runs with scissors
08-17-2009, 11:21 PM
This article is about the British anti-war movement. The whole thing is worth reading.
[div class="excerpt"]Wednesday 15 July 2009
Tim Black
............
As the ever growing tapestry of reasons for the British presence in Afghanistan has unravelleled, so the anti-war movement has picked up the thread, turning each of the ruling class’s failures into anti-war victories. ‘[The invasion of Afghanistan] was originally launched by George Bush and Tony Blair’, German writes on her Stop the War Coalition blog, ‘in order to capture Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Its other justification was humanitarian intervention, including Laura Bush and Cherie Blair calling for war to help liberate women. None of these aims has been even remotely successful’. As for later arguments that it is part of a war on British-based terrorism or that is about protecting democracy, German is simply sceptical: ‘These arguments might have more purchase if the war were a few months old, but it has been going on for eight years.’
Here, the reasons for the war are opposed not on principle but on account of their failure. If these putative aims had been ‘remotely successful’ would that have been okay? Would the war have been justified if women had been ‘liberated’ or if bin Laden had been captured? What there is here by the way of political opposition amounts to little more than an exploitation of Western failure. It is defeatism posturing as political argument.
Little wonder that many placards and chants at Monday’s demonstration merely echoed the broader, national mood of please-bring-our-boys-home defeat. A Stop the War letter delivered to Downing Street captured this sentiment, beginning, not with an attack on the government’s pro-interventionist policy, but with the ‘tragic deaths’ of 15 soldiers in the past week, three of whom, we are told, ‘were barely 18 years old’. Writing in the Mirror, German concluded: ‘This is a pointless conflict and that is why the deaths of these young soldiers are tragic because they are not fighting to defend their country… Many of the soldiers killed in the past few days were teenagers with their whole lives ahead of them.’
In the absence of an argument from political principle, it is fitting that critics of the war in Afghanistan should fall back upon mawkish rhetoric. Whether it is ‘our boys’ or the Afghan people, the anti-war argument seems incapable of seeing those involved in the conflict as anything other than victims, objects of oil-questing forces beyond their control. Aside from highlighting the futility of the conflict, the anti-war movement can offer nothing. There is no defence of, indeed no recognition of, self-determination, and conversely no critique of the Western interventionist creed that led to and legitimised the invasion in the first place. The call to ‘bring the troops home’ stems from a sense that their presence can only make a horrific mess worse. This is a world away from saying that they should never have been there at all.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7153/[/quote]
waaah, waaah, waaah
Bring Our Boys Home
...and Us, Too
[div class="excerpt"]Wednesday 15 July 2009
Tim Black
............
As the ever growing tapestry of reasons for the British presence in Afghanistan has unravelleled, so the anti-war movement has picked up the thread, turning each of the ruling class’s failures into anti-war victories. ‘[The invasion of Afghanistan] was originally launched by George Bush and Tony Blair’, German writes on her Stop the War Coalition blog, ‘in order to capture Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Its other justification was humanitarian intervention, including Laura Bush and Cherie Blair calling for war to help liberate women. None of these aims has been even remotely successful’. As for later arguments that it is part of a war on British-based terrorism or that is about protecting democracy, German is simply sceptical: ‘These arguments might have more purchase if the war were a few months old, but it has been going on for eight years.’
Here, the reasons for the war are opposed not on principle but on account of their failure. If these putative aims had been ‘remotely successful’ would that have been okay? Would the war have been justified if women had been ‘liberated’ or if bin Laden had been captured? What there is here by the way of political opposition amounts to little more than an exploitation of Western failure. It is defeatism posturing as political argument.
Little wonder that many placards and chants at Monday’s demonstration merely echoed the broader, national mood of please-bring-our-boys-home defeat. A Stop the War letter delivered to Downing Street captured this sentiment, beginning, not with an attack on the government’s pro-interventionist policy, but with the ‘tragic deaths’ of 15 soldiers in the past week, three of whom, we are told, ‘were barely 18 years old’. Writing in the Mirror, German concluded: ‘This is a pointless conflict and that is why the deaths of these young soldiers are tragic because they are not fighting to defend their country… Many of the soldiers killed in the past few days were teenagers with their whole lives ahead of them.’
In the absence of an argument from political principle, it is fitting that critics of the war in Afghanistan should fall back upon mawkish rhetoric. Whether it is ‘our boys’ or the Afghan people, the anti-war argument seems incapable of seeing those involved in the conflict as anything other than victims, objects of oil-questing forces beyond their control. Aside from highlighting the futility of the conflict, the anti-war movement can offer nothing. There is no defence of, indeed no recognition of, self-determination, and conversely no critique of the Western interventionist creed that led to and legitimised the invasion in the first place. The call to ‘bring the troops home’ stems from a sense that their presence can only make a horrific mess worse. This is a world away from saying that they should never have been there at all.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7153/[/quote]
waaah, waaah, waaah
Bring Our Boys Home
...and Us, Too