David Runciman
THE POLITICS OF GOOD INTENTIONS
History, fear and hypocrisy in the New World Order
224pp. Princeton University Press. £18.95 (US $29.95).
0 691 12566 X
The philosopher enters town, mean-faced, gun at the ready. He walks down Main Street and blazes away at all he sees. Corpses are soon piling up in the dust. Blowing the smoke from his barrel the great thinker walks away. Did he kill the right guys?
Yes, he did. David Runciman’s virtuoso essay, The Politics of Good Intentions: History, fear and hypocrisy in the New World Order, tackles the world’s present discontents head-on. The politics of risk, the war on
terror, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, al-Qaeda, neoconservatism, George Bush, Tony Blair – everywhere Runciman sees hypocrisy, cant, sloppy thinking and sloppier speaking. But the anger is controlled, informed by history and philosophy, never a rant.
Did the modern world really begin with 9/11? No it did not, unless you want to believe so. What began on 9/11 was the coming of age of an excuse, an outbreak of aggression after the repressive diplomacy and enforced reasonableness of the Cold War. September 11 offered a new and simplistic world view for “a few immensely powerful, intensely paranoic states”: in truth, America. That state was described by a Bush aide as no longer one in which “solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality”. Instead, it was one in which “when we act, we create our own reality . . . we are history’s actors and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do”.
Runciman seeks out the basis of this grotesque solipsism amid the noise of the past five years. He takes as his starting point the familiar phenomenon of a leader who rules by generating fear of the unknown, rooted in some iconic catastrophe to which such fear can be related. The “war on terror” was ideal for this purpose, a war that had no enemy and could thus never be won, a war that need never end. As in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, such a war empowers a leader to fight any battle he chooses, and to require any sacrifice, since he can declare the existence of the State to be at risk.
The villain of Runciman’s piece is Tony Blair, Dick Cheney’s “preacher on a tank”. The central thrust is that 9/11 did not represent a new pattern in world-historical affairs since, as many neocons had been asserting, a similar threat had been around for a decade. No new intent or strategy separated the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center from the 1993 one. The only difference was in technical competence.
September 11 was rather a suitably dramatic event to which the word new could be attached. Blair talked of “globalized terror” and how “I feel so passionately that we are in mortal danger of mistaking the nature of the new world in which we live”. But he cannot explain why the danger is suddenly so mortal, only that many Americans think so. The application to it of the word “new” is sufficient to validate his warning and his passion.
Newness is vital to a leader who wants to persuade the public that the old certainties no longer apply and that it is vulnerable to new risks. As Ulrich Beck has pointed out, a new risk is a political elixir. It harnesses fear to privileged knowledge to require new obediences.
Herein lies the first of Runciman’s many paradoxes. A new risk both puts a premium on the expert, the risk assessor, and yet enables Blair to assert that he “dare not take risks with terrorism”. On the one hand, a democracy is about judging a measure of informed risk as the price of freedom. On the other hand, if the risk is “new”, then a democratic leader can claim that not taking his country to war is a “risk no responsible government could afford to take”.
Too bad if Saddam Hussein has no threatening weapons; there was a risk he might. Not to have attacked him was so dangerous as to be beyond risk assessment. It was “not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance” since the threat to Britain and the world from Saddam was “real and existential”.
Blair therefore contrived both to claim that going to war was “a risk I had to take” and that it was no risk at all, that it was an open-and-shut case. The Iraq war was an incautious venture for whose boldness he deserves credit, and yet was a supremely cautious one for which he also deserves credit. The decision was both not a choice at all and yet “an agonizing one”.
Assuming that all this is not merely the effusions of a beta-minus speechwriter – which may be the case – Runciman exposes what were real confusions in the minds of British leaders as they wrestled with a quite different question: whether it would be better or worse
to invade with the Americans. If Runciman underestimates this consideration, he is right to require the language of war to be clear. The impression is overwhelming that Blair’s approach to the war on terror is the reckless in pursuit of the riskless.
A similar confusion surrounds Blair’s craving for atonement. He protests that critics of the war should judge him not with hindsight but on the basis of his knowledge at the time. He pleads his “purity of purpose” in reading the intelligence about Saddam and thus in going to war. Yet no sooner has he asked to be judged by intentions rather than outcomes than he turns turtle and asks to be judged by outcomes. He demands, “Let history be my judge”. In other words, I meant well at the time and only time will tell whether I was right. Leave me alone for the present. Except that the present keeps bobbing to the surface. When asked why he feels it to be so important to attack Saddam now, Blair replies, “Because we can”.
What is near mesmerizing is Blair’s ability to turn every criticism into a Manichaean dichotomy. When asked about civilian casualties or military atrocities, he explains that they are always the result of error. “We regret them and take precautions to avoid them . . . . That is the difference between us and them.”
It is what Noam Chomsky calls “Blair’s new military humanism”, in which all means are excusable since intentions were noble. The bomb dropped on a marketplace or a wedding reception was moral because it was meant to fall somewhere else. It would indeed, since the war is just, have been immoral not to
have dropped such a weapon. By definition
our bombs are good bombs and theirs are not. Besides, as Blair invariably protests, Saddam was so much worse. Absolutes become relatives when it suits.
