Tony Blair And The Future Of Liberal Thuggism

Tony Blair And The Future Of Liberal Thuggism
28 May 2006

"A lot of the liberal imperialists have lost their religion in the
bloody sands of Iraq"
--A. R.

Are the British more bloody-minded than Greater Texans are, ore only
more foul-mouthed?

Here _im Heimatlande_ the Prime Minister's colonial and imperial
equivalents -- Albrights, Bidens, Holbrookes, Liebermans _et hoc genus_
-- would never frankly refer to their own crew as "imperialists," and
would probably feel rather offended to be referred to that way
themselves by an analyst not institutionalized at Wingnut City. In
America, this tribe of power people would always _like_ to be called
"realists," which means that one should not call them that unless one
has actually signed their pledge, or else is willing to admit that
one's own views are post- or extra-reality-based. "Interventionists"
would be neutral language in itself, I suppose, except that the flip
side of that one is "isolationists," still a dirty word _chez nous_.

Neocomrade A. Rawnsley distinguishes his Leader's grand progressive
international stuff as a better product than "realism," however:
"[T]here is still a compelling case for interventionism and Tony Blair
remains its most eloquent advocate. The alternative is to retreat into
the school of foreign policy that likes to call itself 'realist'. It
was this doctrine of malign inactivity" -- and so forth, and so on.
(Evidently they say "boot" and "realism," we say "trunk" and
"isolationism." You might want to make a memorandum of it.)

Is it some sort of profound commentary on _peccatum originale_ and the
human plight that hardly anybody outside tertiary education is a
self-avowed realist about war and diplomacy? Probably not, since it is
hardly profound to observe that most people can imagine a better state
of affairs than the really existing one, no matter what the _status
quo_ is temporarily like, and no matter which direction away from that
sorry mess, reality, may seem "better" to any particular statesperson
or faction. In any case, the cloud that hangs over "realism" in
Anglo-Saxondom, hawks and doves alike, may be purely linguistic, and
signify merely that native WASP wants to be mistaken for Prince
Metternich or Prince Bismarck or Theodor von Bethmann-Hollweg. (Not to
mention you-know-who after 1933, or Dr. Kissinger of Harvard and the
GOP either.) If the cloud is more than merely a matter of Germanic
dialectology, we need look no farther afield than rhetoric for the
explanation of it: being a "realist" means you wouldn't care to be
caught dead sayin' "That is a high ideal and a noble cause," as
Neocomrade Rawnsley enthuses below about Neocomrade Blair's newly
announced product. Sayin' it seriously and as policy analysis, I mean,
for of course realists have to make speeches to the mob on occasion
too. We may take it as given, I presume, that _The Observer_ is a
policy forum and not a soapbox, so that when the neocomrade abuses
realism as "malign," his sincerity is not in question, only his
judgment.

Like most antirealists, Neocomrade Rownsley cheats more than a little
rhetorically: "The supposed realists are fantasists if they think that
what happens in other states will not blow back across our borders in
economic disruption, the fomentation of terrorism and mass migration as
people flee from civil war and tyranny. No country can now be an
island." Tony's stuff is not just higher idealwise and nobler
causewise, it is more realistic too, really. With Preparation Blair,
the canny statesperson can now have it all, the cake and the eatin'
both, savin' the world and savin' her soul both simultaneously!
Height and nobility and a profitable bottom line too!

The neocomrade gets a bit carried away and perhaps even lapses into mob
mode to some extent. At the policy forum level we do not forget that
his most immediate problem is that Mr. Blair and George XLIII have not
signally _succeeded_ in havin' it all. Any one sentence summary of his
paper would have to read something like "Neocomrade Rownsley insists
that the aggression against Saddam's Iraq and the ensuing
maladministration of Peaceful Freedumbia are to be treated as an
exception that proves the general rule of 'interventionism' or
Preemptive Retaliation." The international gambler does not have to
win every single bet that she places in the Casino of Human Events, she
only has to come out with more chips than she went in with. The maxim
is impeccable, and perhaps Preparation Blair can actually live up to
claims made in those terms -- that is what we here at the policy forum
are debating, after all. If the treatment works for, say, 72.53% of
the patients it is inflicted on, the non-mob advocate is not to turn
that number into 100.0% on the sly and hope we grown-ups won't notice.
Tony and Tony's George may be claimed to _deserve_ success 100.0% of
the time, perhaps, although even that is a bit off topic; claimin' or
insinuatin' anythin' more than the 72.53% in the way of achieved
success, however, is cheatin' pure and simple, and Neocomrade Rownsley
should avoid it. Malign realists and other naughty foreigners should
not be lead to expect better results than the Preparation Blair
salesmen themselves privately expect from it. Malign realism
presumably _must_ work at least two or three times in every ten, or
else it would have died out long ago due to sheer political Darwinism.
Naughty foreigners and domestic malignants have their faults too, of
course, but they are scarcely such total idiots as to persist for
generations and centuries with a strategy that never worked at all.

Neocomrade Rownley may be quite right to advise other gamblers that
Preparation Blair is the best system yet invented for use at the
casino, but their customers must be advised up front that they can bet
"right" -- accordin' to the system -- but nevertheless end up with a
neo-Iraq on their hands. The true value of such a product can only be
judged after a protracted campaign of gambles, ultimate success and
victory may be statistically certain, but only ultimately and
statistically. In any given case, even the smartest gambler may
succumb to "economic disruption, the fomentation of terrorism and mass
migration" and the like.

Somewhat surprisin'ly, Tony's George seems to have grasped this point
better than Tony himself: Little Brother has recently started talkin'
about a "long war," which is his Party's more euphemistic name for what
I just called a protracted campaign of gambles. Mr. Blair is in
general far ahead of the Crawford creatures in concoctin' an
intellectually presentable rationale for Preemptive Retaliation, as
Neocomrade Rownsley implicitly recognizes, I think, when he shifts the
blame for the unanticipated exception in Peaceful Freedumbia over
across the North Atlantic and implies unmistakably that Greater Texas
had better learn some lessons from Airstrip One _pronto_. Exactly what
George did wrong about neo-Iraq that Tony would have done better (or,
anyway, done differently) does not emerge from the murk, but the
general direction of the murk is plain enough.

Recommendin' against " [A]d-hoc coalitions for action that stir massive
controversy about legitimacy" does not amount to a proper lesson in
statecraft. That sound bite looks a good deal as if Tony only means
that if _he_ had been in charge, the "international community" would
have supported the aggression. Perhaps they might have, but as far as
I can make out, Peaceful Freedumbia would still have been in exactly
the same mess three years later for all that. There would be more
targets available for retrospective finger-pointin' by Preemptive
Retaliation enthusiasts, but what difference would that make on the
ground in neo-Iraq? "Massive controversy about legitimacy" is
pertinent to the domestic political standin' of Little Brother and
Prime Minister Blair, no doubt, but it has very little to do with what
went wrong in Peaceful Freedumbia. If the WASP aggression faction were
to do their characteristic stuff Tony's way next time, it would,
indeed, be morally incumbent on them to warn everybody at the UN
Security Council and elsewhere who is persuaded not to controvert the
proposed caper's legitimacy that there is only that 72.53% chance of
success, with or without official endosement from M. Kofi Annan and
"all progressive humanity." Peaceful Freedumbia did not become a
Bushogenic quagmire because the invaders and occupiers were short of
resources that would have been available to them but for the supposed
"massive controversy about legitimacy." Tony and Tony's George may
regret that so many naughty foreigners failed to remark "a high ideal
and a noble cause," but that is a complete red herrin' as to why they
are still findin' success and victory a bit elusive.

In any case, the continuin' GOP occupation, as opposed to the original
GOP invasion, has everythin' that one could wish in the way of formal
endorsement from Turtle Bay -- for what that is worth. I fear
Neocomrade Ambassador J. Bolton's estimate of its cash value is more or
less accurate, myself. The Prime Minister must rate it rather higher,
and _de gustibus non disputandum_!, but no matter how high one rates
it, its impact on the really existin' aggression situation is nil.
The insurgents/terrorists/guerillas of Peaceful Freedumbia don't give a
hoot what "all progressive humanity" thinks of them one way or another,
and unfortunately their view is the dispositive one for all practical
purposes.

In theory, enlistin' a wider spectrum of vigilantes, ideally the whole
United Nations, might mean that somebody with better military and
political judgment than Rancho Crawford happens to possesses could be
in command the next time out. But in the real world, that expectation
is perfectly absurd, since, as everybody knows, the cowpokers paid no
attention at all to poor Tony of Airstrip One. Consent was very
welcome, but hardly advice. I daresay our own Allbrights and
Holbrookes, being out of power at the moment in any case, might say, or
even actually believe, that they would be more receptive to foreign
suggestions for the proper conduct of invasionism than Little Brother
and the Big Party have been, but it would be mad to bet on it. At the
moment their heads must be swollen with self-approval, because the
former Yugoslavia looks like a splendid success for them compared to
what the GOP Kiddie Krusaders have been up to farther east. Should
that crew ever get back in the saddle, they would start off at least as
infallible in their own eyes as the cowpokers ever did, and in addition
they would be even better placed than Neocomrade Blair and Neocomrade
Rawnsley are for shifting all the blame for neo-Iraq on to Dubya and
not learning anything profitable from his blunders -- which of course
_they_ would never have committed!

I don't think the idea of US learnin' anythin' from naughty foreigners
(other than Brits, of course) has actually crossed Mr. Rownsley's mind,
however, as indeed why should it, when they have just proved their
judgment to be execrable by controvertin' the legitimacy of the last
aggression? Even if they do join the posse next time, they cannot
expect to do so except on probation, as it were, and their advice on
the detailed conduct of Preemptive Retaliation is unlikely to be
solicited very earnestly. A reinstated Secretary of War Albright would
probably be more willing to be bored with politely pretending to
consider silly recommendations from her light-weight "coalition
pardners" than Secretary of War Rumsfeld has been, but the difference
in good manners would come to the same zero influence on American
policy at the end of the day. For that matter, she would probably give
poor Tony and little Airstrip One only more of what Little Brother has
given them, an opportunity to admire the height of The Ideal and to
enlist under the noble banner of The Cause, but no more than that.

The exact quality of Neocomrade Rawnsley's antirealism is not clear
enough from this one piece for me to venture a guess whether more of
the same would satisfy him. He says "The trouble is getting America to
sign up to this vision [of Tony's]" which suggests, but scarcely
proves, that he thinks it would be hopeless for Airstrip One to attempt
anythin' much on its own. In that case, Tony or Tony's successors are
never going to get anywhere near the steering wheel of the _USS
Preemptive Retaliation_ in non-visionary practice, and presumably that
arrangement will be pretty much OK with Neocomrade Rawnsley. Always
provided the Yanks first accept Tony's vision, to be sure, don't forget
the _sine quâ non_, please! This analyst is an obvious antirealist
in the sense of not addressin' the ten-times-more-likely contigency
that that won't happen. Where will Airstrip One be found next time if
the cowpokers, whether Bush Republicans or Albright Democrats, want to
ride again on the same old terms, all consent and no advice?
Neocomrade Rownsley does not leave himself a lot of wiggle room with
his folderol about "a high ideal and a noble cause," assumin' that
folderol to be all grown-up policy wisdom without any admixture of mere
mob-orientated rhetoric at all. The height of The Ideal and the
nobility of The Cause can not be supposed to hinge on any low question
about who gets to call the shots, or even on any medium-height question
about controvertin' legitimacy. All of Neocomrade Rawnsley's
pseudo-realist and all his pseudo-idealist argumentation alike point
towards his proviso bein' only a nonsense: if the alternative is in
fact "economic disruption, the fomentation of terrorism and mass
migration as people flee from civil war and tyranny . . . tolerating
genocide and allowing threats from terrorist groups and rogue states to
grow unchecked," why, obviously Airstrip One must ride with the next
Greater Texas posse, and ride with it on any terms offered, however
lowly! How should she not? What would Gladstone do? (If that is
_not_ in fact the alternative, then nothin' the neocomrade says is to
the policy point at all, or anyway, not _primâ facie_ to the policy
point.)

The Prime Minister is not necessarily in the same bind as his apologist
is, and in fact he does have a bit more leeway, since it is not
inconceivable to him that Airstrip One should act alone in the world:
"British intervention in Sierra Leone rescued the benighted people of
that west African hell from the vicious thugs whose sadistic speciality
was chopping the limbs off children." Neocomrade Rawnsley knows well
enough that that happened, but then goes on to scribble "The trouble is
getting America to sign up to this vision of liberal global governance,
never mind China or Russia" all the same.

Since Tony and Tony's George are both notorious political
religionizers, perhaps it is appropriate to put the basic question in a
fake-religionistic format: is it the true _Imitatio Crawfordis_
merely to join every posse that Greater Texas sends out, or is still
more demanded of pious interventionists, that they should launch posses
of their own independently as occasion may demand? Does one just stand
back and admire and only passively and reflexively "support" the ideal
and noble Freedom-That-Means-Invasionism, or does one aspire and
attempt to go and do likewise, to become Truly Free oneself, free even
of Greater Texas itself? Blair is much more willin' than Rawnsley to
walk the extra mile here, or aim at the higher target.

On the other hand, that not very friendly formulation is perhaps not
the same as Neocomrade Rawnsley's original question, which was more
about George (or Madeleine or whoever) hypothetically wantin' to
aggress again, but then Tony (or Gordon or whoever) is not quite so
sure about the proposed scheme, not _vice versa_. Considered _vice
versa_, Rownsleyism looks even worse, I am sorry to report. Nobody in
central North America can dislike witless and fruitless GOP invasionism
much more than I do, but even I find the nanny treatment from London
mildly unacceptable. Neocomrade Rawnsley and his Prime Minister are
"perfectly free" -- in the pre-Bushevik sense of the magic F-word, of
course -- to do as they please internationally. I may condemn, but I
won't be found tryin' to obstruct 'em, short of some demented and
improbable attempt to neo-liberate a NATO member state or take back
what George III once long ago so carelessly let slip. But that is the
sort of favour that one would like to see returned in kind. I'm not
quite sure whether poor Tony himself was ever actually tryin' to
morally _blackmail_ Little Brother on Airstrip One's behalf, but the
Rownsley version of events seems to come perilously close to that. The
fact that any such attempt is antecedently hopeless, Crawford bein'
Crawford, does not compensate for it being inexcusable. Blackmail
would be inexcusable even in the absence of any supposed private
"special relationship" amongst the WASP godly of the world, and
inexcusable even if the USA were no stronger than Andorra or Luxemburg
(or, for that matter, neo-Iraq), instead of the sole remainin'
international Godzilla. No sovereign state, however minor or minimal,
is ever to be provisoed along Neocomrade Rawnsley's lines. Queen
Elizabeth on her deathbed brushed off the proposed attentions of
professional enthusiasm and superstition with "Little man, MUST is not
a word to be used to princes." Never a wiser word from any political
Brit or political Britess! and the point of that wise word had nothing
to do with Her Majesty's Godzilla status in the Europe of 1603, a very
dubious empirical affair, but was only about Her Majesty's princeliness
as such. Any high-flyin' superstitionist or enthusiast can pick holes
in it, to be sure, and bloviate about High Ideals and Noble Causes of
some allegedly better-than-political sort, but in the first place,
didn't we Old Whigs use to congratulate ourselves (or our "Western
Civilisation," as recently concoted for us _ab externo_) for finally
getting away from all that, and then in the last or more recent place,
isn't that more or less the Bin Ladin-Zawahiri-Zarqawi line? It befits
neo-Muslims much better than us palaeo-Enlightened, surely, to complain
that post-mediaeval politics has suddenly failed utterly and so we now
urgently need to find somethin' better than politics.

Such a response to the Pentagon/WTC attacks or the Tube Terrorists is
so disproportionate to any actual danger or threat of danger that it
puts Ms. Chicken Little to shame for her somnolent complacency. Prime
Minister Blair, and even Neocomrade Rawnsley, see this point, sort of,
since they seem to want an Ideal Higher Still and a Cause Nobler Yet
than anythin' the vigilante cowpokers of the Republican Party are
actually fightin' for in their Peaceful Freedumbia, or fightin' for
anywhere else. They want to work the equation of physiology the other
way around, as it were, to invent or imagine themselves some Stimulus
worthy of so great and formidable and "high" and "noble" a Response as
these organisms propose, unilaterally and preemptively, to respond to
"global terrorism" with. That is not post-medieval Western
politics-as-usual, to be sure, but it remains utter neo-baloney
nevertheless. These baloneymongers themselves have been known to
praise Western Civ. (i.e., praise themselves) for understandin'
politics as the heathen allegedly do not understand politics and even,
_im Heimatlande Gottes_ but not in darkest Blairistan, for separatin'
Church and State, segregatin' religionism safely away from Democracy
lest contamination happen.

The Rancho Crawford cowpokers _talk_ like that, but, now that their
initial cowardly panic after 11 September 2001 is over, it becomes
clearer and clearer every day that they don't actually mean their talk
very seriously. Bin Ladin and Zawahiri and Zarqawi have not instantly
become the Godzillas of the world. The "worst" you can say along those
lines is that the faith-crazed fiends have dented the Godzilla
Principle a tiny bit and suggested that post-medieval Western politics
cannot _instantly_ turn Peaceful Freedumbia into the Garden of Eden.
The cowpokers themselves may be radically clueless as to how to pick up
the pieces that that they smashed in their momentary cowardice and
terror, but they never "expand their envelope," they always "think
inside their box." Their Western-political solutions for their invaded
and conquered and occupied and generally neo-liberated Peaceful
Freedumbia -- however stupid, however self-conflictin' and capriciously
changed, however unlikely to work -- remain always Western-political in
a sense that Queen Elizabeth would not have too much trouble
recognizing. It is only about 90% of the miserable indigs of P.F. who
want Higher Ideals and Nobler Causes than "mere" politics can even
provide. I daresay they'll learn their lesson in time and become
post-mediaeval and political at last, even despite all that really very
outstandin'ly incompetent GOP tuition in how to become
Western-political rather than Oriental-Higher-And-Nobler.

The cowpokers, then, are basically on our side, on the
Western-political side, once various minor andd ultimately negligible
eccenticities in their orbits are discounted. Probably Prime Minister
Blair is on basically our side as well, although you probably wouldn't
guess it from his apologist Rawnsley. If Tony ever did approach Tony's
George with any such exotic Higher-and-Nobler _shtik_ as Rownsley
conceives, he must have been either rudely slapped down or politely
ignored, and that is undoubtedly a very good thing for everybody
involved. The Rownsley _shtik_ is bad _simpliciter_ and not only bad
_secundum quid_: even if tryin' to blackmail Uncle Sam, or blackmail
any other Legitimate Prince whatsoever, were a defensible way of
proceedin', acceptable _formaliter_, tryin' to blackmail Uncle Sam into
doin' somethin' that stupid and that regressive would still be
unacceptable on strictly material grounds, _sub speciae materiae_.

If Rownsley's Blair and Rownsley's Blair's Airstrip One have perchance
actually advanced ahead of all these considerations that I adduce _quâ
advocatus diaboli_, good for them! But one really has to insist, it
seems to me, that they should _demonstrate_ all their innovative
advances over Western Civistan's former politics-as-usual system and
not just _claim_ to have advanced already because they can imagine a
Higher and a Nobler the same way any Hollywood scenario writer can
willfully imagine this or that to amuse customers. If Higher and
Nobler really does work better than old-fashioned post-mediaeval
Westistani politics used to work formerly, there ought to be some
concrete examples around to illustrate the proposition with, I should
think. Yet survey the world from China and Peru and tell me where all
the Higher and Nobler fans and politics-haters are hidin': In Qommie
Iran, perhaps? In ever-Stalinoid North Korea? _Wilaayat al-faqiyh_
and Stalinism are guaranteed to interest tertiary educationists forever
_per contra_, no doubt, but does that specialist interest make them the
cuttin' edge of "all progressive humanity," for Pete's sake? Father
Zeus forbid! _Astaghfirullaah_! Let Uncle Sam and even Sam's idiot
nephew Dubya reinforce the prohibition from on high, should our remote
shores ever be threatened with _those_ sorts of alien Old World Higher
and Nobler!

Meanwhile the Rownsley or Rownsley-Blair sort of half-Old World,
half-New World poison is more of a threat to America. Havin' scrambled
back to reality from their original panic and cravenness and
vengefulness, the Crawford critters are probably pretty well inoculated
by now, although the prescriptive infallibility of their Little Brother
and their Big Management prevents them from ever actually sayin' so.
Even without encouragement from the dismal numbers reported by the
pollsters, the GOP geniuses would probably have quietly abandoned any
pretense of Higher and Nobler by now in any case. It would do the
paleo-GOP gentry of Kennebunkport ME and the neo-GOP gentry of Crawford
TX a considerable injustice to claim that they only saw the error of
their invasionite ways after Zogby and Rasmussen started conveying
discouragin' words about it. The perps understood that their faction's
Dr. Strangepearl and their faction's Bani Wolfowitz had very seriously
miscalulated everthin' that really matters long before Zogby and
Rasmussen ever crashed The Big Stick Party to point out what was
already obvious enough anyway to insiders. Serious investigators will
of course get pass the customary and traditional and automatic, and
generally witless and mindless -- plus chickenhawk or chicken***
'military' as well -- GOP screen of "never apologize, never explain!"
and see what is really going on. Probably Blair sees, but obviously
Rawnsley does not see. As one might perhaps have expected, the
neocomrade winds up praisin' his own faction's Leader in a thorougly
extra-reality based sort of way:

"And yet his optimism, as open to ridicule as it is, must be more
attractive than the pessimists who argue that nothing can be done nor
should be done when the poor and the persecuted cry out for help. If
the cause of humanitarian interventionism is lost in Iraq, it won't
just be Tony Blair who has tragic cause to be sorry."


Rownsley seems to reckoned with assaults against his Higher and Nobler
and everythin' post-political from the general McCloskey direction in
advance -- what can such ineffectual insects as I am ever do but
"ridicule" one's predestined betters? That is a fair question, and yet
it is one that Messrs. Zogby and Rasmussen can answer for me and so
I'll leave the answerin' to them. The USA is not run by us ineffectual
insects, after all, it is run -- only temporarily _inshaa'allaah_ -- by
the minions and hirelings of of Rancho Crawford. If the Bushevik
Peaceful Freedumbia happens to be not exactly to suit the finnicky
Rawnley or Rawnley-Blair neo-taste, to blame the joker McCloskey is
maybe not entirely satisfactory, policywise. To dump on some
irrelevant and impotent McCloskey with "nothing can be done nor should
be done when the poor and the persecuted cry out for help" goes rather
beyond bein' "not satisfactory." The Crawford cowpokers (plus Tony)
have been hangin' around their neo-liberated Peaceful Freedumbia for
over three years now, so perhaps Mr. Rownsley has some genuine reason
to complain about the slow pace of progress. Mr. McCloskey would
indeed never consent to the original GOP aggression, and above all
never in a trillion years agree to the announced _principle_ of the
original GOP aggression, which was, as Neocomrade Rownsley perhaps to
some extent blamelessly misremembers in retrospect rather a matter of
savin' the world from those 45-minute terror-tipped specials of Mr.
Anthony Blair's no doubt Brit-thriller-inspired imagination.

Mr. McCloskey does not with any actual seriousness blame Brit thrillers
and Brit entertainments, Graham Greene or Mr. Le Carré or Erskine
Childers -- not even Mr. Anthony Rownsley -- for Mesopotamia becomin'
the mess that the Bushies have lately made of it, Mr. McCloskey only
blames the Bushies themselves for that. Peaceful Freedumbia is
strictly a Bushogenic mess, except maybe in redcoat-occupied Basra,
where Mr. McCloskey suspects that recent reports of indig disorders
have been very tendentiously maximized by certain interested parties
who are neither neither Brit nor GOP themselves.

But there it is, really: why doesn't Tony Poodle try to instantiate
the Rownsleian Utopia at Basra, then? One could hardly imagine a
better opportunity. "If not now, when? If not here, where?" If
Airstrip One could actually _solve_ its Basra problem while Rancho
Crawford ineffectually fumbles America away futher north at New
Baghdad, Mr. McCloskey would become a Blairite at once, even despite
his double prejudice against Brits and redcoats both as a Yank and and
as an Irish.

Unfortunately Neocomrade Rawnsley seems to have no plan the least bit
like that in view. The Vision of St. Tony must, it seems, start from
scratch with the next Rancho Crawford aggression, it is not to try to
snatch what it can from the shambles of the last one. Mr. McCloskey
does not at all actually _mind_ any of this criticism, mind you, but he
does find it just a tad harsh, maybe, to be thus unjustly accused of
"nothing can be done nor should be done when the poor and the
persecuted cry out for help" by Brits and redcoats (and maybe
thrillermongers) who are right there on the spot with drums and
trumpets and even with actual weapons as well.

To speak _literaliter_ rather than _allegorice_, the Blairite Brits
have had rather an easy time of it in the Occupied South until just the
other day. They seem to have vaguely supposed that it should somehow
count as "invasion" and "conquest" and "occupation" to have as little
contact with the indigs as possible and just let local human events
take their course "naturally" with no awkward questions asked or
answered. Not a bad plan, that, really, and certainly much better than
anythin' these exact same perps ever thought of to cope with formerly
unruly provinces like Ireland or Massachusetts, but still!

NEVERTHELESS, if not now in 2006, when, O Tony? If not here and now
at redcoat-dominated Basra, then where and when, O Tony?

But God knows best. Bomby days.
--JHM

=============


The ideals worth rescuing from the deserts of Iraq
Despite the terrible mistakes made after the removal of Saddam, the
case for liberal interventionism is still compelling

Andrew Rawnsley
Sunday May 28, 2006


<< http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1784680,00.html


You could call it the Sorry Summit. George W Bush and Tony Blair now
cut sorry figures in the eyes of many of their own citizens and
weakened ones in the gaze of the world. Their critics cackle that they
have become the axis of feeble. Sorry also because in Washington both
men felt compelled to do some penance for the multitude of errors that
have been committed in the three bloody years since the removal of
Saddam Hussein. The confessions they offered add to the torrent of them
from those who planned the Iraq war and then grossly mismanaged its
searing aftermath. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, has
even talked about the allies perpetrating 'a thousand tactical
mistakes'.

The mistake that mattered most was one colossal strategic blunder.
George Bush waged a war without having an effective plan for winning
the peace. The first key error, for which Donald Rumsfeld is especially
culpable, was not to have enough allied troops in Iraq after the war.
The inevitable result was that order broke down, foreign jihadists
poured across unguarded borders and allied forces were too thinly
spread to quell the insurgency before it grew out of control. That was
compounded by another fundamental error, acknowledged as such by Mr
Blair at his White House news conference with his battered
brother-in-arms. This was to dissolve the 400,000-strong Iraqi army
which produced a huge number of highly resentful, highly armed and
highly dangerous recruits for the religious militias and terrorist
groups.

To those sins, we could add many more of commission and omission, not
least a glibly simplistic view about the challenge of implanting
liberal democracy in post-Saddam Iraq. The consequences of these
terrible failures have been demonstrated time and again, from the
outrages at Abu Ghraib to the inferno of Fallujah.

If George W Bush's grave mistake was not to have a plan, Tony Blair's
grievous error was not to ensure that the Americans had one before he
committed Britain to joining the war. More people might have been
prepared to forgive the way intelligence was distorted to sell the war
had the failure to find any of those fabled weapons of mass destruction
not been followed by such a gruesome aftermath in Iraq.

By being prepared to concede publicly to at least some of those
misjudgments, the Prime Minister must have hoped that he might get a
better hearing for the idealistic speech he then delivered at
Georgetown University. This was both stubbornly optimistic that Iraq
can succeed as a democracy and entirely unapologetic about the world
view which led him to wage war alongside George W Bush. This was the
third of a trio of speeches - the first was in London earlier this
year, the second to the Australian parliament - in which Mr Blair has
been trying to remake his case for an activist foreign policy which you
can call humanitarian interventionism or liberal imperialism.

It was in the springtime of his premiership that he became a pioneer
for a foreign policy which did not see championing liberal values as
incompatible with prosecuting the national interest, but as
complementary to an enlightened version of it. In the late autumn of
his premiership, Mr Blair is especially obsessed with trying to
retrieve this part of his legacy from the stigma of Iraq. He gave a new
label to it in Washington. He recast it as 'progressive pre-emption'.
But in its essentials, it is the same as the doctrine of the
international community which he first argued for in a speech in
Chicago in 1999 in the midst of the Kosovo conflict.

In a globalised world, morality and self-interest alike demand that
Western nations cannot ignore what goes on within the borders of other
states when they threaten their own citizens, their neighbours or the
rest of the world.

Before Iraq, this looked like an idea whose time had come, a doctrine
that was winning friends. British intervention in Sierra Leone rescued
the benighted people of that west African hell from the vicious thugs
whose sadistic speciality was chopping the limbs off children. The
action over Kosovo, during which Tony Blair appointed himself as
spine-stiffener to the vacillating Bill Clinton, ended the cycle of
slaughter which followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Montenegro
has just voted to become Europe's newest independent state. That
peaceful separation from Serbia would be unthinkable had Slobodan
Milosevic not been consigned to the cell in the Hague in which he died
earlier this year. After years of murderous repression by Indonesia,
intervention helped the people of East Timor to win their freedom. The
effectiveness of the military action in Afghanistan is much more moot.
But there are no sane people who mourn the Taliban.

Then came Iraq. Whatever the motives of George W Bush, for Tony Blair,
the war against Saddam was supposed to be another demonstration that
military force could be applied to produce good outcomes by removing
one of the worst tyrannies on the planet.

The Prime Minister has to accept that the war is now widely seen as the
'wreckage' of his world view. What he calls 'a doctrine of benign
inactivity' has, he admits, become 'the majority view of a large part
of Western opinion, certainly in Europe'.

On the isolationist right, the anti-American left and the fearful
centre of politics, those who opposed the war feel supremely vindicated
by what has happened since. Supporters of interventionism are much
harder to find. Many of the American neo-cons and British
interventionists have recanted. A lot of the liberal imperialists have
lost their religion in the bloody sands of Iraq. Mindful of what it has
done to the reputations of George W Bush and Tony Blair, it is going to
be very much harder for any future American President or British Prime
Minister to convince themselves - let alone their voters - that armed
intervention is worth the risks. Gordon Brown's supporters will tell
you that when he gets into Number 10 he has no intention of replicating
Tony Blair's military activism. The Chancellor will raise funds for the
starving, but he is much less keen on mobilising battalions for the
oppressed. Whoever succeeds George W Bush in the White House will be as
haunted by Iraq as a previous generation of Presidents were spooked by
Vietnam.

And yet, for all the appalling mistakes made in Iraq and for all the
ammunition it has given the critics, there is still a compelling case
for interventionism and Tony Blair remains its most eloquent advocate.
The alternative is to retreat into the school of foreign policy that
likes to call itself 'realist'. It was this doctrine of malign
inactivity which sat on its hands as a million people or more were
slaughtered during the genocide in Rwanda.

It was the defeatist realists who were content for UN troops to eat ice
creams while mass murder was perpetrated in the Balkans. It is this
school which argues for doing nothing while the corpses are heaped up
in Sudan. The supposed realists are fantasists if they think that what
happens in other states will not blow back across our borders in
economic disruption, the fomentation of terrorism and mass migration as
people flee from civil war and tyranny. No country can now be an
island.

'What it needs is an empowered international actor; the capacity to
intervene militarily; and a properly orchestrated humanitarian
response.' So argues Mr Blair and it is hard to say that he is wrong.
He also has to be correct that international institutions, especially
the United Nations, which were created in the aftermath of the Second
World War need to be modernised and strengthened for this
interdependent world. He spoke quite bluntly to the unilateralists in
America when he remarked that 'powerful nations want more effective
multilateral institutions', but only when 'they think those
institutions will do their will'.

This was a challenge to the US to rethink. You can have 'ad-hoc
coalitions for action that stir massive controversy about legitimacy'.
In other words, as Mr Blair didn't say explicitly, the Iraq war. You
can have 'paralysis in the face of crisis', which means tolerating
genocide and allowing threats from terrorist groups and rogue states to
grow unchecked. Or you can try to renew the idea of interventionism
through reinvigorating global institutions.

That is a high ideal and a noble cause. The reforms advocated by Mr
Blair sound admirable. He paints a wonderful portrait of a future in
which the powerful nations work in concert and within agreed
international rules to tackle terrorism, poverty, genocide,
humanitarian catastrophe, climate change, disease and conflict. Great
theory; shame about the reality. The trouble is getting America to sign
up to this vision of liberal global governance, never mind China or
Russia. The nightmare of Iraq appears to have made Tony Blair even more
of a dreamer.

And yet his optimism, as open to ridicule as it is, must be more
attractive than the pessimists who argue that nothing can be done nor
should be done when the poor and the persecuted cry out for help. If
the cause of humanitarian interventionism is lost in Iraq, it won't
just be Tony Blair who has tragic cause to be sorry.

&c. &c. &c.

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