AlterNet: Election 2004: Grand Old Attacks on Michael Moore

Nichols is right here that McCain's jab at Moore is certainly something unprecedented. I sincerely doubt that it will make any hardcore Republican go to see it, however, because it has already been branded as something to be avoided. Perhaps if people were exposed to it in any sort of objective-ish setting, they would feel a bit different. I think it would just be interesting for people on the right, who accuse the mass media of being leftist and anti-Bush to actually see what something like that looks like, i.e. to see what it would look like if someone actually was all of these things. Perhaps they won't see the distinction in any meaningful way, but after seeing Moore's film, it is difficult to turn on ABC or CNN and think of it as propaganda for a left wing agenda. It is certainly sensationalistic and dumbs down the conversation--but that is just what the pro-war crowd wanted before the war: black and white, with us or against us, do this now or face a mushroom cloud, etc. NOW they are asking for nuance, for a balanced account of "our" progress in Iraq (the fact that it is usually framed as "our" is telling in itself). I don't subscribe to the Postman theory that TV is incapable of this knid of discussion simply by its virtues as a medium: I think it has more to do with its economic needs of competing with _Fear Factor_ and _Survivor_. This, of course doesn't explain why we aren't reading about Iraqi's surviving life drinking water from a river of sh*t, which is more death defying than eating cockroaches--though I guess less appetizing to show at dinner time. (Susan Douglas actually has some fairly good ideas for Realiy TV shows that haven't been tried yet. She's kidding, but a few of them would be really interesting.)

Anyway, the interesting back and forth between McCain and Moore--who was in the audience, though McCain didn't know it--is also unique, foremost because, in this age when the brilliance of telecommunication is touted, when the President introduces his wife in NY from PA via satellite, we were given an example of how powerful it is to have co-presence, for people who are arguing to occupy the same space. It is becoming rarer these days and makes it much easier to dismiss your opponent as some sort of rogue.

My biggest problem with all of this discussion is that it doesn't get at the conventional wisdom (pun intended) that there was no other way to handle things in Iraq--and that it is okay to give our real reasons for invasion after the fact. It becomes so easy to forget what happened at the time, especially when you have the 1984 history machine out there changing the facts to fit its own needs. The narrative we're asked to accept is that Saddam didn't allow inspectors, that the UN was weak in enforcing it's role, that the opening of Iraq was inevitable (via lifting of sanctions) and that once sanctions were lifted he Iraq would have acquired the weapons we thought they already had. More importantly "everyone" thought that Iraq already had these weapons and we were just as dumbfounded as "everyone" else when we didn't find them. There are, of course, some folks (like the very neo-con Front Page Magazine) that insist we have found WMDs (like 3 or 4--but we should assume there are more where those came from) and that the liberal media is just unable to report these things because they all love Saddam and hate America.

I have seen little evidence that there are any biological or chemical weapons that have been found and I find it not even remotely logical that if there were even a shred of evidence the Bush campaign would be including it in every speech (rather than referring to "WMD related programs" as he did in the state of the union.) Furthermore, the fact that everytime it is mentioned by supporters of the war they say, "we didn't find those, but we did free the Iraqi people," leads me to believe that there is nothing for the really right wingers to rest their claims upon.

Nevertheless, this claim about freeing the Iraqi people seems to be a recurring one. It is ridiculous as a claim at this time when something like 300-500,000 people are in danger of starving to death at the hands of Islamic rebels in Sudan and we are doing almost nothing about it and saying even less about what we could or should do. I am not necessarily an advocate for US intervention around the world, but I do see blatant hipocrisy in a crowd who claims to want to help suffering people AND fight this war against "Jihadistan" and yet they stay away--even rhetorically--from the issue of the Sudan at all costs. (an exemplary exception, again is Front Page Magazine, who claim that it is the liberal human rights organizations who are staying away [an objectively false claim] because they are on the side of radical Islam, aka the new communism.)

But, again I digress, the problem I see with this line of thinking isn't that I want to quibble with how free the Iraqi people are or were, or whether we were the people to do it or this was the time: obviously things weren't awesome under Saddam, obviously many people were happy about getting rid of him; less obvious is how much better they are faring on a day to day level. The real issue is that this wasn't the argument that we presented for going to war: it is an externality. When the president presented the case to the American people, he said it was because Iraq posed a threat, because it had these weapons; when Powell went to the UN, the war was justified on the basis of the threat posed by the WMDs. We didn't try to go to war on the basis of liberating the people of Iraq because that is not how the UN works. The UN is specifically designed to respect the sovereignty of nations.

This, of course has innumerable problems, first of which that it honors obviously oppressive governments with the boon of authority to speak for the people, the resources, and the rights of a state, regardless of how representative they are of the will of that people. From a democratic perspective, this is very problematic. However, it is not enough to simply dismiss this as some sort of bureaucratic nightmare or an ineffective strategy for multilateral cooperation. The attacks on the UN for its implicit support of repressive regimes are completely laughable when made by Americans, Europeans or even Japanese.

Though the UN may give political legitimacy to these regimes, they do it not just so we can all sit around and twiddle our thumbs. This practice of honoring repressive regimes with legitimacy is an old Westphalian tradition that goes back many centuries. And while the UN and its constituent nation-states may grant a government legitimacy, multinational corporations give that government money, support it financially and help it to thrive under this umbrella of legitimacy. The government in Saudi Arabia would have virtually no way to oppress its people if it weren't for the oil revenues that continued to flow into its coffers. The scandal over the UN oil for food program in Iraq, which should be fully investigated, has far less to do with the UN itself as a corrupt organization than with the obscure regime of sanctions we all agreed to impose on Iraq. And if we are to believe that key players in Europe and the US were really ignorant of what was going on until just now, I suppose we should also believe that Richard Nixon wasn't a crook.

But I keep getting away from the point. We never said that freeing the Iraqi people was our mission. That isn't what we said we were gonig there to do. That isn't why many americans agreed to it or believed in it. Fear was used as the primary tactic to rally public support. Freeing the Iraqi people wasn't the argument we presented before the UN because that is not something the UN is designed to do. If it were in the power of the UN to decide when a government can be overthrown, or to agree that a country could overthrow another, without attack, for their own reasons, then the UN would be corrupt. We could have been given the authority to intervene in Iraq for humanitarian reasons. But the fact is that there was no humanitarian crisis in Iraq--or at least not any more so than there had been in the past twenty years. The Kurdish minority was much more in danger across the border in Turkey; in Iraq they were fairly safe thanks in part to the restrictions placed on Saddam by the sanctions. Yes Saddam was a bad guy, but there are lots of bad guys around the world and, believe it or not, that is not necessarily an objective fact. Even America thought Saddam was an okay guy for the first twenty or so years of his reign. That this changed so suddenly should give us some notion of how difficult it is to define "evil" when there are so many different notions of "good."

Unfortunately, most of the pro-war crowd has little doubt that they know the one right way that everyone in the world should be and they have no qualms about imposing that on anyone they can. They actually see their way as the "natural way" and believe that when other regimes are removed, people will naturally revert to the "american way"--except that they won't be allowed to have freedom to do what they want as a country unless the real Americans say it's okay. Somehow these folks have the ability to overlook the sort of dictatorial totalitarian character of this form of action. Even if you agree with the ideas, it is hard to agree with their implementation. Like the Greek empire, it is difficult to extend democracy to other countries against their will. Democracy and empire are incommensurable ideas and the only way that they can seem so is if you overlook the destruction of a culture (good and bad) in favor of seeing only the way that the new culture, post-empire, seems democratic. This has been the favored ideological standpoint of people like Niall Ferguson, who has defended the British Empire for the "civilization" that it brought to places like India.

So these folks are basically mad that the UN isn't designed to give them a blank check to re-make the world in its image. They overlook the fact that the UN was designed to end empires simply because they seemed to be a de-stabilizing factor in the global political economy. That nation-states turn out to be as equally de-stabilizing, should only encourage us to dig deeper for ways to consider global governance, not to revert back to isolationism and imperialism. In one of the more lucid observations about the current war, Johnathan Schell had this to say about the War:

Let us admit, however, that the sudden popularity of global imperial ambition in
the United States is not due entirely to arrogance and lust for power, evident
as these are. It is also a response, however perverse, to requirements of the
time that even the antagonists of empire will acknowledge are inescapable. The
earth is fragile, and the earth is becoming one--economically, ecologically and
digitally. A global politics to deal with both conditions is required, and the
idea of empire, especially of global empire, offers the most familiar answer,
historically speaking, to this need. That it is a desperately wrong answer is
shown by the sweeping failure of the Bush policies. But defeating the Bush
Administration will not be enough. The need for a truly global politics--a need
that, in part, called forth America's misbegotten empire--must be met.

The need for new forms of global governance is inarguable; what form that governance should take is an argument that most neo-liberals don't want to have. They simply want the rest of the world to bow to America as the once and future knig, back on his high horse, dispensing freedom as he (and usually this kind of America would be gendered as "he") sees fit.

This is the kind of America that the republican party wants us to get behind. And to do this, they want us to focus not on the ways that we break with international law to make war or the false pretenses. But that is just here at home. Abroad, they are stuggling--though not very hard, not hard enough--to retain the legitimacy that they might have had in some circles. The whole "beacon of democracy" thing will work only if we can manage to have an uncontested election ourselves this year. The reasons for the war, for anyone who takes the time to remember, are objectively different than Bush, Blair and the other supporters would have us believe. Always reverting to the "freedom" argument, they cover over the "bad intelligence" problem by saying that everyone thought the weapons were there: if we didn't find them, it's not our fault. McCain claims that Saddam threw out or wasn't cooperating with the inspectors. All of these are outright lies.

Though some of the US, UN, and British intelligence pointed to these vast stockholds of WMDs, there was a small group of folks who said there weren't any weapons: the UN weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter--who was withdrawn by the US after Saddam rightfully claimed that the UN was spying for US and Britain--was a weapons inspector who said that there were no weapons. He was simply discredited by the Administration as a child molester, which, regardless of the charges should theoretically have little bearing on his ability to distinguish a barrel of oil from a tub of sarin or anthrax. Hans Blix, who was the head weapons inspector on the ground before BUSH told them to leave because they weren't finding WMDs (go figure), said he didn't think there were any. He f0und a few technical inconsistencies (like some missles that were longer range than they were permitted) but certainly not evidence of the kind of program Powell insisted existed. The international atomic energy comission said that there wasn't evidence of a nuclear program and the two things that inspectors (and Powell and Bush and the Brits) claimed were evidence of the attempt to start a program--the metal tubes and the nigerian uranium--were both discredited by that agency weeks before the war. Finally, the testimony of the Iraqi defector (Saddam's son in law) in the early 1990s, which Powell and others endlessly cited as evidence of the presence of these weapons, actually includes, in the parts they don't talk about, his testimony about how the weapons were all destroyed long before he defected.

And that is just the stuff that I know about and remember. Robert Greenwald's film Uncovered does a much better job of illuminating this silenced dissent in the intelligence community. I won't claim that it says unequivocally that there weren't any weapons, but it certainly was fine intelligence and it said something very different than Bush, Blair and Co. said.

So basically, in a few lines of McCain's speech, he is able to re-write history, along with the rest of the republican party line, so that not only did we go to war for good reasons, but that the thoroughly discredited reasons that Saddam posed a threat to us. I guess if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it.

To sum up...

1. The war can only be justified on the ground of freeing the Iraqi people if that was the reason given to go to war in the first place OR if the reason given to go to war in the first place turns out to be true as well.

2. This is especially true if the second thing you hope the war will do is to discredit the UN as a body for resolving international disputes peacefully. All of our resolutions had to do with WMDs so if the UN didn't approve the war on account of the WMDs, it is difficult to say they were wrong when the WMDs weren't present.

3. Regardless of the co-presence of intelligence saying these WMDs existed, one can't claim to have been ignorant or unaware of a great deal of evidence to the contrary, saying instead that "we didn't know; nobody knew." People knew, people told them, legitimate, knowledgeable people vehemently opposed their interpretation and their assertions: the pro war crowd simply chose not to listen and the media chose not to tell us. This cannot be dismissed as bad intelligence and fixed by having Tenet resign a few days before the reports come out. It was a willful deception of the people and maybe even of these leaders themselves.

4. If these leaders didn't lie, but instead just ignored all the evidence to the contrary, this should really not inspire any confidence in their abilities as leaders to make informed decisions. So far we have at least two events--maybe three with Abu Graib--where the people at the top simply claim they didn't know and expect that to get them off the hook. This is total bullsh*t. In any other setting if someone at the top of the ladder has people under them f*ck up royally time and time again, head need to start rolling or apologies and revolutionary reorganizations need to be visibly taking place. So far niether thing has happened. No one has been fired and no one has apologized: the failure to know the right information and/or to present the right information is simply presented as an accident that should be forgiven. With all of this rhetoric about accountability in regard to teachers and principles, it sickens me to see these same politicians and officials walk around like they shouldn't be help accountable for the decisions they made--however misinformed and however willfully that misinformation was gathered or believed.

5. Since none of the above is objectively true, since none of these things have happened, it is ridiculous to then turn around and try to hold up Iraqi liberation as some sort of token reward we're supposed to accept. Regardless of how "noble" or "good" it was to get rid of Saddam, that wasn't what we said we were there to do. As a mission, it is a failure. It has failed to make us more safe by diverting attention and funds away from the search for Al Queda--there are many reports from both Britain and the US but here is one and the most damning was written by the US Army War College. (The full text pdf is currently available here, but they move these around a lot) . Others have argued that it has opened up a new front for the war on terror, i.e. a place where the terrorists can fight us on the ground. Though this is theoretically and strategically correct, it isn't necessarily true in terms of the people on the ground. It seems to be in line with what Bush and others have claimed, but this seems somewhat unlikely considering the evidence from the Pentagon in July, 2004 that: "Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency." This, however, seems to point to an even more damning problem about Iraq: that all the people we are fighter are domestic insurgents, something Bush and people like McCain would hate for us to know because it undermines even the argument that we are there to free them: if they are fighting us, the only argument that we can make is that, even if freedom and democracy is the natural state of being, some people have to be forced into it and taught how to be natural. The truth of the matter is that the only way we want democracy in the Middle East is if it is a democracy we have total control of because otherwise we risk having another Iran: a popularly supported theocratic regime. (that this regime has stiff opposition is beside the point in this argument because it is ctually just further evidence of the skewed agenda of this administration: if they were really out to support democracy, they would have tried to intervene in Iran where there is a powerful student movement trying to push reforms. Instead they go to Iraq and don't even mention the attempts at democracy in Iran, painting its main problem, again, its attempt to gain WMDs. )

I don't really know why we went to war in Iraq--though lucrative re-construction contracts without real reconstruction, the prospect of privatizing the whole damn thing for American (and now French, German, and British) corporations, the second largest supply of oil and the threat posed to the global supremacy of the dollar by Saddam's trading his oil in euros instead of greenbacks all have their persuasive aspects; but I do know that it wasn't for WMDs, it hasn't made us safer as we were promised and that the liberation of Iraqis seems to be a mixed bag at best. I believe that we should keep an open mind about the last thing, but I don't think the US has any right to take credit for what ordinary Iraqis eventually end up doing with the chaos we have created: we obviously coordinated with the wrong expatriot informers (like Ahmed Chalabi, who gave us much intelligence, was paid by the Pentagon and is now being indicted in Iraq on charges associated with a murder) and miscalculated everything about the culture lying dormant beneath Saddam's oppression--and judging from Najaf, we still are doing so (the Marines decided that they shouldn't plan as the Army recommended but just go in full force that way they could crush them: sound familiar?)

I don't think that John Kerry is the answer to all of these problems. I just know that Bush has had his chance, he's made a mess and can't be trusted to get us out of it. Kerry is evidently the only guy we have to help us clean up. But once he's elected, we must continue to put pressure on him to reverse the neo-conservative/neo-liberal coalition of PNAC and set America back on firm ground. In Fog of War Erroll Morris's documentary about Robert McNamara, the Former Defense Secretary during Vietnam says of that conflict that the biggest mistake that we made --or the first indication that we were making a big mistake--was that our allies wouldn't support us in the UN. Whether it was from self interest or genuine concern, political or moral, for the new doctrine of pre-emption, this war was tainted from the very beginning by that same circumstance. Rather than chide that organization for not following us blindly, we should consider the lessons of history before we decide to go blindly forward in repeating it.