History stops with every new war in the name of
humanitarianism. This time, say the war makers, will be different from all our
catastrophic interventions of the past.
In 1941, Bertolt Brecht remarked to his diary that “strategy
has turned into surgery, an enemy country is ‘opened up’ after it has been
anaesthetised, then it is swabbed down, disinfected, sewn up, etc all with the
greatest of ease.”
That was the old style of war. These days, invasions are
more like social work. Western nations today always fight in the name of
humanitarianism, so that contemporary wars possess a distinctive vocabulary and
grammar.
For instance, each new humanitarian intervention must first
distance itself from the previous one. In 2013, when John Kerry argued for
military strikes in Syria, he presented his plan as a contrast to previous
actions: the Syrian intervention, he said, would not resemble the Libyan
intervention. He didn’t mention that the Americans and their British allies had
sold the Libya mission on an identical basis. For Libya, you see, was to be
nothing like Iraq. But then, Iraq, too, was meant to be different. In 2003,
George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard all contrasted their war with the
disasters of Vietnam.
Now here we are again.
Iraq in 2014 will be “nothing like” the 2003 intervention,
says Australia's prime minister Tony Abbott. “They are two very different
situations,” he explained. “What’s happening now is a humanitarian
involvement.” Which, of course, was precisely what Blair argued – and look how
that worked out.
The necessity of the “not like last time” trope stems from
the almost universally disastrous record of recent humanitarian missions. Libya
(remember that?) offers a particularly vivid example, since, back in 2011, the
mission there was widely described, in David Owen’s words, as “the prototype
for a new kind of intervention.”
So, after all that humanitarianism, how’s Libya travelling?
Just this week we learned that the Libyan authorities had
lost control of most government buildings in Tripoli – they’re now operated by
rival Islamist gangs. Since the intervention, Libya has had had five or six
governments (depending on how you count them). The conflict is no longer a
civil war but “is now being fought regionally, with parallels to other battles
playing out in North Africa and the Middle East”.
In other words, the new model of intervention proved as
catastrophic as the old brand.
The necessity to distance each fresh conflict from the
previous one means that liberals and ex-leftists play an important (perhaps
even disproportionate) role in selling contemporary wars.
Think back to 2003 and the extraordinary enthusiasm for the
Iraq invasion by prominent progressives (Paul Berman, George Packer,
Christopher Hitchens, Kanan Makiya) – many of whom had cut their political
teeth agitating against the Vietnam war. Rather than evading the Vietnam
comparison, Bush and Blair’s liberal enablers usually raised it: they, they
said, understood more than anyone the follies of yesteryear’s wars – and, on
that basis, possessed a unique appreciation of how terrific the Iraq invasion
would be.
Yet, though humanitarian interventionists refer to the past,
they always do so in a peculiarly cavalier way. The advocates of the 2014
mission mention 2003 but only to dismiss the comparison. They invoke history –
and then wave it aside. The new war is always a clean slate, entirely uncoupled
from the prosaic details of historical (or even recent) events.
How has the Islamic State been so successful so quickly?
What relationship might the homicidal sectarianism in today’s Iraq bear to the
2003 invasion or the subsequent surge? What about the west’s attitude to the
Assad dictatorship – what role has that played?
Such questions are irrelevant, since, for the west, each
fresh mission resets the clock – Year Zero commences as soon as the bombs start
falling.
It’s not merely that history begins when we say so (and not
a moment before). It’s also that humanitarian interventionists present each
crisis as a morality tale, an episode in a genre entirely outside historical
time.
We don’t fight men, we fight monsters, creatures so evil
that they oppose us on an almost ontological level.
“[T]his new world faces a new threat,” explained Blair, “of
disorder and chaos born of brutal states like Iraq, armed with weapons of mass
destruction; or of extreme terrorist groups. Both hate our way of life, our
freedom, our democracy…”
And here’s Abbott on the supporters of the Islamic State:
“They hate us for who we are and where we live. They don’t simply hate us for
what we do.”
How could anyone hate us for what we do? It’s not like we
ginned up a murderous invasion on false pretexts, leaving hundreds of thousands
dead and sending the nation spiralling into sectarian conflict. Oh, wait …
There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good
cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good
might come out of apparent evil.
Mark Twain’s words about an earlier overseas adventure apply
with even more force to the Middle East. We might have done bad things – but we
meant well and so we graciously forgive ourselves.
Our enemies, on the other hand, commit their atrocities out
of pure malice. Where we have politics, they have pathologies.
Besides, we cannot discuss the past, for the mission is
urgent – humanitarian interventions always are. No time! No time! The crisis
has been brewing for years. But now it must be solved in an instant, with any
hesitation fatal.
The march to war back in 2003 took place against the tick,
tick, tick of a stopwatch – or, rather, a nuclear detonator, as Condoleeza Rice
explained, the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud.
We couldn’t tarry then and we can’t tarry now, even as we
confront the direct consequences of the previous rush to war. As Simon Maloy
notes about the US neoconservatives: “The disaster they helped create is so
urgent, they claim, that we can’t waste time arguing about why the disaster
exists in the first place.”
But what about the Yazidis, the people we’re ostensibly
coming to save?
Again, we’re always coming to save someone – and we always
leave them worse off after we’re done.
Remember when every pundit was an Afghan feminist? “The
rights of the women of Afghanistan will not be negotiable,” explained secretary
of state Colin Powell. “When the light is fully shed throughout all of
Afghanistan, the United States is committed to working to ensure not only that
the women of Afghanistan regain their place in the sun, but they have a place
in their future government as well.”
What happened to that? What about the Marsh Arabs, whom we
championed against Saddam back in 2003? How are they faring? Or the people of
Benghazi, over whom the world’s leaders exclaimed in 2011? Heard anyone talk of
them lately, now that Libya’s a permanent warzone?
Our sympathy generally extends as far as the first week of
bombing. Then, as our humanitarianism creates a new generation of refugees, the
photogenic victim of yesterday becomes the grasping queue jumper whose boat we
must stop.
Besides, the ostensible earnestness of our interventions,
the high morality we proclaim, goes hand-in-hand with an extraordinary
light-mindedness about how these missions are actually supposed to work.
“What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks
and seeing what happens?” said the influential neocon Bill Kristol, a few days
ago.
Indeed, what’s the harm of dumping 22m AK47 rifle rounds and
32,000 artillery shells into the midst of a civil war? What could possibly go
wrong with that?
The militarists of 1941 talked of surgery, while today’s
leaders speak only of peace. Nonetheless, when you look at Iraq since 2003,
it’s hard not to do it in Brecht’s voice:
Their peace and their war
Are like wind and storm.
War grows from their peace.
Source: The Guardian
Jeff Sparrow 05 September 2014. Posted in News
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