From: David Robjant (David.Robjant@irismurdoch.plus.com)
Date: Mon Jun 07 2004 - 13:57:32 BST
MarkSH,
Judging by the good grace of your last regarding tinnitus, your innumerable
weekend posts on Chomsky and war ought to be worth looking into a little.
But hold on a minute, how many are you posting!???
In one of your posts you challenged my to provide documentation for my claim
that despite mixed feelings the majority of Iraqis are pleased with the
US/UK intervention to remove saddam. Let's deal with that - I can't respond
to your every appear for documentation because often it's a matter of simple
historical record where I can't understand your denial of the facts (eg your
imagining that the French etc didn't think Saddam was a threat) - but on
this matter of opinion polls I can help. I was talking about the Gallup
Poll of Iraq, which is carried out several times in the year and is widely
reported in the press UK and US. Here is one of many available links
garnerd via Google under "Gallup Poll of Iraq":
http://media.gallup.com/GPTB/goverPubli/20040429_9.gif
Datemark 29 April 04. The question asked of selected Iraqis is "Let's talk
about Iraq, say five years from now. Do you think Iraq will be much better
off, somewhat better off, somewhat worse off, or much worse off than it was
before the US-British led invasion?"
Only 19% say either the same or worse off, while 29% say much better, 34%
somewhat better.
So in sum: 63% think that the invasion will do good, 19% think that it will
either do no good or do harm, and that leaves 18% not expressing a view.
For info on how this poll was carried out:
http://www.gallup.com/help/FAQs/answer.asp?ID=169
And now on a few further related matters from MSH:
MSH:
> It will take me a while to respond to the rest of your long post, but
> I will. However, I think our primary source of contention comes down
> to a difference in our beliefs in the motives for US military
> interventions around the world. You seem to believe that such
> activity derives from good intentions, in that they are really about
> trying to make the world a better place for the majority of the
> world's population; I believe, and I think evidence shows, that this
> is not true. Furthermore, you seem to believe that the US has some
> moral obligation to act in this fashion; I think that this "moral
> obligation" is invented to conceal baser motives.
No. That is not a summation of the disagreement. In my previous post, I
said:
"I did not alledge 'for any intervention x, if x is carried out by the US
then it is humanitarian' - no I specifically addressed Iraq, mentioning, by
the by, that I condemned Kissenger's war crimes in Chile etc. Secondly, in
specifically addressing Iraq, I did not claim that the entirety of the
reasons for war were Humanitarian. I beleive the war to have been fully
warranted on UK national security grounds alone..."
It's you and Chomsky who perpetrate the dangerous generalisations here,
asserting generalised beleifs about:
> the motives for US military
> interventions around the world.
- as if one beleif about motivations will automatically do for all cases. I
have no such beleifs. I look at each intervention *case by case*. Hence, I
am able to distinguish Iraq from Chile etc.
I am very much encouraged, about your ability to drop this nonsense about a
*general* diagnosis applying in advance to all cases, by your quote from
Chomsky:
> "I'm sorry that you don't see the difference between Nazism
> and the US-UK system. It's very real. Luckily for India,
> it was never conquered by the Nazis. The British were bad
> enough, but the Nazis were incomparably worse. And not
> just a matter of gas chambers. Putting them aside, what
> about the plans to exterminate 10s of millions of Slavs so
> as to create Lebensraum for the master race -- just for
> starters? I'd really suggest that you rethink all of this. All evils
> are not identical."
I'm chuffed about this, particularly because members of my own extended
family over several generations were engaged in the 'Raj', and I would not
have been pleased to have them thought of as Nazis.
(Digression re Raj: Over two hundred years or so of the Raj I can think of
some terrible episodes (a notable famine in Bengal - due to incompetence,
the mutiny - due to religious insenitivity about animal fat, the amritsar
massacre - due to crass stupidity) - but these years were by no means a
litany of unremitting oppression: the British ruled India by a large degree
of consent for much of that period. So, when Chomsky says that the British
were 'bad enough', perhaps you will be gracious enough to cite his
specifics. Was it the railways, the law, the education system, the
plumbing, the doctors, the schiolarship or the trade that Chomsky most
objects to? And in what period? The raj of the 1760's (when the British
married into and intergrated with Indian society) is not the raj of the
1860's (when the British mostly imported their womenfolk from Surrey) is not
the raj of the 1920's. Bear in mind that whatever the (Disraeli) rhetoric
of empire, British involvement in India began as a mutual trading
arrangement between the previous encumbent empirialists, namely the islamic
Mohguls (the East India Company was awarded the contract for tax collection
in Bengal), proceeded largely by taking up the social and administrative
roles opened to them by the Moghuls, and that it ended by political means.
(In one period the British fought against Russian encrouches towards India
in Persia and Afganistan - what would a Mohgul empire replaced by the Tsar
have been like?) Much of the credit for the eventually peaceful transfer
of soverignty goes to one london educated lawyer, ie Mahatma Gandhi (who as
soon as he had ousted the British had to deal with murderous religous
extremism), but I do not think it would be churlish to point out that, just
as it takes two armies for a war, it takes two well intentioned lawyers to
contract. India is now the largest sustained democracy on the face of the
planet, united by english law and the english language. To whose efforts is
this a continuing testament? Not just those of 'anti-imperialists' I say,
but also those of bridge builders, railway engineers, scholars, teachers,
lawyers etc. The interest and awareness of westerners in Indian religions
owes alot to to this un-ideological variety of imperialism, and many of
those who studied and translated sanskrit texts into english did so as part
of an official role within the Raj. Without the Raj, no Northrop Frye, no
Robert Pirsig.)
A lacuna (or atleast a curiousity) in Chomskys position is, that if one
realises that the word 'imperialism' covers a wide variety of hugely unequal
evils, and indeed some positive goods, why then is it treated as a checkmate
move in any argument about American foreign policy?
The Romans. What have they ever done for us?
(Forgive these allusions)
In another post you responded to my *trucking* analogy, which went thusly:
"Civillian casualities, however many there were, were not then the target or
objective of the US military... The Republican guard, however, was
routinely deployed under saddam's regime with the *objective* of murdering
large numbers of Iraqi civillians. I feel this difference is material.
It is the difference between a) someone who drives a truck so as to get some
load to his destination knowing full well that trucks kill thousands of
pedestrians every year, and b) someone who drives his truck specifically
*at* the pedestrian.
One might imagine the further possibilities where c) the truck driver drives
directly at the pedestrian and calls out as he goes 'you other truck drivers
are really all murders to, so this is nothing special', and d) the truck
driver refuses to mount the cab on the grounds that trucking is murder.
I think that in effect the position on war outlined by some on this list
collapses the distinction between (a) and (b) in order to end up with (d).
What they forget is that in so doing they also justify (c), gladdening the
hearts of terrorist truckdrivers everywhere."
You responded:
> msh says:
> You're [trucking] analogy is fine. But it springs from the false premise that
> trucking is the only way to get the load to its destination. See
> Chomsky's alternate means of transportation, quoted above.
And (the gist from several pages of) Chomsky's alternative means of
transporting a Saddam-free Iraq into reality is:
> "The choice was never restricted to war or murderous sanctions that
> destroy the society and strengthen the dictator. Another possibility
> was allowing the society to reconstitute so Iraqis could determine
> their own fate....
Er, which means what? Which means a game of fantasy revolution:
> "Some, like
> Ceausescu, were easily comparable to Saddam Hussein as tyrants and
> torturers. All were overthrown, from within. There's every reason to
> believe that SH would have gone the same way if the US hadn't
> insisted on devastating the civilian society
Those reasons being? Does Chomsky perhaps mean the way Saddam arranged for
the opposition to become dead, thus further facilitating their work from
underground? By the by, if this analysis of Ceausecu (carefully forgetting
the bit about the dependence upon USSR policy and Russian troops, and the
east block dominos falling due to Gorbachev) really holds water as a policy
recomendation, it would appear to invalidate the D-Day landings.
> "At the time of the 1991 uprising there were many things that could
> have been done, had there been any interest in allowing Iraqis to run
> their own affairs. It would have been possible, for example, not to
> authorize Saddam to use military aircraft to crush the uprising. Or
> not to deny rebels access to captured Iraqi military equipment.
Ah - now we go beyond mere fantasy towards the Chomsky Plan for the
liberation of Iraq, or the Chomsky hindsight Plan for the liberation of
Iraq, given that at the time he was hardly arguing for more action against
saddam. What does the plan consist of again?
> It would have been possible, for example, not to
> authorize Saddam to use military aircraft to crush the uprising.
Whadayamean "not to authorize"? You mean we should shoot his planes down
(like, er, in the no-fly zones over Basra and the Kurds that we instituted
for this very purpose?). Hm, so some limited military action against Saddam
is OK - but why limit it? Why not support the rebels properly, on the
ground? Oh no - that would be imperialism.
> Or
> not to deny rebels access to captured Iraqi military equipment.
You mean we should ship the iraqi arms captured from Kuwait into Basra?
That's sweet. Don't interfere in Iraqi affairs, no, just send them guns and
let them fight it out themselves. What do you think, a couple of million
untrained shias with borrowed weaponry, versus one highly trained army of
sunnis - they could drag it out for years. The Iran-Iraq war Mark II.
Great plan Chomsky and co. Sort of Humanitarian, you know, in it's way.
That way being: avoiding anything that smacks of US "imperialsim" even at
the cost of millions of iraqi lives.
Look, if we were going to intervene in Iraq in '91, and we should have - as
it now appears even Chomsky admits - we should have done it *properly*.
Now we have.
I say: Good.
63% of Iraqis say: Good.
Chomsky says: Imperialism.
> Please!
I couldn't have said it better Mark.
DavidR
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