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Bad arguments for the left

One bad argument used against the war in Afghanistan,
as against the war in Yugoslavia, is that "it
won't work". Indeed, the question is, work for what?
Towards what end? Those that are proclaimed? Or those
that are probably the real ones? Consider first the
latter. We heard warnings that war would only
strengthen Milosevic, or bin Laden, and that the
Taliban would resist for a long time (the so-called
"Afghan trap") and that the war would be too
costly (for "us" of course). It may be too soon to
draw conclusions about Afghanistan, but in
Yugoslavia, the war worked beautifully. It resulted
in a Serbian government in Belgrade that is even
eager to provide NATO with retrospective justifications
for the bombing. What is more, this government was
elected by the Serbs themselves. This was of
course the result of a series of bribes, blackmail, and
deceptions . But who ever did better? Certainly
not the Russians, nor the Germans in World War II,
nor even the British Empire.

Of course, one could try to argue that "it does not
work" in comparison with the proclaimed goals
(defending human rights, peace and stability etc.).
but even that is delicate; any intervention has many
effects and almost always brings some "collateral
benefits" (like the liberation of the Sudetes at
the time of Munich). And, off course, the latter will
be spotlighted by the media to encourage further
interventions. But, I shall explain below, there are
general arguments against interventions that avoid
any detailed discussion of those local and temporary
benefits.

Moreover, portraying the Afghans, the Serbs or the
Iraqis as stronger than they are, allows the
humanitarian warriors to shout "victory" when victory
comes: "see, I told you, it would not be so hard!"
While if we put the issue in realistic terms, and
ask whether the greatest military might of all times
can succeed through months of the most intense bombing
in history in subduing a small, poor and
devastated country, whose level of development is
more or less the one of Europe between the 8th and the
12th century, then the outcome does not look like
such a miracle. It also explains why a large number
of Afghans are ready to collaborate with the United
States: even the Nazis found plenty of collaborators in
all the countries they occupied. So, what is to be
expected when an immensely rich country like the
United States, particularly ready to bribe others,
wishes to install a puppet government in
Afghanistan? Making the victory look like a divine
surprise also encourages the imperial power to go
further: let's now tackle Somalia, Iraq, whatever.
So, this line of argument should be avoided at all
costs.

Another bad argument is to say that the Northern
Alliance is no better than the Talibans, or even
that they are no better in their treatment of Afghan
women. This may be the case, but it is again
irrelevant. What are we to say if they do behave
better? Given the record of the Talibans, that would
not be very hard and, given time, they very well
might. Then, the media will feed us with reports on
how great the situation in Afghanistan is; what will
the left say then?

To understand why all this is irrelevant, just imagine
that the World Trade Center events had occurred in
Bombay and that the Indian government thereupon
decided -- without providing publicly available proofs
and rejecting all negotiations -- that the
responsibility lay with the Afghans, invaded
Afghanistan and toppled the Talibans. How would the
West react? Not hard to guess .

Now, if the condition of Afghan women was the
overriding issue, why not have supported the Soviet
regime (to which many leftists, including myself,
were opposed), the best on that score that the Afghans
ever had? At that time, the overriding issue in the
West was certainly not the condition of women, but
strategic concerns such as the access of the Russians
to warm seas (a dream going back to the Tsars, as
the Western media used to say). But now, the fact
that the United States has obtained new strongholds
both in the Balkans (Albania-Kosovo) and in
Central Asia is totally irrelevant.

Only the fate of women counts.

The real issues: international law and imperialism

Observing (and denouncing) these double standards gets
us closer to the real arguments against the war.
They are of two types. The first one is quite
universal and is simply that nobody has yet found a
better rule to avoid war than respect for
international law. None of the recent wars launched
by the West -- Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan -- were
in accord with international law. The one that came
closest to observing international law was the war
against Iraq. But even there, the equivalent of
the jury -- the Security Council -- was pressured and
coerced by one of the parties, the United States .
In the case of Yugoslavia, there was not even the
pretense of NATO abiding by international law. Finally,
for Afghanistan, one power invoked the right to
respond to aggression. But, even assuming the
existence of a direct link between the events of
September 11 and bin Laden, there was never the sort of
constant assault on the United States
characteristic of a war and thus calling for
self-defense . A spectacular crime was committed
and was used as a pretext to launch a war, period.

Many people will ask, what is so sacred about
international law?

And why respect national sovereignty? After all, most
state boundaries are quite arbitrary and
unnatural. They are the result of previous wars, not
of any rational design. Besides, how can anybody
in his or her right mind stand still while women and
children are murdered or reduced to slavery accross
the border? To answer those questions, we have to think
globally and ask what the alternatives are.

First, let us consider the internal level of political
order. Since the 17th century, the
liberal-democratic reflexion has led to the
conclusion that there are basically three ways to
organize life in society: (1) the war of all against
all, (2) a Hobbesian sovereign that imposes order
through force, or (3) respect for a democratically
decided law as the lesser evil. The Talibans, like
the Soviet communists before them, were playing the
role of a Hobbesian sovereign. The arguments against
that solution are well known. Such a sovereign may
bring temporary benefits (Taliban order compared to
the chaos reigning before and after them in large
parts of Afghanistan -- the war of all against all),
but inevitably acts according to its own interests,
provoking a cycle of rebellion and repression
without end, because its power, being undemocratic,
cannot be accepted by those on which it is imposed.

Now, consider the international order. The sovereign is
the United States and the same arguments apply.
Whatever benefits it may bring to targeted
countries, the United States acts on the basis of
self-interest that inevitably undermines those
benefits. The prime interest in control of world
petroleum and other resources, in investment
opportunities and in strategic positioning clearly
takes precedence over the welfare of populations. In
its striving for world domination, the United States
has promoted drug dealers and Islamic fanatics in
order to destroy the Soviet Union. To control the
Middle East, the United States has unstintingly
backed the transformation of Israel into a garrison
state and relentlessly worked to destroy Iraq. As
liberal theorists should expect, all this eventually
backfires -- an intractable situation in Palestine, and
the World Trade Center attack. Who knows what the
future will bring? Right now, the humanitarian
warriors are celebrating. But perhaps some orphaned
Afghan child will grow up and decide to learn
physics or biology instead of the Koran and inflict
massive nuclear or bacteriological damage to the
United States. Unlikely? Not more than a bin Laden
emerging from the anti-communist maneuvres of the
1980's. No trillion dollar Pentagon budget can
protect the United States from the unforeseeable
backlash of its treatment of countries that today
appear helpless.

The third solution would be to bring more democracy to
the world level, via the United Nations . But that
is exactly what Western liberals, who support ever
greater destruction of a legal international order, in
the name of human rights, oppose. Contemporary
liberals are, by and large, perfectly inconsistent.
They have turned into liberal imperialists: liberal in
the internal order (at least at times and in places
where the powers that be aren't overly challenged),
and autocratic on the international level .

Another line of argument is likely to be more
controversial, but is even more necessary, I think.
In Europe, those of us who criticize U.S. war policy
are often accused of being "anti-American". We might as
well frankly acknowledge that, in some sense, we
are. Not along the lines of the "cultural" critique
adopted by many Europeans who are quick to denounce
the oddities of American society -- its crass
consumerism, its religious backwardness, its
devotion both to the death penalty and to the absence
of gun control, etc.-- while conveniently
forgetting some not-so-pleasant facts about the
material roots (the slave trade, colonial conquest,
etc.) of our own supposedly great civilization. I
mean being anti-American in the sense of good old
anti-imperialism. The United States is now playing
the role that Britain, France or Germany played in
the past, only on a grander scale. What sometimes
causes confusion is that the American empire relies
far more on local collaborators than the old empires,
leaving the countries it dominates nominally
independent. The nature of this "independence" was
illustrated recently when the new anti-Taliban
government of Afghanistan asked the Americans to
stop bombing their country. Too many civilians were
being killed. A naive believer in the right of
self-determination might be excused for thinking
that the Afghans themselves should have a say in such
matters. But the United States flatly said no and,
within 24 hours or so, the "independent" Afghan
government had seen the light and approved the U.S.
bombing. One can easily guess what will happen when
some Afghans try to control a U.S. pipeline going
through their country.

Now, what is the main problem with U.S. imperialism?
First consider all the horror of the U.S. wars:
Indochina, Central America, the Middle East.
Millions of people murdered. Then consider the crimes
of their puppets: Suharto, Mobutu, Pinochet, the
Argentine and Guatemala military dictatorships, the
U.S.-backed rebels in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua,
etc. Another few million people dead. But that only
scratches the surface.

The real problem is, to use a huge understatement, the
loss of opportunity for the Third World. At Porto
Alegre, a new movement has taken up the slogan:
"another world is possible". If that is true, then
probably another world has been possible all
along, but has been beaten back and prevented from
coming into being. Let us try to imagine what it might
have looked like -- it strains the imagination, but
let's try: a world where Congo, Cuba, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, China, Brazil, Iraq, Guatemala, and
countless other places would have been able to
develop themselves without constant Western
interference and sabotage. A world where the 19th
century Arab enlightenment had been able to continue
its modernization of the Middle East, instead of
being crushed by Western-backed obscurantism, and
turned into the besieged hinterland of U.S.-backed
Zionism. A world where apartheid would have been
defeated long ago and where southern Africa would
have been spared both Western-instigated civil wars and
the "debt trap".

What would such a world look like? No closer to
paradise on earth than Europe in the centuries
before it got rich on the Conquest of the Americas,
modernized its agriculture and industrialized.
There might well have been wars and famines and
atrocities. But the condition of the majority of
people would almost surely have been better with
leaders trying, as best they could, to achieve
independence and popular well-being than with
leaders devoted to Western powers and their own
personal enrichment. Compare, in almost every
situation, the indigeneous leaders and movements
with those that the West favored against them: Lumumba
and Mobutu, Somoza and the Sandinistas, Goulart and
the Brazilian generals, Allende and Pinochet,
Mandela and the apartheid regime, Mossadegh and the
Shah, etc.

Nothing is more cynical than the eagerness with which
self-styled humanitarian intellectuals cite Cambodia
under Pol Pot and Rwanda as proof of the need for
Western intervention. In both those cases, enormous
tragedy resulted precisely from massive outside
interventions: from the United States bombing
Cambodia as a "sideshow" to its war against Vietnam,
and from Belgium exploiting and aggravating the
ethnic differences in Rwanda, following the classic
'divide and rule' principle. The most decried
"monsters" of the Third World have not been produced by
those countries on their own but as a response to
the distorting pressures of Western power. It takes
a heavy dose of racism to believe that, without our
constant interventions, Third World peoples could
not find better paths of development than the
present ones. Try to think of the mobilizing effect
that a genuine autonomous but unimpeded development,
undertaken somewhere in the poor countries, could
have had elsewhere. For example, the excellent
public health policies in Cuba would probably be
emulated in the rest of Latin America (even to some
extent in capitalist countries) if mere mention of
Castro's Cuba was not anathema to the United States and
to the elites they direct. If one thinks it through,
one sees that the countless losses of opportunity
suffered by the poor majority of the world translate
into tens and even hundreds of millions of lost
lives. To contemplate this seriously is
heart-rending.

Present day imperalism is even far less justifiable
than its predecessor. Old-fashioned imperialism was
more directly violent in its subjugation of peoples,
but its "civilizing mission", hypocritical and
self-serving as it was, brought some real
advantages. Before the colonial era, the world was
divided between vastly contrasting levels of
development. However indirectly and often
unintentionally, colonialism did make science and even
enlightened ideas available to places where they
had been previously unknown. But the situation is
quite different now. In Asia and the Middle East in
particular, the struggle against Western imperialism
inspired strong movements aimed at appropriating the
most progressive intellectual and political
advantages of the Enlightenment for their own
societies. The post-colonial policies of the
United States have repeatedly aided obscurantist
opposition to such movements. Worst of all, the more
the West presents itself as both the champion of
science and rationality and as a ruthless plunderer
of all the world's resources -- not only natural
resources, but also its cheap labour and even its grey
matter -- and the more it squeezes poor countries
through debt and uneven trade terms, making
genuine development virtually impossible, the more it
gives the Enlightenment a bad name, notably in the
Muslim countries. By its short-sighted egotism, the
West is stifling the very universalism it claims
to promote.

Let me now discuss some rhetorical tricks that are used
to soften opposition to wars and that tend to be
particularly effective within the left.

Fake internationalism

The human rights ideology is often defended within the
left under the guise of "internationalism". We
have, on that basis, to help victims of dictatorial
governments in the Third World (like the Afghan
women), possibly by supporting U.S. and European
interventions. But, again, this is mostly a
delusion. What about child labor in Pakistan? Should we
go to war over that issue? Yet, we can be certain
that, if a major conflict between the West and
Pakistan arises (which seems unlikely), this will
become the issue of the day. Let us also think about
past "issues of the day". Who worries now about the
situation of Indians in Nicaragua? About the drug
trade in Panama? Or human rights in Kosovo? Yet, all
those issues were picked by the powers that be, at a
given time, as the most crucial issue to focus on,
so as to justify their policies. A genuine
internationalist position would at the very least
lead us to think globally and democratically. And to
get in closer touch with mass popular movements in
the Third World (not small sects) and ask them what
they think of the interventions of our governments.
I suspect that a lot could be learned from such
exchanges.

A related issue is the one of "nationalism". The latter
has become very unpopular in leftist circles and it
is thus easy for the mainstream press to discredit
any leader like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein by using
that label. But this overlooks two factors: first,
the extreme emotional reaction to the September 11
events in the US show that nationalism, in its
most primitive and traditional form, is alive and well
in that country. And, since the US is infinitely
more powerful than Iraq or Yugoslavia, it is that
nationalism which is the most dangerous. Moreover, and
more importantly, the strategic orientation of
capitalism today is very much anti-state.
Multinational corporations are often far stronger
economically than Third World states and are quite
happy to see the powers of the state, at least
some of them, be weakened or dismantled. Of course,
nationalism per se is not a leftist value, but any
condemnation of it in a particular instance must be
done while keeping these factors in mind.

The "neither-nor" position

It has become fashionable, in leftists circles,
especially in France, to adopt of position of
"neither-nor" ("ni ni" in French). Neither NATO nor
Milosevic; or neither the Talibans nor the United
States. And, probably tomorrow, neither Saddam
Hussein nor whatever alliance the United States
manages to set up against Iraq. Like all slogans, this
one has some merit, but also serious deficiencies.
Obviously, nobody opposing the war in Afghanistan is
for the Taliban or wishes anybody to live under such
a regime. In that sense, the situation is quite
different from the one at the time of Stalin, for
example, where part of the left did consider his
regime as some kind of ideal (and the long
influence of Stalinism in France may explain why the
"ni ni" attitude is so widespread there). For
reasons explained here, opposing wars of aggression
can be justified quite independently of one's views
about the internal policies of the country being
aggressed.

However, the neither-nor position gives the impression
that there is some kind of symmetry between the two
positions being rejected; but this is simply not
true. It is clear that "Islamic fascism", as the
liberals call it, is a horrible movement (which
harms Muslims most of all). But one cannot equate
such movements to global U.S. imperialism. First of
all, consider the relationship of forces and the
extent of the damage done. The Talibans were an
extremely weak military force whose existence
depended almost entirely on outside support (from
Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, two staunch U.S. allies)
and exhaustion of Afghan society from years of
U.S.-sponsored war. By contrast, the United States is
the greatest military power of all times. The harm
done by the Talibans is direct and visible
(floggings, destruction of artefacts) but not
comparable to the destruction -- much of it
indirect and hidden -- wrought by an imperial power
that has killed millions of people in its
counterrevolutionary wars, and extends its
economic and military power over billions of people.
Moreover, the Talibans, and more generally "Islamic
fascism", must be seen in context as largely a
byproduct of the relentless U.S. opposition to the
unacceptable notion of Arab or other Middle Eastern
nationalists that they might have the right to
control their natural resources.

Most of all, perhaps, is the asymmetry of our own
position: we are not judging the world from some
point situated outside of space and time. We pay
taxes to the United States or to its allies. If we do
military service, it will be in their armed
forces. We vote here. The people we meet and discuss
with are in general totally hostile to the Talibans,
but often support the United States. In that sense,
our primary responsibility is to limit the
violence of our own governments, not to denounce those
of others.

Honest opponents of wars sometimes feel that they have
the duty to denounce the other side to show that
they don't have "double standards". But we need to
keep in mind the actual consequences of what we say,
especially for the victims of the violence of our
states, not simply to show our purity or our
absence of double standards. And whatever we say about
the "enemy" is likely be to used to reinforce
nationalist feelings of self-righteousness and other
war-like sentiments. For example, any denunciation of
Saddam Hussein's policies, done in the Western press
and under present circumstances, even if the
statements made are factually correct, is likely
to have as sole effect to strengthen the resolve of
those who have inflicted and want to continue to
inflict immense suffering on the Iraqi people .

Related to this, is the rhetoric of "supporting X". In
the dominant discourse, particularly in the media,
opponents of wars are always accused of
"supporting" the other side whether the other side is
the German Emperor during WW1, Stalin during the
Cold War, or Milosevic, Saddam or the Talibans
today. This is absurd on two counts: one is that, if
opposing a war against X means that one "supports
X", then even the humanitarian warriors "support"
many X's that do things that they don't really like,
unless they are ready to wage war against Morocco,
Indonesia, Turkey, etc.; indeed, most of the
world, including Israel of course. The second
problem is: how do the warmongers avoid the charge
of supporting the US and his many unsavory proxies?
Well, they simply declare that they don't approve
"all US policies" (usually without saying which ones
they don't like). But they do not give even a hint
of how they would curb the very policies that they
object to; and, given the relationship of forces in the
world, that is indeed a very big open question .
By contrast, if I was to declare (which I am happy
to do) that I don't support "all of Saddam Hussein's
policies", I doubt very much that it would clear
people like me of the charge of "supporting Saddam".

The European illusion

Many leftists nurse the hope that Europe may distance
itself from the United States and become a sort of
counterweight to its global hegemony. But there are
several problems with this hope. To discuss this, we
need to have a clear view of what "Europe " is.
Roughly speaking it is the global imperialist power
of the past, which lost its place to the United
States and would very much like to regain it. Of
course, it wasn't unified in the past, and lost
its dominant role largely because of its internal
divisions. Both its past and its present roles are
justified in the name of unique "European values",
that are often contrasted, in the discourse of the
European elites, with the rudeness and the
commercialism of the Americans. But this, like the
dedication of the United States to human rights,
represents merely the usual ideological framework in
which all powers operate and justify themselves. So,
assuming Europe becomes more unified and more
powerful militarily; what is to be expected? Either it
remains a sort a of vacillating ally of the United
States, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing,
maneuvering to defend its own narrow interests in
the Third World when they differ from those of the
United States. Or else it becomes a more determined
adversary of the United States, and we are back to a
sort of a new Cold War, with Europe playing the role
held by the Soviet Union. Arm races, increased
military spending, the threat of global
destruction, are not exactly what the left should hope
for.

The European political and military buildup should
simply be none of our business. We should combat any
effort to shift budget priorities from social
services to European "defense". Europe is sufficiently
armed already to defend itself against a
hypothetical direct aggression by the United States,
which can best be prevented by political means, by
allying with the rest of the world in favor of
fair commercial arrangements, international law and
measures to counteract the current polarization of
wealth and power. But it would totally foolish for
the left to put its hope in the projection of
European power abroad to play a progressive role.

3. Some Modest Suggestions

Although there are no quick answers to the question of
what is to be done in the present world situation,
one thing should be clear: Western intellectuals
should stop spreading illusions about "our values".
All expanding empires pursue atrocious policies in
the name of "values", either the "white man's
burden" or the "civilizing mission" or various
Christian duties in the past. We should at the very
least lucidly analyze and denounce the hypocrisy of
those discourses.

But, more fundamentally, we need to operate a genuine
cultural revolution in our attitude with respect to
the Third World. Once upon a time, many socialists
and progressives of differing persuasions swallowed the
edifying stories about the "civilizing mission"
and believed that their main business was to educate
the "inferior races". This produced the first
version of liberal imperialism. Later, during the
decolonisation period, many leftist groups projected
their "revolutionary envy", so to speak, on the
Third World, expecting to be saved by distant national
liberation struggles. But if radical social changes
are hard to achieve in the West, they may even be
harder to achieve in the Third World. Dire poverty,
cultural underdevelopment, and the heavy weight of
feudal social relations are not exactly conditions
propitious to the "development of socialism",
whatever socialism may be. But the fact that the
so-called "socialism" in the Third World did not
fulfill the (wild) dreams of many Western leftists
led a number of them to a reaction of burning their
former idols.

Resentful at being let down, they have joined the new
wave of liberal imperialism, brandishing slogans
such as the "right of humanitarian intervention",
justified by the human rights ideology, or by a
perverted "internationalism".

What the world needs now, and what decent citizens of
the West should demand of their governments, is to
put a total end to Western foreign interventions and
even to offer apologies accompanied by massive
reparations for the pillage and exploitation that has
drained the Third World for centuries. Do we feel
altruistic and want to do "humanitarian work"? Let
us cancel debts with no compensation, provide cheap
medicines to cure AIDS in Africa, transfer
technology free of charge, open our borders widely
to refugees and immigrants. All this would do far more
good than all the military interventions that the
liberal imperialists can invent. And to the extent
that we are not so altruistic -- which is human after
all -- we should at least have the honesty to
admit it, try to force our governments to keep
their bloody hands out the affairs of the Third World
and support efforts towards what people sometimes
call a "second independence": after the
decolonisation, elimination of the neo-colonial regimes
that have replaced the old world order.

There are many organizations devoted to "watching"
human rights violations among the former victims
of colonial violence. What is needed, besides and
sometimes against those groups, are organizations
devoted to "watching" interventions and plots by the
imperial powers.

The jingoists a la Bush are making the United States
extremely unpopular in the world. In places with few
or no Muslims, such as Argentina, South Korea or El Salvador,
there are reports of people expressing their sympathies
for bin Laden. This reaction may be shocking, but
not more than, say, the attitude of the crowds in
New York enthusiastically "welcoming the troops"
after the far greater slaughter of the Gulf War. The
gap between North and South is growing and the
admiration for bin Laden reflects this gap. The use
of force by the United States will provoke resistance
(as Hitler and the colonialists did in the past)
and, since there are many weak spots in the West,
one can expect that there will be other events like
September 11. This spiral leads nowhere, or at
least not towards what we would like, but rather
towards more war and more repression. While leftist
intellectuals congratulate themselves about
"victories for human rights", the poverty,
humiliation and despair of much of the world breeds
fanaticism. It is urgent that the Western left build
real bridges with popular organizations in the
Third World; but, to achieve that, we have first to
clarify our views about the real relations of forces
that shape this world, to take into account, in all
our actions, our actual position in it and to expose
the illusions spread by the liberal imperialists.

Jean Bricmont

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