Unlike Clare Short, Tony Blair knows that evil must be fought
By Eoghan Harris
(Filed: 14/03/2003)
"Hard pounding this, gentlemen. Let us see who can pound the longest." Thus the Duke of Wellington, when Waterloo could have gone either way, digging in, setting out his whole strategy in a single sentence, stiffening the spine of his staff. No lecture, just leadership.
It is time Tony Blair did the same. It is time he spoke to his troops. He should go to the Gulf, get down in the dust with his soldiers, and give them a simple mission statement that is worth dying for: go into Iraq, shoot Saddam Hussein and his murder gang, free the people, open the prisons, and help the Iraqi people set up democratic institutions.
If he is wise he will spare his soldiers long lectures about his determined and doomed diplomatic efforts to lay a legal skin over their lethal actions. Then he should come home, fire Clare Short from the Cabinet and tell the country two things: that he is fighting a just war and that he is acting with proper authority.
The Prime Minister's belief that this is a just war is supported by the distinguished Irish Jesuit Fr Seamus Murphy. In a recent article in the Irish Times, he argues that hostilities against Saddam can be seen as a rightful resumption, consequent on non-compliance with resolutions that add up to ceasefire conditions, of the paused Gulf war of 1991 - a war generally agreed to be a just war.
Mr Blair may also wish to argue that he is acting with proper authority, albeit arbitrary authority. As Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas point out, many moral acts are arbitrary acts. If you are standing behind Michael Jackson when he dangles his child dangerously over a balcony, you are morally obliged to act with arbitrary authority and take the child away from him.
In such a case you do not need a certificate from a social worker, either before or after you act. Even if you had the time to look for such a certificate, and failed to get one, you would still be obliged to act. And if you knew in advance that you might well hurt the child in helping it, and be liable to litigation, you would still be obliged to act.
But apart from making Mr Blair feel better, it is doubtful if any argument, at this stage, can really affect how people approach this war. The British people did not make up their mind to back Churchill because he had more convincing arguments than Chamberlain. They simply hated Hitler and what he stood for and felt he should be fought to a finish. And it's the same with Saddam.
In some sense, Western politics comes down to a choice between Aristotle's Politics and Plato's Republic, between realists and romantics, between is and ought. And it is well worth running the risk of reductionism to make clear the difference between Tony Blair, who is an Aristotelian, and Clare Short, who is a Platonist.
Basically, Plato believes man is born good and is corrupted by society. It logically follows that, if you want to make a perfect man, you must first make a perfect society. From Plato's Republic flow all the secular schemes for perfecting man, from the French Revolution to the pale survivals of the communist experiment that in contemporary society take the form of political correctness.
Conversely, Aristotle believes man is born bad, or at least fundamentally flawed, and is redeemed by society. Accordingly, Aristotelians believe you can neither make a perfect man nor a perfect society. Platonists are natural socialists. Aristotelians are natural conservatives. And in any country that cares for civil order, the silent majority and the middle class are Aristotelians.
These two different ways of looking at politics go deeper than nature or nurture, and explain the current strange alliances that cut across parties in the House of Commons.
In some sense, deep down, Chris Patten believes that, if you set down a band of boys on a tropical island they will naturally set up something like the European Union or the United Nations. By contrast, Tony Blair believes they will hunt the fat boy as per Lord of the Flies.
Aristotelians believe that evil men will plague us to the end of time and that, when they use violence, we must be ready to repel them with force. Accordingly, Aristotelians cannot conceive of a world in which all human conflicts can be settled by a chat with Mary Robinson, by cunning French diplomacy or by United Nations inspectors who do not carry guns. In short, they see evil as endemic and endless.
Platonists, on the other hand, tend to see evil as some kind of eradicable error that can be eliminated by social engineering, by the right United Nations resolutions, or by people in blue berets with the right resolutions. Accordingly, they have no adequate theory of evil and, when faced with a Hitler or a Saddam, are inclined to wring their hands.
Scratch any socialist and you will find one or both of the two Platonic delusions about the nature of man: that man can and must be perfected whether he wants to be "perfected" or not; and a failure to face the need for force. These two intellectual deformations are the driving force of the anti-war movement.
Most of the woollier anti-war activists are Platonists. But their ethically empty rhetoric, if applied to Nazi Germany, would go like this: "Hitler is no worse than Churchill. Look at Gallipoli, look at the way he shot the miners. How do we know Hitler means what he says about the Jews? Anyway we shall have to wait until he does something to them. And in the meantime, let's leave it to the League of Nations."
What at first appears to be a high-minded stance against using force against Saddam Hussein is in reality a recipe for raising children to be the sort of ethical eunuchs and moral neutrals who will lack the character to fight the good fight in any field.
Eoghan Harris is a political columnist with the Sunday Independent in Dublin |
