Saving that one for "Jacko" are you?
Posted on 12/19/2003 6:59:10 PM PST by Pokey78
The US president is reflecting his own brutish view of the world
It has always seemed mistaken to perceive Iraq as the epicentre of the "Iraq crisis". Events there represent only one manifestation of a much more profound issue: how the rest of the world should manage its relationship with the United States. This will be our great foreign policy dilemma for at least the first half of the 21st century.
America's wealth and power are inescapable realities. It seems self-indulgent to lavish emotional and intellectual energy on deploring the shortcomings of the world's only superpower. From Tony Blair downwards, all of us must focus on coming to terms with the US, rather than figuratively waving placards to demand that this great nation should be something other than it is.
Yet, it is hard not to hate George Bush. His ignorance and conceit, his professed special relationship with God, invite revulsion. A few weeks ago, I heard a British diplomat observe sagely: "We must not demonise Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz." Why not? The US defence secretary and his assistant have implemented coalition policy in Iraq in a fashion that makes Soviet behaviour in Afghanistan in the 1970s appear dextrous. The British are hapless passengers on the Pentagon's juggernaut.
The president's personal odyssey touched a new low this week, when he asserted publicly that Saddam Hussein should die. After a fair trial, he says, Iraq's former dictator should swing or be shot, though Washington thinks it expedient to delegate Iraqis to do the business.
There will be no trouble with the British government about this scenario. Downing Street's line suggests a script originally written for Pontius Pilate. Tony Blair declares that what an Iraqi administration chooses to do with Saddam is absolutely no business of Britain's. If the powers-that-will-be in Iraq decide he should take an early bath on the scaffold, then what can Britain's prime minister do, save shrug?
This posture seems less worthy of respect than that of the US president. Bush is a long-standing enthusiast for capital punishment, who believes there is nothing like a good hanging to purge the soul. Blair is alleged to be an opponent. Surely this is an indivisible position. If one believes judicial killing is wrong, then how is it possible to make exceptions? What price Ian Huntley's neck if especially horrible crimes justify temporary suspension of principled objections to execution?
About now, somebody from Downing Street will murmur: "Come on, get real. The White House is determined that Saddam will take the jump anyway, so where's the sense in Tony being seen to break ranks on something he can't stop?" This argument has got Britain and its government into a great deal of trouble already. It looks shakier by the day.
Yet Blair would also privately justify his behaviour on the usual basis, that a satisfying proportion of Labour focus groups are untroubled about Saddam's fate. Why should he not hang? It may be crass of a US president publicly to prejudge the outcome of judicial proceedings, but nobody is likely to face the wrath of Sue, Grabbit and Runne for declaring Saddam to be one of the most unpleasant dictators of the past generation - a mass murderer whose crimes place him in the same historical category as Mao or Stalin, albeit with fewer foolish western sympathisers.
We can agree, perhaps, that Saddam Hussein does not deserve to live. It is a pity that he made no show of resistance when American soldiers found him, to justify tossing a grenade into his spider hole. But he did not fight, and was captured alive. Next year, some sort of tribunal will find him guilty of unspeakable crimes. Thereafter it will be inconvenient and expensive to guard him through a long captivity.
Yet those of us who reject judicial killing can support no sentence other than life imprisonment. The coalition's avowed purpose in Iraq is to change the political culture of centuries, above all the region's conviction that problems are capable of solution only by administering violent death. Already, the Americans' tactical conduct of anti-guerrilla operations compromises this objective, by showing how little the US army esteems the lives of innocent Iraqis.
Every British soldier deemed responsible for unjustifiably causing death by his own actions on opera tional duty faces at least disciplinary charges, and not infrequently criminal prosecution. American soldiers, by contrast, are granted a wide-ranging dispensation for silly mistakes when they get their licences to kill.
A friend in the counter-insurgency business recently met some spooky friends in Washington whose organisation was responsible for the Predator strike in which a guided missile killed a group of innocent Afghans, in the mistaken belief that they were Osama bin Laden. "Who faces the murder charges?" my friend teased the spooks. They looked blank. Nobody does, of course.
The neo-cons in Washington deserve credit for getting one big thing right. For too long, Europeans have acquiesced in the view that democracy is a luxury beyond the means of most second and third world countries. Paul Wolfowitz and his friends are surely correct, that only democracy can offer hopes of building societies that behave towards one another with decency and moderation, whatever the evidence to the contrary in the performance of Ariel Sharon.
The neo-cons fatally compromise their purpose, however, by placing their faith in force to impose democracy. Even those of us who were deeply sceptical about US intervention in Iraq should acknowledge that the country is better without Saddam. But US policy since the war ended has emphasised firepower and cash, rather than hearts and minds.
In the old days in Vietnam, I believed that the Americans would achieve nothing until they committed soldiers who liked and respected the place and the people, rather than loathing and despising them. So it seems again in Iraq.
Now, they want to execute Saddam. My wife, whose liberal instincts are normally much more reliable than mine, is bemused by my scruples. She believes the case is unanswerable for the dictator's cheap, permanent removal. But I cannot swallow either the principled or pragmatic arguments for yet another act of government-directed violence.
The allies rightly executed the leading Nazi and Japanese war criminals in 1945 and 1946. That was in another age, after the victors had fought the greatest war of national survival the world has seen. Bush's intervention in Iraq, by contrast, represented a war of choice, with the limited purpose of changing the nation's government.
If it is now to become US policy to execute former dictators who have committed terrible crimes against their own people, then many past and some current American clients will need to form an orderly queue to the gallows.
In reality, Bush's eagerness to see Saddam swing reflects not an overarching objection to murderous dictators, but an ad hominem desire to complete the liberation of Iraq with a gesture that fits his own brutish view of the world. The least Blair can do, on Britain's behalf, is to say that we can no more endorse the sponsorship of a hanging carried out by Iraqi stooges of the coalition, than fly out Geoff Hoon to do the job personally.
Saving that one for "Jacko" are you?
No, in point of fact, Max Hastings is not a wanker, and that's what makes this such a painful read. Hastings was one of Britain's premier war correspondents and landed with the troops during the Falkland Islands war. His strategic understanding of this war is colored by his hatred of Bush and the "neo-cons" (shorthand for "Jews"-notice he doesn't hesitate to give a gratuitous slam at Sharon, the bete-noir of choice for Jew-baiters everywhere). He will never have anything good to say about our struggle as long as Bush is president, though the survival of our civilization be at stake.
Saddam will be killed because his killing is just. Like most Europeans these days, Hastings stops short of the necessity to inflict on Saddam the maximum penalty for his crimes. In short, like most Europeans, Hastings has lost his nerve.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Indeed. We learned about appeasement in 1940, but if we had rallied to stop Hitler in the Sudetenland, or if the world had stopped Japan's march into China, there would be a Max Hastings to question our illegitimate use of force. I'm sure he would have praised Neville Chamberlain and the Munich agreement!
For men like Hastings, our will to be strong as the best defense of freedom is the beginning of our downfall. How can he afford this luxury in the wake of the Cold War, and given the utter destruction of Europe during WWII? Why should the Anglosphere apologize for being an ultra superpower when it made choice after choice that led it to this destiny, each one predicated on the idea of the sacredness of individual freedom?
Hastings may have lost his nerve, but the rest of us are free, defiant, and appreciative of our leaders Blair and Bush, whose roles in defending western civilization are historic and temporary, whose tenure in office will come to an orderly end someday through free elections, and whose duty was committed in the name of their offices rather than for personal accomplishment. The next elected leaders will carry on their tasks because they will understand immediately why the mantle of responsibility rested so heavily on these shoulders.
We will elect leaders who will fight for our freedom and our prosperity because we ourselves are free. Hastings can come along for the ride, like so many before him.
What socialist bombast!
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