On January 8 Bill Martin sent me an email taking issue with a post of mine - Who's a liberal? – of the day before, an email which he also posted on his blog. Kind of an open letter therefore. Bill presents his blog, Reasons to be Impossible, as being 'so ultra-left even Pannekoek's own mother wouldn't recognize it'. On that self-characterization I'm not going to pass judgement except to say I enjoyed it.
I'll reply at some length to one of the points Bill makes, and to a second point more briefly. There is a third issue I also want to deal with, which he himself mentions only in passing when he says that 'the "Why single out this particular dictator while leaving others in place[?]" argument... is quite a strong one'. But I shall reserve this for a separate post. I've been meaning to write on it for some time, since it has figured so prominently as an anti-war riposte to humanitarian intervention arguments on the pro-war side, and it is weak. I won't respond to Bill's argument that the ending of the Baathist regime was an 'incidental outcome' of the war, other than to say that I don't accept this, and to refer him and others to the debate between myself and Ken MacLeod, where I've explained why I don't accept it. (See here and follow the links back to earlier instalments.)
The main thing I want to do is to correct a misunderstanding on Bill's part. He writes:
I will start by taking arms against your assertion that opponents of the war need to annunciate: 'It would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power in Iraq'. Or: 'It would be better if the torture chambers and all the other paraphernalia of murder and oppression in Iraq were still in place', i.e. that that is their effective position. (Emphasis added.)No, this is not what I have ever said. There may be some anti-war liberals and socialists who think it would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power, with all that that entails; but there are many who do not think this, and have clearly said they do not, and there are many who, though they have seemed to find it hard to say explicitly that they do not think this, show indirectly by their very difficulty that they probably do not think it, or that they are unsure about the issue. My point in the post Bill criticizes was not to say that liberals and socialists who opposed the war do, or must, think that it would be better if Saddam Hussein was still in power, but rather to insist that, unless they can say it would be better if he were, they have no grounds for questioning the liberal and/or left credentials of those of us who supported the war because it would bring a murderous tyranny to an end.
Here is the relevant passage from my post of 7 January:
There was every reason for liberals to support the liberation of Iraq, as there was every reason for socialist democrats to do so, and I think, as I said in the September 19 piece, that anti-war liberals and socialists who say different need (at the very least) to pronounce clearly the following statement: 'It would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power in Iraq'. Or: 'It would be better if the torture chambers and all the other paraphernalia of murder and oppression in Iraq were still in place'. Otherwise, it's not clear why they should see support for the war as a basis for denying the relevant labels to others.And here is a segment from my September 19 post (on the old normblog site - Blog's dreckfest), to which I refer in the above passage:
Let them say... that they think it would have been better for the Iraqi people to still be enduring the torments they suffered under Saddam Hussein than to be in the position they are now in, for all its many difficulties. Just say it: 'It would be better if the torture chambers and all the other paraphernalia of murder and oppression in Iraq were still in place'. And unless you can say that, then you should back off the 'idiots' and 'so-called left' stuff. Because those of us who do very much think it's better that all of that is over, we not only think it now that it is over; we thought it before the war, when its being over was in the offing. It was possible even then, with a certain amount of foresight, to think Iraq would be better off after the military intervention of the Coalition than it was before it. So to those … who speak thus contemptuously of the pro-war left, I would say - meaning no impoliteness, naturally - put up or shut up. That is, answer the question, would it have been better for the people of Iraq to continue under Saddam? If you can't say yes, then you should be willing to allow that the pro-war… left had some weighty grounds for thinking as they did.The other point I want to take up more briefly is Bill's statement:
I hope I've made clear that I consider that socialists should oppose all wars - as my organisation, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, has done throughout it[s] 100 years of existence.Against Bill and the SPGB, I think that the necessity, difficult as it is, of trying to distinguish between just and unjust wars is likely to remain with us for some time to come. For there will be those who will continue to wage unjust wars against, or impose unjust and terrible regimes upon, others. To be against all wars and all armed struggles indiscriminately is to deprive nations and peoples who are unjustly attacked - in one mode or another - of mechanisms of defence, while those who attack and oppress them continue to avail themselves of the weapons, and the use of violence, which they judge they need.