Even if we accept that the advocates of humanitarian intervention have no satisfactory response to a whole series of questions—What is the nature of the agent supposed to intervene? What reason is there to trust his sincerity? What replaces international law? How can intervention be reconciled with democracy?—the eternal question remains: What should we do?
I do not claim to have a satisfactory answer. Indeed, it is by no means easy to get out of the state of war in which we find ourselves. Moreover, to do so would require radical changes in the Western mindset, including in progressive circles. To start with, let’s look at what needs to be changed in our overall vision of how we relate to the rest of the world. Next let us consider what should be the priorities of peace movements, the information battle and, finally, the reasons for hope.
What I have written up to now is by no means intended as a plea for staying home and “minding our own business.” It is completely possible to find ways to act while taking into account global factors (the state of the world, the reality of North-South relations, etc.), the relationship of forces that condition our acts, and the place where they occur. But we should start by abandoning the pretense of being able to solve every problem on earth. Colonialism, like the Third International, belongs to the past. And this implies we should not feel responsible for everything that happens.
On the other hand, there are a number of things we can do that do not require any intervention, regarding matters for which we ought to feel responsible but seem of concern to relatively few people. First of all, there is the whole economic aspect of North-South relations: debt, the prices of raw materials, access to cheap medicines. If we have so much money to spend on “humanitarian wars,” then why isn’t there enough for actions whose humanitarian character would be unequivocal? Why do the people who demand that we all feel guilty for not having intervened militarily in Rwanda, where about 8,000 people died every day for a hundred days, not feel responsible that the same number of people die in Africa every day, all year-round, of diseases that are relatively easy to cure? The examples of Cuba or the Indian state of Kerala show that public health can reach a high level in relatively poor countries. Therefore one cannot say that people die from poverty alone. As for the cost, the “war for democracy” in Iraq costs much more than what would be needed to save thousands of lives every day.
There is a world of difference between intervention and cooperation. Unlike intervention, cooperation is carried out with the agreement of the host government. Few governments in the Third World reject cooperation if it is sincere. With so much misery in the world it is hard to imagine a situation in which, for a given expenditure of money and effort, cooperation would not save more human lives than intervention. Even the extreme example of Rwanda does not refute that suggestion.
It follows that, contrary to what some may think, there is no conflict between strict respect for national sovereignty and a (non-hypocritical) defense of human rights. It would be enough to allocate to cooperation the resources we claim ready for altruistic intervention.
Furthermore, there is need for a “cultural revolution” in our relations to “the others”—a bit more modesty and less arrogance. Culinary, musical, or artistic traditions from the Third World have become more and more popular and appreciated in recent decades. But what is missing in the West is any serious attempt at political understanding of the countries of the South, including their movements and leaders. First, there is the problem of information. As soon as our media tell us that atrocities have been committed by a leader or political movement of the South, most of our Western progressives accept the story without question. Now, if the lies about the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda or about Iraq weapons of mass destruction are relatively well-known, other systematic features of war propaganda, for example, what was really going on in Kosovo before the NATO bombing or the history of relations between Israelis and Palestinians, deserve to be better known and understood. A grasp of such past events ought to inspire a reasonable skepticism about future media allegations used to justify going to war.
In particular, the Kosovo war was the culmination of a decade of media bombardment in favor of “humanitarian intervention,” which was supposed to free us from the notion of national sovereignty and, more generally, of international law. The advocates of that intervention zealously spread every bit of one-sided propaganda for war, whether originating with local protagonists seeking to get NATO to fight for their side, or used by the United States to inaugurate a series of post-Cold War “humanitarian” wars.
The result was a Manichean vision of the Yugoslav conflicts, with Milosevic as principal villain. In this context, Western media and publics accepted without hesitation the idea that the ultimatum thrown at the Serbs at Rambouillet was the result of “negotiations,” which broke down solely due to the bad faith of the president of the country to be bombed, and that the combats between government forces and armed Albanian rebels (secretly aided by the United States and Germany) were “ethnic cleansing.” A war waged to oblige the Yugoslav president to deliver his country over to NATO occupation became, as the bombs fell, a war against a “genocide” invented by NATO war propaganda.1 By the time the war was over, and no traces of genocide were found, the public had lost interest. The subsequent “ethnic cleansing” of non-Albanians from Kosovo has been largely ignored by the media, or dismissed as understandable “revenge.”
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that “400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves” is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves. In that publication—“Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves” produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency—Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: “We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.”
On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour Party website that “The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.”
The USAID website, which quotes Blair’s 400,000 assertion, states: “If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.”2
These citations from The Observer illustrate the way the Western propaganda system works. An assertion that is purely factual (“the remains of 400,000 human beings have already been found”) but false (and deliberately so, since the people who make it are the very ones who order the exhumations in the mass graves) is launched by a government and repeated on a large scale (by the British Labor Party, a U.S. news agency, etc.). It is indeed corrected, but only once, and without any echo of that rectification in foreign countries, notably the United States. So the lie remains in the public consciousness and has its effect if someone points out that the U.S. war has cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the immediate answer is: “Ah, yes, but they found 400,000 bodies in Saddam’s mass graves.”
Furthermore, this sort of confession ought to encourage skepticism toward other government assertions. It rarely works this way.
Instead, a frequent reaction is to say that this type of disinformation doesn’t really matter, because, in any case, “Saddam is a brutal dictator” But this is not the point What would be the reaction if the leader of a Third World country multiplied by a factor of 80 the number of dead at Sabra and Chatila (160,000), or during the Vietnam War (240 million) or in the invasion of Iraq (8 million)? How much credibility would he retain?
We must stop being afraid of direct contact with the other side. How many of us wanted to hear the opinion of ordinary Arab citizens during the first Gulf war? Or even the second? How many were willing to listen to the viewpoint of Serbs or Greeks during the Kosovo war? How many are ready today to discuss the Iraq war openly and frankly with intellectuals described as “Islamists”? Why was it necessary to wait for the work of a new school of Israeli historians before taking into consideration things that everyone in the Arab world knows about (what happened in Palestine in 1948)? Doesn’t genuine internationalism consist of challenging our own feeling of moral (and not only cultural) superiority and listening to and discussing events with those who are under constant attack from our media and governments? Will the global justice movement succeed in establishing channels permitting direct discussions between populations, channels that would replace the odd form of “solidarity” that consists today in calling on Western governments to intervene even more than they are already willing to do in the internal affairs of other countries?
The surprising fact that the AFL-CIO went against all its history to take a critical position toward U.S. foreign policy by calling for withdrawal of troops from Iraq may have something to do with the Iraqi trade unionists who came to talk with their American colleagues to describe to them face-to-face the real situation in their country. It is probably by organizing such direct exchanges, especially between peace movements, that public opinion in the United States and Britain can be radically changed.3 But this sort of communication requires that Western governments agree to issue the necessary visas.4
This brings us to the most striking illustration of what must be changed: we are mentally very far from Iraq—much more so than we were “Far from Vietnam” when several French directors made a film with that title in 1967. Fallujah was a Guernica with no Picasso. A city of 300,000 was deprived of water, electricity, and food, emptied of most of its inhabitants who ended up parked in camps. Then came the methodical bombing and recapture of the city, block by block. When soldiers occupied a hospital, the New York Times managed to justify this act on grounds that the hospital served as an enemy propaganda center by exaggerating the number of casualties.5 And by the way, just how many casualties were there? Nobody knows, there is no body count for Iraqis. When estimates are published, even by reputable scientific reviews, they are denounced as exaggerated. Finally, the inhabitants were allowed to return to their devastated city, by way of military checkpoints, and start to sift through the rubble, under the watchful eye of soldiers and biometric controls.
The occupying powers, well aware of an international media presence, will never commit the same crimes that his regime did. Despite arbitrary arrests, cases of torture condemned by Amnesty International and restrictions on the press, it is hard to equate the abuses of the occupation with the brutal conduct of an army on full battle alert….
So the slow progress of the occupying forces has a disproportionate impact
But their many mistakes—some of which have been very dramatic, like the disbanding of the army—have subtler repercussions. Important religious dignitaries have been arrested, as have eminent tribal leaders. The blunders continue. Occasionally car passengers are crushed by an armored vehicle, but nothing seems to trigger revolt or even demonstrations of more than a few thousand.6
The article was published before the revelations on Abu Ghraib and the attack on Fallujah, but the peremptory tone (“never”) reflects perfectly Western certitudes as to our benevolence in comparison to others.
In response to all that, how many protests were there? How many demonstrations in front of U.S. embassies? How many petitions in allied countries to call on the government to demand that the United States stop? Which aid organizations are concerned with those victims as much as with those of Hurricane Katrina? How many newspaper editorials denounce those crimes?
Who are the champions of “civil society” and nonviolence who stop to recall that the tragedy of Fallujah began when, shortly after the invasion, its inhabitants demonstrated peacefully and the Americans fired into the crowd, killing sixteen people? And there is not just Fallujah. There is also Najaf, Al Kaim, Haditha, Samarra, Bakouba, Hit, Bouhriz, Tal Afar.
The Brussels Tribunal frequently receives reports of disappearances and assassinations in Iraq. Not of Islamic fanatics or evil Saddamists, but of intellectuals just as “Western” as those in the West who come up with excuses (Saddam, Islam) to ignore their fate. The “Salvador option” is well under way in Iraq.7 But to whom should we pass on these reports? Who cares?
We are more or less back to the situation that prevailed at the start of the Vietnam War, between 1962 and 1967, when to show concern for the fate of Vietnamese peasants bombed and burned by the U.S. Air Force was perceived by the American liberal intelligentsia as a sign of being “soft on communism.” Today, “Islamists” have taken the place of communists. A big difference is that in those days there existed, outside the United States, a relatively strong communist movement (including its competing Maoist and Trotskyist branches) which to a certain extent was able to contradict the dominant discourse. Today, however, the American liberal ideology has conquered the entire Western world, including for the most part whatever remains of the communist parties.
Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however—if handled right—might (perhaps after the next pause) offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided—which we could offer to do “at the conference table.”8
What do the NGOs have to say about all this, especially the human rights defenders? As the Canadian professor of international law Michael Mandel rightly remarks, at the start of the war, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other groups issued a firm appeal to the “belligerents” (as neutral a term as possible) to respect the rules of war. But not a word was said about the illegality of the war itself, about what international law considers the “supreme crime” committed by those who started the war.9 These organizations are in the position of those who recommend that rapists use condoms. That may seem better than nothing, but finally, given the relationship of forces, even the condoms won’t be used. The ideology of intervention in the name of human rights has been the perfect instrument to destroy peace movements and anti-imperialist movements. But once that intervention takes place on a large scale, human rights and the Geneva Conventions are massively violated.
In 2005, the Brussels Tribunal received a letter written by a human rights activist in Baghdad in reaction to an Amnesty International campaign in favor of an Iraqi constitution based on human rights. This letter explains why asking that the constitution respect human rights, under the current circumstances, comes down to legitimizing the occupation. This is a political choice, but it is not explicitly recognized as such by Amnesty International:
I hear Amnesty International is campaigning for Human Rights in the new Iraqi draft constitution. How wonderful that they are concerned about our human rights in the future … but what about now? Why doesn’t Amnesty International campaign or at least say something about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis who are held for months, years in the American prisons, without the least rights? The known and the unknown prisons inside and outside Iraq? Why don’t they do something about the hundreds of Iraqis, whose bodies are found every day on the garbage piles, with evidences of horrible torture on their bodies after they had been disappeared for a few days? What about the miserable life the Iraqi government is giving the Iraqis for months now, in every field? Does Amnesty International consider the rewriting of the constitution now a legal process? Obviously it does, but on what bases? The war and occupation of Iraq are illegal (even Kofi Annan said it). Who wrote the draft? A member of the writing committee admitted that a draft was sent from the US. So, how far is this legal?
I would like to ask Amnesty International one question: why is it so necessary to write a new constitution for Iraq now? All the political parties, the government the National Assembly, the media etc. are preoccupied with the [controversial points] in the constitution for months now, and will be for the next few months. Meanwhile, the country is full of problems: the security, the services, the economy, the environment, the corruption, the Human Rights conduct of the Iraqi government … to mention only few…. Two days ago I went to a dentist compound, one of the biggest in Baghdad, where at least 50 dentists work. They could not pull out my tooth because they did not have anesthetic … a very common problem in the Iraqi hospitals for months. Too bad for my teeth, but imagine with emergency cases?
In Tal Afar families did not get the food ration, neither any other food since the beginning of this year. In many Iraqi towns, the majority, there is no authority, no law, no police, no courts, only the armed militias and their political parties. Racial cleansing has begun in many parts of Iraq. The government in the heavily fortified Green Zone is very busy working on the constitution.
During the last attack on Haditha, for more than two weeks, all the news programs, the dialogue, the forums were focused on the constitution and in the meantime an Iraqi major city was practically slaughtered. No one said a word about it as if it was happening on the moon. Do you think that this is just a coincidence? And, by the way, it happened and is happening continuously in other places.
There are so many problems in Iraq now, so many crimes committed daily, where innocent people are killed, arrested, tortured … Why is it so important to neglect all these crimes and be busy with the constitution? Why is it so urgent?
Saddam did not write the Iraqi constitution, and if there were some changes or resolutions added to it during the last 30 years, they can be canceled, simple. We can keep our constitution until we have a proper government and national assembly. After we are done with the most urgent problems, we can take our time writing the most humanitarian and progressive constitution in the world!
Maybe more dangerous is the fact that rewriting the constitution now is deepening the divisions between the Iraqis and pushing them to the verge of civil war, because some of them were given guarantees to participate in the political process, which they refused in the beginning, and after they agreed, the guarantees proved to be untrue. Now these groups are saying that they were deceived, and they reject the draft presented to the National Assembly. All these problems are for what? Just to help Bush look more successful in Iraq, to give him more diplomatic credit?
To hold the election, thousands were killed and Fallujah demolished. Now, what is needed to impose a constitution? A civil war?
Can’t you see that it is a game? The political parties and ethnic, sectarian groups are taking the chance of imposing a constitution convenient to their interests and their masters’, not the interests of Iraq. I am not saying this out of my own prejudice, no, they admit it themselves, openly. Also, there is a very unhealthy, nonobjective atmosphere in which this constitution is written, which is something expected and normal in the current situation. But it is not the right way to write a constitution.
I know very well who are the friends and the enemies of Iraq and its people. I have nothing against any international organization. On the contrary, I, personally, am badly in need of an international organization that can help me in my campaign on the Missing. I want these organizations to come here and work on the violations that the occupation did and is doing in Iraq. We need them badly to see what the occupation is covering by rewriting the constitution.
—Sabah Ali10
Finally, what is it that anti-war movements ought to do? Before answering that question, another problem should be raised, concerning the real position of those movements within the overall political balance of forces.
The word idealism can have several meanings. Here what is meant is an expression of good intentions that is not accompanied by an adequate analysis of the relationship of forces in general, and in particular, the position occupied within that relationship of forces by the person expressing those good intentions. Unfortunately, idealism in this sense causes considerable confusion in progressive circles. The feeling of responsibility for things over which one has no control sometimes leads totally powerless opponents of the war to identify with United States power to the extent of trying to figure out “what we should do” to fix the mess it has made, instead of simply demanding that it withdraw its troops.
Such worries reflect the failure to explicitly formulate a couple of key questions, which tend to be implicitly answered without ever being discussed. Does the United States have the right, the ability, or even the duty to prevent civil war in Iraq? And do movements opposed to the war have the obligation to propose alternative solutions to the Iraqi disaster?
Let’s start with the first question.
As for the right, we are back to the matter of international law. Once you accept that any country can intervene in the internal affairs of another where it figures that a danger of civil war exists, we will soon get to the state of war of all against all. And if we consider that the invasion of Iraq was illegitimate, then evoking the risk of civil war to justify the occupation makes no more sense than justifying the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
As to the question of ability, there is a certain tendency on the idealistic left to oppose war because it is immoral, even if the United States is able to win easily. Noam Chomsky illustrates that point of view, combining a strong moral disapproval with an extreme overestimation of American power, when he declares:
What about Iraq? Well, I must say it is a very surprising result what has happened. It should have been one of the easier military occupations in history. First of all I thought the war itself would be over in two days and then that the occupation would immediately succeed. … My guess is the MIT electrical engineering department could have had the energy system running in Iraq by now. It’s hard to imagine that degree of incompetence and failure and it is partly because of the way they are treating people. They have been treating people in such a way that engenders resistance and hatred and fear. But I still find it hard to imagine that they can’t crush guerrilla-style resistance.11
This leaves aside, however, the extent to which American society is permeated with racism, ignorance, and arrogance; that the MIT engineers, who in principle are doubtless equally capable of reinforcing the dikes in New Orleans, are only a tiny minority of that society; that they are not necessarily eager to go to work in Iraq; and that the Iraqi resistance is not only the result of the hatred provoked by the occupation, but has been carefully prepared by the former regime.
Both the current management of the occupation and that of the New Orleans hurricane disaster suggest that the United States is far from being all-powerful. The possession of advanced technology enabling no-risk long-range bombing is so far not, fortunately, the key to world domination. Even if the comparison may not please everybody, the Muslim-Arab world that is massively opposed to the U.S. occupation of Iraq momentarily finds itself in the position of David against Goliath, but as is apparent, the victory of Goliath is not assured.
The lamest defense I could offer—one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear—is that I still support the principle of invasion, it’s just the Bush administration screwed it up. But as one antiwar friend snapped at me when I mooted this argument “Yeah, who would ever have thought that supporting George Bush in the illegal invasion of an Arab country would go wrong?” She’s right the truth is that there was no pure Platonic ideal of The Perfect Invasion to support, no abstract idea we lent our names to. There was only Bush, with his cluster bombs, depleted uranium, IMF-ed up economic model, bogus rationale and unmistakable stench of petrol, offering his war, his way (Expecting Tony Blair to use his influence was, it is now clear a delusion, as he refuses to even frontally condemn the American torture camp at Guantanamo Bay.)
The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush administration would produce disaster Let’s look at the major mistakes-cum-crimes. Who would have thought they would unleash widespread torture, with over 10,000 people disappearing without trial into Iraq’s secret prisons? Anybody who followed the record of the very same people—from Rumsfeld to Negroponte—in Central America in the 1980s. Who would have thought they would use chemical weapons? Anybody who looked up Bush’s stance on chemical weapons treaties (he uses them for toilet paper) or checked Rumsfeld’s record of flogging them to tyrants. Who would have thought they would impose shock therapy mass privatization on the Iraqi economy, sending unemployment soaring to 60 percent—a guarantee of ethnic strife? Anybody who followed the record of the US toward Russia, Argentina, and East Asia. Who could have known that they would cancel all reconstruction funds, when electricity and water supplies are still below even Saddam’s standards? Anybody who looked at their domestic policies.
—Johann Hari12
As for duty, some time ago, an American friend wrote me regarding the situation in Iraq: “What needs to be done now is a different question from knowing whether to support the war in the beginning. Now that the harm has been done, nobody knows how to repair all the damage. Leaving American troops in Iraq indefinitely is obviously not a good idea (from a progressive point of view), but it is not easy to know what would be a better alternative. Even in the peace movement, people are afraid that a simple American withdrawal, with nothing to put in its place, would lead to civil war.”
Well, the Americans have stayed on since then, and the country sinks ever closer to civil war. Finally, the question as to whether the Americans have a duty to stabilize the situation in Iraq is the easiest of all. Inasmuch as it is manifestly impossible for them to do so, what sense does it make to hope that by staying on they will repair the damage they have caused in Iraq? Moreover, experience in Iraq and elsewhere shows that foreign intervention tends to provoke internal conflict, even civil war, as the occupying power seeks to gain support by favoring one group or faction against others.
Having the strongest military in the world is the first step, but we also have to have a strong commitment to using our military in smart ways that further peace, stability, and security around the world.
—Hillary Rodham Clinton
Force will be used without asking anyone’s permission when circumstances warrant
—Joseph Biden, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee13
Richard Holbrooke, who’s been dubbed the “closest thing the party has to a Kissinger” by one foreign policy analyst even tacked to Bush’s right arguing in February 2003 that anything less than an invasion of Iraq would undermine international law.14
Let’s ask the second question: Is it up to the antiwar movement to propose solutions to the dramatic situation in Iraq? A positive response is not so simple, because one needs to know the real role that could be played by such “solutions.” What characterizes idealism in politics is to act as if the world is full of well-meaning folk, sitting around a table trying to work out an intellectually complicated problem. Whereas political problems are generally not intellectually complicated. Take the example of Palestine: one could demand the application of all the United Nations resolutions, which would doubtless be the fairest solution, and in any case would not demand any particular intellectual exertion. Of course, it’s impossible to achieve, and the reason is the relationship of forces—which is where the real problem lies.
People without political power who propose “peace plans,” such as the Geneva agreement on Palestine, rarely ask themselves how to establish a balance of forces that would allow their plans to be adopted. Worse still, proposing such plans in a vacuum, that is, without the support of an effective political power, and letting the media report on it as they please, can have a demobilizing effect, giving public opinion the impression that the problem is in the process of being solved, an effect that gets in the way of any favorable solution.
In the case of Iraq, any “proposal” that could be made by the opposition movements, for example, a replacement of U.S. troops by those of the United Nations, or any other form of internationalization of the war, would have the same drawback as the “peace plans” in the style of the Geneva agreement on Palestine. Having no means to impose the proposed solutions, however brilliant they might be, the simple act of proposing them would be a subtle form of aid to the occupation—focusing on the intellectual search for solutions, rather than building a mass movement to put pressure on the U.S. government to get out.
The purpose of peace movements cannot be to provide such aid, on the pretext that this would be the best solution for the Iraqis. It is true that nobody knows what would happen if the Americans left Iraq. But nobody knows what state Iraq will be in if they leave in ten or twenty years. In any case, it is hard to see how they can stay there indefinitely—the French stayed 130 years in Algeria, the Belgians 80 years in the Congo, the Americans a dozen years in Vietnam, and the Israelis 20 years in Lebanon. But in the end, they were all chased out.
The idea of “proposing solutions” is also the reflection inside opposition movements of a confidence in the almighty power of the West, with the slight difference that these movements consider themselves much more intelligent than the Bush administration. It would be far more realistic to admit that we do not have solutions to other people’s problems, and this being the case, we would do better not to interfere in their affairs.
In contrast to the idealistic tendencies on the left, there are people, call them conservatives, who are worried about the budget deficits deepened by the war, worried about the hatred aroused by U.S. policy, worried about the demoralization of the troops, worried about loss of American lives.15 Worried also about the domestic situation: social polarization, poor education, massive outsourcing and sale of enterprises to foreigners, disappearance of public services, growing concentration of media leading to uniform presentation of information, and so on. For all those reasons, that part of the population would like to “cultivate its own garden” and see the U.S. government tend to the well-being of its own population instead of “building democracy in Iraq.” Of course, it is in that part of the population that we hear annoying arguments such as: “Let’s go home, we have tried everything to bring them democracy.” As if invading a country and killing tens of thousands of its inhabitants, while displaying typically colonial attitudes and practices, was an appropriate way to establish democracy.
Nevertheless, if the conflict in Iraq goes on, or if other countries are attacked, there will have to be an alliance, or at least an objective, between the left and that part of the conservative right. Moreover, the forces that those two groups are confronting—that is, the neoconservatives who dominate the Republican Party and the humanitarian imperialists who dominate the Democratic Party, the Zionists who are influential in both parties, and various military-industrial lobbies—are more formidable than the forces they can mobilize even if they unite.
We can expect to see in coming years that part of the political debate will be centered on the issue of imperialism, intervention, relations with the Muslim world, and that the battle lines on these essential issues will not correspond to the traditional left-right cleavage. The interventionist “center” will attempt to dismiss its critics with the habitual niceties, calling them “extremists,” “totalitarians,” “anti-Semites,” etc., but that will not silence the debate.
The attitude that should be adopted by peace movements is to situate themselves realistically within a global perspective. Indeed, they cannot guarantee a happy outcome to the conflict in Iraq—because that is something nobody can do. Nor could the British anticolonialists guarantee that the end of the Raj would not have tragic consequences. Would that have been a reason it insist that England occupy India indefinitely? On the other hand, those movements are able to struggle within Western societies to get them to adopt a radically different attitude toward the Third World, an attitude based roughly on the demands of the countries of the South for peaceful cooperation, nonintervention, respect for national sovereignty and conflict resolution using the United Nations as intermediary. Withdrawal from Iraq would be a first step in that direction.
Out of the black smoke and ashes of that terrible day, America stood up strong, united, and determined. After careful deliberation, we answered back We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda had trained.
—Senator Bill Frist, press release: “Frist Denounces Democrats’ Plan to Cut and Run,” June 30,2006
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan govemment. The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.
—Associated Press, “U.S. Senate Majority Leader Calls for Efforts to Bring Taliban into Afghan Government,” October 2, 200616
There is no reason to believe that those demands are any more Utopian than the idea of world stability under American hegemony, nor that, had we followed such a policy systematically for the last half-century, human rights would not be better respected than they are now.
Let us consider now one of the first areas where the combat for such an alternative policy must be carried on: the area of information, or, more generally, our representation of the world.
In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of organizations, essentially based in rich countries, watching and denouncing violations of human rights in poor countries. Whenever I happen to discuss with representatives of these organizations why they do not denounce military aggressions, for example in Iraq, the answer is roughly that this is not their field and that they can’t do everything. They are concerned with human rights, period. That response would be defensible if the discourse of these organizations had not become hegemonic to a point that scarcely any other viewpoint, for example the defense of national sovereignty, can get a hearing. Moreover, they push their own priority to the point of being strictly neutral concerning aggressive wars, while denouncing the violations of human rights brought about by those wars—that is, they act as if there were no necessary link between the two. After all, those organizations do not refrain from denouncing those who are responsible for violating human rights—why then not include in that denunciation those who start wars?
“To preserve its neutrality in assessing adherence to the laws of war in the Iraq conflict, Human Rights Watch did not take a position on whether the war itself was justified or legal.
“Coalition forces generally tried to avoid killing Iraqis who weren’t taking part in combat,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “But the deaths of hundreds of civilians still could have been prevented.”17
Air attacks on leadership targets, like those launched in Iraq, should not be carried out until the intelligence and targeting failures have been corrected. Leadership strikes should not be carried out without an adequate collateral damage estimate (CDE).18
This style of criticism is perfectly functional. To establish your own neutrality, you start off by finding fault with your own side, deploring the death of a (greatly underestimated) number of civilian victims (there have been tens of thousands), which seem relatively few measured in terms of various other genocides and wars. Next “neutrality” regarding the war goes so far as to agree to killing the leaders of the opposite side, just so long as the intelligence is correct and that the collateral damage is adequately evaluated (By whom? How? On what basis?).
Amnesty also questioned whether the required precautions were being taken to protect civilians, and called for investigations into civilian deaths like those at the Karbala checkpoint, and the shooting of demonstrators in Falluja. But never once did Amnesty International … mention the fundamental reason why none of the incidents really had to be investigated at all—namely that all of this death and destruction was legally, as well as morally, on the heads of the invaders, whatever precautions they claimed to take, because it was due to an illegal, aggressive war Every death was a crime for which the leaders of the invading coalition were personally, criminally responsible.19
What the world needs today, alongside those organizations, would be an observatory to report on imperialism, a sort of “Imperialism Watch,” whose job would be to denounce not only wars and war propaganda but all the economic pressures and various other maneuvers thanks to which injustice prospers and endures. Such an observatory could also try to counter the mass of disinformation and rewriting of history that characterize Western perceptions of the relations between ourselves and the rest of the world.
To a certain extent, that is the task undertaken by Al Jazeera and by what is sometimes called “Al Bolivar,” that is, the new Latin American television station Telesur. These media can be seen as an extension of the appeal in favor of a new information world order launched by UNESCO and the countries of the South in the 1980s.20 The Western reactions to Al Jazeera are amusing to observe. At first they tended to welcome the appearance in the Arab world of a “professional” network up to “Western” standards of objectivity, not subjected to state control and expressing itself freely without stereotypes. But then it became clear that this network was, nevertheless, Arab. That is, it did not necessarily present Israeli and Palestinian victims in the way our media do, it allowed all the belligerents to have their say—including bin Laden—and also had a tendency to present the Iraq resistance for what it is, that is, a national resistance rather than terrorism. Abruptly, the honeymoon between the West and Al Jazeera was over.
That interrupted honeymoon illustrates a broader phenomenon. Democracy in the Arab world, which Westerners claim to love so much, would be the worst catastrophe that could happen there, because what the peoples of the region want is a better price for their oil, a more economical management of that resource, and more active solidarity with the Palestinian cause. This is by no means what we want, and as for oil, it is by no means obvious that our extravagant economies and the institutions that depend on them could survive very long if that resource were truly controlled by the producing countries.
On September 2, 1945, after the defeat of the Japanese invader and before the French attempt to reconquer Indochina, President Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the following Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam:
“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
The Declaration of the Rights and the Citizen of the French Revolution of 1791 also proclaims: “All men are born and remain free and equal of rights.”
These are undeniable truths.
Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. Their acts are the opposite of the ideals of humanity and justice.
In the field of politics, they deprived us of all liberties. They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united.
They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion; they have practiced obscurantism against our people. To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.
In the economic field, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land.
They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of bank-notes and the export trade. They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. They have prevented our national bourgeoisie from prospering. They have exploited our workers in the most barbarian way.
For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that
Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country; and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.
All the colonized peoples have been able to turn the principles claimed by the colonizers against them. And the Iraqis could today make statements similar to those of the Vietnamese (even certain details like “setting up three political regimes in the North, the Center and the South”). The Israelis and their champions draw attention to human rights violations in Arab countries in order to distract attention from international law or U.N. resolutions, which are not in their favor; but the occupation of Palestinian territories creates a cycle of violence and repression that is structurally incompatible with respect for human rights. The constant reference to human rights turns against them in the end.
We see a similar phenomenon concerning international criminal justice. This was conceived by the dominant powers essentially as a weapon against the leaders of weak but recalcitrant countries (Milosevic, for example) and as a means to legitimize intervention and even war.21 But the intrinsically universal character of justice means that this weapon will eventually turn, at least on the level of discourse, against the powerful states and against men such as Olmert, Bush, and Blair.
Therefore, to function as an instrument of domination, the human rights ideology calls for rewriting history, selective indignation, and arbitrary priorities. The paradox is that the more ethics advances toward a genuine universality—and the human rights ideology constitutes an advance in relation to previous ideologies—the more hypocritical the dominant power becomes. The current dominant powers have a more universalist discourse than, say, Genghis Khan; as a result, they need to be more hypocritical.
But this implies also that denunciation of hypocrisy and demystification should play an increasingly important role, in particular, in critiques of the media and dominant intellectuals. The first sign of hope is that they are not as all-powerful as they tend to seem. In France, the media and the dominant intellectuals overwhelmingly supported a “yes” vote in the May 2005 referendum on the Treaty for a European Constitution, yet the “no” vote won a clear victory. In Venezuela, the press is almost entirely run by and for the opposition, but Chávez wins time and again. Even in the United States, despite insistence by media and both mainstream parties to “stay the course,” a majority of the population seems to be fed up with the war in Iraq.
Recall that in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s world domination and the victory of the most unrestrained capitalism seemed final. Nevertheless, hope is in the process of changing sides. After the massive February 2003 antiwar demonstrations, the New York Times suggested that there were, after all, still two opposing superpowers: the United States and world public opinion.22 The “weapon of criticism” is reemerging against the force of weapons, and there is no telling where that can lead. In Latin America, neoliberal illusions have been discredited and the neocolonial system is being challenged in one place after another. The stubborn resistance of the Iraqis is shaking the certainties of the part of the world that calls itself civilized.
Unfortunately, there is a sort of race between those two superpowers, the United States and world public opinion. The question is no longer whether or not the United States can impose its hegemony on the rest of the world. Since 1945, U.S. domination has weakened, not only economically but even diplomatically and militarily. Just compare the ease with which the United States overthrew Mossadegh or Arbenz in the 1950s with the trouble it took to overthrow Saddam Hussein (two wars and thirteen years of embargo), not to mention the current Iranian regime or Hugo Chávez. Europe’s submission persists, but out of a kind of ambiguous inertia. When Jacques Chirac spoke of a multipolar world in 2003, the French president was the only Western political leader who still seemed able to think for himself. Far from expressing nostalgia for France’s past glory, Chirac was simply recognizing the inevitable limits of power. By taking on the world, the United States is going beyond those limits. The future is uncertain, but it may well be that the war in Iraq, far from affirming U.S. supremacy, turns out to be the swan song of American imperial domination.
The main problem is how the Americans react to the inevitable loss of their hegemony—by a soft landing or by an explosion of violence. If it is the latter, the use of nuclear weapons cannot be excluded. After all, the most recent Pentagon strategies call for such usage, even—or especially—against adversaries who have none of their own.23 Empires often have a way of creating the conditions that bring about their own inevitable and catastrophic fall. The very fear of such catastrophe is one of the things that keeps them going toward the end.
People who have been appealing to human rights for thirty years in order to flatter the American superpower risk finding themselves, perhaps against their will, the “objective allies” of monstrous undertakings.24 In any case, the question of the “soft landing” is the major political problem of our time, as well as the principal challenge that needs to be met by progressive, peace, or global justice movements.
Let us look at history in the long term. At the beginning of the twentieth century, all of Africa and part of Asia were in the hands of European powers. The Russian, Chinese, and Ottoman empires were helpless in the face of Western interventions. Latin America was more tightly controlled than today. Of course, not everything has changed, but with the exception of Palestine, colonialism has at least been relegated to the ash-can of history, at the cost of millions of lives. This end of colonialism constitutes humanity’s greatest social progress of the twentieth century. Those who want to revive the colonial system in Iraq, even with what Lord Curzon described, in the days of the British-controlled monarchy, an “Arab facade,” are dreaming.25 The twenty-first century will be that of the struggle against neocolonialism, just as the twentieth was the century of struggle against colonialism.
Insofar as the progress of the majority of humanity is linked to European defeats in the colonial conflicts, a narrowly Eurocentrist viewpoint leads us to see the evolution of the world in terms of decadence, which is no doubt one of the profound sources of the pessimism that characterizes the views of so many Western intellectuals. But another vision is possible. During the whole colonial period, we Europeans thought we could dominate the world by terror and force. Our absurd sense of superiority and our determination to impose our hegemony led us finally to slaughter each other, along with a good part of the rest of the world, during two world wars.
All those who prefer peace to power, and happiness to glory, should thank the colonized peoples for their civilizing mission. By liberating themselves, they made Europeans more modest, less racist, and more human. Let us hope that the process continues and that the Americans are obliged to follow the same course. When one’s own cause is unjust, defeat can be liberating.