The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn

[Briar]

Brilliantly clear-sighted and inescapably bleak...


The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn


The wider conflict now engulfing Iraq lays bare the absurdity of liberal interventionism - and the decline of US power

John Gray

The era of liberal interventionism in international affairs is over. Invading Iraq was always in part an oil grab. A strategic objective of the Bush administration was control of Iraqi oil, which forms a key portion of the Gulf reserves that are the lifeblood of global capitalism. Yet success in this exercise in geopolitics depended on stability after Saddam was gone, and here American thinking was befogged by illusions. Both the neoconservatives who launched the war and the many liberals who endorsed it in the US and Britain took it for granted that Iraq would remain intact.

As could be foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, things have not turned out that way. The dissolution of Iraq is an unalterable fact, all too clear to those who have to cope on the ground, that is denied only in the White House and the fantasy world of the Green Zone. American-led regime change has created a failed state that no one has the power to rebuild. Yesterday's Oxfam report revealed that nearly one in three Iraqis is in need of emergency aid, and yet the anarchy that prevails prevents any such assistance.

Iraq now belongs in the history books, and Mesopotamia - the ancient region between the Tigris and Euphrates that includes parts of Turkey, Iran and Syria as well as the country that has been destroyed - is the site of an intensifying resource war. The Baghdad government is a battleground of sectarian forces while the Kurdish zone is independent in all but name. Utopian schemes for a federal state have been overtaken by an internal resource war fought out along sectarian lines.

Anarchy of this kind is a hideous condition in which to live, but its destructive impact reaches beyond the millions of Iraqis whose lives are already ruined. The surrounding states are being irresistibly drawn into the country's conflicts. Both Iran and Turkey have an interest in Iraq's oil wealth - Iran by virtue of having expanded its power and influence over the Shia majority, Turkey from fear that control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk will pass into the hands of the Kurds. Such states can hardly avoid intervening and will not be deterred from acting to safeguard what they see as their vital national interests by threats from the Bush administration. Iraq is at risk of becoming the centre of a wider war, which the US can do very little to prevent - which shows up the lack of proportion in comparing the present conflict with Vietnam.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2138064,00.html

[shenmue]

1. "Liberal interventionism"?

Since when is George Bush a liberal?

:shrug:

[bemildred]

2. This fellow is British.

Tony Blair is a Liberal, in UK parlance. And in the larger historical context, he is correct also. It is political propaganda in the USA that has led to distorted meanings of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in this nation. Bush is a reactionary.

[Briar]

3. Bizarrely

Bliar is not a liberal in UK parlance, but a member of the Labour Party (now corrupted by him and his cronies) and a christian socialist! Socialists would disown him: christians apparently don't. Depressing in itself. Liberal interventionism is a term also espoused by the former leftists behind the "Euston Manifesto". I suspect we need to find a new place on the political spectrum for these fellows and their policies - and it will be neither liberal nor leftist.

There's also a wing of liberalism which has to do with free trade, libertarianism (as much to do with the reactionary right as with liberals proper), the free market and so on. I suspect it is from here that some of the liberal interventionist b... er... cr... er, rubbish derives.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Blair himself uses the term

Like it or loathe it, after 10 years Blair knows exactly what he stands for


Sitting in the Downing Street garden, I ask him what is the essence of Blairism in foreign policy. 'Liberal interventionism'

...

This is crisply articulated, but hardly original. Most prime ministers over the last 40 years would have agreed. So what is the distinctive feature of Blair's own approach? What is the essence of Blairism? His answer could not be clearer: "It is liberal interventionism." Blairism is, he elaborates, about a progressive view of the world, starting from the reality of interdependence in an age of globalisation, and acting according to certain values. "I'm a proud interventionist." He would not withdraw anything he said in his 1999 Chicago speech, with its liberal interventionist "doctrine of international community". Even if it is true, as I suggest, that the Bush administration is rowing backwards from its advocacy of democratisation as a central plank of its foreign policy, he is not: "Whether they do or not, I don't."

That includes Iraq. The overwhelming majority of ordinary Iraqis want peace and democracy, but they are being sabotaged by "external players" - he mentions Iran and al-Qaida - plus "a minority of internal extremists". Isn't it a nightmare for him that he'll spend the rest of his life answering questions about Iraq? No, that seems to him perfectly reasonable, but "when people say 'Iraq will determine everything', the answer is: it depends what happens." So are they wrong to argue that the situation in Iraq will determine the verdict on his foreign policy? No, it was certainly "a major dimension" of it; but it is too soon to say how Iraq will turn out. History will tell.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2065453,00.html

Of course, in domestic affairs, Blair regard 'liberal' as an insult:

Today's strategy is the culmination of a journey of change both for progressive politics and for the country. It marks the end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order.

The 1960s saw a huge breakthrough in terms of freedom of expression, of lifestyle, of the individual's right to live their own personal life in the way they choose. It was the beginning of a consensus against discrimination, in favour of women's equality, and the end of any sense of respectability in racism or homophobia. Not that discrimination didn't any longer exist - or doesn't now - but the gradual acceptance that it was contrary to the spirit of a new time. Deference, too, was on the way out and rightly. It spoke to an increasing rejection of rigid class divisions.

All of this has survived and strengthened in today's generation. But with this change in the 1960s came something else, not necessarily because of it but alongside it. It was John Stuart Mill who articulated the modern concept that with freedom comes responsibility. But in the 1960's revolution, that didn't always happen. Law and order policy still focussed on the offender's rights, protecting the innocent, understanding the social causes of their criminality. All through the 1970s and 1980s, under all Governments, a key theme of legislation was around the prevention of miscarriages of justice. Meanwhile some took the freedom without the responsibility. The worst criminals became better organised and more violent. The petty criminals were no longer the bungling but wrong-headed villains of old; but drug pushers and drug-abusers, desperate and without any residual moral sense. And a society of different lifestyles spawned a group of young people who were brought up without parental discipline, without proper role models and without any sense of responsibility to or for others. All of this was then multiplied in effect, by the economic and social changes that altered the established pattern of community life in cities, towns and villages throughout Britain and throughout the developed world.

Here, now, today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus. People do not want a return to old prejudices and ugly discrimination. But they do want rules, order and proper behaviour. They know there is such a thing as society. They want a society of respect. They want a society of responsibility. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge; where those that play by the rules do well; and those that don't, get punished.

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6129.asp

[bemildred]

5. Yes, you are right, my mistake. Thank you for correcting me.

I was thinking as I wrote it I should check on my terminology. Sigh.

Although I stand by the general idea of what "liberal" means in geopolitics, which is roughly economic imperialism, by way of contrast with political imperialism (having overt colonies).

[SteppingRazor]

6. Liberal interventionism is actually correct usage.

Iraq may be a bad example of it, but you have to look at it in terms of what liberal and conservative traditionally stand for. Conservatives, in bygone days, always stood for avoiding unnecessary foreign entanglements. That view has gone by the wayside in our modern, globalized world. When you think "liberal interventionism," think Woodrow Wilson, for example. The conservatives of his day were the ones that were against the war.

[Briar]

7. So

that works in the US. Did the term originate there? Did Bliar just adopt it? As Muriel says, he wouldn't otherwise call himself liberal in our terms!

[SteppingRazor]

8. Actually, in the rest of the world...

liberalism and conservatism still stand for a lot of the same things they used to. It's us that changed, not the British.