It has been disappointing for intellectual life to go through the kind of debate on the war in Iraq that we have had, and are still having. That debate, at least in Europe (including Britain), has been dominated by anti-war voices: an accurate enough reflection, I guess, of the weight of intellectual and creative opinion. Even in the USA, among the intellectuals and artists, the weight of opinion would seem to have been scepticism about, or outright hostility to, the war. But that intellectual domination has bred laziness, or arrogance. It has not, with some exceptions, cared to engage counter arguments.
It has not sought to make clear what might be common between those who have come out for the war and those who have not. Instead, a large part of the anti-war camp has been above all else concerned to demonstrate a moral and emotional superiority. This may have yielded personal satisfaction: it has been disastrous for the development of discussion.
One major exception to this has been this website openDemocracy. It has run both pro and anti-war arguments. More valuably, it has sought to identify these issues with which each side is reluctant to deal the human and other costs of the war and its possible consequences on the part of the pro-war group, and the nature of Saddams tyranny and the logic of support for humanitarian intervention on the part of the anti-war group.
Finding the common ground
However, elsewhere in the public sphere, for the more committed anti-war voices, there has been little attempt to operate in a common ground. Yet, there seem to be at least some elements upon which different groups have agreed. That is, that there is on the one hand a real threat of radical Islamist terrorism, and that on the other there was Saddams hideously brutal regime.
In practice, the pro-war (and the moderate anti-war people) have given radically different emphasis. Opponents of the war usually say that Saddam has been assisted and befriended by the western elites: or, as the American actor Woody Harrelson put it, the US and British governments understand that he (Saddam) is the most brutal kind of terrorist because they created him. He says, they concede he was a monster but forget to acknowledge that they themselves, the west and especially the US, were the Dr. Frankenstein. The common recognition of the monster should have been made more of not reduced on the anti-war side to a kind of face-saving gesture.
A further proposition might get some assent from both sides. That is, that the European Union has had a bad decade in coming to grips with tyranny since the end of communism. Some agreement might be found with Ian Buruma, when he writes that a combination of war weariness, and dependency on the US, has made Europeans complacent (though he added, too blandly in my view, that the common European calculation that international institutions are the most effective safeguards of our democracies is not just a matter of cynicism or cowardice. After all, this idea has served us well for fifty years: far better, at any rate, than a world in which nations compete at military prowess).
That is probably the limit of actual or potential agreement. And because it is so limited, the zone of engagement has been narrow indeed. On the radically anti-war side, the concentration has been on polemics, on taking ethical positions and on representing the US administration as the main threat to world peace.
The rise of ethical foreign policy
What is very rarely recognised in the radical camp, except as the occasion for mockery, is that the major states have, since the collapse of the cold war, elaborated and put into practice some version of an ethical dimension to foreign policy (the phrase was put into the public arena by Robin Cook, the former UK Foreign Secretary).
In an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb and Justine Rosenthal write that something quite important has happened in American foreign policy making with little notice or digestion of its meaning. Morality, values, ethics, universal principles the whole panoply of ideas in international affairs that were once almost the exclusive domain of preachers and scholars have taken root in the hearts, or at least the minds of the American foreign policy community in the past, tyrants supported by Washington did not have to worry a lot about interference in their domestic affairs. Now, even if Washington needs their help, some price has to be exacted, if only sharp public criticism. Moral matters are now part of American politics and the politics of many other nations.
Note the many reservations. Ethics have not taken over foreign policy: it remains largely driven by national interests. The application of moral standards is often indeed, one could say always selective. Some tyrants are targeted, while others are cosseted and the reasons given for targeting some are often applicable to those being cosseted. My contention, however, is that there is a significant effect which is growing. Namely that the ethical dimension is increasingly being linked with the realist concerns of the kind most famously associated, both when he was a scholar and when he was a practitioner, with Henry Kissinger.
This has not of course been confined to America. Britain has its own version of an ethical foreign policy, as has France and even Germany the latter, under a social democratic government, confronting its own comfortable and popular pacifism in order to make some sort of effective response, even if tardy, to the horrors of former Yugoslavia.
The tragedy of cynicism
Many on the left and most on the right have dismissed these shifts towards an ethical dimension in international policy as cosmetic, propagandist, hypocritical, over-idealist or useless. This is tragic, especially on the left, for this current of opinion has in the past together with the United Nations, Christian churches and many international NGOs been in the forefront of pressing for humanitarian intervention, and for an end to the possibility of using national sovereignty as a shield behind which tyrants can commit atrocities with impunity.
As a result the intellectual/creative opposition to this war has, in Europe, been quite close to a monopoly. Only a few have broken this monopoly, notably the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who wrote in La Repubblica on 16 April that one of the few profound joys which history reserves for us is the end of a tyranny. But few of his fellow writers and artists have shared this joy. Most have felt something quite different: a profound disgust at the US.
Down with bad things!
Two examples of leading creative figures, both British, will suffice to illustrate this. The novelist Julian Barnes essay This war is not worth a childs finger is a good example of the literary opposition. Barnes highlights the tragedy of the Iraqi deaths; contrasts the casualness of the treatment of Iraqi dead and wounded with the large media attention given to the Alliances captured, wounded and dead, and stresses that no weapons of mass destruction have been found.
Also writing for the Guardian, the playwright David Hare says the war was wrapped in mystery because no plausible explanation has been given by those who waged it.
Hare did allow, as Barnes did not, that there is a possibility that the outcome of the war will improve the lives of large numbers of people in Iraq. But he then returns to the familiar trope of the anti-war movement: that Saddam and Bush are morally the same (both, in his version, are cowards). He gives us, it seems seriously, his alternative that Saddam and Bush should have had a duel. He then speculates that the US administration has forgotten why it went to war; that Bush suffers from the uncontrollable anger of the alcoholic and concludes that Bush [has come] to represent the man flexing private muscles for no other reason than the feral pleasure of the flex. In other words, as the stand first to his article put it, Bush only invaded Iraq to prove that he could.
Though different in their styles and range, they span a large part of the gamut which has been deployed by the literary opposition. Hare admits the possibility that war has improved human conditions in Iraq, but he is more fantastical than Barnes, jumping off into flights of ungrounded speculation. Barnes is less fanciful but also less interested in conceding that there is another view than his own which might have moral stature that, for example, (to quote Elias Canetti quoted by Enzensberger) the most important motive inspiring the dictator is that he wishes to see the largest possible number of men die before he snuffs it himself, and that stopping him, or hastening his fall from power, might itself have an ethical dimension. It might also, on a reasonable and humanitarian calculus, mean that invasion means fewer dead.
The literary opposition has, in the main, added little to the movement which Gelb and Rosenthal describe as if that opposition were unable to concede anything other than the most basic of motives to leaders like George Bush or Tony Blair, or to the American and British foreign policy communities. No real debate has been joined: no consideration even of the logic of much NGO pressure which has for decades urged that western force should be used to prevent massacre, torture and oppression.
Guilt will not defeat terror
Instead the Iraq crisis should now force us to decide what we are to do about terror and dictatorship. What should we do, for example, when a tyrant is seen to be preparing for a new round of horror as Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe may well be doing (as if there was not plenty of horror already in his home land)? The Zimbabwean opposition can do little: it lacks the force. The neighbouring states, including the most powerful, South Africa, seem unprepared to do more than exert rhetorical pressure, and that only on British or other urging. Do we reflect guiltily on the part imperialism played, decades before, in the unfolding tragedy? Do we cancel out all consideration of action because it would be, or be seen to be, acting for the interests of white farmers against a black government?
Answering the times
According to a report last week in the Independent , poor Zimbabwean youths are asking when Bush will come and liberate them from Mugabe. Do we smile at their naiveté and the falseness of their consciousness? Or, on the other hand, do those of us who are British with some historical responsibility allow an indifferent American administration to convince us that we have no dog in this fight because Mugabe is not part of any axis of evil? Or do we try to think through, as the times invite us to do, how we can better square our ideals, our humanitarian impulses and our internationalism with life as it is lived and deaths as they are meted out?
We should recognise that politics, and human rights, are becoming global. None of the answers to the often-hideous questions thrown up are easy. And those that spring from finely crafted denunciations of American wickedness are the least convincing of all.