Monday, November 19, 2007

How not to stop a war

Peter Wilby argues that “the British press... failed badly to expose the flimsiness of the case for going to war in Iraq”.

Norm responds: “The issue of whether or not to go to war in Iraq was debated as fiercely and extensively as just about anything in recent memory, and the voices against were many and to be read and heard at every turn.”

But they could both be right.

What if the anti-war voices, dominant in the pages of the Mirror, Guardian and Independent, and far from invisible in most of the other papers (not to mention the BBC and Channel 4), were simply incompetent? What if, rather than dissecting Hans Blix’s reports in relation to the provisions of resolution 1441, they devoted too much of their time to shouting about poodles, cowboys, oil, Islamophobia and whose name the whole business was in?

What if, like so very much of the media (left and right, TV and print, ‘quality’ and ‘popular’), the anti-war movement had focused excessively on personalities rather than policy detail?

If so, then despite having been heard at every turn, they still could have failed badly.

If you try to boil an issue down to nasty warmongers and innocent victims, and you don’t put Saddam Hussein in the former category, you’re likely to have trouble getting traction.

Just an idle hypothesis...

5 comments:

anticant said...

No debate - even in cabinet - made the slightest impression on Tony Blair who, like G.W. Bush, hears voices from God and KNOWS that he is right.

So an estimated 2 million marching against the war might just as well have saved their footwear and their breath.

What this shows is that the power of the prime minister is too great for the healthy functioning of democracy, and should be curbed.

Will said...

Awwww -- not this shit again!

"No debate - even in cabinet - made the slightest impression on Tony Blair who, like G.W. Bush, hears voices from God and KNOWS that he is right."

Cretin. Idiot. Fool. Dumbass. Clown. No forces were at work other than those inside blair's and bush's heeds then?

“The impasse to which I am referring has been dramatized recently by many responses on the Left, in the United States and in Europe , to the suicide bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, as well as by the character of the mass mobilizations against the Iraq War. The disastrous nature of the war and, more generally, of the Bush administration should not obscure that in both cases progressives found themselves faced with what should have been viewed as a dilemma — a conflict between an aggressive global imperial power and a deeply reactionary counterglobalization movement in one case, and a brutal fascistic regime in the other. Yet in neither case were there many attempts to problematize this dilemma or to try to analyze this configuration with an eye toward the possibility of formulating what has become exceedingly difficult in the world today — a critique with emancipatory intent. This would have required developing a form of internationalism that broke with the dualisms of a Cold War framework that all too frequently legitimated (as “anti-imperialist”) states whose structures and policies were no more emancipatory than those of many authoritarian and repressive regimes supported by the American government.”

See C Hitchens for the g_d motivation crap. Look it up you fucking arsehole. I have limited tolerance, patience or indulgence for wankstains like yourself.

anticant said...

And I have no tolerance, patience or indulgence for foulmouths like you who use gutter language to promote your 'argument'.

Go rinse your mouth out with carbolic soap.

Tom Freeman said...

Now now, play nice...

Whether any of us likes it or not, there was a hefty majority in parliament for the war. It wasn't just the PM's power (which failed to stop a big backbench rebellion).

And the pre-war opinion polls showed a far more mixed public attitude than the protests did (whoever heard of a march in favour of a government policy?).

Will said...

"And I have no tolerance, patience or indulgence for foulmouths like you who use gutter language to promote your 'argument'."

har har -- moralist pig!