The World Says No To Bushs War

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday February 27, 2003 17:10 by socialist alternative - socialist alternative thesocialistalternative at yahoo dot co dot uk

THE WORLD SAYS NO TO BUSH’S WAR February 15th saw an international day of protest without any precedent in history. 100,000 people marched in Dublin. 1.5m in London, 2m in Rome, 250,000 in Melbourne, 100,000 in San Francisco. CNN estimated a total of 110m worldwide. There was even a protest in Antarctica.

No previous war has seen such a colossal movement of opposition from the very beginning. In August 1914, the people of Europe rushed into war with grins on their faces. In the sixties, the first protests against the invasion of Vietnam attracted a few dozen New Yorkers. There has never been such a decisive rejection of war in the history of mankind.
So how did our rulers respond? How about this from Tony Blair: “I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour. But sometimes it is the price of leadership and the cost of conviction.” Now, many leaders have been willing to accept unpopularity as the price for acting according to their convictions; a certain Iraqi statesman springs to mind. But it’s not an option open to democrats, who are accountable to the people, not to their own consciences (if you please).

THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE

The conservative establishment has responded to the day of protest with admirable honesty: they’ve openly rejected democracy. Not in so many words, of course, but reading their statements attentively can leave us with no other conclusion. One of the most frequently heard arguments was this: we live in a representative democracy, not a direct one. Politicians have the right to make decisions they believe to be in the national interest.
It’s no wonder the world is in such a mess when basic democratic ideas can be misrepresented so blatantly. In a representative democracies, people promise to do certain things to the best of their abilities; people vote for them accordingly and they have a mandate. If they break this mandate, they are no longer legitimate representatives of the popular will. Politicians don’t have the right to do whatever the hell they like when in power; that’s not democracy, just an elected monarchy. This should be the ABC of any civilised society, but it’s obviously foreign to anyone in positions of power.
Since none of the politicians supporting Bush mentioned Iraq in their electoral campaigns, they have no mandate. But voting isn’t the only way of expressing your opinion; eighteenth-century republicans like Jefferson and Paine weren’t playing games when they established freedom of speech and freedom of assembly as basic democratic rights. Exercising these rights, through opinion polls and mass protests, the people of Ireland, Britain, Italy and elsewhere have made their views crystal clear: no war, no way.
One audacious argument was offered to get Blair and Bush out of this hash: apparently, as men with a strong Christian faith, they believe themselves to be accountable to a higher power. Now, this sort of logic may well be enshrined in the Iranian constitution, but its place in a secular democracy is questionable to say the least (God seems to have spoken anyway, and he’s against the war, at least if the Pope is to be believed, or the Archbishop of Canterbury). There’s only one way of looking at the situation: any politician who continues to support war is an avowed enemy of democracy, in any meaningful sense of the term.

NEUTRAL ME ARSE

Our own rulers have made their position clear. Bertie Ahern first tried to claim that the protesters in Dublin all supported government policy, whether they knew it or not. But the Taoiseach’s usual brand of cheerful dishonesty wasn’t up for the task. Mary Harney then joined in; once experts had deciphered her shrill bark, it emerged that she had accused the anti-war campaigners of being anti-American, anti-European and anti-United Nations. Wow, all three? It’s really just another way of saying that we all hate humanity and everything that is sweet and pure in this world, like flowers, kittens, children and the Bush administration.
Harney’s juvenile rage at the sight of people who don’t venerate American capitalism with the same primitive fervour she can muster betrayed her own contempt for democracy. As we’ve already mentioned, in a democratic society, citizens have the right to promote political ideas by exercising their rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. But according to Harney, the Irish Anti-War Movement, PANA, and the NGO Peace Alliance were trying to “infect the mainstream with their extremist ideas”. So a sceptical view of American foreign policy is to be equated with syphilis or AIDS? There are, of course, many precedents for this sort of language, but none of them would be pleasant for Harney to recall.
Bertie, at least, gave a frank admission that US investment was a significant factor in deciding which way to leap. Now that the government has stated it openly, it’s time to deal with this argument. First of all, if we cave in to economic blackmail now, where do we draw the line? What if they demand we join NATO? And it’s not just a foreign policy issue. If any Irish government enforces trade-union recognition on foreign companies, as it certainly should, will the threat of shutting down factories be enough to force a climb-down?
Secondly, shifting investment from one country to another is not as easy as moving pieces on a chessboard. You have to build a factory, set up equipment, train workers and put infrastructure in place. That all costs money. US multinationals are in this country because they can make more profit here than anywhere else (remember, Intel is a business, not a job-creation agency). The chances are, they’ll stay in Ireland as long as that remains the case; when things change, of course, they’ll move abroad no matter how loyal our government has been to Uncle Sam. In any case, US investment has been a mixed blessing. It’s left us totally exposed to downturns in the US economy beyond our control. If we need low-wage, non-union jobs, there’s plenty of Irish businessmen willing to oblige.
The truth is, Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney look to Washington for ideology, not investment. Criticising Bush would be as painful for them as it would be for Desmond Connell to denounce the Pope. This is why they won’t breathe a word of protest, unless we force them too.

THE LIBERATION OF IRAQ

In a last, desperate throw of the dice, the pro-war camp has taken to wheeling Iraqi exiles who support war out to perform in the media. There are many Iraqi dissidents who, out of a combination of naivety and desperation, want a US invasion of their country in the hope that democracy might be the result (equally, there are many who oppose war). Unlike most supporters of Bush’s war, they have made great sacrifices for their beliefs and have not forgotten the shameful complicity of the west with the Iraqi regime. They have the right to be taken seriously, unlike their erstwhile comrades. But their views are still mistaken. An article in the London Observer, the day after the protests, showed why.
Kanan Makiya is an well-known Iraqi opposition activist, living in the US, who is high on Saddam’s death list. For many years, he has put his faith in America as the power to liberate his country, and has launched virulent attacks on other Arab intellectuals such as Edward Said, who have continued to take a more sceptical view of the US government. As he puts it, “We Iraqis hoped and said to our Arab brethren, over and over again, that American mistakes of the past did not have to be repeated in the future. Were we wrong?”
Unfortunately, yes. “The US is on the verge of committing itself to a post-Saddam plan for a military government in Baghdad with Americans appointed to head Iraqi ministries, and American soldiers to patrol the streets of Iraqi cities. The plan further envisages the appointment of an unknown number of Iraqi quislings palatable to the Arab countries of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia as a council of advisers to this military government. The plan reverses a decade-long moral and financial commitment by the US to the Iraqi opposition, and is guaranteed to turn that opposition from the close ally it has always been during the 1990s into an opponent of the United States on the streets of Baghdad the day after liberation.
“Its driving force is appeasement of the existing bankrupt Arab order, and ultimately the retention under a different guise of the repressive institutions of the Baath and the army. Hence its point of departure is, and has got to be, use of direct military rule to deny Iraqis their legitimate right to self-determine their future. In particular it is a plan designed to humiliate the Kurdish people of Iraq and their experiment of self-rule in Northern Iraq of the last 10 years, an experiment made possible by the protections granted to the Kurds by the United States itself. That protection is about to be lifted with the entry into northern Iraq of much-feared Turkish troops (apparently not under American command), infamous throughout the region for their decades-long hostility to Kurdish aspirations.”
There you have it, from an Iraqi who still describes George Bush as “the President who so clearly wants to see a democratic Iraq” and takes a few swipes at the anti-war movement. Let nobody say they didn’t anticipate that “the government of the United States is about to betray, as it has done so many times in the past, those core values of self-determination and individual liberty.” Iraq may achieve liberation; we should all hope so. But the US military will do nothing to help its people achieve this goal.

APPEASEMENT: MYTH AND REALITY

The Murdoch/O’Reilly press in this country have wheeled out a colourful array of characters to abuse peace campaigners. Ex-Stalinist Eoghan Harris, “comedian” Brendan O’Connor, and Ruth Dudley Edwards, hagiographer of the Orange Order, have all bellowed about “appeasement” of the Iraqi regime. Since their employers are merely an off-shoot of the British Tory press, in terms of ownership and ideology, perhaps we should recall an notable incident of appeasement, in the true sense of the term.
In March 1990, the British journalist Farzad Bazoft, who worked for the Observer, was executed for spying in Iraq. He had been trying to report from the scene of an explosion at a weapons factory outside Baghdad. He was arrested by the secret police, tortured and hanged. It was very embarassing for the British government; in those glory days before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was a valuable customer of the arms industry in the UK.
Happily, the Tory media came to the rescue. The Sun carried a front-page head-line “HANGED MAN WAS A ROBBER” (MI5 was the source for this one). The Express claimed that Bazoft was an agent of Mossad, the Israeli secret police. But the most memorable contribution came from the Telegraph. Under the heading “How Innocence can equal Guilt”, its editorial explained that “a group of journalists were to have visited the site with the permission of the Iraqi government. Permission was then withdrawn. Mr Bazoft decided to go anyway. How was this any different from spying? ... In these circumstances the investigative journalist takes on the role of spy.”
So the same people now clamouring for war were at one time prepared to endorse the murder of one of their fellow journalists for doing his job in order to defend the profits of British Aerospace and protect Thatcher from embarassment. And they call us appeasers. As someone remarked when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, satire is dead, it just can’t match reality.

WHERE NOW FOR THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

The US media did its best to ignore the protests. The Italian state broadcaster refused to show the Rome protest live so as not to “place undue pressure on politicians”. But for the most part media dishonesty was more insidious. Many journalists worked hard to give the impression that most people who marched were unblemished by “extremism”. Support for the French position on war is deemed to be the standard view.
This is a clever move, and one that holds dangers for opponents of war, if we fall for it. Chirac is a notorious crook, motivated far more by French commercial interests in Iraq than by principled opposition to war. French governments have a long and blody record of war-mongering when it suits their interests. This is a point that’s already been exploited by intelligent figures in the Bush administration such as Richard Perle. Chirac and his gang should be no more welcome in the anti-imperialist camp than Bin Laden and Al-Queda.
We have to go beyond vague humanitarian concerns and put foward a detailed critique of American policy if we’re going to build from the success of February 15th. Although it may defy conventional wisdom, the radical argument against war is much stronger than the moderate one. As Tony Blair might have put it, it’s time to build a movement that’s tough on war, tough on the causes of war.