America's real role in Iraq

Parapundit has a devastating post on the inability of the United States to recognize the role it is now playing in Iraq.

Our soldiers are tasked with pretending there is a non-sectarian middle in Iraq that has control of the Iraqi central government. The idea is that if we just provide enough support and training to those officially part of the central government then the central government will become the more powerful middle against the sects and factions all around it. But there's no non-partisan center in Iraq. There's no objective and impartial civil service staffing the ministries. We are dealing with tribes motivated by clan loyalty which is sustained by the practice of cousin marriage.

Rather, as Mark Santora has written in the New York Times, "the Sunnis see the Iraqi military as agents of Shia ethnic cleansers and high level Iraqi government officials as obstructors of military operations that might hurt the standing of their factions." America is in a kind of semi-conscious alliance with the Shias—though this does not stop the Shias from killing American soldiers.

George W. Bush's coming big surge of US troops into Iraq will just train more Shias to fight Sunnis. The Shias will receive their training as soldiers in the Iraqi government. They will then proceed to use their skills and equipment to cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis. Some will do this while acting as Iraqi soldiers. Others will leave the Iraqi army and attack Sunnis in cooperation with the Shias who dominate the Iraqi security services. We call this "nation building".

If we were honest about the net effect of our actions we could at least help the Sunnis move away from the Shias so that fewer Sunnis would die in the process. But America's ruling elite and talking heads aren't up for that level of brutal honesty.

British officials saw no Iraqi threat

This item from the Independent does not seem to have attracted much attention in conservative regions of the blogosphere. (For the Telegraph's version, see here.) It was revealed a few days ago that Carne Ross, former top British diplomat at the UN, gave secret testimony to a Commons committee in 2004 that the consensus in the British government, prior to the invasion of Iraq, was that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein had already been contained. "During my posting, at no time did [the Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests", Ross said. Before the war there was no intelligence evidence that Iraq held significant quantities of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, and no intelligence or assessment that Saddam was planning to attack anyone. This contradicts claims made by Tony Blair. Moreover, British diplomats repeatedly warned their American counterparts of the likelihood of Iraq collapsing into chaos following a régime change—and the Americans agreed(!) with this view. Ross also believed that there was insufficient attention given by the UK to stricter enforcement of the existing sanctions against Iraq, an approach which might have provided an alternative to war. Ross says that he resigned his position because of his misgivings about the legality of the invasion.

I came across the above via the usually high-quality libertarian blog Samizdata, whose attitude to the report was, however, dismaying. In effect, Samizdata responded with a "who cares?" to the Independent's assessment that Tony Blair had dragged Britain into a war by lying to his public. Samizdata does not appear to grasp that democracies cannot be sustained when clear and essential factual statements by their leaders cannot be trusted by their own peoples. What happens the next time a British Prime Minister, or American President, appeals to his citizens to back him in a struggle to defend the national interest? Why should anyone believe him when he points to vague intelligence which cannot, for reasons of national security, be fully divulged? But there are no other good sources of information available to ordinary citizens. Such moral failure on the part of leaders can be accepted with equanimity only by those who are under the delusion that we are immune from history, that never again will there be occasions when we genuinely must take up arms on behalf of our nations if they are to survive.

See also: U.S. wargames predicted Iraq mess

Candid opportunism from the BNP

The Wikipedia article on the British National Party attributes the following tidbit to party leader Nick Griffin, in a speech from March of this year. (I haven't verified the quotation against the video record of the speech, which is available through a link at Wikipedia, but the article appears to be a more or less even-handed one.)

We bang on about Islam. Why? Because to the ordinary public out there it's the thing they can understand. It's the thing the newspaper editors sell newspapers with. If we were to attack some other ethnic group—some people say we should attack the Jews ... But ... we've got to get to power. And if that was an issue we chose to bang on about when the press don't talk about it ... the public would just think we were barking mad. They'd just think oh, you're attacking Jews just because you want to attack Jews. You're attacking this group of powerful Zionists just because you want to take poor Manny Cohen the tailor and shove him in a gas chamber. That's what the public would think. It wouldn't get us anywhere other than stepping backwards. It would lock us in a little box; the public would think "extremist crank lunatics, nothing to do with me." And we wouldn't get power.

Isn't Griffin openly admitting here that the BNP's policies towards both Muslims and Jews are dictated simply by political expediency, and that he would be quite prepared to switch to a pro-Islamic and/or anti-Semitic line if this appeared more likely to win votes? (Much as fellow far-rightist Jean Marie Le Pen appears to have done, across the Channel.) What is the source of this imperative of achieving political power, running deeper than mere expedients such as the reviling of particular ethnic groups?

Such opportunism is probably par for the course in politics. But it seems a great deal more dangerous where the party in question is one which openly embraces radical policies—when it is outside the Establishment, which, if it no longer seriously holds any principles, remains predictable by reason of inertia.

See also:
      EU Referendum: BNP is the new mainstream
      Comments on the BNP constitution

Response to "The Proper Response"

Here's a comment I posted in reply to this article by Rebecca Bynum at The New English Review, which asks, "How do we do as Jesus commanded and love our enemies while at the same time preventing our culture and civilization from being destroyed" by those enemies?

There is a rather important difference, it seems to me, between individual non-resistance to evil and collective non-resistance. When a family member is being attacked, do you refuse to fight her attacker on the grounds that she ought to be behaving like a good little Christian and submitting? No, this is her decision, not yours; to turn it into your decision is a moral monstrosity (if it isn't merely cowardice masquerading as high-mindedness). The situation is quite different from when you are personally being attacked, in which case the decision whether to resist is yours. [Similarly,] as members of a political community we have no right to require our fellow-members to submit to aggression. More generally, I will go out on a limb and suggest that the decisions of the community should be based on justice, not charity. Charity is for individuals.

Christianity does not make this very explicit, probably because nobody until recently ever thought that political communities would be crazy enough to attempt to run their affairs on the basis of nonresistance to evil. My impression is that traditionally, both Catholic and Protestant Christianity arrived at ways of keeping nonresistance out of the public sphere; and that the recent tendency to apply it to political questions represents a dangerous innovation. Perhaps it also represents a return to pure, primitive Christianity. But then it has never been demonstrated that such Christianity is a viable basis for a civilization. For one thing, it was based on the idea that the world was about to end.

The ruthlessness of France

Here (via American Thinker) is a Times of London review of a book about French complicity in Rwanda, Silent Accomplice. Author Andrew Wallis accuses the French government of being so obsessed with its diplomatic rivalry with Britain and other English-speaking countries—despite the one-sided character of this rivalry, whose Anglophone side is no longer really in the game—that it preferred to assist a Francophone government in Rwanda to commit genocide rather than permit the faction of the Anglophone Paul Kagame to take power. "[I]t seems there are many eyewitnesses of French troops assisting at torture sessions and catching Tutsis and handing them over to Hutus who hacked them to death before their eyes", while François Mitterrand memorably remarked of the mass killings, "Dans ces pays-là, un genocide ... n'est pas trop important." Several genocidaires, the review says, still live happily in France, whose élite have yet to admit to any wrongdoing in Rwanda.

This kind of behaviour prompts one to think about what would happen should the French élite come to regard the Muslim presence in their country as a threat, not merely to their prestige in a mostly symbolic "Great Game", but to their domestic power and privileges. Theodore Dalrymple some time ago made a remark along the lines that he expected the French ruling class to massacre their Muslim population rather than give up power. The present book review suggests that the French can be brutal and ruthless enough to do just that.

Separated at birth?

Episcopal Church USA head and octopus scientist Dr. Katherine Schori		Colonel Gaddafi

The legitimacy of nationalism

Lukacs' position on nationalism (see the Nov. 18 post) strikes me as somehow awry, though perhaps this is because his exposition is difficult to understand.

"The [nationalistic] love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the [patriotic] love for one's country . . . akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural'." Lukacs here seems, somewhat in the spirit of Simone Weil, to be deprecating nationalism as a collective egotism—which it undoubtedly is. Yet self-love, in some form, is healthy, and those who are inadequately endowed with it are pitiable. Christianity (and probably most of the higher religions) tell us to love others as ourselves, not to stop loving ourselves. It is not a refutation of nationalism to identify it with collective egotism; it merely implies that we ought not to let it get out of hand.

There may be some confusion here over what "love" refers to. It seems to be true that there is a basic psychological difference between love of the other and love of the self, whether individual or collective. From the little I have read about Lutheranism, I have the impression that Martin Luther was greatly struck by this distinction, and consequently ended up by condemning anything done merely for the sake of oneself. He seems to have transformed the principle "love others as yourself" into "love others and hate yourself". (In his mature view, one ought not to defend oneself against criminal attack, for example, except insofar as one is acting on behalf of the general welfare by doing so.) It sounds as though Lukacs may be thinking along similar lines. But if we are to distinguish self-love from the love of another in this way, we must then keep in mind that both types of "love" are necessary. The higher, charitable love of our country will probably only take us so far.

Update (12/14): Paul Cella has just posted a long article on the nature of (American) patriotism here (h/t: Eunomia).