Why Fred Halliday is wrong
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
'If it comes to a choice between fascism and imperialism, then I choose imperialism'. So says Fred Halliday.
Professor Halliday of the London School of Economics has become a familiar figure on our TV screens – as an expert on the Middle East and Afghanistan. In the late '60s he was a leading figure in the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation (RSSF), and subsequently a long-time member of the New Left Review editorial board, before departing a few years ago, with Anthony Barnett, in unexplained circumstances.
During the Gulf crisis he became an increasingly open supporter of the USA's war.
Last week, laying out his pro-war views explicitly in the New Statesman, he attacked the bulk of the left for its 'disastrous' decision to oppose the war.
At the centre of his case are two arguments. First that Saddam's regime is 'fascist' and thus in imperialism's war he backed the lesser evil. Second, Kuwait, like other nations had the right to self-determination which was violated by Iraq.
He starts on a personal note, claiming he has been the subject of unfair pressures from others on the left. He has, apparently, had abuse shouted at him by SWP and other 'ultra-left' (a telling phrase) paper sellers in shopping arcades. He cites unfair attacks by the likes of Alexander Cockburn, who are 'safe in their East Coast and Home Counties platitudes'.
Why the eastern seaboard of the USA and the Home Counties are to be considered the home of safe leftist platitudes, rather than Highgate or the LSE, remains a mystery. But we can all agree that shouting at people in shopping arcades is to be deplored. Though compared with what the Iraqi people have had to endure it seems a small thing.
The substance of Halliday's argument is without merit. Iraq is not a fascist regime. It is a brutal dictatorship, a degenerate form of Arab nationalism, based on the military. But the precise character of Saddam's regime is not the point. Socialists should be in favour of the destruction of reactionary regimes, of course.
But it matters how they are destroyed, in whose interests and with what results. There is a world of difference between the Iraqi masses overthrowing Saddam, and an assault by imperialism which strengthens reaction in the Middle East and worldwide, and slaughters more than 100,000 into the bargain. Someone who doesn't see that lacks logic, as well as common humanity.
Halliday's view that we should defend Kuwaiti 'self-determination' is also wide of the mark. The Kuwaiti city-state is an enclave for pumping oil to the West, dominated by super-rich rulers who employed immigrant workers to do the dirty work. Socialist Outlook backed the right of the inhabitants of Kuwait to have the right to decide whether to be integrated with Iraq. The majority of the inhabitants have now left, leaving a simple enclave of imperialism. There is no Kuwaiti nation. Self-determination for Kuwait has the same status as self-determination for Monaco.
Fred Halliday has come into conflict with much of the left once before - over the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. He backed that intervention on the grounds that the USSR was fighting Islamic reaction. His pro-American stance on the Gulf is not a flip-flop, but the self-same argument, but with the involvement of an imperialist rather than a Stalinist superpower.
This blindness towards reaction, expecting it to do progressive work, stems, as Halliday rightly says from previous debates and more fundamental political positions. Fred Halliday had his original political inspiration in the work of Isaac Deutscher, author of the most famous biography of Trotsky. Halliday edited a collection of Deutscher's writings, published as a Penguin.It was his interpretation of 'Deutscherism' which gave Halliday's mode of thought a distinctly pro-Soviet angle.
But Isaac Deutscher, whatever he got wrong about the Soviet Union, never made the mistake of having any truck with imperialism. His reaction to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was to unequivocally champion the Arab cause. Deutscher would have seen what was going on. Fred Halliday has moved to the right by giant leaps. Perhaps being shouted at in shopping arcades is an acceptable price for becoming a safe-for-the-establishment TV guru.