July 16, 2004
IT'S NOT THE LEFT'S FIGHT:
Iraq war: why all the shock and awe now? (Mick Hume, 7/16/04, Spiked)
Call me an old cynic, but is anybody really surprised that the British and American governments' claims about the causes of the Iraq war turn out to bear little relationship to reality? When was a war ever launched without an accompanying bombardment of black propaganda and distorted facts? [...][W]e have long been taught that the First World War did not really start as the culmination of international rivalries between the competing empires of Britain, Germany, France and Russia, but simply because a Serb gunman shot an Austrian Arch-Duke in 1914. When Hitler's Germany sparked the Second World War by invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis claimed that they were only acting in self-defence after the Poles had attacked them.
That might seem a ridiculous excuse to us now. But it is surely no more absurd an invention than the justification that American President Lyndon B Johnson offered for launching a full-scale war in Vietnam in 1964. In the crucial 'Tonkin incident', communist forces from North Vietnam were said to have launched two unprovoked attacks on US Navy vessels. In fact, the first of these incidents was a response to American attacks on North Vietnam, and the second one was a complete invention of US officials. [...]
The row about governments using intelligence sources to provide political support for the Iraq war seems even more surreal. What does anybody imagine the intelligence and security services are there for? To support world peace? To sit in independent judgement of the evidence, in a state of priestly isolation from political considerations? Hardly. The security services are an arm of the machinery of government, and in times of crisis intelligence has always served as a tool of propaganda. Far from crying foul as they are today, most of the media has proved readily complicit in broadcasting dubious tales about the enemy as hard news.
To imagine otherwise, one would have to be struggling with serious naivety issues. [...]
Yet Bush and Blair find themselves in more trouble at home than their predecessors faced over such blatant war lies. This is all the more remarkable since, unlike Britain's Boer War or America's war in Vietnam, the Iraq invasion ended in an overwhelming victory over Saddam's rag-tag army.
This state of affairs can have little to do with events in Iraq. However bad one believes things there to be, it cannot seriously be argued that Iraq is in a worse state than other warzones. What is different this time around is the out-of-control state of affairs in America and Britain.
Close. Actually the defining difference is that it's the first time that a conservative has ever led the Anglo-American alliance to war (George H. W. Bush, whose conservatism we can debate, essentially followed the U.N.). Posted by Orrin Judd at July 16, 2004 10:30 AM
Steve den Beste has a particularly incisive essay today about this sort of thinking.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at July 16, 2004 11:48 AMI think the key point is that the war was won by a non-liberal Bush. The whole strategy of the Demo. party and the media makes it crystal clear that they are soley for winning over the GOP, and that they would prefer a lost war to a war won by Bush. In other words, traitors pure and simple.
Posted by: John Cunningham at July 16, 2004 12:24 PMThe whole intelligence debate is emptyheaded.
Given 1) a killer already proven to be willing to killl by the hundreds of thousands; who 2) has the wherewithal to buy nukes; and 3) is known to have tried to buy them, then what level of doubt above absolute certainty that he does not now have them are you willing to live with?
For me, no level at all.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 16, 2004 1:39 PMHarry:
Absolutely. But your one paragraph is much too lucid for probably 40% of America (and 75% of the rest of the world), because it requires action based on something other than fear, which is impossible for the people in those percentages.
Posted by: jim hamlen at July 16, 2004 1:44 PMI would disagree with the characterization of elder Bush. He led the U.N. more than he followed it in the leadup to the war to liberate Kuwait. Many of us at the time questioned the degree to which he involved the UN (and the precedent it set) -- especially some of the folks I knew in DoD -- but it was the Bush administration that made the first war happen, not the U.N.
Posted by: kevin whited at July 16, 2004 2:50 PMDitto Harry. What we did in Iraq is morally justifiable based solely on the fact that we liberated the country. The fact that we could not be certain of an imminent threat is not the problem. We had almost certain assurance that Saddam posed a future threat at a time that we could not predict, and that is the more important consideration.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at July 16, 2004 7:09 PM