There was an interesting article in this morning’s Age newspaper written by Pamela Bone, questioning the “moral certainty” of the recent wave of peace protestors (which I guess includes us)

She said in part:

The best hope of avoiding war, still, is to get a strong and unambiguous second resolution from the UN Security Council ordering Iraq to disarm. Dictators should know the world is united against them. Unfortunately, though this was not the intention of the peace marchers, Saddam has taken courage from the massive public opposition to war.

She points out the humanitarian reasons for intervening in Iraq and stopping what she describes as a slow genocide of Iraqi people. She concludes by saying that she envies “the moral certainty of the peace protesters”.

Gee, moral certainty. I wish I could get me some of that.

I have been reflecting about how this whole war debate and the level of polarisation which occurs - you are either emphatically for war or you are entirely anti-war in all circumstances. We come down to finger pointing and arguing that one position is “right” and the other is “wrong”. Neither of these positions can possibly be supported in all circumstances.

I have been following some discussion on rachel’s blog about this issue and posted a comment saying, in part:

Marching and protesting is not necessarily just about being anti-war. For me, protesting was the best tool that I had to encourage our leaders to listen to the alternative voice and acknowledge that public opinion (although as I have been reflecting recently, if you really want to ignore millions of people demonstrating, you can if you try hard enough).

There are a variety of viewpoints expressed there and on other sites around the place, sometimes very heatedly. Even on this page, the discussion between phil and chris in reference to this post illustrates this type of argument.

Do you want to know what concerns me the most? It is exactly this type of extremism and polarisation. You are either with us or you are against us. You oppose Saddam or you don’t. The answer is either war or it isn’t.

Can’t we as a democratic nation and a global community be a little more sophisticated than that? You know the thing that has bugged me most about our PM? It is that he jumped in so quickly to support the US (for crying out loud, we have already deployed troops!) that nobody even thinks that he has really considered any alternatives.

Why have we not received more measured responses about these types of issues which respect the Australian community’s right to engage in this type of discussion in the public forum before a decision has been made? Why couldn’t the PM have said “Well, we have a history of supporting the US and the UN and we are very concerned about these issues and we will make the appropriate decision when the time comes.”? Instead he sends troops.

Why couldn’t he have said in response to the public demonstrations “We are in a terrible situation which weighs heavily on all Australians. The feelings of the demonstrators have been voiced and we will continue to endeavour to resolve this dispute peacefully and avoiding the necessity of armed conflict is very high on our list.”? Instead, he marginalises the viewpoints of hundreds of thousands of citizens by saying that the demonstrations do not reflect public opinion.

Surely this is a complex issue which should be approached in a balanced manner. Perhaps this is happening, but I can’t help but think that the outpouring of demonstrations and the passion of the blog debates over the last little while is at least partly because people think that this reflection and evaluation is just not happening.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2003 at 9:16 am by dan and is filed under iraq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.