Anti-war

Why war on Iran is inevitable

Anti-war, US Foreign Policy, US politics, War on Afghanistan, War on Iran, War on Iraq
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Eleven years of non-stop war later and the US political establishment is as moronic as ever:

Instead of doing penance every single day for the rest of their natural lives for the deaths of 4,422 Americans and, according to a survey from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the deaths of at least 650,000 Iraqis, the architects and principal advocates of the Iraq war angrily brayed for more: more aggression, bigger military, more wars. And the non-neo conservatives, the ones who’ve been proven definitively right by history, seemed to just meekly nod along. The DNC didn’t even issue a press release all day. And so all the lessons that could have been learned are unlearned.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, why would Libya go any better?

Anti-war, Forward March of Decentism
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The Flying Rodent despairs off the ease with which supposedly sensible people embrace yet another halfbaked plan to bomb the democracy into a country:

Honestly. I thought that pretty much the only good thing that came out of the catastrophes of the last decade was a general awareness that war is a Big Deal; a last resort, an option that we don’t use lightly. Now it turns out that we don’t even have that, and that we’re still primed to go off like Two-Push Charlie the nineteen-year-old porno addict in a lapdancing club when somebody whispers airstrikes.

One of his commenters is more cynical:

It looks as if Iraq has had the opposite effect – it’s set an incredibly low bar.

In Iraq we walked into an obvious disaster and it all panned out exactly as opponents of the war had predicted. It will be a long time before a war *quite* that stupid is embarked on again. However, it means that the standard for deciding whether to go to war is now “Is this a less stupid idea than invading Iraq was?”. Bombing Libya passes this incredibly easy test, so off we go.

This certainly seems to be why Juan Cole supports the war against Khadaffi: because it’s nothing like the invasion of Iraq. The only thing Cole seems to have really learned from that debacle is how to blame the left for not being gung-ho enough.

It’s been …interesting… to see how quickly people like Cole, Conor Foley or Aaron “Zunguzungu” Bady have forgotten or discarded their objections to the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and put their faith in the same people who fucked up then. It’s tempting to explain this in ideological terms, as liberals versus leftists, but that’s not quite the case.

The War on Iraq became such a clusterfuck that almost everybody sane whose job did not depend on ignoring what kind of clusterfuck it was sooner or later opposed it. In the process the genuine differences between various kinds of opponents got elided as we made common cause against the war. The same happened with Afghanistan, if less so. One of the things that got shoved under the carpet was the simple fact that quite a few people had no real qualms about wars humanitarian interventions, but just opposed these particular interventions. They still believed in intervention as a tool and might disagree about where and when to use it, but not about the necessity to have it available as a tool for responsible governments. In short, these were people who did continue to trust their own governments to act morally responsible once the people who had shown themselves not to be able to do so were out of power.

The rest of us on the other hand have learned the lesson never to trust any government with this power, as we have seen what happens if we do. We don’t see Iraq and Afghanistan as sad blotches on an otherwise good record, but as what usually happens when the west decides something needs to be done.

And the evidence is overwhelmingly on our side — about the only relatively succesful military intervention of the past two decades is the British involvement in Sierra Leone, while opposed to that is the mess in what used to be Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Congo, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Iraq… Why would Libya be any different?

Intervention in Libya: third time lucky?

Anti-war
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It’s amazing how fast things can happen. This time last week we were still arguing about the merits of a no-fly zone and the likelihood of it being established in the first place — late Saturday night the first bombs dropped. In less than a week time the proposal for a no-fly zone was not only voted on and passed, but the preperations for enforcing it were made and finished to such an extent that the French could actually start bombing within a day of it passing and what’s more, immediately exceeded their mandate by bombing tanks attacking Benghazi. After all, resolution 1973 was supposedly all about the no-fly zone wasn’t it, making sure Khadaffi couldn’t use his airforce to bomb civilians, so what are the Armée de l’Air and RAF doing bombing tanks?

Well, it turned out that while the idea of a no-fly zone emerged quickly in media debate once the civil war in Libya started, the assumption that this and nothing more was what the UN had been asked to authorise was wrong. Because while the resolution does establish a no-fly zone, does sharpen the arms embargo and asset freezes already put in place in an earlier resolution, it also does this this:

Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, and acting in cooperation with the Secretary-General, to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory, and requests the Member States concerned to inform the Secretary-General immediately of the measures they take pursuant to the authorization conferred by this paragraph which shall be immediately reported to the Security Council;

(Paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 forbids the supply of arms to Libya — with certain exceptions — and seems to be negated here. Does this mean arms supplies for the Libyan rebels?)

In other words, there’s a legal justification to take every sort of action against Libyan forces short of wholescale invasion, a far wider mandate than we were told was asked for. I’m not sure whether this was by design or accident, but I think it’s sensible to assume the former, especially since France was so quick to start the actual bombing, without even pretending to stick to no-fly zone enforcement. What worries me most is the sense that this was the only thing that was planned and tha, like Afghanistan, like Iraq, nobody has any idea what comes between 1) Bomb the shit out of our enemies and 3) Freedom and Democracy for everybody, that we’re stuck with yet another underpants-gnomian war.

Questions I haven’t seen answered yet are 1) who are the rebels and why should we support them other than whisky democracy sexy, 2) what is the end result we’re fighting for, what is the minimal acceptable outcome of this intervention, 3) how are we going to reach that state other than by bombing the shit out of the country, 4) what if Khadaffi can’t be defeated through aerial power, what then?

I can see two scenarios in which this campaign can end, other than the glorious triumph of western democracy: Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003. Either we end up with a Libya with Khadaffi in power in the central part of the country and the rebels in control in the east or we might end up with “having to invade” because the air campaign failed. Either way Libya’s screwed and the failure of the opposition to, unlike in Tunesia and Egypt, get rid of Khadaffi on their own does not make me optimistic. Mercenaries or no mercenaries, Khadaffi must still have some sizeable support amongst the population to have survived a wave of protest that did in Ben Ali and Mubarak. Which means that there will be at least part of the population unhappy with any outcome: either the Khadaffi loyalists if he is overthrown, or the rebels if he isn’t. The same was of course true in Egypt and Tunesia, but there the base of support for Mubarak and Ben Ali seemed to be much smaller…

So no, I don’t think third time’s the charm for western intervention in a Middle Eastern/Muslim country.

Nobody knew? No, nobodies knew about the dangers of Iraq

Anti-war, Madness of King George, Manufacturing consent, War on Iraq
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Last Tuesday Glenn Greenwald was right to call out the Washington media on the stupidity of excusing their cheerleading for the War on Iraq seven years ago with the idea that “nobody knew” it would be like this:

I could literally spend the rest of the day quoting those who were issuing similar or even more strident warnings. Anyone who claims they didn’t realize that an attack on Iraq could spawn mammoth civilian casualties, pervasive displacement, endless occupation and intense anti-American hatred is indicting themselves more powerfully than it’s possible for anyone else to do. And anyone who claims, as Burns did, that they “could not know then” that these things might very well happen is simply not telling the truth. They could have known. And should have known. They chose not to.

While Avedon Carol is also right to notice that he had missed one particular high profile politician who had been arguing against the invasion from the start, somebody who should have been taken serious but wasn’t, because, well:

Oddly, Glennzilla does not mention in his list of people who predicted disaster if we invaded Iraq one of the foremost voices who was inexplicably dismissed and derided by the entire press corps, presumably because the man we had elected to be President of the United States is fat.

What both miss however is something much more important: “nobody knew” inside the Washington Beltway what a disaster the War on Iraq would become, but outside it, “nobodies knew” it was a bad idea from the start. At least fifteen million people worldwide demonstrated against the war back on the 15 Februari 2003, with the largest demonstration ever held taking place in London that day and huge demonstrations all over America and Europe, smaller ones in Africa and Asia and South America and Australia and even one in Antarctica (!)

All us little people outside of the loop and not professionally blind to the idea that invading a country on spurious grounds is in itself a bad idea were perfectly aware the War on Iraq was going to be a disaster. We knew that the best we could hope for was a repeat of the first American-Iraqi Gulf War, a US blitzkrieg that would once again kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians and deliver the final blow to an infrastructure that was never allowed to recover from the first war. Literally no one I spoke to during the runup to the war — family, friends, coworkers, passing strangers — no matter their political allegiance thought it was a good idea. And while the serious people would later grudgingly accept that we were right, they’ve never given us credit for it, prefering to think our opposition was just an emotional reflex rather than a reasoned position…

First Muslim women elected to British parliament

Anti-war, Bloody Lawyers, Feminism, Socialism, UK elections, UK politics, Women
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Via TwoCircles.net:

London : Shabana Mahmood and Yasmin Qureshi have become the first Muslim women to be elected to the British parliament after successfully defending Labour seats.

Mahmood successfully increased the majority of former International Development Secretary Clare Short, who has retired from parliament, from under 7,000 votes to more than 10,000 in Birmingham Ladywood in central England.

The Oxford University-educated barrister saw off challenges from two other Muslim candidate, Ayoub Khan representing the Liberal Democrats and Nusrat Ghani, who was standing for the Tories.

I see some things never change.

The announcement of her success came as Qureshi, who is also a lawyer, won by a reduced majority of more than 8,600 in the Bolton South East constituency in north-west England.

Not another bloody lawyer – like they didn’t cause enough damage already.

Respect Party leader Salma Yaqoob is seen as having an outside chance of capturing Birmingham Hall Green, which has boundary changes with the adjacent Sparkbrook and Small Heath, where she came second at the last elections with 27.5% of the vote.

Salma Yaqoob didn’t win but came second:

Despite being written off by the media I came second, polling over 12,000 votes. It is a fantastic achievement and testimony to a desire for a political alternative to the parties of bombing and big business. It is clear that many people’s fear of a Tory government boosted the Labour vote, puncturing the Lib Dem bubble but also squeezing my vote as well.

Not a win, but a good result nonetheless. And if any proposed LibDem/A.N.Other coalition falls apart, she can stand again.