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April 3, 2003
In this piece Tony Parkinson, the international editor of The Age, warns about the oppositon to the war going one step too far. He says:
"Principled opposition to the war in Iraq is one thing. Wishing defeat and humiliation on the United States and its allies is another."
The incident upon which his comments are based on a statement made by Nicholas de Genova, an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University, who told a campus protest meeting/ teach in last week that, "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the US military...I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus."
At Mogadishu in 1993 there was a firefight between US intervention forces and the Somali militia. The enduring image that Mogadishu now stands for is the corpses of two American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after their helicopter was brought down by rebel rocket fire. It is an image of barbarism.
For one response to this from the left, see the post, Moral Idiocy by Invisible Adjunct:
"What concerns me is something far more serious than mere intellectual stupidity: namely, the moral idiocy of his stance. There's no need to belabour the point, which is simply this: To call for the slaughter of the young men and women who are currently serving as American soldiers is to speak from a position of utter and absolute moral bankruptcy."
Is Parkinson seriously saying that the broad response by the anti-war left is one of desiring, or calling for, Australian soldiers to be dragged through the streets of an Iraqi city? I have come across no such public statements. We can redescribe the image of Mogadishu. It could be an example of urban warfare along with Belfast, Beruit and Grozny another. it is a style of warfare the Americans are not comfortable with, and do not have a good track record in.
Parkinson says that this stance by de Genova represents an extreme variant of a broader phenomenon that is at work in the Iraq debate. What is this broad phenomena? He says:
"...this atrocity has become not only a triumphant symbol for Third World gangsterism - but also a new mantra for those in the ganglands of the Western intelligentsia who seem anxious for the superpower to get its comeuppance whenever it engages with the outside world."
Ganglands of the Western intelligenstia? That's a neo-con fantasy. Gangland implies that the academic left is ethically vacuous or morally bankrupt as distinct from just raising questions about Anglo-American patriotism. Is this the case?
In response to criticism Nicholas de Genova puts his remarks in historical context here. The context is one in which:
"...Iraqi liberation can only be effected by the Iraqi people themselves, both by resisting and defeating the U.S. invasion as well as overthrowing a regime whose brutality was long sustained by none other than the U.S. it is an anti-colonial struggle for self-determination might involve a million Mogadishus now but would ultimately have to become something more like another Vietnam. Vietnam was a stunning defeat for U.S. imperialism; as such, it was also a victory for the cause of human self-determination."
The bit about freedom is what Parkinson ignored when he said that the opposition to war translates into something more insidious a desire, subconscious or otherwise, to see US, British and Australian forces falter in their mission. What is not addressed by Parkinson is the clear distinction made between the brutal Iraqi state and the Iraqi people; the determination of freedom being placed in the hands of the Iraqi people; and seeing the US as constraining positive freedom.
That's hardly ethically vacuous or bankrupt. Isn't freedom what the Anglo-American coalition is fighting the war for? To free the Iraqi people?
The left reads that goal in terms of both freedom for the Iraqi people from the tyranny of totalitarianism and freedom for Iraqi's self-determining their own democratic nation-state. A question mark is placed over the Anglo-Americans because it is feared that the technocratic Enlightenment will falter in terms of achieving these democratic goals. It is more a case of the the military methods undercutting the stated political goals of freedom, than desiring that a superpower gets its comeuppance through military defeat.
If we read the events in Iraq in tragic terms then we can interpret the current actions of the militarized Enlightenment in terms of a hubris or arrogance that will have disastrous long-term consequences in the Middle East and in Indonesia. That's very different perspective from the wishful thinking of the comeuppance perspective attributed to the academic left by Parkinson.
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This post is quite lengthy. Didn't you pause at any stage while writing it to think about why you are defending this guy?