The Norms of Civilised Debate
Update It's over at the Guardian blog too. I take the opportunity to remind Norm that if he wants to bring on topic the subject of people "ignoring the Iraqis and just wanting to say I told you so", then it is not necessarily going to reflect all that well on him and his mates.
Oh look. Norman Geras is having a go at me and Marc Mulholland. It's in this post, in the otherwise incomprehensible third paragraph on the "clever-clever approach". Norm has been ... reluctant to mention me by name for quite a while now, and he appears to be giving Marc the same treatment now. I can't speak for anyone else, but I am certainly weeping bitter tears over the snub. What a jolly grown up way for the Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester to behave.[1]
Given that he has had no less that nine months to gestate this one, (counting from the day I first made the point), it's not much of a show for the wait. The "clever clever" argument isn't "clever-clever" at all - it follows from the simple meaning of the words "pro" and "war", and Norman Geras has never responded to the actual argument made. But even if we take "pro-war" to be restricted to "pro the war in Iraq", I respond thus.
1) The Euston Manifesto says, twice that one of the things it is against, is anyone who thinks that the decision to go to war in Iraq should have political consequences for the people who made it. Specifically, it says once that the authors are not interested in "picking over the rubble"[2] of the intervention, and once that the authors "have no truck" with people who spend what the authors perceive to be too much time and energy on insisting on political consequences for the decision to fight a war in Iraq.
2) The Euston Manifesto does say that horrible regimes should be subject to intervention, and it does say that Iraq was such a regime.
3) Whatever the main drafters thought in 2003, as far as I can tell all of them are currently in favour of coalition troops remaining in Iraq, none of them have expressed an opinion against the US policy of increasing troop numbers in Iraq and as far as I can tell all of them were in favour of continuing to occupy Iraq at the time they wrote the Euston Manifesto. The war in Iraq is not actually over, whatever George Bush said about "major combat operations".
4) The simple fact that someone opposed the war in 2003 does not make them "anti war" for the rest of their life. Nick Cohen was against the liberation of Afghanistan at the time, but presumably Norm would not call him "an opponent of the war against the Taliban". Or maybe he would, I have no idea. I have had a bit of a look and as far as I can tell, all of the "anti war" members of the Euston Manifesto committee refer to their being "anti-war" in the past tense; "I was anti-war" rather than "I am anti-war".
5) That cricket analogy is just totally fucking meaningless[3]
So in other words, the document says that the Iraq War was the kind of war that left-wing people should presumptively support, that left wing people should not expend political energy in criticising the decision to fight the Iraq War, and that the troops currently occupying Iraq should stay there. To borrow a phrase, I have no truck with the tendency to pay lip service to the anti-war case, while devoting most of their energy to criticism of political opponents at home (supposedly responsible for every difficulty in Iraq), and observing a tactful silence or near silence about the lies told and the disastrous execution.
In other words, Eustonites, you're the pro war left. Everybody knows it. You're not fooling anybody. Wear it.
[1]Marc had the worst of this, as Norman wrote this post in which he said
"Why, I even used to discuss things with Marc Mulholland, until his blogging turned obsessive in a particular way that I've come to know and leave alone.".
I didn't speak up at the time, but in retrospect I think I should have and now I think I will. This was, in my opinion, utterly unfair in that Marc had not in fact pursued him more than twice for a straight answer to the straight question that he is only now answering, really quite disgusting in the slippery implied accusation that Marc was behaving like a loony, and a really bad example of the kind of behaviour that gets blogs a bad name. It is also really not fair dealing to tell your readers that you are addressing an argument made by "some people" without saying who they are, or providing a link so that people can see for themselves whether you're addressing a strawman.
.
[2] Yes, "picking over the rubble" is what the Euston Manifesto says about Iraq, and whoever came up with that phrase ought to be made to wear it like a crown of thorns until the day that the last bombed building in Iraq is rebuilt.
[3] Since I am a uniter rather than a divider, I will point out to "some people" (by which I mean Norman Geras, although I have decided to become too snooty to say so) that if your main audience is American, it might be a good idea to cut down on these cricketing analogies, as in my experience, Yanks tend to find them irritating rather than cute.
For some reason his banging on about the cricket and crowbarring it in at every opportunity pisses me off far more than anything else he writes.
ReplyDeleteYes, what James said. I'm a big cricket fan, but Geras's posts enthusing about cricket are almost as fatuous and irritating as his posts enthusing about war. His level of analysis is roughly at the level of Ron Manager.
ReplyDeleteYour argument about anti-war people not being anti-war because they are in favor of the continued presence of troops in Iraq (at the behest of the elected Iraqi government), does not hold water.
ReplyDeleteCircumstances change. Even if you felt the war was wrong, one could argue that it is imperative that the US fix the situation it has created. In fact, this is a common theme brought up in comment threads on this issue, and brought out in the comments in Norm's most recent piece.
One anti-war commentator holds the coalition responsible for the continued deaths of Iraqis - including those killed by insurgents (today children in a Mosque). If this is his real opinion, then it is beholden on the US to remain in Iraq - so long as the Iraqi government requires them to - since they should not be able to abdicate the responsibility for the mess their post-war planning has created.
You can argue about the pros and cons of the surge, but the principle that of reducing problems in Iraq is fully in line with discharging that responsibility. (Whether it will work or make things worse is a different judgment).
Let's think of it another way, imagine Iraq had had a Velvet Revolution overthrowing Saddam, leading to elections, which was then followed by a similar insurgency (Iranian involvement, Al Qaeda, ex-Saddamists, Sectarian Shiite Death squads). If the elected government had asked the UN for forces to help them in their fight, would it be the correct course of action to help them, and would it be in the long term interests of the international community to help them?
And isn't there a UN mandate to help Iraq now? Do we just ignore that?
Even if you felt the war was wrong, one could argue that it is imperative that the US fix the situation it has created.
ReplyDeleteYes. One would then have gone from being "anti war" to being "pro war", and then if having undergone this change of mind, one wrote a manifesto, it would be correctly described as "pro war", particularly if it was co-authored with a lot of people who'd been pro war from day one, and if it was in favour of more wars like Iraq. Call me mister dictionary guy here but this seems amazingly obvious.
If the elected government had asked the UN for forces to help them in their fight, would it be the correct course of action to help them, and would it be in the long term interests of the international community to help them?
Yes, potentially. In that circumstance I would be "pro war", and would not get shirty when people correctly identified me as such.
I am against knocking an apple pie off the kitchen table.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if you knock it off the table and I help you clean it up (and bake a new apple pie with you), does that mean I am in favor of knocking the apple pie off the table? Of course not.
It is quite obvious that the two varieties of "pro-war" you suggest cannot be considered the same - at least with regard to the initial decision to go to war. To conflate the two in this manner is illogical.
There are people who agreed with the war in Afghanistan, but who opposed the Iraq war. You would have a problem using your classification system to pin down their affiliation as pro-war or anti-war. Presumably, they are anti-war since that is the last position they held? It is hardly a sustainable argument based in reality.
Nor does the fact that the anti-war Euston Manifesto types accept the theory of a threshold for humanitarian intervention (as you have noted exists in the manifesto) mean that they have given retrospective support for the Iraq war. In the context of the marches of Feb 2003, they remain anti-war - unless they explicitly state that they have now revised their opinion and now say war was the correct course of action.
Have they? I bet they haven't. Have you an example of this?
However, there are other things they are doing (expressing a desire for Iraq to succeed regardless of the Bush administrations bumbling and feckless performance) and other things they are not doing (assuming the war was all about them).
You would have a problem using your classification system to pin down their affiliation as pro-war or anti-war.
ReplyDeleteNot at all really; I wold classify them according to whether they wanted to see more or fewer wars like Iraq, which is what pro- or anti- war really means, whatever Norman Geras says.
other things they are not doing (assuming the war was all about them).
Check out my "update". When it looked like the war was going better, it certainly was "all about them" and specifically all about them and their relationship with the SWP and Guardian Newspapers Ltd.
am against knocking an apple pie off the kitchen table.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if you knock it off the table and I help you clean it up (and bake a new apple pie with you), does that mean I am in favor of knocking the apple pie off the table?
To complete your analogy, you would need to tell our mother to stop scolding me for knocking the pie off the table and encourage me to carry on playing football in the kitchen. In general, I'd advise against taking Norman Geras as your model in constructing analogies; his method appears to be to give the name of a randomly selected thing and then state his conclusion again, and it doesn't really work.
When it looked like the war was going better, it certainly was "all about them" and specifically all about them and their relationship with the SWP and Guardian Newspapers Ltd.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure your update helps your case, since it underlines your own obsessive animus against certain individuals, Geras' charge, and still doesn't defend you against the claim that you are more interested in that than solidarity with the Iraqi people and government. A couple of those links I read were actually celebrating real issues (like elections), rather than being as you suggest " being all about them".
What have you done for them lately? Because I suspect they are disinterested in the argument you are having about Feb 2003. For despite the horrific situation in Iraq, the majority of Iraqis still think ousting Saddam was a good idea. The issue is how to go forward now, whether it be withdrawal or surge. Have you a positive contribution to make to that debate?
(This isn't exactly a poll that gives the coalition a glowing report either)
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep06/Iraq_Sep06_rpt.pdf
Anonymous, you now have to provide a name, please. If you're repeating Norman's "Obsessive" slur, I want you to confirm in so many words who you are. This is a relatively new policy on my blog but it is going to be enforced - only people who provide names get to sling insults. Further posts from you will be deleted, no matter what their content, unless you can comply with this simple request. I am not very good at distinguishing between anonymous commenters, so anybody else who wants to comment anonymously, think twice before you type 1000 words into that comments box.
ReplyDeleteYou certainly don't get to make high-handed demands of what "positive contribution" I have made to the debate. Look, I have made loads of positive contributions. "Don't invade, it will be a disaster", I said. "Get someone other than Chalabi to be the figurehead, he is not popular", I said. "Make sure that De-Baathification doesn't completely undermine the Iraqi state", I said. "Try and bring Sadr into the democratic process, his demand for early free elections is not actually that unreasonable", I said. "Don't let Basra become a de facto sharia state and fight harder against ethnic/religious gangsterism before if gets out of control", I said. Now guess what? I am fresh fucking out of positive suggestions and it is not my fault.
You will notice that while I was making them, my positive suggestions were all about specific courses of action that could have been taken. I didn't "express solidarity" or say "we must establish a secular democratic state", because these would have been meaningless windy proclamations. etc etc.
I was particularly annoyed by Norman Geras' nastily insinuating anathema - Mulholland "turned obsessive in a particular way that I've come to know and leave alone" - precisely because it was so imprecise. In the same post he proudly boasted about his courage in engaging with Ken McLeod, who argued against the War should be opposed even if it made things locally better because it would reinforce US imperialism. So Norman wasn't objecting to my attititude to the war - much closer to his view in this respect - per se.
ReplyDeleteOne doesn't need much familiarity with Decent-blogging to know what renders people actually persona non grata. It is racism and, particularly, anti-semitism. Many a reader with ears attuned will have assumed that this was my cardinal sin.
This is a revolting allegation to make even - or particularly - by wheedling implication. It is debased and, I need not add, totally without foundation. Since then, frankly, I've been of the opinion that Geras can stick his tedious lectures up his arse.
Revolting.
ReplyDeleteFrankly if all the decent left can do is slur people with racism or accusations of anti-semitism then they have nothing to say that is worthwhile listening to.
Marc, where did Geras' put forward the allegations that you were racist or anti-semitic? I'd be very interested to read the evidence for such an accusation. You should expose such twaddle on your blog!
Chris
Chris: the question is whether "turned obsessive in a particular way I've come to recognise" was meant to be a dog-whistle type of statement that maintained plausible deniability, while conveying the message to Norm's audience that what he was talking about was anti-Semitism.
ReplyDeleteI must admit that I didn't see this implication myself, but on the other hand, I'm not the target audience (and following Def Leppard in the 1980s has pretty much fucked my high frequency hearing). I think Marc does at least raise a possibility, and it can't be said to be totally out of character. It would, if true, explain one thing that is otherwise inexplicable, which is that Marc couldn't reasonably have been called "obsessive" in the normal sense of the word, having posted his question exactly once in the comments thread to Norm's post and once on his own blog.
The thing is that this now potentially rebounds and makes Norm look really really bad (as opposed to just really bad - it is certainly not as if it is OK to call a fellow academic an ordinary loony either). If he had been open in the first place rather than trying to achieve things with sneery and ambiguous insults, this would not have happened.
It could be that I'm being paranoid, but my irritation stems more from objective than subjective criteria. I'm afraid that a good number of readers would go - 'blimey, what did Mulholland do that what so terrible. He must have really gone beyond the Pale.' And a further sub-set will smell a whiff of the ultimate crime. Certainly previous Normblog excommunications from polite company - Lenin's Tomb for example - were on the grounds of unsavoury references to Norman Geras' antecedents.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I take it as slander by implication that Geras did not have the decency to define me out of that category.
Mind you, his extraordinarily mind-numbing and pedantic New Left Review polemic against a couple of Po-Mo post-Marxists in the 1980s kicked off with an astonishing ad hominen screed on how they had been personally bought off by the lucre of the wicked bourgeoisie. So playing the man rather than the ball is hardly new to the professor.
That essay also contains this bit:
ReplyDelete"I shall conclude by simply registering some of the more lamentable themes of this book [Hegemony & Socialist Strategy by Laclau and Mouffe] from professed (and so-recently-Marxist) radicals; themes which give reason to ponder just how far ‘post-’ is from straightforward anti-Marxism. First, there is deployment of a concept of ‘totalitarianism’ in its familiar Cold War sense as denoting something common to both ‘a politics of the “left”’ and fascism..."
I certainly don't think you're being paranoid. As I say, it happens to be the case that I didn't notice it, but I'm not always very observant and I always thought there was something weird about that episode.
ReplyDeleteVery sorry for bringing this up again by the way Marc; I wouldn't have brought your name into it at all except that I didn't want to implicitly claim sole authorship, and then I started thinking about the whole episode and got angry.
best,
dd
oh, I've no objection to being named. It's entertaining, also, to see Norm, normally an anti-relativist worthy of Lenin's Materialism and Empiro-Criticism, objecting to the idea that 'there was only a single truth about Iraq'.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure that Geras isn't doing a Sokal on the decents? Gradually he gets them to agree to more and more absurd statements, until eventually he pulls the rug out from under them?
ReplyDeleteSkimming through Geras' blog to see if he'd responded to any of this (unsurprisingly not - presumably it will be another nine months until that happens), I note a semi-approving link to a Tim Blair post. Now, Tim Blair is not a blogger I'd even thought about for about two years until Geras' post reminded me of his existence. While I could understand (while disagreeing with) the pro-war left making common cause with the overseas hard right when Decency was at its zenith in 2003, what kind of political sympathies does one have to harbour to still be reading Tim Blair, and still be sort of agreeing with him, in 2007?
ReplyDeleteIt would be great if Tim Blair was either the nastiest or the looniest person to be approvingly linked to on Normblog (the cast list for his weekly "profile" has had some lulus in it too). If I end up doing a post on the Cohen book, then since his central thesis is that the evvil libberalsses "failed to disassociate themselves" from George Galloway, I think a little forensic analysis of exactly who the Euston Manifesto Group allow to chuck their name about might be in order.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I've noticed, and may be reading too much into: I note he refers to the description 'decents' as 'contemptuous'. This seems odd, as while it's certainly become a pejorative term, it isn't so much 'contemptuous' - with connotations of a possibly irrational hatred - as mocking. The appeal of the 'decent' label to me is that it nails the Decent movement in its absurdity, not because I find it contemptible (though I often do).
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether Geras genuinely thinks 'Decents' is a label of contempt, or if it simply suits his purposes to pretend so to his readers.
"If the elected government had asked the UN for forces to help them in their fight, would it be the correct course of action to help them, and would it be in the long term interests of the international community to help them?
ReplyDeleteYes, potentially. In that circumstance I would be "pro war", and would not get shirty when people correctly identified me as such."
Your faith that the UN would actually do anything if asked is heartening, if misguided. This is an institution that spent weeks discussing the semantics of the word genocide while thousands of people were massacred in Rwanda. I am unsure which is more immoral, the action of the US government in attacking Iraq or the inaction of the UN over Rwanda.
Your faith that the UN would actually do anything if asked is heartening, if misguided
ReplyDeleteYour attempt at sarcasm, based on my hypothetical reaction to a fucking hypothetical example of your own construction, is on the otherhand misguided and not heartening. If you had a mind to fuck off and not come back, don't let me stop you.
Fuck mine! What was hypothetical about Rwanda and the UN's inaction? I happen to feel WAY more shirty about that abrogation of morality than the decision to invade Iraq.
ReplyDeleteI somehow thought a man who loathed decision by committee would be actively against the likes of institutions like the UN.
"If the elected government had asked the UN..." comes from a hypothetical example posted by an anonymous commenter. dsquared's answering the question doesn't seem to demonstrate any faith that in the hypothetical situation the UN would do anything. I'm sure that if he had answered "I don't think the UN would do anything in that situation" he'd have been accused of dodging the question.
ReplyDeleteOK, maybe it doesn't demonstrate any faith that the UN would actually do anything.
ReplyDeleteIt does strongly imply faith in the institution that is the UN and the ability of the Security Council, essentially a committee, to make a judgement on whether to go to war. I am confused by the double standard from a man who so obviously loathes decision making by committee.
Well (presumably Mr. Squared could clarify this if he cares too, but he may well not) the hypothetical says the elected gov't requests aid. So it's not just the UN making the decision. In fact the answer looks to me something like "I would think that the UN should comply with the request."
ReplyDeleteEh? If an elected government requests intervention by the UN, this would require a meeting of the Security Council to a make a decision.
ReplyDeleteIt would still be war by committee. The question remains why committees are such egregiously bad mechanisms for making decisions on such things as local government spending, but fine for making judgements on military interventions.
OK, I don't really care about this issue either, but it seemed to me that the answers were compatible with "I would support war under those circumstances, but the UN Security Council probably wouldn't be able to make the decision to go to war, because bloody committees always fuck up the decision." This is assuming that the war itself wouldn't be run by the Security Council, as far as I know the UN runs peacekeeping missions but not actual wars.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the alternative to a committee of some sort making the decision to go to war seems to be some lone lunatic somewhere making that decision -- which seems to be pretty much what happened with the current Gulf War, for all that Bush listened to anyone who didn't support what he already wanted to do -- and I reckon that's not a good way to make these decisions either. I have no opinion about local government spending.