Sanity

There's a terrific interview with LSE professor of international relations (and expert in matters Middle Eastern) Fred Halliday here. All kinds of great points in there, among them:

--The position of much of the left post-9/11 has been reactionary, self-regarding, and parochial. The position of the parochial left today is an unwillingness to investigate what really goes on in Third World countries, a shying away from serious thought, and a refusal to "do the historical work" and listen to other people.

---Both American and Vatican policy towards family planning and contraception is criminal, and Bush and J. Ratzinger should be indicted for mass murder. The last pope should probably be tried, er, in absentia as well.

---There is no point in commenting extensively on international affairs if your knowledge of "the international" is based solely on cheap and narrow political hacks. One should learn the language, read the history, live among the people and culture and get a keen sense of the place before deciding that you know what's best for the people of (at random) Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Russia, India, and South Dakota.

I fall into this error all the time. What little planning went into the American invasion of Iraq was tragically (literally) short on knowledge of Iraqi history, ethnicities, and cultures. Sad. Pathetic, really...

In other news, Michael Ignatieff is running for the leadership of the Liberal Party and has made several eloquent and passionate speeches on environmental initiatives, Canadian federalism and multi-lingualism and multi-culturalism, and what a truly Liberal international policy would look like. And he looks good on TV, so it's not like he's just some awkward intellectual who found himself in Parliament. Handsome feller, yes indeed.

You can poke around in the good man's words here: http://www.michaelignatieff.ca/en/about_speeches.aspx

There's already something nostalgic, isn't there, about posting the entire link and not just subsuming it into a word.

Provisional termination and resurrection

Okay, so I left the blog dormant for over a month or something. Worse things have happened. I'm still unsure and uncomfortable with this whole blog medium. I wonder whether it doesn't encourage a culture of unreflective, knee-jerk reactions and readymade political discourse that too easily gets carried away in the fashions of the day.

But I suppose the fun of blogging is the immedite rough-and-tumble of it all, and the theatrical knocking down and dragging out and biting people's legs. My, how I'm jabbering...

Don't Screw This One Up

Okay, after railing against the parochial left's willful blindness about the struggle for liberal reform and women's rights in Iran, I feel I should admonish my government (that is, the one in the US) a bit...not so much in the interests of political balance, but because I worry that we're sleep-walking into yet another calamitous mistake in Iran.

The fact is, as numerous commentators from Hitchens to Ash to Michael Axworthy in Prospect have pointed out, even most Iranians who despise the beardocratic regime are eager to have nuclear power, and many support the idea of building up some kind of nuclear deterrent. I'm not exactly sanguine at the thought at Iran having a nuclear arsenal, and Johann Hari's recent suggestion that a nuclear Iran would mean "a Cuban Missile Crisis in the Middle East" is disquieting, to say the least. But the ranting, Holocaust-denying, neanderthal president's line about "wiping Israel off the map" is a hollow threat I think, designed to scare the West and rattle Israel further into a siege mentality. It's just posturing; the mullahs are more calculating than apocalyptic, and they know exactly what would happen if they ever tried to destroy Israel.

That said, it is certainly possible that Israel and Iran could find themselves in some kind of nuclear or otherwise military stand-off in the next few years, which would obviously be a calamity...but it seems inevitable that the Iranians will go ahead with their enrichment program, and surely the best way of dealing with this is a disciplined series of diplomatic talks? Boring, unsexy diplomacy might be the only way to slow down or diperse the march towards nuclearization, but that's just a short-term goal.

Like Ash and Hitchens say, we're spending entirely too much energy on the nuclear weapons and not nearly enough on supporting the forces of reform and dissent in Iran. The suggestions made by Ash and Hitchens--resuming full trade and relations with Iran and ushering in a global convivencia and free exchange of Western and Iranian goods and ideas--is the far more compelling and imaginatively bold vision. And what's more: it's totally feasible and would actually succeed in fostering goodwill towards liberal values in the Middle East. A round of air strikes certainly would not. Nor would sanctions. Imposing sanctions on Iran would not only result in stagnation and hunger that could be easily blamed on the United States, it would also turn much of Iranian opinion against the West. And no one wants that.

I'm honestly shocked that the US government is so preoccupied with making belligerent noises of late. Surely there ARE people in the State Department or Pentagon who know what a disaster a military strike on Iran would be. A Kissingerian policy of setting different factions and ethnicities within the country against one another is so morally bankrupt I don't think it needs further comment.

And if you're a member of that small section of the humanist left that still thinks internationalism is important and claims solidarity with the oppressed people of Iran: remember that the anti-regime liberals and feminists are opposed to military action as well.

Où est la gauche ?

Great witness-chronicler of anti-Communist "refolution" in Central Europe and eminently sensible man Timothy Garton Ash has done it again. All of his columns for the Guardian on Iran have been spot-on, in my opinion, and today's helping is no exception:

Rather than sitting on the sidelines carping at whatever Washington does, we Europeans should do something better ourselves. Instead of merely expressing (justified) scepticism about an American satellite TV channel for Iran, which will be widely seen there as Bush administration propaganda, we should be urging the British parliament to make money available for a 24-hour BBC satellite television service broadcasting to Iran in Farsi. For the BBC does have real credibility in Iran. Rather than just sniping at Washington's sometimes clumsy efforts at democracy promotion, we should be developing our own.

When I say we, I mean all the member states of the European Union, pooling their resources and know-how. After all, we - not the Americans - have the diplomats, businesspeople and journalists on the ground in Iran. Between our 25 countries, we have a unique body of experience about how democratic states can encourage peaceful change in their less democratic neighbours. In the last decades of the cold war, West Germany tried to do this with its Ostpolitik, and Poland, having been on the receiving end, can help us to learn from the mistakes of that Ostpolitik. Not all the European precedents fit Iran, but some do. For example, we should be weaving a dense web of human contacts between Iranians and freer countries, as we did between the western and eastern halves of a divided Europe.
Our universities should invite their academics and students, who have often been in the vanguard of standing up for free speech and human rights in Iran. Our newspapers and journalism schools should bring over their journalists. Our trades unions should hitch up with their unionists, some of whom have organised major strikes. Our parliaments should establish links with their parliament which, though far from fully democratic, has been giving Ahmadinejad a rough ride.

Writers, artists and filmmakers should be encouraged to travel to and fro, carrying ideas in both directions. Women's movements in Iran, representing half the population systematically discriminated against, should be supported by women's movements in Europe. Iran's Islamic thinkers and jurists, both reformist modernisers and conservatives, should be engaged in dialogue by theologians and scholars from other faith traditions. All this should be done less by our governments than by our own societies, and not just by America and Britain - traditionally distrusted by many Iranians - but by all European countries, working separately and together. We need a European Iranpolitik.

Indeed. Channel 4 News has been broadcasting from Tehran all this week, and many of the reports on everyday life in both urban and rural Iran have been interesting and instructive, but I wish Jon Snow and the gang would give more attention to the likes of this.

An International Women's Day demonstration calling for women's rights is put down by armed policemen and the respectable chatter-left of the West is busy fretting over supermarkets. Now, I have no problem with castigating Tesco and other mega-chains (though I admit that the one down the street from me is fairly useful and time-saving), but sometimes I can't help but get the impression the Western middle-class left is more interested in lifestyle choices than human rights. These days, being a "liberal" or a "leftist" or whatever is about buying fair trade products, grumbling about Tesco and McDonald's, and constantly registering how you're just FLABBERGASTED at how silly America can be and how evil Israel is. It has nothing to do with serious principles, certainly nothing to do with a concern for human rights and human dignity. Humanistic and liberal concerns, by the way, are finding eloquent expression among brave women in Iran. And given the chatter-left's eschewal of genuine solidarity in favor of a self-important consumerism (albeit an "ethical shopping" consumerism), their message to the liberals, socialists, feminists, and political prisoners of Iran is: "can't be bothered."

Open the Gates

Christopher Hitchens is right on the money about Iran. Read the full article here: http://www.slate.com/id/2137560/

Some choice passages:

...our options are down to three: reliance on the United Nations/European Union bargaining table, a "decapitating" military strike, or Nixon goes to China. The first being demonstrably useless and somewhat humiliating, and the second being possibly futile as well as hazardous, it might be worth giving some thought to the third of these.
...
Assume that the Iranians are within measurable distance of nuclear status. Appearances sometimes to the contrary, they are not mad—or not clinically insane in the way that Saddam Hussein was and Kim Jong-il is. The recent fuss about the obliteration of Israel is largely bullshit: Ayatollah Khomeini's call for this has been intoned pedantically and routinely ever since he first uttered it, and it only got attention this year because of the new phenomenon of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the scrofulous engineer who acts the part of civilian president for his clerical bosses. These people (who once bought weapons from Israel via Oliver North in order to fight Saddam Hussein) are cynical and corrupt. They know as well as you do what would happen if they tried to nuke Israel or the United States. They want the bomb as insurance against invasion and as a weapon of strategic ambiguity to shore up their position in the region.

But they have a crucial vulnerability on the inside. The overwhelmingly young population—an ironic result of the mullahs' attempt to increase the birth rate after the calamitous war with Iraq—is fed up with medieval rule. Unlike the hermetic societies of Baathist Iraq and North Korea, Iran has been forced to permit a lot of latitude to its citizens. A huge number of them have relatives in the West, access to satellite dishes and cell phones, and regular contact with neighboring societies. They are appalled at the way that Turkey, for example, has evolved into a near-European state while Iran is still stuck in enforced backwardness and stagnation, competing only in the rug and pistachio markets. Opinion polling is a new science in Iran, but several believable surveys have shown that a huge majority converges on one point: that it is time to resume diplomatic relations with the United States.
...

So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need not add that they have also given some clerics monopoly positions in various black markets; the populace already knows this.) A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.


I agree that a military assault on Iran would be catastrophic and wildly counter-productive in terms of liberalization. A huge segment of the (mostly young) Iranian population is fed up with clerical rule; even more promising is the fact that they're pro-Western and even pro-American...meaning that if they were to define Iranian society on their terms it would be a much brighter picture all around. If the US launched an attack, it's obvious that the entire country--old religious conservatives and young liberals alike--would unite to defend their homeland and their sense of national pride.

Anyone who's ever been to a film festival or book festival knows that the Iranian diaspora, and Iran itself, are full of brilliant people. It's high time we tapped into the potential for a free exchange of ideas and talent.

Apologizing for past American crimes isn't a bad idea either. The coup the CIA organized against Mossadegh and the subsequent support of the Shah was a crime against the Iranian people of the most serious kind, as was the inciting of Saddam to invade, as was the crooked deal between the Reagan and North crowd, the Ayatollah, and the far-right Contras of Nicaragua. Yes indeed. Damn straight.

International Women's Day demonstration

David T at Harry's Place (I've been a silent reader of that one for too long) has alerted the world to a massively worthwhile cause to support tomorrow between the hours of 12 and 2 (and hopefully afterward):

The Worker-communist Party of Iran are holding a demonstration, 12 noon to 2pm, Parliament Square, London SW1, Wednesday 8 March:

No to sexual apartheid in Iran – Women’s freedom now
Condemn the Islamic regime of Iran for 27 years of crimes against women
Women’s rights – not Sharia law
End the death penalty for lesbianism and adultery
Don’t invade Iran - Halt all western military threats
Support the Iranian people’s struggle for democracy, social justice and human rights
Expel the Islamic regime from the international community

The Use and Abuse of Language

I think this small slice of poetry from Geoffrey Hill (the greatest English-language poet alive, I think) might offer some idea of what it is I value, and what I seek to write about in both political and cultural matters:

"Of the personality as a mask;
of character as self-founded, self-founding;
and of the sacredness of the person.

Of licence and exorbitance, of scheme
and fidelity; of custom and the want of custom;
of dissimulation; of envy

and detraction. Of bare preservation,
of obligation to mutual love;
and of our covenants with language

contra tyrannos. "


These words could of course be applied to plenty of things in matters cultural and political. You could say I'm above all concerned with what Hill (a man whose sensibility is essentially religious, though mine is not) calls "the sacredness of the person." I'm an unapologetic humanist, and so I oppose any policy that degrades humankind, that "devalues the person" as Saul Bellow's Herzog might say.

The grinding and horrible truth though, is that politics rarely offers such a simple choice between policies and actions that enhance human dignity, freedom, and potential and policies and actions that belittle and destroy those things. Politics isn't about keeping your soul pure; more often than not it's about making difficult decisions. And we all degrade ourselves in the process, though sometimes our messy, bloody decisions result in good things, an increase in human dignity, etc...

Which brings me to current affairs. In many positions I've taken recently, I could be called a member of the "pro-war left" or the "liberal hawks" or whatever you wish to call them. The likes of Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, Norman Geras, and the folks at Harry's Place should give you a much better idea of where I'm coming from.

I basically agreed with them about invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and like Tony Blair I thought any any argument for toppling Saddam Hussein was better than none, and I was convinced that a liberal, secular democracy would spring up rather quickly after the invasion. Of course we all know now how ridiculous and naive that last expectation was. The occupation of Iraq has been a disaster, partially due to the fumbling idiocy of the Bush administration and partially due to the fact that the Iraqi people have been brutalized and their tribal and sectarian hostilities exacerbated by a century of imperial meddling, then Ba'athist genocide and torture and tyranny, then a suicidal war with Iran, and then the supreme indignity of more than a decade of sanctions and starvation presided over by Saddam.

Michael Ignatieff has written perceptively about what happens when an artificially-constructed nation comprised of different ethnicites and tribes (like Yugoslavia) held together by a strongman tyrant and police-military apparatus with a monopoly on violence (like Tito and the Communist Party) dissolves into chaos precisely because that monopoly on violence--for whatever reasons--disappears. Saddam's secret police had a monopoly on violence in Iraq for decades; when other groups tried their hand at violence and revolt, like the Kurds in the late 80s or the Shias in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 war, they were bloodily and decisively suppressed. That is, they were murdered and their grievances were erased. The disappearance of Saddam's monopoly on all violence in Iraq has left a massive power vaccuum, and different factions are battling for supremacy. There is nothing mystical or perplexing about this. What's happening in Iraq right now is a power struggle, pure and simple, and it has little to do with religion. It's more about dominance.

The terrorist demolition of the gobsmackingly beautiful mosque in Samarra, and the subsequent calm and dignified response from most of Iraq's Shia population, does illustrate something important about this power stuggle, however. There is of course a real danger of Iraq sliding into a sectarian civil war, but I think reports from those on the ground suggest that most of the violence in Iraq is coming from various groups that associate themselves with the large Sunni minority that Saddam hailed from and used to "represent" in some perverse way. Some of them are Wahhabist jihadis led by Zarqawi (as they always usefully remind us in the small snuff-film industry they've set up), some are the remnants of Saddam's Ba'ath Party that can't get over their fall from power, and others are just Sunni folks who are acting out 1) their tribe prejudices, and 2) their hatred of the American-British occupation.

It is these Wahhabist and Ba'athist forces that murder children, behead hostages from human rights and peace organizations, destroy gorgeous centuries-old mosques, and fire on Shia funeral processions. Whatever one makes of the decision to go to war in the first place, it seems beyond contention that the Wahhabist-Baathist forces are serious criminals and reactionaries. To romanticize them as some kind of Third World national liberation front, or to celebrate them as "the resistance," or to explain away their actual motives and characteristics the way most of the centre-left press does today, is worse than fatuous.

Such a mentality lends legitimacy to these fascists, and effectively endorses the murder of Shias, Kurds, liberal Iraqis everywhere, and humans rights workers from countries that aren't even a part of the Coalition. Much of what the good folks at the Guardian and the Independent have to say about these noble "insurgents" amounts to a glib abuse of language. It's a shattering of what Geoffrey Hill might call "our covenants with language/ contra tyrannos." People who make their living by thinking, speaking, and writing should have more respect for precision, truth, and nuance than they appear to have. Speaking in lazy and easy shorthand is so much easier than actually taking a cold, hard look at the realities of Iraq and making judgements based on a real consideration. Most of our media prefer to draw readymade phrases and explanations out of a comfortable ideological line.

The cheapening and degradation of language--the breaking of our covenants with it--is of course the most effective tool of tyrants and demagogues. Which is why I'm just as virulently opposed to the Bush regime's grim sophistry over torture and detention-without-trial as to the Islington and Manhattan coteries' brainless appeasement of fascist tactics in the Sunni Triangle. Torture, it seems to me, can hardly ever be justifed. It's a moral absolute with me, I must confess. I'm like the country preacher who can't permit himself the thought of alcohol and rock music being okay: torture is just ALWAYS WRONG. The Bush administration's behavior has been a case of 'licence and exorbitance' of power, and that is always something to be militantly contested.

Which is why I'm puzzled that the bien-pensant left can't bring itself to make a big fuss about torture and mass murder in China, Sudan, Egypt, Iran, and elswhere when it seems perfectly capable of a good self-righteous, chest-beating tizzy over Guantanamo Bay. I suppose it has something to do with universal values...

As many people who read these kinds of blogs know, George Orwell wrote about what Geoffrey Hill calls "our covenants with language/ contra tyrannos." Orwell understood language as a way of apprehending and comprehending reality, and as a currency of common understanding and communication. It must be used precisely and clearly, and its ability to express difficult, complex realities that elude easy categorizations of media and politicians must be respected. It is an insult to language to use it as an easy shorthand. Doing so can be a lazy or pernicious evasion of its relationship to truth, and it conscripts our currency of words and insights into the service of a narrow creed or ideology. Orwell and Hill, in their very different ways, offer an alternative way of handling language, something quite removed from the serial abuse and cheapening that goes on in our newspapers, television, and political speeches.

I'll cut this post off here. Not all of my posts on this blog will be this long (most of them will be much shorter in fact), but thanks for reading if you've stuck with my rambling. I'll end it this way: that poem of Hill's comes from his recent book "Scenes from Comus," based on a masque by John Milton. In the midst of the Puritans' assault on free expression in print and theatre during the Commonwealth (of which he was a supporter, being anti-monarchist) Milton wrote this in his bracing defense of press freedom, the Areopagitica:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

Two words: Danish cartoons.

Hiya and Welcome

Greetings!

And, more importantly, congratulations. You, reader, are at present wallowing in the luxury and priveledge of reading the first-ever post on my blog. Hooray!

I suppose I could set out my political philosophy, offer a brief history of the positions I've taken in recent years about the war on terror, Israel-Palestine, Iraq and all that, and explain a bit about myself...but all that should become clear as this blog clunks along. I'll be writing quite a lot about the affairs of this global city, I predict, but my first love is literature and art so expect plenty of pretentious cultural navel-gazing. In short: this is a blog about the arts and humanities, culture, politics, the state of education in the Western world, history, ideas, beauty, horror, philosophy, religion, life in a big and wondrous city, boys, girls, animals, and senior citizens: all with a running commentary on current events that will hopefully be eccentric enough to attract two or so readers.

I should say that I'm an American living in London, currently pursuing a degree in Comparative Literature and Film Studies at one of the colleges of the University of London. That in itself isn't interesting; hopefully the transatlantic, international perspective on things will be.

Here we go!