Richard Seymour
Bombs won’t solve the Islamic State problem
BY Richard Seymour
There are some surprising people who want to see American bombs dropping on Iraq again. Of course, it is no surprise at all to see the coalescence of a pro-war sentiment in the Atlanticist wing of the political class. Even Jack Straw’s extraordinary bluster against Barack Obama’s “indecisiveness” (thank God for his “decisiveness” back in 2003) hardly raises more than an eyebrow.
Yet, beyond the Westminster spear-carriers for American empire, there is a muted, hardly enthusiastic, but nonetheless real sentiment in parts of the left. It runs something like this: “I marched against the war on Iraq, I detest US domination, but in this case I have no problem with American air strikes.” Why?
The answer is Islamic State. IS goes to your head and gets under your skin; it leaves you feeling infested. Back in the days when one didn’t know much about the jihadis carrying out beheadings, it was possible to think that they were just – as David Cameron has denounced them – “monsters”, savages, beasts. Or, if one were on the anti-war left, one could simply point out that there was, after all, a war on. A brutal occupation produces a brutal insurgency: case closed.
But that argument was always vulgar, and it would be even more vulgar now to say that IS’s success can be explained by reference to an occupation that no longer persists.
The unutterable, ostentatious horror of IS’s actions – the latest of which is the beheading of the British aid worker David Haines – and the way in which it actively solicits disgust, now has to be reconciled with the knowledge that these combatants are educated, tech-savvy and enjoy a popular base. The mainstream press doesn’t offer much help in interpreting this.
Given the paucity of political explanations for IS’s racing success, and knowing only what IS rule means for the majority of inhabitants of the incipient “Islamic state”, American or British bombs seem to offer a tempting short-cut. This is what has always given “humanitarian intervention” its compelling ideological power: while we as citizens watch in horror, we know that there are powerful people in the world who could stop this without breaking a sweat.
Such a stance, of course, involves taking great risks with the lives of other people one is in no position to consult, by urging on a military and political authority over which we have at most extremely exiguous checks. Worse, the illusion that there is a simple techno-military solution to grave humanitarian exigencies is necessarily inherently naive about the social basis of war, and therefore about the potential for even the best-intentioned intervention to go horribly wrong.
It is easy to think that if IS members were identified and vaporised, the murder would end. However, IS would be nowhere if it weren’t for the generalised rejection by Sunni Iraqis of the sectarian political authority in Baghdad.
This is, after all, a state that was built by the US occupiers on the basis of the more sectarian Shia religious parties and their death squads. Trained and deployed by the US, they end up being worse torturers than Saddam Hussein.
Air strikes can destroy bodies, but they can’t destroy political antagonisms. Nor would a renewed occupation solve the problem. The formerly occupying coalition which constructed that authority are in no position – even if they had the ability – to replace it with something plural and democratic. There simply are no shortcuts. The illusion that there are, or could be, is one of the reasons why people were led to war in Iraq in 2003. THE GUARDIAN
Bombs won’t solve the Islamic State problem
BY Richard Seymour
There are some surprising people who want to see American bombs dropping on Iraq again. Of course, it is no surprise at all to see the coalescence of a pro-war sentiment in the Atlanticist wing of the political class. Even Jack Straw’s extraordinary bluster against Barack Obama’s “indecisiveness” (thank God for his “decisiveness” back in 2003) hardly raises more than an eyebrow.
Yet, beyond the Westminster spear-carriers for American empire, there is a muted, hardly enthusiastic, but nonetheless real sentiment in parts of the left. It runs something like this: “I marched against the war on Iraq, I detest US domination, but in this case I have no problem with American air strikes.” Why?
The answer is Islamic State. IS goes to your head and gets under your skin; it leaves you feeling infested. Back in the days when one didn’t know much about the jihadis carrying out beheadings, it was possible to think that they were just – as David Cameron has denounced them – “monsters”, savages, beasts. Or, if one were on the anti-war left, one could simply point out that there was, after all, a war on. A brutal occupation produces a brutal insurgency: case closed.
But that argument was always vulgar, and it would be even more vulgar now to say that IS’s success can be explained by reference to an occupation that no longer persists.
The unutterable, ostentatious horror of IS’s actions – the latest of which is the beheading of the British aid worker David Haines – and the way in which it actively solicits disgust, now has to be reconciled with the knowledge that these combatants are educated, tech-savvy and enjoy a popular base. The mainstream press doesn’t offer much help in interpreting this.
Given the paucity of political explanations for IS’s racing success, and knowing only what IS rule means for the majority of inhabitants of the incipient “Islamic state”, American or British bombs seem to offer a tempting short-cut. This is what has always given “humanitarian intervention” its compelling ideological power: while we as citizens watch in horror, we know that there are powerful people in the world who could stop this without breaking a sweat.
Such a stance, of course, involves taking great risks with the lives of other people one is in no position to consult, by urging on a military and political authority over which we have at most extremely exiguous checks. Worse, the illusion that there is a simple techno-military solution to grave humanitarian exigencies is necessarily inherently naive about the social basis of war, and therefore about the potential for even the best-intentioned intervention to go horribly wrong.
It is easy to think that if IS members were identified and vaporised, the murder would end. However, IS would be nowhere if it weren’t for the generalised rejection by Sunni Iraqis of the sectarian political authority in Baghdad.
This is, after all, a state that was built by the US occupiers on the basis of the more sectarian Shia religious parties and their death squads. Trained and deployed by the US, they end up being worse torturers than Saddam Hussein.
Air strikes can destroy bodies, but they can’t destroy political antagonisms. Nor would a renewed occupation solve the problem. The formerly occupying coalition which constructed that authority are in no position – even if they had the ability – to replace it with something plural and democratic. There simply are no shortcuts. The illusion that there are, or could be, is one of the reasons why people were led to war in Iraq in 2003. THE GUARDIAN
