Just To Clarify

[poliphilo]

I'm almost but not quite a pacifist. War is always evil, but sometimes it's the lesser evil.

I didn't have strong views about the first Gulf War. At the time I reckoned we needed to finish what we'd started and sweep on into Baghdad and topple Saddam. In the light of what's happened more recently, I think Bush #I was probably right to hold back.

The sanctions under which Iraq laboured through the 90s were an obscenity.

The Invasion of Iraq was unjustified. I never believed there were WMDs. Or that Saddam had anything to do with 911. It was clear to me that Bush and Blair were committed to waging war no matter what.

I find it hard to believe politicians who say they were convinced by the "evidence" put forward by the Bush administration. If I could see through the lies (and they were pretty flimsy) why couldn't they?

The only way the war can be justified is as an exercise in beneficent Imperialism. We are white, Christian and culturally superior and it's our duty to free these poor, suffering people from an evil dictatorship. A number of voices on the left took this line. I thought they were puddled.

Once the war was launched I was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe our troops would be greeted as liberators. Maybe we'd do more good than harm. It was thrilling to see Saddam's statue bite the dust. But it soon became clear that there was no proper strategy for the occupation. Mistakes were made, opportunities squandered. Bad faith was crowned with incompetence. 

The happenings at Abu Ghraib blew away the last shreds of the pretence that Crusader morality was any higher than Saddam's.

Iraq is a ruin. The institutions of civil society have been swept away. The so-called "government" is a joke.There's a vicious civil war going on. The occupation troops are piggies-in-the-middle- hated by almost everyone and incompetent to police the situation.   The only people who are doing very nicely, thank you, are the sectarian warlords like Muktadr-al-Sadr and the war profiteers.

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Have you read Sunzi's, The Art of War? The opening paragraph - Sawyer's translation:

Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survival or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed.

The entire treatise, though obviously devoted to the technical particulars of warfare, is presented from this perspective, that war is a far too serious business to be taken lightly and paradoxically, at least from a military standpoint, should be avoided at all costs.

Another chunk, this time from the opening of Ch 3, "Planning Offensives":

In general, the method for employing the military is this: Preserving the enemy's state capital is best, destroying their state capital is second-best. Preserving their army is best, destroying their army second-best. ... For this reason attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.

One comes away with the distinct impression that perhaps the greatest military stategist China has ever produced was himself a pragmatic pacifist.

With Sunzi in mind, as I watched the run up to the invasion of Iraq and its immediate result, I was convinced that it would all go very badly.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Sunzi. I like these extracts. So many books; so little time.

The Iraq war was run by men who had no experience of war. Men, in fact, who had gone out of their way to avoid direct experience of war. I've no quarrel with draft-dodging, but draft dodgers who gleefully- and ignorantly- take their country into war are another matter