Klein every mountain

A new meme has announced itself, its spokesperson Naomi Klein. Remember one of the arguments against the war (I don't say used by all anti-warriors, but certainly by many)? To the point that Iraq was a vile tyranny, and its people could use some outside assistance in escaping from that, there came the reply often enough: but if it's done in this way and by these people (Bush, Blair, imperialist nations), then what follows won't be democracy. Well, but maybe it will be a whole lot better than Saddam's regime? Not better enough, evidently, to swing the argument.

So if something quite a lot better were now to follow the war and what some of us call the liberation of Iraq, if indeed democracy were to follow, would this be a plus point for the war after all? Naaah, fiddlesticks.

Naomi Klein, writing in The Nation this week, is struck by the 'appetite for democracy among Iraqis'. Fair enough. It's something a lot of us who supported the war guessed at even before the war, as likely to have been generated by decades of intense oppression and suffering. The body of Klein's article is a critique of coalition policy in Iraq, a setting out of the things she thinks shouldn't be happening but are, and of the things she thinks should be happening instead, and which she sees good possibilities for, coming out of that aforesaid appetite for democracy. But then we come to Klein's conclusion, the argumentative crux - and the place which I've been heading for since I clicked on 'New Post'. It is as follows:

And here's the really surprising part: It could actually happen. Why? Because all of Washington's reasons for going to war have evaporated; the only excuse left is Bush's deep desire to bring democracy to the Iraqi people. Of course, this is as much a lie as the rest - but it's a lie we can use. We can harness Bush's political weakness on Iraq to demand that the democracy lie become a reality, that Iraq be truly sovereign: unshackled by debt, unencumbered by inherited contracts, unscarred by US military bases and with full control over its resources, from oil to reparations.

Washington's hold on Baghdad is growing weaker by the day, while the pro-democracy forces inside the country grow stronger. Genuine democracy could come to Iraq, not because Bush's war was right, but because it has been proven so desperately wrong.

If you hear, rumbling from out of the skies above you, a deep and resonating belly laugh, don't look at me. It's not my way to mock, and in any case I'm seriously earthbound. However: even if the aftermath of war ends by delivering a democratic outcome, one which no one could foreseeably have envisaged without that war, the war will have been wrong. The subtext: we who opposed it will still be able to claim the credit for us and our views.

Got to teminate this abruptly - sorry, folks. My window panes are rattling and the table is shaking. Damn, my tea's all spilled.

(Hat tip: Tony Hutchison.)