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December 08, 2005
I read the news today, oh boy
Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder in New York by a deranged fan of the rock singer turned anti-War protestor, John Lennon.
‘All you need is Love’ and ‘Give peace a chance’ were the compositions with which, in his distinctively nasal Liverpudlian drawl, Lennon lamented America’s war effort in Vietnam and implored its forces to lay down their arms.
A quarter of a century on, another American war in another equally faraway theatre, this time undertaken with active British participation, evokes similar opposition from similarly well-heeled English literati, who, like Lennon, would have lasted no more than five minutes under the regimes against which the US was and is fighting.
Last night, from the clinic in which the ailing seventy-five year old playwright is undergoing treatment for widely suspected throat cancer, Harold Pinter delivered an excoriating attack upon American foreign policy since World War 2, especially its current military action in Iraq.
The attack formed the substance of his Nobel acceptance speech, ‘Art, truth, and politics’.
As a piece of theatre, Pinter’s televised delivery of his speech was truly electrifying. As an actor himself in his time, Pinter really knew how to deliver to maximum effect his scathing indictment of Bush and Blair. By the time he had finished, viewers of it could be forgiven for thinking there was little to choose morally speaking between Bush (or Blair for that matter) and bin Laden beyond the former's more frequent recourse to a barber.
‘The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading. as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.’
‘We have brought torture, cluster bombs, … innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.’
‘How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arranged before the International Criminal Court of Justice.’
‘At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began.’
Powerful stuff, undoubtedly. The question, however, is how much truth is there in the assertions of Pinter with which he indicted America?
As was indicated by the title and in the opening paragraph of Pinter’s address, there is a crucial difference between truth in art and in politics. Pinter claims Bush and Blair deliberately deceived the American and British publics about WMD and about a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection to provide a pretext for war which Pinter also claimed has led to a over 100,000 non-combatant Iraqi fatalities.
Pinter supplied no evidence in his talk for any of these assertions which have all been vociferously denied by relevant the parties in question. The Pentagon has estimated there to have been only 26,000 Iraqi fatalities, admittedy a tragically large enough figure but far smaller than that claimed by Pinter.
Winning the war, or rather peace, in Iraq has proved far more elusive than America anticipated in its first flush of apparent victory, shortly after its invasion of the country with ground troops.
However, incremental progress, though slow, has been steady: elections are about to take place and Saddam is on trial where the full enormity of his crimes against his own people when in power continues to be displayed.
If, as Pinter contends, Bush and Blair should be indicted for war crimes, then, by parity of reasoning, so should Saddam -- in which case their action against him was not unjustified in which they, unlike he, should not be indicted.
One word was missing from the title of Pinter’s speech and its denotation likewise was noticeably missing from the speech itself. This was logic.
Absence of logical rigour and of correspondence with fact does not undermine such truth as theatre can contain, any more than it does in the case of dreams. But when the suspension of disbelief involved in theatre itself becomes suspended, what we end up with is something akin to what happens when a dreamer mistakes their waking dream for reality – namely, delusional psychosis.
That, sadly, is what we witnessed from Pinter yesterday, a man blinded by prior visceral hatred of America to the gravity of the threat both it and we face from an imminent threat far greater than any either has faced since Hitler and one which, given the enormity of the Saddam regime and his repeated defiance of international law over weapons inspection, fully warranted American military action against his regime, action whose non-combatant casualties rate is by no means disproportionate to the enormity of the ultimate cause that led to and warranted the action.
For a very different, more realistic and far less morally condemning assessment of the war than in Iraq than Pinter's, read the column 'A Moral War' by Victor David Hanson, first posted in the National Review on December 2nd.
Likewise, for a conclusive and detailed evidence-based rebuttal of the claim that Bush and Blair lied when they claimed Saddam had WMD and that his regime had links with Al Qaeda, see Norman Podhoretz's article Who is Lying about Iraq?' in the December 2005 issue of Commentary.
Posted by David Conway at December 8, 2005 12:45 PM
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