Perry Anderson on the principles an anti-war movement will need to survi

http://www.counterpunch.org/anderson03082003.html

Are We Sure We Can Get Away With It This Time?
The Special Treatment of Iraq
By PERRY ANDERSON

The prospect of a second war on Iraq raises a large number of questions, 
analytic and political. What are the intentions behind the impending campaign? 
What are likely to be the consequences? What does the drive to war tell us 
about the long-term dynamics of American global power? These issues will remain 
on the table for some time to come, outliving any assault this spring. The 
front of the stage is currently occupied by a different set of arguments, over 
the legitimacy or wisdom of the military expedition now brewing. My purpose 
here will be to consider the current criticisms of the Bush Administration 
articulated within mainstream opinion, and the responses of the Administration 
to them: in effect, the structure of intellectual justification on each side of 
the argument, what divides them and what they have common. I will end with a 
few remarks on how this debate looks from a perspective with a different set of 
premises.

Taking an overview of the range--one might say torrent--of objections to a 
second war in the Gulf, we can distinguish six principal criticisms, expressed 
in many different registers, distributed across a wide span of opinion.

1. The projected attack on Iraq is a naked display of American unilateralism. 
The Bush Administration has openly declared its intention of attacking Baghdad, 
whether or not the UN sanctions an assault. This is not only a grave blow to 
the unity of the Western alliance, but must lead to an unprecedented and 
perilous weakening of the authority of the Security Council, as the highest 
embodiment of international law.

2. Massive intervention on this scale in the Middle East can only foster 
anti-Western terrorism. Rather than helping to crush al-Qaida, it is likely to 
multiply recruits for it. America will be more endangered after a war with Iraq 
than before it.

3. The blitz in preparation is a pre-emptive strike, openly declared to be 
such, that undermines respect for international law, and risks plunging the 
world into a maelstrom of violence, as other states follow suit, taking the law 
into their own hands in turn.

4. War should in any case always be a last resort in settling an international 
conflict. In the case of Iraq, sufficient tightening of sanctions and 
surveillance is capable of de-fanging the Baath regime, while sparing innocent 
lives and preserving the unity of the international community.

5. Concentration on Iraq is a distraction from the more acute danger posed by 
North Korea, which has greater nuclear potential, a more powerful army, and an 
even deadlier leadership. The US should give top priority to dealing with Kim 
Jong Il, not Saddam Hussein.

6. Even if an invasion of Iraq went smoothly, an occupation of the country is 
too hazardous and costly an undertaking for the United States to pull off 
successfully. Allied participation is necessary for it to have any chance of 
succeeding, but the Administration's unilateralism compromises the chance of 
that. The Arab world is likely to view a foreign protectorate with resentment. 
Even with a Western coalition to run the country, Iraq is a deeply divided 
society, with no democratic tradition, which cannot easily be rebuilt along 
postwar German or Japanese lines. The potential costs of the whole venture 
outweigh any possible benefits the US could garner from it.

Such is more or less the spectrum of criticism that can be found in the 
mainstream media and in respectable political circles, both in the United 
States itself, and--still more strongly--in Europe and beyond. They can be 
summarised under the headings: the vices of unilateralism, the risks of 
encouraging terrorism, the dangers of pre-emption, the human costs of war, the 
threat from North Korea, and the liabilities of over-reach. As such, they 
divide into two categories: objections of principle--the evils of 
unilateralism, pre-emption, war; and objections of prudence: the hazards of 
terrorism, North Korea, over-reach.

What are the replies the Bush Administration can make to each of these?

1. Unilateralism. Historically, the United States has always reserved the right 
to act alone where necessary, while seeking allies wherever possible. In recent 
years it acted alone in Grenada, in Panama, in Nicaragua, and which of its 
allies now complains about current arrangements in any of these countries? As 
for the UN, Nato did not consult it when it launched its attack on Yugoslavia 
in 1999, in which every European ally that now talks of the need for 
authorisation from the Security Council fully participated, and which 90 per 
cent of the opinion that now complains about our plans for Iraq warmly 
supported. If it was right to remove Milosevic by force, who had no weapons of 
mass destruction and even tolerated an opposition that eventually beat him in 
an election, how can it be wrong to remove Saddam by force, a far more lethal 
tyrant, whose human rights record is worse, has invaded a neighbour, used 
chemical weapons and brooks no opposition of any kind? In any case, the UN has 
already passed a resolution, No. 1441, that in effect gives clear leeway to 
members of the Security Council to use force against Iraq, so the legality of 
an attack is not in question.

2. Terrorism. Al-Qaida is a network bonded by religious fanaticism, in a faith 
that calls for holy war by the Muslim world against the United States. The 
belief that Allah assures victory to the jihadi is basic to it. There is 
therefore no surer way of demoralising and breaking it up than by demonstrating 
the vanity of hopes from heaven and the absolute impossibility of resistance to 
superior American military force. Nazi and Japanese imperial fanaticism were 
snuffed out by the simple fact of crushing defeat. Al-Qaida is nowhere near 
their level of strength. Why should it be different?

3. Pre-emption. Far from being a novel doctrine, this is a traditional right of 
states. What, after all, is the most admired military victory of the postwar 
era but a lightning pre-emptive strike? Israel's Six-Day War of 1967, so far 
from being cause for condemnation, is actually the occasion of the modern 
doctrine of Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by a distinguished philosopher of 
the American Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more 
eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of 
Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the 
vital preventive strike against the Osirak reactor of 1981. Who now complains 
about that?

4. The Human Costs of War. These are indeed tragic, and we will do everything 
in our power--now technically considerable--to minimise civilian casualties. 
But the reality is that a swift war will save lives, not lose them. Since 1991, 
sanctions against Iraq--which most objectors to war support--have caused 
500,000 deaths from malnutrition and disease, according to Unicef. Let us 
accept a lower figure, say 300,000. It is very unlikely that the swift, 
surgical war of which we are capable will come anywhere near this destruction 
by peace. On the contrary, once Saddam is overthrown, oil will soon flow freely 
again, and Iraqi children will have enough to eat. You will see population 
growth rebound very quickly.

5. North Korea. This is a failed Communist state that certainly poses a great 
danger to North-East Asia. As we pointed out well before the current hue and 
cry, it forms the other extremity of an Axis of Evil. But it is a simple matter 
of good sense to concentrate our forces on the weaker, rather than stronger, 
link of the Axis first. It is not because Pyongyang may, or may not, have a few 
rudimentary nuclear weapons, which we could easily take out, but because it can 
shatter Seoul in a conventional attack that we have to proceed more cautiously 
in bringing it down. But do you seriously doubt that we intend to take care of 
the North Korean regime too in due course?

6. Over-reach. An occupation of Iraq does pose a challenge, which we don't 
underestimate. But it is a reasonable wager. Arab hostility is overrated. After 
all, there hasn't been a single demonstration of significance in the whole 
Middle East during the two years it has taken Israel to crush the second 
Intifada, in full view of television cameras, yet popular sympathy is far 
greater for the Palestinians than for Saddam. You also forget that we already 
have a very successful protectorate in the northern third of Iraq, where we 
have knocked Kurdish heads together pretty effectively. Do you ever hear dire 
talk about that? The Sunni centre of the country will certainly be trickier to 
manage, but the idea that stable regimes created or guided by foreign powers 
are impossible in the Middle East is absurd. Think of the long-term stability 
of the monarchy set up by the British in Jordan, or the very satisfactory 
little state they created in Kuwait. Indeed, think of our loyal friend Mubarak 
in Egypt, which has a much larger urban population than Iraq. Everyone said 
Afghanistan was a graveyard for foreigners--British, Russian and so on--but we 
liberated it quickly enough, and now the UN is doing excellent work bringing it 
back to life. Why not Iraq? If all goes well, we could reap great benefits--a 
strategic platform, an institutional model, and not inconsiderable oil supplies.

Now, if one looks dispassionately at the two sets of arguments, there is little 
doubt that on questions of principle, the Administration's case against its 
critics is iron-clad. The reason for that is also fairly clear. The two sides 
share a set of common assumptions, whose logic makes an attack on Iraq an 
eminently defensible proposition. What are these assumptions? Roughly, they can 
be summed up like this.

1. The UN Security Council represents the supreme legal expression of the 
'international community'; except where otherwise specified, its resolutions 
have binding moral and juridical force.

2. Where necessary, however, humanitarian or other interventions by the West do 
not require permission of the UN, although it is always preferable to have it.

3. Iraq committed an outrage against international law in seeking to annex 
Kuwait, and has had to be punished for this crime, against which the UN rallied 
as one, ever since.

4. Iraq has also sought to acquire nuclear weapons, whose proliferation is any 
case an urgent danger to the international community, not to speak of chemical 
or biological weapons.

5. Iraq is a dictatorship in a class of its own, or a very small set that 
includes North Korea, for violation of human rights.

6. In consequence, Iraq cannot be accorded the rights of a sovereign state, but 
must submit to blockade, bombing and loss of territorial integrity, until the 
international community decides otherwise.

Equipped with these premises, it is not difficult to show that Iraq cannot be 
permitted possession of nuclear or other weapons, that it has defied successive 
UN resolutions, that the Security Council has tacitly authorised a second 
attack on it (as it did not the attack on Yugoslavia), and that the removal of 
Saddam Hussein is now long overdue.

On the same premises, however, it is still open to critics of the 
Administration to take their stand, not on principle, but simply on grounds of 
prudence. Invading Iraq may well be morally acceptable, even desirable, but is 
it politically wise? Calculation of consequences is always more imponderable 
than deduction from principles, so the room for disagreement remains 
considerable. Anyone who believes that al-Qaida is a deadly bacillus waiting to 
become an epidemic, or that Kim Jong Il is a more demented despot even than 
Saddam Hussein, or that Iraq could become another Vietnam, is unlikely to be 
swayed by reminders of the letter of UN Resolution 1441, or Nato's lofty 
mission in protecting human rights in the Balkans.

Structures of intellectual justification are one thing. Popular sentiment, 
although not unaffected by them, is another. The enormous demonstrations of 15 
February in Western Europe, the United States and Australia, opposing an attack 
on Iraq, pose a different sort of question. It can be put simply like this. 
What explains this vast, passionate revolt against the prospect of a war whose 
principles differ little from preceding military interventions, that were 
accepted or even welcomed by so many of those now up in arms against this one? 
Why does war in the Middle East today arouse feelings that war in the Balkans 
did not, if logically there is little or nothing to choose between them? The 
disproportion in reactions is unlikely to have much to do with distinctions 
between Belgrade and Baghdad, and would in any case presumably speak for rather 
than against intervention. The explanation clearly lies elsewhere. Three 
factors appear to have been decisive.

First, hostility to the Republican regime in the White House. Cultural dislike 
of the Bush Presidency is widespread in Western Europe, where its rough 
affirmations of American primacy, and undiplomatic tendency to match word to 
deed, have become intensely resented by public opinion accustomed to a more 
decorous veil being drawn over the realities of relative power. To see how 
important this ingredient in European anti-war sentiment must be, one need only 
look at the complaisance with which Clinton's successive aerial bombardments of 
Iraq were met. If a Gore or Lieberman Administration were preparing a second 
Gulf War, the resistance would be a moiety of what it is now. The current 
execration of Bush in wide swathes of West European media and public opinion 
bears no relation to the actual differences between the two parties in the 
United States. It is enough to note that both the leading practical exponent 
and the major intellectual theorist of a war on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack and 
Philip Bobbitt, are former ornaments of the Clinton regime. But as substantial 
policy contrasts tend to dwindle in Western political systems, symbolic 
differences of style and image can easily acquire, in compensation, a 
hysterical rigidity. The Kulturkampf between Democrats and Republicans within 
the United States is now being reproduced between the US and EU. Typically, in 
such disputes, the violence of partisan passions is in inverse proportion to 
the depth of real disagreements. But as in the conflicts between Blue and Green 
factions of the Byzantine hippodrome, minor affective preferences can have 
major political consequences. A Europe in mourning for Clinton--see any 
editorial in the Guardian, Le Monde, La Repubblica, El Pais--can unite in 
commination of Bush.

Second, there is the role of the spectacle. Public opinion was well prepared 
for the Balkan War by massive television and press coverage of ethnic 
savageries in the region, real and--after Rambouillet, to a considerable 
extent--mythical. The incomparably greater killings in Rwanda, where the United 
States, fearing distraction from media focus on Bosnia, blocked intervention in 
the same period, were by contrast ignored. In full view of the cameras, the 
siege of Sarajevo appalled millions. The obliteration of Grozny, safely 
off-screen, drew scarcely a shrug. Clinton called it liberation, and Blair sped 
to congratulate Putin for the election he won on the back of it. In Iraq, the 
plight of the Kurds was widely televised in the aftermath of the Gulf War, 
mobilising public opinion behind the creation of an Anglo-American 
protectorate, without any warrant from the UN. But today, however much 
Washington or London declaim the atrocities of Saddam Hussein, not to speak of 
his weapons of mass destruction, they are for all practical purposes invisible 
to the European spectator. Powell's slide-shows in the Security Council are no 
substitute for Bernard-Henri Levy or Michael Ignatieff vibrating at the 
microphone. For lack of visual aids, the deliverance of Baghdad leaves European 
imagination cold.

Third, and perhaps most important, there is fear. Aerial retribution could be 
wreaked on Yugoslavia in 1996, and continuously on Iraq since 1991, without 
risk of reprisal. What could Milosevic or Saddam do? They were sitting ducks. 
The attentats of 11 September have altered this self-assurance. Here indeed was 
an unforgettable spectacle, designed to mesmerise the West. The target of the 
attacks was the US, not Europe. If the European states, Britain and France in 
the lead, joined in the counter-attack on Afghanistan, for their populations 
this was still a remote theatre of war, on which the curtain came down swiftly. 
The prospect of an invasion and occupation of Iraq, far larger and closer, in 
the heart of the Middle East, where European public opinion is uneasily 
aware--without stirring itself to do anything about it--that all is not well in 
the Land of Israel, is another matter. The spectre of retaliation by al-Qaida 
or kindred groups for a rerun of the Balkan War has frozen many an ardent 
combatant of the new 'military humanism' of the late 1990s. The Serbs were a 
bagatelle: fewer than eight million. The Arabs are 280 million, and they are 
much closer to Europe than to America--not a few of them indeed within it. 
Contemplating the expedition to Baghdad, even New Labour loyalists ask, as 
readers of this journal will have noticed: are we sure we can get away with it 
this time?

Great mass movements are not to be judged by tight logical standards. Whatever 
their reasons, the multitudes who have protested against a war on Iraq are a 
whiplash to the governments bent on it. They include, in any case, many too 
young to have been compromised by its precedents. But if the movement is to 
have staying power, it will have to develop beyond the fixations of the fan 
club, the politics of the spectacle, the ethics of fright. For war, if it 
comes, will not be like Vietnam. It will be short and sharp; and there is no 
guarantee that poetic justice will follow. A merely prudential opposition to 
the war will not survive a triumph, any more than handwringing about its 
legality a UN figleaf. Assorted justices and lawyers who now cavil at the 
upcoming campaign, will make their peace with its commanders soon enough, once 
allied armies are ensconced on the Tigris, and Kofi Annan has pronounced an 
eirenic speech or two, courtesy of ghostwriters seconded from the Financial 
Times, on postwar relief. Resistance to the ruling dispensation that can last 
has to find another, principled basis. Since current debates so interminably 
invoke the 'international community' and the United Nations, as if these were a 
salve against the Bush Administration, it is as well to start from these. An 
alternative perspective can be suggested in a few telegraphic propositions.

1. No international community exists. The term is a euphemism for American 
hegemony. It is to the credit of the Administration that some of its officials 
have abandoned it.

2. The United Nations is not a seat of impartial authority. Its structure, 
giving overwhelming formal power to five victor nations of a war fought fifty 
years ago, is politically indefensible: comparable historically to the Holy 
Alliance of the early 19th century, which also proclaimed its mission to be the 
preservation of 'international peace' for the 'benefit of humanity'. So long as 
these powers were divided by the Cold War, they neutralised each other in the 
Security Council, and the organisation could do little harm. But since the Cold 
War came to an end, the UN has become essentially a screen for American will. 
Supposedly dedicated to the cause of international peace, the organisation has 
waged two major wars since 1945 and prevented none. Its resolutions are mostly 
exercises in ideological manipulation. Some of its secondary 
affiliates--Unesco, Unctad and the like--do good work, and the General Assembly 
does little harm. But there is no prospect of reforming the Security Council. 
The world would be better off--a more honest and equal arena of states--without 
it.

3. The nuclear oligopoly of the five victor powers of 1945 is equally 
indefensible. The Non-Proliferation Treaty is a mockery of any principles of 
equality or justice--those who possess weapons of mass destruction insisting 
that everyone except themselves give them up, in the interests of humanity. If 
any states had a claim to such weapons, it would be small not large ones, since 
that would counterbalance the overweening power of the latter. In practice, as 
one would expect, such weapons have already spread, and so long as the big 
powers refuse to abandon theirs, there is no principled reason to oppose their 
possession by others. Kenneth Waltz, doyen of American international relations 
theory, an impeccably respectable source, long ago published a calm and 
detailed essay, which has never been refuted, entitled 'The Spread of Nuclear 
Weapons: More May Be Better'. It can be recommended. The idea that Iraq or 
North Korea should not be permitted such weapons, while those of Israel or 
white South Africa could be condoned, has no logical basis.

4. Annexations of territory--conquests, in more traditional language--whose 
punishment provides the nominal justification of the UN blockade of Iraq, have 
never resulted in UN retribution when the conquerors were allies of the United 
States, only when they were its adversaries. Israel's borders, in defiance of 
the UN resolutions of 1947, not to speak of 1967, are the product of conquest. 
Turkey seized two-fifths of Cyprus, Indonesia East Timor, and Morocco Western 
Sahara, without a tremor in the Security Council. Legal niceties matter only 
when the interests of enemies are at stake. So far as Iraq is concerned, the 
exceptional aggressions of the Baath regime are a myth, as John Mearsheimer and 
Stephen Walt--hardly two incendiary radicals--have recently shown in some 
detail in their recent essay in Foreign Policy.

5. Terrorism, of the sort practised by al-Qaida, is not a serious threat to the 
status quo anywhere. The success of the spectacular attack of 11 September 
depended on surprise--even by the fourth plane, it was impossible to repeat. 
Had al-Qaida ever been a strong organisation, it would have aimed its blows at 
client states of America in the Middle East, where the overthrow of a regime 
would make a political difference, rather than at America itself, where it 
could not leave so much as a strategic pinprick. As Olivier Roy and Gilles 
Keppel, the two best authorities in the field of contemporary Islamism have 
argued, al-Qaida is the isolated remnant of a mass movement of Muslim 
fundamentalism, whose turn to terror is the symptom of a larger weakness and 
defeat--an Islamic equivalent of the Red Army Faction or Red Brigades that 
emerged in Germany and Italy after the great student uprisings of the late 
1960s faded away, and were easily quelled by the state. The complete inability 
of al-Qaida to stage even a single attentat, while its base was being pounded 
to shreds and its leadership killed off in Afghanistan, speaks volumes about 
its weakness. In different ways, it suits both the Administration and the 
Democratic opposition to conjure up the spectre of a vast and deadly 
conspiracy, capable of striking at any moment, but this is a figment with 
little bearing one way or another on Iraq, which is neither connected to 
al-Qaida today, nor likely to give it much of a boost, if it falls tomorrow.

6. Domestic tyrannies, or the abuse of human rights, which are now held to 
justify military interventions--overriding national sovereignty in the name of 
humanitarian values--are treated no less selectively by the UN. The Iraqi 
regime is a brutal dictatorship, but until it attacked an American pawn in the 
Gulf, it was armed and funded by the West. Its record is less bloody than that 
of the Indonesian regime that for three decades was the West's main pillar in 
South-East Asia. Torture was legal in Israel till yesterday, openly sanctioned 
by the Supreme Court, and is unlikely to have disappeared today without an 
eyelash being batted by the assembled Western Governments that have befriended 
it. Turkey, freshly off the mark for entry into the EU, does not, unlike Iraq, 
even tolerate the language of its Kurds--and, as a member of Nato in good 
standing, likewise jails and tortures without hindrance. As for 'international 
justice', the farce of the Hague Tribunal on Yugoslavia, where Nato is 
prosecutor and judge, will be amplified in the International Criminal Court, in 
which the Security Council can forbid or suspend any actions it dislikes (i.e. 
which might ruffle its permanent members), and private firms or 
millionaires--Walmart or Dow Chemicals, Hinduja or Fayed, as the case might 
be--are cordially invited to fund investigations (Articles 16 and 116). Saddam, 
if captured, will certainly be arraigned before this august body. Who imagines 
that Sharon or Putin or Mubarak would ever be, any more than was once Tudjman 
before its predecessor?

What conclusions follow? Simply this. Mewling about Blair's folly or Bush's 
crudity, is merely saving the furniture. Arguments about the impending war 
would do better to focus on the entire prior structure of the special treatment 
accorded to Iraq by the United Nations, rather than wrangle over the secondary 
issue of whether to continue strangling the country slowly or to put it out of 
its misery quickly.

Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA. He is the author of Extra Time: Global 
Politics Since 1989 and Lineages of the Absolutist State.

This article originally appeared in the London Review of Books.