Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
Does anyone have any idea what might be done about the pointless blob of white space above this paragraph? It seems to be resistant to all my efforts. Update haha, it succumbed.
Monday, May 10, 2004
It's all our fault, by which I mean it's all your fault
Feedback from the comments section reveals that I have been outflanked in my bile-ridden and jaundiced view of life by several commentators who form what one might call the "This War Now Is As Good As We're Going To Get" Left. This is the view that Bush is such a moron, and Blair is such a lickspittle, and the French and Russians are so venial and hypocritical, that no matter what happens, the current clown show was the only war proposal that was ever going to be made. All I can really say is good God. I thought it was bad enough being me. I'm now imaging what it would be like to be someone who regards me as a hopelessly impractical optimist, far too inclined to give politicians the benefit of the doubt, and to be honest it's quite the Joseph Conrad moment. Hell.
No come on guys. It's insufferable. While this is world is a bad old place, it's surely to hell not that bad. I offer as exhibit A, the recent experience of the UK in the debate over tuition fees (toward the end of the debate, we weighed in on Crooked Timber on the subject; Chris thought the bill was worth saving and I didn't. So now the American readers are up to speed).
The substantive issues on that bill are not the question here; in retrospect, I think that I was probably wrong to oppose the final bill that past, and that I underestimated a number of the provisions in it which could genuinely help to make it a broadly egalitarian proposition (in particular, increasing the size of the student grant, lengtheneing the term of repayment of the new loan arrangements and reducing the amount of variability in fees). But that's not the important point here. The important point is that all the good bits of the bill were the result of compromises and amendments. The original tuition fees bill submitted by the government was just terrible. But the labour backbenches rejected it, in sufficient numbers to make Blair and Clarke afeared of an embarrassing rebellion. So they came back with another draft. And another. And another. Until they finally squeaked in under the wire having shed enough ideological ballast to convince enough wavering lefties that the bill was no longer worth handing the Tories a victory over. For this fantastic piece of work, of course, the backbench MPs were treated shoddily by the press; they were portrayed as bitter unrealistic chumps, and the Blairites were able to spin hated compromise climbdown provisions as if they were part of the bill all along. But the important thing was that, through obstinacy and truculence, recalcitrant British lefties were able to force the government to come up with what was actually a quite decent piece of legislation.
I hope that the parallel with the war is clear. It didn't have to be the dog and pony show we have before us. They did have it in them to plan and execute a proper war. If Blair had been genuinely made to think that the fiasco he was allowing Bush to set in motion was going to cost him the election, he'd have put up some resistance to it. If meaningful resistance from allies had been encountered, I am more or less certain that, under pressure, the Bush team would have come up with a better plan. They're all intelligent blokes.
So in other words, the conclusion is pretty bleakly pessimistic for the British Left. It's all our fault. If we had tried a bit harder with the Stop the War movement, then there would have been a better war. Sure, a better war would have meant that we'd have to put up with some fairly insufferable arseholes saying "despite your silly predictions of a fiasco and quagmire everything has turned out alright thanks to the sensible and realistic plan put together by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz", but we're the left; we've got broad shoulders when it comes to that sort of thing. We should have done better.
Of course, it would have helped somewhat if the efforts of those of us on the Anti This War Now Left had not been constantly and maliciously undercut by people who thought that - their breathless enthusiasm for an idealised vision of humanitarian intervention, or
- (far less forgivably) their own desire to settle scores with obscure far-left grouplets that they were embarrassed with their own previous associations with or
- (far more forgivably) their distaste at the nasty element of British Islam that attached itself to the movement
were sufficient reasons to ignore the coming farrago of fond hopes and underplanned plans which anyone with eyes in his head could have seen was being put together. But, to be honest, I'm not anticipating many mea culpas from that direction. Much easier to claim that everyone who disagrees with you is a supporter of fascists and ignore the practical consequences of your program. Which formulation has the effect of clearing my head on the question of why there are so many ex-Trots on the pro war left.
Update: I wrote this a couple of weeks ago then went on holiday. Since then, for obvious reasons, the "This War Now Is As Good As We're Going To Get Left" has rather thinned out in its ranks, and we have even had a few mea culpas. So my final paragraph is probably too harsh.
posted by the management 5/10/2004 10:25:00 AM
Sunday, April 18, 2004
Breaking with the D2Digest format for this one. It probably ought to have been a Crooked Timber post, but I thought it was slightly unfair to the rest of the CT gang to put it up there as it's basically part of a debate that I'm having in which they might not want to be on my side. I've removed most of the personal attacks ...
Help! I'm Being Repressed!
A response to the debate over Scott Lucas's book, "The Betrayal of Dissent", and much blogospheric venting over the same issue. I've avoided references to specific people below (other than three journalists) because I've argued publicly with a lot of them, and I don't want to excessively personalise this piece (yes yes well you should have seen the first draft)
The whole debate about whether anyone is "shutting down the debate" over the Iraq War seems to me to be conducted on both sides in somewhat less than good faith. Although that doesn�t mean that I think the blame is equally distributed.
On the factual point, people like Christopher Hitchens are right; it�s pretty easy to get anti-war opinions published in the left-wing press, and probably a bit more difficult to get pro-war ones printed (though one has to say, for all that people bang on about the horrible horribleness of the Guardian, the fact is that the Guardian Media Group publishes David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen once a week, and Hitchens pretty regularly). But this factual point is pretty trivial, and I�m surprised that anyone thinks it worth hiding behind.
As always, analogise it to your everyday life and all the complexities fall away like scales. If you and I and a bunch of our mates were to be having a discussion in the pub, say about the merits of League versus Union, or some such, and half way through the argument you noticed that every time you opened your mouth, I stuck my fingers in my ears and started shouting "LALALALALA CAN�T HEAR YOU", then you might scribble on a beermat something along the lines of:
"For Christ�s sake, what have you got against me? Why won�t you let me take part in this discussion?"
And if I were to reply:
"It�s ludicrous to suggest that I�m trying to silence you! You have ample opportunity to express yourself! LALALALA CAN�T HEAR YOU EYES CLOSED NOW!"
Then I think everyone would agree that this was a punch-in-the-mouth situation, and that while you may or may not technically have been "silenced", it was obvious that the person who was genuinely trying to avoid a debate was me.
It�s this behaviour that I, and I believe the rest of the anti-(This)war(Now) left are complaining about. Except that instead of "LALALALA I CAN�T HEAR YOU", the phrase used is "OF COURSE YOU WOULD RATHER STILL HAVE SADDAM HUSSEIN IN POWER".
The wording here is important, because OCYWRSHSHIP is similar to in its literal meaning, but very different from in its rhetorical impact, an entirely valid argument, which is of equally general purpose in that, like OCYWRSHSHIP, it is more or less relevant to any anti-war point about the dangers of creeping imperialism, the corruption of domestic political culture by the untruths told in support of the war, the facts on the ground in Iraq etc. That argument would be:
"But nevertheless, the people of Iraq have been freed from Saddam Hussein, and that is a very great benefit which needs to be set against all the disbenefits you are talking about".
Which is a fair enough point; it�s the starting point for a sensible discussion about the specific vilenesses of the Hussein regime, how well the post-war has been handled, and the longer-term political issues.
OCYWRSHSHIP, however, is not a starting point for a discussion. It�s an insult aimed at your interlocutor, basically trying to accuse him of being a closet Saddamist, and an implicit demand that he admit that he was a horrible person for supporting Saddam Hussein against the forces of good, before any debate will carry on.
Analysed as an argument, to be honest, I don�t think it�s any good; the fact remains that Human Rights Watch did not consider this to be a humanitarian intervention, so I�ve no damn idea why I should. But analysed as a debating tactic, which is what it is, it�s just ghastly; OCYWRSHSHIP is simply a version of LLLLLICHY.
In my personal assessment, David Aaronovich has almost always been scrupulous in using the second, fair version of the two arguments. Nick Cohen has tried to play the ball and not the man but has often allowed his combative nature to get the better of him. Christopher Hitchens, as far as I can tell, stuck his fingers in his ears around the beginning of 2003 and has been warbling ever since.
So to return to my original subject, the "pro-war left" (interestingly, the pro-war right, and Americans, have been in my experience much more willing to justify the invasion on their own assessment of the facts; OCYWRSHSHIP is for the most part a feature of the Left and of the British Left in particular) are not "trying to stifle debate". They�re trying to avoid getting themselves involved in a debate which, to be blunt, they fear they would lose. To coin a phrase, they�re "frit". They got themselves involved in what they thought would be a well-run internationalist humanitarian operation, and they found out that it wasn�t well-run, it wasn�t internationalist and it wasn�t a humanitarian intervention (sorry for repeating the HRW link, but I do think it�s vital to drive this point home. There are squatters on the moral high ground, and the owners of the real estate do not recognise their claim).
It�s never nice to have your Johnny Rotten moment ("Ever get the feeling you�ve been conned?"). It's never nice to have to admit that you've been made a monkey of, which is why large sections of the pro-war left have taken to defending more or less any action of the Bush/Blair governments, the CPA and the US military, without considering whether they make sense or not. And since they've got used to the feeling of using it, OCYWRSHSHIP comes out as the weapon of choice in all those debates too. Having been adopted in the beginning as a last resort, a tactic only to be used against genuinely dreadful foes like George Galloway and ANSWER, it's now the first resort against anyone who steps out of line � funny the way that the self-styled heirs of George Orwell often tend to be pig-blind to their own behaviour, innit?
So anyway, next time I get the OCYWRSHSHIP chucked at me (for what it's worth, yes I would, as part of the "Anti This War Now" position, as I doubt that a credible and well-thought-out war proposal would have been made available by now), it's not going to be "shutting down debate" I'm talking about. It's gonna be three words. Frit. Frit. And Frit.
Update See this is exaclty the sort of thing I'm talking about
Stop the War meant no war. No war meant Saddam in power. Saddam in power meant, well you know the rest.
Well no. They don't "know the rest". If the cruise-missile liberals "knew the rest", then they would have to get to grips with the fact that Iraq was not a humanitarian intervention. I have yet to see a single bomber make the honest humanitarian case - that it was worth fighting a war in order to prevent the 2,000 murders per year1 that were happening. I've seen fucking loads of war-liberals making arguments about Iraq which include the words "mass graves", implying that massacres in 1991 are a reason to fight a war in 2003. This is exactly what I mean by "squatters on the moral high ground". The words "you know the rest" are weasel; it's an attempt to suggest that very terrible things would have happened in Iraq if we hadn't had a war right now in 1Q03, without wanting to get into a discussion about exactly what those things might have been. The squatters don't want to get into that discussion, of course, because they're frit.
1Plus torture and suppression of free speech; these have to be recognised as part of the moral equation, though I've not seen anyone argue that a war could be justified on these grounds either.
posted by the management 4/18/2004 05:31:00 PM
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