When it comes to the British International Development Secretary, Clare Short, any attempt to analyze her views are bedeviled by the fact she is such a mass of contradictions and illogic. Yesterday at a briefing in London she was asked by a journalist if she thought the death toll of Iraqi civilians was a price worth paying for the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism, to which she replied:
I do not think that the death of any human being is a price worth paying
Let us ponder that remark… that the Ba’athist regime was mass murderous is beyond doubt and clearly something of which Clare Short would be cognisant. So what is she saying? She is not saying that what even the hilarious Iraqi Minister for Information admitted was a small number of Iraqi civilians killed was too high a price to end two and a half decades of tyranny.
No, she is saying that the loss of even a single life is not a price worth paying… paying for what? To prevent the murder of thousands of Iraqi people every year, that is what. The term ‘absurdity’ seems inadequate somehow.
Face it… Clare Short does not give a damn about the Iraqi people. She is more concerned about preserving the sanctity of her surreal world view. Why else would she say such an idiotic thing if not because trapped within her dogmatic meta-context, she is simply incapable of saying anything else regardless of florescent evidence suggesting better moral theories.
As I have written before, to oppose the war on the grounds that the domestic cost in Britain or the USA in blood, treasure and encroachment of the state is too high a price for the sake of the Iraqi people, is at least a coherent viable argument… but to oppose the war on ostensibly altruistic grounds that the price to the Iraqi people of overturning the Ba’athist Socialist status quo is too high is simply ridiculous, given that the scale of that Saddamite tyranny was hardly a secret.
To have taken such a position at before the war or in the early stages of the campaign was at least somewhat tenable, at least for a person with a poor understanding of the military and technological realities, on the grounds the cost in blood would indeed be mind bogglingly high.
But to still use that argument after we know that the ‘massive casualties’ scenario has not proved to be the case is bizzare. Pictures of tragic little Ali Ismail Abbas are truly heartrending for sure, but how does that change the cold hard facts about the butcher’s bill if Ba’athism had not been overthrown?
To argue on a ‘what is best for the Iraqi people cost/benefit analysis’ means the likes of Clare Short cannot have it both ways… unless all that matters is not that a ‘single life’ is lost to violence but only who did the deed. Although Clare Short’s logic is hard for me to fathom, perhaps she is saying that preventing thousands of Iraqi civilians dying every year in Saddam Hussain’s jails and torture chambers is not worth a single Iraqi death if a British taxpayer funded soldier was the one who ended the ‘single life’ in question. Or maybe she means nothing of the sort.
So who exactly does Clare Short care about? What does she mean when she opens her mouth and makes noises that sound like English? I cannot figure it out.
She’s simply restating the hypocrisy of the ‘not in my name’ crowd that seems to feel that leaving a genocidal regime such as Saddam’s in power is better than having to take the responsibility for the inevitable loss of life caused by its overthrow.
Clare Short is apparently short quite a few sectors of her brain…how aptly named she is! That explains all one needs to know about her.
More concerned with preserving her own seat at the next election. Her vacillations cost her a lot of support.
Wasn’t it Clare Short’s predecessor, (coincidentally, also called Clare Short) who said that the opponents of the war against Serbia were like the appeasers of Hitler? Didn’t she also believe that the deaths of innocent Serbs and Kosovars were a price worth paying to kick Milosevic out of Kosovo?
Or is my memory failing me?
I’m not so sure “Short” is an apt name for her.
Now, Claire Fat’n’Dumb’n’Loud, on the other hand…
And from the looks of it, she doesn’t have to worry about losing her seat… anything that big is visible to the naked eye from space.
Pride. She can’t admitt USA/UK did/do a great job and that war this time was the only solution. Pride. Pride. Pride.
“So who exactly does Clare Short care about?”
Too easy – she cares above all else about Clare Short. She is going to great and absurd lengths to protect her own view of herself and the opinions of her inner circle. The whole “not one life” thing is just the latest example of the contortions that she will go to to avoid having to admit that she was wrong or that her particular take on the world isn’t absolutely perfect.
Its all about Clare, see?
It’s a soundbite. Politicians of the “conviction” variety love these oneliners that guarantee a round of applause at conferences and peace rallies. It doesn’t mean anything, really, unless she is objecting to the phrase on aesthetic grounds …
Yeah, when will people like her come to see that there is nothing problematic in treating fellow humans as means to ends, and that it is perfectly just to sacrifice unwilling people to whatever goals we think are worth while.
Quite so Richard. Well said. Rather than kill anyone, better they just be left to be killed by someone else. There is much less moral angst involved, for us at least. After all, rather than use violence we could always use
sanctionsdiplomacyappeasementharsh language if we find the idea of mass murder anywhere intolerable.So what, if anything, would you have urged be done about Baathism in Iraq? My guess is you would just talk a lot, quote some Rothbard and suggest nothing meaningful at all be done… but I look forward to being contradicted.
When people are financially bankrupt they are not allowed to practice business.We ought to have a law preventing moral bankrupts practicing politics
Clare Short is simply repeating “right on” opinion; no objective is ever worth hurting anyone. Consider their “feelings”.
Can a policy that may cause harm be in accord with “health and safety”?
Has sufficient attention been given to a multicultural perspective?
Why is everything not perfect RIGHT NOW?
Who is to blame for this?
What lessons can be learned?
Who can be sued?
Evil globalization!
Evil capitalist exploitation!
Naughty, silly Americans.
Blah.
Johan has it absolutely right about Clare Short, I fear. The sin of pride indeed.
A small woman, with a small mind, who is out of her league.
Which journalist asked this question? I don’t have anything to add to the discussions about Short but I noticed that this question looked familiar.
It’s the same question that journalist Leslie Stahl of the news show 60 Minutes (a gottcha
yellowinvestigative journalism show in the U.S.) posed to Madeline Albright during an interview about the effects of sanctions on Iraq back in the mid-1990’s. Albright fell into the trap (it’s obviously a loaded question – and Stahl used highly inflated numbers) and her affirmative answer was used for years as a favorite sound-bite of all critics of American policy (and rabid anti-Americans). Albright was not saying what they represent her as saying (“it’s worth it to contain Saddam at the cost of the death of thousands of children and the suffering of millions”). But it didn’t matter. Once they had their recorded interview quote, they had their smoking gun evidence that Americans deliberately kill innocents.I am not an Albright fan but this smear was absurd. If you ever hear such a question, NEVER GIVE A STRAIGHT ANSWER, especially if you’re a politician.
While I think she is wrong on the general point, Short is right about one thing. The human rights of the Iraqi people aren’t on their own the responsibility of the Coalition in any way. It would be profoundly immoral for our politicians to send our boys out to die to ease their consciences about Saddam’s murders. If we want a foreign policy that is at all consistent, we either wage war only when we or our interests are threatened, or we fight every regime in the world with a dubious human rights record and run out of troops faster than an NHS bureaucrat runs out of extra funding. There’s only one sane choice among those two.
Peter: as I am not concerned with the ‘interests’ of any state, I see things rather differently. As we are currently stuck with nation-states (which are inherently repressive even at their best), I will continue to argue for my stolen tax money to be use for military action against tyrannical states that I disapprove of for no better reason than they are tyrannical. If people are willing to volunteer to fight those wars, great. If not, oh well, I guess that particular tyranny will have to wait for another day.
If the state stops taxing me, I promise to shut up and stop throwing virtual turds at North Korea, China etc, at least until I figure out how to direct my funds into shares in some sort of military version of International Rescue.
I care only to enable liberty for as many individual people as possible. I care nothing for the interests of nation-states.
“If we want a foreign policy that is at all consistent…”
Why is consistency at all important in foreign policy? Maybe its just semantics, I do agree that we should only wage war when we perceive it to be in our own best interests – but each scenario is entirely different with unique risks/benefits. And there are serious security risks to ignoring some repressive regimes, as I think we have just learned.
MLD makes a good point here. The Ba’athist regime in Iraq was not only tyrannical but also disinterested in international opinion and therefore imune to diplomatic pressure. As such, invading Iraq to depose the regime is justified.
This is not always the case.
The principle (working to ensure liberty for all) should be consistent. There is no reason why the means should be.
The aptly named Snide says
“Quite so Richard. Well said. Rather than kill anyone, better they just be left to be killed by someone else. There is much less moral angst involved, for us at least.”
Seeing as the situation you describe involves an innocent person definitely dieing and no other alternative – they will die, the only question is whether we do it or somebody else does it – the only moral answer I have is that somebody else does it. You seem to think that this is wrong and immoral – like being the first to kill a guy that would be killed anyway is the most moral option!
Yeah, definitely, thousands of Iraqi citizens might have got killed if Britain hadn’t intervened… But I wouldn’t be responsible for their murder.
“After all, rather than use violence we could always use sanctions diplomacy appeasement harsh language if we find the idea of mass murder anywhere intolerable.”
Murder is killing an innocent person against their will (politicians who oppose euthanisia even think that killing someone according to their will is murder). This is also what collateral damage is. British soldiers have been murdering Iraqis and you support it, so your claim above is contradictory – you defend murder as a solution to murder.
“So what, if anything, would you have urged be done about Baathism in Iraq? My guess is you would just talk a lot, quote some Rothbard and suggest nothing meaningful at all be done… but I look forward to being contradicted.”
I have already answerred that – countries dependent upon each other for trade establish peaceful relations with each other, and historically growing trade has led to increased democratisation.
I said: “So what, if anything, would you have urged be done about Baathism in Iraq? My guess is you would just talk a lot, quote some Rothbard and suggest nothing meaningful at all be done… but I look forward to being contradicted.”
And you did exactly what I expected by saying:
I have already answerred that – countries dependent upon each other for trade establish peaceful relations with each other, and historically growing trade has led to increased democratisation.
TRADE? Unbelievable. Let us look at Iraq… it exports oil. The oil was controlled by the Ba’ath Party. If you buy Iraqi oil, you are funding more secret police, more torture chambers and more grave diggers for use by the ruling regime. Trading with ‘Iraq’ does not mean trading with Abdul the Carpet Merchant and thereby infusing him with capitalist virtues and a respect for private property, it means keeping the Ba’athist in power. Unlike the Soviet Union, who had too large a population and too huge a political and military infrastructure to support just by selling its oil, Iraq could do exactly that… leave the population in grinding poverty and just fund the military and social elite off the profits of oil.
Would Ba’athism eventually collapse? Sure. Maybe in another 25 years? Could be. Hell, they killed about a million Iraqis in the first 25 years of Saddam’s rule, so heaven forbid we interfere with them killing another million over the next 25 years just so long as we do not have to deal with anything morally ‘icky’. Forget it.
Sorry fellah… you seem to be confusing morality with squeamishness. Normal rules of civil interaction do not apply when normal civil society does not exist and to think otherwise is tantamount to suicide. The real world involves hard choices.