A maze of illusion: the anti-war case

Before he condemns the ‘caricatures of the anti-war movement’, Anthony Barnett should stop promoting his own caricatures of a supposed ‘might-makes-right crowd’.

He might also try reading a bit more widely. ‘There is no direct connection between Baghdad and al-Qaida or bin Laden,’ Barnett contends – despite a plethora of first-hand evidence assembled and presented by numerous reporters in the New Yorker and the New York Times. The US’s incompetent CIA notwithstanding, in March 2002 Jeffrey Goldberg published a 16,000-word article in the New Yorker that demonstrated conclusively that Iraq has become a haven for al-Qaida affiliates escaping Afghanistan and that these groups have been employed by Iraqi forces to terrorise the Kurds (and recently tried to assassinate one of the Kurdish leaders). William Safire brings together some of this evidence in the New York Times.

So we know about the link to al-Qaida, and we know that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and seeks more. We know that sanctions have been an abject failure and that the inspections regime is completely ineffectual. Yet none of these facts seems to matter, given the sort of heads-I-win, tails-you-lose arguments put forth by the anti-war crowd.

Seven pillars of unwisdom

To take some of the more comical ones, in turn:

1. It is argued that war is to be avoided because it hasn’t been proven that Saddam has WMD and because, if attacked, Saddam will surely unleash a holocaust with his chemical weapons.
2. Threatening war is wrong because: (1) we can easily deter Saddam with our superior arsenal; (2) deterrence is morally wrong; (3) it hasn’t been proven that Saddam has nuclear weapons.
3. War must be resisted because it will surely wreck the economy and because it’s a transparent ploy by the Bush administration to rescue the faltering US economy.
4. There is the mother of all canards: that the war is ‘about oil’. Actually it is indeed about oil – for France and Russia (LUKoil’s Iraqi contracts alone amount to nearly 2% of Russia’s entire GDP!). This is why they consistently favour the most cost-effective oil-centric policy there is, i.e. lifting the sanctions. Yet to remove the moral taint of our oil-lust, the US is instructed to seek support from the United Nations Security Council – in other words to win the blessing of those grand realpolitik-ers, France and Russia. But the war-for-oil theory does help us understand the motives behind the impending US invasion of Venezuela….
5. A somewhat different anti-war argument is based on something called a ‘humanitarian war’. This entails attacking and killing people who do not threaten your nation or its interests, such as Somalis or Rwandans. According to this theory, the smaller the threat posed to your nation’s vital interests, the more virtuous the war against the nation posing the non-threat. Therefore, the US should not attack Iraq, a nation that is harbouring, arming and funding a movement that has already slaughtered thousands and that intends to kill thousands more Americans, but should devote its energies and power to intervening in tribal conflicts and warlord feuds in Africa.
6. Another line of reasoning involves a new concept called ‘multilateralism’, which is Good, to be set against ‘unilateralism’, which is the Source of All Evil in the World Today. This is more complex than it sounds, inasmuch as ‘unilateralism’ is only evil when it’s the US that’s ‘unilateralist’. For example, in 1999 the west unilaterally – despite vociferous Russian opposition and without even an attempt at seeking UN authorisation – attacked a sovereign state that did not threaten any NATO country in the slightest. Germany took the unilateral decision recently to renounce its NATO obligations to support the US. France hasn’t sought ‘multilateral’ approval for any of its repeated incursions in Africa during the past thirty years.
7. It is also argued that war will also incur the wrath of the Muslim world – unlike NATO’s 1999 ‘humanitarian’ war on behalf of oppressed Muslims in Kosovo, which was hugely effective in persuading Muslim terror groups to cease attacking us. This is similar to the mantra, repeated so often in the weeks after 9/11; that a groundswell of anti-Americanism will follow from any US military action against a Muslim nation and, in Barnett’s words, ‘intensify the attitudes that feed terrorism’.

Ignore the clumsy prose and try to locate the logic in that statement: whose ‘attitudes’, exactly, and how do these attitudes enable the programme and capabilities of a minuscule fringe group of hardcore terrorists? How exactly would US restraint in the face of a direct threat diminish such attitudes as the determination to slaughter western infidels, be they Russian atheists or German or Australian holidaymakers in North Africa or Bali or Manhattan office workers and carhops? Or diminish the fear and loathing of religious pluralism, sexual freedom, women’s equality, modern democracy?

In truth, al-Qaida’s existence and effectiveness depend almost entirely on state sponsors who provide it necessary infrastructure, weapons, money, and above all, a refuge from global policing and interdiction efforts.

What is the anti-war solution?

But cheer up. There is hope, namely, the Barnett Option. The basis of this approach is the idea that a pre-emptive US-led attack would appear correct in God’s – er, would be legitimate – if it were to involve ground troops drawn from those paragons of human rights, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, operating in cahoots with the US. I’m not making this up. In Barnett’s words: ‘A determined Washington could have brought Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and, if necessary, Syria together to assemble a combined ground force with US air support, from Muslim-majority states; such an alliance would be unbeatable.’

‘Unbeatable’, eh? So that’s what the Pentagon planners have been missing! Forget smart bombs and night vision; all we need are some illiterate, nearsighted, unarmed adolescent fighters. Onward Muslim/Christian (male only) soldiers!

Is there a better expression of the anti-war movement’s desperate refusal to believe that Iraq, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia continue to support, arm, shelter, and fund terrorist movements targeting the US and its allies?

A gentle suggestion to the anti-warriors: end the farce. I speak not only of the running farce that is the inspections regime, but also ludicrous suggestions like the above, as well as the mindless, inconsistent cant about ‘unilateralism’ and the idiocy about the incendiary ‘Arab street’ and war-for-oil.

Instead, make an intelligent and credible case for an alternative to destroying, by US force, Saddam’s terror infrastructure and mass destruction war machine, or hold your peace.