Jonathan Freedland, regular readers may recall, is the man who discovered US imperialism, as dating from no earlier than the accession to the presidency of George W. Bush. This discovery aside, however, he is not the most unbalanced or blinkered amongst Guardian journalists. He has occasionally been known to register a consideration on the other side of things from the side of them which he himself favours. This is why his opinion piece in today's Guardian may serve as a sort of guide to the way in which a lot of more moderate people of his cast of mind tend to go on. Freedland's schtick on this occasion is that all the arguments for the Iraq war are falling - 'falling like skittles in a bowling alley'. Let us see, therefore, how he establishes this.
Item:
Next [after WMD - it just had to be that first, right?] was the insistent promise that a US-led conquest of Baghdad would end completely and forever human rights abuses committed in hell-holes such as Abu Ghraib jail. Except we saw the pictures and realised that abuses had continued even in Abu Ghraib itself - albeit under new management.Note, first, 'completely and forever', a piece of shameless hyperbole like the loveable Rod Liddle's characterization of Saddam as 'a creature so hideous and cruel that the world had never seen the like before'. Why do these guys need to speak like this - in a matter where proportion is everything? Don't ask me. I'll only give the answer I've already given more than once before: I think there's something in their stance on the war that they don't feel altogether comfortable about. Anyway, this isn't the main thing here. The main thing is that Freedland allows himself a locution about human rights abuses in Iraq which only talks about continuity - as if nothing had changed. I said clearly at the time when they came to light what a terrible stain on the project of liberation the Abu Ghraib abuses were. But to write, now, in the way Freedland does, as if he didn't know perfectly well that, bad as it was, what was done by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib was not of the same order as what had been going on in Saddam's jails for years, and that it caused a public outcry in the US, with some remedial follow-up, and that something important did change in this regard with the defeat and overthrow of the Baathist regime - to write like this is a disgrace. Even if the rest of Freedland's article contained nothing but the shining truth about its subject matter, the piece would be besmirched by that ugly licence in a matter of such moral gravity.
In fact, however, the rest of his article is not nothing but the shining truth. It's more of the same lack of proportion. Freedland pays lip service to the obvious consideration that 'an open, democratic society' can't be built in a day, especially following upon decades of dictatorship. But this doesn't count for anything in the assessment which follows: introduction of capital punishment, the banning of al-Jazeera ('for at least one month'), the delaying of elections - all just 'democratic lapses'. Predictably, too, what is behind them is 'the American hand'. Counter-considerations? Such as that, going by reports in much of the world's press, there has been an explosion of the free word in Iraq under the iron heel of Bush-led US imperialism? Doesn't count, apparently. Such as that there are certain other forces at work in the field which have also been having an effect on the development - as in trying to block it - of democratic processes, to say nothing of their effect on the elementary amenities of civilized life, or their effect on life itself (as in ended life)? No, these forces don't get a look-in when responsibility is being dished out. It's as if they were merely forces of nature, rather than - what they are - the enemies of the democratization of Iraq. Freedland's view about that? Forget it.
I shouldn't like anyone to get the impression that I think this article of his is an especially lousy instance of the genre. No, it's altogether typical. Left-liberal, anti-war, anti-liberation journalism in the year 2004.
