One of the most perverse mechanisms that reinforce the intervention ideology is the constant effort to make critics of recent wars feel guilty. One of the best examples concerns the sad situation of Afghan women. Who is worrying about them today? Who is even trying to find out what is happening to them, especially in the countryside? The same questions could have been asked up until September 2001. But, from the moment the United States decided to wage war against Afghanistan, a “noble” justification had to be found, especially for all those who were not convinced by the “war against terrorism” and had little sympathy for American imperial adventures.
The war [in Afghanistan] has been a near-perfect laboratory, according to Michael Vickers, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense research center
Vickers, a former army officer and CIA operative, said the success came because the Qaeda network and the Taliban government sheltering it were overmatched.
“When great powers fight smaller wars,” he said, “you can experiment more because there’s no doubt you’re going to win. You experiment, and there is real feedback. You don’t get that very much in the military.”
In Afghanistan, Vickers drew a distinction between technical innovation, such as the development of the thermobaric bomb, and what he considers even more important organizational and tactical innovation, such as linking troops on the ground with bombers in the air
“This was a new way of war, a new operational concept” Vickers said. “And it was a pretty significant innovation, because we got fairly rapid regime change with it…
“This was the way we planned to overthrow governments.”1
The horrors inflicted on Afghan women by the Taliban did the trick. Many activists, doubtless with perfect sincerity, suddenly expressed urgent concern over the fate of those women, whereas few people show such concern today. Why? Because everyone is quite aware, then as now, that we are not capable of solving all the world’s problems, and especially that such problems as the oppression of women are not solved overnight. But the strength of the propaganda in favor of war is such that even people who are against it feel obliged to express their agreement with the objectives that have been proclaimed in order to justify it, instead of simply denouncing the hypocrisy of the whole maneuver. It seems likely that this sense of obligation stems from the fact that the last thing anti-war activists want to be accused of is “supporting the Taliban.” The notion of “support” is in fact at the center of the guilt-trip mechanisms. Let’s take a look at it.
On May 1, 2005, the Sunday Times (London) published a “secret and strictly personal” memo for “UK eyes only” summarizing top-level deliberations at the prime minister’s office on July 23, 2002, concerning British reaction to the U.S. decision to go to war.2
From the July 23, 2002, memo:
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime….
It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorization. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors.
From another memo, dated July 21,2002 (point 14):
It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject (because he is unwilling to accept unfettered access) and which would not be regarded as unreasonable by the international community. However failing that (or an Iraqi attack) we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal base for military action by January 2003.
In the run-up to the First World War, a French caricature showed the face of Jean Jaurès, the socialist leader who strongly opposed the war, merged with the face of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Lenin, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Morel, Eugene Debs-all those who for one reason or another opposed the wars or the militarism of their own countries have been accused of “supporting” the enemy.3 This method of making opponents of war feel guilty was of course used for the 2003 war against Iraq. The accusation of “anti-Semitism” plays a similar role in silencing criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people.
In answer to these reproaches concerning support to the enemy, we should perhaps start by making the distinction between active (or objective) support and passive (or subjective) support. A state, a movement or an individual can be said to actively support one side in a conflict when its actions strengthen the position of that side. On the other hand, passive support, hoping that one side will win, is analogous to the support football fans give their team while watching a match on television. It is purely sentimental and has no impact on the real world. From an ethical point of view, what counts is the consequences of our actions, but it can be observed that, like football fans, many people can argue endlessly over which attitude to adopt toward certain events-September 11, for example—although that attitude has no impact on the world.
The antiwar movement unquestionably supported Saddam Hussein, in the sense of an active support, because, had this movement succeeded in preventing the war, Saddam would have remained in power (leaving aside that Washington’s decision to go to war was made well in advance, at least as early as the summer of 2002, as shown by the “Downing Street memos,” and that the antiwar movement had no chance of preventing it). Before considering that as a decisive argument against the movement, thought should be given to some other instances of active support: the British pacifists during the war of 1914–18, who sought a negotiated conclusion to that war, “objectively supported” the German emperor, because such a conclusion would doubtless have allowed him to retain his throne (it might also have allowed Germany to avoid Nazism). During the Second World War, the Anglo-Americans supported Stalin objectively (by arms deliveries, albeit in modest quantities), and in that case, they even supported him subjectively (hoping for his victory over Hitler).
There are many such examples, and thinking about them, one realizes that cases of “objective support” work in all different directions (the protests against the Iraq war also “objectively supported” all who died and are going to die in that war, which is far from over, and who would still be alive without it). The world is much too complicated for us to be able to control all the indirect consequences of our actions. We are faced with a sort of paradox: the only things for which we are morally responsible are the consequences of our actions, but we do not control those consequences, at least not all of them, whereas we perfectly control our “passive support,” but that has no direct consequence, at least insofar as it does not inspire us to act and therefore has no moral significance.
The only way out of these dilemmas is not to worry too much about the multitude of objective supports indirectly implied by our actions, but to base these actions on an analysis linking each concrete situation to general principles that can be defended by philosophical and historic reasoning: equality between individuals, whatever the strength of the nations to which they belong, defense of international law as a means of keeping peace, and an anti-imperialist perspective.
Unfortunately, the efforts to neutralize antiwar movements by provoking guilt do not always meet with this sort of response. Rather, it often provokes two kinds of reactions, diametrically opposed, but both of which tend to weaken these movements—what one may call the “neither-nor” stance, and the rhetoric of support.
This expression refers to slogans often heard in demonstrations against recent wars: “Neither Milosevic nor NATO,” “Neither Bush nor Saddam,” and, concerning Israel, refers to the practice of condemning in the same breath the policy of Ariel Sharon and that of Hamas and Palestinian suicide bombers. This is obviously a far cry from the slogan heard during the Vietnam War, “The NLF will win!” (shouted then by some of the same individuals who have shifted to the more prudent neither-nor thirty years later). Even if the “support” to the NLF can be dismissed as sentimental rhetoric, to be discussed further on, the current slogans create several false symmetries. First, in all the recent wars, there has been an aggressor and an aggressed; it was neither Iraq nor Yugoslavia that started bombing the United States. To fail to make that distinction, one must have abandoned all notions of national sovereignty and international law.4 Furthermore, the power and the capacity of the two parties to do harm are not at all comparable. It is the United States and its military power that uphold the extremely unjust world order in which we live. Whatever one may think of the situation in Iraq or in Yugoslavia, it is the United States and not those countries that progressive forces are confronting and will continue to confront in one conflict after another. Every war and every diplomatic success that strengthens the United States should be seen, at least in part, as a setback for most progressive causes.
More important, the neither-nor stance gives the impression that we are somehow situated above it all, outside of time and space, whereas we are living, working, and paying taxes in the aggressor countries or their allies (in contrast, the position “neither Bush nor Saddam” made sense for Iraqis, since they were subjected to both regimes). An elementary moral reaction would be to oppose the aggressions for which our own governments are responsible, or else to approve them outright, before even discussing the responsibility of others.
A frequent argument in favor of the neither-nor position is that it gains respectability, and thus is more effective. This argument is often accompanied by warnings not to repeat the errors of the past, concerning “support” for Stalin or Pol Pot. The “support” for Pol Pot, to the slight extent that it ever existed, was purely subjective, without any influence on the course of events. As for Stalin, note that resistance to Nazism was obviously not based on the slogan “neither Hitler nor Stalin” but more often involved a veritable cult of the Soviet Union and its leader. Whatever one may think retrospectively of that cult, it was massive and its effects (to encourage resistance to Nazism) were by no means all negative.
The argument of effectiveness is thus the easiest to refute: let us simply compare the intensity of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, when no one was saying “Neither Johnson (or Nixon) nor Ho Chi Minh,” with those against the Kosovo war or even the war in Iraq. Indeed, the opposition to the latter is strongest in Muslim countries where everybody, including even Saddam Hussein’s worst enemies, acknowledges that the United States is the aggressor and that Iraq is the victim of aggression.
The question of respectability is more delicate to discuss, because it is not clear in whose eyes that respectability is supposed to be established. Either “respectability” means that the position adopted is morally defensible, and the “neither-nor” in no way qualifies, for reasons already mentioned. If, on the other hand, respectability means being acceptable in the eyes of the media and the dominant intellectuals, in that case you may as well recognize that a principled opposition to war will never qualify, and it is self-defeating to entertain any illusions on that score. Then there is public opinion. To be respected by public opinion is certainly a praiseworthy aim, but the job of an antiwar movement is to wage an ideological combat against war propaganda and the mystifications, humanitarian among others, on which it is based. To carry on that combat, shouldn’t you start by clarifying your own ideas, and choose slogans that reflect that clarity?
What is most pernicious in the insistence on neither-nor is the idea, widespread even among the most sincere peace advocates, that it is necessary to denounce the adversary—Saddam, Milosevic, Islamic fundamentalists, etc.-to prove that double standards do not apply. Unfortunately, things are not so simple. Nobody can doubt that the caricatures of the German emperor drawn during the First World War were an aspect of war propaganda, which contributed to sending millions of young men to their graves. But few Westerners seem to notice that dehumanizing cartoons of Milosevic or of Mahomet serve the same purpose. The basic principle is nevertheless the same: the things we say and write are heard or read essentially in our own camp, that of the West. Aside from their accuracy, what matters from an ethical viewpoint is the effects they produce here. During wartime, denouncing the crimes of the adversary, even supposing one is accurately informed, which is often not the case, comes down to stimulating the hatred that makes war acceptable.
During the First World War, each side focused on details—some true, others false—to support its claim of defending civilization from barbarism. In retrospect, they seem to have had much in common, and the basic atrocity was the war itself.
All this suggests the need to exercise a certain prudence today in the frequent and virtually automatic denunciations of Islam. We are not (yet) at war with the Muslim world, but the United States (leader of the “free world”) is at war in two Muslim countries while threatening Iran and Syria, and, of course, Israel is also seen as part of the “free world.” More than the bomb attacks in Madrid and London, this raises the danger of an explosion leading to a more global conflict with the Arab-Muslim world. If that should happen, the current denunciations of Islam can be seen as equivalent to the nationalist propaganda on all sides that preceded the First World War. It is too often forgotten that media campaigns against new “threats” and “enemies” have preceded every major conflagration, often inventing or exaggerating alleged atrocities and acts of barbarism.
It was principally against the Turks turned Mohametans that our monks wrote so many books, when they could scarcely find another response to the conquerors of Constantinople. Our authors, who are much more numerous than the Janissaries, found it easy to win women over to their side. They persuaded them that Mohamet didn’t regard them as intelligent animals, that they were all slaves according to the laws of the Koran, they had no possessions in this world, and that in the next they had no share of paradise.
—Voltaire
Another example of the effects produced by the idea that we are above it all: after the Vietnam War, a certain number of American antiwar activists considered that their past opposition to the war gave them a particular responsibility for whatever went wrong afterward, whether the plight of the Vietnamese boat people or the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot, and thus a special obligation to denounce those things.5 That attitude seems to have been most widespread in France, where it contributed heavily to the conversion of the intelligentsia. However, their denunciations did not resound in Indochina but in the West, where they inevitably contributed to the resurgence of imperial ideology. This made it easier for United States leaders to refuse any reparations for the devastation that they had wreaked on Indochina, thereby aggravating the suffering of the peoples of the region, of which the phenomenon of the boat people was in large part a reflection.6 It also made it easier for them to ideologically prepare for the wars in Central America and in Iraq, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives. But the psychological mechanisms that create a clear conscience are such that hardly any of those who took part in reconstructing the imperial ideology feel any particular responsibility for those crimes.
Still, the main problem for the neither-nor advocates is elsewhere: now that Saddam and Milosevic are in prison or dead, what do they suggest doing with the other half of the neither-nor, Bush or NATO? Certain supporters of humanitarian war in Iraq admit that Bremer’s policy was catastrophic, that American companies behaved like vultures, that torture is scandalous, that the destruction of Fallujah is unacceptable and that, of course, it is now their duty to denounce all that.7 But denouncing and stopping are two very different things, and it is here that the immense gap between the United States and its adversaries shows up again. This gap underscores once more the difference in attitude between human rights defenders who encourage the U.S. armed forces to attack distant countries and, say, the International Brigades fighters during the Spanish Civil War or other real revolutionaries. The point here is not only that the latter risked their lives, contrary to the former, but that they were to a certain extent in control of the force being employed because they were that force. But the human rights defenders have no influence, or at least no moderating influence, on the force they encourage, that is, the U.S. armed forces. Any lucid analysis of American society, as well as of the nature of armies, would indicate that the behavior of the United States in Iraq was perfectly foreseeable, and that is why its armed forces are such a bad instrument for advancing human rights. Despite all their denunciations of Stalinism and their claims to see through abuses of power, the partisans of the right of humanitarian intervention have simply become the “useful idiots” of our time.
An example of rhetoric justifying imperial wars while putting oneself on the high moral ground is provided by Salman Rushdie. In a 2002 article defending his support for the war in Afghanistan, he suggested that the United States put Ahmed Chalabi in power in Iraq after overthrowing Saddam Hussein rather than installing a new military power: “I can’t speak for the others, but my own view is pretty straightforward. If America gets into bed with scumbags, it loses the moral high ground, and once that ground is lost the argument is lost, with rt”8 Given that it would scarcely be a novelty for America to “get into bed with scumbags,” what should be done if it happens again? Rushdie proposes appealing to public opinion. But with the public’s “patriotism” and indifference, both cultivated by the media, this is not very realistic, to say the least Does American public opinion care about the fate of the Serbs in Kosovo or the situation in the Afghan countryside? Who in the American population was going to protest against Chalabi’s installation (if the Americans followed Rushdie’s advice) in the face of his extreme unpopularity in Iraq, where many people considered him to be precisely a “scumbag”? When American soldiers are killed, as in Iraq, public opinion begins to take notice, but one can scarcely suppose that the advocates of humanitarian war count on large numbers of U.S. soldiers getting killed in order to exert their own moral influence.
The neither-nor approach is also symptomatic of a more general trend on the left, after the failure of communism, toward a quasi-religious position of moral absolutism. The discourse of the left, especially the far left in France, today often comes down to a catalogue of good intentions (open borders and guaranteed full employment) that are not accompanied by any political strategy to accomplish these goals. One is reminded of the words of Jesus, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The failure of “scientific socialism” has given way to a return to Utopian socialism. This tendency is often accompanied by adoption of an irritating moral posturing: neither this nor that, but no concrete alternative in the real world. Obviously, doing nothing that could have any impact on reality carries no risk, and there is no need to worry about being accused of supporting Stalin or Pol Pot.
But, at that point, why continue to claim to be engaged in political action? This attitude of effortless moral purity is typical of a philosophical or religious aversion to the real world, which is the exact opposite of politics. Proposing a way out of this impasse is far beyond the scope of this book. It can nevertheless be recalled that all effective politics has its dark side and its drawbacks and that politics often comes down to defending the lesser evil, such as international law rather than American hegemony, which religious absolutism tends to refuse to do. A symptom of this moral purism is the general reluctance of the French left to recognize that President Jacques Chirac, whatever his other shortcomings, by refusing to go along with the United States aggression in Iraq, took a historic decision that could do much more to preserve peace between Europe and the Arab world than countless expressions of good intentions.
Finally, a few words should be said about the rhetoric of “support” to revolutionary causes and liberation movements in the Third World, rhetoric quite prevalent within the small minority in the West that takes anti-imperialist positions and which is the exact opposite of the neither-nor, though with certain drawbacks of its own. “We” are supposed to support the Palestinian or Iraqi resistance, or Chávez, or, at one time or another in the past, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.
What follows is in no way a criticism of those militants who are concretely engaged alongside revolutionary struggles and who, as a result, go beyond the stage of rhetoric, but rather concerns the debates that take place in the West and the splits they create. A large part of the disputes within the far left, between “Stalinists” and “Trotskyists,” for example, concerning support of this or that faction, suffer because the support being discussed is not clearly defined, and, in particular, the distinction between active and passive support is ignored. Most of us have neither weapons nor secrets to hand over to a cause with which we sympathize. Our “support” is at best sentimental and it is hard to see why we should behave like supporters of football teams. If all-out interventionism is largely a residue of the colonial mentality, the rhetoric of support can be considered an indirect heritage of the Third International, even if it has often been outdone in that particular exercise by various Trotskyist groups. The Communist International was a powerful and relatively centralized movement. It meant something when it supported, through obedient parties, such and such a movement or struggle in a given country, which does not mean that the method chosen was necessarily effective or appropriate, but simply that it had real political effects. That period, however, belongs to the past, and it is of no use to continue to act as though there exists somewhere a revolutionary headquarters that is going to listen to us and pass along our enlightened opinions to the other ends of the earth.
The rhetoric of support has numerous drawbacks. It locks militants into useless discussions regarding conflicts over which they have not the slightest influence (what should Trotsky have done in 1924?) and isolates them from the general population, which quite rightly regards such discussions as modern counterparts of the Byzantine dispute over the sex of angels. Moreover, it leads them into a pursuit of historical erudition that gets in the way of understanding today’s world or persuading other people they need to change it. Finally, those imaginary supports end up being followed by often painful and politically catastrophic disillusion. How many people have reproached themselves for having “supported” Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, and subsequently abandoned all political activity, when, unless they actually lived and were active in the Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia, all they ever really did was to express opinions, perhaps mistaken, but with no impact on the course of world events?
The latest avatar of the support problem concerns the Iraqi resistance. How does one dare support those cutthroats and adversaries of democracy? To which others reply: Don’t peoples have the right to defend themselves? Note first of all that when the USSR invaded Afghanistan, the Western consensus demanding their withdrawal did not usually dwell on its support to the Afghan resistance, support which would have raised serious questions if the nature of that resistance had come under closer scrutiny. It was enough to consider that it was necessary to put a stop to an illegal invasion. The same can be said for a number of other invasions, that of Kuwait by Iraq, for example. The pretexts furnished by the United States to invade Iraq were, if anything, even more far-fetched, and certainly do not justify suspension of opposition to invasion, without ever raising the question of support.
One of the main things wrong with the rhetoric of support is that it accepts the logic of the adversary: they accuse us of “supporting” the other camp. Instead of justifying that support, it is better to answer that what we do is no different from what they do in similar circumstances.
Moreover, a minimum of modesty should lead us to think that, far from us supporting a resistance that isn’t asking for anything, it is the resistance that supports us. After all, the resistance is much more effective in blocking the U.S. military machine, at least for a while, than the millions of demonstrators who marched peacefully against the war and who unfortunately did not manage to stop the soldiers or the bombs. Without the Iraqi resistance, the United States would perhaps today be attacking Damascus, Teherán, Caracas, or Havana. If I do not claim to “support” the Iraqi resistance, for which I am sometimes criticized, the reason, among other things, is that an Iraqi insurgent could always ask, echoing Stalin’s remark about the pope, how many divisions will you send into battle?9
It is true, as is often pointed out in response to Stalin’s wisecrack, that ideas can be effective. And the combat on the level of ideas, for example, through opinion tribunals such as the World Tribunal on Iraq and its branch, the Brussels Tribunal, can be considered a “support” to the Iraqi resistance (and be denounced or applauded as such). But they can also be seen as fitting into a much broader perspective, which will be sketched in the following pages.
For a political leader, few therapies compare with military victory For a leader who went to war in the absence of a single political ally who believed in the war as unreservedly as he did, Iraq now looks like vindication on an astounding scale.
—Hugo Young, The Guardian, April 15, 2003
There’s no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East… is now increasingly tied up with military power
—BBC I, “Panorama,” April 13, 2003
They’ve covered his face in the Stars and Stripes! This gets better by the minute … ha ha, better by the minute.
—ITV, Tonight with Trevor McDonald, April 11, 2003
Yes, too many people died in the war Too many people always die in war War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short The death toll has been nothing like as high as had been widely feared. Thousands have died in this war, millions have died at the hands of Saddam. … In the mind of Tony Blair, I don’t think this war was ever wholly, or even mainly, about any threat posed by Saddam. These were arguments designed to make the conflict accord with international law. The Prime Minister was never very convincing that Saddam was a real and present danger … For Mr Blair, getting rid of Saddam is legitimacy enough.
—Andrew Rawnsley, “The Voices of Doom Were So Wrong,”
The Observer, April 13,2003
No one can deny that victory happened. The existential fact sweeps aside the prior agonising. … We got rid of a pitiless enemy of humanity. What more do you want? All that agonising about the whys and wherefores? Forget it
—Hugo Young, The Guardian, April 15, 2003
The great irony is that the Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the U.S. in Iraq because—unlike many leftists—they understand exactly what this war is about They understand that U.S. power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo, as it was in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Arab world during the Cold War They understand that this is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched—a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world.
—Thomas L Friedman10