbodycount.net whose numbers the Ministry of Defence has scorned in the past. Furthermore, it has been reported that the Iraqi ministry of health's latest statistics show that in the last six months of 2004 coalition troops killed almost three times as many people as the insurgents did.
When one considers such evidence, it is hard not to feel mistrustful of the manner in which we have dealt with Iraq and its people. But should the manner of the invasion really bother us at all? In Stuff Happens, David Hare’s excellent play about the Iraqi invasion, a pro-war British journalist spits:
‘How spoiled, how indulged we are to discuss the manner….from what height of luxury and excess we look down to condemn the exact style in which even a little was given to those who had nothing’.
Pretty damning stuff, and a perspective that certainly made me wonder if I was wrong all along. These people are voting for the first time in fifty years, ‘no other story obtains’. I can just see the posturing of Michael Gove and others if they read this piece thus far – it fits perfectly with the ‘woolly liberal’ portrayal of the anti-war movement, hell bent on dissecting the manner of the occupation rather than trumpeting its results.
But Hare’s play, overall, is far from positive about the invasion of Iraq, and when the dangers inherent in such a policy are considered, one can also reject the notion that we were wrong all along.
The inconsistency of western foreign policy is galling and one can only wonder how its hypocrisy must endanger British interests. When questioned why he was acting in Iraq and not Zimbabwe or elsewhere, Tony Blair replied that the popular belief at the time allowed him to do so: there was a will. This is an important tenet of neo-conservative philosophy: when circumstances allow action, do not hesitate. This is trotted out in the government’s defence when questioned on coherence and consistency, they would if they could but they can’t. But Toby Pragasam, 22, a student of international public policy at University College London, highlights a problem with this.
‘The US often says that Iraq is a stepping stone and they will continue to spread “democracy” and “freedom” whenever possible,’ he said. ‘But this is rubbish: when geo-political and economic situations suit America they have no qualms about promoting corrupt regimes that diametrically oppose the values Bush’s administration supposedly upholds.’
‘Look at Bush’s State of Union speech, Iran was vilified and directly threatened with military action,’ he said. ‘But repressive states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt who defend US interests got off scott free. There was no suggestion whatsoever that either would face any consequences if they did not change.’
A Foreign Office report in November listed 52 people executed by the Saudi government in 2003. On 10th February 2005, Saudi Arabia embarked on a men-only, no-parties election. But Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest markets for British arms. One can draw their own conclusions.
One of the greatest anomalies in British foreign policy was brought to the public’s attention by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. In April 2002, a UN report concluded that Islam Karimov’s regime was guilty of ‘systematic’ torture. The same year Murray reported that the leader of the opposition, Muzafar Avazov, was boiled alive for refusing to abandon his religious convictions.
But Uzbekistan allowed the US to launch attacks against Afghanistan from its own soil. For its troubles, Uzbekistan was rewarded in 2003 personally by President Bush. Its failure to improve its human rights record should have led to a marked decrease or cessation in aid. Bush docked it a token 20%. In February 2004, Donald Rumsfeld visited Karimov and declared the two countries’ relationship as ‘strong and growing stronger’. According to the latest estimates Uzbekistan has 10,000 political prisoners. Incidentally, Murray was sacked for pointing out the incongruity in Britain’s approach to Uzbekistan compared with other countries. His exit was engineered by the Foreign Office who tried to justify the decision by bringing 18 disciplinary charges against him. All were dismissed as unfounded.
The sense of unease deepens when one ponders the historical implications of the Iraqi intervention. For years the British empire sustained itself by backing native elites keen to collaborate with the Colonial Office; the US now matches all the criteria of an imperial power despite its readiness to portray itself as otherwise. As Niall Ferguson has pointed out, how can a nation with 750 military bases in three-quarters of the countries on earth considered to be anything else? Like its British predecessor, this American empire needs its janissary politicians, hence the new breed of Washington-backed, neo-liberal politicians who have been trained and educated in the West.
This is not to say that the previous regime in Iraq was more favourable to the Iraqis or the geo-political situation. But we should not be helping to perpetuate America’s empire, for empire has no place in the world today. The calls for a global effort to end poverty are mounting and serve as a frank reminder of how appallingly at least one of the continents were treated by colonial powers in the past. As Tariq Ali pointed out recently, ‘the symbiosis of neo-liberal politics and a neo-liberal media helps reinforce the collective memory loss from which the west suffers today’. Should we therefore be waging a war that is seen by much of the world – and not just the extremists - as imperialist?
Bush and Blair have made another sizable ripple in the pool of history: the era of the ‘pre-emptive strike’. There is no denying that the UN is encountering a difficult period but its commitments to multilateralism and military force as a last resort have seen relatively little global conflict since its inception. At the Nuremberg trials Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister was charged with providing the justification for Hitler’s pre-emptive strike against Norway. This rejection of such a policy has continued throughout the post-war era. Do we really want to resurrect it?
So why should we have gone to war? We are still searching for a justification. A common validation is that Islam is resistant to democracy and this view is proferred by both sides of the political spectrum. It is this philosophy, together with the flippant refusal to learn history’s lessons which constructs the obvious reason why the war should never have happened. It is no coincidence that al-Qaida favoured belligerent Bush over compromising Kerry in the US presidential elections. The war in Iraq is fuelling the war on terror, not winning it.
In Adam Curtis’ eye-opening BBC series The Power of Nightmares, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is traced from the early 1980s. Curtis believes extremists hi-jacked Abdullah Azzam’s CIA-backed jihad against Soviet intervention into Afghanistan and spawned a more militant version. The fundamentalists were intent on rejecting all liberal concepts such as democracy (which they believed to be the fault of the west) and ushering in a Pan-Islamic conversion to the Koran as the state’s absolute law.
Their efforts were thwarted throughout the 1990s. Countries such as Algeria and Egypt rejected radical, religious regimes and by the end of the decade the movement looked to be on its last legs. It mobilised for one final attempt and struck at the heart of all they despised: democracy, freedom, civil rights. It is cruel that America can be proud she was targeted in this way. She should not be proud of her response; the success of September 11 for the extremists knows no bounds.
Since the neo-Conservative led response to September 11, the ranks of the fundamentalist movement have swollen beyond recognition. Muslims all around the world are angry about the West’s heavy-handed tactics. This is not to say that Islam rejects democracy - Indonesia and Turkey, two of the world’s largest Muslim nations, are fledgling democracies. But every time politicians and the media imply as such, another moderate will become militant. (And domestically, another vote will go to Robert Kilroy-Silk.)
Yes, what implication domestically do we have in Britain, apart from the increased threat of terrorism from abroad that the war in Iraq has created? Tom Beedham is also worried about what is happening to closer to home.
‘We now have a reduction in civil liberties without precedent,’ he said. ‘When you add this to the mix, it becomes even more unsavoury - the rights of the individual are what hold the state to account. The government seems intent on waging a war without public backing and, at the same time, launches a domestic attack on the very mechanisms which can keep them in check. It’s very worrying.’
The official line is that the security threats we face today are so challenging to society at large that the curtailment of civil rights is justified. The defence academic and former air marshal Lord Garden believes otherwise.
‘The threat of a nuclear war did not appear to generate much repressive governance in Western nations,’ he said. ‘The period of McCarthyism in the early 1950s in the United States was perhaps as extreme as reaction in democracies became, and did not persist. Today there is a long list of security challenges, but none carry the same risk of immediate global mass casualties.’
Michael Gove and others should take a closer look at the Iraqi elections. The results have not even been announced yet; the much-heralded turnout of 60% is but a figure. Debka, a pro US-Israeli website puts the turnout at closer to 40%. The Carter Centre which monitors elections worldwide, refused to send observers. Jonathan Steele’s insightful analysis of the elections in the Guardian points out a further inconsistency. During Condoleezza Rice’s recent whirlwind tour of Europe and the Middle East, she denounced Iran as ‘totalitarian’. The reason given was that candidates at one end of the political spectrum were off the ballot.
‘If Iran qualifies as totalitarian because it holds an election in which voters had only a limited choice, then the same is true of Iraq,’ he wrote. ‘Parties and movements which want an immediate end to the occupation were off the ballot.’
Tom, Alan and Toby all remain opposed to the action taken in Iraq. They all stressed that the relative success of the elections was a crumb of comfort to be taken from the last two years. But serious doubt remained.
‘I don’t know how viable a democratic process can be when it is triggered externally,’ Toby said. ‘When the wish and the means for change do not come from within I would imagine there will always be problems.’
Indeed, it seems almost Machiavellian of the west to think of democracy not as a process, but as an end. Anything goes if you eventually reach your final goal, no matter if your methods make the world a more dangerous place to live in. Seamus Milne put it succinctly in the comment pages of the Guardian: ‘As a 21st century Madame Roland might have said: “Oh democracy, what crimes are committed in your name”.’
Tom Harper
e-mail:
tomtomharper@hotmail.com
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Naomi Klein on Iraq's elections
15.02.2005 23:14
Getting the Purple Finger, Naomi Klein
The Iraqi people gave America the biggest 'thank you' in the best way we could have hoped for." Reading this election analysis from Betsy Hart, a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, I found myself thinking about my late grandmother. Half blind and a menace behind the wheel of her Chevrolet, she adamantly refused to surrender her car keys. She was convinced that everywhere she drove (flattening the house pets of Philadelphia along the way) people were waving and smiling at her. "They are so friendly!" We had to break the bad news. "They aren't waving with their whole hand, Grandma--just with their middle finger."
So it is with Betsy Hart and the other near-sighted election observers: They think the Iraqi people have finally sent America those long-awaited flowers and candies, when Iraq's voters just gave them the (purple) finger.
The election results are in: Iraqis voted overwhelmingly to throw out the US-installed government of Iyad Allawi, who refused to ask the United States to leave. A decisive majority voted for the United Iraqi Alliance; the second plank in the UIA platform calls for "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq."
There are more single-digit messages embedded in the winning coalition's platform. Some highlights: "Adopting a social security system under which the state guarantees a job for every fit Iraqi...and offers facilities to citizens to build homes." The UIA also pledges "to write off Iraq's debts, cancel reparations and use the oil wealth for economic development projects." In short, Iraqis voted to repudiate the radical free-market policies imposed by former chief US envoy Paul Bremer and locked in by a recent agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
So will the people who got all choked up watching Iraqis flock to the polls support these democratically chosen demands? Please. "You don't set timetables," George W. Bush said four days after Iraqis voted for exactly that. Likewise, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the elections "magnificent" but dismissed a firm timetable out of hand. The UIA's pledges to expand the public sector, keep the oil and drop the debt will likely suffer similar fates. At least if Adel Abd al-Mahdi gets his way--he's Iraq's finance minister and the man suddenly being touted as leader of Iraq's next government.
Al-Mahdi is the Bush Administration's Trojan horse in the UIA. (You didn't think they were going to put all their money on Allawi, did you?) In October he told a gathering of the American Enterprise Institute that he planned to "restructure and privatize [Iraq's] state-owned enterprises," and in December he made another trip to Washington to unveil plans for a new oil law "very promising to the American investors." It was al-Mahdi himself who oversaw the signing of a flurry of deals with Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco in the weeks before the elections, and it is he who negotiated the recent austerity deal with the IMF. On troop withdrawal, al-Mahdi sounds nothing like his party's platform and instead appears to be channeling Dick Cheney on Fox News: "When the Americans go will depend on when our own forces are ready and on how the resistance responds after the elections." But on Sharia law, we are told, he is very close to the clerics.
Iraq's elections were delayed time and time again, while the occupation and resistance grew ever more deadly. Now it seems that two years of bloodshed, bribery and backroom arm-twisting were leading up to this: a deal in which the ayatollahs get control over the family, Texaco gets the oil, and Washington gets its enduring military bases (call it the "oil for women program"). Everyone wins except the voters, who risked their lives to cast their ballots for a very different set of policies.
But never mind that. January 30, we are told, was not about what Iraqis were voting for--it was about the fact of their voting and, more important, how their plucky courage made Americans feel about their war. Apparently, the elections' true purpose was to prove to Americans that, as George Bush put it, "the Iraqi people value their own liberty." Stunningly, this appears to come as news. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown said the vote was "the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people." On The Daily Show, CNN's Anderson Cooper described it as "the first time we've sort of had a gauge of whether or not they're willing to sort of step forward and do stuff."
This is some tough crowd. The Shiite uprising against Saddam in 1991 was clearly not enough to convince them that Iraqis were willing to "do stuff" to be free. Nor was the demonstration of 100,000 people held one year ago demanding immediate elections, or the spontaneous local elections organized by Iraqis in the early months of the occupation--both summarily shot down by Bremer. It turns out that on American TV, the entire occupation has been one long episode of Fear Factor, in which Iraqis overcome ever-more-challenging obstacles to demonstrate the depths of their desire to win their country back. Having their cities leveled, being tortured in Abu Ghraib, getting shot at checkpoints, having their journalists censored and their water and electricity cut off--all of it was just a prelude to the ultimate endurance test: dodging bombs and bullets to get to the polling station. At last, Americans were persuaded that Iraqis really, really want to be free.
So what's the prize? An end to occupation, as the voters demanded? Don't be silly--the US government won't submit to any "artificial timetable." Jobs for everyone, as the UIA promised? You can't vote for socialist nonsense like that. No, they get Geraldo Rivera's tears ("I felt like such a sap"), Laura Bush's motherly pride ("It was so moving for the President and me to watch people come out with purple fingers") and Betsy Hart's sincere apology for ever doubting them ("Wow--do I stand corrected").
And that should be enough. Because if it weren't for the invasion, Iraqis would not even have the freedom to vote for their liberation, and then to have that vote completely ignored. And that's the real prize: the freedom to be occupied. Wow--do I stand corrected.
posted from nologo.org
Very Interesting Article Tom
20.02.2005 20:30
Here's a another interesting article by John Pilger from this weeks New Statesman:
John Pilger finds our children learning lies
John Pilger
New Statesman
Monday 21st February 2005
In our schools, children learn that the US fought the Vietnam war against a "communist threat" to "us". Is it any wonder that so many don't understand the truth about Iraq? By John Pilger
How does thought control work in societies that call themselves free? Why are famous journalists so eager, almost as a reflex, to minimise the culpability of a prime minister who shares responsibility for the unprovoked attack on a defenceless people, for laying waste to their land and for killing at least 100,000 people, most of them civilians, having sought to justify this epic crime with demonstrable lies? What made the BBC's Mark Mardell describe the invasion of Iraq as "a vindication for him"? Why have broadcasters never associated the British or American state with terrorism? Why have such privileged communicators, with unlimited access to the facts, lined up to describe an unobserved, unverified, illegitimate, cynically manipulated election, held under a brutal occupation, as "democratic", with the pristine aim of being "free and fair"? That quotation belongs to Helen Boaden, the director of BBC News.
Have she and the others read no history? Or is the history they know, or choose to know, subject to such amnesia and omission that it produces a world-view as seen only through a one-way moral mirror? There is no suggestion of conspiracy. This one-way mirror ensures that most of humanity is regarded in terms of its usefulness to "us", its desirability or expendability, its worthiness or unworthiness: for example, the notion of "good" Kurds in Iraq and "bad" Kurds in Turkey. The unerring assumption is that "we" in the dominant west have moral standards superior to "theirs". One of "their" dictators (often a former client of ours, such as Saddam Hussein) kills thousands of people and he is declared a monster, a second Hitler. When one of our leaders does the same he is viewed, at worst, like Blair, in Shakespearean terms. Those who kill people with car bombs are "terrorists"; those who kill far more people with cluster bombs are the noble occupants of a "quagmire".
Historical amnesia can spread quickly. Only ten years after the Vietnam war, which I reported, an opinion poll in the United States found that a third of Americans could not remember which side their government had supported. This demonstrated the insidious power of the dominant propaganda, that the war was essentially a conflict of "good" Vietnamese against "bad" Vietnamese, in which the Americans became "involved", bringing democracy to the people of southern Vietnam faced with a "communist threat". Such a false and dishonest assumption permeated the media coverage, with honourable exceptions. The truth is that the longest war of the 20th century was a war waged against Vietnam, north and south, communist and non-communist, by America. It was an unprovoked invasion of the people's homeland and their lives, just like the invasion of Iraq. Amnesia ensures that, while the relatively few deaths of the invaders are constantly acknowledged, the deaths of up to five million Vietnamese are consigned to oblivion.
What are the roots of this? Certainly, "popular culture", especially Hollywood movies, can decide what and how little we remember. Selective education at a tender age performs the same task. I have been sent a widely used revision guide for GCSE modern world history, on Vietnam and the cold war. This is learned by 14- to-16-year-olds in our schools. It informs their understanding of a pivotal period in history, which must influence how they make sense of today's news from Iraq and elsewhere.
It is shocking. It says that under the 1954 Geneva Accord: "Vietnam was partitioned into communist north and democratic south." In one sentence, truth is despatched. The final declaration of the Geneva conference divided Vietnam "temporarily" until free national elections were held on 26 July 1956. There was little doubt that Ho Chi Minh would win and form Vietnam's first democratically elected government. Certainly, President Eisenhower was in no doubt of this. "I have never talked with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs," he wrote, "who did not agree that . . . 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader."
Not only did the United States refuse to allow the UN to administer the agreed elections two years later, but the "democratic" regime in the south was an invention. One of the inventors, the CIA official Ralph McGehee, describes in his masterly book Deadly Deceits how a brutal expatriate mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem, was imported from New Jersey to be "president" and a fake government was put in place. "The CIA," he wrote, "was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda [placed in the media]."
Phoney elections were arranged, hailed in the west as "free and fair", with American officials fabricating "an 83 per cent turnout despite Vietcong terror". The GCSE guide alludes to none of this, nor that "the terrorists", whom the Americans called the Vietcong, were also southern Vietnamese defending their homeland against the American invasion and whose resistance was popular. For Vietnam, read Iraq.
The tone of this tract is from the point of view of "us". There is no sense that a national liberation movement existed in Vietnam, merely "a communist threat", merely the propaganda that "the USA was terrified that many other countries might become communist and help the USSR - they didn't want to be outnumbered", merely that President Lyndon B Johnson "was determined to keep South Vietnam communist-free" (emphasis as in the original). This proceeds quickly to the Tet Offensive of 1968, which "ended in the loss of thousands of American lives - 14,000 in 1969 - most were young men". There is no mention of the millions of Vietnamese lives also lost in the offensive. And America merely began "a bombing campaign": there is no mention of the greatest tonnage of bombs dropped in the history of warfare, of a military strategy that was deliberately designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes, and of chemicals used in a manner that profoundly changed the environment and the genetic order, leaving a once-bountiful land all but ruined.
This guide is from a private publisher, but its bias and omissions reflect that of the official syllabuses, such as the syllabus from Oxford and Cambridge, whose cold war section refers to Soviet "expansionism" and the "spread" of communism; there is not a word about the "spread" of rapacious America. One of its "key questions" is: "How effectively did the USA contain the spread of communism?" Good versus evil for untutored minds.
"Phew, loads for you to learn here . . ." say the authors of the revision guide, "so get it learned right now." Phew, the British empire did not happen; there is nothing about the atrocious colonial wars that were models for the successor power, America, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, to name but a few along modern history's imperial trail of blood of which Iraq is the latest.
And now Iran? The drumbeat has already begun. How many more innocent people have to die before those who filter the past and the present wake up to their moral responsibility to protect our memory and the lives of human beings?
This article first appeared in the New Statesman
Ed