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George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of America's peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the 'lesser evil.' This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, 'lesser evil' is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of today's Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clinton's bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albright's veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism--the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it--is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than 'cowboy' language.
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al-shifa-pharmaceutical-factory
anti-war
ba-ath-party
bill-clinton
democratic-party-united-states
evil
george-w-bush
iraq
iraq-war
leftism
liberalism
madeleine-albright
moral-absolutism
moral-relativism
morality
opposition-to-the-iraq-war
peace-movement
presidency-of-bill-clinton
presidency-of-george-w-bush
rwanda
rwandan-genocide
saddam-hussein
sudan
united-nations
united-states
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Christopher Hitchens |
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So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being 'nationalized,' had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad. (Post-Kuwait inspections by the United Nations had uncovered a huge nuclear-reactor site that had not even been known about by the international community.) I had seen with my own eyes the evidence of a serious breach of the Genocide Convention on Iraqi soil, and I had also seen with my own eyes the evidence that it had been carried out in part with the use of weapons of mass destruction. I was, if you like, the prisoner of this knowledge. I certainly did not have the option of un-knowing it.
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ba-ath-party
ba-athist-iraq
bill-clinton
crime-family
fascism
genocide
genocide-convention
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iraq
iraq-war
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militarism
national-socialism
nationalisation
nuclear-reactor-technology
oil
privatisation
psychopaths
serial-killers
stalinism
united-nations
wmd
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Christopher Hitchens |
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You might think that the Left could have a regime-change perspective of its own, based on solidarity with its comrades abroad. After all, Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party consolidated its power by first destroying the Iraqi communist and labor movements, and then turning on the Kurds (whose cause, historically, has been one of the main priorities of the Left in the Middle East). When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not. I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for 'regime change' when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. Not only does the 'peace' movement ignore the anti-Saddam civilian opposition, it sends missions to console the Ba'athists in their isolation, and speaks of the invader of Kuwait and Iran and the butcher of Kurdistan as if he were the victim and George W. Bush the aggressor.
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anti-war
ba-ath-party
baghdad
communism
democratic-party-united-states
george-w-bush
invasion-of-kuwait
iran-iraq-war
iraq
iraq-war
iraqi-communist-party
iraqi-kurdistan
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kuwait
labour-movement
leftism
middle-east
opposition-to-the-iraq-war
peace-movement
republican-party-united-states
saddam-hussein
socialism
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Christopher Hitchens |