What a contrast. This morning the Globe and Mail included a diatribe by Norman Spector (former B.C. Social Credit svengail, former Brian Mulroney advisor and later ambassador to Israel) that I had a hard time figuring out. It was partly an apologia for George Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction ("all politicians lie"), partly an attack on those people who were upset about the fact that Bush lied about WMD (Spector apparently feels that we are upset about these lies because we feel that if we focus enough on the lying we can focus attention away from the "good" things that Bush accomplished in Iraq -- we don't want to acknowledge that Saddam Hussein was an mass murderer etc., so instead we scream loudly about George W. Bush in the pathetic hope that by so doing we can make the world ignore our hero, Saddam.
At least that's what Norman Spector says.
The fact is that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken because supposedly Iraq was harbouring WMD and had violated UN Security Council resolutions that called for them to be dismantled. If Bush and Blair were to be beileved, Iraq was capable of unleashing horrendous destruction on its neighbours and even further afield and therefore had to be stopped through a preventive war. That was the justification for the war. Saddam's oppression of his own people was not the justification, though that has become the apres-war justification. If the argument that Iraq had to be invaded in order to save the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictatorship is to be taken to its logical conclusion, then the United States should even now be preparing to invade Myanamar, China, Cuba and many other countries. But that argument leads down a slippery slope - what is oppression? How arbitrary and butal does a regime have to be before the mighty United States feels it has to step in and take over? Is Cuba, a one-party state that has elections and social equaility, an oppressive regime? If so, why isn't the United States invading? After all, they invaded Iraq. What about North Korea which is inarguably repressive and without doubt has weapons of mass destruction? Or Pakistan; also authoritarian and possessing nuclear weapons?
The arguments for the invasion of Iraq do not hold water. Once taken to their logical conclusion they dissolve in a mess of contradictions and hypocricy. The United States and Britain invaded Iraq for three reasons: oil, vengeance for George Bush Senior and to gain political advantage come the next election (though it looks like that will backfire for Blair.)
Spector's column also contained a curious attack on the Toronto Star's media columnist Antonia Zerbisias. I don't know what the point of this attack was, besides the fact that Zerbisias is sceptical towards the prevailing wisdom of neo-conservatism that otherwise infests Canadian journalism and that the Star itself breaks ranks with other news outlets by espousing a liberal point of view (albeit a moderate, not a left wing one). I think the gist of Spector's argument was that the left complains about the National Post and the Asper empire and their bias while ignoring the equal, but opposite bias of the Toronto Star.
I soon discovered the perfect antidote to Spector's wooly-headedness in a book called The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, by Greg Palast, which I began reading while on the way to work on the SkyTrain. Palast is an American who writes for the Guardian and the Observer and the BBC. His book, written last year but updated in 2003 to include information on the invasion of Iraq, is largely a collection of work he's done for those outlets. The first article, for example, is about how Jeb Bush and his Florida administration helped his brother steal the 2000 presidential election in the United States by arbitrarily and incorrectly wiping thousands of legitmate voters from the voters' list. The second article, which I've just begun, is a fascinating piece about the World Bank and the IMF and the World Trade Organization and how globalization has failed the Third World. Palast argues that developing nations have fallen significantly behind since the adoption of neo-conservative principles in the early 1980s, after making significant strides before then through high tariffs and governnment investment in social programs and infrastructure. Quite an eye-opener, and highly recommended.