Halliday and Rawnsley explain the current international situation

Today’s Observer carries two very fine articles which help us understand the current political situation.

The veteran writer on international relations, Fred Halliday describes how “we are still infected by Cold War ills: an arrogant West, shabby dictators, naive protests.

He excoriates “the contemporary global protest movement, to a considerable degree a children's crusade of intellectual demagogues, recycled 1960s bunkeristas with their fellow travellers in literary circles, dreamers and political manipulators, of the old and new lefts, whose claim to moral and analytic superiority too often masks a set of unexamined, and themselves often recycled, platitudes from the Cold War period and, indeed, from the ideology of the communist world.”

Halliday also slams its “ritual incantantion of 'no war' that avoids any substantive engagement with problems of international peace and security, or reflection on how positively to help peoples in zones of conflict; a set of vague, unthought out, uncosted and often dangerous utopian ideas about an alternative world; a pleasing but vapid invocation of global human values and internationalism that blithely ignores the misuses to which that term was put in the 20th century (for example by Stalin or Mao); a complacent attitude, innocent when not indulgent, towards political violence (witness the cult of Che Guevara, a cruel and dangerous man, and the invitees from Northern Ireland, Palestine and Iran, to name but three at the London Social Summit in October). This was a capitulation, that would have shocked their socialist forebears, to nationalist and religious bigots (as in the reception by the supposedly left-wing Mayor of London of Sheikh Yusif al-Qaradawi, the descendant of a line of Mus lim fascist thinkers). There is also a vapid and politically ineffective attitude to nature, forgetting, as the tsunami should have reminded all of us, that nature can also kill. And all of this is mixed up with a shallow, repetitive critique of globalisation, in the name of what we are never sure, and a naive, uninformed, analysis of the US.”

His colleague Andrew Rawnsley explores the Iraqi elections, saying that “To be hopeful about Iraq is to invite being straitjacketed for insane optimism. But better that than the dismal certainties of those who have already denounced these elections as a doomed charade before a single result has been returned.”

He examines the issue of the US/UK military exit strategy and reveals that whilst they are “wary of announcing a timetable for withdrawal, not least for fear of providing dates for the insurgents to target” that “secret scoping of how they might begin to reduce their forces has begun in the Pentagon and Ministry of Defence.”

He rightly concludes that “People prepared to risk their lives to vote deserve not our cynicism, but our respect and hope.”