Mea Culpa - Not bloody likely!

On demands on CiF that those who supported the war apologise….

Lets be clear here – all those demanding recantation from liberal interventionists were and are happy to provide alibis for fascist and theocrat mass murderers in Iraq. It’s a free world that they are lucky to live in but they might at least have the decency to be less pleased with themselves.

To which comes the reply: “I guess secular mass murder gets a pass in your moral universe, does it?”

No, as indicated (and unlike Neil Clark) I am appalled at Stalin’s, Milosevic’s and Saddam’s torture chambers and mass graves too. All of these are a standing rebuke to the lazy and complacent guilt exhibitionists in the west who think that their attention seeking mea culpa’s give them a moral edge when all it demonstrates is their moral bankruptcy.

I am then told that “Criticizing yourself for picking a fight you've lost isn't the same thing as exculpating your opponent. "

Well it does excuse the enemy if like the other denizens of creepy hollow you think there is some magic formula which converts all Iraqi excess deaths into the victims of evil America instead of the victims of those who actually do target and kill them.

It does excuse the enemy if you make the claim, routinely retched up from the SWP vomitorium onto CiF, that the motive of those who blew up 19 Iraqi children this week are the same as the French resistance rather than the SS.

It does excuse the enemy if you make the "right on" but racist assumption that the insurgents can be infantilised by our vogue for pity and guilt out of a moral identity of their own.

Exempted from having evil motives and excused moral responsibility for their own crimes because as mere objects of pity in our narrative they are only provided with the motives that we select i.e. "blowback" against the "root cause" (singular) of American evil and not credited with the motives they themselves proclaim Jihad, Caliphate, restoration of Baathist dictatorship and/or genocidal ethnic supremacy as the case may be.

The actual motives and the actual actions of the insurgents are also not "culturally legitimate" even in that land of lesser breeds called "the other" that we are continuously commanded to "respect" because we are culturally forbidden from understanding it.

The “other guys” aren't in a silent movie they have voices of their own – listen to them and see if making respectful excuses for them whilst demonising "Bushitler" is really the only acceptable response.

We can only lose in Iraq if we decide to. That decision may have already been made but history won't end there, with vindication for the righteous westerners who opposed the war. They are the only one’s who think that this is all about them and their low rent exhibitionist “morality”. In the real world it’s also about the other guy and, after such an easy triumph in Iraq, our enemies will deliver their own distinctive reward in carnage and chaos to their silly, dilettante allies in the West. They certainly don’t look like the types to stay at home and take up social work.

Conor Foley stamps on Clark

Neil Clark in his piece on denying Asylum to the Iraqi translator “Quislings” used by British troops in Iraq wasn’t justifying attacks against Brit troops he was justifying the murder of Iraqi non combatants. No matter what “stance” you take - that is incitement to a crime in international law……

From Conor Foley on the “Quislings” thread:

Since Clark rests part of his incitement to murder on international law (and clearly the terms in which he has described these civilian staff as 'legitimate targets' does constitute such an incitment), it is worth explaining one point here.

There is an overwelming consensus that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. However, the notion that people 'collaborating with the occupation' are war criminals is rubbish. On the contrary, the statute of the International Criminal Court, which is largely based on the Geneva Conventions, specifically states that what Clark is advocating is a war crime. You can find the link here:

http://www.icc-cpi.int/about.html

It is worth reading Article 8 on war crimes. Amongst the crimes that it lists are:
'Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities'.

The second half of that sentence was specifically written to protect those whom Clark calls 'collaborators'. He goes on to argue against a basic principle of human rights law (enshrined in the UN Convention against Torture, the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights) that people fleeing persecution should be denied sanctuary in Britain, so we can assume that his commitment to international law is fairly selective.

What is more interesting is whether or not this article, through its clear incitment to people to commit war crimes (his repeated refusal to distinguish between military combatants and civilians), would actually make Clark himself liable to criminal prosecution. The Rwanda radio case springs to mind and war crimes have universal jurisdiction. I think that the police and attorney general might want to have a word here.

Triumph of the "Tankies"

Well it’s been tankies* week with a vengeance at the old Grauniad.

*tankies is the slang referring to members of the Socialist Workers Party.

Next week s exclusive : David Duke and the KKK give us their views on Iraq (identical with the tankies actually – funny that!)

First we had Neil Clark who has set aside his usual brief as an equal opportunity genocide denier – and used this high moral platform to instruct us that leftists who supported the war should be indicted for thought crimes (aah Stalin dontcha just miss the big guy Neil).

Then we had Seumus Milne telling us that every dead American was a good American because otherwise the war will not be won by the “resistance”. Not so much stop the war then – more a plea for the victory of the Caliphate/ Baathist rape room operatives/ Shia end of timers – or of anybody else who’ll just kill lots and lots of Americans (& Brits).

Back came Neil with this charmer – Iraqi translators are quislings who deserve to die at the hands of the mosque bombing, market bombing, children butchering “resistance”. Very classy that one - it even had some of the “hard core” gagging up their breakfast and had to have comments stopped after only three hours. Truly Neil is the one man Reeperbahn of political pornography.

Now the “nice” tankie Andrew Murray comes among us to shed some obligatory tears over British casualties and tells us that resistance to the resistance is futile.

But who can deny this freak show their moment of glory – after all they conned the entire praline left into supporting their campaigns. They founded and ran the “stop the war” movement. They founded the respect party as a coalition of unreconstructed soviet nostalgics and unreconstructed religious absolutists. The “religion is the opium of the people” crowd marching arm in arm with the “God is great” brigade would still be funny if it weren’t for the fact that it was this reactionary coalition of genocide deniers who formed the command structure of the Stop the War coalition. They provided the parameters of the anti war argument and they were its spokespeople. For progressives this was farce replayed as tragedy.

They set the terms of the discourse that every useful idiot from Maddy Bunting to the Archbishop of Canterbury has faithfully parroted. The broad complacent hinterlands of the left have lazily volunteered to be the “useful idiots” of two of the most anti progressive forces in British politics.

The complacent left have happily repeated as both argument and slogan doctrines which completely cannibalise the whole progressive project.

A global apartheid of rights is now proclaimed under the grotesquely inappropriate rubric of “respect” so that now feminism and gay rights are only to be defended in the west (and even there not amongst citizens of non western origin). They are to be abandoned elsewhere as “culturally incompatable” & “western artifacts”. The preposterous claims made by a gaggle of reactionary, bearded patriarchs to a monopoly of cultural authority in these lands of the “other” are also completely unchallenged by progressives.

As for the war the surreal swiftly succumbed to the downright sick as mainstream feminists declared Saddam’s Iraq to have been a middle eastern haven for women’s rights thereby awarding the author of “rape rooms” an accolade which ( to even that megalomaniac) must have been somewhat unexpected.

Environmentalists legitimately denounced Bush over Kyoto but found no room to denounce the Saddam’s destruction of the Iraqi marshes or his ignition of the Kuwaiti oilfields.

As for Human rights NGO brigade Abu Ghraib was only spoken of as the site of American abuses not the industrial scale torture and death centre that it was for decades under Saddam. It is also self evident to many right thinking progressives that Guantanamo is directly comparable to Stalins gulag.

For realists Saddam was the guarantor of Iraqi unity so recklessly destroyed by culturally ignorant imperialist Americans – the troubling fact that Saddam maintained Iraqi integrity by copiously digging and filling mass graves was not as large a source of concern to them as it might have been.

And nearly everyone embraces the lopsided accounting that places all Iraqi victims of both Baathist and Jihadist bombs against the account of “American imperialism”. Thus those who intentionally blow up mosque and market are awarded a free pass in the greater cause of demonising America. After all, everyone knows that the “other” has no moral autonomy whatsoever and all his atrocities are only “blowback” - a predetermined and programmed response to the “root cause” (not plural) of American imperialism.

This intellectual and moral slurry is not confined to the wilder reaches of the “respect” coalition but is the text and subtext of mainstream left of centre commentary.

So as the helicopters airlift the last personnel from the “green zone” the headline in the Socialist worker will be –

“IT WAS US WOT WON IT”

And who could argue with that?

The war and thought crimes

The baying for blood of those traitors of the left who supported the Iraq war continues unabated on the Guardian CiF pages.

Below is an extract from a recent exchange with commenter longsword on International law.

Longsword: “When Rumsfeld stated that the resort to law was "the strategy of the weak", he uttered the classic statement of fascism. Power trumps law.”

That is certainly true and I for one am happy to join you in your “howl of protest”.

Longsword: “Quite the contrary. The left-liberal hawks only reinforced, by their writings, contempt for the rule of law. In that, they were complicit and provided ideological cover for what has to be one of the most bizarre episodes in the life and times of liberal democracy (and certainly no over yet).”

Perhaps because the conflict between the principles of sovereignty via Westphalia and the mandate of the UN Convention that sovereignty is no legal defence against intervention on humanitarian grounds introduces more complexity to the matter than your amateur but categorical legal pronouncements acknowledge.

Perhaps because the lack of one additional resolution did not mean that 14 others (many of them chapter 7 & therefore mandatory) had not already been illegally disregarded by Saddam.

Perhaps because so narrow a principle of law merely operates as a preservation order for dictatorships. L’etat c’est Moi says Saddam – and a clutch of legal bureaucrats rush in to the breach to agree with him.

Perhaps because the ceasefire mandated by the UN after Gulf War 1 was only a conditional suspension of legitimate military action against Saddam - and he violated the conditions.

Perhaps because the basis of an international law that rests on the arbitrary arrangement of the governments represented on the Security Council at any one time (many of them undemocratic and repressive regimes) doesn’t command the automatic respect in others that it clearly does in you. Particularly as four of them (Germany, France, China and Russia) were actively subverting international law via their abuse of the “oil for food” programme. Especially since the independent guardian of “international law” the permanent officials of the UN itself were also actively and personally profiting from the abuse of Oil for food programme.

No doubt you howled yourself hoarse at these abuses of international law – if not then perhaps international law needs a better class of “respect” then your shallow opportunism would seem to permit?

Longsword: “And there were certainly precedents set at Nuremberg for such savants de service. And had the notorious Houston Stewart Chamberlain survived long enough, he would no doubt have been in the dock at Nuremberg."

Really – on what charge?

Nuremberg had enough real crimes to deal with without introducing bogus thought crimes to its agenda.