[Reader-list] Perry Anderson on Casuistries of Peace and War

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Casuistries of Peace and War
Perry Anderson

The prospect of a second war on Iraq raises a large number of 
questions, analytic and political. What are the intentions behind 
the impending campaign? What are likely to be the consequences? 
What does the drive to war tell us about the long-term dynamics of 
American global power? These issues will remain on the table for 
some time to come, outliving any assault this spring. The front of 
the stage is currently occupied by a different set of arguments, 
over the legitimacy or wisdom of the military expedition now 
brewing. My purpose here will be to consider the current 
criticisms of the Bush Administration articulated within 
mainstream opinion, and the responses of the Administration to 
them: in effect, the structure of intellectual justification on 
each side of the argument, what divides them and what they have 
common. I will end with a few remarks on how this debate looks 
 from a perspective with a different set of premises.

Taking an overview of the range - one might say torrent - of 
objections to a second war in the Gulf, we can distinguish six 
principal criticisms, expressed in many different registers, 
distributed across a wide span of opinion.

1. The projected attack on Iraq is a naked display of American 
unilateralism. The Bush Administration has openly declared its 
intention of attacking Baghdad, whether or not the UN sanctions an 
assault. This is not only a grave blow to the unity of the Western 
alliance, but must lead to an unprecedented and perilous weakening 
of the authority of the Security Council, as the highest 
embodiment of international law.

2. Massive intervention on this scale in the Middle East can only 
foster anti-Western terrorism. Rather than helping to crush 
al-Qaida, it is likely to multiply recruits for it. America will 
be more endangered after a war with Iraq than before it.

3. The blitz in preparation is a pre-emptive strike, openly 
declared to be such, that undermines respect for international 
law, and risks plunging the world into a maelstrom of violence, as 
other states follow suit, taking the law into their own hands in 
turn.

4. War should in any case always be a last resort in settling an 
international conflict. In the case of Iraq, sufficient tightening 
of sanctions and surveillance is capable of de-fanging the Baath 
regime, while sparing innocent lives and preserving the unity of 
the international community.

5. Concentration on Iraq is a distraction from the more acute 
danger posed by North Korea, which has greater nuclear potential, 
a more powerful army, and an even deadlier leadership. The US 
should give top priority to dealing with Kim Jong Il, not Saddam 
Hussein.

6. Even if an invasion of Iraq went smoothly, an occupation of the 
country is too hazardous and costly an undertaking for the United 
States to pull off successfully. Allied participation is necessary 
for it to have any chance of succeeding, but the Administration's 
unilateralism compromises the chance of that. The Arab world is 
likely to view a foreign protectorate with resentment. Even with a 
Western coalition to run the country, Iraq is a deeply divided 
society, with no democratic tradition, which cannot easily be 
rebuilt along postwar German or Japanese lines. The potential 
costs of the whole venture outweigh any possible benefits the US 
could garner from it.

Such is more or less the spectrum of criticism that can be found 
in the mainstream media and in respectable political circles, both 
in the United States itself, and - still more strongly - in Europe 
and beyond. They can be summarised under the headings: the vices 
of unilateralism, the risks of encouraging terrorism, the dangers 
of pre-emption, the human costs of war, the threat from North 
Korea, and the liabilities of over-reach. As such, they divide 
into two categories: objections of principle - the evils of 
unilateralism, pre-emption, war; and objections of prudence: the 
hazards of terrorism, North Korea, over-reach.

What are the replies the Bush Administration can make to each of 
these?

1. Unilateralism. Historically, the United States has always 
reserved the right to act alone where necessary, while seeking 
allies wherever possible. In recent years it acted alone in 
Grenada, in Panama, in Nicaragua, and which of its allies now 
complains about current arrangements in any of these countries? As 
for the UN, Nato did not consult it when it launched its attack on 
Yugoslavia in 1999, in which every European ally that now talks of 
the need for authorisation from the Security Council fully 
participated, and which 90 per cent of the opinion that now 
complains about our plans for Iraq warmly supported. If it was 
right to remove Milosevic by force, who had no weapons of mass 
destruction and even tolerated an opposition that eventually beat 
him in an election, how can it be wrong to remove Saddam by force, 
a far more lethal tyrant, whose human rights record is worse, has 
invaded a neighbour, used chemical weapons and brooks no 
opposition of any kind? In any case, the UN has already passed a 
resolution, No. 1441, that in effect gives clear leeway to members 
of the Security Council to use force against Iraq, so the legality 
of an attack is not in question.

2. Terrorism. Al-Qaida is a network bonded by religious 
fanaticism, in a faith that calls for holy war by the Muslim world 
against the United States. The belief that Allah assures victory 
to the jihadi is basic to it. There is therefore no surer way of 
demoralising and breaking it up than by demonstrating the vanity 
of hopes from heaven and the absolute impossibility of resistance 
to superior American military force. Nazi and Japanese imperial 
fanaticism were snuffed out by the simple fact of crushing defeat. 
Al-Qaida is nowhere near their level of strength. Why should it be 
different?

3. Pre-emption. Far from being a novel doctrine, this is a 
traditional right of states. What, after all, is the most admired 
military victory of the postwar era but a lightning pre-emptive 
strike? Israel's Six-Day War of 1967, so far from being cause for 
condemnation, is actually the occasion of the modern doctrine of 
Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by a distinguished philosopher of 
the American Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by 
the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his 
aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we 
will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike 
against the Osirak reactor of 1981. Who now complains about 
that?

4. The Human Costs of War. These are indeed tragic, and we will do 
everything in our power - now technically considerable - to 
minimise civilian casualties. But the reality is that a swift war 
will save lives, not lose them. Since 1991, sanctions against Iraq 
- which most objectors to war support - have caused 500,000 deaths 
 from malnutrition and disease, according to Unicef. Let us accept 
a lower figure, say 300,000. It is very unlikely that the swift, 
surgical war of which we are capable will come anywhere near this 
destruction by peace. On the contrary, once Saddam is overthrown, 
oil will soon flow freely again, and Iraqi children will have 
enough to eat. You will see population growth rebound very 
quickly.

5. North Korea. This is a failed Communist state that certainly 
poses a great danger to North-East Asia. As we pointed out well 
before the current hue and cry, it forms the other extremity of an 
Axis of Evil. But it is a simple matter of good sense to 
concentrate our forces on the weaker, rather than stronger, link 
of the Axis first. It is not because Pyongyang may, or may not, 
have a few rudimentary nuclear weapons, which we could easily take 
out, but because it can shatter Seoul in a conventional attack 
that we have to proceed more cautiously in bringing it down. But 
do you seriously doubt that we intend to take care of the North 
Korean regime too in due course?

6. Over-reach. An occupation of Iraq does pose a challenge, which 
we don't underestimate. But it is a reasonable wager. Arab 
hostility is overrated. After all, there hasn't been a single 
demonstration of significance in the whole Middle East during the 
two years it has taken Israel to crush the second Intifada, in 
full view of television cameras, yet popular sympathy is far 
greater for the Palestinians than for Saddam. You also forget that 
we already have a very successful protectorate in the northern 
third of Iraq, where we have knocked Kurdish heads together pretty 
effectively. Do you ever hear dire talk about that? The Sunni 
centre of the country will certainly be trickier to manage, but 
the idea that stable regimes created or guided by foreign powers 
are impossible in the Middle East is absurd. Think of the 
long-term stability of the monarchy set up by the British in 
Jordan, or the very satisfactory little state they created in 
Kuwait. Indeed, think of our loyal friend Mubarak in Egypt, which 
has a much larger urban population than Iraq. Everyone said 
Afghanistan was a graveyard for foreigners - British, Russian and 
so on - but we liberated it quickly enough, and now the UN is 
doing excellent work bringing it back to life. Why not Iraq? If 
all goes well, we could reap great benefits - a strategic 
platform, an institutional model, and not inconsiderable oil 
supplies.

Now, if one looks dispassionately at the two sets of arguments, 
there is little doubt that on questions of principle, the 
Administration's case against its critics is iron-clad. The reason 
for that is also fairly clear. The two sides share a set of common 
assumptions, whose logic makes an attack on Iraq an eminently 
defensible proposition. What are these assumptions? Roughly, they 
can be summed up like this.

1. The UN Security Council represents the supreme legal expression 
of the 'international community'; except where otherwise 
specified, its resolutions have binding moral and juridical 
force.

2. Where necessary, however, humanitarian or other interventions 
by the West do not require permission of the UN, although it is 
always preferable to have it.

3. Iraq committed an outrage against international law in seeking 
to annex Kuwait, and has had to be punished for this crime, 
against which the UN rallied as one, ever since.

4. Iraq has also sought to acquire nuclear weapons, whose 
proliferation is any case an urgent danger to the international 
community, not to speak of chemical or biological weapons.

5. Iraq is a dictatorship in a class of its own, or a very small 
set that includes North Korea, for violation of human rights.

6. In consequence, Iraq cannot be accorded the rights of a 
sovereign state, but must submit to blockade, bombing and loss of 
territorial integrity, until the international community decides 
otherwise.

Equipped with these premises, it is not difficult to show that 
Iraq cannot be permitted possession of nuclear or other weapons, 
that it has defied successive UN resolutions, that the Security 
Council has tacitly authorised a second attack on it (as it did 
not the attack on Yugoslavia), and that the removal of Saddam 
Hussein is now long overdue.

On the same premises, however, it is still open to critics of the 
Administration to take their stand, not on principle, but simply 
on grounds of prudence. Invading Iraq may well be morally 
acceptable, even desirable, but is it politically wise? 
Calculation of consequences is always more imponderable than 
deduction from principles, so the room for disagreement remains 
considerable. Anyone who believes that al-Qaida is a deadly 
bacillus waiting to become an epidemic, or that Kim Jong Il is a 
more demented despot even than Saddam Hussein, or that Iraq could 
become another Vietnam, is unlikely to be swayed by reminders of 
the letter of UN Resolution 1441, or Nato's lofty mission in 
protecting human rights in the Balkans.

Structures of intellectual justification are one thing. Popular 
sentiment, although not unaffected by them, is another. The 
enormous demonstrations of 15 February in Western Europe, the 
United States and Australia, opposing an attack on Iraq, pose a 
different sort of question. It can be put simply like this. What 
explains this vast, passionate revolt against the prospect of a 
war whose principles differ little from preceding military 
interventions, that were accepted or even welcomed by so many of 
those now up in arms against this one? Why does war in the Middle 
East today arouse feelings that war in the Balkans did not, if 
logically there is little or nothing to choose between them? The 
disproportion in reactions is unlikely to have much to do with 
distinctions between Belgrade and Baghdad, and would in any case 
presumably speak for rather than against intervention. The 
explanation clearly lies elsewhere. Three factors appear to have 
been decisive.

First, hostility to the Republican regime in the White House. 
Cultural dislike of the Bush Presidency is widespread in Western 
Europe, where its rough affirmations of American primacy, and 
undiplomatic tendency to match word to deed, have become intensely 
resented by public opinion accustomed to a more decorous veil 
being drawn over the realities of relative power. To see how 
important this ingredient in European anti-war sentiment must be, 
one need only look at the complaisance with which Clinton's 
successive aerial bombardments of Iraq were met. If a Gore or 
Lieberman Administration were preparing a second Gulf War, the 
resistance would be a moiety of what it is now. The current 
execration of Bush in wide swathes of West European media and 
public opinion bears no relation to the actual differences between 
the two parties in the United States. It is enough to note that 
both the leading practical exponent and the major intellectual 
theorist of a war on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack and Philip Bobbitt, are 
former ornaments of the Clinton regime. But as substantial policy 
contrasts tend to dwindle in Western political systems, symbolic 
differences of style and image can easily acquire, in 
compensation, a hysterical rigidity. The Kulturkampf between 
Democrats and Republicans within the United States is now being 
reproduced between the US and EU. Typically, in such disputes, the 
violence of partisan passions is in inverse proportion to the 
depth of real disagreements. But as in the conflicts between Blue 
and Green factions of the Byzantine hippodrome, minor affective 
preferences can have major political consequences. A Europe in 
mourning for Clinton - see any editorial in the Guardian, Le 
Monde, La Repubblica, El Pais - can unite in commination of 
Bush.

Second, there is the role of the spectacle. Public opinion was 
well prepared for the Balkan War by massive television and press 
coverage of ethnic savageries in the region, real and - after 
Rambouillet, to a considerable extent - mythical. The incomparably 
greater killings in Rwanda, where the United States, fearing 
distraction from media focus on Bosnia, blocked intervention in 
the same period, were by contrast ignored. In full view of the 
cameras, the siege of Sarajevo appalled millions. The obliteration 
of Grozny, safely off-screen, drew scarcely a shrug. Clinton 
called it liberation, and Blair sped to congratulate Putin for the 
election he won on the back of it. In Iraq, the plight of the 
Kurds was widely televised in the aftermath of the Gulf War, 
mobilising public opinion behind the creation of an Anglo-American 
protectorate, without any warrant from the UN. But today, however 
much Washington or London declaim the atrocities of Saddam 
Hussein, not to speak of his weapons of mass destruction, they are 
for all practical purposes invisible to the European spectator. 
Powell's slide-shows in the Security Council are no substitute for 
Bernard-Henri Lévy or Michael Ignatieff vibrating at the 
microphone. For lack of visual aids, the deliverance of Baghdad 
leaves European imagination cold.

Third, and perhaps most important, there is fear. Aerial 
retribution could be wreaked on Yugoslavia in 1996, and 
continuously on Iraq since 1991, without risk of reprisal. What 
could Milosevic or Saddam do? They were sitting ducks. The 
attentats of 11 September have altered this self-assurance. Here 
indeed was an unforgettable spectacle, designed to mesmerise the 
West. The target of the attacks was the US, not Europe. If the 
European states, Britain and France in the lead, joined in the 
counter-attack on Afghanistan, for their populations this was 
still a remote theatre of war, on which the curtain came down 
swiftly. The prospect of an invasion and occupation of Iraq, far 
larger and closer, in the heart of the Middle East, where European 
public opinion is uneasily aware - without stirring itself to do 
anything about it - that all is not well in the Land of Israel, is 
another matter. The spectre of retaliation by al-Qaida or kindred 
groups for a rerun of the Balkan War has frozen many an ardent 
combatant of the new 'military humanism' of the late 1990s. The 
Serbs were a bagatelle: fewer than eight million. The Arabs are 
280 million, and they are much closer to Europe than to America - 
not a few of them indeed within it. Contemplating the expedition 
to Baghdad, even New Labour loyalists ask, as readers of this 
journal will have noticed: are we sure we can get away with it 
this time?

Great mass movements are not to be judged by tight logical 
standards. Whatever their reasons, the multitudes who have 
protested against a war on Iraq are a whiplash to the governments 
bent on it. They include, in any case, many too young to have been 
compromised by its precedents. But if the movement is to have 
staying power, it will have to develop beyond the fixations of the 
fan club, the politics of the spectacle, the ethics of fright. For 
war, if it comes, will not be like Vietnam. It will be short and 
sharp; and there is no guarantee that poetic justice will follow. 
A merely prudential opposition to the war will not survive a 
triumph, any more than handwringing about its legality a UN 
figleaf. Assorted justices and lawyers who now cavil at the 
upcoming campaign, will make their peace with its commanders soon 
enough, once allied armies are ensconced on the Tigris, and Kofi 
Annan has pronounced an eirenic speech or two, courtesy of 
ghostwriters seconded from the Financial Times, on postwar relief. 
Resistance to the ruling dispensation that can last has to find 
another, principled basis. Since current debates so interminably 
invoke the 'international community' and the United Nations, as if 
these were a salve against the Bush Administration, it is as well 
to start from these. An alternative perspective can be suggested 
in a few telegraphic propositions.

1. No international community exists. The term is a euphemism for 
American hegemony. It is to the credit of the Administration that 
some of its officials have abandoned it.

2. The United Nations is not a seat of impartial authority. Its 
structure, giving overwhelming formal power to five victor nations 
of a war fought fifty years ago, is politically indefensible: 
comparable historically to the Holy Alliance of the early 19th 
century, which also proclaimed its mission to be the preservation 
of 'international peace' for the 'benefit of humanity'. So long as 
these powers were divided by the Cold War, they neutralised each 
other in the Security Council, and the organisation could do 
little harm. But since the Cold War came to an end, the UN has 
become essentially a screen for American will. Supposedly 
dedicated to the cause of international peace, the organisation 
has waged two major wars since 1945 and prevented none. Its 
resolutions are mostly exercises in ideological manipulation. Some 
of its secondary affiliates - Unesco, Unctad and the like - do 
good work, and the General Assembly does little harm. But there is 
no prospect of reforming the Security Council. The world would be 
better off - a more honest and equal arena of states - without 
it.

3. The nuclear oligopoly of the five victor powers of 1945 is 
equally indefensible. The Non-Proliferation Treaty is a mockery of 
any principles of equality or justice - those who possess weapons 
of mass destruction insisting that everyone except themselves give 
them up, in the interests of humanity. If any states had a claim 
to such weapons, it would be small not large ones, since that 
would counterbalance the overweening power of the latter. In 
practice, as one would expect, such weapons have already spread, 
and so long as the big powers refuse to abandon theirs, there is 
no principled reason to oppose their possession by others. Kenneth 
Waltz, doyen of American international relations theory, an 
impeccably respectable source, long ago published a calm and 
detailed essay, which has never been refuted, entitled 'The Spread 
of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better'. It can be recommended. 
The idea that Iraq or North Korea should not be permitted such 
weapons, while those of Israel or white South Africa could be 
condoned, has no logical basis.

4. Annexations of territory - conquests, in more traditional 
language - whose punishment provides the nominal justification of 
the UN blockade of Iraq, have never resulted in UN retribution 
when the conquerors were allies of the United States, only when 
they were its adversaries. Israel's borders, in defiance of the UN 
resolutions of 1947, not to speak of 1967, are the product of 
conquest. Turkey seized two-fifths of Cyprus, Indonesia East 
Timor, and Morocco Western Sahara, without a tremor in the 
Security Council. Legal niceties matter only when the interests of 
enemies are at stake. So far as Iraq is concerned, the exceptional 
aggressions of the Baath regime are a myth, as John Mearsheimer 
and Stephen Walt - hardly two incendiary radicals - have recently 
shown in some detail in their recent essay in Foreign Policy.

5. Terrorism, of the sort practised by al-Qaida, is not a serious 
threat to the status quo anywhere. The success of the spectacular 
attack of 11 September depended on surprise - even by the fourth 
plane, it was impossible to repeat. Had al-Qaida ever been a 
strong organisation, it would have aimed its blows at client 
states of America in the Middle East, where the overthrow of a 
regime would make a political difference, rather than at America 
itself, where it could not leave so much as a strategic pinprick. 
As Olivier Roy and Gilles Keppel, the two best authorities in the 
field of contemporary Islamism have argued, al-Qaida is the 
isolated remnant of a mass movement of Muslim fundamentalism, 
whose turn to terror is the symptom of a larger weakness and 
defeat - an Islamic equivalent of the Red Army Faction or Red 
Brigades that emerged in Germany and Italy after the great student 
uprisings of the late 1960s faded away, and were easily quelled by 
the state. The complete inability of al-Qaida to stage even a 
single attentat, while its base was being pounded to shreds and 
its leadership killed off in Afghanistan, speaks volumes about its 
weakness. In different ways, it suits both the Administration and 
the Democratic opposition to conjure up the spectre of a vast and 
deadly conspiracy, capable of striking at any moment, but this is 
a figment with little bearing one way or another on Iraq, which is 
neither connected to al-Qaida today, nor likely to give it much of 
a boost, if it falls tomorrow.

6. Domestic tyrannies, or the abuse of human rights, which are now 
held to justify military interventions - overriding national 
sovereignty in the name of humanitarian values - are treated no 
less selectively by the UN. The Iraqi regime is a brutal 
dictatorship, but until it attacked an American pawn in the Gulf, 
it was armed and funded by the West. Its record is less bloody 
than that of the Indonesian regime that for three decades was the 
West's main pillar in South-East Asia. Torture was legal in Israel 
till yesterday, openly sanctioned by the Supreme Court, and is 
unlikely to have disappeared today without an eyelash being batted 
by the assembled Western Governments that have befriended it. 
Turkey, freshly off the mark for entry into the EU, does not, 
unlike Iraq, even tolerate the language of its Kurds - and, as a 
member of Nato in good standing, likewise jails and tortures 
without hindrance. As for 'international justice', the farce of 
the Hague Tribunal on Yugoslavia, where Nato is prosecutor and 
judge, will be amplified in the International Criminal Court, in 
which the Security Council can forbid or suspend any actions it 
dislikes (i.e. which might ruffle its permanent members), and 
private firms or millionaires - Walmart or Dow Chemicals, Hinduja 
or Fayed, as the case might be - are cordially invited to fund 
investigations (Articles 16 and 116). Saddam, if captured, will 
certainly be arraigned before this august body. Who imagines that 
Sharon or Putin or Mubarak would ever be, any more than was once 
Tudjman before its predecessor?

What conclusions follow? Simply this. Mewling about Blair's folly 
or Bush's crudity, is merely saving the furniture. Arguments about 
the impending war would do better to focus on the entire prior 
structure of the special treatment accorded to Iraq by the United 
Nations, rather than wrangle over the secondary issue of whether 
to continue strangling the country slowly or to put it out of its 
misery quickly.