Iraq corporate media whore article in student paper

A new perspective on the Iraq question

by James Naish  WEBLINKwww.student-direct.co.uk/2010/02/a-new-perspective-on-the-iraq-question/comment-page-1/#comment-587

NEW?  Hahaha.  James will make it far in the halls of power. The capitalists need apologists that can write well. He needs to learn a bit about propaganda, though.
Defending the indefensible is not easy in the 21st century.  Keep reading Chomsky. 

The 1991 Gulf War was motivated entirely by realpolitik. Iraqi forces in Kuwait presented a significant threat to the West’s trading partner – Saudi Arabia – and so had to be repelled. However, it was essential not to remove the Ba’athist regime from power as Saddam Hussein presented a useful counterweight to the growing power of the Islamic Republic – Iran. A policy of containment was consequently established to ensure that Saddam Hussein could remain in office while being prevented from gaining or exercising such military power that he could threaten Western allies or interests.

By 2002 the containment policy was in tatters. After more than a decade of sanctions and attempted diplomacy, the West was still in the position of having to enforce and monitor sanctions, and for this cost, what gain? There was little evidence that the Iraqi regime had been reformed or was ready to co-operate with the crucial weapons inspections. Furthermore, brutal sanctions had crippled the Iraqi economy, leaving Iraq a somewhat second-rate business partner and causing a great degree of suffering to ordinary Iraqi people.

Many on the left had argued for simply terminating sanctions in the hope that this would empower Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. This line of reasoning ignored the near-impossibility of organising any kind of an opposition movement under the Ba’athist regime. Furthermore, the complexity of this task would have brought Saddam time, at the very moment of the reinvigoration of the Iraqi economy, to consolidate his own position in Iraq and to rebuild his crippled arsenal. In reality, then, the most humane and prudent solution was to depose Saddam Hussein.

This was a point which the left did their best to refute; it was claimed that the Ba’athist’s numerous war crimes could not justify the intervention due to Western backing at the time. Should, then, no government ever attempt to make amends for the crimes of its predecessors? Similarly, Noam Chomsky claimed that Saddam “wasn’t going to threaten anyone” if sanctions were terminated. One wonders if the “thousands of people” who faced “arbitrary […and…] systematic repression” (Amnesty International, 1999) would have agreed. In actuality, it was a fundamentalist commitment to oppose Western imperialism that led the left to betray those most deeply cherished principles: humanism and internationalism.

The position of those who supported intervention in Iraq was no less problematic; on what legal grounds could the intervention be justified? A war crimes tribunal could have been established to prosecute the relevant Ba’athist officials for the acts of aggression against Iran and Kuwait, and the genocidal al-Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds. This approach had significant advantages: strong evidence was already available to bring the case to justice; a precedent had been set (Yugoslavia); such an approach was supported by a strong humanitarian argument which, although dismissed, was not directly disputed.

Despite its strength, however, this approach was rejected in favour of a more pragmatic solution. Containment had dominated the debate over Iraq since the end of the Gulf War. (Saddam’s use of chemical weapons was viewed only as evidence to support containment). By 2002, the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) argument for removing Saddam was well established. By contrast, the process for dealing with the Ba’athists through a war crimes tribunal was less familiar and significantly more complex. It was, therefore, more attractive to pitch the intervention in Iraq as an extension of, rather than a break from, the existing policy.

Underpinning this miscalculation is the cause of the degradation of Iraq into chaos: after a decade of debate over Iraq policy, there was a general failure to recognise a change in the basic proposition: by 2002, it was not realpolitik, but rather the collapse of realpolitik that motivated intervention – a position entirely consistent with humanist objectives. This failure inhibited the provision of an objective critique of policy. The left, locked in their view of intervention as essentially imperialist, dismissed the policy, rather than critique the strategy. Those who favoured the war attempted to tie fresh policy to the existing debate over WMDs, regardless of relevance; a meaningful critique would have pointed out sensible alternatives.

Ultimately, it was this entrenchment of positions, and the consequent failure to analyse the new situation objectively, that created the conditions in which the intervention could decline. Our leaders made catastrophic mistakes over Iraq (their strategy was negligent; their arguments, fraudulent; for this they must be held to account) but for their failure to understand the actual motives for intervention, and thus to propose serious alternatives, the anti-war camp must partially shoulder the blame for the chaos in Iraq.

Comments

1. Comment:
   February 22nd, 2010 at 20:00

   Haha, what a brilliant article in the service of power. But it’s not even remotely credible. Never once mentioned the real motives of the powerful, Oil (pipelines) and military bases, instead it tries the age-old “we are only trying to help” nonsense that history of anglo-american financial-takeover and military intervention is full of. White man’s burden, deja-vu all over again.
   Just a few points. The 1991 “tanks at the border to Saudi Arabia” satellite photos were faked, and worse, it deceived an ally, Saudi Arabia. Relations have never improved after that. (There were bombs at Marine barracks instead). Saddam was successfully fighting the financial-oppression, he had the oil-money he was allowed to retain put into Euro-accounts, and double his money. Oil being sold in Euro? US goes to war!

   “the most humane and prudent solution was to depose Saddam Hussein”

   let me rephrase that. The west is helping people by killing and maming untold numbers of them.
   “deposing” a foreign country’s leader is a dangerous precendent. Will China have the right to do too?

   “the anti-war camp must partially shoulder the blame for the chaos in Iraq”

   Yeah right. Grow up!

2. Comment
   February 22nd, 2010 at 20:11

   Have a look at some of the best cartoons on the Iraq Oil-War subject:

   http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2009/01/bush-is-gone-good-riddance-cartoons.html

   and tell me if you were able to suppress your smiles… Then, to get you blood boiling over “lefties” again, read these:

   http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2008/06/barak-obama-clinton-israel-operation.html

   http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2007/08/hiroshima-nagasaki-end-war-myth.html

   http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2008/05/learned-helplessness-cia-mind-control.html

3.