OK, so logic now seems to be going out the window. A brief state-of-play:
A) An American-led coalition will invade Iraq, with or without UN sanction, and mostly, supporters claim, to neutralise Saddam’s WMD threat. If necessary the US-coalition will use its own Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) while doing so. If Saddam’s generals use WMD against US troops, America will try them as war criminals, presumably in American domestic courts. UN forums are apparently irrelevant; the US doesn’t recognise the new-born International Criminal Court, and it’s unlikely The Hague War Crimes Tribunal will make its courts available, either, since…
B) …France and Germany are no longer crucial in the European scheme of things, according to Donald Rumsfeld. NATO has yet to state its position on an invasion. Today’s Australian editorial argues that Germany should support an invasion because they know all about the dangers of ‘aggression’, while France, on the other hand, should support it because they know all about the dangers of ‘appeasement’.
C) According to a grab on SBS News on Thursday night, George W. Bush now wants to call the ‘world’ to account, not just Iraq. A silly, if ugly, slip of the tongue? You’d hope so.
D) Australia’s deployment to the Iraq AO does not mean we are deploying for participation in an invasion. According to today’s Australian editorial, anti-invasion public opinion polls are ‘soft’; on this occasion, the ‘Ordinary Australian’ doesn’t know what he thinks yet. Once Australian soldiers start fighting, he will. Patriotic blackmail; war-by-retrospective-democratic-mandate.
e) Notwithstanding Rumsfeld’s breezy dismissal of one permanent member and the incoming Chair, if the UN Security Council now fails to endorse what America wants it to endorse, then it will be the end of the UN as a credible world body. Moot, because whatever happens now, it’s probably already stuffed. Fail to endorse US-led action, and the White House won’t care much. Endorse it and every other sovereign country opposed to such an undisguised railroading of the world’s governing body will be deeply estranged from it.
America is now unlikely to back down on an invasion. If that is so, whatever happens in Iraq and beyond, a temporarily-powerful group of hawkish Americans will have engineered, for the country that did more for post-WW2 unity and reconstruction than any other, an unambiguous ascendancy over the UN at last, at the cost of a deep split in the West.
To Americans reading this who think I’m engaging in yet more ‘knee-jerk Yank-bashing’, I’d say this: It’s very hard to imagine a single more anti-American misuse of what is now globally-unmatchable American power than what is transpiring – the final castration of whatever balls the UN might have had.
I think that future leaders and the people of the United States will be grappling with this legacy for a long time. There are more than six billion people in the world. There are under 300,000, 000 Americans. Australia and no doubt much of the West will still support their nation on Iraq. More accurately, we’ll support their soldiers (and ours, and the Brits), probably no matter what rotten mess our leaders end up landing them in.
But the American Administration could at least do us all the courtesy of maintaining a modicum of global perspective. Rumsfeld’s vaudeville act is getting tiresome. Sneering at France and Germany as irrelevant in Europe? How many GIs died at Normandy again, Don? How much dough did America sink into the Marshall Plan? Remember the Cold War, mate?
I don’t know what exactly all this is, but I know for sure that it’s not the ‘American Way’, at least not the one that has proved so globally successful in the past.
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The Weapons of Mass Destruction Argument
Harry Heidelberg’s intervention in the ‘Human Rights-invasion’ argument (Yes, it really is about getting the weapons) aimed to point out its secondary status to the WMD arguments, and also to respond to my ‘operational’ questions in Time for a question change on Iraq. On the first matter, I’d invoke Scott Burchill’s myth-busting piece Counterspin: Pro-war mythology, because Harry’s reasoning makes many of the simplistic assertions about the nexus between Osama and Saddam that Scott’s piece has already deconstructed; and also Hamish Tweedy’s response to it in Always willing, we’re off to war again, because it challenges and amplifies Scott’s reasoning to good effect.
My position on WMD is that the pro-invasion lobby still has its work cut out to explain why a Saddam threatened by imminent oblivion will be less, not more, inclined to unleash chemical and biological weapons, and/or ‘hand them off’ to any opportunistic takers, under chaotic cover of the fog of invasion, in a final act of defiance. There are three core possibilities with the WMD line of argument:
A) We know accurately enough what Saddam’s got and where he’s hiding it, and it’s extremely scary and a genuine immediate threat. If this is so, presumably we will seek to neutralise at least Saddam’s delivery capacity as a pre-invasion or very early tactical priority – perhaps using special force and/or aerial attacks. If this is the case, why not just do this in isolation – as did Israel against Iraqi nuclear facilities in the eighties – and better avoid the potential by-product of a pan-Islamic, ‘anti-West’ polarisation that might arise from a full-scale invasion?
B) We’re sure he’s got some dangerous capacity but don’t know what or where, and we’re hoping that some time down the track, our invading ground forces will squirrel the WMD out in their own good time. If this is the case, the invasion-as-WMD-threat-reduction becomes tenuous in the extreme, because the longer that time delay, the greater the motive and opportunity exists for Saddam’s last-gasp use/dissemination of them. Since the inspectors haven’t yet found much of what is ‘missing’, I’d very much like Harry or anyone else to explain exactly how the ‘regime change invasion = safe disarmament’ equation actually stands up to practical scrutiny.
C) The WMD threat has been knowingly hyped beyond its true credibility. If this is the case, Bush’s White House is playing very dangerous games with global security, and it should get back to hunting terrorists.
Harry also claims that North Korea is a different case, more akin to a Cold War MAD stand-off. Why? The claim is that Saddam does have (chemical and biological) WMD. However you look at it, the logic is not quite right here; if a doomed Saddam regime is capable of delivering VX (say) into a tactical sphere occupied by invading US-led forces, it very probably will, regardless of Bush’s ‘war crimes’ threat. In such a case, invading forces may be able to minimise their casualties, but the Iraqi population they’re supposedly there to liberate will not. Harry says we shouldn’t consider invading North Korea because of the MAD principle, but that we should invade Iraq despite it. Logic failure.
As with too many of their arguments to date, the pro-invasion lobby starts with the requisite aim of invading Iraq, and then works backwards, trying to fit the WMD arguments to that aim. To me, it seems palpably clear that, for a range of reasons, strategic ‘visionaries’ in the US Administration have judged that now is the time to establish a major, permanent and essentially autonomous presence in the Middle East. WMD, terrorism, Human Rights, oil, a ‘new century’ of Enlightenment Democracy forcibly ushered into the Middle East – the net merit of these and other arguments for this profound global shift is largely moot as it seems pretty clear that the current White House is determined to own Iraq come what may. There’s little Australia can do to sway her from that strategic aim or even demand that she properly articulate its merits if she doesn’t feel any need to. But for our country, even higher strategic interests like ANZUS and/or Australia’s aspirations to a future Free Trade Agreement with the US are an insufficient basis for our unquestioning support. At the very least, I think the US should be more honest with her allies about her true strategic aims. It’s post-S11; we’re all supposed to be grown-ups re Realpolitik.
The Devil in the Details
In addressing my operational questions, Harry generally displays exactly the lack of precision I was attacking. I asked eight practical questions about the invasion; he notes: “Jack asks a heap of questions that no one can easily answer. That’s the nature of it. I don’t know anything more than anyone else knows. I’m just a schmuck with a column in Web Diary.” Sorry, simply not good enough, Harry. You’re using that ‘schmuckish’ column to argue that our soldiers should invade Iraq; every Australian soldier, sailor and airman, and their families, has a right to more from you than ‘I don’t know anything more than anyone else knows’ on the nitty-gritty details. Try a little harder; alternatively, simply stop arguing for an invasion. This is not a time for pick-and-choose intellectual dilettantes, cyberspace or not.
To respond in depth to just one of Harry’s responses to my questions (to me the most important): I asked what the Rules of Engagement (ROE) would be, given that much of the Iraqi civilian population, including women and children, has now been armed and primed for defensive jihad. Harry answered: “I assume we will only find out the ROE afterwards. I am not sure what is meant either by a “formal distinction”. An armed individual who appears threatening to allied forces will be approached as such. I don’t know how else it could work, no matter how painful this reality may seem. Even civilian police forces act this way. Unpalatable but true.”
Not remotely good enough, Harry. I want to know before the first Australian soldier fires a single pre-emptive shot precisely what his ROE are, if for no other reason than to confirm that there are crystal-clear ROE. Rules of Engagement are not simply issued to give soldiers a rock-hard touchstone in combat situations; they play a critical part in stripping ambiguity, at all command levels, from the entire aim of the mission. Harry’s extra comments here about any ‘armed individual who appears threatening to allied forces’, and the glib comparison with policing, thoroughly miss the crucial point, which is that invading forces will not be assuming a tactically-defensive or even neutral role in response to an existing crisis, but pre-emptively initiating a series of aggressive assaults, with the higher aim of over-throwing a sovereign government and gaining control of an entire country by force. In the absence of a rigidly-limiting tactical ROE, that overall mission risks giving, by default, our soldiers carte blanche to regard every Iraqi with a pointy stick and a nasty leer as an ‘armed individual who appears threatening to allied forces’, if they ‘choose’ in the heat of the combat moment.
The urgent broader point here is that unlike any military operation either the US or Australia has conducted post-WW2, and regardless of the invasion lobby’s claims, in military terms this will be an unprovoked invasion. What that means is that the outcome of any subsequent military engagement will be solely the responsibility of the invading force. This is not Bosnia, it’s not East Timor, it’s not Afghanistan, and it’s not even the Falklands or Vietnam, for that matter; all these interventions were preceded by enemy aggression in one form or another (in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s harbouring of the S11 attack grand architects).
This placed our soldiers firmly on the overall moral high ground, at least in the first instance, even in those cases (like Vietnam, or Somalia, or the Iran hostage-rescue mission) where the tactical outcomes were ultimately disastrous. This not-so-subtle distinction underscores the true military impact of the US strategic shift to ‘pre-emption’ (a term Burchill rightly identified as a misnomer), which is this: any action undertaken under its auspices that fails will automatically cast America (and her allies, and their soldiers) in the role of wrong-doer, since the moral justification for pre-emptive action can only come retrospectively, that is, via a successful outcome. In this sense, far from being a secondary issue, improved Human Rights in post-Saddam Iraq are the only measurable indicator of ‘success’. Right now, Saddam isn’t using WMD on the world. He hasn’t yet been shown to have supplied terrorists with them. The only manifest invasion achievement a US-Coalition will be able to present to the world will be better Human Rights there. The other justifications for it will, in the very best case, remain forever genuinely hypothetical.
What if, in achieving that best case outcome on those hypothetical justifications (terrorist/WMD nexus threat elimination), as an unfortunate by-product we cause great human misery in readily measurable terms – let’s say 30,000 Iraqis and 2,000 Coalition soldiers killed, 200,000 people made internal refugees, and 70 % of those who innocent Iraqis know damned well were responsible for gross HR-abuse getting off scot-free in the name of post-Saddam reconciliation. Against this, how can we ever possibly judge whether or not the invasion was truly justified? More pertinently, how can we ever convince the Iraqi population, and neighbouring Arab States, of that? (If, by the way, WMD are also used during the invasion, and by either side, we’ll make a sick mockery of our WMD hypothetical justification anyway).
We must keep in mind not merely that we can’t get half-way into this invasion and then simply say, Whoops, sorry’, if it starts to go wrong, but also that we haven’t remotely thought through what ‘half-way through’ the invasion even means. If Iran becomes involved in even an indirect way, perhaps we’ll eventually have to invade it too? Or if Kurdish terrorist/freedom groups like the PKK aren’t granted their independent State post-Saddam, maybe we’ll end up fighting them? And so on.
Hard-headed answers to this type of strategic/political question are critical, especially in the context of scant public support for invasion already. We shouldn’t be under any liberation delusions here, either: The majority of the populations in Iraq and just about every country bordering her, even some of those from which this invasion will be based, mistrusts and even hates America with a growing religious passion. ‘Friendly’ Turkey and Saudi Arabia are good cases in point. We must examine closely just how fat is the shit sandwich into which we’re about to bite. Correction: Harry and the pro-invasion lobby must do so. As yet, most seem to be content to ‘suck it and see’.
Still, for all the potential future complexities, Harry might still think the risk of ending up on the wrong side of history is one worth taking in view of the potential gains to be made. Again, it’s not good enough just to leave it there and hope for the best; in reality, it’s a risk that US-coalition soldiers, not the non-military pro-invasion lobby, will actually end up taking. Soldiers don’t set ROE; politicians do, or should. Consider this scenario:
Let’s say ten invading LAV-25s roll into an Iraqi town. A twenty-year old Iraqi hothead takes exception to his aged parents being frightened by all these foreign soldiers, and waves his AK-47 around a bit. Who exactly is threatening whom here? What would the young GI in the LAV-25 turret be doing himself if this was occurring in Baton Rouge, with roles reversed? How will that same GI see things five minutes later, if and/or when he is surveying thirty dead men, women and children from his LAV-25, because the ‘stupid’ Iraqi squeezed off a frantic round or two, and the US commander, rightly not wanting to endanger his own troops unnecessarily, had everyone open up, and the situation descended into a one-sided blood-bath? Is this self-defence? Is this a war crime? Is it just bad luck? And is it the Iraqi kid’s own stupid fault, really? What would you do, Harry? Surrender obediently to an invading soldier who has vowed to overthrow your government, however much you might (or might not) hate it yourself? It’s not as if the kid’s got anywhere else to go.
Regardless of the legal niceties, the GI will have to live with his actions forever, and uppermost in his mind will be the knowledge that his actions occurred in the context of a US invasion that even a great big wedge of his own countrymen simply didn’t support, not a ‘peace-keeping mission’, or a ‘defensive insertion’, or a ‘humanitarian aid project’.
Whatever transpires, the pro-invasion theorisers can and will chatter forever about the ‘what ifs’ of the WMD and ‘Axis of Evil’ arguments, but the GI himself may not be able to buy them forever, especially if the ‘quick, clean’ Iraq campaign turns into something larger and messier. Mostly, he’ll remember a village he drove up to in his APC, a stupid hothead who thought he was protecting his grandparents and didn’t wish to be ‘liberated’ by Americans, and the awful moment when it all got out of hand and he had to pull the 25 mil. trigger. These sorts of messy exchanges happen in every war, even during the liberation of Europe. BUT the GI there – and everywhere else since (to date) – was at least reasonably confident that he was on the right side of history. War is always hell, but any war that turns out to have been an unjust one can become a kind of personal moral damnation for every soldier who took part. The invasion of Iraq is not yet within cooee of being sufficiently argued, by our leaders, as being ‘just’. It won’t simply ‘become more just’ of its own accord as we go along, either. The process usually travels the other way as ugly reality bites.
The tactical situation I outline above, if not the outcome, is exactly what our soldiers are now contemplating, and Harry’s casual lack of interest in a critical matter like ROE is not good enough. Forgive me for being unkind, but I can’t help feeling that his not really wanting to discuss such ‘details’ beforehand is at least partly an unconscious way of leaving himself a convenient moral escape route for later, if such outcomes as that outlined above turn out to be more prevalent than the pro-invasion lobby is apparently expecting.
Maybe this is harsh and unfair, but when Harry says blithely, of the brutalities of military engagement, ‘unpalatable, but true’, I picture a young Australian soldier gunning down suicidal Iraqi ten-year-olds, impossibly caught in a militarily-disastrous, deeply-unpopular, extra-UN invasion that has long turned into a war against an entire hostile region, half a globe away from home.
The soldiers of the Israeli Defence Force, after fifty-odd years of corporate experience of walking the excruciating split-second decision line between aggression and restraint, and in exactly the kind of tactical circumstances we will face in Iraq, still get it wrong far more often than they would like. Why we Western novices think Iraq will be a relative walk in the park in terms of differentiating between dangerous military combatants and scared civilian non-combatants is beyond me.
So my questions are anything but ‘hypothetical’, Harry, and if you consider them ‘unanswerable’, then you have no business arguing for invasion. They are not advanced from of position of ‘knee-jerk anti-Americanism’, or ‘terror appeasement’, or ‘unworldly naivety’ (I wish), or bleeding-heart lefty soppiness. They are hard-headed queries about what it is we are about to ask our soldiers to do, and no-one has yet answered them satisfactorily.
The reason I, and others, are urgently posing them now is to try to force the pro-invasion lobbyists – you – to become un-hypothetical and highly answerable (in painstaking detail), rather than simply allowing the debate to jump straight from hypothetical to fait accompli, which this week’s deployment demonstrates is exactly the way we seem determined to head off to the first aggressive war in Australia’s history.
We are being taken for a ride thus far, and I will kick and scratch and scream all the way if I have to. Every Australian from the Prime Minister up owes our soldiers no less.
Yet I doubt now that we’ll see their bravery, professionalism and commitment treated with any such real respect by our leaders. By far the sickest part of all this is that the leading forces in the pro-invasion lobby – caricatures of ‘The Thoughtful Public Commentator’ like Greg Sheridan – are simply ignoring such questions of devilish detail, content in the knowledge that the second the first shot is fired, and no matter what happens next, even the most extreme anti-war activists – and I’m by no means one – in Australia will feel bound to back our soldiers personally to the hilt, anyway.
The grotesque patriotic blackmail that has been going on since September 11 – the repeated accusations of ‘appeasement’, the relentless ‘straw man’ tactics, the lying and misrepresentation from those many opportunists who now seem to regard S11 as the green light on a giggly neo-conservative race to see who can kick their Lefty bete noirs in the teeth most times per column – now threatens to split this country for years to come.
I still oppose Australian participation in a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq on many grounds, but most of all because our leaders refuse to sink their teeth properly into the real, practical problems that such an invasion will rush upon us. No-one has explained adequately yet why, if an invasion of Iraq wasn’t necessary in the early morning of September 11, 2001, it suddenly is now. Simply saying the ‘world has changed’, over and over again, is not good enough. This is especially true here in Australia, since, from long before S11 but now more than ever, our part of the world has had more than enough of its own human misery, terrorism, HR-abuse and instability for our soldiers to going on with – West Papua, East Timor, the Solomons, Indonesia, North Korea, and elsewhere.
Above all else, I’m bewildered at why the West seems so intent on playing into Osama bin Laden’s nasty hands, so naively, so soon, so completely. America appears to have fallen for his almighty ‘jihad con’ without question. As if Al-Qaeda – a gaggle of half-arsed bloody criminals – could ever have strategically ‘threatened’ Western Liberal Democracy on their own.
In truth what bin Laden really set out to do on S11 was polarise the world, and he’s rapidly pulling it off. A US-led invasion into the heart of the Middle East now will, far more likely than intimidating bin Laden’s remaining handful of globally-scattered supporters, have them cheering in satisfied glee, and saying, of what history might eventually come to assess as the mere opening skirmishes of the WTC and Pentagon attacks: “Mission accomplished, Osama. Now, let the real jihad begin at last.”
We need to be intellectually and morally as tough as nails. We need to hold our nerve and use our brains if we are to truly to hold the secular, liberal, democratic, post-Enlightenment Western defensive line. Mostly, we need to think through what could well be this next ‘one-way’ step far more thoroughly, lest we fall into a Clash of Civilisations by default.
Unfortunately, these days I get the distinct feeling that exactly that – all-out confrontation between ‘The West’ and ‘Islam’ – is exactly what too many people now crave. I hope I’m simply jumping at shadows again. No doubt we will soon find out.
Since Harry asked, I’ll outline my alternative to an Iraq invasion, from where we stand right now, next week. Not that there seems to be much point anymore.