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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 6, 2002
An honest coward
"I've had a good look at the U.S. Air Force and a good think about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and I'm going to stay out of it. This is between Bush and Saddam and the farther I can get away the better." So wrote a European friend German no less about the impending war in the Middle East or rather the most likely next front in that war. (You never know where a Scud may land this afternoon or what the recipient may do about it.) While at first sight his remark had the throwaway plausibility that I've come to expect from "liberal" people (our North American term: but here was a man who hadn't even voted for Gerhard Schroeder); at second sight it seemed almost sane. I imagine it is the secret thought of many millions of people who aren't much concerned with politics or diplomacy dislike the idea of war and whose interest in personal security comes to mind only when walking at night through a rough neighbourhood. But my correspondent is not a member of that large club. He is instead politically informed and interested prepared to hear arguments for a "just war" and I suspect even capable of personal bravery for I saw him stand up to a thug once who was threatening unpleasantness in a Mainz tavern. Nor so far as I can detect does he have anything against the United States at least anything much. He sneers at Disneyland; but so do I and the careful reader of my scribbling will not accuse me of anti-Americanism. Sanity is often contextual and my attribution of sanity to this German gentleman is in honour of all these qualities above. For as I know from other correspondence few people who actually read newspapers can stay out of the Iraq imbroglio. They feel called upon to have an opinion; or having an opinion feel called upon to justify it in some way. Hence the great quantity of almost unbelievably indefensible nonsense that has been presented on the issue especially in the media. So much that it actually influences the course of events. The most obvious example is the effort the Bush administration has made to take its demands on the Saddam regime through the United Nations. This could not possibly have happened had not there been a known very large constituency of reasonably articulate people who think the U.N. has some kind of legitimacy -- moral as well as legal -- in world affairs. But the idea is ridiculous. The great majority of members of the General Assembly are dictatorships of one kind or another many of those fairly murderous. This is a fact casually acknowledged by most opponents of U.S. pre-emption in Iraq for the first question they ask is Why Saddam? What makes him special? The Security Council reflects this disorder in microcosm but the evil there is enhanced by the provision of five vetoes among states that include the regime of still-Communist China the erstwhile butchers of Tiananmen Square. That the world's smelliest despots do in fact contrive to advance or defend their common interests within the organization was most recently shown in the nomination of Libya -- among the world's worst violators of human rights -- to the chairmanship of the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission. By comparison other international organizations such as the OECD and NATO -- the targets of routine moral posturing by the smarm set -- at least have the virtue of respectable members. Here we have democracies consulting among themselves about what to do economically militarily and otherwise in a world where democracy and the rule of law are not universal. The idea that decent law-abiding bourgeois democracies should defer judgement in matters of life and death to a majority of states in a Chamber of Horrors on the principle of "one country one vote" is among the more crack-brained moral theses even from the left of the political spectrum. And yet people subscribe to it without further thought and media editors take it for granted. Two reasons for this: one simple and one slightly involved. The simple reason is that people who don't happen to be American and even some of those compulsively dislike the U.S. government no matter how legitimate it may be. It is the usual human envy and resentment for the inheritor of wealth and power and like every other human foible it must dress itself up for the mirror. Hence the demand for "equality": and since we can think of no way to raise ourselves up we propose to bring the giant down humble him somehow to our condition. The phrase begins I'm not anti-American, but ... and will continue with any number of accusations that come immediately to mind. And it is only when we suddenly discover ourselves in need of the giant's help that we find ourselves looking on his better side. To anyone who "honestly thinks" the U.S. government or the people who elect it must be inherently worse than those of any other bourgeois democracy I say: you are demented. Either emigrate or learn to be contented with citizenship in a smaller country and try to make that one better. We may well have a few things to teach the Americans but it is up to them to learn; for our part do we learn what they can teach us? (About taking responsibility for a start.) The other reason for this strange infatuation with the United Nations is more complexly ideological. It is what remains of "socialist internationalism" which never did make very fine moral distinctions. The belief is that the larger governmental unit is by definition and always more legitimate than the smaller -- and more "democratic" since it contains more people. Thus provinces are preferred to municipalities the federal government to provinces and "world government" to federal for whatever purpose -- usually some social engineering scheme. And once again the idea goes without thinking; for the implications of it are horrendous. So returning to my German friend here is what I like about his position. It is genuinely neutral even if as I am persuaded it is neutral between good and evil. He does not feel the need to excuse the worse party nor condemn the better by way of self-justification. He only wants to get out of the way. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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