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Ian Williams Fan Club accepting new members

I remember 2002 as, among other things, the Year I Didn’t Know Whom To Trust.  The left wing of the left seemed to me to have gone right off the rails, denouncing the war in Afghanistan as an imperialist occupation and then, in the same breath, complaining that the Taliban was regrouping while Bush-Halliburton turned its attention to Iraq.  I could only gather that this wing wanted US forces out of Afghanistan and a more thorough routing of the Taliban, plus a pony.  But the right wing of the left seemed to me to have hopped right onto the Bush-Halliburton rails, ready to ride ‘em all the way to Baghdad and Beyond.  Christopher Hitchens led the charge, of course, but many (more circumspect and less incendiary) liberals joined him, sometimes for “humanitarian” reasons.  My friends and allies were horrified.  “With these preparations for war in Iraq, George Bush is giving the concept of humanitarian intervention a bad name,” some people said.  “Uh, no,” others replied.  “Actually, it’s worse than that—Michael Ignatieff himself is giving the concept of humanitarian intervention a bad name.” Everyone I knew that year had a Theory of Hitchens, the most compelling of which, I think, was that he had suffered the fate of Vincent D’Onofrio in Men in Black, and his body was being occupied by an enormous bug.  But every time people like me would take their distance from Hitchens’ lurch to the right, we would be bumped from behind by guys like Ed Herman, who went a few rounds with me in Z (online) in the course of arguing that my opposition to war in Iraq was in fact a form of support for war in Iraq.  (Herman has since moved on to bigger and better things, like denying that the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica really happened.) For a while, it looked like the Party that Approved of One but Only One Military Response to al-Qaeda, namely, the destruction of the training camps and the removal of the Taliban (whom we considered a rogue government inhabiting a failed state) but not a foolish, illegal, and counterproductive war in Iraq, was small enough to hold its meetings in a coffeehouse.  Without taking up all the tables, either.  And while we were flanked by people to our left calling us cruise missile leftists and shills for Bush, and people to our right calling us appeasers and neo-isolationists, we muttered to ourselves, “you know, both these camps agree that Afghanistan and Iraq are part of the same enterprise—though one calls that enterprise ‘imperialism’ and the other calls it ‘liberation.’ Whereas we think one thing was a strike against al-Qaeda and the other is a PNAC project that has nothing to do with 9/11.  What do we have to say for ourselves?”

Well, I don’t want to revisit those dark days minute by minute, not now when we should be focusing all our attention on how the Bush Administration is replaying the second term of the Nixon Administration (and I so hope someone is taping everything for us—and that there won’t be any mysterious erasures this time!).  I just wanted to say that I came out of 2002 with profound respect for the work of Danny Postel, Mark Danner, and Ian Williams.  Flying below the radar of the Celebrity Deathmatches between Hitchens and Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and more recently George Galloway, these writers have taken on post-9/11 politics with serious intelligence and almost zero fanfare.

So I thought I’d try to embarrass Williams with some fanfare.  His latest short essay, on the UN Oil-for-Food program, is available only to Nation subscribers, but (a) you should go ahead and get yourselves a Nation subscription (just say you’re a member of the Williams Fan Club), and (b) I can give you a Nation subscriber’s sense of why I say (a).

Far from being a failure, by any rational standards oil-for-food was a success—so much so, in fact, that the United States asked the UN to maintain it six months into the occupation. (Citizens of the Gulf Coast might have welcomed the program’s expertise last month, too.)

The [Volcker] inquiry did identify $8 billion of revenue for Saddam—nothing to do with oil-for-food, though. These billions came from oil trades with US allies, condoned and in many cases facilitated by the United States.  In fact, Volcker’s committee found that US officials were fine with Saddam profiting from these trades; they only became agitated when Syria and Iran began to take part. The sole finding of corruption directly tied to oil-for-food was that Benon Sevan, head of the $100 billion program, reported $147,000 in gifts over four years from a now deceased aunt in Cyprus; the committee suspected it was from oil-trade commissions from a company run by friends of Sevan.

The Volcker committee didn’t look into the more than $9 billion in oil-for-food surpluses given to US occupation authorities in Iraq. No accounting of these funds has been provided, either to Congress or to the UN monitoring board. Richard Goldstone, a former Yugoslav war crimes prosecutor who served on the committee, says, “The fate of the cash handed over to the Coalition Provisional Authority was not in the committee’s mandate” but adds that “the report largely rebutted the wild claims made in some of the media about corruption in the UN itself.”

We can be sure that Congressional committees mining oil-for-food for political advantage will also steer clear of CPA corruption. Expect to hear little about cases like that of Custer Battles, a security company set up by defense consultant Scott Custer and Fox News commentator Michael Battles that’s accused of looting the CPA of $50 million. The US courts have ruled that those responsible can be prosecuted only if they stole US money. If it came from the UN, they get off scot-free.

Williams has worked this beat before—in a short May 2004 piece (subscription required, hint hint) and in a more substantial (definitive, I think) analysis of “The Right’s Assault on Kofi Annan” in January of this year (free and open to the Internets public).  So if you know a friendly neighborhood wingnut who likes to go on about Annan and the UN and Oil-for-Food in the way wingnuts will, you should consider sending him or her this handy three-pack of essays, courtesy of the Ian Williams Fan Club.

Posted by on 10/12 at 12:16 PM

  1. "The Party that Approved of One but Only One Military Response to al-Qaeda, namely, the destruction of the training camps and the removal of the Taliban (whom we considered a rogue government inhabiting a failed state) but not a foolish, illegal, and counterproductive war in Iraq” was bigger than you give it credit.  Unfortunately, the two other parties always placed that party into one of the other parties, not recognizing its separate existence.  Also, it probably was not as outspoken as the other two parties.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  02:59 PM

  2. Hmm, your last two sentences sound just about right.  So I’ll take that as a friendly amendment, blah.  Thanks.

    But you know, it was hard to tell how big or small we were back then.  I mean, who knew that Pat Tillman was actually on our side?  Not Ted Rall or Ann Coulter, that’s for damn sure.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  03:05 PM

  3. Thanks for sharing this Michael.  I was a member of it, though, then I was a California girl.

    I do have to admit that it took me a few weeks to join that Party, because I wasn’t so very comfortable associating myself with the “It’s all imperialism” group, since I had supported the Afghan war.  And my personal prejudices got in the way too.  Too many of the early opposers were members of the birkenstock brigades, and I have an irrational hatred for birkenstocks under most circumstances.

    But I did get past that by January of 2003 at the latest.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  04:53 PM

  4. Balance and nuance are hard for all of us. For some, more than others. I thank you, Michael, for modeling those qualities.

    And what’s with this cottage industry of far leftists (Herman, Parenti and others) being pro Serbian, etc? I don’t get that. I have colleagues who have wanted to invite some of these folks to lecture. And some of them just don’t understand why I argue against.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  06:17 PM

  5. In the same vein of celebrating Ian Williams work, i must add Joy Gordon to the fete.  She is a philosophy professor from Fairfield University who has diligently studied the UN Sanctions programs, especially the 661 committee that oversaw the Iraq malignancy for a dozen years.  I have waited patiently for her book on this, and although i am running out of patience, i suggest that those interested in what Iraq really looked like in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s need to read these three essays.  The first is very powerful and deeply depressing, given the buildup for war in 2002 and early 2003.  That Fall, i insisted that all of my students read it thoroughly before we proceeded with the inevitable pre-war discourses.

    http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041206/gordon
    http://www.merip.org/mero/mero071904.html

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  07:52 PM

  6. spyder—funny how the mind plays tricks when it comes to the 661 Committee!  I thought I remembered that Harper’s essay almost paragraph by paragraph and yet I thought it was written by Phyllis Bennis.  Go figure.  Anyway, yeah, here’s to Joy Gordon.  Cheers!

    Dale, you ask a very good question.  Parenti’s visit here last year was touted by (among others) the local peace and justice group, and you know, something catches in my throat when apologists for genocide (Parenti has gone the whole distance, signing up with the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic) travel under the banner of peace and justice.  I don’t have a good answer for you, but my guess is this:  these guys started out with more or less reasonable suspicions of NATO, Albright-Cohen- Berger-Clinton, bombing, etc.  They bought Chomsky’s arguments that Kosovo could not possibly be a “humanitarian” intervention because (a) the KLA were a foul group too and (b) we weren’t intervening in East Timor.  And then from that point, their position morphed into “the enemy of my US imperialist enemy is my friend,” and congealed and hardened into something very, very ugly.

    My side of that argument—and Danny Postel and Ian Williams are two of its best exponents—is that Herman’s insistence that the NATO war violated Milosevic’s sovereignty is a betrayal of a noble tradition of left internationalism.  Imagine, we like to say, a “left” in 1937 that marched under the slogan “what Franco does in his own country is his own business.” Problem is, the war in Iraq, as supported by liberal hawks, is also a betrayal of that internationalist left tradition.  According to us.  But Perry Anderson (New Left Review, fall 2002) disagreed strongly, writing in an essay titled “Force and Consent,” “The doctrine of pre-emption is a menace to every state that might in future cross the will of the hegemon or its allies. But it is no better when proclaimed in the name of human rights than of non-proliferation. What is sauce for the Balkan goose is sauce for the Mesopotamian gander. The remonstrants who pretend otherwise deserve less respect than those they implore not to act on their common presumptions.” Yep, you read that right:  Kosovo = Iraq, and Ian Williams, Richard Falk, Michael Walzer et al. deserve less respect than Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.  And Anderson speaks of Kosovo as a war of “pre-emption” as if it did not follow the Dayton Accords—and Srebenica—by four years.  At the end of the day, I have to admit that I do not fully understand this.  Yes, we who supported Kosovo had some hideous allies:  Albright, the New Republic, the KLA.  Most opponents of the war are content to point that out.  But their allies included Tom DeLay, Pat Buchanan, James Baker, Russian ethnic nationalists, and Milosevic himself.  I like to claim (not without reason, I hope) that the Kosovo war marked the end of “guilt by association” as a plausible left debating tactic.

    Which is not to say that anyone on my side likes Clinton, Albright (shudder), Berger or Cohen.  Or bombings.

    Bostoniangirl, thanks for chipping in.  So it was the damn Birkenstocks after all!  I spent much of 2002-03 wondering how the left could win more allies in opposition to war in Iraq, and I worried that fringe neo-Stalinoid sects like International ANSWER were driving people away from the cause.  Now I know it was the shoes.  I despise ‘em too, and all they stand for (except for their support of the Endangered Species Act).

    Posted by Michael  on  10/12  at  09:17 PM

  7. That was a miserable time.  Miserable.  My best friend and my husband both felt it was time we “took Saddam out” and patted me on the head and treated me like a bikenstock wearing all-imperialism party member.  I kept trying to explain about aluminum tubes and Hans Blix and Got. No. Where.  Ugh.

    It wasn’t quite as bad with my peacenik friends, because at least we could agree that whatever the merits in Afghanistan, Bush was sure to screw it up.

    Seriously, blah has called it.  There were lots of us, but the all-imperialists and to some extent the all-liberationists each put us in the other camp and ignored our independent existance.  Ten seconds after we were done explaining our position, they had forgotten its gist.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  09:23 PM

  8. Michael, this is a belated thank-you for some very thought-provoking discussions and posts at Maxspeak in the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003.

    The wig-out of Hitchens and the lesser but still offensive (to this day) ‘do it to Julia’-ism of Gitlin and Cooper made it very hard during that time to engage the real issues of U.S. actions after the September 11 attacks, and the inadequacies of the purely anti-imperialist response.

    More than most critics of the left who site themselves on the left, you were able to make yourself heard.  The key was some measure of humility, and much less brow-beating and self-righteousness. Thanks for the nuance.

    Evaluating the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and the region isn’t much easier now than then, what with documented massacre of prisoners by Dostum’s army (with blind eye turned by our forces), torture and murders at Bagram (ongoing?), the airstrikes that killed civilians and allies, abusive behavior by U.S. forces right on through —enough to get Karzai to complain during his D.C. visit, enough to get the UN human rights monitor who documented the abuses kicked out at U.S. behest.

    I publicly opposed the Afghan war and occupation in the fall/winter of 2001-2, even as events caused me privately to reevalute almost all of my convictions about political action and foreign policy.  Today I’m still of two minds about the intervention. What I’m sure of is that it was politically inevitable. It’s impossible for me to imagine a U.S. administraton that would not have attacked Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

    But it’s impossible to imagine any other admin plunging the country into the Iraq quagmire.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  10:38 PM

  9. Emma Anne, you take me back—but then, the Plame case and the Fitzgerald indictments will also take us back, will they not?  To the parsing of those sixteen words in the 2003 SOTU, to the arguments about aluminum tubes and yellowcake, to the 661 Committee and the revisiting of the First Gulf War?  Perhaps most dispiriting of all in those days, for me, was the feeling that it was all going to be academic, in that worst sense of the word:  it would not matter.  We medium-leftists who opposed war in Iraq but who took seriously the question, “what’s the rationale for leaving Saddam in power,” spent our days researching the history of the sanctions and (in my case) deciding that at the very least, chlorine should be removed from the “dual use” list so that the Iraqis could purify the water supply we’d deliberately degraded in 1991.  But we knew that the Bush junta would invade regardless of how nuanced a position we devised, regardless of whether the UN Security Council gave them the OK, regardless even of whether Turkey would grant them access from the north.  It was a sterile, debate-team exercise in retrospect.  But now that Drum, Yglesias and company are engaged in the same exercise three years later, maybe it’s worth remembering that some of us have been around this damn block a few times already.

    Which brings me to Nell.  Thanks for your kind words about my remarks chez Max:  Max’s was the very first blog on which I felt I could contribute comments as part of a substantive exchange, and on which the infelicitous or mistaken moments of my 2002-03 essays would be discussed with brio.  I hope it doesn’t surprise you that I agree with most of what you say, particularly this:

    Today I’m still of two minds about the intervention. What I’m sure of is that it was politically inevitable. It’s impossible for me to imagine a U.S. administraton that would not have attacked Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.

    But it’s impossible to imagine any other admin plunging the country into the Iraq quagmire.

    As for me, I sometimes think that what I supported in 2001-02 was a completely counterfactual Afghanistan operation, in which the US stays with a real coalition, helps to build roads and schools and institutions of democratic civil society, keeps both the Northern Alliance and the Taliban at arm’s length, captures bin Laden, and demonstrates to the wretched of the earth that they’re better off with us than with Islamism.  And, needless to say, no prisoner abuse, no bombing of the wedding party in Kakrak, no prolonged torture and murder of unfortunates who have no connection to terrorism whatsoever.  Talk about your sterile exercises:  it is as if I support a military response in Afghanistan that exists only in the comments section of this here blog.

    As for Gitlin and Cooper, one of the things I admired (no, present tense:  admire) most about the Danner-Postel-Williams left is that it is 99 and 44/100ths percent invective-free.  I thought Williams’ November 2002 In These Times essay on Hitchens was a marvel of judiciousness and . . . yep . . . nuance.

    Posted by Michael  on  10/12  at  11:20 PM

  10. Say, was there nobody who was against the invasion of Afghanistan but in favor of the invasion of Iraq?

    Posted by Jeremy Osner  on  10/13  at  02:10 PM

  11. That’s a damn good question.  I think Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were pretty much the only ones.  On the grounds that Afghanistan was a diversion from the important stuff, of course.

    Posted by  on  10/13  at  02:23 PM

  12. A nod to Phyllis Bennis is in order, thank you Michael.  Her essays on the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus have been great over the last six or seven years.  Cheers for her then as well!!

    I keep thinking of the Tom Robbins and Robert Anton Wilson rejoinders in their first books: “when you can’t figure out what is going on, just follow the money.” This seems to apply to the PNAC agenda of those who have vested economic, and thus militarized security, interests in the MidEast and Central Asia.  There has been some recent speculation that a very large chunk of the missing $19 billion from Iraq appropriations has been diverted into funding and propping up various tribal groups, regimes, and other agencies in order to maintain control over pipelines, oil fields, other mineral resources and such in those regions.  The money is “allegedly” to have been dispersed through corporate contractors operating at the behest of certain groups who are attempting to sustain long term control regardless of what happens to various national economies or other indeterminate crises.  Afghanistan, and the supposed war there against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, is really a process engagement in facilitating these transactions; a negotiations in essence.  If we have trouble believing that, well here are a couple of facts for pondering: It would have cost the US a little over $ 600 million to purchase the entire opium crop production in Afghan in 2004.  Instead we spent more than $750 million in “eradication” programs that only accounted for 1/15th of the total crop--thus insuring that opium and heroin were spread throughout the world (btw, the crop in 2004 was the largest ever produced).

    Posted by  on  10/13  at  04:42 PM

  13. When Bush said No to the UN, and declared a (-n Orwellian) War on Terror, I opposed the invasion of Afghanistan.  It grieves me to say that cowardice or no, I was right about Bush’s intentions.  Because I supported and continue to support the goal of bringing justice to al Qaeda.

    Hawks of every wing talk about our “victory” in Afghanistan.  We intervened in a long-raging civil war, on the side of the heroin-producing gangsters against the anti-heroin terrorists.  With our firepower, the heroin gangsters took control of most of the country, but not enough to rout the anti-heroin terrorists.  So now we got the heroin AND the terrorists. 

    A farce too painful to believe.

    Posted by John  on  10/13  at  06:19 PM

  14. Please ignore “cowardice or no”—undigested unfinished thought leak.

    As soon as I find the leaker, that person will no longer work here!

    Posted by John  on  10/13  at  06:52 PM

  15. It’s heartening to read that U.S. “center liberals”, those for the Afganistan war and against the Iraq war, are at least sometimes “in two minds” about the latter. The only question that remains for me, whom you would designate a “right liberal” (i.e., for both wars, for Hitch’s reasons of spreading liberalism--though I’m not averse to Bush’s comic book rhetoric of “fighting evil” either) are the criterion for a just war. From reading this thread, it appears to be “clear and present danger to the welfare of the U.S. population”.  Applied retrospectively, I guess y’all would have been against war with Germany too.  Shame about all those Jews.

    Posted by  on  10/13  at  10:58 PM

  16. Sigui, you may to be interested to read this commentary on humanitarian intervention.  It lists 13 widely agreed criteria for humanitarian intervention:

    1. The threat or occurrence of grave and large-scale violations of human rights.
    2. Clear and objective evidence of such a threat or occurrence.
    3. The government of the state is unwilling or unable to take remedial action.
    4. There is clear urgency.
    5. The use of force should be the last resort.
    6. The purpose is clearly explained to publics and the international community.
    7. The purpose is limited to stopping the human rights abuses.
    8. The action is supported by those for whom it is intended.
    9. There is support of regional states.
    10. There should be a high probability of success.
    11. There should be a mapped-out transition to post-conflict peace building.
    12. The use of force should be proportionate to achieving these goals.
    13. International law on the conduct of war should be followed during the action.

    I think you have to agree that Operation Iraqi Freedom violates at least several of these conditions.  (In my opinion, for instance, none of conditions 5-13 have been satisfactorily demonstrated)

    Posted by  on  10/17  at  09:55 PM

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