In this post I take up the discussion with Ken MacLeod on whether or not the Iraq war should have been supported. Ken argued against the position of the pro-war left here; I took issue with him here (on the old normblog site: December 8); and he then responded to me here.
In my criticism of Ken, I expressed the nub of my disagreement with his view by saying that:
it loses the specific in the general. Because of the general character of US power as projected by opponents of the Iraq war, we must oppose a course of action which leads to the demise of the Saddam regime.For left supporters of the war, I went on to say, 'the present and proximate future of the Iraqi people' weighed more heavily in the balance than speculative projections about the future use of American power and generalist characterizations of what the latter supposedly is by its very essence. In his response Ken formally moves as if to meet the point. But I don't think he does meet it. What he says amounts simply to a restatement of the position I was criticizing. Here is his reply:
I don't think my objection turns on opposing the specific to the general, or the real present to the speculated-upon future… [T]his particular war is avowedly part of a long-term project to establish unchallengeable US hegemony, a project that in the view of many people... threatens much wider wars, including (and yes, this is speculative) against other advanced capitalist states. That a war that is overall reactionary (or otherwise disastrous) can have progressive (or otherwise good) effects is not new, and abstracting these effects from their context isn't a new mistake, particularly and regrettably for socialists.The argument starts as though it might be about to meet the criticism I made - with its reference to, and claims about, 'this particular war'. But the characterization of the war which immediately follows (a) only obtains its content by adverting back from the particular to the general, with 'long-term project', 'threatens', and 'overall reactionary'; and (b) is question-begging on the issues that divided left supporters and left opponents of the war.
I won't elaborate on (a). It speaks for itself. What Ken writes here seems to me self-evidently subject to the same criticism it is meant to be defending against. This point is reinforced by a consideration of (b). For those of us who supported the war - well, for me at any rate - the ending of the Baathist regime is not just an incidental side-effect of what happened. It is the main story. I therefore don't accept that the war was 'overall reactionary'. I think that the freeing of the Iraqi people from a decades-long political darkness was - as Ken himself appears to allow - 'progressive'. It was a boon, a great release for the Iraqi people, a national liberation, no less; and then, more than this, an opportunity for the region and the world. Therefore, I don't regard support for the war as 'abstracting these effects from their context' - as if the context was already pre-defined by something else more general, with the progressive 'bit' being merely by the way. It's a skewed version of what the war was about, WMD and all the rest of it notwithstanding. I would hold this view even if I thought (as in fact I do not) that George Bush and Tony Blair fought the war for wholly cynical reasons. To give a crude analogy here: if someone burgles a house and her only motive in doing so is greed, I will approve of her action if, in order to bring off the burglary, she finds she has to release a terrified family from the grip of a bullying, violent and child-abusing patriarch. I will not think that what happened was overall bad because it was - 'in essence' - a burglary; or worry, in my approval, about the burglar going on to burgle others. If she does, we can disapprove of - and oppose - that.
Ken also makes the point that 'the occupation itself could be the catalyst for a slide into a worse situation than that before the war'. I'm not going to engage over it, because he doesn't know that this will happen, and I don't know that it won't. It's relevant to say that supporters of the war will have reckoned that the baseline for comparison about better and worse was such that it was improbable that the war would make things worse.
Finally, I criticized Ken for what struck me as a rather cavalier approach ('So bloody what?') to the mistakes that have been made by many on the left in opposing the war. What he says in reply I recognize as a partial clarification. He meant that in the circumstances such 'stupidity is something to be expected and endured and fought against within the antiwar movement, not something that has to be accepted'; that these are 'correctable, though shameful' errors. All the same, as before here, for him the deep or inner character of everything is already fixed in advance by the generalities from which he begins. Those errors, he says, weren't 'a betrayal of the victims of Saddam's regime'. No? Why not? Just so. On the other hand:
Errors on the side of support to imperialism are hardly ever correctable. That slope is too slippery, and the social gravitation too powerful, to be easily climbed back.I don't propose to comment on this other than to say that, though it's more gently put than sometimes, it's the discourse of renegacy. There could not be two views on the left about the war; or not two safe views anyway. And so we who supported the war look to be on the way out. Thanks, but no thanks. I won't be excommunicated.
A postscript of a purely personal nature. Ken finishes on the 'monstrous misconception of the pro-war left that some justification for supporting the invasion of Iraq can be found in the words or deeds of Lenin or Trotsky' - next to which, he says, any mistakes on the anti-war side 'are as dust in the balance'. I don't know which people he has in mind in the matter of Lenin and Trotsky, but I'm bound, for contextual reasons, to suspect I might be amongst them. I'd like, therefore, to say this. In the daily flow of blogging, amidst the press of everything else, it is possible to have a hazy memory sometimes about what you may have written on this or that point. Still, I feel reasonably confident about two things: (1) I haven't recently invoked Lenin's name or authority on behalf of anything at all; and (2) the only appeal I've made to Trotsky's thinking in connection with the Iraq war was to point out what he thought about treating fascism as a lesser enemy than social democracy and a lesser threat than (as it used to be called) bourgeois democracy. It is uselessly anachronistic to try to guess what viewpoint figures from the past might have adopted in present circumstances, but I know enough about Trotsky's politics to know that, were he suddenly to be transported from his time into ours, he would almost certainly not be supporting the Coalition in Iraq. For a number of reasons which I won't go into, that speculation carries no weight whatsoever in my own thinking about things. Or to put it more briefly, I don't care. It's not how I make up my mind on any issue, and it's not how I ever have.