Category: Uncategorized

The speech of the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, at the UN – and also the way it was presented on the BBC website – is old news, so I cite this passage from it here, not because I think you won’t already have come across it, but just because I want to. I feel it belongs on my blog:

One year ago, this Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable. The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure. The United Nations must not fail the Iraqi people again. After eight months of liberation, Iraqis are slowly beginning to get back on their feet with the help of their allied friends, and they are eagerly awaiting the help of the international community, led by the United Nations. And so we ask you today: please put aside your differences, pull together and work with us and all those who have contributed and sacrificed so much, to realize our shared objectives of a sovereign, united and democratic Iraq.

Apropos the topic of the last, Julie Burchill, not yet departed from the Daily Knock, writes about her attitude to Christmas and, as is her way, throws in a provocative aside:

The blessed silence, albeit momentarily, when Ruth replied that, actually, they were planning to have beef [for Christmas dinner], was a joy. You’d have thought that she had said, “Actually, Jill, we were planning to have Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein spit-roasting Mrs Antrobus on the table in front of us, as a special treat for Pip, Josh and little Ben.” (And yes, Guardian-readers-dear, I know that if that WERE to happen, it would all be the fault of the wicked west!)

Some of those readers just can’t wait for her to go.

Jackie D poses a question:

I’m genuinely interested in reading what people have to say about a point brought up by Samizdata’s Johnathan Pearce: Why do the British leftists who are so unashamedly (and, I should say, understandably) hostile towards Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet – hostility that in many cases hits the point of proud hatred – feel so much less disgust for Saddam Hussein? Is it because Pinochet was a champion of capitalism in Chile, creating what Milton Friedman called “an economic miracle”? I’m not sure, but contrasting the vastly different reactions to these two tyrants is a bit troubling. Any ideas on why what appears to be an extreme double standard has taken root in the British left are most welcome.

Here’s my suggestion: Pinochet was supported by the US; Saddam Hussein was, finally, taken down by them. It may not be the whole story, but I’d say it’s most of it. I’d also add, however, that the question would be better expressed as ‘some British leftists’. There are plenty that feel the same, or a greater, disgust for the former Iraqi dictator – though some of them have been keeping rather quiet about it over the last year or so.

On the subject of former dictators, Jackie also points to a rather odd inconsistency in BBC norms and usages.

Emma Nicholson thinks that evidence of WMD will in due course be found:

A Liberal Democrat peer tonight insisted Saddam Hussein had been a “clear and present danger” and she was certain evidence of his weapons of mass destruction would be found.

Baroness Emma Nicholson said the captured dictator was a “huge threat” and had buried “huge boxes” of weapons in Iraq’s marshland.

She said the reversal of sanctions on Iraq meant Saddam had had billions of dollars to spend on WMD.

And he had many months to hide them during the build-up to war.

Hat tip: Andrew Russell.

Sheila O’Malley was born in Boston, and grew up in Rhode Island. She got her Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting from the University of Rhode Island. After graduating, she lived in Chicago for 5 years, where she performed in such plays as Golden Boy, by Clifford Odets, Edna O’Brien’s Virginia (playing Virginia Woolf), and an award-winning adaptation of James Agee’s Death in the Family. Sheila also appeared in a regional production of Tracy Letts’s Killer Joe, performed at The Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca, New York. She then moved to NYC, to get her Master’s in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA program at the New School University. She is now at work on a one-woman show. Sheila blogs at Sheila Astray’s Redheaded Ramblings.

Why do you blog? > I blog because, basically, I am a big-mouth, and I needed to create a public platform where I could shout about things which matter to me. Also, the writing impulse had to be satisfied.

What has been your best blogging experience? > When a piece I wrote, That PBS special, was posted in the Wall Street Journal’s ‘Best of the Web’, on September 10, 2003. I am still getting letters about that piece.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > I had a freaky stalker who thought we had a deep personal relationship merely because he read me every day.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Have fun. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Also – read other blogs. Know that you are not inventing the wheel.

What are you reading at the moment? > Re-reading Orwell’s 1984.

Who are your cultural heroes? > James Joyce, Shakespeare, The Beatles.

What is the best novel you’ve ever read? > Catch 22, by Joseph Heller.

What is your favourite poem? > ‘The More Loving One’ by Auden.

What is your favourite movie? > Running on Empty.

What is your favourite song? > At the moment? ‘Fields of Joy’ by Lenny Kravitz.

Who is your favourite composer? > Bach.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you’ve ever changed your mind? > Almost every single one! My views are a constant work-in-process. The main one, so far, has been my feeling that war is always bad. I have changed my mind on that one in a major way.

Who are your political heroes? > John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Vaclav Havel.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Don’t procrastinate anything. Do stuff immediately. Risk failure, risk disappointment – because life is fleeting and cruel.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > There are two: curiosity and a sense of humour.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Rigidity, close-mindedness.

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > If I felt a family member was in danger, and only a lie would save them, I would lie like gangbusters. I would also lie if I thought the lie would get me a backstage pass to meet Eminem.

Do you have any prejudices you’re willing to acknowledge? > Yes. Against people who are wilfully shallow, who are unwilling to look at themselves, unwilling to inquire, who actively resist growth, who cannot change. Scott Peck calls these people People of the Lie.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Gambling.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > The correct question is what do I not worry about. The main thing I worry about is my family. Are they happy? Safe? Are they okay?

What would your ideal holiday be? > Two months in a little house on the west coast of Ireland.

What is your most treasured possession? > A teeny clear piece of beach glass given to me long ago by someone I once loved deeply.

What talent would you most like to have? > Snowboarding at an Olympic level of skill.

Who are your sporting heroes? > Joe DiMaggio, Carlton Fisk.

Which baseball team do you support? > Tragically, yet fatalistically, the Red Sox.

If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > Novels published. Tony-award winning one-woman show.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Marilyn Monroe, John Adams, Tennessee Williams.

What animal would you most like to be? > A dolphin. They, among animals, seem to have a true sense of fun.

[Previous profiles: Ophelia Benson (Nov 7); Chris Bertram (Sep 26); Alan Brain (Oct 10); Francois Brutsch (Dec 5); Jackie D (Oct 17); Harry Hatchet (Oct 24); Saddam Hussein (Nov 14); Oliver Kamm (Nov 21); Natalie Solent (Nov 28); Roger L. Simon (Oct 31); Michael J. Totten (Oct 3); Brian Weatherson (Dec 12). The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature.]

Yesterday, I had a parable on the issue of anti-Semitism. Today I’m fresh out of parables. Time to look at some of the realities which the parable was about. There’s a piece in the last Socialist Worker but one, purporting to address itself to the issue of anti-Semitism. How does it do this? It places it in the broader context of the need to combat all forms of racism. Fair enough. No one should argue against that; no one should expect that within the broader context the fight against anti-Semitism is to take priority over other kinds of racism.

However, the problem of anti-Semitism needs to be seen for what it is, a real one. Yet both times this Socialist Worker article gets to the sensitive point, it ducks it. First:

[W]hat some groups have claimed recently is that the real threat to Jewish people is a new form of anti-Semitism which, they say, comes from Muslims and the left. A new report on anti-Semitism in Europe published last week was used in this argument.

This ignores the fact that discrimination against blacks and Asians is still the dominant form taken by racism in Britain and around Europe.

No, this (claim) doesn’t ignore that fact. It’s a separate, free-standing claim whose truth or falsity is independent of what is the dominant form taken by racism in Britain, Europe or anywhere else. Let’s try again:

Some people do accept the argument that Israel is “the Jewish state”. This means that some people, including some Muslims, make the mistake of blaming all Jews for the actions of Israel and for the horrors inflicted on people across the Middle East.

But… [paragraph on Bush, oil, US power, its ally Israel.]

One great success of the global anti-war movement is that it has cut through the smokescreen thrown up by the supporters of US imperialism. It has squarely targeted the neo-conservative warmongers and united large numbers of Jews alongside Muslims and many others.

In so doing… it is winning large numbers of people in Europe and the Middle East away from seeing the world in the communal terms our rulers use. The increasing numbers of Jewish people prepared to attack what Israel is doing have speeded that process enormously.

So, there might just be a bit of a problem with ‘some people’, but no worries – many Jews are joining with everyone else to address it by attacking what Israel is doing. How about non-Jews joining with Jews to attack what other forces than Israel are contributing to the problem? Nix and nada. The article comes to an abrupt end pretty much there. Fortunate that it does, because this is only one of the things wrong with it – or two of the things.

Meanwhile back in the real world, EU leaders talk a language in which the realities of the real world show through rather more clearly:

At the [EU] summit, the leaders… issued a statement expressing their deep concern over rising anti-Semitism and condemned all attacks against Jewish religious sites and individuals.
…..
The denunciation of anti-Semitism was the first joint statement by EU leaders on the subject since the leaking of an EU-commissioned study which found that most anti-Jewish attacks are carried out by Muslims.
…..
“This anti-Semitism is real in our country,” commission secretary Remy Schwartz said. “We found children have to leave public schools in some areas because they are not physically secure… This has profoundly shocked the commission.”

The committee stated that for the first time, the number of attacks on Jews surpassed the number of racist attacks on any other minority last year…

According to the French report, wearing a skullcap in the street or on public transportation could be dangerous, and the expression “dirty Jew” has become common in schoolyards. Many Jewish students and teachers have left the public education system for Jewish and Catholic private schools because of the racial problems they encountered, the report found.

BUT… Jane has probably done her homework.

Maybe it’s that I’m tired and I missed it, but so far as I can see, in the week when Saddam Hussein finally met his political end the Socialist Worker (stop and think about this if, like me, you’re of the left: Socialist and Worker) have not one single solitary syllable marking that end as something to welcome, to be relieved about – to rejoice over. See here, here and here.

The capture of Saddam Hussein hasn’t been greeted with unalloyed delight in every corner of the blogosphere. For those of us who find this puzzling (what can be wrong with catching someone dripping with the blood of his countless victims?) Philosoraptor provides an unusually detailed and helpful explanation:

We didn’t nobly decide to make sacrifices in order to do what is right and bring down the tyrant. Rather, we were tricked into doing it for craven reasons. Because we were stupid and uninformed, and because we were easily frightened and overly deferential to authority, we allowed ourselves to be talked into going to war. What we did will probably, on balance, have morally good consequences (unless the administration cuts and runs before the next election, that is). But we don’t get credit for those consequences since we didn’t go to war in order to achieve them. If I’m a tad dim and easily frightened and, as a result, I shoot someone who in fact posed no threat to me, then I don’t get any moral credit for shooting him, even if I saved someone else by doing so. If my reasons for shooting were stupid and cowardly, then I’m a stupid coward – no matter what good is accomplished by my bullet. Actions are morally good or bad on the basis of intentions – on the basis of the goals for which they are undertaken – and we undertook this war not in order to bring justice to Iraq, but in order to eliminate a threat our leaders invented almost out of whole cloth.

OK, so what follows from this view? It looks as if we can’t give any credit to the USSR for resisting the Nazis, since they didn’t do it to bring about justice (but just for what Philosoraptor regards as the ‘not-especially-noble goal of self-defense’); and no credit either to Churchill for resisting Hitler, since he didn’t do it to bring about justice, not for Poland and not for Czechoslovakia, and certainly not for the Jews or the Roma, and what’s more he also invented a German threat to the British Empire which never really existed, since Hitler would have liked to have had England as an ally. So really no one can get any credit at all for fighting the Second World War. And France can’t get credit for opposing the Iraq war, since her motives were to protect her financial interests in maintaining the Saddam regime, and the UN certainly can’t get any credit, since it was making money hand over fist from the oil-for-palaces programme, and wanted to protect its special interests too. And, as for the Stop-the-War protestors, and the ANSWER group in America, well, the hysterical anti-Americanism of their motives really does make their activities thoroughly bad. In fact, once we start assessing actions strictly in terms of the purity of their motives, we’ll find that not a lot in politics turns out to be creditable!

Myself, I think it’s unlikely that Blair’s and Bush’s motives were as bad as Philosoraptor and others assume – it seems much more likely that they were a mixed bunch, containing among other things some genuine commitment to regime change for the reasons they gave us. But let’s go along with the assumption of bad motives for just now, since what I want to concentrate on is not the truth or falsity of this view, but its implicit commitment to the claim that people’s motives are the most important thing, morally speaking, about their actions. This meme about the overwhelming significance of bad motives appears all over the place in anti-war discourse. But in the context of the war in Iraq, it involves a serious mislocation of moral importance. Perhaps motives do determine whether an agent is good or bad, but that’s a different, and in this context a much less important, issue than the question of whether an action (e.g. the intervention in Iraq) is right or wrong. Leave aside the fact that the exclusive concern with the moral status of the agent often looks depressingly like a juvenile interest in the giving and withholding of brownie points and black marks. Even if that concern were itself driven by the purest of motives, nonetheless in the context of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths, the moral status of George Bush’s character really isn’t the most important thing. What’s of far greater importance is the question of whether it was right to engage in a war to overthrow Saddam. And the question of the rightness of an act isn’t settled exclusively by an appeal to motives – as we acknowledge every time we allow that a person can do the right thing for the wrong reasons. The rightness or otherwise of the war in Iraq is a separate question from the goodness or badness of its participants’ motives or characters. You don’t need to be an ethical consequentialist to think that the consequences here, such as the overthrow of a vile tyrant, are going to play a pretty important part in deciding whether it was right to go to war.

One possible reply to this is that if Bush’s motives were bad, there’s no guarantee that his next action won’t be a wicked one. Very true. But if his motives were bad, then whether or not Saddam’s regime gets attacked we’ve got no guarantee that America’s next action won’t be a wicked one. But in the meantime, a terrible tyrant has been overthrown. And if the next action is wrong, we can always oppose it. The possibility of the next action being wrong can’t be a reason for refusing to support the current action if it’s right.

Connected to this concern for motives is another major theme of Philosoraptor’s post (and of many others): namely, We Were Lied To. For my part, I think we probably weren’t, but maybe I’m wrong about this, so again suppose for the sake of the argument that we really were deliberately deceived. How important is this? Picture the scales of justice: in one pan, we have the (putative) fact that we were lied to – a wrongful act, therefore; in the other pan, we have the overthrow of a monster who tortures and kills his people. Which way do the scales tip? And what kind of narcissistic concern for our condition, rather than that of Saddam’s victims and future prey, would lead one to see only the scale containing the lie?

These were both relayed to me by a friend in London. Conversation 1:

Other: “Well, Israel should not exist.”
Friend: “The reality is it does exist. So the question is: how can a settlement be made that can suit all parties involved?”
Other: “No, it just shouldn’t exist, it isn’t right.”
Friend: “Are you suggesting that the citizens of Israel just be forced out of their country then?”
Other: “Well, Israel shouldn’t exist in the first place”

Conversation 2:

Other (expressing surprise at Friend carrying a copy of the Daily Telegraph): “You read the Telegraph?”
Friend: “Yes, I’ve stopped buying the Guardian since I find much of the comments page depressing, anti-American and at times bordering on anti-Semitic.”
Other: “How do you mean?”
Friend: “Oh, some of the comments that appear to lend weight to the argument that America is run by Jews.”
Other: “Well, they are right, aren’t they? What really gets me is that Jews are doing to others what was done to them. The reason the Americans don’t tackle Israel is that there are too many Jews in control in America, just like the way they didn’t fight the IRA because of the Irish Americans.”
Friend (after brief explanation of 1967 war): “And you have to remember that they are under attack by people like Hamas, who effectively want Israel destroyed.”
Other: “Well, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”
Friend: “You do realise that Israel was in part formed by the experience of the Jews in Europe. After the war many of them were kept in camps on the continent and were not wanted in the UK for example, and some, understandably after seeing their comunities ripped apart, wanted to have a country of their own they could live in.”
Other: “We were stupid to let Israel be formed.”

According to my friend, her interlocutors could not be regarded as belonging on either extreme of the political spectrum.

Amongst the What the Papers say awards:

David Aaronovitch, who writes for both the Guardian and the Observer, won columnist of the year.

“At a time when most left-leaning commentators were opposing the war in Iraq, he took a brave and consistent stand, presenting the case for action in the most coherent and persuasive manner,” the judges said of Aaronovitch.

Good for the judges, and good for David Aaronovitch!