www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/justpeace

Andrew Chitty

Moralism, Terrorism and War: A Reply to Martin Shaw

This reply appears with Martin Shaw’s original article, Ten challenges to antiwar politics, in Radical Philosophy 111 (Jan/Feb 2002), pp. 11-19. Shaw has replied to Chitty in A confession from the amoral left.

There are two fundamental problems with Martin Shaw's commentary. First, he presumes the legitimacy of the world status quo, and then sees the attacks of 11 September as an 'initial aggression', an irruption into this status quo from out of the blue. Yet in fact the attacks are a continuation and escalation of a war for the colonial subjugation of the Middle East that has been fought more or less continuously since World War II between the USA and its proxy state Israel on the one hand, and their locally based opponents on the other. Suez, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War of 1991, the bombing of Iraq which has continued ever since, and the two Palestinian intifadas are all episodes in this continuing war, a war which has cost probably over a million Middle Easterners their lives in the last fifty years. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the ascendancy of the USA in this war has become ever greater, to the point at which virtually every regime in the area is now its client, while the socialist and communist movements in those countries have been defeated and marginalized.

However, the result has not been the disappearance of opposition to US domination. Instead, the organized leadership of this opposition has increasingly been taken up by the network of Islamic revivalist (or 'fundamentalist' as Westerners call them) groups that now crisscross the region: groups that construe the war as an assault on the Muslim Ummah and that combine their demand for the removal of the USA and its client rulers from the Muslim world with an aspiration to restore this Ummah as a self-determining political entity governed in accord with the precepts of Islam. With the effective throttling of democratic routes to power in their own states, exemplified most blatantly by the annulment of the Algerian elections when they were won by an Islamic revivalist party in 1992, these groups have turned increasingly to terrorism as a means of waging a 'war of pan-Islamic independence' directly on the USA: through attacks on US military installations in the Arabian Peninsula (the heartland of the Ummah), through the bombing of its embassies in East Africa, and now through the attacks of 11 September on the American mainland.

Not only does Shaw make no attempt to understand the political and historical origins of these last attacks; he positively castigates those who have attempted to provide such understandings, saying that this prevents us from taking the attacks 'seriously'. In fact it is the only way to take them seriously, that is, to appreciate their full significance - a task that still remains largely unaccomplished three months after the attacks not because people have spent too much time on such understandings but because they have still spent too little. For Shaw, however, to take the attacks seriously means something else: to condemn them in moral language which is adequate to their enormity.

The second problem with Shaw's approach is the moralism that saturates it, a moralism which goes hand in hand with his dismissal of historical context, for the more we know about the historical antecedents of any act, the less easy it is to be satisfied with passing a moral judgement on it, and moralism demands such judgements everywhere. For Shaw every act must first of all be named and judged in the language of morality and right: the attacks of 11 September (a 'genocidal massacre'), the launching of a war on Afghanistan (America had a right to do so, though doing so may not have been right), the method of bombing to prosecute the war ('questionable', which is to say morally questionable), and even the actions of the anti-war movement (which show a 'moral failing'). In this perspective even historical contextualization is reduced to a matter of asking whether or not past morally bad acts by the USA (its support for the occupation of the West Bank, its bombing of a pharmaceuticals factory in the Sudan) mitigate the moral badness of the 11 September attacks. It is this moralizing perspective that he calls on the anti-war movement retrospectively to adopt: those who oppose the war, he says, should have responded to the attacks of 11 September with the same strength of moral revulsion as shown by all the other figures in the public sphere. They should then have tried to channel that moral revulsion by calling for a 'morally framed' response to the attacks, specifically an international police action against the al-Qaeda network leading to prosecutions before an international court.

Shaw's moralism places him in the company of the vast majority of media opinion-makers in this country, for whom immediate moral judgement always takes precedence over historical explanation. Yet the uses of moralism should warn us of its dangers. The language of extreme moral condemnation is the standard precursor to violence - for which, after all, it serves as the justification - and this connection has never been more glaringly obvious than in the period after 11 September. The month-long Western chorus of public moral outrage that followed that date became part and parcel of the preparation for war, the drumbeat that roused the domestic population to readiness for violence. It served to make the attack on Afghanistan, when it came, seem not merely justified but inevitable. Tony Blair expressed the connection between moralism and violence in an almost pristine form, exceeding every other world leader except Bush in both the strength of his moral condemnation of the attacks and his enthusiasm for a war on Afghanistan to avenge them.

Meanwhile, it is clear that the American foreign policy establishment that took the decisions to launch this war does not allow its thinking to be hampered by moral categories at all; one only has to look at the websites of 'geopolitical intelligence' think-tanks like Strategic Forecasting that form the milieu of this establishment to be sure of that. At the time of writing, just after the collapse of Taliban control over Afghanistan, the question is being raised whether the USA will now move to attack Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Whichever way the decision goes, we can be sure that it will not ultimately be based on the strength of evidence, if any, linking the Iraqi government to the attacks of 11 September. The only questions will be: What are the chances of success? Can a successor regime be installed that will be pliable to the USA? What are the risks to the stability of other US client regimes in the Middle East? Can Russia and the EU be squared? If the decision is to launch military action then the necessary moral fervour to justify it will be whipped up, if not on the grounds of support for terrorism then over its possible possession of nuclear or biological weapons. In the sphere of international relations, public moral discourse in the West is little more than a means of selling decisions that have already been arrived at by other means to the domestic population in a language they can understand.

Against 'for or against'

In the light of this complete instrumentalization of the discourse of morality, the anti-war movement has been quite right to be wary of adding its voice to an already deafening public roar of moral condemnation of 11 September (the volume of which is quite out of proportion to the numbers killed on that day, if we take as a standard the corresponding levels of public condemnation of, say, the Rwandan genocide, the Russian butchery in Chechnya, or the ongoing slaughter of Turkish Kurds). The anti-war movement has largely left the condemnation to others, and concentrated on opposing the war that has been justified by it. Yet by contrast Shaw wants to go even further than Bush and Blair in ratcheting up the level of moral condemnation, by using the term 'genocidal' to describe the attacks.

Let us leave aside the inappropriateness of this particular term (the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were attacked as the greatest symbols of US economic and military power, not for the number of American people in them). The issue here is, what purpose is served by cranking up the pitch of moral execration still higher in a context where such execration has become simply a means to justify war? Perhaps Shaw thinks that the anti-war movement could have ridden this tiger and steered it in the direction of gaining popular support for his preferred means of dealing with al-Qaeda. But suppose this had happened. The anti-war movement would simply have become the mirror image of the moralizing pro-war columnists of the national press: moral cheerleaders for a policy which is being advanced, within the circles of power, simply for its efficacy in consolidating Western power and security and without any reference to its moral qualities. Shaw cites Michael Howard as a source for this alternative policy, but Howard is no more weighed down by moral considerations than the Pentagon or the US State Department. In fact his model is the British Army's campaign against Malayan guerrillas in the 1950s - a campaign virtually unreported by the media - that was one of the morally dirtiest episodes in the history of the Empire, but that successfully annihilated opposition to British rule in Malaya. As for the system of international justice Shaw recommends, so far it is noticeable that its chief victims have been those who have posed an obstacle to the USA, or at best those for whom it has no use. The chances that the members of the Russian, Turkish, Indonesian, Salvadorian, Chilean, Israeli and (most of all) American governments responsible for the massacres of the last fifty years will ever face trial before its courts are effectively zero. It is a system that has functioned overwhelmingly as another tool of US power.

It is at this point that the real nature of Shaw's challenge to the anti-war movement becomes clear. Stripped of its moral rhetoric, it is the same challenge already thrown down by Bush: are you for us or against us? If you are for us, then prove it by the strength and authenticity of your condemnation of 11 September, and couple your rejection of war with a call for alternative ways of 'hunting down' (as if they were animals) the terrorists who organized it. If you fail to do this, then by your silence you are colluding with those perpetrators themselves: you are against us.

The fact that this challenge originates ultimately from Bush does not make it any the less serious; quite the contrary. It is a challenge that goes to the heart of the central division in the anti-war movement, between those who above all want to take sides against the USA (and its British lieutenant and Israeli proxy) in the war of the Middle East, whatever de facto alliances this may involve; and those who above all want to see an end to violence and oppression, as much that of al-Qaeda and the Taliban as that of the USA and its clients. Both impulses, the 'anti-imperialist' (to say 'anti-American' is to make a hopeless conflation between a governing class and the population it controls) and the 'emancipationist', are legitimate ones. But in situations like the war on Afghanistan they pull in opposite directions: one towards a positive defence of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, as the current representatives of Middle Eastern resistance to imperialist power, in their war against the USA and its proxies; the other towards a simultaneous rejection of both sides in this war. Shaw's proposal forces all opponents of the war to situate themselves one side or the other of this divide by the way they respond to it, for while anti-imperialists must reject it outright, emancipationists can only argue with its detail.

That an anti-war movement that (rightly) aimed from the start to be as broad-based as possible should contain such contradictions is hardly a surprise. Sooner or later, though, if it is to develop into anything more than an ad hoc coalition of people who oppose the war for quite different reasons, then it must address them and think them through. The way to do this is not by a fruitless counterposition of moral judgements. It is by a patient collective effort to understand the basic roots of the war. It will come as no surprise, given the attempt made above to sketch those roots, if I predict that such an effort will inevitably lead in an anti-imperialist direction.