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Casualties of War "...among the calamities
of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth,
by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages". There is some debate
as to who first coined the celebrated phrase "truth is the first casualty
of war". It may have been coined by Republican Senator Hiram
William Johnson (probably not related to Dr. Samuel) in a speech he
delivered in 1918. The first written source would appear to be
the 1928 book Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First
World War by British M.P. Arthur Ponsonby. Others claim that
it was coined by the classic Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525-456 BCE).
Be all this as it may, Dr. Johnson, as usual, was the first to identify
the necessary elements to give us the whole picture. Falsehoods
arise because it is in the interests of some to spread them. And
it is also true-most unfortunately-that large sections of the general
public are indeed credulous when it comes to accepting official information
at face value. As Ponsonby was to say 150 years later: "It is,
indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish". This is perhaps
particularly so when "the nation is at war" (another phrase that
does not bear too much close examination), when conniving at official
lies appears to be raised to the level of a patriotic duty (cf. Dr.
Johnson: "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel".). The Australian journalist
(and scourge of the establishment in all its pious manifestations) John
Pilger takes a slightly different view. In his article "The
Real First Casualty of War" published in the New Statesman in 2006,
he claimed that the said first casualty was in fact journalism, through
the coopting of journalists through embedding, or restricting access
to information (or the means of discovering the truth) thereby forcing
the media to rely on official sources or print absolutely nothing at
all. Pilger's article begins with a most revealing quote from
the Czech novelist Zdenek Urbánek, something he said to Pilger during
the 1970s, when his country was well and truly under the thumb of the
Soviet Union: "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you
in the West. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers
and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike
you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is
always subversive." What he is saying, in effect, is that you
lazy westerners are stupid to believe the official line: Dr. Johnson
was perfectly correct-people are, for one reason or another, overly
credulous. In light of yet another
further release of classified US military information by WikiLeaks (October
23 2010) , this time focussing on the deployment, not to mention documents
which have come to light in Britain either through or because of the
Hutton Inquiry, credulity must surely also rank among the refuges of
scoundrels. Indeed, when a country is facing a crisis of one sort
or another, the need for citizen vigilance, a free media, and an independent
judiciary, is necessary as never before. It is precisely in circumstances
of stress that resolution and independent thinking is required.
For those who doubt this, the shocking revelations on both sides of
the Atlantic over the appalling mess in Iraq, the staggering cost in
terms of deaths and injuries, physical and psychological, the enormous
expenditure of money, the extraordinary damage done to the standing
of a number of the countries concerned-much of this can be laid at
the door of credulity masking as some sort of vague patriotic sentiment.
In fact, as I hope to demonstrate, it is nothing of the sort.
Abnegating the responsibilities of the citizen is an act of cowardice,
not loyalty. In what follows I am
going to summarize some of the findings that have emerged from the WikiLeaks
publications, and key documents previously secret which have now been
released in the United Kingdom. I will finish by trying to tease
out some lessons from what we have learnt from this unedifying and ultimately
tragic saga. WikiLeaks It may be as well to
begin by making clear my own point of departure. In company with
the vast majority of neutral international lawyers, I have always viewed
the Anglo/American intervention in Iraq as illegal. Contemporary
international law permits the use of force in one of two situations.
First, proportionate self defence (or very possibly anticipatory self
defence-striking at your enemy before you yourself sustain injury),
or with the clear, and express authorization of the Security Council
of the United Nations. By no stretch of the imagination could
the United States, the United Kingdom and their allies claim to have
been acting in self defence or anticipatory self defence. Furthermore,
and this is a point to be discussed further below, there was no clear
and express authorization on the part of the Security Council.
But what of the purported justification which has to do with the liberation
of the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictator? The trouble with
this apparently attractive notion is that it is both extremely subjective
(who sets the criteria for determining whether a regime is oppressive
or not?), and inconsistent. The regime of Saddam Hussein was ghastly
and the Iraqi people are well rid of him and it, but he is hardly alone.
A list of "repressive" regimes in the world today would be a long
one, and could possibly include all Iraq's neighbours. Is it
seriously being contended that it is acceptable to launch an unprovoked
attack on, say, Saudi Arabia? Er, no. As always in situations
like this, a brief consideration of the applicable history reveals much.
It is possible to trace the existence of a sovereign entity taking one
form or another and incorporating the word "Iraq" for over 1,000
years. The modern state was created by Britain and France in the
aftermath of the First World War. For several centuries preceding
this, the Middle East had been part of the Ottoman Empire. This
collapsed in the aftermath of defeat, and modern and secular Turkey
emerged. Britain and France, as was their wont, took it upon themselves
to determine the fate of the old empire's Arab and Palestinian territories
(they were League of Nations mandates), and in such a way that ensured-so
they thought-their own pre-eminence, particularly with respect to
access to oil. One of the leading sheiks was duly installed as
king, and the country appeared to make progress politically, economically,
and socially, until the coup staged by the army in 1958. The Ba'ath
Party took power for nine months in 1963, and were finally entrenched
in 1968. Saddam Hussein was a relatively junior player at this point,
but quickly emerged as leader, deposing his former mentor in 1979. This
was followed by the swift murder of anyone in his party who might conceivably
be seen as an opponent, a tactic which was to be a marked feature of
his years in power. Saddam has been much vilified, and rightly
so, but it is a sobering thought to remember that Western governments,
whatever they thought of him personally, recognized the legitimacy of
his regime (otherwise they could not have maintained Ambassadors in
Baghdad). Some did more and actively
supported him. It is a matter of record that President George
Bush Père had a request before congress for loan guarantees for Saddam
mere weeks before his invasion of Kuwait of 1990, the act that turned
the world against him once and for all. It is also necessary to
remind ourselves that Western support did not falter up to that point
despite what we knew of the despicable practices of the man and his
government, his gassing of the Kurds, and multiple human rights abuses.
We may also be perfectly sure that the Iraqi people have not forgotten
for one moment that Western countries, for all their purported justification
of their actions allegedly for and on behalf of them and not themselves,
have not forgotten. One can go further, and ask whether the average
Iraqi citizen would think for one moment that Western powers have ever
done anything to or for his country which wasn't ultimately in their
own interest. In This Issue I make no attempt to
assess the impact of the WikiLeaks information on the American public.
I suspect that it is thoroughly tired of Iraq and everything to do about
it and would like nothing more than, as they say, to "move on".
Those who fought there may have other ideas, and it is clear that at
least some of the close relatives of those who died are aghast at the
notion that the loss they suffered was in vain. But this is the
risk of military actions everywhere. One recalls in this connection
the story of Australian soldiers picking their way through the makeshift
graveyard of many of their compatriots as they prepared to abandon Gallipoli-"let's
hope they can't hear us". While conflict-weariness
is understandable, and indeed continues through the engagement in Afghanistan,
there is a risk of some of the important lessons arising from the debacle
being lost. More than this: these lessons are not new, not
one of them. They have been learnt painfully before, and then
apparently forgotten. Forgotten too is the absurd and sometimes
fatuous mood of pre-invasion triumphalism, that the inevitable forces
of the West would crush any resistance and (and this was perhaps the
greatest illusion of all), the Iraqi population would be delirious with
joy and gratitude, "dancing in the streets" as Christopher Hitchens
and others confidently predicted. No doubt the thought was of
the flower-strewn path that greeted the Allies as they liberated France,
the Netherlands and Belgium in 1944, but this was very different.
A population that has been subjected to a ferocious aerial bombardment
rarely looks with gratitude on those responsible for it. Worse
still was the "new millennium" sense that things were different
now, that the past had little or nothing to teach, and a new order of
some sort or other had been established. In the introduction to
his collection of essays and criticism "Reappraisals", the late
Tony Judt castigated this short-sighted and self-deluding folly for
what it is: a curious mixture of anti-intellectualism, arrogance,
and sheer ignorance, the assumption that, through some alchemy or other,
most of the world was going to start looking like the western model.
These are notions we need to dispense with as quickly as possible, but
we also need to be aware that they had a certain currency, and to acknowledge
where this led us. Law and War I recall reading this
statement with utter disbelief. Was this the best they could do,
was this all there was? I asked myself. When one country
uses armed force against another, commits, in other words, the ultimate
international sin of a violation of its territorial integrity, the legal
justification should be crystal clear. There is no doubt as to
the international legal justification for the action that liberated
Kuwait from Iraq's occupation in 1991. But nothing of the sort
was available here, merely this sleight of hand, this legal legerdemain. This was bad enough,
but we now know that this memorandum was not Goldsmith's original
view. That was expressed in a memorandum to Prime Minister Blair
written before the invasion, and which has only now come to light thanks
to the activities of (even if not directly attributable to) the Hutton
enquiry. In a nutshell, Goldsmith's view before the invasion
was that there was no causus belli-no legal justification for
military action. The copy of the memorandum released by the British
Government contains marginalia by a number of those who received it.
A Blair aide questions why the memo is necessary at all, especially
at this critical juncture. Blair himself comments that "I just do
not understand this". It was as if he (a lawyer, let us not
forget) expected firm legal backing from his Attorney-General, and was
puzzled, to say the least, that he was not receiving it. Shortly after sending
his memo Goldsmith flew to Washington, where his counterparts at the
White House appear to have put him right on certain matters, and caused
him to change his mind: the invasion was lawful. A facsimile
of the memo plus marginalia appears in an excellent dissection of this
dreadful period in modern British history by the leading human rights
lawyer Philippe Sands, a law professor at University College London,
in the October 2010 edition of the London Review of Books.
It is very well worth reading for more reasons than one. The conclusion must
be that Tony Blair and Goldsmith were less than open with their cabinet
colleagues, parliament, and the British people about all this.
We know that popular opposition to the Iraq involvement was much more
vociferous in Britain than it was in the United States, but the fact
remains that Blair's colleagues and party simply "went along"
with what he wanted to do. And the worrying thing is, that it
appears that if "the President got his war", then the Prime Minister
did too. Is this really what we mean today by responsible government?
It seems that that's what we might have, but I am equally sure that
we should not have it. It is probably too
soon to assign blame in all the quarters where it might conceivably
lie, but on this showing, any theory of where the buck stops must indict
George W. Bush and Tony Blair for a dismaying list of crimes and misdemeanours,
in which, bringing about the deaths of more than 100,000 people is not
the least. Quite what all this tells us about these two men is
not for me to say, though one recalls Blair's extraordinary enthusiasm
for military action against Serbia during the Kosovo crisis, when his
appetite for letting the Serbs have it seemed to be much keener than
that of Bill Clinton. Final Thoughts The only point I would
make is that we must all beware of the "instant expert", a point
I have made in a previous article. There is no "instant expert".
Expertise, by its very nature, requires time, application, and a certain
measure of ability. This is where the current tide of anti-intellectualism
in many western societies is so dangerous. It pretends that Tea
Party simplifications are actually adequate to dealing with domestic
and international issues, when it is blindingly obvious that this is
very far from being the case. It was this same simplistic philosophy
that embroiled the United States and its allies in Iraq in the first
place, and appears to be working the same magic in Afghanistan.
None of this is to call into question the dedication and bravery of
those in uniform in that theatre, but unfortunately there is such a
thing, quite literally, as "mission impossible". Iraq, Afghanistan,
the occupied territories-I fought in Northern Ireland during my teenage
years. People of a certain age simply do not take kindly to being
ordered around, patted down, and occasionally humiliated by heavily
armed youngsters who may display arrogance, or even genuine fear-it
doesn't matter. In circumstances such as these, the conqueror
may ensure compliance through the barrel of a gun, but nothing more
unless a very great deal of hard work is done to bridge the unbridgeable
between them. And we know this can and does happen. The
trouble is, it won't happen at checkpoints, and especially after a
history-we know this thanks to WikiLeaks-in the case families being
gunned down because they did not understand what it was they were supposed
to do or not do in a given situation. In the final analysis,
I have no sympathy for those who decry the leaking of documents because
they show "our boys" in a bad light. If people in uniform
have behaved less than well, and manifestly contrary to their own human
instincts, then society must ponder the reasons why they are where they
are, and the collective responsibility it bears for this. |