Stop the World
I thought this opinion piece from David Aaronovitch in the Times made a number of valid points about the case for 'intervening' in the affairs of other countries - under certain circumstances.
So much so that I've highlighted the 3rd paragraph, in particular - because it's as good a description of the position that the Labour Party finds itself today, albeit as much by accident as by design, after the recent vote in the House of Commons.
Any decision to intervene in another sovereign country's internal affairs - by military or other means - should never be taken lightly and for every successful example of where this has occurred (Kosovo and Libya) there are others where intervention has come with a terrible price (Iraq and Afghanistan).
And there are still others where the world stood by and watched while civilians died in their hundreds of thousands (Rwanda).
By David Aaronovitch
Anti-intervention, anti-immigration, anti-aid. It’s a fantasy to think we can turn our backs on the planet
When the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suddenly seized upon John Kerry’s lip bubble that if Assad were to bin his chemical weapons then all might be well, a sigh went up in the Western world. Well that’s it, then, went the truest part of this exhalation, that’s kicked the thing into the grubby part of the garden where the grass is longest. Hopefully nothing will happen now.
Since the Syrian President’s forces killed up to 1,500 residents of a Damascus suburb with sarin gas, the obfuscation on the part of various people has been wonderful. It might not have been gas. It might not have been the Government. It might have been a rogue element. Why would Assad be so stupid? In any case didn’t we sell Assad the sarin gas? Or did we ship chemicals that could be used to make gas, so aren’t we hypocrites? And didn’t we ignore the use of chemical weapons in the 1980s, so aren’t we inconsistent? What’s all this fuss about chemical weapons anyway, when tens of thousands have died from conventional arms? And so on.
When people are trying this hard to get out from under one very obvious truth, it tells you something — that they know that they are faced with a considerable moral challenge and that they don’t want to face it.
Let me acknowledge early on that there are good arguments against intervention in Syria, some of them made by people who are genuinely worried that the consequences of action will be worse than inaction. I am not convinced by these arguments but I won’t try readers’ patience by repeating why. That’s not my purpose today, which is instead to try and account for the way in which the case for action was lost before it was made.
There has always been a strand of pacifism that holds that violence can only create more violence. It is a respectable if impractical tradition. There are also the “anti-imperialists” of the far left for whom America is the enemy and America’s enemies are therefore their friends. They cluster within the misnamed Stop The War movements, tolerating any war but that which has America in it.
But neither the outpourings of these groups nor the specific arguments of anti-interventionists — however well-founded — account for why it is that public opinion has settled so convincingly on the side of allowing Assad to get away with it. Let me cut to this one. There are idealistic non-interveners, but what gives the opposition its true heft is the sentiment that it is none of our business if Arabs killed each other in a far-off, dusty, dangerous land. Let’s keep out of it. Let’s deal with our own problems. We don’t want to know.
A decade ago when, after that other September, the US Republicans realised that the world was a place that sometimes came to you, there was a broad agreement on how things were. The ideas on the right came from the neoconservatives, the momentum on the centre and centre left from the liberal interventionists. In very broad terms there was an understanding that the globalisation of labour, trade and communications had created interdependence. This couldn’t be wished away, not least because it was the foundation of future prosperity. It had instead to be reckoned with.
I’m not being crude enough to suggest that this meant everybody signed up to a coherent notion of how the world should be. But it was striking that the Republican president of the United States and the Labour prime minister of the United Kingdom could agree, not just about the need to act in the world but also about such matters as migration, co-operation and trade.
There was, in a way, something that might be called Blairism. Just over a year ago Britain waved off the Paralympians and congratulated itself on its global standing. The summer hadn’t gone tits up as so many Jeremiahs had prophesied — it had gone brilliantly and the Queen had parachuted down to a Doyled amphitheatre watched by billions.
In retrospect I can now see something that I didn’t then. The London Olympics of 2012 marked not the peak of a dominant sentiment, but its end. It was the last trumpet of that Blairism — optimistic, engaged, international and conceived in a time of plenty. What has followed has been altogether more gloomy. It has confirmed trends already well established before the first volleyball was fisted in Horse Guards Parade, and now they rule.
Since 2008 President Obama, extricating himself from two wars and an economic crisis, has maintained the rhetoric of America’s role in the world while reducing it. Instead of facing criticism from an activist neocon Right (excepting Senator John McCain, the Arizona Ashdown, as he isn’t known) Mr Obama has been assaulted by the Tea Party libertarians of the New Right. The weather-makers are not the Cheneyites, but those such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who believe the US government has no big role in the world. Why should it expend men and treasure on the forlorn hope of supporting democracy abroad? Look to America! America First!
Here in Britain a similar strain runs through our politics. It is best exemplified by Faragism, that “common-sense” combination of isolationist and autarkic politics. I call it “Faragism” because it exists in the Conservative Party and even, in etiolated form, in parts of the Labour Party. It is anti-EU, anti-American, anti-foreigner, anti-State, anti-aid and anti big-project. Bizarrely, in Farage’s own case, he wants a large, well-funded military and then wants it not to do anything.
I use the word “autarkic” to describe the fantasy of our economic separateness. And it is a unifying theme of post-crash pessimistic politics that somehow we were and are better off on our own. Better off with fewer migrants, outside the EU, unentangled in complex and incomprehensible foreign doings. Ourselves alone — or Sinn Fein as the Irish say it.
This moment tries the centrist politicians. In Australia Labor and the victorious opposition competed to see who could up with the most punitive ideas for where to put asylum seekers who risk their lives on the seaways to Oz. Here stupid mobile sandwich boards are sent on to the streets to convince us that the government is tough on illegal immigration. Labour — the internationalist party — “apologises” for the entry into Britain of tens of thousands of often wonderful young East Europeans and seizes the moment to stop any action over Syria.
It was glib and predictable that people should blame Iraq and I certainly wouldn’t argue that it helped. But I think two other factors have been more important. One proximate reason was the seeming failure of the Arab Spring as exemplified by recent events in Egypt. The other was the fact that after nearly two decades from 1990 to 2008, when globalisation meant wealth for people in the West, that process went into reverse. The world let us down and now we want as little as possible to do with it.
It’s a fantasy, and an arid one at that. Real leaders, people who discern a better future and seek to move towards it, will be the ones who try to re-engage with the planet. False leaders, or non-leaders, will simply tell us that they too share the dream of apartness.
Anti-intervention, anti-immigration, anti-aid. It’s a fantasy to think we can turn our backs on the planet
When the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suddenly seized upon John Kerry’s lip bubble that if Assad were to bin his chemical weapons then all might be well, a sigh went up in the Western world. Well that’s it, then, went the truest part of this exhalation, that’s kicked the thing into the grubby part of the garden where the grass is longest. Hopefully nothing will happen now.
Since the Syrian President’s forces killed up to 1,500 residents of a Damascus suburb with sarin gas, the obfuscation on the part of various people has been wonderful. It might not have been gas. It might not have been the Government. It might have been a rogue element. Why would Assad be so stupid? In any case didn’t we sell Assad the sarin gas? Or did we ship chemicals that could be used to make gas, so aren’t we hypocrites? And didn’t we ignore the use of chemical weapons in the 1980s, so aren’t we inconsistent? What’s all this fuss about chemical weapons anyway, when tens of thousands have died from conventional arms? And so on.
When people are trying this hard to get out from under one very obvious truth, it tells you something — that they know that they are faced with a considerable moral challenge and that they don’t want to face it.
Let me acknowledge early on that there are good arguments against intervention in Syria, some of them made by people who are genuinely worried that the consequences of action will be worse than inaction. I am not convinced by these arguments but I won’t try readers’ patience by repeating why. That’s not my purpose today, which is instead to try and account for the way in which the case for action was lost before it was made.
There has always been a strand of pacifism that holds that violence can only create more violence. It is a respectable if impractical tradition. There are also the “anti-imperialists” of the far left for whom America is the enemy and America’s enemies are therefore their friends. They cluster within the misnamed Stop The War movements, tolerating any war but that which has America in it.
But neither the outpourings of these groups nor the specific arguments of anti-interventionists — however well-founded — account for why it is that public opinion has settled so convincingly on the side of allowing Assad to get away with it. Let me cut to this one. There are idealistic non-interveners, but what gives the opposition its true heft is the sentiment that it is none of our business if Arabs killed each other in a far-off, dusty, dangerous land. Let’s keep out of it. Let’s deal with our own problems. We don’t want to know.
A decade ago when, after that other September, the US Republicans realised that the world was a place that sometimes came to you, there was a broad agreement on how things were. The ideas on the right came from the neoconservatives, the momentum on the centre and centre left from the liberal interventionists. In very broad terms there was an understanding that the globalisation of labour, trade and communications had created interdependence. This couldn’t be wished away, not least because it was the foundation of future prosperity. It had instead to be reckoned with.
I’m not being crude enough to suggest that this meant everybody signed up to a coherent notion of how the world should be. But it was striking that the Republican president of the United States and the Labour prime minister of the United Kingdom could agree, not just about the need to act in the world but also about such matters as migration, co-operation and trade.
There was, in a way, something that might be called Blairism. Just over a year ago Britain waved off the Paralympians and congratulated itself on its global standing. The summer hadn’t gone tits up as so many Jeremiahs had prophesied — it had gone brilliantly and the Queen had parachuted down to a Doyled amphitheatre watched by billions.
In retrospect I can now see something that I didn’t then. The London Olympics of 2012 marked not the peak of a dominant sentiment, but its end. It was the last trumpet of that Blairism — optimistic, engaged, international and conceived in a time of plenty. What has followed has been altogether more gloomy. It has confirmed trends already well established before the first volleyball was fisted in Horse Guards Parade, and now they rule.
Since 2008 President Obama, extricating himself from two wars and an economic crisis, has maintained the rhetoric of America’s role in the world while reducing it. Instead of facing criticism from an activist neocon Right (excepting Senator John McCain, the Arizona Ashdown, as he isn’t known) Mr Obama has been assaulted by the Tea Party libertarians of the New Right. The weather-makers are not the Cheneyites, but those such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who believe the US government has no big role in the world. Why should it expend men and treasure on the forlorn hope of supporting democracy abroad? Look to America! America First!
Here in Britain a similar strain runs through our politics. It is best exemplified by Faragism, that “common-sense” combination of isolationist and autarkic politics. I call it “Faragism” because it exists in the Conservative Party and even, in etiolated form, in parts of the Labour Party. It is anti-EU, anti-American, anti-foreigner, anti-State, anti-aid and anti big-project. Bizarrely, in Farage’s own case, he wants a large, well-funded military and then wants it not to do anything.
I use the word “autarkic” to describe the fantasy of our economic separateness. And it is a unifying theme of post-crash pessimistic politics that somehow we were and are better off on our own. Better off with fewer migrants, outside the EU, unentangled in complex and incomprehensible foreign doings. Ourselves alone — or Sinn Fein as the Irish say it.
This moment tries the centrist politicians. In Australia Labor and the victorious opposition competed to see who could up with the most punitive ideas for where to put asylum seekers who risk their lives on the seaways to Oz. Here stupid mobile sandwich boards are sent on to the streets to convince us that the government is tough on illegal immigration. Labour — the internationalist party — “apologises” for the entry into Britain of tens of thousands of often wonderful young East Europeans and seizes the moment to stop any action over Syria.
It was glib and predictable that people should blame Iraq and I certainly wouldn’t argue that it helped. But I think two other factors have been more important. One proximate reason was the seeming failure of the Arab Spring as exemplified by recent events in Egypt. The other was the fact that after nearly two decades from 1990 to 2008, when globalisation meant wealth for people in the West, that process went into reverse. The world let us down and now we want as little as possible to do with it.
It’s a fantasy, and an arid one at that. Real leaders, people who discern a better future and seek to move towards it, will be the ones who try to re-engage with the planet. False leaders, or non-leaders, will simply tell us that they too share the dream of apartness.
