June Purvis from Portsmouth, who writes decent letters to the Guardian, has this one there today:
I had hoped to see a thoughtful essay condemning the latest bombings in Iraq and expressing hope for Iraqis as they move towards democracy. Instead Mr Garton Ash gave us another in the endless series of articles about the missing WMD. It is time to move on.Poor June Purvis. She wasn't to know that above her letter would appear five others from her fellow dnoc-readers determined to do anything but move on. On the page opposite her letter today, June will also be able to find an article by Richard Norton-Taylor that discloses one of the essential secrets of the non-mover-onners. It is to be found in these lines:
We are talking here about military action that would not only visit death and destruction on another country but would overthrow the government of a sovereign state. Whatever one thinks of that government... [etc.]I'm going to bypass, just for today, the 'visit death and destruction' bit, and this for three reasons. First, I mean to address it on a separate - proximate, not distant - occasion. Second, Norton-Taylor doesn't himself balance his use of the 'death and destruction' consideration with any genuine weighing of countervailing considerations in the same ballpark, but rather tucks them away - as ya do - with a 'whatever one thinks of that government' as if he might equally have been saying 'whichever day it is that Gran is planning to visit'; so I prefer to save a discussion of the 'death and destruction' consideration for a non-Norton-Taylorish context. Third I want to focus on the other thing that's lurking there, this other thing being 'action that... would overthrow the government of a sovereign state'.
Now then. I do not take lightly the principle of national sovereignty, and I would urge anyone reading this not to do that either if they are so inclined. It is a fundamental principle in any world in which the self-determination of nations and peoples is thought to matter, and the world we live in is such a world and will remain one for the foreseeable future, even if a different world may be thinkable within a utopian, or science fiction, or just slowly reformist but ultimately reconstructive, long-range vision. For the time being we seem, in the arrangement of human affairs, to need to attend to matters of importance within sub-groups smaller than the planetary population, and it matters to pretty well most people that they should be able to act within communities which are meaningfully specific to them, and to do so without being ruled coercively, or dictated to, by others alien to their community, ethnicity, nationality. These are important values of long standing and not to be cast aside for the convenience of any momentary political objective.
Yet every - or maybe it's nearly every - value has its limits, has sometimes to be made an exception to, and the principle of sovereignty comes under this general rule. There is an established lineage of moral thinking about international affairs, including thinking specifically within the tradition of international law, that respect for national sovereignty, as important as it is, does have its limits. These limits are set high. They do not permit one state to invade another merely because the former disapproves of the latter's internal policies, or because 'we' don't share some of 'their' values or customs or practices, or because some of those strike us as, or indeed are, bad. However, beyond a certain threshold of what I will call, for short, basic humanity, where a state has begun to violate on a large scale some of the most basic rights and/or needs and/or requirements that go with any kind of tolerable existence, then that state is no longer to be seen as enjoying the protection of the principle of national sovereignty.
There's an analogy, and an apt one, from within the domestic political arena. If we are democrats, then we accept (acting within a well-ordered democratic polity) that we will sometimes have to see policies enacted with which we are in disagreement - sometimes, even, very fundamental disagreement, over matters that we care about deeply. But we defer, when we are in a minority on some issue, to a basic principle of democracy requiring us to give precedence to the will of the majority. Yet, this principle also has its limits and they are of the same kind as those I've just alluded to for the principle of national sovereignty. If there were a democratic majority behind legislation systematically violating some of the most basic rights, needs and so forth I spoke of above - a clear case would be where you had a majority for genocidal policies towards an ethnic or other minority - then we would be duty bound to resist this, whether it was by civil disobedience or something more extreme.
How do we know? I mean, how do we know, in either the sovereignty or the democracy case, when the limit has been reached? Well, we don't always know with certainty. We have to make a judgement as best we can. We do this and, according to an old formula, we appeal to heaven. So, now, if I were a religious person, I might say: in the name of heaven - no, in God's name - what more did that regime, the regime of Saddam Hussein, have to do, what more than the murders, the slaughters, the tortures and the trampling and degradation of every human tie or sentiment it had already carried out, before it should lose the protection of the legal principle of national sovereignty. As I'm not a religious person, I will formulate the same thing in different terms. I will say: in the name of every principle of common humanity, compassion and justice, the Baathist regime had long ago gone beyond any defensible limit that the principle of national sovereignty might be thought to embody.
That is my view, and it is the view, I'm sure, of plenty of others who supported the military intervention in Iraq for regime change reasons. But not to rehearse all of the arguments that have now been gone over so many times, let me bring this back to the point from which I started: the point, namely, of moving or not moving on. Here's a suggestion. Those who opposed the war in the full knowledge, or some reasonable level of knowledge, of the character and record of the Saddam regime, had their reasons; and while some of these reasons weren't good ones, some of them also were: amongst which I would put the concern about international law, the principle of adhering to established multilateral procedures and the fears about the level of likely casualties, both civilian and military. I would hypothesize, however, that with many if not all of the opponents of the war who were genuinely attached to these considerations and not merely using them as a cynical cover for something else, there will have been some sense of, some feeling for, the considerations pulling in the other direction, the ones that I've invoked above under the formula of a common humanity. So my suggestion is as follows. People who opposed the war but with a proper sense of the other considerations, the ones that moved us left-liberal supporters of the war, should be willing to move on. All said and done, they didn't agree with what was done, but what was done removed a scourge and they will recognize that and look to what is now the best possible course forward for the people of Iraq. And those, on the other hand, who can't move on? It's hard not to conclude that what they want is an alibi. It seems that the considerations which moved us to support the war were not only outweighed for them by their reasons against the war; they just don't count for very much at all. If that's how you think, then you better make real sure that people are talking about something else.
A footnote here concerning something that is part of the same mental complex. On the front of the Guardian today, the authors of the piece about Gordon Brown possibly going to the IMF say, and say just like that:
[T]he prime minister has been facing mounting difficulties over Britain's decision to join the war against Iraq.The war 'against' Iraq. Well, yes possibly, if the principle of national sovereignty is sacrosanct. Otherwise, no. And therefore, no. It was a war against the regime that had bled the Iraqi people. This point was made a few days ago by Oliver Kamm apropos a similar remark of Charles Kennedy's:
Charles Kennedy... has now adopted the Galloway-esque elision that the most brutal dictator in the world is to be identified with the nation he oppressed.