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Dear all, I think that we need to think about internationalist rhetoric, and how we use it. It's a potent weapon in the hands of both sides of the sanctions debate, as Cook, Blair and Hain regularly demonstrate. Below is something that I wrote about it a few months ago, and I've not really changed my mind since. It's an extract from a Green Left pamphlet called 'Back to the Future', which you can order for £1.50 from jmorrissey@grnleft.demon.co.uk. Incidentally, I don't think the issue of Israel's nuclear arsenal should be conflated with the issue of whether or not Jewish people have rights. Best wishes Chris [Below, 'SDR' = Labour's 1998 Strategic Defence Review] 5. Amnesty International With Rockets: the justification NATO's spokesman during the Kosova war got his PhD in History for a study of the way that the belligerent powers in World War One justified themselves to intellectuals. As old communists would say: 'this is not a co-incidence'. Every war fought by an advanced capitalist country in the last 150 years has always had a group of liberal cheer-leaders, ready to explain why, even though all the previous conflicts might have been wrong, this one is 'the first moral war'. It is like those 'Peanuts' cartoons, where Lucy held the football for Charlie Brown to kick. Each time she convinced him that this time she wouldn't pull it away at the last miunte. Each time, she did. Each time, the liberal intellectuals come to a grudging conclusion some years later, that maybe the Gulf War wasn't fought to usher in a new era of democracy and freedom, for instance. Ruling groups are well aware of the need to dress up their nationalism in the clothes of internationalism. The idea that NATO can fight a 'moral war' for 'humanitarian ends' is dangerous in the same way that patriotism or communalism are dangerous - because they do have a certain appeal. It would be nice if all this expensive overwhelming force really was being used to selectively kill the bad guys. We want our taxes to be financing a crusade, rather than paying for selfish aggrandisement. But we need to remember the first useage of the word 'crusade'. Interventions have always been presented as defending a nice person (those White Russians, for instance, or the lovely Greek Royalists, or the Kenyan settlers, or those useful Kuwaiti Al-Sabahs) from nastiness both general and specific. According to the SDR, the British armed forces are now going to be 'a force for good'. As Mandy Rice-Davies once remarked, 'They would say that, wouldn't they?' Illustrative examples were peppered throughout the SDR press releases. The new modifications to the software in Nimrod aircraft will help them do things like look for refugees in East Africa. We're going to train the South African Army. That's nice: the training given to the armies of the feudal Gulf states doesn't seem to feature in the PR. International Lynch law The Kosova war was a turning point for New Labour because it marked a U-turn in their policy towards international law. Before the illegal intervention, they had been consistently advocating an international order based on a binding court of justice, and intervention according to the UN Charter. Both these proposals were being opposed by the US. Labour had also been co-operating with attempts to bring Pinochet to justice. The use of War Crimes indictments is not even-handed. Only the paranoid think that 'they' are reading everything we send and tapping our phones. Of course, they're not - there's not enough of them - but they are reading and listenting to everything they want to. For details of exactly how this is done, read about project ECHELON. What this means in practice is that, given the dodgy dealings inherent in the exercise of state power, the G7 states have enough evidence to drop any world leader in the War Crimes Trial soup any time they feel like it. Most of the time, the rulers stay on side, but sometimes they have to be brought up sharp. Remember Noriega? The manipulation of war crimes indictments by the selective release of intelligence is something only the G7 states are capable of doing. Thus, we have to remember that, whatever the motives of those human rights lawyers working to bring criminals to justice, the likelihood is that they will only ever get to practise their prosecution skills on those criminals who have stepped out of line. A 'rule of law' that exempts certain groups is no rule of law at all. While not ideal, Labour's attempt to give more teeth to international law was certainly a better option than: 'bomb the people ruled by this week's bad guys'. Think of the difference between a corrupt judge and lynch law. But all this went out the window - along with the UN Charter, the NATO treaty, and the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which prohibits the threat of force to get a signature on international agreements - when they bombed Yugoslavia. The NATO powers have since 're-defined' their treaty to include interventionist operations, in a statement issued on April 24 1999, which even though it fundamentally changed the justification for the alliance, does not need to be ratified by the parliaments of any of the signatory states. The executives are (literally) calling the shots. We must at all times question the idea that the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, located in a bunker near Brussels, has anything to do with something called the 'international community'. This latter entity might exist as a formless set of desires for peace and justice, but at the moment its only expression in practice is via the militaries of the 'liberal democracies': organisations that have a very different agenda built into all of their preferred outcomes, and which rarely go to war in the spirit of liberality or democracy. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq For removal from list, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk Full archive and list instructions are available from the CASI website: http://welcome.to/casi