Nothing captures the absurdity of the debate around Syria better than an exchange yesterday on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today program. Veteran broadcaster John Humphrys was interviewing Syrian expat Rim Turkmani, who is opposed to any form of military intervention. “But what if it was your family in Homs?” Humphrys probed. “I have family in Homs. At least a dozen,” Tukmani replied. “I’m terrified for them, but intervention will only increase the bloodshed.” At which point the interview lost its easy structure.
True, Humphrys was playing advocatus diaboli, but he was a lot less diaboli to the other guest, a Syrian advocating Western arming of the Free Syrian Army. Why? Because he fitted the now tiresome narrative — beleaguered people crying out for help, spurned by the West. Yet Tukmani made clear the full absurdity of the situation, in that no one is seriously contemplating any sort of full-scale Western military intervention in Syria — whatever is going to happen will depend on what Turkey wants to do.
So the debate about it has become entirely virtual — it is now an occasion for the wringing of hands, and the abstract discussion of moral obligations that no one proposes acting on. And just in case attentive readers are wondering how your correspondent can say this having supported Western involvement in Libya — it’s the very difference of the situations that suggest when one should and shouldn’t support involvement.
Libya was a revolution by the Libyan people across the board — whatever the shadowy nature of the leadership — against an autocrat with no social base to speak of, merely mercenaries and weapons. We assisted a process they had begun themselves in a clear manifestation of the general will, and in a military situation where strategic assistance was limitable and feasible.
Syria has several separate peoples penned within a colonial-era boundary. The uprising is partial, ethno-religiously based, and does not appear to have general or national consent. Assad’s brutality in Homs and elsewhere is indefensible, and it is possible that Turkey will wave a stick as part of negotiating a political solution. Anything else, would be attending to the horror of witnessing the killing of Homs, rather than doing what is possible to stop the killing itself.
That division — between our own needs and those of the actual Syrian people — is no better illustrated than by the treatment of the death of Marie Colvin, the veteran war correspondent, who was killed (with a young French photographer) in Homs two days ago. Colvin was famous as a three-decade veteran of dangerous war assignments, and became iconic, due to the adoption of a black patch, to cover an eye lost in the line of fire. She stayed in Homs, after her editor urged her to get out to get “one more story”, and appears to have been directly targeted by the Syrian government. Her death has dominated the news for a full 36 hours, with the always added subscript that “we should not forget ordinary Syrians are dying in large numbers”.
Amidst all this, no one has really asked whether her death, or her extended mission, had any real purpose. By the day she died, Colvin had already filed a long piece in The Sunday Times about the effects of the shelling on Homs, and added this comment to the BBC, which has gone round the world:
“I watched a little baby die today,” Marie Colvin told the BBC from the embattled city of Homs on Tuesday in one of her final reports.
“Absolutely horrific, a two-year old child had been hit … They stripped it and found the shrapnel had gone into the left chest and the doctor said, ‘I can’t do anything.’ His little tummy just kept heaving until he died.”
The hard question to ask is this: did Colvin’s reports add anything to our understanding of the situation? We were pretty clear about what a lethal siege looks like, even if we hadn’t been from lethal sieges of the past. Colvin could argue that by simply being there, she was making something happen — her presence in East Timor during the Indonesian attacks was said to have saved the lives of a whole community, though the story is not undisputed — but was that really the purpose of journalism per se? Or had she succumbed to what she herself mused upon last year, the confusion of bravery with bravado, of reporting with war junkiedom?
That suspicion is reinforced by remarks she made, about her continued work after losing the eye in Sri Lanka in 2001: “So, was I stupid? Stupid I would feel writing a column about the dinner party I went to last night … Equally, I’d rather be in that middle ground between a desk job and getting shot, no offence to desk jobs.” Front-line reportage or dinner party gossip, are those really the only alternatives? What about something more interpretive, that explained to readers the roots of the conflict, and the complexities of the situation? Would that not be — desk job though it is — in service to the Syrian people, perhaps more so than reportage, sometimes shading into war p-rn?
The suspicion that something more is going on — as it is with many war correspondents — is reinforced not only by that damn eye patch, a largely superfluous affectation that seemed to emphasise the narcissistic dimension of war reporting — but also by her comparison of Homs with Srebrenice, despite the many differences between the two situations. Having decided that the West should intervene, Colvin was, by her own account, trying to gather stories that would shame the West into acting. She seems to have achieved that with her death, with Nicolas Sarkozy stating: “That’s enough now … This regime must go,” the death of two European journalists apparently capable of tipping any scale you might want to offer.
Thus the whole cause is neatly contained within the Western drama of salvation, and the Syrians themselves become a backdrop in their own country — as in the last photo of her that has now become iconic, and a more telling picture than many war correspondents would want to admit to. Did her death add to our understanding? Or become part of the drama in ways which make clear-sighted action less possible?
The question can be widened to one that is rarely asked, and that is abut not merely the personality, but the class basis of many such journalists. Overwhemingly drawn from a fairly privileged elite –especially in Britain — or ex-forces personnel, their default setting seems to be a cynicism about organisational politics of any type, and a celebration of individual “conscience”, tied in with eye-witness, and often uncontextualised, accounts of suffering. For many such correspondents, trying to understand the meaning of a conflict is what Colvin disparagingly called the “desk job”, a hint of the wilful anti-intellectualism that often pervades war reporting (making all the more visible the quality of the work of those — such as Robert Fisk and John Pilger — who do put in the desk time).
Such journalists’ careers also serve the interests of other journalists, trapped in a profession that is increasingly devolving to rewriting press releases to wrap around advertising on a page of lifestyle features. The exploits — constructive or otherwise — of war correspondents becomes a way of retaining some meaning in a diminished profession, and their deaths consequently become a rallying point for professional self-celebration.
Bravery is a virtue, and Colvin clearly had it in spades, but it’s a virtue of means, not ends — and when attached to a series of agendas that are anything but those of the wider Syrian people, such exploits can have a contrary effect. At a time when an ever larger proportion of war reportage is being done by the people themselves, and then posted/smuggled/emailed to the wider world, there’s all the more reason to cast a critical eye over large organisations such as the BBC, and individual hero correspondents and the narratives they bring to complex struggles.
26 thoughts on “Rundle: Colvin was brave in Syria, but her cause is unjust”
Guy Rundle
February 25, 2012 at 3:14 amTad
the 30,000 dead figure you quote is, as far as I can tell, a figure that was put about by the NTC in the midst of the campaign – a figure that they alleged were those killed by Gaddafi. No proof of that figure was provided by them at the time, and antiwar.com described it as without evidence. But, if you’ve got another source for a figure of 30,000, point me to it. As far as I can tell, there is no reliable figure for the death toll in Libya.
The mere fact of a bombing campaign, or a struggle of some months duration doesn’t invalidate the notion of a general will. The only pertinent question in that respect was whether those rising up had broad social support. I think they did, and that, among other things, distinguishes it from Syria.
Yes, I doubt Libya is idyllic at the moment. But neither was Russia in 1918, France in 1790, or Nicaragua in 1981. Post-revolutionary violence doesn’t delegitimate a revolution. Nor do post-revolutionary reversals – else what would we think of Egypt, where the immediate result of the struggle has been the victory not merely of the Brotherhood, but the Salafists – with the prospect that basic liberties and civil rights, for women and others, are about to get somewhat worse than they were under Mubarak?
Dr_Tad
February 25, 2012 at 8:46 amGuy
I used that figure of 30,000 precisely because it was the claim made by the NTC health minister. The NTC also claimed that half the dead were Gaddafi fighters. See here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/08/libya-war-died_n_953456.html This is significant because it undercuts your contention as to how isolated Gaddafi was. You simply cannot keep a war going for that long if you’re “an autocrat with no social base to speak of, merely mercenaries and weapons”.
My point is not that Gaddafi was widely loved (he was a brutal dictator after all), but that the revolutionaries had not managed to unite anything even close to a “general will” for their strategies and aims. They were politically much less able to do so than the Egyptian revolutionaries, who were able to win not just Mubarak’s ouster but massively increased space to organise on a collective democratic basis. I’ll get back to Egypt in a minute.
The NTC’s mortality estimates have been challenged by various other accounts, which Wikipedia summarises as being between 13,343 and 17,313 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Libyan_civil_war). Of course a big part of the problem is that NATO forces specifically avoided counting deaths, most especially those civilian deaths which may have been caused by their actions. See here, for example: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/scores-of-unintended-casualties-in-nato-war-in-libya.html
The numbers dead and wounded also stand in stark contrast to the NTC’s claims that intervention would avert large numbers of killings in Gaddafi’s “impending massacre” that never happened (and that there was not much evidence he could actually carry out even if it had been his intention, although exactly what his intention was also remains seriously contested).
I think the deeper problem with your formulation of a “general will” is that such things never exist in revolutions. Revolutions expose the deep cleavages and antagonisms within societies, not the possibility of a general unity. In Egypt even when Mubarak fell he retained considerable minority support, and as you rightly point out the immediate electoral beneficiaries of the revolution have been Islamist parties well to the Right of those driving the revolutionary process forward. But it is tendentious in the extreme to pose the possibility that rights won in Egypt are “about to get somewhat worse than they were under Mubarak”. This is the kind of speculation that ignores how destabilised systems of authority and social control are now in Egypt.
In fact, Egyptians have more democratic rights in practice today than they have had any time since the early days of Nasser (or perhaps before — Nasser was no democrat). The ruling SCAF military council has passed a series of laws banning strikes and protests that have been observed almost entirely in the breach. This is the nature of a revolutionary situation: states lose their authority and cannot enforce the will of the ruling elite through either consent or force.
Another problem with raising Egypt is that you telescope a worst case scenario that hasn’t happened in order to deflect from the horrors that already have emerged in Libya under the NTC. It’s not just that things aren’t “idyllic” right now, it’s that the fragmented post-war regime is acting in thoroughly reactionary ways — in part to solidify its political and economic ties to the West, and in part because it has been content to allow and/or promote the grossest human rights abuses, torture, etc.
That’s why your invocation of “post-revolutionary violence” is just as misleading as your invocation of a “general will”. It elides the character of the violence and the agency carrying it out. In fact, it evades a serious analysis of the NTC regime and its ties (strengthened by the intervention) to far more sinister forces in the West who definitely don’t want to see the early liberatory potential of the revolution to return. To compare Libya 2012 with France 1790, Russia 1918 and Nicaragua 1981, when in all three cases any significant foreign intervention was opposed to the revolutionary process, is the height of obfuscation.
The way you hedge support or opposition to Western intervention in the Arab Spring rests on some pretty untenable abstractions. It means you cannot deal concretely with how each revolution might go forward beyond what Western states should or shouldn’t do. How can much wider sections of Syrian society be united around an effective political project to win democratic rights and social justice?
And, finally, you forget the very relevant proposition that even if you have nothing useful to say about that (which is fair enough) then at least you know that for an Australian Leftist the main enemy is always at home, in the form of the Australian ruling class and state. Your formulae here encourage illusions that our main enemy can be the Libyan or Syrian people’s occasional friend.
straightbreaks
February 25, 2012 at 10:01 amIf Colvin’s accounts of violence in a besieged part of Syria added nothing to our understanding, perhaps Crikey should reconsider sending Rundle around the world to capture the vibe of the far less important events he has touched on in recent years.
No war reportage could be as self-aggrandising as the waffle you have presented here, Guy. Colvin may have been addicted to action, and war coverage may be romanticised, but surely a witness inside Syria has some value. If nothing else, it’s the most valuable form of journalism in this kind of situation. Until the situation in Syria become far clearer, I’ll take a straight report on action over a distant pundit’s sweeping analysis.
Crikey readers, spend the weekend watching the Rundles of Australia as they speculate on the Labour caucus. When the votes are in, ask yourself how much of the punditry on the Rudd-Gillard conflict offered any meaning.
Col in Sydney
February 25, 2012 at 10:03 amThis from some tosser who has worked his way up from being a theatre
critic?
Pal, before you want to run people down for being brave enough to go
into war zones to give eye witness accounts of what is happening,
perhaps you should do it yourself – or shut the fuck up!
The constant drone from the mainstream new media on the events in
Syria has been “these [reports, pictures, videos, anything] cannot be
independently verified”… What they didn’t add was “because we have
not yet found anyone with the acceptable mixture of guts and
credibility to go in there.”
Your analysis of the politics of the situation is similarly worthless
bullshit.
The conflicts in Libya and Syria are almost identical. The differentiation
has nothing to do with Turkey – it is all and only about Israel. Syria has
a border with Israel. If the West intervenes, Assad can say it is a Zionist
plot (and in part he would no doubt be correct).
Given the tinpot nature of Crikey generally, it is probably true that you
write your own headlines – so where the fuck does “unjust” come into it.
Go back to writing gratuitous, self-involved gossip about the other fairies
Mr Rundle, and leave the serious journalism for the serious people.
(And can someone at Crikey organise the $200 it might cost to have
your Comments Box software fixed?)
Peter Hannigan
February 25, 2012 at 2:44 pmInteresting article on the journalism side. Syria itself is a sad case of where the call to ‘do something’ has to be balanced against ‘don’t make things worse’. I suspect that at this stage there is no good outcome possible for Syria.
The Al Assad government was/is one of the most secular and religiously tolerant in the Middle East – more so for Christians than for example Israel (see William Dalrymple’s book From the Holy Mountain for an analysis of government treatment of Christians across the Middle East). What the Syrian government was not big on was political toleration. Despite the widespread belief among Syrians that Bashar Al Assad was a reformer, the Baath Party stalwarts continued to run the country along central planning lines while only gradually introducing a more open economy and market forces. The pace of reform was way too slow for the demographic, economic and political changes occurring in the region.
I remember a meeting in Damascus in 2007 where the Syrian bureaucrats said they would introduce changes over the next 10 years. The business people there simply said “You don’t have ten years”. As it turns out it looks like they only had 5 years left.
There are so many might have beens about decisions and actions in Syria that could have led to a different model of a secular Arab nation linking to the world. Unfortunately many of those possibilities are gone as the situation is now one where ‘you can’t get there from here’.
Guy Rundle
February 26, 2012 at 4:46 amTad
Your use of the 30,000 figure has become more unconvincing. Midway through your reply, you identify the NTC as being complicit in reactionary activities to strengthen its ties to the West, and in alliance with some dark forces. Yet in the first paragraph, you admit that the 30,000 figure is an NTC figure – and one of no great reliability. Having earlier used it to characterise the Libyan ‘event’ as a whole, you now want to use it to attempt to rebut any notion that Gaddafi had no social base – an argument I’m not slightly convinced by, since a few thousand mercenaries, artillery and planes could easily kill tens of thousands of people
How is it possible to criticse a group, ie the NTC, as having a dubious hidden agenda – and yet use in your argument a figure they threw into the mix for propagandistic purposes? It gives the strong impression that you grabbed the figure because it was the largest one around, and are now trying to use it for a purpose different to the one you originally employed it for. Why not simply admit that there is no evidence for the figure whatsoever, and stop using it? It is helpful to neither side of the argument.
As to your other points:
1. Libya, post-revolution – you appear to take it as read that Libya post-revolution is a disaster.I dont believe that to be the case. The existence of multiple militias and centres of power is hardly unusual after a violent revolution. Nor is post-revolutionary regressive violence, often by those who were otherwise progressive in their acts. Revenge killings, racist incidents, and torture do not discredit the revolution. Nor does the possible involvement of the NTC in them. As I noted during the events themselves, the NTC were one group who had elevated themselves above a mass process. Some of the coverage points to substantial disorder. Other coverage suggests that things are beginning to consolidate, and that much of the negative coverage – i note stories in the New York Times being quoted approvingly, by those usually justifiably suspicious of its agendas and prejudices – has more than a whiff of anti-arab orientalism about it.
2. Post-revolutionary situations – you seem to misunderstand the point i’m making about post-revolutionary violence, but I wasnt fully clear on it either. I’m not talking about the use of violence to bolster the revolution, I’m talking about regressive violence in progressive regimes. The suggestion that the NTC is either actively or passively involved in torture and racist retribution seems unproven to me – and the violence is local and partial. As with the racist violence that came after October 1917, multiple retribution in 1945 Yugoslavia, anti-Chinese violence in Vietnam 1975, etc, the occurrence does not invalidate the revolution itself. Involvement or otherwise of foreign forces strikes me as irrelevant, since such regressive violence occurs both in its presence and its absence. Your horror of the disorder and violence of a post revolutionary situation is, from anyone of the Marxist revolutionary tradition, hypocritical. Quaker-Pacifist babble about human rights, anyone?
3. Egypt – I made the general point that post-revolutionary reversals do not discredit a revolution per se. There’s no point getting into an argument about the exact nature of contemporary Egypt. I was simply suggesting that the electoral victory of the Islamists does not invalidate the uprising, even though it has objectively shifted the country rightward, on one scale by any measure. It’s not central to my argument, and you’ve made far too much of it. I can happily stipulate that, whatever the victory of the Islamists, and the possibility of future reversals, Egypt remains in some ways (but not in others) in a better place than it was under Mubarak. You’ve taken one example as a core argument, and removing neither advances nor damages either of our arguments, as far as I can see.
4. The Western State as ultimate enemy – I simply don’t accept that framework, a Marxist assessment which I don’t subscribe to. My belief was that the Libyan people were conducting a genuine revolution, and asking for assistance so that it would be a fight and not a martyrdom. I regarded expressions of solidarity by the western left as a statement of obligation. The request was for firepower that could defeat a regime with no social base, but a lot of weaponry bought with petrodollars. To not advocate in the west, the fulfillment of that request, was, in my opinion, a betrayal of promised solidarity in the name of an abstract theory of the state, one that I regard as simplistic and one-dimensional.
Dr_Tad
February 26, 2012 at 3:41 pmIt appears, Guy, that you are the sole self-appointed arbiter of the bona fides of the NTC leadership’s actions and pronouncements in this debate. Perhaps its not just BHL but you who has direct access to their innermost motivations?
[BTW, I actually pulled the 30,000 estimate from historian and former International Crisis Group director Hugh Roberts’ detailed argument in the LRB: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n22/hugh-roberts/who-said-gaddafi-had-to-go ]
Even on the Wikipedia figure — one using a methodology we know from Iraq and Afghanistan underestimates total casualties — it’s still a lot of people dead. At the same time Mubarak had way more arms and yet his military was paralysed and forced him to depart with way less bloodshed. The difference cannot be explained purely at the level of arms, but in social and political terms (on all sides of the conflict). If the social uprising in Libya had been on the scale that happened in Egypt, Gaddafi would have been penned in much more quickly. It didn’t, but ignoring that fact is no excuse for saying that only one strategy — that involving NATO — was the only one the Western Left should support.
And why do you suggest that I think the NTC has “a dubious hidden agenda”. I think it’s out there in full public view. Strange you don’t seem to notice it.
On your other points:
(1) On the problems in Libya, there are two issues. One is the parlous “human rights” and political economic situation shepherded in under NATO’s aegis, which that well-known anti-Arab Orientalist Vijay Prashad summarises here: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4353/the-libyan-model
The other, completely intertwined with the first, is the question of the social character of the mess. What currently obtains has much less potential than in the opening days of the revolution, and any chance of salvaging it will mean ordinary people organising themselves to fight their own leaders (and their leaders’ NATO backers). Yet you stubbornly avoid pointing to any political alternative to the NTC’s strategy — unsurprisingly because you back it.
(2) I’m hardly making a pacifist case. I think it is important that revolutions don’t just involve the mass of ordinary people but give them genuinely increased collective control over their lives. That speaks to the social character of any violence and who carries it out. That’s what I meant by your obfuscation; you refuse to consider the social character of what is going on now that what you saw as the overwhelming aim — NTC-led regime change with Western backing — has been achieved. You cover it in talk of a “general will”, but that’s what you’re really celebrating here.
(3) There is a point in talking about Egypt, and it says much that you treat Egypt the way you do. Egypt shows what happens when a different set of politics to those that dominated the Libyan rebellion emerges to challenge a dictator. The idea that the victory of the Islamists in elections represents a step rightwards is bizarre. If Mubarak’s old party had won that many seats I’d be depressed, but how was the result ever likely to look more left-wing than this, given the mass character and deep social roots of Islamism as an oppositional movement under Mubarak? Furthermore, in the streets and workplaces there is growing clarity about the limits of the Islamists in taking the revolution forward, and their unwillingness (although contradictory) to take on SCAF. It is precisely your inability to interrogate the rapidly-shifting social forces here that leaves you floundering when NATO comes to claim a progressive mantle by intervening militarily elsewhere.
The reality is that Mubarak had a much deeper social support base (as well as more arms) than Gaddafi, but that the Egyptian opposition from below also made political choices that pointed in a different direction to the strategy of the NTC. Such choices are crucial in how things develop, and your basically uncritical response to the NTC’s calls for Western military intervention seem to me to point to an attachment to military adventures in preference to more fundamental social struggles. That’s fine if it’s your position, but a strange one for someone who identifies as so strongly Left to take. It leaves you sounding uncomfortably like the neo-cons who saw Western military action to deliver liberal democracy as some kind of revolutionary act.
(4) Even though you imagine you were part of a Western Left providing “solidarity” to the Libyan rebels, you and all those Leftists who agreed with you were actually providing solidarity to the governments of NATO. Western regimes wanted an opening to intervene militarily in a region running out of their control because of mass popular uprisings. The Western Left was (and remains) in no position to provide any kind of military “solidarity”, and those who think they were doing so last year are merely deluding themselves that they were doing something more than providing some useful ideological cover for their own ruling classes.
Kevin Herbert
February 26, 2012 at 3:43 pmCOL FROM SYDNEY:
Having confirmed the fact that you’re obviously not a former Rhodes
scholar, Ivy League alumni, or a current DFAT foreign policy strategist, what exactly is your point??….other than to diss Mr Rundle for daring to present a view with which you don’t agree.
straightbreaks
February 26, 2012 at 3:55 pmHis point will be clear to you in coming years as the real analysis of Syria is written. That’s when we’ll see what is cited more — Colvin’s reportage or Rundle’s whiplashing pan across a crisis
Andybob
February 26, 2012 at 10:36 pmSyria is only 0.5% of the global oil market. That might have more to do with why the West won’t intervene. If it had the tenth largest proven reserves then all the arguments Guy mounts would not stop intervention. The points Guy brings out are rationalisations for inaction, not the reason for it.