Sirantos Fotopoulos <https://www.facebook.com/sirantos.fotopoulos?__cft__%5b0%5d=AZZ_4bLvWOabMKorlKCk9j3kfxHUa6gsLcy7_LySWijRGyqN4W29S-X2xTqRjqxMB5Y4YtcTHe9aWan8_NgnR0pxhdRG4OY-xeTBWXfYyPviw2U-OHVACW2MTQaLZtLLl0TR5tEhtTFzQEIbh5Cg7J51GXlnC-GYOpzRISpZve2hvKTS2DDBiwJjp7vsbtCK46Y&__tn__=-UC%2CP-R>
In Iraq, we were promised liberation. And then came the privatisation of state industries, the dismantling of labor protections, the transformation of an oil-rich nation into a playground for contractors — many of them connected, with a directness that not even the most credulous observer could attribute to coincidence, to the administration conducting the liberation. The Iraqi working-class, which had lived under genuine tyranny, found itself liberated into a new condition: structurally unemployed, exposed to a market it had no preparation to navigate, presided over by a succession of pliant governments whose primary qualification was their willingness to sign the appropriate documents. In Libya, we were promised a more surgical affair — no boots, just airpower, just the nudge that a brave people needed. The result is a decade and a half of armed factions, open slave markets, and the systematic looting of a country's resources by a rotating cast of militias and their foreign backers. The question — the only serious question — was what would replace them, and in whose interest. And on that question, the record of American-led liberation speaks with a clarity that ought to silence the most enthusiastic hawk. There is a particular kind of bad faith at work in the invocation of the Iranian protests as justification for this bombardment, and I want to name it precisely because it represents the most cynical inversion of solidarity imaginable. Those Iranians who took to the streets did so at extraordinary personal risk. They were motivated by economic desperation — by the collapse of a currency that had rendered ordinary life nearly impossible, by a kleptocratic system that funnelled resources upward to the Revolutionary Guard and its associated enterprises while ordinary people chose between heating and eating. This was a working-class uprising in the most elementary sense: people whose material conditions had become intolerable refusing, at last, to tolerate them. What they were not asking for was to be bombed into liberation by the government of Donald Trump and the administration of Benjamin Netanyahu. The arrogance required to assume otherwise — to take the genuine, indigenous, economically-rooted rage of a people and conscript it as retroactive permission for an operation planned months in advance — is congruent with the entire colonial tradition of speaking for the natives while acting against their interests. If the United States government had spent a fraction of the resources now expended on "Operation Epic Fury" — and I note in passing that the Pentagon's talent for naming these adventures has not improved — on, say, lifting the sanctions that contributed to the economic misery driving those protests, we might have a conversation worth having about American sympathy for the Iranian working-class. Demands for bread and dignity can never be served with bombs and death. It is not the Iranian worker who will see their conditions improve when the dust settles and the reconstruction contracts are signed. It is not the nurse or the teacher or the factory hand whose rial-denominated salary had become a sick joke. It is the Lockheed Martin shareholder. It is the Raytheon board. It is the private equity firm that will move, with admirable swiftness, into the newly opened Iranian market. It is the anti-democratic, anti-worker, and anti-woman Gulf monarchies who will breathe easier with their most capable regional rival reduced to rubble. It is, in short, the same class that always benefits from these episodes, wearing the same flag it always wears while mouthing the same words it always mouths. The Iranian people deserve better than the monstrous theocracy that has oppressed them. They deserve, equally, better than the liberation now being delivered to them at several thousand feet per second. They deserved, most of all, the right to determine their own future — which is precisely what this bombardment, whatever its outcome, has now made infinitely more complicated. There is, in the repertoire of imperial apologetics, a familiar rhetorical maneuver: the sudden discovery of humanitarian concern at the precise moment when the cruise missiles are already in the air. One hears, with almost liturgical regularity, that this time the bombs are different, that this time the targets are chosen with moral delicacy, that this time the suffering inflicted will be the regrettable but necessary precondition for a more enlightened order. It is an argument that has survived every empirical refutation not because it is persuasive, but because it is useful. It allows those who have never felt the concussion of an airstrike to speak with solemn authority about its supposed emancipatory potential, and it allows those who profit from the enterprise to clothe their balance sheets in the language of human rights. We are told, as we have been told before, that the alternative to intervention is indifference — as though the only possible relationship to another people is either to bomb them or to abandon them. This false dilemma is the intellectual refuge of those who cannot imagine solidarity except at the end of a weapons contract. It ignores the far less theatrical but infinitely more difficult work of diplomacy, of economic normalization, of permitting a society to resolve its own contradictions without the helpful acceleration provided by high explosives. The United States has spent decades perfecting the art of making the moderate impossible, and then expressing regret that only extremists remain. It is worth recalling that the present Iranian state, for all its brutality and clerical absurdity, did not emerge from a vacuum but from a history in which foreign interference played no small part. A population that remembers the overthrow of its elected Mosaddegh-led government at the hands of Western intelligence services is not inclined to interpret incoming missiles as gestures of friendship. One does not have to romanticize the present regime to understand that every bomb dropped in the name of liberation strengthens precisely those factions most adept at presenting themselves as the defenders of national sovereignty. Nothing consolidates a repressive government quite so efficiently as an external enemy obligingly proving its point. The advocates of this operation speak as though history begins at the moment they clear their throats. They discuss reconstruction before the rubble has settled, speak of markets before the electricity grid has stopped burning, and assure us that prosperity will follow destruction with the punctuality of a scheduled flight. We have heard this prophecy delivered over Baghdad, over Kabul, over Tripoli, each time with the same confidence and each time with the same result: a shattered state, a flourishing black market in weapons, and a generation of young men for whom the only stable employment is participation in the next round of violence. If this is liberation, it is liberation of a peculiarly circular kind. And so one is left with the conclusion that the most honest description of these campaigns is also the least fashionable: they are not acts of rescue but acts of power, undertaken because they can be undertaken, justified after the fact with whatever moral vocabulary happens to be available. The tragedy is not only the lives lost — though those are tragedy enough — but the corrosion of language itself, the steady degradation of words like freedom, solidarity, and human rights into instruments of persuasion for policies that produce their opposite. The Iranian worker who marched for bread did not ask to become a footnote in someone else’s demonstration of resolve, and the world would be a less dangerous place if we learned, at last, to take such people at their word rather than at our convenience. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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