Dinner party imperialists
The blogger known as Lenin reports on an exchange between some of the
staunchest supporters of Iraqi democracy, including the bloated Hitchens and some
actual Iraqi people and draws his conclusions:
Since Hitchens and Totten are not ventriloquising on behalf of President Bush, we have to deal with their asseverations as recommendations. Hitchens recommends that, if Iraqis vote for a theocratic government, the US military should step in and deny the government-elect access to power. Does he know what he is recommending? The resistance in Iraq now is a storm in a tea-cup compared to the tsunami of violence and civil strife that would be aroused if Iraqis saw that they were to be subjected to permanent occupation. (Interesting that Totten references the political and military investment that the US has already made in Iraq – ‘we didn’t come this far to…’. Lesson one of imperialism: the more one kills and maims, the more one is obliged to kill and maim). I confidently expect that Hitchens is replaying the Algerian civil war in his head, in which the military preempted a likely electoral success by the Fronte Islamique du Salut (they had already done exceptionally well in first round of elections) and promulgated martial law. The FIS was banned in 1992, and the subsequent civil war claimed 100,000 lives. Hitchens has said that “if we hadn’t won that war, and thousands of refugees had fled to France as a result, Jean Marie Le Pen would probably be the President of France today.” ‘We’ again. Suffice to note that quite a few refugees did make it to France, which had supported the junta, and some of them brought nightmarish explosions to the capital.
There are lessons in that, and lessons in this as well: someone who prefers dictatorship to democracy because of the risks that democracy entails, and would rather see civil war and mass murder than chance anything but strictly secular governance is not exactly what I would call an opponent of fanaticism. I’ll put it no more strongly than that. There is an inherent connection between national independence and individual autonomy; in colonial situations, the self- determination of peoples is contiguous with the self-determination of people. It is a sad reminder of how far we have fallen back that it is necessary to disinter these elementary lessons of Empire.