Getting to know another person’s point of view does not mean you agree with them or that you support them. This sounds simple enough. But in minds possessed by the virus of ideology, simple observations about another person become monsters attacking the foundation of one’s existence. There are undoubtedly times when ideology has to be fought with the intellect, with arguments; but there are also times when observations are simply no more than the stuff of reality.
The main point of my Against Human Rights in Iraq was to draw attention to the lack of the Iraqi viewpoint in all of Jack Robertson’s Iraq pieces, which nevertheless express an opinion on what ought to happen in Iraq. He has not “consulted” the Iraqis while presuming to tell them (and all of us) what’s best for them.
As I’ve argued before, this holds, too, for “the people” – those antiwar protesters described in Margo Kingston’s The People’s Instinct on the War. Nothing about seeing the viewpoint of the Iraqi in Iraq necessitates being for the war; but if you’re against the war, and you’re not a scum of a human being, you owe the Iraqis an apology for your choice that this time you cannot support their liberation. “The people” should have apologised to the Iraqis, then been ashamed of themselves.
The elementary fact that getting yourself informed about the Iraqi position does not necessarily mean agreeing with it is what underlies all my recent articles; namely, Why the people’s instinct can be wrong, I felt liberated when I saw the bombs falling and That obscure thing called reality. These pieces are therefore neither pro war nor antiwar.
These works are for seeing another person’s reality – this time, that of the Iraqi under Saddam – and for smashing the mental barriers that prevent human beings from seeing other human beings. With these barriers in place – be they rooted in fear or ideology or both – no just future is possible in Australia or anywhere.
In these pieces I’m simply for clarity and truth, and against the obliterating virus of ideology.
I’ve made my case many times over – and Jack proved my point once again in Two letters to the future. His politicised soul insists that ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’ betrays a political leaning; but in fact he’s hallucinating monsters and goblins, like some medieval religious knave obsessed with grasping onto power no matter what.
In the 21st century so far, two devastating bushfires have swept across the Australian societal landscape, each in turn reinforcing the great Australian inability to imagine in any depth the lot of a stranger, each dividing the world into us and outsiders, whereby what in each case is accepted as “us and ours” is elevated to a special status through heightened familiarity, to the exclusion of the other.
The outsiders are thought of in myth-like ways, images of them are somewhat unreal, because the image of “the other” is a projection of what is necessary for “us” to uphold “our” image of “ourselves”: it has no basis in reality, and its effect is ultimately to falsify and oppress human beings.
In the Tampa and SIEV-X cases, this was called “racism”. It is no different now with the anti-war protests, in the way they shun the Iraqi viewpoint.
I’m saying that when antiwar protesters claim their prejudice is unintentional, they’re not being completely honest: True, they’re not directly intending this consequence, but a destructive intention certainly exists. The viewpoint of the Iraqi seeking liberty – who is supposed to be our kindred spirit, is he not? – is obliterated in the minds of “the people”; for example, by promoting myths such as he or she hates the Americans so much that he or she will fight for Saddam Hussein and not against him.
“The people” naturally believe that Iraqis will willingly fight to save Saddam’s totalitarianism – because if they had it in their mind that Iraqis want to fight with the Americans against Saddam, then they would be confronted with the unsavoury truth that their antiwar protest is denying individual liberty.
Jack Robertson, too, sees Iraqis as an abstraction. He has written so much on Iraq, yet not one word about the Iraqi viewpoint. Not one word of his piece Controil – ostensibly about American Big Oil but it ends up being an antiwar rant on the prophecy that American self-interest is the sole motivation for invading Iraq and that democracy is not worth the risk – sees the situation from the point of view of the Iraqi desiring liberty (as opposed to the apparatchik, and the expatriate conservative Muslim and expatriate socialist/communist, which almost entirely account for Iraqi opposition to the war).
In his letter to me in Two Letters to the Future, Jack admits that he doesn’t have any idea what the Iraqis think. He writes:
I simply don’t know what ‘most’ Iraqis want …. We just don’t know what all the twenty-three million individual Iraqis want, John… there are many Iraqis, here in Australia, around the world, and in Iraq, too, who don’t share your views that we in the West should ‘liberate’ Iraq…
But he’s nevertheless certain that “this debate is dividing Iraqis, just as much as it is dividing the rest of us”.
He projects his image of ourselves onto the Iraqis, as if Saddam’s brutal totalitarian dictatorship makes no difference.
Most striking is that Jack sees no problem with his insinuation that “many Iraqis inside Iraq choose Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship over American liberation”. It’s striking for two reasons:
a) It’s not correct (in any meaningful sense of the word “many”). See ‘I felt liberated…’, ‘Why the people’s instinct…’ and especially ‘That obscure thing called reality’ for the opinion of probably the majority of Iraqis. Also have a look at the open letter from Barham Salih, Prime Minister of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, in The Age, March 10 (A Plea from the People of Iraq):
No one wants a war in Iraq less than the Iraqi people. But we don’t have the luxury of being anti-war. For the past 35 years, the Baathist regime has been waging war against Iraqis. We know there can be no peace without the military liberation of Iraq. The brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime leaves Iraqis and the civilised world with no other option.
b) Being capable of taking that insinuation seriously can only mean that despite Jack’s years of doing a lot of good in the Australian community, and years of activism – against Saddam in 1983, as he tells us, too – Saddam’s totalitarian dictatorship is enough of an abstraction in his mind for him to imagine it to be a viable alternative for the Iraqi individual. There’s something making him keep a distance between himself and the reality of totalitarianism. Could it be his ideology?
In ‘I felt liberated when I saw the bombs falling’, I wrote:
Despite knowing tons of information, people don’t have a feel for what a totalitarian dictatorship is – what it actually feels like inside your body, how it makes your body sick (“Hussein is like a cancer eating away at me every moment of the day.”). Often it’s because of preoccupations (eg the obsession with America) – or maybe preoccupations are projections of the mind as it tries to fill the disjointed gaps: a search for meaning.
In summary, Jack has clearly allowed my basic point in ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’:
Most importantly, and I stress that this is the main point of this Webdiary note, you have failed to consider the viewpoint of the Iraqi people.
Yet he still has the gall to claim:
You’re quite wrong about (Amnesty International), by the way – concentrating on individuals is exactly what our little group does.
But evidently it’s not what he does in the case of Iraq, because he hasn’t bothered to inform himself of what Iraqis think.
I only disclosed my involvement with AI – while making it clear that my views were personal…
So while working for Amnesty in his contact group, Jack suddenly becomes enlightened on the viewpoint of the Iraqi individual? I don’t think so. Ignorance of the meaning of totalitarianism represents a fundamental conflict of interest for Amnesty International workers. Anti-American jaundice is likewise.
This was the point of ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’. One cannot seriously act for human rights in Iraq if one is ignorant of the Iraqi viewpoint. Moreover, in opposing the war, one is culpable for keeping a dictator in place. One ought to acknowledge that, just as Australians ought to acknowledge that modern Australia is partly founded on the suffering of the Aborigines.
Now, as I wrote above, you do not need to be for or against the war to inform yourself of the Iraqi viewpoint. Getting to know another person’s point of view does not mean you agree with them or that you support them. My recent pieces are neither pro-war nor antiwar.
Despite this, Jack has hallucinated some “monster” of pro-war sentiment in ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’ – without bothering to read the other three pieces I mentioned above at the start. His phantasms are purely a product of his politicised soul, the cause and symptom of his inability to see what is simply human. He writes:
You’re not the first pro-war ‘Born-Again Human Rights Believer’… pro-invasionists like you get bored by plodding, case-by-case grass-roots work … For all your pompous bluster, none of you war-hawks have a clue what your invasion aim really is … your knee-jerk lefty stereotyping… You warhawks keep wanting to use force to bring stability to the unstable world … I don’t agree with your plans for carpet-bombing Baghdad into freedom; ergo, I must be ‘against Human Rights in Iraq’. … It’s you, I think, who are the real Utopian – vague, assertive, short-sighted, unpractical, seeming to believe that an invasion will magically ‘cure everything’,… You’re blindly hoping for the best, John, and not remotely preparing for the worst. … Do you remotely care…? And my kind of plan is also far, far more likely to achieve a good HR and democracy outcome in Iraq in the long run than yours… You’re the one about to summarily take over the joint, and tell everyone who lives there what ‘free’ and ‘just’ is going to mean to them all, from now on…. What we can’t be so sure of is the ‘big picture’, the ‘sweeping solution’ that people like you – the real Utopians – love so much. … Did you bother to… before you decided to declare me a self-obsessed, Utopian, pro-Saddam ignoramus…? I’m sorry, I’m now all confused again. This is your problem, John.
Oh, is it? I think you still have some growing up to do, Jack. That is your motto, isn’t it? “Leftists must grow up or die.”
It’s extraordinary that Jack has written so many words while completely missing my point. He therefore doesn’t say anything that I need to respond to.
There are, nonetheless, some sentences I will respond to, for various reasons.
Jack writes:
It’s you, I think, who are the real Utopian – vague, assertive, short-sighted, unpractical, seeming to believe that an invasion will magically ‘cure everything’, even if it’s run by, and/or for the partial benefit of, oil ‘parasites’, to use your term.
In fact, I’m reporting the views of Iraqis both inside and outside Iraq. I have taken the time to understand their point of view. Jack’s disdain towards their existence, while making pronouncements about what’s best for their country, is disgraceful.
I think he should now explain to the Iraqis – because I know we have a small audience in northern Iraq – why their desire to be liberated from the most brutal regime on earth is “vague, assertive, short-sighted, unpractical”, despite the effort they’ve put into plans for democracy, and the enormous price the Kurds have paid in creating the freest region in the Middle East.
On a similar note, Jack mentions protesting against Saddam Hussein in 1983. I wonder to what extent Jack was against Saddam Hussein, and to what extent he was raging against Ronald Reagan, and whether obsession with the latter stunted his education about Iraq. (Although Reagan had decided that the US should entice Iraq away from the Soviet Union, it did not come across like this to Reagan haters.)
Jack writes that he lived in Dresden not all that long after the war. I wonder whether – while comprehending in full intensity Allied war crimes in Dresden – he took the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, or Babi Yar (near Kiev), to name just a few, all of which aren’t that far away from Dresden. It would have been possible, even under the communists.
In any case, let’s get back to Iraq, as these days we’re talking about Saddam’s brand of fascism.
Must I – to prove my (human rights) credentials to your satisfaction – climb heartily aboard your Iraq invasion bandwagon?
Nothing about seeing the viewpoint of the Iraqi in Iraq requires climbing onto any “invasion bandwagon”. This is why I did not mention it. Jack’s claim is just a phantasm inside his head.
But to prove his HR credentials to his own satisfaction, may I suggest he apologise to the Iraqis – thereby acknowledging their existence – for being unable to support their desire for liberation and for taking action whose success would keep Saddam in power, thereby making him partly culpable for the murder of countless Iraqis by Saddam’s henchmen in the years until the fall of his regime.
I don’t agree with your plans for carpet-bombing Baghdad into freedom.
“My” plans? Jack’s hallucinations.
But there’s a worrying slovenliness with the truth in Jack’s sentence, indicative of a wider trend. Stealing certitude they’re not entitled to is completely typical of “the people”. Here is an example of a point I mentioned in ‘Why the people’s instinct can be wrong’.
Even Paul McGeough knows that the Americans are not going to carpet bomb Baghdad. That’s why he’s staying put. See Margo Kingston’s interview with him, Behind the story.
“Carpet bombing” is propaganda. Jack has swallowed it hook line and sinker. Jack uses his army experience – and his family’s involvement in the imminent war – to claim authority on military matters, yet he’s gullible for the most blatant propaganda concerning tactics of war. This particular image of the American invasion seems to dominate his thinking on the issue. Propaganda has obliterated his better sense, and has stopped him from informing himself about the most basic aspects of American tactics.
If there’s any threat of mass destruction, it comes from Saddam Hussein and a possible “Nero” order, a la Hitler, March 1945. (I shall write about this for Webdiary soon).
Saddam Hussein – not the Americans – would be to blame. Jack’s perverse inversion of values would blame the Americans for Saddam’s murder suicide.
Paul McGeough might have got his information on how the Americans intend to minimise civilian casualties from defenselink.
Jack writes:
The first Principle of War is ‘selection and maintenance of the aim’.
Depends on who you read. According to Sun Tsu, it’s something like this:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Jack writes:
I spent a good deal of my time in uniform finding practical solutions to real-world problems – floods, bushfires, aerial search-and-rescues, the odd delicate ‘crowd situation’, h/c medical evacuations, and so on.
Good for Jack! Evidently, however, Jack ought to spend less time in the great outdoors and more time reading about what the Iraqis think before presuming to advise them on what’s best for their country.
Did you actually bother to read my alternative plan for the use of the West’s power? (Looking for John Curtin)
Actually, I did. I immediately saw that Jack’s idea is a product of naive wishful thinking. As Iraqi vice president Tarek Aziz stated late in February, Iraq would consider a UN force (or “protection” force as Jack puts it) to oversee weapons inspections as a violation of its sovereignty.
Jack’s plan amounts to an invasion of a sovereign country. You’re back to square one.
The bottom line has always been getting Saddam Hussein to cooperate. Without his cooperation, nothing but war is possible – if you’re serious about imposing United Nations “law”. This is the basic reality Jack’s plan misses.
You can’t democratise a country by imposed force, mate, any more than you can smack a child into adulthood.
This folklore “history” suits Jack’s purpose but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Afghanistan. Kosovo. Serbia. Bosnia. Germany and forced de-Nazification. Japan and forced de-imperialisation. The Marshall Plan. The Vietnamese liberation of the Khmer Republic.
Imposed force was essential in the democratisation of all of these places. Although in some of them the job is still going on, in all of them life is better now than it was.
Echoing de-Nazification in postwar Germany, one prominent Iraqi this week called for “de-Baathification” of Iraq following liberation. I’m not lying, Jack. And this fact has nothing to do with being for or against the war. It’s got everything to do with finding out what Iraqis think before presuming to tell them what’s best for them.
Nobody necessarily has to agree with the Iraqis just because he or she has the courtesy to find out what they think. That Jack has continually accused me of acting otherwise is an indication of the politicisation of his soul. If he’s too far gone then there’s no hope for him – he’ll continue to have a lot of trouble sorting out the spin from the truth.
There’s an undercurrent in Jack’s writing:
You’re supposed to inspire, demonstrate, show, lead by brilliant example.
The Iraqis are not stupid, Jack. Why are you presuming that the Iraqis are incapable of organizing a democracy for themselves? Any reasons? Do you know anything at all about northern Iraq?
Why are the Iraqis a monolithic, unknown entity in your mind?
The fact is that the Iraqi situation is not as familiar to you in your mind as, say, American oil interests. That’s a shame.
In all of your pieces, you haven’t shown any understanding of what the Iraqis are planning in their own country, or acknowledged that they have made serious plans for Iraq’s future. These plans may or may not be realized, there is always risk – but why do you deny in advance that democracy is possible in Iraq?
You’re manifesting complete ignorance of the Iraqi viewpoint – that they are willing to take that risk.
Jack writes further:
Do I whine back at you about much time I spend as Balmain AI co-convener writing letters, articles and appeals, helping run market stalls, collecting furniture, collecting money, collecting members, collecting signatures and advocating on behalf of Iraqi refugees and Iraqi HR-abuse victims…
The question is not how much good you have done in the past, nor whether you once advocated on behalf of Iraqi refugees in Australia. The question is why is the Iraqi viewpoint missing in your present writings – while an obsession with the Americans is manifested clearly.
It’s about time you faced the fact that the same refugees you helped are looking on in horror at your present actions:
On Sunday I watched the peace activists rallying for peace without mentioning my butcher, Hussein.
They marched alongside Hussein’s activists, I saw them very clearly. I watched the Greens seeking votes. I watched Labor seeking leadership. I watched the Democrats trying to save their sinking party. I did not see John Howard marching, but he too is serving his own interests.
I don’t care if this war is for oil or not. I didn’t get any advantage from oil under Hussein and if it goes to the US, who cares?
My only wish is for the sinking ship of Iraq to be saved. We tried very hard to save ourselves but we couldn’t. All the nation rebelled in 1991, but was put down brutally, right before America’s eyes. Hussein has survived more than 20 assassination attempts.
“I looked to the Iraqi opposition groups to unite so they could form a government after an invasion. There is not much hope of that either.
“I don’t care who rules my country after an invasion as long as there are less jails, less killing. (Account of “Adnan Hussan”, Feb 20, The Australian)
Jack writes:
But I simply have to protest that it’s asking a bit much to expect me to cop it sweet when someone like you tries to blame us anti-invasionists for Saddam.
This is populist obfuscation. A cop-out, anti-intellectual laziness. I never made the argument that you claim here. Shame on you. If you succeed in your cause, then you will be helping keep the status quo in Iraq. This may not be your intention, but it is the effect. Doesn’t it bother you that your actions would lead to this if they’re successful?
Now, you’re intelligent enough to know the difference between “culpability” and “blame”. Why are you playing the fool?
If you’re not playing the fool, and you truly don’t care much for the distinction between “culpability” and “blame”, then next time Australian right-wing conservatives bemoan the “black armband view of history”, and refuse to say “sorry” because “it’s asking a bit much to expect me to cop it sweet when someone like you tries to blame us” for the stolen children and the cultural genocide of the 1930s, then I expect you not only to respect their right to express their monstrous inhumanity, but also to support their washing their hands, because that’s what you have done in every piece of yours on Iraq.
Yeah, you’re not the first pro-war ‘Born-Again Human Rights Believer’ who’s berated me over my refusal to support the act of bombing Baghdad into HR submission, John. Nor, no doubt, will you be the last. ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’. Jesus.
Nothing about seeing the viewpoint of the Iraqi in Iraq necessitates being for the war; but if you’re against the war, and you’re not a scum of a human being, you owe the Iraqis an apology for your choice that this time you cannot support their liberation.
Moreover, your term of abuse betrays your ideology.
Read that again. “In Iraq”. Not “In Australia”. As the Amnesty website says, human rights are indivisible, universal. But it is impossible to claim to be upholding human rights in a country of which you have none of the essential knowledge.
You’re blindly hoping for the best, John, and not remotely preparing for the worst.
On the contrary, in ‘Why the people’s instinct can be wrong’, I wrote:
…these last two years have been an extraordinarily difficult time to be an Australian. Twice already, the 21st century has exposed deep flaws in the Australian character. Of course, Australia is not uniquely afflicted with these problems; but historical, geographical, demographic and other factors conspire to make them particularly pronounced here.
In this period, two devastating bushfires have swept across the Australian societal landscape, each in turn reinforcing the great Australian inability to imagine in any depth the lot of a stranger, each dividing the world into us and outsiders, whereby what in each case is accepted as “us and ours” is elevated to a special status through heightened familiarity, to the exclusion of the other.
The outsiders are thought of in myth-like ways, images of them are somewhat unreal, because the image of “the other” is a projection of what is necessary for “us” to uphold “our” image of “ourselves”: It has no basis in reality, and its effect is ultimately to falsify and oppress human beings.
The first Australian catastrophe was the assertion of State power – feeding and fed by nationalist paranoia – over human decency; the second, as we have now seen, is the assertion of a pose of international solidarity, in a movement of vilification of a figurehead – feeding and fed by self-seeking neurosis ostensibly in the name of justice.
Both are ultimately inward-looking. Both, as George Orwell wrote, are forms of nationalist isolationism, despite the latter’s internationalist pose.
… Like Tampa and SIEV-X, the antiwar marches expose gaps in Australians’ ability to function as moral people, which means as people who can imagine the lot of another and do the right thing of their own free will. There’s room for improvement. Australia’s only hope for the future is if enough people find the will to improve. Otherwise Tampas and concentration camps for asylum seekers will keep recurring.
Preparing for the worst means that in this strange, sick country of ours, seeming so free yet giving only lip service to loving liberty, the overwhelming impression one gets will continue to be the same as that of the Iraqis who watched the antiwar protesters and despaired – those who call Australia “home” and now wonder what sort of society can so passionately ignore the victims of totalitarianism.
Just as Jack Robertson has done once again in his letter to me.
The overwhelming impression one gets of Australia, particularly following the two recent disasters, is a country where reality is obliterated from the mind and replaced with inhuman phantasms generated by the virus of ideology.
Prepare to feel a foreigner in your own country. That is preparing for the worst, for the day when you fall within the sphere of influence of an ideologue, a person in whom distance between human beings is permanently and irredeemably embedded.
I fear that in Australia it’s already the case that this kind of ideologue constitutes the vast majority, and that only a small number of foreigners in their own country are wandering shattered and shell-shocked through the wreckage.
I’ll end by citing a portion of ‘Why the people’s instinct can be wrong’:
It must be emphasised that apart from the neo-nazis, none of the protesters would have wanted Saddam Hussein to win. They do, after all, have a feeling for peace that they were promoting, even if it was expressed as vilification of Bush. Moreover, consideration of the potential victims of the imminent war was certainly a part of their protest, even if their conception ignored the view of the Iraqi seeking liberation.
But it is easy to be appalled at violence, especially when it hasn’t happened yet and everybody fears the worst, … It is much harder for “the people” to come to terms with the dilemma faced by Iraqis who dream of freedom.
Furthermore, the protesters would have been appalled if it were explained to them that their action was subsequently used by the dictator and his henchmen to prop up the totalitarian regime oppressing the Iraqi people – by buying time and waiting for public support in the USA and Britain to collapse, a tactic Saddam announced in an Egyptian newspaper interview back in November. Saddam’s plan has been falling into place ever since.
Saddam’s tactic seems to be working, with extreme pressure recently having been placed by their electorates on the prime ministers of Britain and Spain, Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar, following the French and German-led revival of the worldwide antiwar movement.
Nevertheless, protesters that wash their hands of responsibility for handing Saddam the initiative would be acting dishonestly. They would be denying their culpability (ie unintentional causation) in the same way that many Australians, having supported the unscrupulous opportunists on the Tampa and SIEV-X issues, deny responsibility for the self-mutilation of asylum seekers in Australian concentration camps. These denialists think every man is an island. We’re far away from Iraq, why should our actions have any influence there? (Similarly: we’re far from Iraq, why should it be Australia’s problem?) But the distance we imagine between us and Iraq is mirrored in the distance between fellow Australians.
Perhaps Australia’s landscape is a strong influence, embedding distance between human beings. Or perhaps it’s our relatively comfortable existence influences our worldview. The protesters – or, at least, “the people”, because their view is what I have on paper before me – are without doubt morally blameworthy.
The reason lies not in the fact that Saddam Hussein was able to use their protest towards his own goals, but in their wilful promotion of – and wilful neglect in permitting – the long gradual process of forgetting – the “Chinese whispers process” – of the point of view of the Iraqi who thirsts for liberty. “The people” have driven this Iraqi from their mind, so their naive and dreadfully misconceived protest became thinkable. In the end, if Hans Blix does his job well, then it probably won’t matter to Saddam Hussein. But it will always matter to the Iraqis who watched the protesters and despaired – those who call Australia “home”, and now wonder what sort of society can so passionately ignore the victims of totalitarianism who long for freedom.
“The people” have rendered themselves incapable of acting (eg holding a demonstration) in full knowledge of that other human being’s viewpoint.
Worse, that human being’s viewpoint – who is supposed to be our kindred spirit, is he not? – is obliterated in the minds of “the people”; for example, by promoting myths such as he or she hates the Americans so much that he or she will fight for Saddam Hussein and not against him. “The people” naturally believe that Iraqis will willingly fight to save Saddam’s totalitarianism – if they had it in their mind that Iraqis want to fight with the Americans against Saddam, then they would be confronted with the unsavoury truth that their antiwar protest is denying individual liberty.
They would be confronted with the logical consequence of their negative choice: they are the ones responsible for keeping Saddam in power, for the murder of countless Iraqis by his henchmen in the years until the fall of his regime. Whether you agree with the war or not, this is the consequence of the success of the protests’ aims. From being obliterated in the minds of “the people”, the viewpoint of the Iraqi desiring liberty is obliterated in reality.
The antiwar movement in its current form is perpetrating a moral disaster for the world and for Australia. The symptom is that “the people” have not come to terms with the fact that Iraqis can desire liberation; that Iraqis face a horrific dilemma; and that Iraqis can choose war, on the side of the Americans, in full knowledge of the consequences.
The committed leftist and the committed pacifist reel away from the human desires expressed by Iraqis desiring liberty, because here is an implicit blessing for war. But this is what the Iraqi wants – because he knows that alone, the opposition groups are no match for the totalitarian regime.
The diagnosis is that the Iraqi reality is obliterated from the protester’s mind and replaced with phantasms generated by the virus of inhuman ideology.
The prognosis is not good for a just society in Australia, or anywhere.
To save themselves from this plague – and give Australia some hope for her own future – the antiwar protesters ought to apologise to Iraqis and offer their condolences that this time they cannot support liberty in Iraq; that they have chosen to block action that would free Iraqis. Then they should be ashamed of themselves.