Source: Italian magazine Micromega
Published (in Italian translation) as Paul Berman/Anatol Lieven, "Guerra antifascista o regalo ai terroristi?", in the Italian magazine Micromega (Rome), October 2004.
BERMAN: To start, we decided to choose a passage from a recent article of mine, Five Lessons from a Bad Year. Silence and Cruelty, published on the "The New Republic" on June 28, 2004. There I wrote: "I tried to persuade people that severe oppression justifies intervention, no matter what other explanations Bush may have offered; that Baathism and radical Islam are extremist movements with a visible link to European fascism and have worked together to achieve their shared ideal, the human bomb; that a great struggle over totalitarian ideas is precisely the issue in Iraq; that Muslim liberals do exist in both Iraq and Afghanistan (though I am willing to be tolerantly flexible about the definition of liberalism, under the circumstances), and merit our support; that liberalism's gain will be terrorism's loss; and that every country in the liberal democratic world has a role to play, even if certain passages in the damnable National Security Strategy might suggest otherwise".
Those are my views. I have spent quite a while trying to persuade people around the world to accept those views. Perhaps I should specify that by "liberal", I am not referring to the philosophy of unrestrained or unregulated capitalism, which is the conventional European definition of the word; I am referring instead to the philosophy of democratic freedom, the commitment to rationality, human rights, separation of church and state, which are the foundations for all successful modern and free societies.
When I say in the statement quoted that there is a struggle against totalitarianism, despite what some people have said, I am quarrelling with the Bush Administration, which on both sides of this issue has been inarticulate or incoherent. In the official National Security Statement of 2002 -- the official manifesto, so to speak, of the Bush Administration's foreign policy -- the authors said specifically that the struggles between free societies, or liberal societies, and totalitarianism were an event of the twentieth century, but that they are over. The threats facing the contemporary world would come from other things.
I regard that opinion as a gigantic error, a huge philosophical mistake on the part of the Bush Administration. It is a mistake that has led to many dire consequences. In some statements Bush himself and members of his Administration have spoken in the opposite manner, as if a struggle with totalitarianism does exist, but this incoherence on their part has itself been a grave problem.
The fascist nature of Baathism I think is beyond dispute. Baathism was founded in 1943 in Damascus, under the authority of Vichy France, in collaboration with the Nazis. The Baath movement, in other words, was founded as something of an adaptation of Nazi ideas to the Arab world.
It is sometimes falsely maintained that Baathism is a secular movement and this is a popular and conventional idea, the origin of which I don't really understand. It was always the theory of Baathism that the Arab nation, meaning the Arabs as an ethnic nation, have a special role to play in the world. What defines the Arab nation is Islam, so the movement is not itself an Islamic movement, but it is a nationalist movement which defines Islam as the core of the Arab national idea. That is an idea that was perfectly acceptable for even Arab Christians, such as one of the founders of the movement, Aflaq, to affirm. One could maintain one's own Christian ideas or even secular ideas and still affirm this notion of an Arab nationalism, which is defined by the Islam which forms the center of the Arab soul. Of course, in later years Baathism took an increasingly religious turn, as everyone who has read the speeches of Saddam Hussein and watched the progress of the Baath party in Iraq knows.
The fascist origins of Islamism are different and are a little more tenuous but I think are none the less real, and that it is crucial for us to be able to understand them. I think the argument that Islamism is a genuine expression of Muslim fundamentalism is a grave error. The crucial concepts of Islamism come again from a fascist idea of a particular group of people with a divine-like mission to struggle against the world. The Islamists' idea reflects the paranoid and apocalyptic doctrines that are familiar to us from fascism, and of course like Baathism, one of the central aspects of Islamic Radicalism is anti-Semitism, not in the traditional Muslim sense but the anti-Semitism of the extreme Right of Europe. This is why the Protocol of the Elders of Zion and other documents of the European extreme Right and the Nazi movement have played such a very prominent role in the history of the Islamist movement.
Now the two movements have been bitter enemies and rivals for many years and there have been terrible wars between them. Similarly, there have been violent struggles of all sorts between different wings both of Baathist movement in its Syrian versus Iraqi branches, and between different wings of the Islamist movement in its Shiite and Sunni branches. But the fact that there are these different struggles and rivalries and hatreds and even wars among these groups should not blind us to the points that they have in common and should not blind us to the history of collaboration between them. The collaboration that I have in mind is not really the simple comic book plotting that Dick Cheney seems to be obsessed by, but it is just more of a natural thing which has flowed over the years and has found expression in recent years in a certain shared sentiment for constructing the human bomb, suicide terrorism. The history of Baathist and radical Islamist collaboration on this sort of thing is long and well established and I don't think it is disputed by anybody, or ought not to be disputed by anybody.
I think the tragedy that has come from these movements has had two qualities that ought to draw attention. One is simply the scale of suffering that has been created by these movements. Totalitarianism in its European versions caused the death of millions and millions of people. European totalitarianism in the version that was exported over the years to East Asia, in the form of Stalinism and other such things, likewise has had victims in the millions. The same is true of the adaptations of European fascism in Baathism and radical Islamism. During the last twenty five years millions of Arabs and Muslims have fallen victims to these movements, millions and millions of people: not just Muslims but also Christians and Animists in the Sudan, Israelis, Spaniards, Americans and so forth. The principal victims have been, of course, overwhelmingly Muslims themselves. That is the first thing to note, the scale of the horror, which is on the grandest most horrific twentieth century scale.
The second thing to note is that is in the eyes of much of the world, all of this has been invisible. The fascist movements have prospered, they have grown, they have achieved power, they have acted on their principles, as they have said they would in their ideological documents. Results have been what they have been, the death of millions of people, many more millions driven in from their homes into exile, entire regions of the world driven into poverty. Yet these horrific sufferings have remained invisible to much of the world, so just as the horrors of Nazism were invisible to many people in the 1930's and just as the horrors of Stalinism were invisible to many people during the whole period from the 30's to the middle 50's, the horrors of the Islamic fascist movements, Baathism and Radical Islamism, have likewise been invisible. And because of the invisibility the forces around the world that ought to have mobilized in solidarity with the victims and with the potential victims have never done so. The kind of progressive Anti-fascist struggle that ought to have been undertaken all these years has never actually taken place, , even now to do such a thing is to be thought to have made a controversial point.
To my mind one of the great scandals of all modern history was the anti-war movement of 2003. The regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was surely the most tyrannical, most totalitarian, most murderous regime in all of modern history after that of Pol Pot: hundreds of thousands, probably millions were killed, four million were driven into exile. The Liberals of Iraq have faced a nightmare of hopelessness and the horrors of abandonment by much of the rest of the world. Finally, steps were being taken to overthrow this worst of tyrannies in the modern world and at this moment the largest mass movement in the history of the entire world formed to prevent the overthrow of the fascist government in Iraq. To me this is a gigantic moral scandal. It is the kind of moral scandal which has characterized so much of modern history and is an example in microcosm of the many forces that have led to the tragic and truly unbearable fact that modern history in the last ninety years of so has been one of the cruelest and bloodiest periods in all of human history.
LIEVEN:
I should say, to start with, that I do not consider myself a person of the Left, and I certainly do not consider myself a pacifist. I supported the British war in the Falklands as a British patriot. I strongly supported the first Iraq war to throw Saddam out of Kuwait, and indeed if we had then gone onto to overthrow Saddam in Baghdad I would have supported that as well. And I supported the Western military interventions in the Balkans in the 1990's and I only wish that they had come a lot sooner.
Concerning the parallel to previous totalitarian movements in Europe, although I believe that it is profoundly wrong as far as a large part of the contemporary Muslim world is concerned, it does nonetheless go to the heart of one of the critical issues under discussion here. That is the question of strategy, or if you prefer tactics.
Like Mr. Berman, I would have been profoundly opposed to both Nazism and Stalinism in the 1940's and it was necessary for the West to struggle against both. If, however, as Winston Churchill proposed in the autumn of 1939, Britain or the West had gone to war with both Nazism and Stalinism simultaneously, then the West would have lost. We would have lost that war with catastrophic consequences for humanity. The alliance with Stalin during the Second World War after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union was not a pretty thing, but it was a necessary thing: it destroyed Nazism, it preserved the West, and it did so at an infinitely lesser cost in Western and perhaps even German lives than would have been the case if we had not had the Soviet Union on our side, or, if God forbid, we tried to fight Hitler and Stalin simultaneously.
I opposed this latest war in Iraq having strongly supported the first Iraq war, not out of any sympathy with the Baath regime in Iraq, nor out of any inherent opposition to the use of American power as such - American power has often been very positively used in the world, above all during and after the Second World War. Like a great many people I opposed this war on prudential grounds because it did seem to me that it would create or greatly strengthen exactly what we were setting out to oppose, which is to say an alliance between the forces of radical Arab nationalism, represented by the Baath, and those of radical Sunni Islamism and terrorism, represented by Al Qaeda and its allies.
This is exactly what we now see. People like me warned about this danger and it has happened. An alliance which previously was very, very weak, for which no solid evidence has been produced, has now become very strong. In consequence, unfortunately, both the military prestige and the moral prestige of the United States and Britain in the world, and especially in the Muslim world, have been greatly weakened. Our military prestige has weakened, because it is now recognised by radicals in the Muslim world that although the US can overthrow governments it has vastly greater difficulty in conducting occupations in the face of armed opposition, and in creating stable states. This is an active incentive to Al Qaeda and its allies to try to provoke the US into invading and occupying more Muslim states.
As far as moral prestige is concerned, one needs to look no further than Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib, however, was not simply an accident. I am not actually blaming the US military for this, because by comparison with other occupation forces the US military has actually behaved relatively well; the point is that any armed forces in a war of occupation of this kind are going to end up committing brutalities and atrocities. In this particular case where it is of the most critical importance to win over important sections of Arab and Muslim public opinion, this has had a politically and therefore by implication a military disastrous result.
Concerning the totalitarian and fascist analogy, Mr. Berman himself has said that Baathism and allied movements in the Arab world, Sunni revolutionary Islamism as represented by Al Qaeda and its allies and theocratic Shia Islam, have indeed been very bitterly opposed to each other. The Iran/Iraq war is obviously an example of the bitter hostility between radical Arab nationalism and Shia Iran. Iran in turn very nearly went to war with Taliban Afghanistan in 1998. Furthermore, by far the most savage repression in the Arab world outside Iraq in recent decades has been Baath Syria's repression of Sunni Islamist revolution in the early 1980's. These conflicts have been on an enormous scale.
It is true that some of these different forces and ideologies have tactically cooperated on occasions against the West, like Hitler and Stalin in 1939-40. It is also absolutely true that the Baath has fascist roots, indeed they celebrated these. Michel Aflaq openly propagandized on the basis of the lessons that he'd drawn from Nazism and Fascism. But to take an Italian historical analogy: to suggest that this makes all these different movements into basically the same movement is to suggest that theocracy as represented by the Vatican until the twentieth century, radical Italian nationalism and conservative Italian regionalism were all one and the same thing because they were all hiostile to liberal democracy, which historically speaking is just frankly ludicrous.
Mr. Berman has spoken of something that joins all these different movements in the Muslim world, namely a common idea of constituting particular group of people with a divine mission to struggle, but once again, that would be as true of the Jesuits in European history or Christian history as it would have been of the Nazis, for example. Just because they have a not dissimilar sense of their own role of the historical elite, or elect group, it does not mean that these people represent one and the same basic historical force.
Now, on that score, Aflaq and the Baath, the parallel with Italian fascism is indeed very interesting. Aflaq and his supporters and followers certainly supported or gloried in the historical achievements of Arab Islam, just as Mussolini gloried in the historical, cultural and political achievements of Italian Catholicism or Catholic Italy. However, in practical terms, both fascism in Europe outside Spain, and the Baath in Syria and Iraq were bitterly opposed to any involvement of real religious-political groups in actual politics and government, and for very similar reasons. These forms of modern radical nationalism were all about creating a totalitarian version of a national society. In the fascist view, this totalitarian society must not be diluted or undermined either from above, by wider appeals to religious unity and belief, or from below, by smaller religious subgroups.
Of course later on, Mussolini signed the Concordat with the Vatican and Saddam Hussein, particularly after the first Iraq war, called on Islam for support in Iraq, just as by the way Stalin during the Second World War called on the Russian Orthodoxy to strengthen his regime against the Nazi invasion. In none of these cases however did it mean that there was any fundamental ideological reconciliation between these groups. Mussolini remained a convinced and absolute atheist to the day he died.
I have to say that Mr. Berman's view of Islam is a bit like that of those Muslims who conflate the whole of Western history into one mass of hostility to Islam. They mix up the widest possible range of utterly different Western traditions, many of which have indeed been deeply hostile to Islam, but which have been even more hostile to each other. To conflate different movements in this way makes Western history absolutely incomprehensible in serious intellectual terms.
Just to conclude, once again on the strategic point, we can lose this war against terrorism with catastrophic results for the Muslim world itself, for the West and for Israel. To win a war of this kind it is absolutely essential that we understand what kind of war we are fighting and that we also understand the nature of the enemy. And one thing that is absolutely critical to winning this war is dividing the enemy, just as it was in the Cold War: In that struggle, we were able to split the Communist front along nationalist lines, and this contributed enormously to our ultimately winning that war. This is what we must also set out to do, I think, in the war against Sunni Islamist Terrorism.
I am afraid that relying just on Muslim liberals to this end isn't going to hack it, frankly. Mr. Berman has said that there are Afghan liberals in Afghanistan: well, yes, there are some Afghan liberals, but during my travels in Afghanistan I met them only in Kabul and only under the protection of the Western Forces. I did not meet any in any of the other provinces that I visited, even those that were firmly in the hands of our own allies. To build up those liberals as a serious force in Afghanistan will take decades. I am not saying that we shouldn't do that, but to think that they can give us really strong support now, is profoundly foolish. Unfortunately for the moment we have to deal with the Muslim world as it is, with all the advantages and disadvantages that this affords for Western strategy. It is our duty to play upon the advantages and thereby to weaken our enemies.
BERMAN: First, unlike Mr. Lieven, I do consider myself a man of the Left, so there is a tiny difference.
Second, let me address Mr. Lieven's statement that I have a view of Islam which conflates all kinds of opposite things. Here I have to protest that really I don't have any view of Islam at all. I look at Islam in pretty much the same light as I look at Christianity, as a vast construction capable of the greatest heights of civilized achievement and likewise capable of terrible and monstrous things. The issue for me has never been Islam. The issue for me has been the modern political movements that have been so powerful in so many parts of the Muslim world. These political movements, Baathism and Radical Islamism principal amongst them, have claimed Islam, the ancient religion, as a source of their authority. I do not think that this claim should be taken at face value. I think that Islam is perfectly capable of producing liberal and progressive democrats just as Christianity is. Islam like Christianity is a symphony orchestra that can play many different tunes depending on what is asked of it.
Now, to address Mr. Lieven's points, on the question of strategy in the war, he is right, he is all too right, he is heartbreakingly right to say that we might well lose this war. It is entirely possible that the struggle against modern terrorism on one hand, and the larger struggle against what I am describing as Muslim totalitarianism and its different branches, on the other hand, could well be lost and there could be monstrous consequences: vast numbers of deaths all over the world including parts of the world that might seem inconceivable remote from the centers of the Muslim world. So, I share Mr. Lieven's worry about this.
I agree with him too that at least on the limited question of George Bush and his political errors and strategic misconceptions. I think that Bush has done a thousand things wrong and I fervently hope that he will be out of office in a few months. I have always vehemently and publicly opposed Bush. The nature of these errors is something that we ought to define.
Mr. Lieven wants to argue that the Baathists, on one hand, and the Radical Islamists, on the other hand, are really hugely different and he compares my assimilation of these two movements into the larger concept of totalitarianism to an effort to assimilate things as wildly different as the Hapsburg empire, the traditional Papacy and Italian Fascists. Of course I agree with Mr. Lieven that any effort to assimilate those things would have a ludicrous quality, but I don't think that it is mistake to assimilate the Iron Guard of Romania, the Nazi, the Falange of Spain, the Fascists of Italy, the movement of Charles Maurras in France, and so forth to each of the different countries of Europe. Nor is it entirely preposterous to see the similarity between Stalinism and Nazism.
Mr. Lieven cites Churchill to say that it would have been crazy to go to war against Stalinism and Nazism at the same time. This is absolutely true. In fact it would have been crazy to go to war against Stalinism at all, ever, given that it was possible to defeat Stalinism without going to war merely by waging a Cold War. It is certainly true that the actual consequences of actions should be taken into account and that questions of tactics and strategy must be considered. The only problem though is this. This strategy which Mr. Lieven advocates of divide and conquer is precisely the strategy that the United States and other Western countries have pursued in the Arab world during the last many decades. The United States has a genuinely shameful history of backing one or another horrendous and tyrannical group for the purpose of opposing some other horrendous and tyrannical group.
Thus the United States found itself in the position of supporting Iraq under Saddam Hussein. It is true that the French perhaps outdid the United States, but nonetheless the United States did play this kind of role. Similarly many Governments in the West sought to back the most radical Islamists for various purposes. Here again the United States managed to back, not just the Islamists of Afghanistan but the worst factions amongst the Islamists of Afghanistan in their struggle against the Soviet Union in the 1980's. But it wasn't just the United States, France was backing the Islamists of France. Israel began by backing Hammas for a while in the hope that the radical Islamists of Hammas were going to counter the radical nationalists of Arafat's faction and other factions.
The difficulty with this was, first, a moral difficulty. Let us speak about loss of moral credibility. Abu Ghraib is certainly a disgrace. I myself am outraged that Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of Defense, hasn't been forced to resign in disgrace over this matter, but if we are to speak about the ways in which the United States has disgraced itself morally in the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world, surely it is through backing these horrendous totalitarian movements, not just for a month or a year but over a period of decades. In the entire history of American relations with the Arab and Muslim world as a whole the United States has never stood up in any kind of consistent way for the principles of liberal democracy or for the principles of what I would describe as anti-totalitarianism. But there is a reason why the United States acted in this way and that reason was the analysis that the proper way to proceed is to divide and conquer, to set one group against the other and therefore to proceed, along the lines of what are called in discourse of American Foreign Policy, along 'realist' paths.
This has been truly the greatest American error. It is true that some aspect of divide and conquer nonetheless can make certain sense. We see Iyad Allawi in Iraq now, the new Prime Minister, doubtless in some sort of agreement with the American embassy there, led by the horrendous John Negroponte, trying to act in this manner to divide the Baathist resistance from the Islamist resistance, to divide the Shiite resistance from the Sunni and the Iraqi resistance in its whole from that of foreign terrorists in Iraq. That is a very intelligent way to proceed and I hope that it succeeds, but ultimately these kinds of movements, the larger totalitarian wave that has been represented by the larger Baathist and Islamist movements and all their different wings, is not going to be defeated by setting one against the other. It is not the war between Hitler and Stalin which is going to end the problem. What is going to end the problem is to bring about some kind of success for the Liberals of the Muslim world. Here we come to the question which Mr. Lieven raises. Are there in fact liberals in the Muslim world? Are there people who we should support as comrades...
There are, but it is a question of how strong they are and how many there are.
BERMAN: This is precisely what I want to address. Mr. Lieven said that in his travels around Afghanistan he found very few, he found them in Kabul and not in the provinces. Here, I have no doubt that Mr. Lieven's observations are correct and to the point and I conclude from this that yes, we do right to support Hamid Karzai and his people in Kabul. I think it has been one of the great moral errors of liberalism and the Left in the West, moral error number 3,233,132, not to have pressed for still more aid to Karzai and his government, not to have pressed for more NATO troops and all the rest of this, but I agree that the ability of Karzai and the liberal minded Afghans in Kabul to transform utterly the nature of society and political thought in Afghanistan is bound to be limited. Yet this is the very reason why in my eyes, this central struggle against the totalitarianism of our day is not taking place in Afghanistan.
I think that the invasion of Afghanistan was necessary in order to crush the training camps and headquarters of Al Qaeda, but I never imagined for a moment that crushing those camps or eliminating the headquarters was going to eliminate Al Qaeda or the larger dangers of modern terrorism. Afghanistan was nothing but a temporary office for Al Qaeda. It was also a kind of Utopia, but it was never the center of the movement. Nor has Afghanistan ever played a central role in the development of these modern political ideas, except in the form of a projection from other parts of the Muslim world onto Afghanistan and its struggle against the Soviet Union. The core, the social and intellectual base of these movements have always been in the center of the Arab world plus in Iran. That is why the more important struggle is actually the one in Iraq. The war in Iraq is addressing a deeper and more central question than the war in Afghanistan, because the war in Iraq represents a struggle for power and authority and moral authority in the center of the region which has generated the most important of the totalitarian movements.
I think that to speak about Liberals in Iraq, in fact to speak about the democratic Left in Iraq is entirely reasonable. In Iraq we are not dealing with a situation like that of Afghanistan. Two weeks ago, the Deputy Prime Minister of the new Government was appointed and this is Barham Salih, who had been the Premier of some of the regions of Iraqi Kurdistan. Salih, as the readers of Micromega ought to know, delivered an impassioned socialist speech to the council of the Socialists' International meeting in Rome, early in 2003, asking for solidarity from the Democrats of the Western Left, the people, I would think of in my American language, considered the Liberals of the Left. In that historic speech that Salih addressed to his own comrades of the Socialist International, he explained that Italy had fallen under the sway of fascism and Italy was unable to liberate itself from the fascist dictatorship. Italy needed the invasion that was mounted by the Anglo-American forces in June of 1944 to be liberated from Fascism. The invasion of Italy and the subsequent occupation -- including the subsequent meddling by the American Embassy, which was sometimes good and sometimes atrocious and even scandalous -- represented in the end the liberation of Italy by the Italians themselves. Once freed of the dictatorship, the Italian themeselves were able to participate in the construction of a modern and free society, certainly a society that by world standards has to be regarded as a great success.
Barham Salih addressed the Socialist International and described at that point the impending invasion of Iraq as something quite similar. In Kurdistan under the protection of the British and American military and even the French for a while at the very beginning, after the first Gulf War, the Kurds have succeeded in building what is at least the beginnings of a liberal and democratic society, in which organizations like the patriot union of Kurdistan are in fact organizations of the modern democratic left with some affiliation to the Socialists" International. This is not a small thing. I am perfectly aware of the many struggles and dark conspiracies that have gone on among the different Kurdish politicians, Left and otherwise, and I am perfectly aware that liberal democracy as it has developed in Northern Iraq is perhaps not to be compared at this point to the liberal democracy of Sweden, let us say, but still something has happened in Iraq. It is a progressive step undertaken by millions of people in Northern Iraq who have made this kind of progress. Now, just two weeks ago Barham Salih has been selected as Deputy Prime Minister, true not by a democratic process because there are the conditions of military occupation and the failure yet to generate the conditions that can produce that genuine democratic process, and yet nonetheless he is precisely the kind of figure who would find himself in power if there truly were a democratic process. That is to say that he is a genuinely popular figure in Kurdistan who has been accepted by politicians representing all the other principal groups of Iraq as someone who ought to playing, what he is playing, a leading role in Iraqi politics as a whole and not just in Kurdistan.
When we look at this kind of thing we see something larger than a handful of Liberals in Kabul. We see a struggle in which there are people with whom we ought to be able to identify, people who ask for our solidarity, as Liberals or Leftists of the West and of the rest of the world and who ought to obtain that solidarity.
Mr. Lieven says, with some acuity, that Bush has gone about the Iraq war in a bad way, that he has aroused animosity unnecessarily. I agree. I couldn't agree more. Nonetheless the war is a fact. People who we ought to identify as our comrades are struggling now in Iraq to change the natu