The following is part two of an interview with Dr Eric Herring, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol. Part one can be read here. Dr Herring is co-author of ‘Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy’ (2005), and a co-founder of NASPIR the Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations. He is an advisor to UKWatch.
Alex Doherty: The British media has tended to very sharply contrast the behaviour of British and American troops. The Americans are very trigger-happy whereas we have the softly-softly approach and so on. How accurate do you think that depiction is? And what role do you think the British are playing in the South?
Eric Herring: There are very significant differences between the British and American modes of operation, though I’m going to qualify that heavily in a moment. The Americans are engaged in “force protection” meaning, if in doubt shoot it. The Americans talk about “hostile intent” you know he looked dangerous so I shot him sarge. Whereas the British tend to refer to hostile action, you have to actually be shooting, at least a lot of the time. There is significant evidence that even when British forces got shot at they didn’t see that there was any productive value in shooting back so they didn’t. That has been a very significant difference but it doesn’t tell you very much. Interestingly when you look at the operation of American forces in the Kurdish North of Iraq they’ve mostly played a very positive role, they’ve engaged in local dispute resolution, mediation, peacekeeping – not combat.
In the south British forces there’s only about eight and a half thousand of them, which is a puny number of troops for doing anything and they are basically tolerated. It’s not that they are winning hearts and minds whereas the Americans are losing them. This is just a choice between two ways of not controlling Iraq. You can do it the American way where you blast the hell out of everything, kill lots of people, and trash lots of places. You declare a town “insurgent hell” you go in, you take over, you alienate everyone, you pull out and the insurgents move back in. Or you can do it the British way where you just abandon control to the insurgents. So it’s two ways of losing one trashes the place and the other abandons it. You are not talking about a superior British way. Interestingly enough the people who know that are the British military and especially in non-attributed interviews they will tell you that straight out. And sometimes on the record – one of the British commanders said we are only here because we are tolerated, and that’s completely true. They now find themselves in a very dangerous position where as soon as there is any opposition they suddenly find themselves having to travel by helicopter, or not leave base at all. They are tolerated, and they have abandoned control and there is no state building project. For example Mark Etherington who was the coalition governments coordinator for the province of Wasit in the east he had a total of six people, six civilian staff in the whole of a province of a million people. Actually we can’t even run this department of politics that were sitting in with six administrative staff, so how do you run a province of a million people? Well the answer is you don’t.
AD: The insurgency has been extremely violent, operations carried out with seemingly little regard for civilians. There have been a great many atrocities that are very much focussed on in the media. The use of suicide attacks far outstrips Hezbollahs use in Lebanon or Palestinian militant groups in the occupied territories. What do you attribute the ferocity of the insurgency to?
EH: I haven’t done any serious comparison of relative degrees of use of suicide bomb attacks or indeed bomb attacks targeted on civilians so I couldn’t give you a general comparison. In terms of the Iraqi case one of the most important aspects of it is the foreign dimension, which does matter. It’s not that the insurgency is dominated by foreign fighters but that the jihadist culture of martyrdom has been developing in the specific circumstances of a number of conflicts, building on Bosnia as well as Palestine, Afghanistan and so on. There’s a growing assumption that it’s a tactic that works, it seems to and indeed does work it inflicts costs on the enemy and so on. You also have to put it in the context of some of the very specific sectarian violence that’s developing in Iraq itself.
Now you mentioned two things one was the suicide bombings and the other was the civilian casualties- and they’re not the same. A lot of suicide attacks are very much directed at American forces and infrastructural targets as opposed to those that are deliberately for sectarian purposes which is clearly the case with Al-Qaeda in Iraq who have a very extreme view of Sunni Islam and who therefore regard the Shia as apostates. So you have to separate out those things.
There is now debate amongst the insurgents with some arguing that this is provoking a divide in the insurgency between those Iraqi insurgents who don’t want sectarian violence and Al-Qaeda who are increasingly regarded by indigenous insurgents as a problem for the insurgency, as they are de-legitimising the insurgency.
AD: In a recent debate that you spoke at you said that you would not choose between the occupation forces and the insurgents. Since though you support an end to the occupation many would say that you are therefore tacitly supporting the insurgency since they are the people who are likely to take over if the occupation ends.
EH: I certainly see the logic of that but the underlying point for me is what have the Iraqis themselves expressed a preference for? After all it’s their lives, their country, their society. What Iraqis are pretty clear about in the centre and south, the north is different of course, what Iraqis have said is that the fact of occupation itself is unacceptable. Regardless of the legal niceties Iraqis still regard themselves as occupied by the proportion of nine to one. The same proportion want foreign forces to leave, either immediately or as soon as there is a directly elected Iraqi government. Most of them regard armed attacks on coalition forces as legitimate. Well that has to matter. They also tend to see that the presence of coalition forces makes there lives less secure, both because they induce insurgent attacks and also because of the actual actions of the coalition forces in terms of their impunity and their violence and so on. Well that’s what they want, it’s their choice, and that is not siding with the insurgents. I think that if foreign forces were offered to Iraqis in a peacekeeping role and a policing role they would welcome that. They’ve said all along what they want is security and if foreign forces will contribute to that then thats fine. So the Iraqi people haven’t chosen the insurgents.
The next problem is when the conflict continues and when it reshapes without foreign forces who then do you support? Because there isn’t a single thing called “the insurgency” and not everyone is in favour of armed opposition to the occupation so you’d have to look at what those remaining social forces were and work out who to support and how and why. So I suppose you could argue in quite a crude way that if you’re not with us you’re against us, but the Iraqi people don’t see it that way I think.
AD: With regard to the issue of peace-keepers being used in Iraq with a withdrawal of the British and Americans, we recently did an interview with Milan Rai who argues for what he calls a “replacement strategy” replacing the occupation forces with forces either drawn from Arab nations or European countries that did not support the invasion. There are others in the anti-war movement who have argued for a straightforward withdrawal. People like Alex Callinicos for example who says that at this point the UN is just too discredited in the eyes of Iraqis because of the sanctions and the weapons inspection process and so on. What would you say to those kinds of positions?
EH: I think it’s very unclear. There’s no clear preference amongst Iraqis as far as I can see. What Iraqis desperately want is security and what they desperately want is an end to the occupation and what they want is an end to the violence and impunity of the occupation forces. I don’t think it’s necessary for anyone in the anti-war movement to prescribe the right solution because that needs to mesh with Iraqi preferences. Now it may be that what emerges from Iraqi preferences when you offer them a variety of possible involvements is that they say well Arab forces under a UN flag, they may say actually we want the British to stay on in a different role. There are all sorts of things that they may want I just don’t think it’s real politics to in some abstract sense prescribe the ideal involvement. You just look at your range of options and you look at the political feasibility and it may be one of a number of things and it may be that we just have to keep the hell out. So I don’t think one needs to and it’s not politically realistic to prescribe one solution.
The reason we get drawn into talking about these things is the standard gambit which is ‘Ok what’s your alternative’ and the standard reply tends to be oh dear I better have a very specific plan and then someone says this is the right one and then we all argue about it. I think a better argument is to say here is the range of options and it may be one of those. It seems to me that that is vastly more plausible in a circumstance where we really don’t know what the outcome will be. It may well be that after the December elections the new Iraqi government will tell foreign forces to just go and at that point it’s just bye bye. That’s what I can easily imagine as an outcome.
AD: That would be quite a disaster for the Americans given the cost of the occupation and the decline in support for the US around the world that the invasion and occupation has caused. But you really think they would let it go.
EH: Well they wouldn’t have a choice. Because the nightmare scenario a united Arab Iraqi uprising – would just finish them. Absolutely finish them. If [Grand Ayatollah] Sistani declared that the American presence was unacceptable they absolutely could not hold on. They would be wiped out; it would be a complete disaster. The Americans I’ve talked to, including the American military are much more of the view ‘lets declare victory and get the hell out of here’ and they can say ‘look there you go, we’ve established a democracy, we helped the people, they’ve had elections, we’ve delivered. We’ve created the Iraq we said we were going to create and look they’ve made their choice – they’ve asked us to leave and we’re leaving’. So they might have to make the best of a bad job.
That then leads to the question of what is Iraq’s future? I think that Iraq is going to be more pro-US and pro-British than a lot of people think. The Iran connection I think is unbelievably exaggerated. And I think we might find this especially when we think about Iraqi elite politics and also the Iraqi business class and the current state of corporate capitalism which is American led. And global capitalist institutions are American led and so you kind of have to get on with the Americans. A possible example would be Vietnam, which is now a capitalist pro-American state. Some of the most ludicrously pro-American people I’ve ever met are Vietnamese, embarrassingly so where they talk about the wonderful gift of democracy from the Americans. That could be the outcome in Iraq’s case.
AD: There has been a lot of speculation regarding Iran as to whether the Americans are gearing up to some kind of attack on the country especially since the Iranian President’s comments regarding Israel. How likely do you think such an attack is given the public opposition from people like Jack Straw?
EH: I think the political costs in Britain would very be heavy. Britain going along with it would force a general election and bring down the government. The reason for that is that last time before the invasion when there were massive demonstrations the government was insisting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The governments credibility on these issues has now gone, it’s absolutely in tatters. So I think it would really be unsustainable for the government the Americans would be doing this on their own. The demonstrations would be five, ten times larger. An invasion of Iran would bring pandemonium in the UK.
In terms of the likelihood of American military action against Iran it is amazing what people can gear themselves up to do once they persuade themselves of a given outcome. It’s amazing that in the run-up to the Iraq invasion that the ideologues in the Bush administration just shut out anyone who had a different view, and who warned them of the possible outcomes. And they grew to believe deeply that Iraq was up to the gills in WMD and so on. It is possible that that kind of mentality will arise again.
Another issue is tactical, that is what you would attack in Iran and how you would attack it, and with what expected strategic result. It’s hard to see what the scenario would be. If they attempt to topple the government by bombing the country who’s going to take over? Well harder liners probably. So no one who’s rational should attack Iraq but who knows what fantasy they might come up with.
AD: I was reading recently the piece you wrote on Noam Chomsky and his treatment by academics. As you know he’s recently been voted the world’s greatest intellectual for whatever that’s worth, and yet you write of how he’s pretty much ignored in the humanities, treated really as pariah. Why is that do you think?
EH: I think it’s incredibly important to focus on the fact that he is such a pariah. I think it is an important thing. Not because of him personally but what it says about academic politics. Way back I read some of his work when I was an undergraduate and I mentioned it in class and my tutor said ‘Oh Chomsky! The guy’s just a conspiracy theorist, don’t waste your time reading Chomsky’. And so you know I thought well I’m too busy to be wasting my time, if my tutor says its rubbish I’ll leave it because I’m not going to waste my time. Years later I started reading him again and found he was saying things that I wasn’t hearing elsewhere and I was just completely knocked out by it. And you know every time I said Chomsky there was just this wave of hostility. Now the question I always ask people is ‘which Chomsky books have you read?’ Because it usually turns out that they haven’t read any.
When I wrote that piece with Piers Robinson about models of the US media and foreign policy what we pointed out was that the mainstream leading communications scholars in the United States have the same model as Chomsky in very significant respects. Except that they call it “indexing” and so on, they just don’t use the same words as him. As part of this project we wrote to these scholars and said why don’t you use Chomsky and [Ed] Herman? Because it’s the same model in a lot of ways. Many wrote back and said, well we don’t like his politics, he’s far too left wing. And you know academics aren’t supposed to say that, they’re meant to say it’s because there’s some intellectual flaw in the project. Others wrote back and said ‘look I really like Chomsky’s stuff but I daren’t reference it because I won’t get taken seriously. So the amount of flak people get is very considerable.
Well what is it that makes Chomsky different? Well a number of things; first is that he embeds his analysis in a critique of the ideological function of academia itself. You see these academics and communications scholars they study the media and say the media like to think they are independent and adversarial but actually they are indexed to the government, theyre indexed to the government and elite debates. But Chomsky then says well so are academics, whose response is you cant say that about us, how dare you say that about us! Similar to what the journalists say in fact. So academics are highly offended by his critique of the ideological function of academia. The second thing is that he argues that US actions in the world arent mistakes. They are systematically functional for an offensive corporately driven power structure. And academics wont have anything to do with this either. They wont talk about the underlying reason for media obedience. The third thing is that he harnesses his critique to actual existing social movements, real campaigns, and real current issues. Another thing is that he is contemptuous towards the academic establishment; he has no respect for it. And theyre contemptuous back. They basically say you can do everything except challenge our legitimacy, and this is the problem as he fundamentally rejects the notion that they are legitimate. So they dont recognise themselves in his picture.
AD: With regard to the media and the propaganda model a question that has always interested me is the difference between British media and American media. Particularly why there is the kind of narrow gap in the British mainstream for some dissident opinion. So Mark Curtis say can get published in the Guardian and theres a few others Monbiot, Fisk in the Independent and so on who inhabit a small gap on the left extreme of the mainstream. Whereas in the US theres more total exclusion. Why do you think there is that difference and which do you think is the more functional system, which works better at quelling the domestic population?
EH: Thats a good question; in terms of functionality I think its a very good question. I think you could end up with quite a long complicated answer explaining the different British and American culture, corporate structure, and specific histories. You could end up with quite a long complicated answer that wouldnt necessarily be wrong but the way I would put it is that the closer you are to power the more touchy power becomes. Britain is relatively marginal so we can have all our relatively fancy debates because we are actually quite secondary in terms of global corporate power. Its a hypothesis rather than a considered conclusion but its a pretty reasonable argument that in any structure the closer you get to threatening the power structure the harder it will be to have a hearing. You know Fisk has an audience of how many? Pilger, Curtis how many in comparison to the American syndicated media? I mean youre talking about dozens of orders of magnitude.
In terms of which is the more functional system well that will depend on the existing social movements. So the incredibly narrow range in America, and it is unbelievably narrow. I lived there for many years and it just staggered me the limited range of opinion. Apart from of course ultra-liberal little hotspots. But the very narrow political scene is something that has been worked at very successfully over generations, whereas here there is more breadth. In terms of which works better well I think you have to look for whats functional for the relevant interests and analyse that contextually. I think that you just couldnt have such a narrow range here because of the social breadth and political history of socialist movements, which has been more effectively buried in American history. Equally though the critique here is still very much more about America and the interesting thing about Mark Curtis is that his work is about British foreign policy and its getting people to do stuff about Britain in the world that gets you as vilified as Curtis and Pilger.
AD: Whats your view of the current state of the anti-war movement, which at least appears to have declined from the pre-invasion period. Where do you think it should be going? What do you think it should be focussing on?
EH: Well in the pre-invasion period the reason you could have mass mobilisation was that there was a very specific objective that people could agree on – which was prevent the invasion. It was an incredibly diverse movement with people coming from all backgrounds lots of people who had previously not been at all political and who have gone back to their non-political background. Now some are of the view that the only way to stop British and American aggression is to follow on with civil disobedience and so on. Im more sceptical, Im sure that civil disobedience, strategic non-violence can work in certain circumstances but it can backfire as well. Perhaps thats just me being a personal coward in saying that! And who knows maybe thats partly true, but I often think its not useful.
In terms of what to focus on one thing is the work that the Campaign Against the Arms Trade are doing which is particularly good and something I try to promote research into. The good thing about it is that it focuses in on the really dark under-belly of the British state and what it does the people it supplies with arms and what they are supplied with, and the subsidies to the arms trade. So I think targeting Britain and the arms trade is an incredibly valuable thing. Uncovering more of Britains colonial history is a very good thing; uncovering more about Britains role in the occupation is a very good thing. For instance the public interest lawyers who have been bringing all those cases about Iraqis whove been killed and tortured. These are all very important things because they challenge the British state on its territory. There are many things relating to continuing violence that Britain is involved in that are being worked at. There are a lot of very healthy positive things going on.
Alex Doherty is a member of the UKWatch Collective
The following is part two of an interview with Dr Eric Herring, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol. Part one can be read here. Dr Herring is co-author of ‘Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy’ (2005), and a co-founder of NASPIR the Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations. He is an advisor to UKWatch.
Alex Doherty: The British media has tended to very sharply contrast the behaviour of British and American troops. The Americans are very trigger-happy whereas we have the softly-softly approach and so on. How accurate do you think that depiction is? And what role do you think the British are playing in the South?
Eric Herring: There are very significant differences between the British and American modes of operation, though I’m going to qualify that heavily in a moment. The Americans are engaged in “force protection” meaning, if in doubt shoot it. The Americans talk about “hostile intent” you know he looked dangerous so I shot him sarge. Whereas the British tend to refer to hostile action, you have to actually be shooting, at least a lot of the time. There is significant evidence that even when British forces got shot at they didn’t see that there was any productive value in shooting back so they didn’t. That has been a very significant difference but it doesn’t tell you very much. Interestingly when you look at the operation of American forces in the Kurdish North of Iraq they’ve mostly played a very positive role, they’ve engaged in local dispute resolution, mediation, peacekeeping – not combat.
In the south British forces there’s only about eight and a half thousand of them, which is a puny number of troops for doing anything and they are basically tolerated. It’s not that they are winning hearts and minds whereas the Americans are losing them. This is just a choice between two ways of not controlling Iraq. You can do it the American way where you blast the hell out of everything, kill lots of people, and trash lots of places. You declare a town “insurgent hell” you go in, you take over, you alienate everyone, you pull out and the insurgents move back in. Or you can do it the British way where you just abandon control to the insurgents. So it’s two ways of losing one trashes the place and the other abandons it. You are not talking about a superior British way. Interestingly enough the people who know that are the British military and especially in non-attributed interviews they will tell you that straight out. And sometimes on the record – one of the British commanders said we are only here because we are tolerated, and that’s completely true. They now find themselves in a very dangerous position where as soon as there is any opposition they suddenly find themselves having to travel by helicopter, or not leave base at all. They are tolerated, and they have abandoned control and there is no state building project. For example Mark Etherington who was the coalition governments coordinator for the province of Wasit in the east he had a total of six people, six civilian staff in the whole of a province of a million people. Actually we can’t even run this department of politics that were sitting in with six administrative staff, so how do you run a province of a million people? Well the answer is you don’t.
AD: The insurgency has been extremely violent, operations carried out with seemingly little regard for civilians. There have been a great many atrocities that are very much focussed on in the media. The use of suicide attacks far outstrips Hezbollahs use in Lebanon or Palestinian militant groups in the occupied territories. What do you attribute the ferocity of the insurgency to?
EH: I haven’t done any serious comparison of relative degrees of use of suicide bomb attacks or indeed bomb attacks targeted on civilians so I couldn’t give you a general comparison. In terms of the Iraqi case one of the most important aspects of it is the foreign dimension, which does matter. It’s not that the insurgency is dominated by foreign fighters but that the jihadist culture of martyrdom has been developing in the specific circumstances of a number of conflicts, building on Bosnia as well as Palestine, Afghanistan and so on. There’s a growing assumption that it’s a tactic that works, it seems to and indeed does work it inflicts costs on the enemy and so on. You also have to put it in the context of some of the very specific sectarian violence that’s developing in Iraq itself.
Now you mentioned two things one was the suicide bombings and the other was the civilian casualties- and they’re not the same. A lot of suicide attacks are very much directed at American forces and infrastructural targets as opposed to those that are deliberately for sectarian purposes which is clearly the case with Al-Qaeda in Iraq who have a very extreme view of Sunni Islam and who therefore regard the Shia as apostates. So you have to separate out those things.
There is now debate amongst the insurgents with some arguing that this is provoking a divide in the insurgency between those Iraqi insurgents who don’t want sectarian violence and Al-Qaeda who are increasingly regarded by indigenous insurgents as a problem for the insurgency, as they are de-legitimising the insurgency.
AD: In a recent debate that you spoke at you said that you would not choose between the occupation forces and the insurgents. Since though you support an end to the occupation many would say that you are therefore tacitly supporting the insurgency since they are the people who are likely to take over if the occupation ends.
EH: I certainly see the logic of that but the underlying point for me is what have the Iraqis themselves expressed a preference for? After all it’s their lives, their country, their society. What Iraqis are pretty clear about in the centre and south, the north is different of course, what Iraqis have said is that the fact of occupation itself is unacceptable. Regardless of the legal niceties Iraqis still regard themselves as occupied by the proportion of nine to one. The same proportion want foreign forces to leave, either immediately or as soon as there is a directly elected Iraqi government. Most of them regard armed attacks on coalition forces as legitimate. Well that has to matter. They also tend to see that the presence of coalition forces makes there lives less secure, both because they induce insurgent attacks and also because of the actual actions of the coalition forces in terms of their impunity and their violence and so on. Well that’s what they want, it’s their choice, and that is not siding with the insurgents. I think that if foreign forces were offered to Iraqis in a peacekeeping role and a policing role they would welcome that. They’ve said all along what they want is security and if foreign forces will contribute to that then thats fine. So the Iraqi people haven’t chosen the insurgents.
The next problem is when the conflict continues and when it reshapes without foreign forces who then do you support? Because there isn’t a single thing called “the insurgency” and not everyone is in favour of armed opposition to the occupation so you’d have to look at what those remaining social forces were and work out who to support and how and why. So I suppose you could argue in quite a crude way that if you’re not with us you’re against us, but the Iraqi people don’t see it that way I think.
AD: With regard to the issue of peace-keepers being used in Iraq with a withdrawal of the British and Americans, we recently did an interview with Milan Rai who argues for what he calls a “replacement strategy” replacing the occupation forces with forces either drawn from Arab nations or European countries that did not support the invasion. There are others in the anti-war movement who have argued for a straightforward withdrawal. People like Alex Callinicos for example who says that at this point the UN is just too discredited in the eyes of Iraqis because of the sanctions and the weapons inspection process and so on. What would you say to those kinds of positions?
EH: I think it’s very unclear. There’s no clear preference amongst Iraqis as far as I can see. What Iraqis desperately want is security and what they desperately want is an end to the occupation and what they want is an end to the violence and impunity of the occupation forces. I don’t think it’s necessary for anyone in the anti-war movement to prescribe the right solution because that needs to mesh with Iraqi preferences. Now it may be that what emerges from Iraqi preferences when you offer them a variety of possible involvements is that they say well Arab forces under a UN flag, they may say actually we want the British to stay on in a different role. There are all sorts of things that they may want I just don’t think it’s real politics to in some abstract sense prescribe the ideal involvement. You just look at your range of options and you look at the political feasibility and it may be one of a number of things and it may be that we just have to keep the hell out. So I don’t think one needs to and it’s not politically realistic to prescribe one solution.
The reason we get drawn into talking about these things is the standard gambit which is ‘Ok what’s your alternative’ and the standard reply tends to be oh dear I better have a very specific plan and then someone says this is the right one and then we all argue about it. I think a better argument is to say here is the range of options and it may be one of those. It seems to me that that is vastly more plausible in a circumstance where we really don’t know what the outcome will be. It may well be that after the December elections the new Iraqi government will tell foreign forces to just go and at that point it’s just bye bye. That’s what I can easily imagine as an outcome.
AD: That would be quite a disaster for the Americans given the cost of the occupation and the decline in support for the US around the world that the invasion and occupation has caused. But you really think they would let it go.
EH: Well they wouldn’t have a choice. Because the nightmare scenario a united Arab Iraqi uprising – would just finish them. Absolutely finish them. If [Grand Ayatollah] Sistani declared that the American presence was unacceptable they absolutely could not hold on. They would be wiped out; it would be a complete disaster. The Americans I’ve talked to, including the American military are much more of the view ‘lets declare victory and get the hell out of here’ and they can say ‘look there you go, we’ve established a democracy, we helped the people, they’ve had elections, we’ve delivered. We’ve created the Iraq we said we were going to create and look they’ve made their choice – they’ve asked us to leave and we’re leaving’. So they might have to make the best of a bad job.
That then leads to the question of what is Iraq’s future? I think that Iraq is going to be more pro-US and pro-British than a lot of people think. The Iran connection I think is unbelievably exaggerated. And I think we might find this especially when we think about Iraqi elite politics and also the Iraqi business class and the current state of corporate capitalism which is American led. And global capitalist institutions are American led and so you kind of have to get on with the Americans. A possible example would be Vietnam, which is now a capitalist pro-American state. Some of the most ludicrously pro-American people I’ve ever met are Vietnamese, embarrassingly so where they talk about the wonderful gift of democracy from the Americans. That could be the outcome in Iraq’s case.
AD: There has been a lot of speculation regarding Iran as to whether the Americans are gearing up to some kind of attack on the country especially since the Iranian President’s comments regarding Israel. How likely do you think such an attack is given the public opposition from people like Jack Straw?
EH: I think the political costs in Britain would very be heavy. Britain going along with it would force a general election and bring down the government. The reason for that is that last time before the invasion when there were massive demonstrations the government was insisting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The governments credibility on these issues has now gone, it’s absolutely in tatters. So I think it would really be unsustainable for the government the Americans would be doing this on their own. The demonstrations would be five, ten times larger. An invasion of Iran would bring pandemonium in the UK.
In terms of the likelihood of American military action against Iran it is amazing what people can gear themselves up to do once they persuade themselves of a given outcome. It’s amazing that in the run-up to the Iraq invasion that the ideologues in the Bush administration just shut out anyone who had a different view, and who warned them of the possible outcomes. And they grew to believe deeply that Iraq was up to the gills in WMD and so on. It is possible that that kind of mentality will arise again.
Another issue is tactical, that is what you would attack in Iran and how you would attack it, and with what expected strategic result. It’s hard to see what the scenario would be. If they attempt to topple the government by bombing the country who’s going to take over? Well harder liners probably. So no one who’s rational should attack Iraq but who knows what fantasy they might come up with.
AD: I was reading recently the piece you wrote on Noam Chomsky and his treatment by academics. As you know he’s recently been voted the world’s greatest intellectual for whatever that’s worth, and yet you write of how he’s pretty much ignored in the humanities, treated really as pariah. Why is that do you think?
EH: I think it’s incredibly important to focus on the fact that he is such a pariah. I think it is an important thing. Not because of him personally but what it says about academic politics. Way back I read some of his work when I was an undergraduate and I mentioned it in class and my tutor said ‘Oh Chomsky! The guy’s just a conspiracy theorist, don’t waste your time reading Chomsky’. And so you know I thought well I’m too busy to be wasting my time, if my tutor says its rubbish I’ll leave it because I’m not going to waste my time. Years later I started reading him again and found he was saying things that I wasn’t hearing elsewhere and I was just completely knocked out by it. And you know every time I said Chomsky there was just this wave of hostility. Now the question I always ask people is ‘which Chomsky books have you read?’ Because it usually turns out that they haven’t read any.
When I wrote that piece with Piers Robinson about models of the US media and foreign policy what we pointed out was that the mainstream leading communications scholars in the United States have the same model as Chomsky in very significant respects. Except that they call it “indexing” and so on, they just don’t use the same words as him. As part of this project we wrote to these scholars and said why don’t you use Chomsky and [Ed] Herman? Because it’s the same model in a lot of ways. Many wrote back and said, well we don’t like his politics, he’s far too left wing. And you know academics aren’t supposed to say that, they’re meant to say it’s because there’s some intellectual flaw in the project. Others wrote back and said ‘look I really like Chomsky’s stuff but I daren’t reference it because I won’t get taken seriously. So the amount of flak people get is very considerable.
Well what is it that makes Chomsky different? Well a number of things; first is that he embeds his analysis in a critique of the ideological function of academia itself. You see these academics and communications scholars they study the media and say the media like to think they are independent and adversarial but actually they are indexed to the government, theyre indexed to the government and elite debates. But Chomsky then says well so are academics, whose response is you cant say that about us, how dare you say that about us! Similar to what the journalists say in fact. So academics are highly offended by his critique of the ideological function of academia. The second thing is that he argues that US actions in the world arent mistakes. They are systematically functional for an offensive corporately driven power structure. And academics wont have anything to do with this either. They wont talk about the underlying reason for media obedience. The third thing is that he harnesses his critique to actual existing social movements, real campaigns, and real current issues. Another thing is that he is contemptuous towards the academic establishment; he has no respect for it. And theyre contemptuous back. They basically say you can do everything except challenge our legitimacy, and this is the problem as he fundamentally rejects the notion that they are legitimate. So they dont recognise themselves in his picture.
AD: With regard to the media and the propaganda model a question that has always interested me is the difference between British media and American media. Particularly why there is the kind of narrow gap in the British mainstream for some dissident opinion. So Mark Curtis say can get published in the Guardian and theres a few others Monbiot, Fisk in the Independent and so on who inhabit a small gap on the left extreme of the mainstream. Whereas in the US theres more total exclusion. Why do you think there is that difference and which do you think is the more functional system, which works better at quelling the domestic population?
EH: Thats a good question; in terms of functionality I think its a very good question. I think you could end up with quite a long complicated answer explaining the different British and American culture, corporate structure, and specific histories. You could end up with quite a long complicated answer that wouldnt necessarily be wrong but the way I would put it is that the closer you are to power the more touchy power becomes. Britain is relatively marginal so we can have all our relatively fancy debates because we are actually quite secondary in terms of global corporate power. Its a hypothesis rather than a considered conclusion but its a pretty reasonable argument that in any structure the closer you get to threatening the power structure the harder it will be to have a hearing. You know Fisk has an audience of how many? Pilger, Curtis how many in comparison to the American syndicated media? I mean youre talking about dozens of orders of magnitude.
In terms of which is the more functional system well that will depend on the existing social movements. So the incredibly narrow range in America, and it is unbelievably narrow. I lived there for many years and it just staggered me the limited range of opinion. Apart from of course ultra-liberal little hotspots. But the very narrow political scene is something that has been worked at very successfully over generations, whereas here there is more breadth. In terms of which works better well I think you have to look for whats functional for the relevant interests and analyse that contextually. I think that you just couldnt have such a narrow range here because of the social breadth and political history of socialist movements, which has been more effectively buried in American history. Equally though the critique here is still very much more about America and the interesting thing about Mark Curtis is that his work is about British foreign policy and its getting people to do stuff about Britain in the world that gets you as vilified as Curtis and Pilger.
AD: Whats your view of the current state of the anti-war movement, which at least appears to have declined from the pre-invasion period. Where do you think it should be going? What do you think it should be focussing on?
EH: Well in the pre-invasion period the reason you could have mass mobilisation was that there was a very specific objective that people could agree on – which was prevent the invasion. It was an incredibly diverse movement with people coming from all backgrounds lots of people who had previously not been at all political and who have gone back to their non-political background. Now some are of the view that the only way to stop British and American aggression is to follow on with civil disobedience and so on. Im more sceptical, Im sure that civil disobedience, strategic non-violence can work in certain circumstances but it can backfire as well. Perhaps thats just me being a personal coward in saying that! And who knows maybe thats partly true, but I often think its not useful.
In terms of what to focus on one thing is the work that the Campaign Against the Arms Trade are doing which is particularly good and something I try to promote research into. The good thing about it is that it focuses in on the really dark under-belly of the British state and what it does the people it supplies with arms and what they are supplied with, and the subsidies to the arms trade. So I think targeting Britain and the arms trade is an incredibly valuable thing. Uncovering more of Britains colonial history is a very good thing; uncovering more about Britains role in the occupation is a very good thing. For instance the public interest lawyers who have been bringing all those cases about Iraqis whove been killed and tortured. These are all very important things because they challenge the British state on its territory. There are many things relating to continuing violence that Britain is involved in that are being worked at. There are a lot of very healthy positive things going on.
Alex Doherty is a member of the UKWatch Collective