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FROM: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1092487,00.html
[TVOTW Insert:-
As we can all see from this
footage - Bush even looks guilty as he blatantly lies about every
aspect of Iraq with no remorse whatsoever - 218kb - 12 Apr 2004.
Also
- Saddam
- Full Confirmation By Clinton - At No Time Was Iraq A Direct Or Indirect
Threat To The US - 218 kb/sec - 18 Jul 2004.]
The moral myth
Superpowers act out of
self-interest, not morality, and the US in Iraq is no different
George Monbiot
Tuesday November 25, 2003
The Guardian
It is no use telling
the hawks that bombing a country in which al-Qaida was not operating
was unlikely to rid the world of al-Qaida. It is no use arguing that
had the billions spent on the war with Iraq been used instead for intelligence
and security, atrocities such as last week's attacks in Istanbul may
have been prevented. As soon as one argument for the invasion and occupation
of Iraq collapses, they switch to another. Over the past month, almost
all the warriors - Bush, Blair and the belligerents in both the conservative
and the liberal press - have fallen back on the last line of defence,
the argument we know as "the moral case for war".
Challenged in the Commons
by Scottish Nationalist MP Pete Wishart last Wednesday over those devilishly
uncooperative weapons of mass destruction, for example, Tony Blair dodged
the question. "What everyone should realise is that if people like
the honourable gentleman had had their way, Saddam Hussein, his sons
and his henchmen would still be terrorising people in Iraq. I find it
quite extraordinary that he thinks that that would be a preferable state
of affairs."
I do believe that there
was a moral case for deposing Saddam - who was one of the world's most
revolting tyrants - by violent means. I also believe that there was
a moral case for not doing so, and that this case was the stronger.
That Saddam is no longer president of Iraq is, without question, a good
thing. But against this we must weigh the killing or mutilation of thousands
of people; the possibility of civil war in Iraq; the anger and resentment
the invasion has generated throughout the Muslim world and the creation,
as a result, of a more hospitable environment in which terrorists can
operate; the reassertion of imperial power; and the vitiation of international
law. It seems to me that these costs outweigh the undoubted benefit.
But the key point, overlooked
by all those who have made the moral case for war, is this: that a moral
case is not the same as a moral reason. Whatever the argument for toppling
Saddam on humanitarian grounds may have been, this
is not why Bush and Blair went to war.
A superpower does not
have moral imperatives. It has strategic imperatives. Its
purpose is not to sustain the lives of other people, but to sustain
itself. Concern for the rights and feelings of others is
an impediment to the pursuit of its objectives. It
can make the moral case, but that doesn't mean that it is motivated
by the moral case.
Writing in the Observer
recently, David Aaronovitch argued in favour of US intervention, while
suggesting that it could be improved by means of some policy changes.
"Sure, I want them to change. I want more consistency. I want Bush
to stop tolerating the nastystans of Central Asia, to tell Ariel where
to get off, to treat allies with more respect, to dump the hubristic
neo-cons..." So say we all. But the White House is not a branch
of Amnesty International. When it suits its
purposes to append a moral justification to its actions, it will do
so. When it is better served by supporting dictatorships
like Uzbekistan's, expansionist governments
like Ariel Sharon's and organisations which torture and mutilate and
murder, like the Colombian army and (through it) the paramilitary AUC,
it will do so.
It armed and funded
Saddam when it needed to; it knocked him down when it needed to.
In neither case did it act because it cared about the people of his
country. It acted because it cared about its own interests. The US,
like all superpowers, does have a consistent approach to international
affairs. But it is not morally consistent; it is strategically consistent.
It is hard to see why
we should expect anything else. All empires work according to the rules
of practical advantage, rather than those of kindness and moral decency.
In Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Rubashov, the fallen hero of
the revolution, condemns himself for "having followed sentimental
impulses, and in so doing to have been led into contradiction with historical
necessity. I have lent my ear to the laments of the sacrificed, and
thus became deaf to the arguments which proved the necessity to sacrifice
them." "Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance
and atonement", his interrogator reminds him, "are for us
repellent debauchery".
Koestler, of course,
was describing a different superpower, but these considerations have
always held true. During the cold war, the two empires supported whichever
indigenous leaders advanced their interests. They
helped them to seize and retain power by massacring their own people,
then flung them into conflicts in which millions were killed.
One of the reasons why the US triumphed was that it possessed the resources
to pursue that strategy with more consistency than the Soviet Union
could. Today the necessity for mass murder has diminished. But those
who imagine that the strategic calculus has somehow been overturned
are deceiving themselves.
There were plenty of
hard-headed reasons for the United States to go to war with Iraq. As
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, has admitted, the occupation
of that country permits the US to retain its presence in the Middle
East while removing "almost all of our
forces from Saudi Arabia". The presence of "crusader
forces on the holy land" was, he revealed, becoming ever less sustainable.
(Their removal, of course, was Osama bin Laden's first demand: whoever
said that terrorism does not work?) Retaining
troops in the Middle East permits the US to continue to exercise control
over its oil supplies, and thus
to hold China, its new economic and political rival, to ransom.
The bombing of Iraq was used by Bush to show that his war on terror
had not lost momentum. And power, as anyone who possesses it appreciates,
is something you use or lose. Unless you flex your muscles, they wither
away.
We can't say which of
these motives was dominant, but we can say that they are realistic reasons
for war. The same cannot be said of a concern for the human rights of
foreigners. This is merely the cover under which one has to act in a
nominal democracy.
But in debating the war,
those of us who opposed it find ourselves drawn into this fairytale.
We are obliged to argue about the relative moral merits of leaving Saddam
in place or deposing him, while we know, though we are seldom brave
enough to say it, that the moral issue is a distraction. The
genius of the hawks has been to oblige us to accept a fiction as the
reference point for debate.
Of course, it is possible
for empires to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and upon this
possibility the hawks may hang their last best hopes of justification.
But the wrong reasons, consistently applied, lead at the global level
to the wrong results. Let us argue about the moral case for war by all
means; but let us do so in the knowledge that
it had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq.
Monbiot.com
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