The Evil Of Humanitarian Wars: Iraq,
Libya, Syria: We Have No Right To Play God
20 July 2012
By Jonathan Cook
In a traditional cowboy movie, we know what to do: we
look for the guy wearing the white hat to be sure who
to cheer, and for the one wearing the black hat to
know who deserves to die, preferably gruesomely,
before the credits roll. If Hollywood learnt early to
play on these most tribal of emotions, do we doubt
that Washington's political script-writers are any
less sophisticated?
Since 9/11, the United States and its allies in Europe
have persuaded us that they are waging a series of
"white hat" wars against "black hat" regimes in the
Middle East. Each has been sold to us misleadingly as
a "humanitarian intervention". The cycle of such wars
is still far from complete.
But over the course of the past decade, the
presentation of these wars has necessarily changed. As
Hollywood well understands, audiences quickly tire of
the same contrived plot. Invention, creativity and
ever greater complexity are needed to sustain our
emotional engagement.
Declarations by Israeli prime minister Binyamin
Netanyahu aside, there are only so many times we can
be convinced that there is a new Hitler in the Middle
East, and that the moment is rapidly approaching when
this evil mastermind will succeed in developing a
doomsday weapon designed to wipe out Israel, the US,
or maybe the planet.
In 1950s Hollywood, the solution for audience ennui
was simple: High Noon put the noble sheriff, Gary
Cooper, in a black hat, and the evil gunslinger in a
white one. It offered a veneer of complexity, but in
reality the same good guy-bad guy formula played out
along familiar lines.
If Washington required a new storyline after the
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, it did not have to
work hard to write one. It was assisted by the rapid
changes taking place in the political environment of
the Middle East: the so-called Arab Spring. Washington
could hardly have overlooked the emotionally
satisfying twists and turns presented by the awakening
of popular forces against the deadening hand of
autocratic regimes, many of them installed decades ago
by the West.
The reality, of course, is that the US and its allies
are pursuing the same agenda as before the Arab
Spring: that is, they are looking to preserve their
own geo-political interests. In that regard, they are
trying to contain and reverse dangerous manifestations
of the awakening, especially in Egypt, the most
populous and influential of the Arab states, and in
the Gulf, our pipeline to the world's most abundant
oil reserves.
But for Washington, the Arab Spring presented
opportunities as well as threats, and these are being
keenly exploited.
Both Afghanistan and Iraq followed a model of
"intervention" that is now widely discredited and
probably no longer viable for a West struggling with
economic decline. It is not an easy sell to Western
publics that our armies should single-handedly invade,
occupy and "fix" Middle Eastern states, especially
given how ungrateful the recipients of our largesse
have proven to be.
Humanitarian wars might have run into the sand at this
point had the Arab Spring not opened up new
possibilities for "intervening".
The Arab awakening created a fresh set of dynamics in
the Middle East that countered the dominance of the
traditional military and political elites: democratic
and Islamist forces were buoyed with new confidence;
business elites spied domestic economic opportunities
through collaboration with the West; and oppressed
ethnic, religious and tribal groups saw a chance to
settle old scores.
Not surprisingly, Washington has shown more interest
in cultivating the latter two groups than the first.
In Libya, the US and its allies in Nato took off the
white hat and handed it to the so-called rebels,
comprising mostly tribes out of favour with Gadaffi.
The West took a visible role, especially in its
bombing sorties, but one that made sure the local
actors were presented as in the driving seat. The West
was only too happy to appear as if relegated to a
minor role: enabling the good guys.
After Libya's outlaw, Muammar Gadaffi, was beaten to
death by the rebels last year, the credits rolled. The
movie was over for Western audiences. But for Libyans
a new film began, in a language foreign to our ears
and with no subtitles. What little information has
seeped out since suggests that Libya is now mired in
lawlessness, no better than the political waste lands
we ourselves created in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hundreds
of regional militias run the country, extorting,
torturing and slaughtering those who oppose them.
Few can doubt that Syria is next on the West's hit
list. And this time, the script-writers in Washington
seem to believe that the task of turning a
functioning, if highly repressive, state into a basket
case can be achieved without the West's hand being
visible at all. This time the white hat has been
assigned to our allies, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf
states, who, according to the latest reports, are
stoking an incipient civil war not only by arming some
among the rebels but also by preparing to pay them
salaries too, in petro-dollars.
The importance to Western governments of developing
more "complex" narratives about intervention has been
driven by the need to weaken domestic opposition to
continuing Middle East wars. The impression that these
wars are being inspired and directed exclusively from
"inside", even if by a heterogeneous opposition whose
composition remains murky to outsiders, adds a degree
of extra legitimacy; and additionally, it suggests to
Western publics that that the cost in treasure and
casualties will not be born by us.
Whereas there was a wide consensus in favour of
attacking Afghanistan, Western opinion split,
especially in Europe, over the question of invading
Iraq in the same manner. In the post 9/11 world, the
villain in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, seemed a more
credible threat to Western interests than Saddam
Hussein. The critics of Operation Shock and Awe were
proven resoundingly right.
The Arab awakenings, however, provided a different
storyline for subsequent Western intervention -- one
that Washington had tried weakly to advance in Iraq
too, after Saddam's WMD could not be located. It was
no longer about finding a doomsday person or weapon,
but about a civilising mission to bring democracy to
oppressed peoples.
In the era before the Arab Spring, this risked looking
like just another ploy to promote Western interests.
But afterwards, it seemed far more plausible. It
mattered little whether the local actors were
democratic elements seeking a new kind of politics or
feuding ethnic groups seeking control of the old
politics for their own, vengeful ends. The goal of the
West was to co-opt them, willingly or not, to the new
narrative.
This move effectively eroded popular opposition to the
next humanitarian war, in Libya, and looks like it is
already achieving the same end in Syria.
Certainly, it has fatally undermined effective dissent
from the left, which has squabbled and splintered over
each of these humanitarian wars. A number of leading
leftwing intellectuals lined up behind the project to
overthrow Gadaffi, and more of them are already
applauding the same fate for Syria's Bashar Assad.
There is now only a rump of critical leftwing opinion
steadfast in its opposition to yet another attempt by
the West to engineer an Arab state's implosion.
If this were simply a cowboy movie, none of this would
be of more than incidental interest. Gadaffi was, and
Assad is, an outlaw. But international politics is far
more complex than a Hollywood script, as should be
obvious if we paused for a moment to reflect on what
kind of sheriffs we have elected and re-elected in the
West. George Bush, Tony Blair and Barack Obama
probably have more blood on their hands than any Arab
autocrat.
Many on the left are struggling to analyse the new
Middle East with anything approaching the
sophistication of Washington's military planners. This
failure derives in large part from a willingness to
allow the war-merchants to blur the meaningful issues
-- on the regimes, the opposition groups and the media
coverage -- related to each "humanitarian
intervention".
Yes, the regimes selected for destruction are
uniformly brutal and ugly towards their own people.
Yes, the nature of their rule should be denounced.
Yes, the world would be better off without them. But
this is no reason for the West to wage wars against
them, at least not so long as the world continues to
be configured the way it is into competing and
self-interested nation states.
Nearly all states in the Middle East have appalling
human rights records, some of them with even fewer
redeeming features than Gadaffi's Libya or Assad's
Syria. But then those states, such as Saudi Arabia,
are close allies of the West. Only the terminally
naïve or dishonest argue that the states targeted by
the West have been selected for the benefit of their
long-suffering citizens. Rather, they have been chosen
because they are seen as implacably opposed to
American and Israeli interests in the region.
Even in the case of Libya, where Gadaffi's threat to
the West was far from clear to many observers, Western
geo-political interests were, in fact, dominant. Dan
Glazebrook, a journalist specialising in Western
foreign policy, has noted that shortly before the West
turned its sights on Libya Gadaffi had begun
galvanising African opposition to Africom, the Africa
command established by the US military in 2008.
Africom's role is to organise and direct African
troops to fight to ensure, in the words of a US
Vice-Admiral, "the free flow of natural resources from
Africa to the global market". In overthrowing Gadaffi,
Africom both removed the main challenger to its plan
and put into effect its mission statement: not a
single US or European soldier died in the operation to
unseat Gadaffi.
Highlighting the hypocrisy at the heart of the
interventionist agenda should not be dismissed as
simple whataboutery. The West's mendacity fatally
undermines the rationale for intervention, stripping
it of any semblance of legitimacy. It also ensures
that those who are our allies in these military
adventures, such as Saudi Arabia, are the ones who
will ultimately get to shape the regimes that emerge
out of the rubble.
And yes too, the peoples of the Arab world have the
right to live in freedom and dignity. Yes, they are
entitled to rise up against their dictators. Yes, they
have the right to our moral sympathy, to our advice
and to our best efforts at diplomacy in their cause.
But they have no right to expect us to go to war on
their behalf, or to arm them, or to bring their
governments down for them.
This principle should hold because, as the world is
currently configured, humanitarian intervention
guarantees not a new moral order but rather the law of
the jungle. Even if the West could be trusted to wage
just wars, rather than ones to promote the interests
of its elites, how could we ever divine what action
was needed to achieve a just outcome – all the more so
in the still deeply divided societies of the Middle
East?
Is the average Libyan safer because we pulverised his
or her country with bombs, because we crushed its
institutions, good and bad alike, because we left it
politically and socially adrift, and because we then
handed arms and power to tribal groups so that they
could wreak revenge on their predecessors? It is
doubtful. But even if the answer is unclear, in the
absence of certainty we are obliged to follow the
medical maxim: "First, do no harm".
It is the height of arrogance – no, more a God complex
– to be as sure as some of our politicians and pundits
that we deserve the gratitude of Iraqis for
overthrowing Saddam Hussein at the likely cost of more
than a million Iraqi lives and millions more forced
into exile.
Societies cannot have democracy imposed from without,
as though it were an item to be ordered from a lunch
menu. The West's democracies, imperfect as they are,
were fought for by their peoples over centuries at
great cost, including horrific wars. Each state
developed its own checks and balances to cope with the
unique political, social and economic conditions that
prevailed there. Those hard-won freedoms are under
constant threat, not least from the very same
political and economic elites that so vociferously
campaign for humanitarian interventions abroad.
The reality is that greater freedoms are not awarded
by outside benefactors; they are struggled for and won
by the people themselves. No modern society achieved
democracy except through a gradual, painful struggle,
where lessons were learnt, often through error, where
reverses and setbacks were plentiful, and where
lasting success came with the realisation by all sides
that legitimacy could not be secured through violence.
If we owe other societies struggling for freedom
anything, it is our solidarity, not access to our
government's arsenals.
In fact, the West's duty is not to intervene more but
to intervene far less. We already massively arm
tyrannies such as those in the Gulf so that they can
protect the oil that we consider our birthright; we
offer military, financial and diplomatic cover for
Israel's continuing oppression of millions of
Palestinians, a major cause of political instability
in the Middle East; and we quietly support the
Egyptian military, which is currently trying to
reverse last year's revolutionary gains.
Popular support for humanitarian wars could not be
maintained without the spread of propaganda
masquerading as news by our corporate-owned media.
Over the past decade they have faithfully marketed the
Middle East agendas of our war-making governments. As
the fanciful pretext for each war is exposed, the
armchair generals assure us that the lessons have been
learnt for next time. But when the script is given a
makeover – and the white hat passed to a new lawman –
the same discredited media pundits justify war yet
again from the safety of their studios.
This is another reason to tread cautiously. In the
case of Syria, the source of the certainty expressed
by our newsrooms is often no more than a one-man
outfit in the British town of Coventry known as the
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. If Rami
Abdulrahman did not exist, our interventionist
governments and their courtiers in the media would
have had to invent him. The Observatory produces the
anti-regime news needed to justify another war.
This is not to argue that Assad's regime has not
committed war crimes. Rather, it is that, even were
"humanitarian interventions" a legitimate undertaking,
we have no comsistently reliable information to make
an assessment of how best we can intervene, based on
the "news" placed in our media by partisan groups to
the conflict. All that is clear is that we are once
again being manipulated, and to a known end.
These are grounds enough to oppose another
humanitarian war. But there is an additional reason
why it is foolhardy in the extreme for those on the
left to play along with West's current agenda in
Syria, even if they genuinely believe that ordinary
Syrians will be the beneficiaries.
If the West succeeds in its slow-motion, proxy
intervention in Syria and disables yet another Arab
state for refusing to toe its line, the stage will be
set for the next war against the next target: Iran.
That is not an argument condoning Assad's continuing
rule. Syrians should be left to make that decision.
But it is an admonition to those who justify endless
meddling in the Middle East in the service of a
Western agenda. It is a caution against waging wars
whose destructive power is directed chiefly at
civilians. It is a warning that none of these
humanitarian wars is a solution to a problem; they are
only a prelude to yet more war. And it is a reminder
that we have no right to play God.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize
for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the
Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and
"Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human
Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net
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