The total ignorance of the circumstances driving the USA and UK to War in Iraq back in 2003 was at least partly a result of intellectuals utterly failing to come to terms with what was at stake and mechanically writing off, as did Tony Blair himself, the oil grab motive as a "conspiracy theory".Certainly John Gray was correct to assert that support for it from "progressive" intellectuals was posited on the belief that it was a Utopian opportunity to create a new world order where conflicts of interest could be overcome by toppling a vile and cruel dictator and initiating a "domino effect" in the Middle East.
By getting rid of Saddam and allowing the oil to flow again without sanctions, Iraq would be able to pay for its own reconstruction and become a new model secular democracy. Thus it would destabilise remnant Arab nationalist dictatorships on its borders such as Syria as people there, as in Lebanon, would demand some kind of version of Europe's Velvet Revolution" in 1989.
The big idiocy behind thinking that a military invasion would bring that about meant projecting fantasies that were purely Euro-Atlanticist on to an Iraq that had never been a unitary nation state in the first place but an oil protectorate carved out of the Ottoman Empire by Britain in the aftermath of the First World War.
The fact that Blair had decided long before at Crawford Ranch with George Bush in 2002 that Iraq should be invaded can only be understood against the background not merely of dodgy dossiers, political lies about Saddam's threat to the West in the 45 minute scare warning that he could launch missiles against it.
It has to be understood that by 2001 North Sea Oil has peaked and was inexorably declining and Blair had faced a revolt by haulage companies who went on strike because of the increasingly high price of oil as David Strahan asserts correctly in his superb The Last Oil Shock.
Historians will no doubt start to debate the origins of the Iraq War within time. At the moment documentation will be sealed up in the Foreign Office and the exact reasons Blair supported Bush will remain concealed, with the Chilcot Enquiry being a mere Establishment cover up.
However, it's depressing that even Norman Davies, the great historian of Poland in his East and West , though opposing the war, claimed it was merely part of neoconservative ideology and omitted to mention anything about oil or the number of Polish intellectuals who supported it like Adam Michnik.
Yet mere outrage that Iraq was "all about the oil" tends to have Marxoid overtones that liberals shy away from as it upsets the vision of Europe, including the UK in particular, as settled and basically functioning and decent liberal democracies. No less than Poland which even supported the invasion without a vote in the Sejm .
The outrage of the supposed "anti-war" left did nothing to look at the structural factors leading to the war, looming shortages of oil, Peak Oil, Chinese inroads into other oil producing areas in Central Asia and Africa and the threat that poses to the notion that the Middle East should remain in the Western "sphere of influence".
The reason many protesters against Iraq, as well as others who opposed it, saw it as "ideological" or a simplistic Moral Evil is because few have the courage to accept that Iraq might have been a necessary invasion if it is accepted that the West's energy intensive lifestyles and what Thatcher called The Great Car Economy is not challenged.
Erstwhile fans of 'The Iron Lady, ' such as Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski of the PO, believe that Poland must follow the rugged individualism of that vision. For Poland's New Model Democracy now exhibits many of the features of this over reliance on the car and which is evident as cities like even Krakow become gridlocked by smelly and snarling SUV's.
The oil imperative was wholly ignored by by many liberals who continue to espouse a bland belief in Progress and tended to define themselves as "leftists" or the "decent left". Precedents were hunted around for. For those like Christopher Hitchens, his "leftist" post-Trotskyism indicated a proclivity to smashing "Islamo-Fascism".
The notion that the cultural radicals of 1968 had actually created and supported an antinomian politics in which an infinite growth Utopia was taken for granted and would "liberate Iraq" from the dark spell of theocratic tyranny , even though Saddam's dictatorship was secular, was quite simply never something other intellectuals have looked at.
Few "leftist" intellectuals were prepared to face up to what amounts to a crisis in civilisation as opposed to asserting a "Clash of Civilisations" where growing global demand for oil and diminishing supplies was a major factor in the drive towards the Iraq War. Timothy Garton Ash has not mentioned oil once in any commentary on the "mistake" of the Iraq War.
That few liberal intellectuals will face up to what the intelligent liberal thinker Sir Isaah Berlin called "agonistic dilemmas" is a total betrayal of the better critical aspects of the better sections of the older secular left intelligensia such as George Orwell in Britain and Albert Camus in France.
Instead the Iraq War was literally sold by feeble journalists like Nick Cohen, whom Lord Bragg pitifully called a successor to Tom Paine for his What's Left ?, a pathetic attempt to have an "Orwell moment" as Orwell did when fighting, yes actually fighting, in the Spanish Civil War against Fascism and when he declared in Why I Write,
'The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it'.But the Spanish Civil War was not remotely comparable to the Iraq War, unless one thinks that by defining oneself against those on the remnant totalitarian left who controlled the "anti-war" movement that one is fighting for the freedom of Iraqis instead of an armchair polemics where empirical facts are omitted.
The fact is that the invasion of Iraq, never a nation state anyway in the European sense, descended into Civil War after the invasion as was predicted clearly by John Gray. If comparisons with the Spanish Civil War are apt, it might be in seeing the napalming of Fallujah in 2005 as akin to the Fascist attack from the air on Guernica in 1936.
Such support as was given to the Iraq War by people who really should have known better like the ex-dissident and Czech President Vaclav Havel was not a sign of innate badness but folly. It was a sign that ageing 68ers were hitching themselves to the sole remaining hyperpower in the USA on the lines that many in the 1930s supported the USSR.
The naive belief, and it was a belief merely, that the USA as the world's last great hope could free Iraq with very minimal bloodshed and that secular democracy as opposed to an Islamist one would arise in the wake of a War of Liberation that would be in linear continuity with "the West's" victory over the USSR and the end of the Cold War.
If that was not bad enough, the anti-war protests were choreographed and led by those who have situated themselves carefully into iconic anti-war organisations such as CND, those like Kate Hudson who was a member of the Communist Party or those who extolled the USSR such as Andrew Murray and the repellant Seumas Milne, an important editor in The Guardian.
The importance of the anti-war movement being led by people no less fanatical than the neoconservatives was not that they constituted some vast "enemy within" in aligning with Islamists such as Soumaya Ghannoushi or the psychopathological Dr Tamimi Azzam or Anas Al-Tikriti.
It was that a serious politics of dissent outside Parliament was ruined by the presence of people who really are motivated by the urge to see Western Civilisation destroyed for purely nihilistic reasons as opposed to reforming the political system so that decisions could not be over concentrated in the Prime Ministerial executive represented by Tony Blair.
However, to cite such nonentities and cranks as a reason why the West was threatened from within and without by some "seamless totalitarian threat", as Michael Gove asserted in his intellectually feeble tract Celsius 7/7, was utter drivel. A responsible anti-Iraq War movement would have quelled the force of such loony assertions.
It was merely comical that the Respect Party, an incoherent bunch of ex-Trotskyists and Islamists, would bring any good any more than they could, as the Socioalist Workers Part mantra goes, "Build the Party" and present Islamists in Britain as some proto-proletarian spearhead of global insurrection against Imperialism and Capitalism from Gaza to Hackney.
Whilst nobody could take these cargo cult cranks seriously, with George Galloway the leader of Respect quickly absorbed into what J G Ballard called "the entertainment economy" by appearing on the cretinous reality telly show Big Brother, they simply blocked the need for a coherent movement for for political and constitutional change.
As Orwell made clear in novels such as Coming Up for Air, the ideologues of Respect were similar to the gangster gramophones he parodied in 1984 where George Bowling, who is trying to make some sense of the world around him, comments on one bald little lecturer spouting slogans.
The lecturer was rather a mean-looking little chap, but a good speaker. White face, very mobile mouth, and the rather grating voice that they get from constant speaking. Of course he was pitching into Hitler and the Nazis. I wasn't particularly keen to hear what he was saying--get the same stuff in the News Chronicle every morning--but his voiceSuch a view must have been that of those who opposed the Iraq War without wanting to embrace an Islamo-Bolshevik cause in the process but just knew that Blair was slightly deranged and that the Iraq War was being based on systemic lies and falsehoods. One reason the march in March 2003 failed to keep up momentum or translate into real politics.
came across to me as a kind of burr-burr-burr, with now and again a phrase that struck out and caught my attention.
'Bestial atrocities. . . . Hideous outbursts of sadism. . . .
Rubber truncheons. . . . Concentration camps. . . . Iniquitous
persecution of the Jews. . . . Back to the Dark Ages. . . .
European civilization. . . . Act before it is too late. . . .
Indignation of all decent peoples. . . . Alliance of the
democratic nations. . . . Firm stand. . . . Defence of
democracy. . . . Democracy. . . . Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . .
Fascism. . . . Democracy. . . .'
You know the line of talk. These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a gramophone. Turn the handle, press the button, and it starts. Democracy, Fascism, Democracy. But somehow it interested me to watch him. A rather mean little man, with a white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. What's he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists. It's a queer thing, I thought, to be known as 'Mr So-and-so, the well-known anti-Fascist'. A queer trade, anti-Fascism. This fellow, I suppose, makes his living by writing books against Hitler. But what did he do before Hitler came along? And what'll he do if Hitler ever disappears? Same question applies to doctors, detectives, rat-catchers, and so forth, of course.
But the grating voice went on and on, and another thought struck me. He MEANS it. Not faking at all--feels every word he's saying. He's trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that's nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan's gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy. Interesting to know a chap like that in private life. But does he have a private life? Or does he only go round from platform to platform, working up hatred? Perhaps even his dreams are slogans.
Ian McEwan was quite correct to state at the time of the anti-Iraq War March that most of the protesters most likely knew nothing of Iraq or what was at stake: as a literary man he knew his Milan Kundera and the fact that these protests were festooned with what the Czech novelist called, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the 'Kitsch of the Grand March'.
Much of the protest was pathetic, an attempt by bored consumers who did not make the connection between their consumerism and energy intensive lifestyles and that Blair was invading Iraq to protect that. Knowing that, instead of dumb placards reading Make T Not War, might have stimulated them into thinking about energy alternatives to oil.
The Iraq Protest march 0f 2003 was atrociously kitsch: it was a fun day out and gave the feeling at least of being part of "the oceanic effect", some higher cause that would alleviate boredom and give errant children and infantile consumers something more important to their banal lives. There was no coherent politics involved at all.
The simple fact remains that the Iraq War happened because few challenged the basis of their consumerist existences. Neither the self styled "decent left" who supported the war nor the old "hard left" opponents like Galloway added up to much with their tedious polemics. It reflected the total sense of impotence such people had in the face of events beyond their control.
The only public intellectual to challenge this malaise has been the liberal social democratic historian Tony Judt who wrote in his coruscating Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents, this,
'In our political as well as individual lives we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gambit of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole'.Most contemporary intellectuals live in a sterile ivory tower or in "think tanks" disengaged from the real reality of the world around them and incapable, as Orwell said, od "seeing what is in front of their noses'. "Think tanks" merely encourage "group think", the fitting of the facts to the prescriptions of already agreed on creeds.
The dissenting free thinker is becoming rapidly a thing from the past. One problem is the existence of the Internet which encourages "think tankers" to try and psychoanalyse their polemical opponents, the work out their "mindset", as if by so doing those opposing their correct view of the world can be chopped to pieces by cherry picking quotes.
Worse than that are "framing devices" wherby political terminology contains within it implicit assumptions that bury within them an implicit meaning without actually saying what is quite clearly insinuated by the writer or journalist. To be "anti-war" implies not to be "pro-war" and that is clearly a Good Thing as anyone for a war is necessarily evil-except against Hitler.
But in order to frame a cause as Goodthink, all it has been necessary to do when "taking a stance" on Iraq is to use terms which seem implicitly politically correct: "the decent left", "the pro-liberation left" ( i.e those for invading Afghanistan and Iraq ) or else we have terms bandied about like "leftists"
What on earth "leftist" means shows the vacuity of our political culture. It implies a tendency towards the left which might not completely be "left wing" but is generally as good as being thought of as "progressive", as few want to be thought of as "regressive" or even "reactionary", no matter what the person writing is actually saying.
The depressing thing is that those who supported Iraq often claimed Orwell's mantle or, at least, insinuated that they were fearless speaker saying that "liberty if it means anything is telling people what they don't want to hear". Using Orwell like that to justify the Iraq War, as though it was in the same vein as World War Two, is a travesty.
It seems that too many have dipped into Orwell, a man who died at the height of the Cold War, to justify a rather silly crusade against totalitarian despots without understanding that Orwell was a man of his particular time and who cannot be set up as some "authority" or "secular saint". Or such nonsense as Orwell would have supported the Iraq War.
The man died of TB in 1950. It is fruitless to conjecture what "he would have said" because he has been dead for 60 years. But what can be taken from Orwell is his method of scenting out frauds who performed intellectual exercises as "pea and thimble tricks" rather than looking at what was the reality outside polemics flying to and forth.
Near theological disputes over what "leftism" really means or the correct "leftist" or "liberal-left" attitude to the Iraq War and the way it should proceed are embodied in think tanks like Compass headed by Neal Lawson. A Compass is a hady travelling companion to those who just know which way forward is the best no matter the practical obstacles or facts.
As Judt puts it,
'Sadly contemporary intellectuals show little informed interest in the nitty gritty of public policy, preferring to intervene or protest on ethically defined topics where the choices seem clearer. This has left debate on the way we ought to govern ourselves to policy specialists and "think tanks", where unconventional opinions rarely finds a place and the public are excluded'Bibliography
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents.
George Orwell, Why I Write.
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air.
George Orwell, 1984.
George Orwell, Why I Write.
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