More On That Intellectual Bankruptcy

Here's An Example!

Right on cue, here's an article by Tom Switzer that illustrates my point.

It should be obvious to even primary school students that a war criminal is someone who has actually committed a war crime. More to the point, to equate a democratic leader who supported the toppling of a brutal dictatorship with the likes of the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge is a cheapening of moral language. 

One could oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and still believe that Howard, like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, was motivated by good intentions. Saddam Hussein, after all, was a murderous despot who had invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 and subsequently defied about 17 United Nations resolutions. He also used chemical weapons in the murder of tens of thousands of Kurds in the north and the Shiites of southern Iraq.

Where do you start? Let's do this in order.
When the so-called 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq in 2003, it did so without a sign off from the UN Security Council. You might recall Collin Powell getting up and showing aerial reconnaissance photographs which purported showing Iraqis shuttling trucks loaded with Weapons of Mass Destruction. The UN did not say, "sure go ahead", they said, "no".

The point is, the 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq unilaterally, and for that John Howard has to wear the responsibility of co-authoring that disastrous move - a move so disastrous we're still reaping the poisoned fruits of those labours. This side of 1945, we do have an understanding that world leaders who unilaterally invade countries (no matter the goodness of intentions) are up for war crimes.

And as stupid as it is to repeat this here, this is why there is a legitimate argument to be made that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are war criminals by the very same ruler we use to measure such diverse people as Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and whoever else tinpot dictators in Africa we don't like. This accusation is expressly not, "cheapening of moral language" as Switzer argues; merely a logical ramification of the legal logic cast upon these other people like Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic et al. To argue otherwise is an attempt to create one set of rules for the people in history we dislike, and another set of rules for leaders of English speaking nations to suit Tom Switzer's bit of sophistry.

As of the findings of the Chilcott Report earlier this year, it is no longer tenable to give the benefit of the doubt to GeorgeW. Bush and Tony Blair for their so-called "good intentions". To argue that Saddam Hussein had it coming - sans proper trial at the Hague which he did not get - and therefore his misdeeds justified the Iraq War, flies in the face of the principle of having War Criminals. If you think Saddam being Saddam justified the 2003 invasion, you're arguing that any nation can go invade another if it can form its own coalition of willing countries to participate because might and majority make their own right.

Clearly we in the Western World do not go by this thinking, and this is also why the world has such an elaborate institution as the United Nations with its Security Council to forestall such free-for-alls. You just can't have it both ways where Saddam is a War Criminal and George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are not War Criminals, if you believe in the moral language of having war criminals in the first place. That leaves the legal defence of John Howard to the possibility that he was not part of the criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Bush and Blair, but merely a tag-along. That would make him a dangerous adventurer, which is no more admirable than a "War Criminal".

The thing that gets me is that all of this is simply logic. It's not a philosophical issue at all.It's simply the logic constructed by the types of conservatives in the past - like Winston Churchill - thought up with all this legal logic. The history altering event of 2003 was that the self-appointed leaders of the free world would throw reason together with caution to the wind and go rampaging into Iraq. To pretend otherwise is so intellectually deficient and dishonest it makes you wonder how the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't balk at it (yes you Darren Goodsir).

Anyway... Switzer decides to give himself a pat on the back - a bit unseemly but what the heck - and then goes on to say:

What Howard failed to recognise, however, was the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Toppling Saddam, as many conservative realists (such as this writer and my friends Owen Harries and John Mearsheimer) warned at the time, was also fraught with the danger of unintended consequences.

Good God. Conservative realists? Really? As opposed to ordinary realists who opposed the war on principle, the Conservative realists who opposed it on the basis of the difficulty of fulfilling the rest of the mission, once begun? If you are going to bang on the morality of language to begin with, you'd think you would argue things on the principle of it, but no. Tom Switzer wants to argue a technicality that the mission itself was difficult, and that's why it was wrong. Switzer is saying if the Iraq War worked out much cleaner, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
He's dead wrong.

On top of which, if that were the case, then he is once again arguing that Saddam had it coming, and that's good enough for him - but heaven forbid those who would argue on principle that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime. That's the height of hypocrisy.

Then there's this bit...

The objectors to the honorary doctorate also claim Howard was a racist. Never mind his post-Tampa asylum-seeker standoff policies boosted public confidence in our immigration and humanitarian refugee agenda. So much so that the rate of legal, non-discriminatory migration from four corners of the world, including Africa, doubled from 2002 to 2007. When Malcolm Turnbull praises Australia as the global role model for border protection, he is paying tribute to Howard (and his successor Tony Abbott).

Look, John Howard landed himself in much trouble in the 1987 Federal election campaign when he said there were too many asian migrants. It took him a long time to rehabilitate his image, but those words were uttered and even in 1987, it was obvious that he was playing race politics to get ahead. That would make John Howard a racialist politician. If he is not one today, it may be because he's grown to be a better man since, but the John Howard of 1987 was rightfully spotted as a racist - and proud of it. These things are not going to get forgotten. If John Howard never wanted to wear the epithet, he should have had the good sense not to stoke those fires for a few votes more. Most famous people who are not racists, never get hung with the epithet. The fact that it landed on Howard speaks volumes.

As it is, his tacit non-condemntion of One Nation in 1996 only entrenched the view that he was still a racist, even after his alleged detente with the Chinese community. There is no way known you could argue John Howard was not a racist politician. Malcolm Turnbull can praise Howard for a multi-cultural Australia all he likes, but he'd be dead wrong too - it simply wasn't the way that historic discussion went. Once again, it is intellectually dishonest for Tom Switzer to present John Howard as this amazing champion of multiculturalism in Australia. He can try it on, but it's called lying.

And this is what we have as conservative commentary. Two bits of sophistry combined with moral outrage about the "moral language" ("egadz!") and an outright attempt to rewrite the track record of a man who was an unpleasant racialist politician, if not an outright racist individual.

John Howard richly deserves the opprobrium heaped upon him. That the University of Sydney with its crappy regressive culture would want to honour John Howard with an honorary doctorate is their business. In my books, nothing is beneath them. If Switzer thinks John Howard is so deserving of this honour, that's also his business. However, complaining about those who would object to this conferring of social capital is a bit rich. The public record is what it is; John Howard knows what he did; Switzer knows what he did; we all know what Howard did. Let's not pretend for a moment that it's not contentious to hand this man an honorary doctorate and praise him. It's this kind of game-playing sophistry and hypocrisy that makes the conservatives look so intellectually vacant in this country. If Tom Switzer is the leading light of these conservative thinkers, then they've really got a problem.

Just saying.