In his usual, sweetly controversial way Brendan O’Neill spells out his opposition to the planned US bombing of Baghdad rejecting the West’s right and its responsibility to intervene in Iraq or anywhere abroad.
He sees the world in realpolitik terms where the only ‘right’ of the West to do as they please comes from competing rights – i.e. the West’s right against the sovereign right of smaller nations. Apparently, given that is not the case now as almost everybody accepts that
Western powers should ‘do something, anything!’ about corrupt, victimised and poor states, instead all we hear is the word ‘responsibility’.
Brendan finds curious the implicit notion that ‘we’, the West, have some kind of responsibility to do something about Iraq. And by extension anywhere else, even if the regimes are repressive. At least he is consistent in his position which is a rare virtue in today’s muddled-up musings on individual and collective morality, rights and responsibilities.
Let’s have it out then, Brendan.
Round 1: The West is not a uniform block. It is a collection of nation states, governments, or as we, Samizdatistas, like to think of them, a bunch of bureaucratic and oppressive collectivist entities, and as such it cannot be assigned rights or responsibilities. There may be unifying or common features characteristic to the Western world and there may be some moral force vested in those.
Round 2: Freedom is what makes us, the ‘West’, better. I find curious Brendan’s implicit notion that Western values are on a moral par with those of the non-Western regimes whether it be ex-communists or the Third World. Therefore there can be no ‘moral’ right or responsibility to intervene. Given Brendan’s scepticism of the state and governments, perhaps his notion is based on something like: Those who live in glass houses, shouldn’t throw stones…
However, there is such as thing as relative comparison. I may not like the Western states and governments but they are a damn sight better than the communist regimes of old and the oppressive regimes of the present. However flawed the Western moral, political and social fabric may be, it got there by way of choice and freedom! I say it was thanks to progress based on freedom, rights of an individual and other visions and aspirations of the kind I recall Brendan calling for:
It seems perfectly clear to me that we need more development, more production, and bigger and loftier ambitions. (10th July 2002)
Round 3: Monopoly on power. The problem is not assignment of rights or responsibilities to the international players but the fact that only governments currently have monopoly on power and force of the kind needed to bring freedom to those living under totalitarian regimes. This has not always been the case and so people did not need to look for moral guidance in international affairs in the press releases of their politicians and defense officials. Individuals with convictions could fight for their vision regardless of the official position. Take Lord Byron in Greece, Tom Paine in the French Revolution and George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish civil war.
Round 4: If it’s evil, fight it. Brendan says:
They [the left and liberal opponents to war] seem to have forgotten two important points: democratic governments, by their nature, cannot be imposed from without – and to those on the receiving end, choosing between diplomacy and war is a bit like choosing between a rock and a hard place or between having a gun pointed at your head and having somebody pull the trigger. It’s no choice at all.
Speaking as someone with experience of being on the receiving end, the Soviet empire was evil and repressive and there has never been a chance of achieving democracy from within. The only hope for those trapped inside was pressure from without combined with the inevitable but oh so slow decay of the system. My parents’ generation is a ‘lost’ generation – the best years of their lives wasted by communism. Why? Because the West didn’t have enough balls in 1948, 1956 and 1968 to kick the communist arse. Iraq is a variation on the same theme. Therefore, I say, if force is needed to defend freedom, use it.
So do we have any right or responsibility towards those who do not enjoy the same degree of freedom as us? Perhaps not collectively, in the form of state intervention but as individuals we do. Otherwise how can we passionately call for freedom and progress for ourselves and then calmly insist that others will just have to put up with whatever kind of oppression they find themselves subjected to?!
