FLOWERS FOR TONY BLAIR
It's funny I forgot to mention this before now, since half the reason I did it was to brag about it on my blog. While I was in London, I took the time to stop by 10 Downing Street and pay my respects to Tony Blair. I brought him a bouquet of flowers and a sonnet I wrote. Of course, I couldn't deliver it directly to his doorstep. The guards there showed me where they would accept the package; I had to cross the street, go through a security check, give them my name. Which was all kind of fun, because I kept getting to tell everybody, "I've an admirer of the prime minister with some fan mail... it's just some flowers and a poem I wrote..." They recorded my name in a computerized log and put my flowers on the conveyor, and here's hoping that he'll read it!

Here's the poem:

To Tony Blair
These smug streets spurn you and they spit with scorn
They throb with intelligent and genial hate
Sons of privilege to secure freedom born
Content to leave lesser men in servile state
They breathe your name as a byword and a curse
Small comfort then that you are in the right
Though you your case a thousand times rehearse
And put your enemies' arguments to flight
They serve not conscience nor reason but fashion
A haughty and a heartless mistress she
The freedom of others and all such generous passions
Are praised only with thorough hypocrisy
Yet I have looked on you as gratefully
As on daffodils that bloom in February.

So there. I couldn't really have enjoyed my stay in London much without some way of shaking my fist at the activists. Poor Tony Blair. He has to face that all the time. Hope my little gesture was of use.

BLOGGING FROM AFRICA
All right, you may not have known if from the last two posts about Iraq, but I'm actually blogging from Malawi right now. Here's a new blog I started for my Africa trip, since I anticipate the style will be so different that overlapping the new will not be ideal.

It may be a good thing that I'm out of the country this election year, because I'm afraid it will be a painful one. Edwards seems to be out of the race, so the pleasant election in which I like both candidates will not happen. Meanwhile, the consensus seems to be that Bush is losing touch with the public. My attitude to Bush is that for a short time, beginning in Afghanistan perhaps but coming to a climax during the war in Iraq and immediately afterwards, I thought the guy was the embodiment of my political ideals of transcending borders, and Americans' traditional narcissism, and trying to do something for the world. His immigration reform proposal made me feel that way again. But I don't like the tax cuts, and even the support for the Federal Marriage Amendment is starting to rub me the wrong way. I wish he had just said, "The courts should not decide this issue; it's for the people to decide," rather than taking a definite stand, even from the point of view of tactics. Meanwhile, Bush has not boosted the US commitment to development and foreign aid to the degree I would like, and I oppose the tax cut and Medicare "reform," and the absence of any effort to cut entitlements. And yet I just can't stand Kerry.

I was thinking the other day about Kerry's outrage over the Bush campaign supposedly "impugning" his "patriotism" (which they didn't) and it occurred to me that, while it's good Bush is taking the high ground (somebody should!), I would impugn Kerry's patriotism any day of the week, among other things because of his nastiness towards the president. A real patriot should respect the president's judgment, principles, courage, should give the president the benefit of the doubt and give him credit where he can; certainly, you might run against him, but to be so ungenerous towards him is unpatriotic, as well as just bad character. I don't think Kerry is a patriot because the kind of spontaneous, simple love of one's fellow man, which patriotism is a special case of (towards one's country in particular) is not part of the character of a man like Kerry. But maybe I shouldn't be so hasty to judge. After all, even if Kerry is not much of a patriot now, I'm sure he will be if we elect him president. As he said after he won New Hampshire: "I love New Hampshire! And I love Iowa too." If the whole country becomes the vehicle of his ambition, I'm sure he'll love us plenty. Anyway, I'm in no position to blame someone for their patriotism being contingent, because I don't think I could give any of that automatic respect and benefit of the doubt to President Kerry, and if he is elected, that will pretty much be the end of my patriotism. I had a dream that America had risen above Clintonian narcissism and had a vision of freedom for the world, and was prepared for the sacrifices that would make that real, that would make "another world possible," in the words of the World Social Forum, that our stunning wealth and power, energy and efficiency, which only serve to damn us as long as we keep them to ourselves, would become virtues because we were beginning to devote them to the service of a higher cause. If that dream is going to rot away into smoldering Kerry-ite resentment politics, I'm just grateful to be far, far away. Time, perhaps, to bear in mind the words of Christ: "My kingdom is not of this world."

AN IRAQI PERSPECTIVE
Zeyad is outraged by the recent bombings. And he's not alone; he reports that:

Iraqis are very bitter. Just as everything was looking so promising after the announcement of the Interim Law recently there's this. And I don't think it's going to stop any soon.

But he's a little more careful about drawing the lines of blame:

Statements like 'No Iraqi would commit such an atrocity' or 'No Muslim would do that' are stupid, as if all Iraqis were saints and haven't committed atrocities before. One GC member even went far as to say 'No human being did that'. Of course not, dude, they were Greys from the Zeta Reticuli system.

The reaction of the Shi'ite margi'iyah wasn't a surprise, blaming the coalition. First they ask coalition forces to keep out of the holy sites and stay as far as possible from the festivals, and when something goes wrong they are the first to blame for not providing adequate protection.

There are some important lessons here. First, the lunacy of moral equivalence. We do no one any good by blaming the atrocities of terrorists on those who want to and try to prevent the atrocities of terrorists but occasionally do not succeed. Indignation against the US in such cases is dangerously misdirected. Second, the degree of condescension and cultural racism that characterizes the critique of the war; of course we can't expect Arabs to refrain from committing horrible crimes, they're just barbarians! Zeyad, a smart young Iraqi, has also had his phases of disillusionment with his own people in the past few months. But ultimately, though the US and the UK (and the UN) can help, it is Iraqis who must solve their own problems. And they know it. By protesting in favor of elections, they are asking to be given the chance.

This is the pleasant irony of the occupation: even our failures feed into our success. Religious leaders like Sistani enjoy more trust than the coalition, for understandable cultural reasons, yet Iraqis are drawn to democratic ideas. So Sistani calls for elections, and meets some resistance from the occupation, which has its own ideas about how to manage the political transition. And yet at the same time, the call for elections is exactly the sort of pro-democratic mass mobilization we want to encourage; and thus, by conceding here and there and sometimes standing firm, the coalition wins much bigger than if Iraqis let us passively dictate to them, because we establish patterns of compromise, and of dialog between mass public opinion and the political elite, which are just what democracy needs. In a grimmer way, the same may hold even for these acts of terrorism: public outrage against the terrorists will be channeled into the building of institutions of pulic safety, and into cultural changes that reject murder and atrocities and embrace peaceful dialog, compromise and consensus. This is how democracy establishes itself and becomes durable. You have to take the long view.

Andrew Beath became the first person to use the new comments feature on my blog. Very fun to make it a bit of a conversation, and my apologies to him that I didn't get a chance to acknowledge it before now. I'm afraid he hasn't convinced me that there are decent arguments against the Iraq war however. To start with, we need to make one thing clear:

It's interesting to compare Japan & Germany circa WWII with Iraq now and to think about the differences that made occupation succeed in the former, but fail in the latter... Invading a high unstable, very fragmented and quite poor country with a foreign army (which isn't exactly universally loved in the region) is a real recipe for disaster, as the past ten months has borne out.

"Fail" in the latter [Iraq]? "A real recipe for disaster, as the past ten months has borne out?" The past ten months have borne out nothing of the kind, and to claim that the Iraqi occupation has failed is not merely ridiculously premature, but quite wrong.

Premature, because it's only been ten months. As late as 1947 it looked like Japan might fall to a Communist revolution, and the situation in Germany was no better. But ten years after the occupation, in 1955, most Japanese were happy about the changes the Occupation had made in their country. If, within the next few months, there is a genocidal civil war in Iraq, comparable in brutality to the regime of Saddam Hussein, then critics of the war will have some justification in asserting that the occupation failed. At the present time, such a claim is absurd.

It is also wrong, because Iraq has made a lot of progress in the past ten months. Here is The Economist's report on the new constitution. True, it also describes two terrorist atrocities, which killed 170 people, the worst since the occupation began. But a sense of proportion is essential here. 170 Shia deaths is a tragedy, but one much smaller in scale than the hundreds of thousands killed by the sanctions, or by Saddam's regime, let alone the millions killed in Saddam's wars. 170 Shia deaths is a tragedy, but in no way comparable to the triumph of 22 million people who lived in fear and who now live in freedom. Iraqis have been showing a strong desire for elections and democracy lately, and now have a constitution which recognizes basic rights established hardly anywhere in the Islamic world. The electricity is back on, mostly; the press is free; public sentiment is increasingly opposed to terrorism and violence, and the Iraqi police are learning to deal with this on their own; the ethnic groups are learning to compromise. Al Qaeda, foreseeing that the Americans' withdrawal and the coming of elections will ruin the pretext for their ongoing campaign of terror, is resorting to desperate measures. But Iraq has already come a long way, so that backsliding to Saddam's rule is improbable.

1. "[E]veryone else thought [that Iraq had WMDs] too" . . . former UN Weapons Inspectors (Scott Ritter) and the current UN Weapons Inspectors certainly did not seem to think so.

Well, I didn't follow Scott Ritter, only Hans Blix, and he certainly did seem to think so. So did French intelligence, German intelligence, and so forth. So did Wesley Clark, John Kerry, and so forth. So did The Economist magazine. Everyone thought so, it's that simple. But whatever, WMDs are quite superfluous to the case for war anyway.

2. The broken UN resolution thingy doesn't work. First, he complied with UN resolutions in the lead-up to war. Second, Israel has flouted an insane number of UN resolutions with complete impunity.

Well, first, Saddam did not comply with the first UN resolution. The first UN resolution gave him only 45 days, and he took a lot more. Even when he let inspectors in, Hans Blix was not satisfied with the level of cooperation. Inspections were always a false middle ground anyway, as the aftermath of war has made clear: even with the regime removed and the new authority (the US and UK) highly motivated to find the WMDs, it took us months to confirm that they weren't there.

As for Israel, to say that we should allow Iraq to violate UN resolutions with impunity because Israel is like saying we should allow other people to get away with murder because OJ Simpson did. Two wrongs do not make a right. Another way to look at it was that a UN resolution was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the war; Saddam's violation of international law permitted us to start a war that was beneficial for a whole range of other reasons.

3. An argument against sanctions is an argument for removing the sanctions and only that.

No, excuse me, there is no obligation that all arguments be simplistic. Sanctions were the middle ground between, on the one hand, leaving Saddam alone entirely, and, on the other, regime change. If we reject sanctions as inhumane, the options are giving Hussein impunity, and removing him by war. Leaving Saddam alone has two drawbacks: first, it would be easier for him to acquire WMDs if sanctions were removed; second, his people would suffer less economic hardship, but would still live in a terror-state. War opened a door to freedom for the Iraqi people, and also removed a ruler who, as it turns out, was not much of a threat as long as he was pent up by sanctions, but certainly had been one, and would become one again if we stopped clipping his wings. Thus, an argument against sanctions is an argument for regime change or removing the sanctions unilaterally; if the second option is rejected, then it becomes an argument for the first.

4. A few of gov'ts that are as bad, if not worse than Saddam that could be easily overthrown and which Bush seems have next to no interest in messing with . . . Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Burma, Uzbekistan, Pakistan etc., plus places like Congo, Uganda and Indonesia we're lots of people die from civil war and nobody seems to care.

First, there is no reason that if we overthrow one bad regimes we have to overthrow them all. Better one than none. And the US is hardly strong enough to overthrow all these regimes. Anyway, none of the regimes listed here are as bad as Saddam's was, in my opinion; the only one that comes close is Zimbabwe. But if this is an argument to apply the muscular support for human rights and anti-totalitarian interventionism more broadly across the world, then I agree.

I'll end with a question, though . . . given the assumption that Saddam was to be overthrown, wouldn't an invasion of a coalition of forces from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey been a Pareto improvement over a US invasion? At least that wouldn't have turned Iraq into the terror-state it is today.

First, Iraq is not a "terror-state." It was a terror-state until a few months ago. Now it is coalescing as a constitutional state, respectful of a range of constitutional rights, and committed to representing Iraq's various ethnic groups. It is also a country afflicted by terror, the importance is much exaggerated by a sensational (and mostly anti-war) press, but which is certainly a serious problem.

Second, about the invasion by Iraq's neighbors, no, it would not be better. What kind of government would Saudi Arabia impose? Hardly a democracy. As for Turkey, Iraqis rejected the offer of Turkish troops to participate in the occupation; they have had bad experiences with Turkish troops in the past. Moreover, these countries probably could not have won a war against Saddam, certainly not as quickly and cleanly as the US and the UK did. Germany and Japan made successful transitions to constitutional self-government, and Iraq shows signs of being in the process of a similar successful transition, not because of anything in their own cultures but rather because of the values and political personality of the occupying power.

Third, an invasion by Iraq's neighbors was obviously never an option. Iraqis are rather resentful of their neighbors, in fact, because they were so supportive of Saddam; and a lot of Jordanians, for that matter, were rather resentful of Iraqis for welcoming American tanks into Baghdad to topple a president they were so fond of. The Arabs would hardly even coalesce willingly in America's toppling of Saddam, let alone spill their own blood and treasure to do it. So why make a proposal like this? It is symptomatic of the general escapism of the left, which is afflicted by a strange and impossible desire to oppose the war while avoiding the logical corollary: wishing that Saddam were still in power.

To sum up: Iraqis welcomed the fall of Saddam, which could have come about in no other way than through an American-led war; and the occupation so far shows promising signs of leading towards constitutional Iraqi self-rule, even democracy, and is more or less similar in its setbacks and in its successes to the transitions in Germany and Japan.