Oi, all you disgruntled liberals - over 'ere!

[monkeytrousers]

Intersting to learn that Blair wan not in fact Bush's poodle at all; more the other way around!

Something to help you get excited about progressive liberalism again!!

?Blair?s position has been more constant than many of his critics suppose. In many respects it has been admirable. Long before 9/11, Blair abandoned the conservative ?realism? ?more accurately moral quietism ? ((which almost had it indicted in the human rights courts)) that had characterised John Major?s foreign policies. Rather than acquiescing in Serb aggression ((as Major et al did)), Blair confronted it. Out of humanitarian obligation and an awareness that failed states breed fanaticism, he sent British troops to preserve Sierra Leone from hand-lopping rebels. Iraq was notr the biggest blunder since Suez: it was the most far sighted and noble act iof British foreign policy since the founding of Nato. Blair?s record exemplifies foreign policy ?with an ethical dimension?.

Before the election, bien-pensant academics asserted that a vote for Blair was a vote for Bush. The reverse was true: President Bush, who was a candidate in the presidential election of 2000 had denounced interventionist ?nation-building?, adopted by Blairism. After 9/11, Bush?s instinctive conservatism gave way to promoting global democracy as our defence against theocratic barbarism ? a strategy that accords with traditional liberal-democratic internationalism.?

Oliver Kamm - Anti-Totalitarianism The Left Wing Case for a Neoconservative foreign policy.

It?s only about 100 pages long!

bump

not holding my breath

and people say they are interested in politics...

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And we go for that do we?

Hmm.
Unfortunately I think that limited military actions with defined objectives seem to be common in the early years of many rulers; they then get kind of addicted to them and end up landing the world in royal bloody messes.

Me too Pruners

No, Princess, you maybe read ot discuss and learn a bit more..?

Not sure what you are talking about CF; life is often a royal bloody mess. Politics cannot save us from life, surely? Just try to make it more worth the fight of fuckup? That's why we pick sides?

and challenge too Princess!

and Pruners..I do love you for actually reading teh evolutioanry stuff! [big drubk hug]

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does that make going to war okay?

I dunno? Was it okay to go to war in Kosovo but not Iraq?

What I mean is, atrocities were happening in both. The difference was that the western media were more interetsed in the Kosovan tradgedy cos it was nearer, more recent; the massacres commited by Saddam and the Baath party in Iraq had been going on for decades - but the horror was still the same.

There is a programme on this week; Rageh Omarr: Iraq By Numbers - it looks good but it also personifies the 'spin' of the war as it is presented to us here. It documenst the dead and missing since the start of the invasion - but what of the dead and missing under Saddam? What of the gassed Kurds? What of the thousands of Iraq's own 'disappeared'? The counting shoudl start at teh beginning of Saddam's dictatorship.

I think iot is possible to be ctirical of things about the war; it is possible sympathise with the innocent civillians and their terribel loses, want justice against allied wrongdoing - but still see the invasion as the lesser of two evils, one of which was to leave the Iraqi peopel to the mercy of Saddam and his Baathist party.

The story is much more complicated than we have been led to believe.

an Iraqi perspective

It is only 4 pages long

I'm interested too MT - just didn't see this before...

I think you're right - that we have been fed a very distorted view of what went on/goes on.

I still don't believe that going to war was a "far sighted and noble" act. It's true that we might not have known, or been exposed to, the atrocities in Iraq - and that, dubiously, an attitude of consequentialism might suggest that they do justify our intervention. But isn't the point more why we didn't know, and why we didn't go in until we did?

We didn't know (imho) because we've adopted a laissez-faire attitude to the middle east where we expect them to be blowing the hell out of each other, living in abject poverty, under tyrants, and experiencing the kind of atrocities that anywhere else in the world (as in the Kosovo example) would lead the outrage. We have made them "other".

Perhaps going to war was the right thing to do. I think though, that that, if true, is a happy accident. A result of rather more luck than judgement. I don't believe we went for the right reasons, or that it was well thought out. If we had, we would have been there a long time before - or perhaps not left such a bloody mess the first time around.

I haven't time to debate today as have ils arriving any minute. But I don't think it neccessarily a two option scenario. To war or to ignore.

There were for example, uprisings of Iraqi people themselves which could have been supported financially and otherwise but weren't.

hmmm Saddam was a puppet of the west?

war is not a lesser evil, if innocent people are being killed what makes being killed by western powers any more acceptable than being killed by a despotic leader?

I don't think going to war in Iraq was a humanitarian action, and it wasn't because Bush etc felt that Iraqi kurds were being massacred and needed saving.

Most of the people wholed the first uprising after the 1st Iraq war were killed Slur; and thei families and friends - and the friends that were left forced to take part in their slaughter. This was a specific tactic of Saddam, to hand the gun to the people around him and there implicated them at the highest level in the atrocities he orchestrated. Ex-Stasi were hired to train his police. Hairdressers were informers and would themselves be torutred if gthey didn't come forward with evidence against their customers regularly. Son's were taught at school to inform on their fami,ies if they were disrepectful to 'papa' saddam. Insurrection from the inside was incredibly difficult n these circumstances, especuially as such things as unions had been banned.

If Blair had been in office then he might have persuaded Bush Sr to go in and help the real insurgency. Who knows..

I don't know if the war was a far sighted and noble act either. But I don't think it was the biggest blunder since Suez, as Robin Cook suggested.

I dunno how useful ideas such as the 'other' are. I studied them at uni and they are great abstract ideas, but it makes the mistake of still putting western perpective centre. We are also the 'other' from a different perspective.

Most people in Iraq are not being killed today by western forces, but Islamist terrorists trtyingto force sectarian civil war. Trying to stop democracy.

Youi are rioght AFK, not Bush no, but Blair, maybe so.

I am not 100% decided on this by any degree. I hope you can read some of the stuff, Kamm's books for instance. It has really opened a door to a new perspective on all this for me.

who led

The people in the twin towers were the 'other' for example to all those people celebrating the hit on the West in the West Bank and Gaza that day.

I didn't mean "other" in that sense. I haven't studied it, sadly, so didn't know I was using a technical term!

I just meant that it seems to me as if we distance ourselves from what happens in the middle east, and all the hell, by saying somehow they are different. I think this sense of difference and removal is exploited by the media (parts of) and various powers in order to stifle the outrage that would inevitably arise were similar situations to exist in, say, France.

What's interesting about this imo, when it comes to the theory of the "other" with regard to national identity, is that although we have an 'enemy', an 'other', that we are fighting against, at least from the point of view of a pro-iraq war politician, this has not been taken up by the vast majority of the British population.

We have an 'other' (created/presented/however you want to put it) by not only our nation but those we feel the strongest bonds with (i.e. the USA amongst others). THis "other" has plenty of characteristics (as perceived by the west) that are either alien or unacceptable to us.

Yet rather than this winning support from the majority, or creating a greater sense of identity and community (at a time when one might argue it was lacking) this has only suceeded in doing the opposite - in creating a wider gulf between the politicians and the populace.

Interesting imo - purely from a national identity point of view.

Am not too good on the actual history of Iraq/the middle east (at least since the ottomans ) and world politics.

The thing is that, in all this PC madness, we have forgotten why the concept of the 'other' even exists. The 'other' can extend to someone not in your family, or extended family, or tribe, or community, ot religion - there is a positive reason for the 'other' existing - and existing in our psychology before it is projectd onto our environment.

The whole neo-liberalism thing is trying to reinfirce a collective national identidy in the west which has been sorely neglected (somewhat correctly too_ but which has been in self flagilating mode for a long time. There are others around the world who will do that flagilating for us - it's time we were post colonial guilt now and fought for what we beleiev in for the sake of our kids. You can still be a humanitarian and do that. You just don't put yourself last - which is always suicide.

monkeytrousers, re "Was it okay to go to war in Kosovo but not Iraq?"

Apples and oranges.

There was ongoing genocide in Kosovo, which was only stopped by intervention.

There was no such emergency in Iraq, only that US thought it a good idea to take on Iraq after Afghanistan. Any example of mass murder you can give in Iraq happened more than a decade ago.

On a more general note, I see you are reading funny books again Invasion of Iraq was "the most far sighted and noble act of British foreign policy since founding of Nato", no less.

I can't really figure out why being against the Iraq war is "putting ourselves last"?

what is a collective national identity? and in what way is it neglected?

what should we believe in "for our kid's sake" that justifies other people being brutally killed? this neo-liberalism stuff gives me the willies.

but I am interested in what you have to say MT, I just don't agree with it.

What do you think Saddam had done to the Kurds? There was ongoing chronic atrocity in Iraq - ongoing for decades!

They aren't 'funny' books but ones that widen the persoctive. Books by brave Iraqi dissidents (they are short on the ground!) like Kanan Makiya

These aren't my arguments AFK, I'm just trying to get an opinion but no one seems willling to read anything that doesn't already chime with their beliefs.