Turning Down the Lights in Iraq by Alan Johnson

This week Alan Johnson starts a weekly Friday column. This week he is prompted by Oliver Wendell Holmes to reflect on the appeal of wishful thinking about Iraq to both political right and left.

Lying in bed last night I was reading The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America, by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Louis Menand. It’s a quite beautiful book about Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S Peirce and John Dewey. But one sentence in it would not leave me alone. Apparently, before he died, the philosopher William James asked his brother Henry, the novelist, to stay in Cambridge for six weeks after the funeral: he would try to communicate from the other side. It was with this kind of thing in mind that Wendell Holmes said of his old friend William James, 'His wishes made him turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance'.

I felt that phrase powerfully. Certainly it had a depth worthy of the famous Supreme Court Judge. But it was also reminding me of something? But what?

I had it. Holmes had captured in poetic form what I had heard Democratic Senator Joe Biden say to Chris Wallace about the wishful thinking of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on Fox News. Here is the exchange:

WALLACE: Finally, in Dr. Rice's, Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, you had some blunt advice for her. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: For God's sake, don't listen to Rumsfeld. He doesn't know what in the hell he's talking about on this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(LAUGHTER)

WALLACE: Classic Biden. And afterward, as you were saying goodbye to Dr. Rice, you told her she shouldn't listen to Vice President Cheney either. My question, Senator Biden, is, why not?

BIDEN: Because they've been wrong on every major decision relative to Iraq since the statue came down. They indicated that we would be able to draw down troops very rapidly. They indicated that we would be greeted with open arms. They indicated there would be enough Iraqi oil to pay for this operation. They indicated it wouldn't cost $260 billion. They indicated that we had trained up troops, and we haven't.

Every fundamental — and I told the president this just four months ago, straight up. He asked my opinion. And it seems to me that my obligation is to say it as I see it. The truth of the matter is, they're both fine men. They have been substantively wrong on the specific decisions they've made since the statue has fallen. And many of the military leaders in the region — I've visited there more than anybody, I believe, in the United States Congress — and people that are involved with this administration believe they've been dead wrong on the advice they've been given. All I'm saying is, unless they change their advice, I wouldn't be listening very closely.

BIDEN: When Rumsfeld was on your program — I think it was your program, I could be mistaken — a year and a half ago, he said it's, I think the word was "amazing," we'd trained up 210,000 Iraqi forces. We put 210,000 people in uniform who couldn't shoot straight and had little training, some of them as little as three days.
I just think we should get real here”.

Wendell Holmes was saying that William James had turned down his powers of reason, his intellectual ‘lights’, so as to give miracle, i.e. dogma or unreasoning faith, its chance. Rumsfeld and Cheney have indeed ‘turned down the lights’. From the scrapping of the State Department plans to the failure to send enough troops; from the casual dismissal of the post-war turmoil in Baghdad with the comment ‘stuff happens’ to the criminally delayed democratic elections that gave the Ba’ath and Islamist terrorists their opening; from the culpability for Abu Ghraib to the myth-making about ‘210,000 Iraqi troops’. The result has been a series of what Chris Hitchens calls ‘near impeachable’ errors and set-backs that only the bravery of the troops and the Iraqi people have, perhaps, salvaged.

But wasn’t only Biden’s attack on the right wing fantasy world of Donald Rumsfeld that the Holmes had reminded me of. There was something else. Something much closer to home.

I realised that the new issue of the US socialist journal New Politics had dropped through my letterbox that morning and I had been repressing my bad reaction to an article in it all day. I used to edit New Politics so I had looked through the new volume eagerly. But then I fastened on this concluding sentence in an article by a new editor, Glenn Perusek: ‘The Iraqi resistance will continue to fight beyond the January 2005 Elections…Iraqis fought the British and their puppet monarchy before 1958; they fight today in memory of that great struggle’. Oh dear. No, they don’t. They fight to restore secular or theocratic tyranny, the very opposite of Iraqi self-determination.

But Perusek denounces as ‘collaborationists’ those who I would call democrats. He celebrates the murdering activities of the ‘resistance’. ‘In the Middle East the grievances are so great’ it is understandable that the resistance fight ‘in a forthright and rigorous manner’. They ‘give Goliath a black eye’. ‘Fundamentalist Islam can be…a marker for opposition to Imperialism’, after all. And, don’t you know, ‘the political character of the national liberation movement is a secondary consideration: the prime concern is opposition to imperialism’. Moreover, out of this ‘earnest struggle for anti-imperialism [i.e. the beheadings, the shootings of electricity sub-station workers and cooks, the murder of election workers, the torture of trade unionists and socialists – AJ] …a democratic left could be forged’. (You’ve got to love dialectics. Every cloud has a silver lining, that’s dialectics).

This picture of Iraq is, of course, literally, fantastical. It is unrelated to anything actually going on in the real world. Truly, we can say of Pesusek, 'His wishes made him turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance'.

But it was with Perusek’s talk of the ‘black eyes’ inflicted by the resistance that I had to lay down my old journal for a while.

For Hadi Saleh, Iraqi socialist and leader of the free Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, got more than a ‘black eye’ from Pesusek’s heroic ‘oppositionists’. Perusek should listen to the voice of the Iraqi Faleh A, Jabar, a friend of Hadi and a leading Iraqi social scientist:

“A group of five, most probably, ex-security men, broke into his house in Baghdad, waited for him in the dark and preyed on him the moment he stepped in. They killed three times: first they strangled him with a wire; second they riddled his body with bullets; lastly they burnt him. This was not an ordinary killing. Unlike show beheadings that mark ‘resistance’ in Iraq, this was a triple vengeance: in the 1970s Saleh was condemned to death for clandestine unionism, he was amnestied years later, now the Ba’ath security men working in clandestine for restoration reneged on their amnesty.

They also took vengeance for the successes Saleh achieved in rebuilding trade unions (The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, IFTU) that stand now at some 200,000 membership, a formidable democratic social movement defying all sorts of fundamentalist, communal or other parochial identities. Lastly, they wanted to hush him and his colleagues who pursue a twin line of peaceful action for the restitution of Iraq’s sovereignty and building an all-inclusive, federal democracy.

Perhaps he was born with a smile; and simply forgot it was there. I never saw him appearing without that innocent grin. We rubbed shoulders at the ICP printing house in Baghdad that ran the only non-governmental publications in the 1970s. He was a printing worker, and later, an expert, I was a fledgling writer. My first book appeared there. He was on the production line ready with a helping hand. In exile in Beirut and Damascus, we worked on a daily basis to produce the ICP’s monthly, al-Thaqafa al-Jadida.

After his return from Sweden in 2003 with his wife Corea and two kids, the offices of the Iraqi unions were raided by the coalition forces for no apparent reason. I was worried about him. Following the macabre series of kidnapping and beheadings in 2004, my worries grew even sharper, and he had this reassurance to offer at our last encounter in Baghdad in November 2004: ‘I am a worker and unionist not a politician, who on earth would wish to target me. They are killing your lot, writers and intellectuals‘.

I wish he were right. He was on the hit list by the very murderers who raped the nation for thirty odd years and who reemerged now with the gold they dug from the Central Bank, their family networks and the criminals of the underworld, putting a false mantle of ‘resistance’.

Millions of Iraqis are resisting the occupation peaceably. Their collective wisdom is that restitution of sovereignty should go hand in hand with popular mandate, and block restoration. Hadi Saleh’s death is a wake-up call for all those who rightly opposed the war, but wrongly support post-conflict violence”.

But will Perusek hear that wake up call? Or has he turned the lights down so low to give miracle its chance that he cant see where he is anymore?

Blundering around in his darkness, Perusek tells us that in Iraq, ‘Muslim fundamentalists are the popular heroes’. In fact, on election day in Baghdad, a suicide bomber blew himself up before he could reach the lines of Iraqi voters. All day, as Iraqis voted, they walked around his body, spat on it as went in, and bore their purple finger with pride on their way out.

But Pesusek wont even accept the word terrorist. Like every ex-student of all those Smart Alec 101 classes he puts the word in sneering, sophisticated mocking scare quotes as ‘terrorist’. To Perusek these men are heroes and should, he insists, be called oppositionists. Such is the fantasy world of much of the contemporary western left. Terrorists who blow up brave democratic Iraqis as they vote are presented as heroic ‘oppositionists’. Democrats trying to build a new Iraq are dismissed as ‘collaborators’.

Like some kind of intuitive analyst, Wendell Holmes had gently pushed to the surface a thought I had been suppressing all day. The fantasy world of much of today's far left works in similar ways to the fantasy world of the right. Both sides dim the lights. Ridiculous fantasies are discerned in the semi-darkness, phantoms taken for reality. Tremendous hopes are entertained without any rational basis. Thought-worlds are allowed to loom over and dominate empirical worlds. Miracle is given its chance. Dogma and faith and text substitute for the accurate tracking of reality, serious thought, and steady carving out of the future.

Wendell Holmes and William James drifted apart, largely because of William James's drift to the irrational. But when in 1912 William James's son, Henry, asked Holmes for letters from James for an edition of his fathers letters, and Holmes re-read the letters, he said they 'revive a lifelong pain, the partial drawing asunder of two who loved each other'. Without wanting to be too maudlin I suspect that also speaks to and for many of us.

But we are right. After six weeks Henry James left Cambridge. If William had sent a message from the grave it had not been heard by Henry.