Monbiot, Syria and Universalism

by Philip Roddis

George Monbiot

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) last month published its investigation into the chemical weapons attack on the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun, which killed almost 100 people on 4 April and injured around 200. After examining the competing theories and conducting wide-ranging interviews, laboratory tests and forensic analysis of videos and photos, it concluded that the atrocity was caused by a bomb filled with sarin, dropped by the government of Syria.

I don’t share Monbiot’s faith in the impartiality of United Nations agencies and, yes, that does include the OPCW. If you deem, as I do, the western powers guilty of a dirty war on Syria whose real drivers – like those in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and a barely visible Yemen – had little to do with their sanctimonious rationales, you’ll likely share my scepticism but that’s not my point. Nor is the fact that the first of the two links in the paragraph cited is broken. When I searched for the report I found the OPCW has indeed declared that sarin was used at Idlib on April 4 this year (point 1.5 of its summary). The report also says (point 2.5 of its Legal Framework) that:

The scope of the FFM [OPCW Fact Finding Mission] mandate does not include the task of attributing responsibility for the alleged use.

So George, did you know this and choose not to share it with your Guardian readers? Or were you too busy trashing ‘denialism’ to actually read the report?
Yesterday’s piece houses other examples of questionable integrity. Monbiot’s second link is to a Guardian piece by Emma Graham-Harrison. Written the day after the attack, it begins with this assertion:

Syrian government planes carried out a dawn raid on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun on Tuesday morning. Following the airstrikes, residents reported whole families found dead in their beds, with victims and injured survivors showing symptoms that match poisoning by nerve agents.

Hmm. Why bother with all the fuss and expense of a UN investigation? Why not simply ask the Guardian, legendary for its extensive presence on the ground in Syria? I mean, it must be right if Emma Graham-Harrison says so.
Enough of the sarcasm. You get the point. Monbiot’s piece simply does not withstand careful scrutiny. Here’s another sample:

The Syrian government has a long history of chemical weapons use, and the OPCW’s conclusions concur with a wealth of witness testimony. But a major propaganda effort has sought to discredit such testimony, and characterise the atrocity as a “false-flag attack”.

Three comments. One, the first link above is to a roll call of imperialism’s frontline warriors, a who’s who of western aggression: Obama and Netanyahu, McCain and French Foreign Minister Fabius – predecessor of Jean-Marc Ayrault, whose ‘incontestable evidence’ of Damascus having authored the sarin attack on Idlib we have yet to see. (Sadly, “we have evidence” is all too easily mistaken for evidence when repeated ad infinitum by mainstream media.) This list of the great and not so good willing to damn Assad to hell and back also takes in – just as risibly but in a different way – the Syrian Observatory on Human Rights. That, in case you were fazed by the grand title, is the one-man band of a disgruntled Syrian in Coventry.
(Monbiot later cites, to show up the flat-eartherish denialism he so roundly trashes, widespread scepticism – sorry, denialism – re another ‘impartial’ source, the so-called White Helmets. So George, leaving aside the fact of their total invisibility when Aleppo was finally rid of ISIS, are you aware that White Helmet claims to be independent of government funding were given the lie in April 2016, when US State Department Press Officer Mark Toner revealed they’d had $23 million to date from his department? The video of that press briefing has been removed from Youtube – can’t for the life of me think why or at whose behest – but can be found here.)
Two, the second link – that ‘wealth of testimony’ – is in fact the product of a one-man visit to what was then ‘rebel’ held Idlib by Guardian and Daily Star reporter, Kareem Shaheen, a man with a long record of hostility to Damascus. Don’t take my word, check him out. Worse yet, Monbiot cites the very same piece later in the article as though it were something new. In my book that crosses the line from laziness to subterfuge since, taken alongside other examples of multiple and/or shoddy citings, it suggests an array of evidence, i.e. of Assad’s guilt, far wider than it really is.
Three, the idea of false flag chemical attacks is dismissed out of hand. Why? Here I quote from the post I’m about to replicate, below and in full. This extract is directed not at Monbiot but a man very similar – albeit more lightweight – in his flawed grasp of imperialism. The context is not Idlib 2017 but Ghouta 2013:

What does Owen Jones believe Damascus could gain from such an attack? Conversely, what is it that stops him seeing that the terrorists, with or without the complicity of western or Saudi intelligence services, had everything to gain from yet another false flag operation to justify further and more direct western intervention against the state they loathe for its multi-faith secularism, Washington for its “Arab communism”?

I’ve yet to see any convincing answer to either question, and regard Monbiot’s dismissal of the possibility of a false flag attack as disgraceful: “I have found no credible evidence that Syrian jihadists have access to sarin.” Thus spake George Monbiot, adding chemistry and ordnance to the many disciplines he’s master of. Here’s an alternative view:

[Sarin] is not especially hard to produce, in terms of both resources and expertise. “A competent chemist could make it, and possibly very quickly, in a matter of days,” says John Gilbert, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, who spent much of his Air Force career assessing countries’ WMD capabilities. Producing sarin doesn’t require any kind of massive facility; a roughly 200 square foot room would do.

This, in case you were wondering, was taken not from a ‘denialist site’ but one convinced Assad is a bad guy who has to go. There’s a small clue in the piece’s opening line:

On Tuesday, the forces of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad unleashed a chemical attack on the civilian residents of Khan Sheikun

There are many other holes in George Monbiot’s column yesterday but I’ll leave them for those – such as OffGuardian BTL commenters – better versed than me to expose. And let me say now I do not claim Assad to be innocent. I say that (a) his guilt is highly unlikely on ground of motive, (b) terrorist guilt is highly likely on grounds of motive and past form, (c) few if any mainstream sources can be trusted on these or any matters where imperialism’s core interests and plans are concerned. See my short post, Syria: what we know and what we don’t
No, my aim is not to dissect Monbiot’s piece line by line. I want to contextualise it. Why does he take the position he has on Syria? And why in a way that not only compromises an outstanding record of calling out other aspects of capitalism in the age of imperialism, but takes a broker I see as fundamentally honest to the edge – some might say over it – of its opposite? My answer to the first question is universalism unexamined. I’m sure of that. My answers to the second are guesswork, and in any case less important. But here they are anyway, in a piece I wrote in May and have tinkered with ever since. As recently as yesterday, just hours before reading George’s latest, I was at it, striving as ever for greater simplicity and clarity on what I see as a complex (though not fiendishly so) and insufficiently examined phenomenon.

Universalism in an unfair world

For his well researched work on the British establishment, you couldn’t slide a cigarette paper between Owen Jones and me. The same goes for George Monbiot’s forensic but neatly penned linking of environmental vandalism to big money. Other of their writings, however – on Russia and Syria respectively – strike me as misconceived. In both cases the cause is the same. Each, in arguing sincerely held views on Putin or Assad, invokes the principle of universalism.

If you’re a socialist, you’re a universalist, not a relativist: you believe all people deserve the same economic and political rights. That can’t be achieved without democracy — not the limited democracy the West currently has, but a full democracy that we should aspire to. That means not lauding a regime which, despite its achievements, lacks the democratic rights a truly socialist society must enjoy as a bare minimum. Owen Jones, 29/11/2016

If we deny crimes against humanity, or deny the evidence pointing to the authorship of these crimes, we deny the humanity of the victims. Aren’t we supposed to be better than this? If we do not support the principle of universalism – human rights and justice for everyone, regardless of their identity or the identity of those who oppress them – what are we for? George Monbiot, Disavowal 27/04/2017

Jones writes four days after Fidel Castro’s death. Monbiot’s Disavowal comes three weeks after he’d tweeted his 99% certainty that Damascus had, three days earlier on April 4, used chemical weapons at Idlib. (More specifically, it’s one of a series of tweets and blog posts pouring scorn on the ‘denialists’ who won’t accept what he deems an open and shut case against Assad.) For both writers, universalism means condemning human rights abuse wherever it arises: be that in Ferguson Missouri or Aleppo, Abu Ghraib or Havana. On this the pair are in tune with an earlier writer, one whose hallowed status has obscured questionable deeds that to my mind arise from the logic of a universalism unexamined. I mean that other George, he who gave the world 1984 and MI5 lists of communist sympathisers.
As principle, who’d argue with the universality of human rights? Not me, though I have caveats. First, let’s not define human rights narrowly. That’s so we don’t get worked up – played even – over abuses real or alleged in countries our rulers have screwed for centuries, and in a different form still are screwing, while barely registering burgeoning infant mortality by humanitarian sanction or soaring cancer rates from depleted uranium in the wake of the latest humanitarian invasion. Since universalists seldom ignore the latter entirely, broadening ‘human rights’ to take in such as welfare provision, literacy and prosperity levels also makes it hard, if we’ve an ounce of intellectual rigour, to play an old get-out card. It gives less latitude for a lazy absolutism that cries ‘a plague on both houses’ while at best doing nothing, at worst giving de facto support to the America led aggression we piously deplore.
A wider definition of human rights obliges real-world assessments. One such is to discriminate between greater and lesser abuse, to shun specious moral equivalence. Suppose every word our media say about Assad to be true: a huge stretch, I know, but stay with me. Could he inflict a fraction of the death, misery and mayhem the US and its partners in crime have? (To answer this we need to acquaint ourselves with a little postwar history. It helps too to know something of the global balance of power, and financing and stupendous scale of America’s for-profit arms industry.) Here’s another question. Are any modern weapons not chemical? The implicit mantra – Tomahawk Good … Sarin Baad – shows, as does the barrel bomb brouhaha, just how easily red herringed we are by the spurious categorisations of a Washington dominated UN.
(Two years ago I visited a residential home for disabled men and women in Hoi Anh, Vietnam. Half the residents were disfigured, many in grotesque ways, by the Agent Orange the Pentagon used in its war on the Vietnamese people. Surprised by the youth of some, I was told the toxic effects are congenital. To this day children are born with severe defects as a result of chemical warfare Washington arm-twisted the UN out of describing as such. On what ground? That any harm to civilians was collateral and secondary to the aim of depriving Vietcong/NVA of ground cover. In fact millions of hectares of land remained uncultivable into the twenty-first century. This in a country on starvation rations for decades due to America’s embargo, and punishing of nations friendly to Hanoi. As with barrel bombs, too many liberals who consider themselves well informed are duped by arbitrary categorisations designed in Washington and relayed by ‘our’ media, a fraud of breathtaking cynicism rendered all the more effective by the naivity of leftist comment in the liberal media. And since I’m sure you were wondering, no; America has paid not one cent in compensation to Agent Orange victims. Not chemical warfare, you see.)
A second caveat is that we don’t take as truth incontrovertible every claim which, in an age of ‘humanitarian intervention’, will lend cover to aggression for profit. Not even when those claims are backed by sober voices packaged as impartial experts, and relayed by journalists not often mendacious but too often sharing the credulity of their audiences, topped up in their case by ‘career focus’. Journalists who know what’s good for them please editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors. Proprietors, by definition fully paid up members of the ruling class, crave honours and need advertisers.
A third is to do as E.M. Forster counsels, and only connect. IMF bullying and covert ops, deadly sanction and deadlier missile strike put states dubbed ‘pariah’ (read, distasteful to Wall Street) on a war footing. We in the west enjoy freedom of expression and limited democracy, fruits of a prosperity based on exploiting the global south*. When progressive governments must fight for survival – as in Castro’s Cuba, Chavez’s Venezuela and Ba’athist Syria – those freedoms may jeopardise gains without which democracy and human rights are meaningless except as cover for their antithesis. I mean economic planning instead of casino capitalism. I mean healthcare and schooling for all, not just those who can afford it.
The jeopardising factor here comes not from freedom of expression per se but its abuse by vested interests. These may be comprador capitalists, like the Venezeulan elite who gained from the impoverishment of their compatriots, who stood to lose from nationalisations that helped reduce said impoverishment, and whose near monopoly control of the media is as big an affront to meaningful democracy in that country as is its equivalent in ours. Or they may be the jihadists backed for decades by ‘our’ governments while ‘our’ media decried Hafez al-Assad’s ruthless crackdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood: a suppression of human rights which for all its brutality enabled Syria’s extraordinary progress on the very factors – literacy, welfare, shared prosperity on the back of state ownership of key sectors, womens’ rights and secularism – I want included in the definition before I sign up for the breezy universalism of Jones and Monbiot. In the meantime I adopt a stance out of favour with much of the left; critical but unconditional defence. What I hear from self styled universalists is too much of the critical, too little of the defence.
On that last, two 2013 pieces by Fred Weston are worth reading. These In Defence of Marxism articles make fair points on Assad (mainly Hafez) failings. They also set out a sound statement, albeit dated in its implicit vanguardism, of the case against Stalinism, ‘stageism’ and ‘socialism in one country’. Given that Trotsky is favourably cited it’s striking Weston makes no mention of the critical-but-unconditional meme, central to postwar Trotskyism and to my mind one of the more useful legacies of the ill fated Fourth International. If that’s all too estoteric, my point is he’s too busy trashing – on grounds I share and with a cogency I’d welcome in other contexts – the anti-imperialist credentials of Ba’athism to grasp the biggest aspect of this mess. Assad may be insufficiently opposed to imperialism for Fred Weston’s tastes, but is sufficiently in the way of it to be on the receiving end of its wrath. Says Weston:

What’s wrong here (on top of slyly conflating Hafez and Bashar into a single Assad) is the tacit demand that an imperialised state behave with anti imperialist consistency to ‘earn’ the support of the left in imperialist states. But unless he thinks the west attacks Syria because of the sins he lists, and I’m sure he thinks no such thing, Weston makes the very confusion critical but unconditional defence disentangles. Internationalism begins at home. A key tenet is that imperialised states be defended from our own imperialism, regardless of Stalinist, nationalist, theocratic or other defects in their worldviews, or failings real or cynically concocted in their leaders. Such defects and failings must be condemned where proven, but always in the context of – yet meticulously decoupled from – unwavering insistence that the prime villain is ‘our’ imperialism.
Why does this matter? Because the left in the global north has a sorry record of capitulation to ferocious dominant narratives. That’s why defence of the Provisional IRA was tougher for British socialists than defence of an ANC whose program and leaders were equally flawed. Conversely, it’s why white South Africans in the ANC were truly heroic – likewise Israeli Jews fighting their own apartheid state – and why it was easier to defend the IRA if you were French or American than British. But in their hostility to Damascus, western media have set a climate as vicious as that created by British media at the height of the ‘troubles’ in the Six Counties. I’m sure Weston, like Jones and Monbiot, does not intend it but his attacks on ‘misguided’ leftists who back Damascus against Washington will add to a narrative of vilification funded by the deepest pockets and driven by the most venal interests. Music to Wall Street ears, they’ll also give cover for those on the left more interested in an easy life than in challenging a criminally insane world order at the points of greatest criminality. In this respect Weston’s brand of marxism serves, objectively, the same ends as Monbiot’s and Jones’s universalism.
That need for widening our definition of human rights, and being sceptical when leaders and media take the moral high ground on nations they do so much to impoverish, applies not only to imperialised peoples but to weaker imperialisms. I refer to Russia and China, whose rise I welcome not as ‘good guys’ to the west’s ‘bad guys’ but as sorely needed counterbalance. A materialist, not an idealist, I don’t locate evil in the peculiarities of any national psyche. I think in terms of class not country, and see our rulers concealing – not from rival leaders but their own subjects – the interests they truly serve beneath a cloak of morality. That needn’t imply conspiracism. (On the whole I locate evil in the logic of capital; its dynamic accelerated by the fall of the Soviet Union.) Yes, history is rife with conspiracy – proven in the cases of Tonkin and Saddam’s WMDs; deservedly suspected at Idlib – but dark plots are more history’s catalysts than its primary drivers. What’s more they tend to be seen by their authors as For The Greater Good.
Hence my open letter to Jones; its subject Putin, its theme the flaws of a universalism detached from realpolitik. Hence too my saying Monbiot is astray on Syria. I don’t doubt the sincerity of his views, though they’ve led a usually critical man to errors of reason and lapses of evidential standards. His failing has moral aspects too. See the Media Lens response to his Disavowal. Driving the disingenuity and flagrant misrepresentations, calmly dissected by ML, of this on the whole honest broker are the vanity and blinkered credulity of a man who can’t admit error: one who boasts he can ‘handle more reality than most’, and by that boast opens a door on the very opposite.
Owen Jones’s very similar vanity has led him to very similar misrepresentations over Syria. He wouldn’t share a 2013 Stop the War platform with Mother Agnes, mother superior of St. James Monastery in Qara, Syria, who’d spoken out on the ‘civil war’ and western-backed terrorists. (He’s less fastidious about appearing on BBC Question Time alongside champions of the west’s wars on the middle east.) Jones blogged that Mother Agnes is

perhaps most infamous for publishing a 50-page report claiming that the video footage of the Ghoutta massacre was faked, that the children suffocating to death had been kidnapped by rebels and were actually sleeping or “under anaesthesia”’.

Jones provides no link to said report. My guess, and that’s all it can be, is he didn’t read beyond its introduction. And it is a difficult read; lengthy and detailed, with erratic ‘signposting’ of the significance of every factor it documents. The difficulties are compounded for a lay westerner by technical terms, Arab names and the misspellings and unorthodox syntax of a writer whose first language is not English. Moreover, the report was rushed out to counter jihadist accounts lapped up by western media bent on damning Assad in ways that, intended or not, prime us for further aggression in our name on the middle east.
Be that as it may, an hour or two studying Mother Agnes’s report throws up serious questions Jones fails to address. How come a photo shown on page 20, offered by ‘rebels’ as evidence of atrocity by Assad, had been used a week earlier in Egypt after Muslim Brotherhood violence? What does Jones say to relatives claiming to have seen, in other ‘rebel’ supplied footage, their own children abducted earlier that month from Alawite villages, almost certainly by Al Nusra terrorists? Is it so far fetchedly incredible – as Jones’s airy refusal to trouble himself with the details would suggest – that these zealots, famous for both unspeakable cruelty and crude but effective propaganda, would act with such cynicism?
Related are two questions I’ve raised in other posts. What does Jones believe Damascus could gain from such an attack? Conversely, what is it that stops him seeing that the terrorists, with or without the complicity of western or Saudi intelligence services, had everything to gain from yet another false flag operation to justify further and more direct western intervention against the state they loathe for its multi-faith secularism, Washington for its “Arab communism”?
Crucially, in a foreshadowing of Monbiot’s misrepresentation of Media Lens over Idlib, Jones neglects to say that Mother Agnes is not offering an alternative narrative for Ghouta. Rather, she is pointing out flaws in the case for Damascus having used sarin there.
Blogger Phil Greaves echoes my views, albeit in terms I would not use, of Jones on Syria:

To be fair, Greaves is wide of the mark in saying that for Jones anyone that .. refuses to support [Assad’s] ouster through coercion or violence is BAD. Jones the universalist does indeed condemn regime change in the middle east but Jonathan Cook’s response, below, to Monbiot’s empty denunciation of the warmongers is equally applicable here. FWIW I don’t see either man as fundamentally dishonest. I do see them as complacent: a consequence on the one hand of their revered status on the liberal left; on the other their employment by a Guardian on a decidedly rightward drift. The first can turn the steadiest head, the second exert a groupthink effect whose dynamics need not depend on censorship or other forms of editorial conspiracy.
But vanity, complacency and any ethical consequences thereof are secondary. My focus is on flaws intrinsic to uncritical universalism. I’ll give the last – OK, penultimate – word to Jonathan Cook, familiar to all who are up to speed on the Palestine travesty, and in my opinion the best informed middle east commentator on the block.

Monbiot has repeatedly denied he wants a military attack on Syria. But if he weakly accepts whatever narratives are crafted by those who do – and refuses to subject them to meaningful scrutiny – he is decisively helping to promote such an attack.
Noam Chomsky made this point in a different context in Understanding Power:
“So when American dissidents criticize the atrocities of some enemy state like Cuba or Vietnam, it’s no secret what the effects of that criticism are going to be: it’s not going to have any effect whatsoever on the Cuban regime, for example, but certainly will help the torturers in Washington and Miami to keep inflicting their campaign of suffering on the Cuban population [i.e. through the US-led embargo]. Well, that is something I do not think a moral person would want to contribute to.”

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.