Tuesday, July 01, 2003

 

SOVEREIGNTY, THE U.N. AND IRAQ

(A historically-aware email in support of the Iraq war apparently sent by a Left-leaning older Englishman to a Canadian and a Brit before the war began. Author unknown.)

The post-1945 settlement kept the peace for an important period, but there was (there always is) a high price to be paid for that in the extension of the Westphalian doctrine of sovereignty to areas which would have been unthinkable in 1648. The result of this was that the Divine Right of Kings, which the Roundheads defeated so soundly in the 1640s, was brought back and extended to any tinpot gangster who managed to get his hands on power.

Now I don't like the Divine Right of Kings. Insofar as my kaleidoscopic assortment of political views can be gathered under a single conceptual umbrella, I'm an Anarchist. Most of my lefty friends put the miserable condition of much of the Third World down to imperialism and global capitalism and suchlike; I (along with many Tories!) put it down very largely to bad, indeed appalling, government. In parts of the world where the nation state more or less fits the social and cultural development of the people and acts as a guarantor of their liberties, I'm prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.

But in Africa and the Middle East it's simply been an abomination; the state has been a synonym for waste, corruption and brutality almost everywhere, to say nothing of ridiculous so-called "states" like Sudan, which is not so much a country as an institutionalised civil war. And then all the client states of the Evil Empire (the one across the Channel beginning appropriately with F) which are the main reason those egregious garlic-scented traitors are so keen on the idea of "sovereignty". I'm not advocating imperialism (equally, I'm not going purple at the very mention of the word, like most lefties do) but I think that imposing on these regions the Western doctrine of sovereignty was the biggest mistake we made since 1945. (No, I haven't given detailed thought to what should have happened instead. I shall have to ask Mr Bakunin.)

The problem with the UN is thus that it's a club full of Hammer Horror figures. This is OK so long as it's keeping the world on an even keel, but if it isn't then in my view it lacks all legitimacy. I respect the view that the war is wrong because it's wrong; that its rightness or wrongness depends on the view taken by the blinkered and sclerotic leader of a dead-from-the-neck-down regime in Beijing, or by a slimy, shifty, unscrupulous, corrupt spiv in Paris, is just silly. And who the hell thought it was necessary to ask Angola and Guinea? You can't base a lasting system of international law on this arrangement.

On the more general question of pre-emptive war; if it was only the knowledge that you would be fighting purely in self-defence that persuaded you that joining the army was honourable, you picked a rather odd army to join. In fact you picked two. The Canadian armed forces, for all their honourable record, have surely never fought in self-defence, as since the Dominion was founded in the mid-eighteenth century it has never been attacked. But the same is true of the British Army. Neither in 1914 nor in 1939 did we declare war in self-defence; we faced no immediate threat on either occasion. We fought for two reasons; a) honourable obligations to an ally, and b) the belief that, while there was no immediate threat to us, if Germany was not stopped there was likely to be one in the longer term. Those are precisely the reasons for which we are proposing to fight now. In fact the last English leader to go to war purely in self-defence was one of my great heroes, King Harold Godwinson, who had to do so twice in three weeks with results of which we are all aware.

And I'm not quite sure what conclusion we should draw from your view that "Iraq is not a threat". It is, indeed, arguable. But we are talking about a regime which has twice invaded its neighbours, as well as not only possessing but using chemical weapons. If it is now no longer a threat, that is purely because of huge military pressure and the destruction of most of its forces in 1991. If we take the view that war is wrong, we can't really keep that pressure up. If we can only keep Iraq in check by having half the Army on battle stations in the Gulf more or less for ever, while promising not actually to activate them, then people will start asking whether it might not actually have been better to remove the cause of this requirement. (My answer to all those who've been against sanctions for years and are now against war is that our side have at last come up with a viable proposal for lifting sanctions.)

Virtually every one of the anti-war arguments I've heard in the last few months are wearily familiar to me from the period 1936-39. Then the democracies clung smugly and pedantically to the letter of the rules (League of Nations, Non-Intervention Committee, Munich etc.) and abandoned Abyssinia, Spain, Austria and Czechoslovakia to fascism. Sticking to the rules when dealing with people who are determined to disregard them is suicidal, and nearly was then. And we lefties can't help feeling a little uneasy when conservatives are as scrupulous as this, as we know damn well that conservatives will throw out the rule book if they feel threatened enough. Every dictator who came to power in the Thirties was put there with the help of ordinary conservatives who backed the reality of Fascism against the highly dubious "threat" of "Bolshevism". And many of the appeasers based their disinclination to fight fascism on "the horrors of war" - Sir Oswald Mosley for one.

Obviously, like all lefties, I'm not happy with the idea of a power-crazed America stomping more and more carelessly all over the world in its size twelve Doc Martens. But the struggle against that will be a long haul. Yes, it will be necessary to build bulwarks against overweening American power, but I don't want them to be Saddam and Kim Jong Il. Nor do I want them to be founded on the basis of absolute prostration before the sovereignty scam (i.e. France, cynically, and Russia, possibly more genuinely).

I suppose what I'm saying is that I can feel the force of all these other considerations, but feel that to see a fascist regime taken down in full view of the whole world is a benefit which outweighs them. And so is the blow it will deal to the twentieth-century doctrine of illimitable state sovereignty. Yes, we'll need to bring the rogue elephant under control. But let him do a bit of useful jungle clearance first.

posted by JR 2:14 PM