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Iraq...

  
 
sdv (non-human)
15:47 / 20.05.06
Yesterday, a politician and a pro-war journalist explained, yet-again why the invasion of Iraq had been a good thing for human-rights, the construction of middle-eastern democracy, well I'm sure that you can guess the rest the sad story. Including the denial that the war was anything to do with the shrinking rights of europeans and others on the planet. This morning as another set of US and American troops are listed as coming home in body bags, I wondered not for the first time why the body count was this low.... Imagine my surprise when I read an interview with an UK Colonel who has supplied 20,000 front line security staff whose numbers are not counted in the casualities lists. Frankly I didn't know that they (the military controllers in the pentagon and westminster) had that much imagination.

As Iraq collapses into racial and sectarian mass murder, death squads and the usual murders, have you been watching the death counts ? usually disguised in the media here as a developing civil war - and the numbers of dead since the invasion are estimated at being around 200,000++ I wonder if the death count is higher per day, per week, per month now than Saddam's fascist regime managed during his regime ?
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
09:14 / 21.05.06
Could you say, in a paragraph or so, where you want this discussion to go? I doubt there are many people on this board who think the Iraq war is going well, so unless you have a specific question you want to ask this thread might be redundant.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
11:00 / 21.05.06
phex,

not that straightforward really, personally I really dislike the tendency to believe a 'thread' must have a specific meaning and direction. That is to say that the thread is constrained by the summary or the person who wrote it... by me. If this isn't a legitimate approach then this is the wrong place to think aloud.

I probably think to abstractly to thiunk aloud here..
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:02 / 21.05.06
Thinking abstractly is fine, sdv, but lack of focus can be a problem for threads.

That said, I have something to say about your (perhaps rhetorical) question:

"Surely nobody still thinks that invading Iraq and deposing Saddam was the lessor of the evils?"

which is that deposing Saddam, ending the sanctions regime and holding elections have been good things. So there is at least a pause for that, if one comes at this issue for the first time. Moreover, I think that there are people who supported and continue to support the war and post war because they think it is genuinely better for Iraq and its people. Not all war supporters fall into this camp, to be sure, but one common feature of the discussions over Iraq is the facile dismissal of the moral depravity of differing opinion. I confess I've done it myself, but I think it is a bad habit, in that it allows one to avoid difficult questions by wrapping oneself up in a snug ideological blanket.
 
 
nighthawk
13:05 / 21.05.06
For reference, Medialens have published some articles questioning the methodology behind the current casualty numbers for Iraq
 
 
sleazenation
13:29 / 21.05.06
How do you evaluate the pros and cons of the invasion?

Is it the pile of bodies? The global economic impact/consequences?

How do you weight positive and negative outcomes? Is non-nuclear, non-terrorist Libiya worth the price of a likely inevitably nuclear Iran?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
19:28 / 21.05.06
How do you evaluate the pros and cons of the invasion?

I think that is a really important question in the context of Lurid's post:

deposing Saddam, ending the sanctions regime and holding elections have been good things.

I think that the problem with deposing Saddam is that people often talk in the context of people he killed ten/twenty years ago and throw in freedom as an abstract idea that must be applied. It's as if "freedom" can be conditionally imposed. To take into account the sheer number of people who have been killed as a result of deposing him is important. That makes the method of counting casualties of the occupation and the primary attack significant because at the point where the casualties equate with one another, whether the deaths are those of Iraqi nationality or those of troops it becomes an empty reason. To attack a country and free it of a killer in control and to create a situation where more people die is to further a problem rather than resolve it.

Ending the sanction regime is positive but that would have been better done by simply ending the sanctions. At the same time as this is happening the electricity supply is erratic and the country has been so destabilised that you have to wonder if the products that were being taken away from people are being received adequately now.

As for holding elections- well, that's a mixed bag isn't it? Elections are positive when you have a real choice, when you have the opportunity to vote, when they mean something, preserve the intent of freedom in some way. I have a lot of questions about elections in Iraq that simply can't be answered at the moment. Many of them arise from recent articles on the judgement of the democratic government in Afghanistan and the lack of power that the government actually has there. Is the government in Iraq recognised and able to wield power and law over the people there? If not is the election a true election?

There are people who think that invading Iraq and deposing Saddam were the right choices simply because his was not a democratic regime. Take a look at the Euston Maifesto.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
20:23 / 21.05.06
Lurid/all,

It's not a 'snug ideological blanket' surronding the event, rather it's a specific historical case with a history, and this specific event is close enough for anyone to read a few books and scan the media for supporting information.

The overthrow of other countries regimes is never about the nature of the regimes but it is about the relations of the regimes to the economically dominant democracies. Which is precisely why Sleazenations points are mistaken.

Lurid is right to point out the rhetorical flaw in my question, i did not mean to imply that there had ever been a possibility that the invasion was ever going to be a good thing or have any good results... To believe so is merely to refuse to understand the nature of the invasions and more to the point suggests that they are willfully ignorant of colonial and imperialist history.

Anna's point about the 'democrats' suggesting it is correct to depose dictators is interesting (the arrogance is simply breathtaking). I can't help remember that Chile(73), Iran(50s and today), Venezula and Bolivia were or are all democratic regimes that have been deposed by other democratic governments. The list of democratic governments deposing non-democratic regimes is much shorter than the number of overthrown democratic regimes. Why is it that liberals and people on the soft left imagine that colonial and imperial activity has some 'good things' about it ?
 
 
Disco is My Class War
12:46 / 22.05.06
I think it's almost impossible to find out reliable body count numbers in Iraq. That's not to say I think the body counts are much higher than what various agencies have been reporting: but official reporting on numbers dead counts those who have papers, those who have families to bury them, those who have not died in covert operations. Given that a lot of reconstruction and security work is being done by private agencies who would probably consider casualties bad publicity, how is it possible to really know?

I would be against the war no matter how many people died. When it becomes a calculation of numbers of dead, then you enter dangerous ethical territory where this (lesser) number might be acceptable, but this (higher) number is not. The Bush government seems engaged in precisely that sort of calculation, which is why they outsource the really messy security work to private corporations. But left-leaning people do that calculation too, and this is why the anti-Vietnam war campaigns were more effective. More actual 'soldiers' died; there was more domestic outrage.

I don't know of any wars happening right now in the world where it's possible to distinguish, finally, between 'civilian' and 'military' casualities. Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, Afghanistan, West Papua and the rest are all wars that are not 'wars', officially. The official soldiers are engaged in euphemstically-names activities such as 'reconstruction', 'peace-keeping', 'border defence'. Resistance movements are fragmented and populist at the same time, mostly guerilla. This is the problem with bodies like IBC.

Please let's not go round again on whether the invasion should have happened, or calculate the worth of the war in terms of deposing Saddam. It's been done so many times before. There are more interesting questions. That said, I think the reasons for this invasion were clearly about far more than simply 'the right to kill'; but again, the oil war, oil euro/dollars, and 'creation of a bastion of democracy in the ME' discussions have all been had before as well. Does it matter whether this was a just war anymore? More importantly, what do we do about the fallout?
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:51 / 22.05.06
It's not a 'snug ideological blanket' surronding the event, rather it's a specific historical case with a history, and this specific event is close enough for anyone to read a few books and scan the media for supporting information.

True, but the conclusions one can draw are highly dependent on the analysis one uses. In this contentious debate - in some ways, I think it has been hugely divisive - one can't simply assume that there is consensus on the appropriate framework for understanding the issues. The facts do not speak for themselves at all.

Lurid is right to point out the rhetorical flaw in my question, i did not mean to imply that there had ever been a possibility that the invasion was ever going to be a good thing or have any good results...

Is that a typo? Or are you saying that the invasion hasn't had any good results at all? I assume the former, but it is best to check.

Why is it that liberals and people on the soft left imagine that colonial and imperial activity has some 'good things' about it ?

Well, the status of the war and of the US itself as colonial and imperial is debated, for starters. Second, it isn't clear to me why imperial and colonial activity might not, at least in theory, be an overall good. Certainly, *some* of the arguments supplied by the pro-war side amount to saying that those imperialistic ambitions that survive are well worth the price of deposing a fascist dictator - and, I think, there has been at least some acceptance of this amongst Iraqis, though the support for that position has been declining steadily as far as I can tell. Human Rights Watch, in their report on the war, came out against the action but took seriously the claims that the humanitarian benefit may have outweighed the problematic motives of the coalition. Just putting this as a rhetorical question, then seems insufficient to me.

So, while I don't agree with the Euston manifesto people at all, but I find the anti-imperialist arguments as a trump card pretty unconvincing too. I think its interesting because I have a lot more sympathy for a straightforwardly pacifist position...I think I'm deeply suspicious of what seems like a commonplace move (despite all the fancy terminology) to divide the world into good guys and bad guys, and much of the debate seems to want to do something like that....This is pretty weak in itself, of course, since the history of imperial power is pretty decisive and very ugly. But, given that, at what point does one allow the possibility for change? That is, the possibility of a humanitarian military action conducted by existing military powers?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
17:43 / 22.05.06
I think I'm deeply suspicious of what seems like a commonplace move (despite all the fancy terminology) to divide the world into good guys and bad guys, and much of the debate seems to want to do something like that

I agree with that, there are plenty of people who disliked the occupation of Iraq who I disagree with on other issues but I think one of the questions in this thread is whether people can still believe, logically, that this action was the right one. The answer to that should be no, the specific action that a number of governments took was flawed in its outset, never mind in the aftermath.

Does it matter whether this was a just war anymore?

Yes it matters because if you don't focus on that then this specific brand of colonialism keeps happening. The point being that there are swathes of people who don't see that every single premise for what amounts to the invasion and occupation of Iraq was entirely fallible. We start with the fact that there were no weapons, we move on to the fact that democracy is not an absolute good and cannot be imposed, through ideas about territorialism, the western countries controlling foreign governments, then there's the jumble of arguments about global capitalism including oil, then there are the deaths. You can't shift from the premise to the clean up unless you believe that these actions don't take place consistently and as SDV has already pointed out that's a misinterpretation of recent history, particularly for Britain and the US.

If we don't hash out this debate again and again then we open ourselves up to not recognising that it is the same debate next time and that's dangerous.
 
  
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