A Sort of Personal Statement

This isn't the anonymous authors of Aaro Watch. This is I, Dave Weeden/Backword Dave/Chardonnay Chap. This is me. These are my opinions.
Actually, they aren't even that. Th-they're a s-sort of stammering response of the "You asked an interesting question, now let me faff a bit while I try to think on my feet" sort.
Fortunately for me, I can prevaricate a bit. I've just started James Fenton's All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim. (Tedious explanatory notes: Fenton is one my favourite poets. He's also the not-so-famous-one of the Amis-Hitchens-Fenton triumvirate (as they style themselves). Finally, as I remember from the cover of his first book of poems, he is (or was) a member of the Socialist Party. I can't remember where the Socialist Party were on a putative chart of left/right conviction, but I strongly suspect that membership (rather than of the Labour Party) suggests something like the following:

Yet where I feel an affinity with left-wing radicalism, and a lack of affinity with the politics of the mainstream left represented by Labour or the European Social Democrats, is in the fundamental interest the former puts on ideals, issues and causes, in contrast to the necessary but 'humdrum' business of building a parliamentary party and winning elections, with all the compromising of principles and de-emphasising of ideas that this involves. It is not that I do not respect and appreciate the work of the mainstream parliamentary left; it is simply a different world from my own.

That's our new friend Marco Attila Hoare. (Bruschetta Boy is too decent to make jokes about his name so I will: why does he think being a foul-mouthed Michelin starred celebrity chef entitles him to political opinions anyway?) Since this is a personal statement, I'll chuck in my view. If you've ever lived in a goddam nuclear family, you'll know that just rubbing along requires compromise. This is a damp little island of 60 million people. Of course getting along requires compromise. Even if we can agree on what 'working class' means (and we probably won't), the working class in London may have different and exclusive interests from the working class in Liverpool (assuming either is homogenous). Besides, Marxism is about material things rather than ideas and such: or, as Brecht put it, "Bread first, then ethics." Anyway, Fenton is, or was, pretty big on "ideals, issues and causes" rather than politicking in the pejorative sense.) OK, I could have written all this in a footnote, but none of you would have read it.
This is Fenton writing in 1988 about 1973:

Although I had a few journalistic commissions, I was not going [to Cambodia] primarily as a journalist. I wanted time and solitude to write, and knew that travel would make me fall back on my own company. I wanted to see a communist victory because, as did many people, I believed the Americans had not the slightest justification for their interference in Indochina. I admired the Vietcong and, by extension, the Khmer Rouge, but I subscribed to a philosophy that prided itself on taking a cool, critical look at the liberation movements of the Third World. We supported them against the ambitions of American foreign policy. We supported them as nationalist movements. We did not support their political character, which we perceived as Stalinist in the case of the Vietnamese, and in the case of teh Cambodians ... I don't know. The theory was, and is, that where a genuine movement of national liberation was fighting against imperialism, it received our unconditional support. When such a movement had won, it might then take its place among the governments that we execrated -- those who ruled by sophisticated tyranny in the name of socialism.
... The broadest support for the antiwar movement came from disgust at what the Americans were doing. But the movement itself brought into being, all over the world, political groups that took the lessons of Indochina a stage further. In Britain, the Communist Party made precious few gains during this period. The tradition to which the students looked was broadly or narrowly Trotskyist, a fact which no doubt intrigued the Vietnamese communists, who had taken care to bump off their own Trotskyists a long time before. The Trotskyist emphasis -- the general emphasis -- was on opposition to American imperialism. Very few people idolized the Vietcong, or the North Vietnamese, or Uncle Ho in quite the same way that, for instance, the French Left did. Indeed, it might fairly be said that the Left in Britain was not terribly curious about or enamored of the movement it was supporting.
... At the [Indochina Solidarity Group] conference itself, I remember two speeches of interest. One was by I.F. Stone, who was hissed by the audience (which included an unusually large number of Maoists) when he attacked Chairman Mao for shaking hands with a murderer like Nixon. The other was by Noam Chomsky, who warned against the assumption that the war was over, and that direct U.S. intervention in Vietnam would cease. Chomsky also argued that members of the Left were wrong to dismiss the domino theory out of hand. As stated by Cold Warriors it might not measure up to the facts, but there was another formulation which did indeed make sense: that it was U.S. foreign policy, rather than Russian expansionism, that had knocked over the dominoes.

Pages 4-5. To start from the end, that's not a bad characterization of Chomsky, in my opinion. To begin with, he's a scientist, and he's not afraid to turn definitions upside down. That account reminds me of the story in one of Richard Feynman's books about Murray Gell-Mann: Gell-Mann came up with an explanation as to why all electrons are the same mass and charge - they're all the same electron. (Positrons, like all anti-matter, may be matter traveling back in time - whatever that may mean.) Gell-Mann may not always have been right; he may have been, on occasion, a nut - but he was always fertile. Chomsky is much the same. Arguing against him is an education.
The real purpose of this post - and why it's a personal statement - is to challenge Marco on this

You cannot oppose the genocide in Sudan, or the Islamists in Iraq, if you oppose 'Western intervention'....

Never mind that others have noted that 'Islamists' are more visible (and probably more numerous) in Iraq than they were under Saddam (ie - before 'Western intervention'), I wish to say that I don't oppose 'Western intervention' as simply as that. This is the sort of thing my simple mind can only approach crab-wise by analogy. This is my best effort (so far). Generally, I'm against violence. I don't think anyone should hit anyone else unless they were hit first. But that doesn't mean I don't support the police if they forcibly detain a (supposed) rapist (say). Interventions, in certain circumstances, may be for the best. As to Iraq, I presently think the following (among other stuff): America has oil interests, Iraq has oil, I don't believe the invasion was altruistic at all; the invasion looked like payback or revenge for Gulf War I - and I regard revenge as a very bad reason in itself; an intervention should have an end in view - bad as I agree Saddam was, the Iraq fiasco looks worse to me.
In short, I don't oppose 'Western intervention' as a rule. Most of the time, I think it's craven or silly or driven by the sort of idiot who ordered the Charge of the Light Brigade. But I won't say that it's wrong in principle. I believe (as I think Robin Cook did) in the UN. I also believe in consensus. If you can convince the UN (where the representatives are well educated and independently minded people, mostly) of a case, it's fairly likely to be right. If you have to lie, spin, or whatever, and then ignore the verdict ... you're on your own. (Daniel Davies made this point very well.) BTW, not supporting the Invasion in 2003 does not mean not supporting Western intervention. The West (as represented by Bill Clinton) was intervening in Iraq.