I'm afraid i no longer really post from this blog, so apologies if you have come from the Stand Down blog (it wasn't my fault: i have no idea why they posted this url on their website).
Try my Christopher Hitchens Website

http://hitchenswatch.blogspot.com

(apologies for the apalling layout btw, am working on it!)

or try

http://milleniumpeople.blogspot.com

for more general ramblings.

Or email me on thirdcity@ntlworld.com.

 
. But they are funded by the CIA (largely) . The comparison is therefore this: i am not a stooge or proxy for my boss. But simply due to the fact that he pays my wages, there are going to be limits to how much i criticise him. Another fine quote:
It has taken decades for the Turkish state even to acknowledge that another people with a distinct language and culture lives within its borders. It's sadly true that a Kurdish rebellion in southeastern Turkey was led by a "Shining Path"-type leader named Abdullah Ocalan (believe me: I interviewed him in Lebanon and found a Kurdish Pol Pot), but this in itself expresses the desperate conditions that obtain'. Apart form the vague, and, possibly ungrammatical nature of this sentence (expresses? obtains? what do these words mean in this context? Hitchen's 'mastery of the english language' starts to look like Enoch Powell's greek....something that gets dragged out as a defence whenever the subject says something really stupid). But...imagine someone writing exactly the same sentence, but discussing the Arab world in general, or the hell of Saudi Arabia and substituting 'Osama Bin Laden' for 'Ocalan'.....would this not be the sort of 'apology for terrorism' that Hitchen's would pounce upon if it was someone else making this point?

 
another moderately awful piece from Christopher Hitchens
'The slander of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition, and of their friends, as little better than puppets of the Bush administration is an idea that is half-alive in the minds of those who are knowingly trying to buy "more time" for Saddam Hussein. Every now and then, one gets a sneer about it. So, it's good to step aside from the everyday arguments with the regime preservers and point out that proxies and mercenaries seldom express themselves as forcefully and publicly as the Iraqi opposition has been doing recently.'. But from whom is the slander coming? Certainly many lies have been told about the Iraqi opposition. We have been told that none of them are protesting about the coming war: a lie. We are told that the anti-war movement did not allow, or at best, did not encourage, turks and kurds toappear on the protest march: another lie. And another in Hitchen's 'straw man' arguments. No one is claiming that the Iraqi opposition are stooges or mercenaries. But they are funded by the US (largely). The comparison is therefore this: i am not a stooge or proxy for my boss. But simply due to the fact that he pays my wages, there are going to be limits to how much i criticise him. Another fine quote:
It has taken decades for the Turkish state even to acknowledge that another people with a distinct language and culture lives within its borders. It's sadly true that a Kurdish rebellion in southeastern Turkey was led by a "Shining Path"-type leader named Abdullah Ocalan (believe me: I interviewed him in Lebanon and found a Kurdish Pol Pot), but this in itself expresses the desperate conditions that obtain'. Apart form the vague, and, possibly ungrammatical nature of this sentence (expresses? obtains? what do these words mean in this context? Hitchen's 'mastery of the english language' starts to look like Enoch Powell's greek....something that gets dragged out as a defence whenever the subject says something really stupid). But...imagine someone writing exactly the same sentence, but discussing the Arab world in general, or the hell of Saudi Arabia and substituting 'Osama Bin Laden' for 'Ocalan'.....would this not be the sort of 'apology for terrorism' that Hitchen's would pounce upon?

 
A cynical article on US policy, which may have a grain of truth in it.Worth reading in any case. The author states that a bloodbath may well follow gulf war redux.

 
and again.

 
i know this is extremely catty (or sick) but this is worth looking at, for obvious reason. As a mental exercise work out 'casualties' as a total, including civilian deaths. The reason for this should be obvious in the current context, and in terms of understanding why European countries tend to be against war. Remember as well that these figures should also probably be expressed as a perecentage of the population, not just as 'raw' data.

 
Read here and let your head swim. . Remember this is what we are getting into and also remember.....the members of the brave Kurdish resistance fighters etc. that the likes of Christopher Hitchens so approves of, are in fact hardened politicians forged in the burning, never ending fire of Kurdish politics. They probably have more in common with Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness than with Tony Blair. And they are well aware of how the West treated them the last time. To repeat, this is no excuse for ignoring the long suffering Kurdish people....but....carefully. Very carefully.

 
Check this as an adjunct to this last point.

 
Here is a brief history of the PKK. And here is another. The key phrase is: "Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, currently waging a guerrilla insurgency in southeastern Turkey, has rejected the Iraqi Kurds' decision to seek local self-government within a federal Iraq. The PKK believes any independent Kurdish state should be a homeland for all Kurds." Now at the moment, official policy is that the Kurds will not vote to secede from iraq (although some of us cynics remember people saying the same about the Slovaks). But what if the PKK idea prevails? And what are we to make of this? .
And finally here is an interesting article describing possible dificulties with the coming war. I tend to agree with the main stream that the U.S. will win reasonably easily but i could be wrong . The key point is the Kurds. Will the PUK and the KDP manage to co operate?

 
here is a nasty and right wing article. But it points out an important truth...that the Marxist PKK is unlikely to be a friend of the US in the long run. Of course the PKK are very different from your average Iraqi Kurd. But how will things turn out when the US bombs start falling and the whole wasps nest is stirred up?

 
And here is an interesting link. There is of course, no link between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein....in fact, here, (as it were, objectively) we are on Bin Laden's side in attempting to depose him. But perhaps there is a link, albeit a vauge one, between the Kurds in Iraq (our new 'friends') and bin laden...how ironic if that were true!

 
Okay given that i accept the point the we should listen to the Kurds....but this means we should listen to the Kurds, regardless of whether what they are saying fits in with our war plans or not.

 
Does this mean incidentally that any country (albeit a democracy) can attach any other country it dislikes? Can Iceland attach China? Can Belgium attack Zimbabwe? Or (more to the point) will Israel be allowed to attack Iran? Why not? Israel is a democracy is it not? And isnt Iran guilty of serious human rights violations?

 
Part of the problem with pro-war thinking is that they seem to be completely unable to put themselves in the shoes of ordinary Iraqis Sure they say they can, but that is the same as fashionable Marxists in the 'thirties saying things like 'we must listen to the working masses'. In other words it's just a rhetorical trick to make you sound democratic. Actually what you mean is 'we must listen to the working masses if they happen to agree with my point of view'. And it is the same with the Iraqis.
Readers should put themselves in the following position. Say Tony Blair (or George Bush in the States) seized power in a coup d'etat and turned Britian into a totalitarian state. How would we feel about a mass invasion by France (or Ireland) to 'liberate us'? Moreover, how would we feel about an invasion that we had to pay for, and which left the existing power structure intact? this analogy is not exact: of course i don't know what Donald Rumsfield's plans for Iraq are (and i suspect the pro-war campaigners dont either). But the key point is that most people have a gut emotional problem with foreigners invading their country and telling them how to run their lives (ww2 was different. The Allies were so well received because they were liberating territory that had already been conquered. The Italians had already kicked Mussolini out, and the Allies were kicking out a German puppet government).

 
Here's an interesting article, which states and important truth: that 'morality' and enlightened intelligent self interest usually lead to the same conclusions. It is not cynical to ask 'why is this war in the national interest?'. And if it isn't, it is not cynical or contemptuous or racist to argue that the Iraqis (with our help, if they ask for it) should be allowed to solve their own problems. Actually the statement that people should be allowed to work out their own problems is an essential aspect of democratic thinking. But more to the point, the question is not 'should we have the war or not?' which sets up a 'binary' series of assumptions which the dominant value system is well able to cope with. The war is going to happen, whether we like it or not. No the question is, what happens afterwards and who pays for it? This matters a lot to the 'moral' argument for war. Hopefully we can all agree that a situation where the Kurds are worse off than before and the Ba'ath power structure is left intact is not a good one, and that, perhaps a war that achieves these 'goals' is hard to describe as moral. This is even more the case if the Iraqis themselves have to pay for the cost of the war they didn't ask for (and thats another thing...Nick Cohen etc. always state 'listen to the Iraqi people' but then quote a KURDISH spokesperson (Christopher Hitchens also does this). Now the Kurds want at least to have a federal level of autonomy, and at most to secede and set up their own state. If Britain became totalitarian, how would u feel if the foreign press chose to talk to Gerry Adams or John Hume for an insight into how the Biritish people felt? But Kurdish Nationalists bear the same relationship to the Iraqi state as Irish Nationalists do to the British State).
Now the Americans seem to be in two minds as to what to do with Iraq. Some Americans, to their credit, seem to want a stable and democratic Iraq. But some do not, and until it is demonstrated that the former are going to be in charge of 'nation building' after the war, I remain unconvinced as to the morality of 'regime change'. Listing the horrors of Saddam Hussein's rule is irrelevant unless you have concrete (and that means costed) plans to improve things. Sure a war can change things in Iraq. It can make things worse. And we should assume that it will make things worse unless plans are produced as to how things will be made better.

 
On Double Standards
n an outrageously self-righteous column, (all the worse for appearing to be 'liberal') David Aaronovitch asks anti-war protesters some questions. However in the course of his piece he lets slip the following comment: "Even so, some things get up an old marcher's nose. The Sunday Telegraph had no trouble in finding what it called "moderate" protesters, such as 57-year-old Chelsea businessman Jonathan Callow, who had been on only one previous demonstration - with the Countryside Alliance. Sourly, I wondered how he had resisted all those entreaties we had made for him to support the anti-apartheid movement after Sharpeville and Soweto, or to march against the endless Vietnam war" . This implies that Aaronovitch still thinks his anti-Vietnam marching was a good thing. (I imagine Christopher Hitchens thinks the same, or at least he hasn't lead his readers to believe otherwise). He adds: "So, in this moment of extraordinary success, I wanted to ask those who went on the demonstration some questions. I wanted to ask whether, among your hundreds of thousands, the absences bothered you? The Kurds, the Iraqis - of whom there are many thousands in this country - where were they? Why were they not there? When Tony Benn was confronted by a young pro-war Iraqi woman on Channel 4 news on Saturday night, why did he describe the organisations of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition as "CIA stooges"?" Of course he doesnt say it outright, but the implication is that if the people of Iraq were not 100% against war, then the morality of the marchers (or at least their common sense) is called into question. I say 100% because we already know that at least some iraqis and at least some kurds do oppose the war (see posts below). The question i would like to ask aaronovitch is: does the fact that a substantial percentage of the anti-Vietnam marchers supported the NLF lead you to question your own support for that movement? For they did. See here. . And the NLF did and do suppress, torture and murder (see here) . So i take it that you now agree with Richard Nixon and Kissinger that you were in the wrong and that the Vietnam war was a 'noble cause?'

 
Of course some people think the current sanctions regime against Iraq is also Genocide which is also silly.

 
hmmmmmmmmm! back to the genocide question. to be more specific, what I mean by Genocide is a thought out attempt to kill every last man woman and child of a race. So for example, Hitler wanted to exterminate every Jew in Europe, and, later on, the world. Its not (as i understand the term anyway) simply killing a lot of people. However, it is fair to say that some people disagree with me, and heres a link that states that Saddam Hussein's assaults on the Kurds (but not Turkey's of course) are genocide. All i can say is that the United Nations doesn't agree, and on balance i agree with them.

 
just for the sake of balance heres someone who claims that saddam Hussein did actually gas the kurds. The author also claims that this does amount to Genocide, but im not convinced about that one.

 
The question is not, it seems to me, war or no war, depose Saddam or don't. Firstly because (and this isn't fatalism only common sense) because the war is going to happen, and there is nothing you, me or the peace brigade can do about it, and secondly because the question is not should Saddam be deposed but by whom, in what circumstances, and with what loss of life? And, most importantly, what comes after it? What we should be aiming for, surely, is a situation as much as possible like the Velvet Revolution where a bloodless coup took place. Of course some people will state that is impossible, and it probably is at present, but there is nothing wrong with thinking five or six years in the future. This isnt utopian, just a recognition that the 'experts' thought a revolution in Russia was impossible as well.

 
Another way the debate on the war has been polarised is the way words like 'genocide' are now twisted. Now, strictly speaking, Genocide refers to to the attempt to exterminate a whole race of people. So the End Genocide campaign list only seven genocides this century
Armenians in Turkey
Burundi
Cambodia
the Holocaust
Indonesia
Baha'i in Iran
Rwanda
Soviet Union
Sudan (with thh Soviet Union the attempt was to exterminate a class of people)

Even this, some might argue, is too broad a definition, and some people insist that only the Holocaust, Rwanda and (possibly) the Armenians are true cases of genocide.
Now Saddam Hussein has not committed genocide by any definition of the term (despite what is claimed.) What he has done is killed many many people, tortured others, used rape as a tool of political coercion etc. etc.
(Also it is possibly not true that saddam gassed 'his own people' (ie the Kurds...of course Saddam would not view the Kurds as his own people, but as people who backed the fundamentalist regime of iran in the iran-iraq war). See here.)
Of course, to repeat again and again and again, Saddam is a monster who will be overthrown by the Iraqi people, but he is not guilty of genocide, as that word is generally used.

 
A key argument that has been used recently by the pro-war lobby is that 'the left' do not pay attention to the Iraqi people, and that since they see every evil in the world as emanating from the United States, the Iraqis become simply puppets of various external powers, incapable (as the jargon has it) of 'agency'.
Of course this has an element of truth in it, and it is one of the prerequisites of a genuinely democratic and respectful approach to other counties is that one allows them the ability to be evil. In other words, when (say) black Africans, or Arabs behave in an evil way, we don't patronise them by saying 'well their environment made them do it' or 'this is the fault of the West really', or any of the other polite ways of saying 'well they are too stupid too behave any other way, what do you expect?'. Saddam Hussein has been used and supported by the West, but he is a nasty guy because (presumably) he wants to be, and to blame the West (or the environment, or his genes.....) is just another way or dehumanising people, and stating that they are merely robots, programmed by external (or internal) phenomena.
But, there are a huge load of problems with the pro-war argument as it stands.
For a start this war does not only affect the people of iraq.
When the war happens, economies will affected.... probably for the worse. Oil prices will probabably go up ( i speak as a car driver). Interest rates may alter (maybe upwards.... i own a house!). Businesses will, therefore, presumably go bankrupt, people will be thrown out of work....etc. etc. etc. This isnt even to mention the fact that Israel will almost certainly use the war as an excuse to further oppress the Palestinians, and that the Russians are already using Bush's help to camouflage what they are getting up to in Chechneya. So to describe this war as affecting the Iraqi people and no-one else is false.
Secondly, pro-war advocates tend to speak as if 'the Iraqis' or 'the Kurds' were a single homogenous group who spoke with one voice (see, for example, Christopher Hitchens ) and that politicians represent that voice. But if Britain was conquered by a foreign power, and our government was thrown into exile, it wouldn't be hard to work out that Tony Blair etc. did NOT necessarily stand for the 'opinion of hte average Britain', mainly because there IS NO SUCH THING as the opinion of the average Britain...merely British people who have their own opinions, morality, etc. and who disagree as people do. For example here is a Kurdish politician arguing against the war. Now, for all i know, he is a stooge of Saddam Hussein. But the point is i don't know because i dont know the internal politics of the Kurds, or of Iraq....for all i know, the politicians arguing in favour of the war are stooges of George Bush. (incidentally with reference to the Hitchens piece, i suspect his al-Qaeda-saddam Hussein link is a complete fantasy....if Osama Bin Laden is still alive he knows his best chance to get iraq is to have a war, wait for the Americans to get everyone to hate them, and then attempt to gain power by democratic means via a fellow extremist, similar to what happened in Algeria. And what does the West do then?).
Note Nick Cohen here writing,

, "There is evasion of the central question. How can the people of Iraq remove Saddam without war? He protects himself like Stalin. He has five secret police forces. Opponents are killed before they can mount a credible threat. Even his sons in law couldn't get close enough to assasinate him and had to flee the country. If you don't think the Left is disgracing itself, check out the current issue of Red Pepper which asserts that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is anti-war and then check out www.puk.org. There's a whiff of the apologetics for Stalinism in the air".

This, (which i take it is the Christopher Hitchens line as well), is the nub of the argument. I dont want to get into accusations of racism (and one of the most depressing aspects of this whole 'debate' is the way both sides are keen to throw out the accusation with little or any evidence) but another way of putting this is 'Iraqis are too weak and pathetic to save their own country. they need our help.'
Can't one imagine exactly the same thing being said (actually it was said) about East Germany in the mid 'eighties? or East Timor? Or El Salvador? Or....the list goes on of countries where 'newspaper columnists' insisted no democratic revolution could never take place without 'our' help. (if democratic revolutions can never take place without outside help it is a bit difficult to see how democracy ever got started in the first place). Note Cohen ignores the huge amount of popular protest Iraq actually has had, and ignores the central fact about any dictatorship which everyone on both right and left tries to deny: all governments without any exception rule (at least to a certain extent) with the help and support of the general population.

Having said all that the anti-war protesters seem to me to have ignored the salient fact about the current inspections: that the inspectors wouldnt be there in the first place without American force. So the issue again comes down to Weapons of Mass Destruction: does Saddam Hussein have them or not?

 
oh and incidentally my email is thirdcity@ntlworld.com

 
Like most people i have been spending a lot of time, rather unfortunately, thinking about the war (unfortunately because i do allegedly have a life, and pointless war related ramblings interfere with it). Given that i have spent hours thinking about it, i could write a 10,000 word essay on what i think about the war. But that would bore everyone senseless, myself included. So here are titbits based on things that i see. My views on the whole matter should become apparent as you go on.