Why there will be war with Iran (and Syria, etc, etc.)

(Same caveat as below)

I am not a big fan of war, in the same way that most anybody normal (i.e. not Bush) isn’t. It involves casualties; it disrupts the orderly progress of day to day life; and it is also hugely expensive. Of course, it is occasionally necessary to defend yourselves against aggressors, but the threat of Sierra Leone (a tiny African basket case, which Blair decided to invade, god alone knows why, nine years ago) and Iraq to Britain can, not to put too fine a point on it, be overestimated. So, it is fair enough to say that I am anti-war in the current context.

Armed with these considerations, I decided to attend a recent anti-war (against Iran) rally in Churchill Square. How foolish of me, in my naiveté I supposed it might somehow resemble a rally, and might somehow be related to the avoidance of war! In actual fact, it resembled more a picnic for Socialist nut jobs. There were twenty varieties of Trotskyite, twelve varieties of Stalinist, plus a few assorted Greens, Anarchists and the devil knows what else. One stand was agitating for women’s rights, another was proclaiming it’s supposedly trampled right to engage in sodomy. One particularly inspired stand was agitating for class warfare, a somewhat unusual wish to express at an “anti-war” rally, one might think. I heard a lot about the plight of Hamas (perhaps the greatest warmongers on this Earth), about poor North Korea (yes, the one brandishing its own collection of nuclear weapons) and more than I could ever possibly wish to know about Australia’s imperialism (it once occupied East Timor for about a month, before setting it free). On the other hand, I heard next to nothing about how we might curb Blair’s appetite for further unnecessary wars.

How was any of this even faintly relevant? I must confess that I fail to see, unless the protesters were just the permanently dissatisfied looking for any excuse to whinge and complain. This ineptness of the anti-war movement is why, I think, the Anglosphere will invade Iran, and Syria, and Pakistan (and China, for all we know, and wherever else Bush’s fetid imagination will take us). Never mind that Iraq’s WMD turn out to have consisted of a bit of botox, regardless that this war has cost one hundred British lives and angered the Muslim world unnecessarily, never mind that the vast majority oppose this quagmire and don’t wish to send our troops into another one, nobody will trust an anti-war movement whose sole spokesmen are radical revolutionaries and wild-eyed students.

Bush is surrounded by people who speak like comic book anarchists, affirming their commitment to “creative destruction” and praising him for his “revolutionary” ideas. His Administration has not yet met a revolution it didn’t like, and has caused a fair few through its reckless rhetoric and incontinent funding to foreign opposition figures. It has acted less like a conservative and democratic government, and more like a Revolutionary People’s Tribunal. He and his colleagues are the mirror image of their radical detractors.

So, it makes perfect sense to be against the current spate of wars, but also against the current anti-war movement. Conservative and sensible folks should form a movement to oppose both, a movement which might (remembering the old hippie slogan) be more interested in “not making war”, than in “making love”.

Posted by Alex Zeka on Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at 06:01 PM in Activism, Liberalism & the Left, War on Terror
Comments (4) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by DissidentMan on March 28, 2006, 08:01 PM | #

I have argued since long ago that the likes of Michael Moore create a useful distraction for the neocons. If the anti-war movement were serious about stopping the war they would have to deviate from the Marxist script. However, they won’t, and the Trotskycons are free to go about their revolutionary business.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 28, 2006, 09:27 PM | #

A morality-war is impossible not only from the moral side, but from the war-political side. War is not a norm—one cannot fight against it.War is an existential disjunction, not a system or an institution. There is no rational aim, program, for economic, moral, esthetic, or other change, no ever-so-correct norm that would justify one in killing. To adopt war and politics is in fact to abandon the other things. One can retain non-political ideas privately, but if they become public they vanish into the political. The result is politics dressed in moral clothing.

Posted by Paul Johnson on March 29, 2006, 07:16 PM | #

What is it with you clowns and your love of murderous oppressors?
Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Hussein… an endless list of millions of victims, and you demand the victims die quietly rather than fight back against those who delight in their deaths.
The silence of the oppressed is NOT peace - peace happens when oppressors are removed.

Posted by Matra on March 29, 2006, 07:26 PM | #

The silence of the oppressed is NOT peace - peace happens when oppressors are removed.

Yes, I noticed as soon as Saddam was removed peace broke out all over Iraq.

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