Arising from the Draining the Swamps exchange between Albert Langer and Noam Chomsky, Patrick M wrote:

Bush was forced to change course by the realities of a dramatically exposed relative US weakness in the twenty first century.  This weakness was demonstrated by 9/11 and the war cabinet realization of the ongoing and rapidly developing potential for things to get much worse via WMD.  Technology really does spread real power ever wider and an atomic weapon or similar, devastating a city is now more than possible it’s probable, if the old policies were not abandoned.  Whatever policies are followed, they must address this issue.  The old policies had to go and new policies had to be followed. 

If Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 had been a nuclear attack on New York instead of one using hijacked passenger aircraft, the US response would have been chosen from a number of options, all probably nuclear. It is hard to imagine anything else, particularly from George W Bush. The radioactive aftermath would have spread from the mountains of Tora Bora to whatever else the terrorists held in Afghanistan and possibly to Baghdad as well. Whatever it takes would likely have been repeated into general agreement across America, with a ‘terrible resolve’ for revenge and retribution like that which followed Pearl Harbour.

With the spread of WMD and its ever-decreasing cost of acquisition, we enter a new world. In the Cold War, Washington courted and bought friends wherever it could, and turned a blind eye if they were none too savoury. Its highest priorities were strategic balance, ‘stability’, and favourable power and trade positions for itself in the world. I think Albert Langer’s May Day 2003 article and the resulting Draining the Swamps thread have made the point well: terrorism has now scared Washington into a U turn. (Or at least, a partial one. It is a bit slow off the blocks in sub-Saharan Africa, for example.) It is now dealing with a hostile grassroots movement in the Islamic world quite analogous to fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Then the German establishment (with a certain understandable reluctance) backed as a lesser evil Hitler’s Nazis against the Left only to find that they had let loose a Frankenstein monster. Without seeking their prior approval, Hitler got them into a ruinous war.

If Kissinger’s style of realpolitik was workable in the Middle East, the US would probably be in a cosy relationship with Saddam Hussein today. But Saddam wanted to be a power in his own right, not someone else’s stooge. Where (to put it sarcastically) Suharto did the right thing and obtained US approval  before invading East Timor in 1975, Saddam did not bother to ask anyone’s permission before invading Kuwait in 1991. Understandably, because such approval would have been denied. When US diplomatic pressure on Saddam failed, the result was the 1991 war.

The US is widely detested in the Arab world because of its support for Israel, and the years of Arab humiliation that have flowed from that. Saddam’s gambit in 1991 was to use his geographical advantages and political support in the Arab world in a bid to corner the world’s oil stocks – or at least, a decisive part of them. Had it worked, Bush would be one of a queue of western government leaders waiting cap in hand in Baghdad today to pay him their respects and ask a favour. The combination of WMD and an ever growing oil monopoly would have given Saddam a very strong bargaining position in the world at large and a towering prestige in the eyes of the Arabs. That is, had it worked.

It might have, had the stakes been not quite so high. But alarm bells started ringing in the White House and the European capitals. What saved Saddam in 1991 was fear of the effects on the ‘stability’ of other autocratic regimes in the wider Middle East should he fall. Saddam gained a reprieve, the chance to liquidate his Shi’ite and Kurdish opponents and to then consider his next move.

Two problems then arose. First, the UN demanded that he prove a negative, a task which has stumped better philosophers than Saddam. The UN required proof from him that he had no WMD, and the result was the UNSCOM farce led by Australia’s own Richard Butler, and well described by him in his book Saddam Defiant. Saddam and his cronies gave the UNSCOM teams good reason to believe that there was something hidden – a lot of something. Then came the second problem. Enter bin Laden.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Osama bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Centre was a second Pearl Harbour for the US. It put the writing on the wall for bin Laden’s Taliban associates in Afghanistan, and more. As Thomas L. Friedman put it, 9/11 meant that an Arab government had to fall. Bin Laden and his 9/11 colleagues were natives of Saudi Arabia, but that oil rich country’s regime was a good US ally, and lived in fear of its own population. In the 1991 Gulf War, key US allies had made a condition of giving their support that Saddam should not be deposed, just chased out of Kuwait. He tempted fate by subsequently attempting to assassinate Bush senior, and his fate was finally sealed by bin Laden, who must have been the ultimate loose cannon from Saddam’s point of view. No cheers came out of Baghdad after September 11, 2002, for it was not in Saddam’s interest, and if he did know about it in advance, one must assume he was powerless to stop it happening.

It is not surprising that the evidence of a link between Saddam and bin Laden is so flimsy. If an invitation to visit Baghdad for discussion of matters of mutual interest had ever been extended by Saddam to bin Laden, then most likely bin Laden did not take it up. Had he done so, and the CIA got wind of it, the world would now know. Bush would have seen to that.

It was clear after the 1991 Gulf War that it would take another war to overthrow Saddam. It would have been politically very difficult to fight a war in order to replace Saddam with another military dictator a bit more well disposed to the US. The war was only justifiable in the Coalition countries if the monster Saddam was to be replaced by a democratically elected regime. Moreover, in the Islamic world, dictators like Suharto and Saddam cannot stop terrorists; quite the contrary. The misery the despots preside over generates terrorism. A population hostile to terrorists will fail to give them cover: witness the fate of the Red Brigades in Italy and the Bader-Meinhof gang in Germany. But it is a different matter for the Taliban remnants in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, and for Jemmah Islamiah in Indonesia. The latter enjoy quite significant popular support, extending into the police and armed forces.

Fostering the spread of liberal democracy is now America’s declared approach for containing and defeating Islamic fascism (though not applied enthusiastically in Central Asia, whose regimes have supported the US effort in Afghanistan). But understandably, many distrust Bush. Most of the Left opposed the Coalition’s intervention (unlike the majority of voters in the Australian and US elections), and will likely be seen in future as having played a reactionary role at this juncture of Iraq’s history.

Experience and reading over my life to date leads me to the conclusion that a characteristic (perhaps a defining one) of our species is the ability to empathise. All but a mercifully small number of us humans have it, and it has been vividly illustrated in the wake of the Asian Tsunami. Empathy as a process of perception and identification leads us to imagine how we would feel in the same situation, and to behave with sympathy and support. We don’t just have a concept of justice. We have a sense of it as well, which once stimulated produces a response just as occurs with the classically defined senses.

It was outrage over what I perceived as the injustices of the world that led me in childhood to start on the course which in turn led me to the Left: a rather lonely place to be until the 1960s. Learning about the histories of the homelands of my paternal ancestors (Scotland) and my maternal ones (Ireland) was a major factor, but the greatest influence of all was the history of China, from Opium War to what the Maoists at the time quite rightly called Liberation. Imperialism: British, French, German, Russian, American, had an absolutely indefensible record in China as far as I was concerned, and that got me thinking. By the time I was old enough to be conscripted for national service, I was not exactly happy about what the government might be heading me into.

Vietnam was the last and most devastating of the colonial wars, both for the Vietnamese who despite all managed to win it, and for those citizens of the US who lost family and friends, or who simply did not like seeing ‘their’ army defeated. Today it is a rather interesting exercise to ask what makes the difference between Left and Right, but then there was a simple enough test, provided by imperialism and colonialism. Opposition to the war was not an issue of socialism vs capitalism. If you were on the side of the colonial peoples in their struggle for independence and against their oppressors, you were on the left. Empathy had a lot to do with it.

What stopped a lot more people then from taking an antiwar stance (cf again the Tsunami response) was the thought that their living standards and the military security of their country somehow depended on continued subjugation of the ‘Third World’, either by direct imperial rule or by proxies: a conventional wisdom which everyday propaganda in its various grades of subtlety did its best to help along. Propaganda encouraged identification with those in the ‘Third World’ who were threatened by anti-imperialist movements. The mass movements in the west against the war in Vietnam (particularly those in America and Australia) were a watershed, given the reluctance of people generally to oppose a war their country was involved in, and which the government rhetoric portrayed as one of defence.

Over the last 100 years, the Left’s response to war has been mixed. The socialist parties of Europe opposed the First World War while it was in preparation, and then supported it on nationalist and patriotic lines once it had begun. But after the European bourgeoisies had the living daylights scared out of them by such events as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German naval mutiny of 1918, the issues became more starkly defined. It was socialism vs capitalism, or as some preferred to see it, Christianity vs godless Bolshevism.

The 1936 Franco revolt against the Spanish republic united the Left on ends, but divided it on means. The Republican cause was complicated and doomed by the influence of Stalin, not just over western communists, but across much of the non-communist left as well. But the Left was never split over which side to support, and its criticism of the governments of Britain and France was for their staying out rather than (cf Iraq today) getting in. Nor was there any significant doubt, after the whole anti-fascist side was crushed in Italy, Germany, Spain and then continental Europe, as to whether the allied war effort should be supported.

The popular perception in the west of the Chinese (1949) and Cuban (1959) revolutions was that whatever else, they were understandable. Their ‘root cause’ was sufficiently clear and their own domestic popular bases strong enough to prevent any overt intervention against them. Covert operations were tried by the US, the most spectacular being the Bay of Pigs disaster, and the assassination of Kennedy would appear to have been a direct consequence of it. (No, I do not think it likely Oswald acted alone, and he may well not have acted at all.) Ironically, Kennedy also moved the first US troops into Vietnam.

I think it can be reasonably argued that the conduct of the US over Vietnam and (to a lesser extent) Latin America inclined the general population to a future questioning of American motives, and the Left to an anti-American reflex, not present at the end of WW2. Hence John Pilger’s claim that the 2002 antiwar movement was starting at a level of street support only seen at the end of the Vietnam War. Understandably, many have attempted to build capital by equating Iraq with Vietnam.

At the end of 1957 I was conscripted into the army to be trained for wars such as Vietnam that were anticipated by then Prime Minister Menzies. By the time Vietnam began I was 23 years old, and as we in the Army Reserve were by then getting mortgages, starting families and pursuing careers, Menzies chose to leave us alone and to train up a whole new army of 18 year old conscripts to replace us, whose subsequent experiences overall were far less farcical and far more tragic than ours ever were. But as 18 year olds often do, I had numerous arguments with various others in the platoon about religion and politics.

I had one memorable religious argument with a fellow soldier, a great bloke who is now a medical practitioner, and as far as I know still a Catholic. I asked him what his position was on X. (There was a religious issue X, but please don’t ask me to recall what exactly it was.) He replied: “I’m not exactly sure what we believe on that.”

That bowled me over at the time. I know exactly what I believe for every belief I have, even if I cannot always say why I believe whatever I do. But I do not have any beliefs that are in the heads of others and that I don’t know about. While there are no agreed criteria for belief in science and philosophy, even if there were I would still not find it necessary to consult any third party on anything to find out what I think, though I confess that in my time in the Left I often asked others convoluted questions analogous to those a devout believer might ask a priest: “What’s the line on this?” I think that conformity, while so often a curse, is at least understandable; particularly the tribal variety often favoured by young men.

 By 1982 I had been out of the organised Left for some time. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, I considered the issues without much reference to anyone else, and decided that I was on the side of Britain and against Argentina. Then I started to run into lefty acquaintances taking the opposite stance, and found they were shocked by my attitude. When I asked how they could support a vicious military dictatorship against the Falkland inhabitants (the kelpers) who wanted to stay British, they usually said that they were for the Argentine claim to the ‘Malvinas’ (as it became fashionable on the Left to call the islands), but against the junta. I could see a contradiction there, and perhaps they could see it too, as the junta was using the Falklands issue as a means of putting the brakes on its growing domestic opposition. Inescapably, to be for the ‘Malvinas’ was to be for the junta.

Today you cannot find any opponent of the Coalition cause in Iraq who is prepared to say the fall of Saddam was a bad thing. Not even George Galloway. They just oppose the way it was done. My problem at the outset of the Iraq war was that I thought it was necessary if only to deprive Saddam of his WMD, and agreement on his possession of such went right across the political spectrum. I could not see how it could be achieved any other way. On that point I have not shifted one inch.

(Margaret Thatcher by the way, however hideous her attitudes and her support for the Chilean monster Pinochet, managed to play a positive role in Argentine history by defeating General Galtieri’s junta in the Falklands, and thus causing its subsequent downfall in favour of an elected government. Bush will probably finish up beside her on a similar pedestal over Iraq.)

The Left in general supported the revolution of the mullahs against the Shah of Iran in 1979, and also in the subsequent Iran-Iraq war when the US chose to aid Saddam. My sympathies were with the Iranians even though by then the theocrats had managed to stop the popular movement for democracy. However when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1991 and the US turned against him, the Left again divided on the issue of the war. I supported the American campaign to evict him, as did that part of the Kuwaiti population he left alive.

As I said, prior to the US invasion of Iraq, there were few who doubted that Saddam had WMD. (Even Andrew Wilkie expressed surprise when none were found.) Opponents of the invasion at that time argued that even if Saddam had WMD, it did not constitute justification for invasion. I thought that it very much did, particularly given Saddam’s track record. I am still of that view; also that none found to date does not mean none ever existed. The Israelis concealed their nuclear program for years, even from the US. Chemical and biological WMD plants are much easier to conceal and move around than are nuclear plants.

Those opposed to the Coalition in Iraq commonly hold it responsible for the deaths of 150,000 Iraqis in the fighting, and all the physical destruction. Understandably, some of them try to present the Iraqi ‘resistance fighters’ as just like the Vietnamese NLF (‘Viet Cong’) or any other native anti-imperialist army. The assumption underlying this is that Iraq and the wider Middle East would have been better off if Saddam had been left in power, and that overall there would have been less death and destruction. There is no way to prove this, and there are good reasons to doubt it.

Saddam invaded Iran in 1980, got bogged down, and then offered the Iranians settlement terms:  Iraq to get complete control of the Arab River, and Iran’s oil-rich province of Khuzistan to get autonomy (read Iraqi control). This was Saddam’s first negotiating position, but it indicates the trend that was to become clear with his invasion of Kuwait in 1991: with increased control of its oil, he would become the supreme leader of the Arab world. His nuclear weapons would neutralise Israel’s, and make him unassailable. He was well on the way to assuming the sort of control over the Middle East that his hero Stalin had formerly held over Eastern Europe and the USSR. Paralysis in the west after 9/11 and jostling to get the best position re Iraqi oil would likely have restored Saddam's confidence. (He said after Bush senior failed to follow through against him in 1991: "We have won!") Interesting times would  have been ahead.

Fascists of all kinds fight to create a society in which everyone thinks and behaves alike. The common belief can be Islam, Catholicism, the drivel of Mein Kampf, Stalinomarxism or whatever. The important thing is the formation of a hierarchical militant army blindly obedient to a Fuehrer. Believing and belonging are two sides of the one coin, and whatever challenges one automatically threatens the other. The Nazi rally, in worshipping the Fuehrer, also worships itself.

I favour maximum diversity of thought, and have confidence that it will emerge under liberal conditions. I don’t mind belonging to a tribe, but never at the expense of freedom to think and seek information. So not many tribes want me for a member. I think it is not unhealthy if the Left, however defined, is disunited on any given issue, even one as serious as the war in Iraq. Of course, if the Left also wants everyone thinking the same way, then the Left has a problem, and either needs to resolve it, or to sit down with the more rabid Right and see if it can strike up a deal.

Islamic fascism should be studied in detail and understood. Its support base should be undermined, and those it would recruit given alternative choices. Those who would sympathise with it, or portray  its death squads as some sort of national liberation movement, are dangerously wrong.