[Reader-list] Nation-as-Person, Structuralism and other War stories

[Rana Dasgupta]

Jamie

I haven't got time to go into all the points you raise
but in brief: i think you have too readily accepted
the terms of argument presented by the warmakers
themselves.  these terms are misleading and cause us
to focus on trivia.  i think what i am going to write
here is obvious but i was a bit stunned by your email,
so...

rejecting an american/british attack on iraq does not
amount to believing in saddam's willingness to disarm
and all those other things you mentioned.  in fact it
has nothing to do with which items in the catalogue of
alleged misdeeds saddam is actually guilty of.  he is
guilty of most of them: and when he is toppled we will
not be unhappy to see him go.  

but the debate about this war is not about iraq. 
iraq, after all has not *suddenly* become the problem
it is now deemed to be.  that we are all suddenly
obsessed about saddam's weapons programmes (which by
any measure are less threatening than those of
countries like N Korea) is a sleight of hand that has
been performed on us (as Bob Fisk advises: try to
think about when it was that the fury at Osama and
Afghanistan was suddenly held to lead naturally onto
war with Iraq).  

no: the debate is about the american coalition and its
current project, of which iraq is only a part.  it is
about the ethics of invoking a ghostly, omnipresent
and neverending enemy to justify the exercise of new
forms of absolute power within america and across the
world by a small number of individuals and
organisations.  this power includes, for instance:
getting rid of the need for the president to persuade
congress of his decision to declare war; the
overturning of some of the most basic rights of
citizens; the use of overwhelming military force to
protect partisan economic interests; the license to go
into any "problem" country and submit it to direct US
military rule; the ability to ignore consensual
notions of legality with respect to war; etc.  

(and the ability, incidentally, to do all of this in
such a way that those same individuals and
organisations benefit financially in extraordinary
ways.)

the problems caused by the exercise of such power will
go far beyond the specific horrors of the iraqi war,
which are likely to be bad enough (mass famine and
disease among a population whose supply network will
have been destroyed, various kinds of 'ethnic
cleansing', etc).  

they will include the rapid and entirely rational
spread of weapons of mass destruction to states that
correctly consider their sovereignty to be under
threat and that, again correctly, realise that the
only way to have any bargaining position with such
power is to possess nuclear weapons.  they will
include potentially disastrous reassertions of
disrupted power in the Middle East.  they will surely
include more desperate kinds of violent protest
against american might.  and they will undoubtedly
include new kinds of economic injustice against Iraq
since the US needs to pay for this imperialist project
somehow: it does not earn any tax income from these
territories it is spending so many billions to invade
and police.

these things are not obscure: they are the obvious
implications of the exercise of absolute power,
discussed for several centuries.  because this
exercise of pwoer is highly undesirable we have tried
to find various ways of qualifying it, at least in
theory.  this war represents, for many people, an end
to those attempts.  

obviously there are political situations that are
repugnant to the entire "international community"
(whatever that is) and whose only solution is
military.  but let us get over all the nauseously
repetitive parallels with the supposed moral
transparency of 1938/9: nothing whatsoever is "proved"
by the invocation of Chamberlain and there are no
similarities between the two situations.  *even* if
you feel that the iraq "problem" was one that needed
"dealing with" right now then *even* tony blair
acknowledged that current measures had actually begun
to meet expectations before the invasion began but
said, with some twisted logic, that this was the best
reason to invade.  no need to argue against "war as a
last resort" for that was never the situation we were
in.

i am surprised by your turn-around on this.  the last
week, during which it became ridiculous to believe in
the possibility of war not happening, seems to have
made the whole informationscape suddenly fall into
line with it - as if to think against was to pit
oneself against historical inevitability.  actually
there is no more important time for inhabiting
alternative imaginations than when they have been
exiled from reality.  

R



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