Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 23:06:43 +0000
Subject: M-G: Peace success


However mucky and compromised, Annan's announcement in Baghdad is a victory.

Each side, US/Britain, and Iraq will claim it as a vindication. 

It is a reflection of the balance of forces. But it is still a victory. Not
because peace is always just in some abstract idealist way: wars of
liberation are just. 

It is a victory for anti-war activisists, activists against this particular
war, and for members of religious organisations who raised question after
question of what constitutes a just war. But above all it is a victory for
masses of people in the Middle East, who prevented their governments from
being able openly to side with a  US/British attack, and also for millions
of people within the imperialist countries whose deeper feelings, below the
opinion poll headlines, were a reluctance and an uncertainty about this
enterprise. Spartacists perhaps played their part in the meeting in Ohio,
but what really mattered was that the focus groups were not decisively
enough in favour of the military line that Blair and Clinton would have
played to.

Imperialist power remains imperialist power, but the net effect of these
events is that many people on all sides will see that the US has to be that
little bit more careful about how it acts in the face of world opinion. And
US imperialism will have to be that little bit more careful. I doubt if
interventions can be opposed on principle, but if an imperialist power is
to play policeman, it will have to have a more impartial image, for example
in relation to the Islamic world.  This is a process whereby standards are
set for the international monitoring of peace and civil rights within
different countries, and it is becoming less acceptable for such processes
to be dominated and enforced by the imperialist powers without a more
extensive veil of the participation of others. This, in a mucky and
confused way, is progress. 

Chris Burford

London.



     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---