Iraqi realities, American dilemmas: a New York debate

On Friday 30 January 2004, the auditorium at New York’s New School University was crammed to hear four of the most incisive commentators in the United States speak on the challenges post-war Iraq presents to American policy. When should elections be held? Are more coalition troops needed? How should the authorities in Baghdad respond to Shi’a aspirations? Where are the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and does it matter? How has America’s international credibility been affected by the war?

Morals of intervention, logics of war

The panelists of “Iraq and beyond: a debate” were chosen, said moderator Susie Linfield, because they have each invigorated the debate on Iraq, thinking in the “bold and original” ways required in the post-9/11 world. The classic political alignments that were entrenched in the United States since the Vietnam war – where the left was fairly consistently anti-interventionist and the right believed in a Realpolitik of military action and deals with dictatorships – no longer applied.

Remember the pre-war? openDemocracy featured a New York debate in November 2002 between Todd Gitlin, Kanan Makiya, Mansour Farhang, Michael Walzer and others

Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair columnist and self-proclaimed liberal “internationalist”, supports what he calls George Bush’s war “on the forces of reaction”. He has written that he felt “exhilarated” on 9/11 because the forces of jihad would now, finally, be confronted.

His adversary in a series of debates across the United States, Mark Danner, has consistently argued that the threat from Iraq was never severe enough to warrant a pre-emptive strike – an ominous new genre of war.

Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell, about America’s inadequate response to genocide in the 20th century, supports the principle of humanitarian intervention but found it couldn’t be easily applied to Iraq.

David Frum, booed and hissed when introduced as an editor of the right-wing National Review, is one of the idealistic neo-conservatives whose outlook occasionally overlaps with that of the liberal internationalists’. As George W. Bush’s speechwriter, Frum was responsible (at least in part) for the phrase “axis of evil”. His new book (with Richard Perle) is entitled An End to Evil: how to win the war on terror.

Christopher Hitchens opened with an exultant yet sober speech about the “return of politics” to the “gorgeous mosaic” of peoples in Iraq. “This is a cause well worth fighting for, believe you me … I don’t think there has ever been a better use to which the United States armed forces has been put.” The US is acquiring skills in Iraq that will have to be used in many other countries.

The tradition of Islamic constitutionalism in Najaf and Karbala, continued Hitchens, can provide the basis for a “democratic revolution” in Shi’a Islam. “The Shi’a of Iraq know very well the titanic failure of theocracy in Iran” and won’t repeat the mistake. Furthermore, they’ve shown “extraordinary maturity and restraint” in obeying Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s fatwa against taking private revenge on the remnants of Ba’athist Iraq.

On WMD, Hitchens took comfort in knowing, finally and for certain, that Iraq was disarmed. Inspections under Hans Blix could never have yielded this knowledge, but “It’s done now”. Moreover, the Bush administration was quite right to assume the worst of Saddam Hussein all along.

Referring to the battle “to the knife” with the forces of jihad – if not to suicide bombings themselves – Hitchens paraphrased Bush and said “Bring it on.” (To which an audience member shouted “Shame on you!”) “Why have defeat in your minds,” Hitchens continued, unperturbed, “when the battleground is right here in lower Manhattan?” For Hitchens, every additional bombing in Iraq further justifies America’s presence there.

Mark Danner, by contrast, saw every bombing as proof that the US should never have invaded Iraq in the first place. Danner characterised himself as the realist, against Hitchens’s defiant, or blinkered, optimism. “It seems incumbent on me not to talk about the hopes for Iraq, like a pitch-man, but about the fact that the rate of killing there is going up.”

He reminded the audience of his repeated predictions that Bush’s shoddy post-war planning would guarantee the turmoil the US now finds itself in: both fighting a lethal insurgency and stuck in a political deadlock where the direct elections Bush and Paul Bremer pretend to support cannot be permitted because they wouldn’t produce a government that is “palatable” to the United States.

Danner posed the question, with regard to WMD, whether “lying in public” matters. He called for an investigation into pre-war intelligence failures (granted three days later by President Bush). David Frum later called his fellow panelist’s desire for Washington bloodletting a distraction; the important job is to rebuild Iraq, isn’t it?

Danner didn’t budge from his pessimistic position. The stylish rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens may be heart-swelling, but it only draws a veil over the chaos the US has unleashed in Iraq. “Read the papers!” he implored, on at least three separate occasions. Hitchens replied, “Mark, I will throw up if you say that once more. One reason I became a journalist was because I wasn’t satisfied with what was in the papers. Don’t argue the difficulties. The difficulties argue themselves.”

Not spectators, but participants

“The only thing worse than debating Christopher and Mark is being a bystander to that debate,” began Samantha Power. Her ego didn’t seem to be invested in the proceedings quite so much, but her intellectual rigor and clarity of voice certainly were. Her speech explored how the US lost international legitimacy over Iraq, but it wasn’t couched in the simplistic vocabulary of unilateralism and multilateralism – in fact, these words were never once uttered on the night.

Samantha Power went for the bigger picture. The Bush administration’s argument for war was mistakenly confined to the corners of Iraq: the WMD threat and the necessity of regime change. But the world doubted America’s sincerity in Iraq because of its selectivity in applying its “principles” elsewhere.

While calling Saddam Hussein to account, the US revealed its true commitment to international law by passing the American Servicemen’s Protection Act. This law licenses a US invasion of the Netherlands – Holland! – should US military personnel ever be on trial at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Meanwhile, America’s complicity with the brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, together with its refusal to confront President Putin over Russia’s war in Chechnya, sends a clear message to the world at large: Washington still practices an outdated and corrosive style of Realpolitik.

For an alternative account of the New York debate, read Rajeev Advani in Full Context

To win the “war on terror”, the US must truly “stand for something”, Power insisted, breathing new life into the arguments for an ethically consistent foreign policy that old lefties like Noam Chomsky have beaten to death. The fact that human rights were “last on the list” of Bush’s war aims, “told you pretty much everything you needed to know” about the proficiency with which nation-building would occur.

“Are Iraqis better off now?” They have something resembling freedom, said Power, so at the moment the answer is yes. But if more violence or even civil war breaks out during elections – a possibility brought up by Danner and an anxious audience member – then everyone will have to think again. All the panelists, even Danner, agreed that a precipitous US military withdrawal (if not a political withdrawal) would be catastrophic.

In his speech, David Frum asked of Danner “a very Washington question”: “So what would you have us do instead? What would you do?” Frum listed what he saw as absurd options for the US in Iraq: enlist the UN (which would only amount to making the existing forces in Iraq put on blue helmets); exchange unpopular American forces for, say, Pakistani forces; or quit the country entirely. He concluded that “only the Bush administration’s plan of action is really on.”

David Frum would, however, accelerate the handover of power in Iraq, and admitted that Bush should have had a provisional government ready before the invasion. Having “Jerry” Bremer at the helm “helps no one.”

Badgered by Frum’s slick eloquence and forcefulness (“So? So?” he repeated as Danner made another speech about what’s in the newspapers), Mark Danner finally made a suggestion, or a prediction, for Iraq: the proposed 30 June handover of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the Governing Council won’t work because the US can’t decide between caucuses or elections to select a transitional government; more troops are needed; and elections should be delayed because it would be unsafe to hold them any time soon.

But Danner objected to having to make these suggestions at all because, he said, they all beg the original question of the war, which he opposed in the first place. And now he wasn’t being allowed to address those old arguments. Hitchens also confessed a “nostalgia” for the old arguments. But Danner, because he lost the argument – in the sense that the US did go to war – is now on the defensive. He said he feels like a man on the street who has just been punched out and, when he asks his assailant “Why did you do that?”, is asked in turn, “Why are you obsessed with the past?”

In the end, Christopher Hitchens’ optimism about democratic participation in both Iraq and the US seemed more persuasive – or seductive – than Mark Danner’s gloomy recital of the problems we’re already aware of. Echoing Kanan Makiya’s famous speech at New York University in November 2002, in which he called for even those deeply suspicious of Bush to support the war for the sake of democracy in Iraq, Hitchens said that Iraq is now an “extraordinary laboratory for pluralism” and that “you should not believe for a second that you watch all this as non-participants.”