Peter Watt
A few years ago, the sanctimonious Tony Blair lectured us on the new era of “humanitarian” intervention. Now we would be “fighting not for territory but for values,” he proclaimed. The governments of Western nations, spearheaded by Britain and the United States, in an about turn, had decided that old-fashioned imperialism was simply out-of-date. Enlightened countries could no longer merely oppress, kill and exploit the world’s needy into liberation. They needed to modernise. In the enlightened 1990s military intervention could only be justified on humanitarian grounds. Racism was out, human rights were in. Anything else wouldn’t fit with the vacuous image Blair’s PR team concocted of “Cool Britannia.”
The shift, of course, had nothing to do with a brave new era of concern for the world’s oppressed. Rather, it was the recognition that the neo-imperial powers would have to dress up military action in comfortable liberal language in order to deceive the population to believe the next imperial intervention was justified. Unfortunately, the dim-witted and indignant public just doesn’t think much of going to war. Yet spending on PR does provide some dividends, as was proved by the NATO escapade in Serbia. Journalists accepted the Blairite rhetoric – despite its evident contradictions – and parroted them on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 news and in the print media. Leaving aside the fact that NATO action actually made the humanitarian catastrophe worse, the same journalists were blind to the paradox that if the enlightened powers were compelled to act in Serbia, they were not in East Timor where a third of the population had been killed with US/UK support. In the mainstream media it just wouldn’t do to mention such inconvenient facts.
Similarly, when the US/UK coalition bombed Afghanistan, it was for Afghanistan’s own good, we were supposed to believe. Journalists repeated the doctrine and suddenly discovered a hitherto concealed compassion for the women of that country. Writer Arundhati Roy observed sardonically that Bush, Rumsfeld, Blair and company all of a sudden had become feminists! And then, Iraq. When the justifications for war ran out, exposed for the lies they were, the imperial powers could always turn to humanitarian intervention. Amazingly, in the media, there are still slaves to this pathetic dogma, who claim, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, that Iraq is better off than it was pre-invasion and that Iraqis are truly savouring the fruits of our Western “democracy.” A simple test to determine whether or not the Western powers are willing to intervene for humanitarian reasons is revealing. This has been missed, ignored and avoided in the mainstream media, so let’s spell it out. Surely, if ‘we’ intervened in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq to save those people from violence and oppression, ‘we’ should intervene in Lebanon to stop the indiscriminate killing of civilians and decimation of the infrastructure.
Yet the response of Blair and Bush has been to rule out any chance of a ceasefire, although Hezbollah has offered one if Israel stops its bombardment and releases kidnapped prisoners. This is not what Bush and Blair want, and it would be foolish to take seriously Condoleeza Rice’s gormless ruminations about wanting peace because the invasion of Lebanon is paid for by the United States itself. The US lavishes Israel with $15 million in military aid every single day and the arms, tanks and missiles that are being used to destroy Lebanon come directly from the US, courtesy of the taxpayer. It is now the fourth largest military power in the world with a huge nuclear arsenal – no small achievement for a country about the size of New Jersey. With friends like the government of the United States can anyone seriously believe that Israel is going to get pushed into the sea?
America’s proxy army in Israel is propped up and armed to the hilt up by the same people who claim to champion peace and democracy. Blair longs for peace, he tells us, but says that it would be wrong to stop the shipment of arms to Israel from the US and continues to authorise the use of Prestwick airport in order to lend a hand in the new arm of America’s war. Blair claims a ceasefire must be achieved soon to stop the suffering but lends his undying support to the war’s principal aggressors. War is peace indeed. As long as this goes on, the message from Rice, Bush and holier-than-thou Mr Blair is that any ceasefire will have to wait. “If the ceasefire is not on both sides,” he warns, “Israel will continue to take action. That’s the reality.” Israel, he and Bush remind us, has a right to defend itself. Implicit in this reversal of reality is the view that Palestine and Lebanon don’t possess that same right although the crimes against the two countries, spanning several decades, are incomparably worse. Given that the broader context of the 50 year long Israeli occupation of Palestine – oppression and murder of its people, destruction of its infrastructure, stealing of its natural resources, torture and imprisonment of thousands who have never received trial, cantonisation of its land – is considered irrelevant and cast aside by Blair and the media. Israel merely defends itself from irrational Islamo-fascists. Even is this were true, the vast majority of those killed have been civilians and not members of Hezbollah.
So much for humanitarian intervention. Remember the urgency with which Blair and company wanted you to believe that NATO forces had to intervene in Serbia? In his speeches the prime-minister pushed for “a new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated,” and “for a world where those responsible for such crimes have nowhere to hide.” In 1999, Blair warned, “We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and children from humanitarian catastrophe.” So why is Blair’s standard inapplicable to Arabs? Remember how the media repeatedly warned that to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in the Balkans, ‘we’ had to do something? Remember the purported humanitarian motives for coalition forces bombing Afghanistan and for occupying Iraq? How often have you seen, in our free and open media, that most radical suggestion that human rights are either everybody’s or nobody’s? How often has a parallel been made with other crises – where ‘we’ supposedly intervened for the sake of human rights – and that therefore ‘we’ must now? How often has the question been raised by supine BBC journalists – like Huw Edwards, whose fawning interview with Israeli ex-prime minister Barak the other night on the 10 o’clock news was as insipid as it was revealing about pro-Israeli bias at the BBC – that either international law applies to everyone or it applies to no-one? Evidently, it does not apply to Israel, the US and Britain just as human rights are inapplicable to Palestinians and Lebanese. With over 800 Lebanese dead, that makes the total killed equivalent to around fifteen times the number of people killed in London in July last year. Over 3,000 wounded and almost a million people displaced. How many more Arabs will have to be killed to equal the respect and mourning afforded those Britons killed on 7/7 before enough outrage is felt to stop the unspeakable tragedy of Lebanon? How many more to equal 9/11?
Now that a force is needed to stop the Israeli slaughter of civilians and destruction of Lebanese infrastructure, there’s little talk of intervening. These are complex issues, we’re constantly told, by the likes of Louise Ellman, MP and vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, as she reversed history on Channel 4 news last night. For Ellman, the only crimes that count are those of Hezbollah or Hamas – Israel by definition is exempt, as it’s an ally of the West. “Complex issues” is government newspeak for, “we’re not going to anything about it” – and so the killing will continue. The Middle East is too “complex,” which really means that the interests of global political power are at stake, so best forget about human rights, albeit “regrettably.”
Just as the humanitarian West deliberates over its next PR initiative on how to stall condemnation for its inaction, the UN’s lacklustre response hardly bears much hope. The UN offices in Beirut were attacked because the UN is seen (quite accurately) as a tool of the United States, afraid to offend America and Israel, rendering it impotent in this time of great crisis.
“Humanitarian” intervention, just like its predecessor, imperialism, is a political force. When it is politically expedient to do so, the West must intervene to save lives, no matter – “regrettably” – how many innocent people die. For the rulers of the world, the people of Lebanon represent little political capital. The goals of the Western powers to fully control and take over the Middle East cannot be secured by halting Israel’s aggression against the country. On the contrary, the primary agent of this war is the government of the United States, backed up by its faithful lapdog, Great Britain.
And so to Blair’s latest pronouncement, the “arc of extremism.” Like the “axis of evil,” such pronouncements would elicit hilarity were the consequences of the actual policies not so brutal. Of course, Blair is highly selective in his choice of extremism. He evidently sees no extremism in the Saudi regime, which he actively supports, but then there’s a lot of oil there. No extremism in the occupation of Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan – that’s humanitarian intervention, not extremism. Neither is there an arc of extremism in Israel’s 50 year long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, who now see only 22% of their land not occupied by Israel. The maiming of Lebanese civilians and the destruction of their homes and their country’s infrastructure is not extremism. “Disproportionate,” perhaps, but nothing as vulgar as extremism.
There was a good reason why the UN last year could not agree on a clear definition of terrorism – the activities of states participating in mass-scale terror such as the United States, Britain and Israel might be included in such a definition. Because if it’s terror to kill innocent civilians in New York, London, Madrid or Israel it’s also terrorism to kill them in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Lebanon. To a child, this might seem like simple logic – in the media and the political sphere, it’s a “complex issue.”
Still, many people are refusing to buy the empty Blairite rhetoric about humanitarianism, democracy and the “arc of extremism” even if columnists at the “left-wing” Guardian and The Independent and CNN-style TV journalists still take such lofty pronouncements seriously. Some of those people will take to the streets this Saturday to demonstrate against the brutal assault against Lebanon and the ongoing apartheid occupation of Palestine.
Despite the new language and the new PR, parallels to the Bushite and Blairite nightmare for the world leap out at us from the past. At the respective pinnacles of their power, the European imperial powers – Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, France and Britain – all embraced an ideology based on racial superiority. The lives of colonial subjects were simply considered of less value than those of their European masters. Without that conceptualisation, division and hierarchy of human beings, the European colonial projects would have found it more difficult to justify the taking over and exploitation of vast tracts of the globe. The terms “humanitarian intervention” and “democracy” have replaced colonialism and imperialism, but the racism – particularly now against Arabs – is still palpable, to say the least. The underlying message from Blair, Bush and their Oxbridge educated media courtesans is one of racist contempt for the unpeople of the Middle East, whose deaths they claim are “regrettable,” but not to the extent that they will curb their neo-imperial ambitions. Looking at the gruesome images of dead children killed by Israel’s bombs amid the rubble, I reflect that any one of them could have been my own two-year old daughter. She, who by virtue of a natal lottery was born in the West and not in expendable Lebanon, is spared the horror.
How dare the politicians and the media talk of justice and democracy when our own government’s real role in the world is one of murderous and brutal invasions and direct support for the terror unfolding daily in Lebanon and Palestine. Now more than ever, a strong anti-war movement is needed to halt the unadulterated political and military power of the West and Israel.
