SBS Doco and War in Iraq

On Tuesday 3/7/2007 SBS aired Naama Pyritz’s "Bahais in my Backyard." Pyritz worked through her misgivings about the Bahia faith, a more recent religion based in Israel and with connections to Islam. What was interesting that Pyritz invoked the ghost of Dr David Kelly.

"Kelly (May 17, 1944 – July 17, 2003) was an employee of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MoD), an expert in biological warfare, and a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. Kelly's discussion with Today programme journalist Andrew Gilligan about the British government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq inadvertently caused a major political scandal. He was found dead days after appearing before the Parliamentary committee charged with investigating the scandal...The Hutton Inquiry, a public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death, ruled that he had committed suicide.... [However many believe] that the official account of suicide was implausible because the means Kelly was said to have chosen is an unlikely and ineffective means of suicide … [and] that the most likely cause of death was murder." (Wikipedia entry)

Whatever was said to Gilligan, there is no doubt Kelly was uncomfortable with political pressure bought to bear on the weapons inspectors to keep mum about the lack of evidence for any WMDs. The aim, I shall assume here, was to get the troops into Iraq in order to maximise mainly petrochemical profits.

Mai Pedersen, one of the bi-linguists working with Kelly’s inspection team claimed to share his misgivings. The problem is that it was well known that the term “translator” could itself be translated into “secret service operative.”

Pyritz was led to Kelly because Pederson (CIA) claimed to be a Bahia, and apparently that this faith could resolve the conflict Kelly felt about being pressured to lie. As I reconstruct the Bahia argument, you can be part of the politically pressured inspections teams, but by being a Bahia you commit to acting with integrity and in the name of a future sacred world government.

Kelly converted, but of course being a Bahia resolves nothing. It simply dresses an existing conflict between integrity and political pressure in religious garb, and worse, was a factor that allowed Pederson to win Kelly's trust Pedersen, despite her day job as a CIA agent(an affair was another factor). Assuming Kelly was murdered, it is highly likely that this trust was very useful, both at the time and in the resulting cover-up — Pyritz found that Pederson was exempted from the Hutton Inquiry.

By asking about Kelly, Pyritz also implicitly raised the question of the relationship between western society and democracy. During large demos against that war a lot was made of the idea that peace demonstrators presented us with a practical contradiction. Demonstrators claimed they were against the war in Iraq, but according to the practical contradiction idea when their message was rightly interpreted (for e.g. by media pundits who pointed out demonstrations were not possible in Iraq, or by shots of mass demos moving past Westminister Abbey), we find the demonstrators actions actually supported the Iraq war. For by the very act of demonstrating the demonstrators purportedly showed they stood against Saddam’s dictatorial “ideals” where there is no democracy and so one can not take to the streets, and for the democratic precepts of the invading western powers where demonstrations are allowed.

However the Kelly case problematises the view that peace demonstrators fell into this practical contradiction. For Kelly was a highly effective (because sensitively placed) demonstrator, the only mass rallies were permitted were by contrast completely ineffectual.

I think that in such circumstances there is no democracy even if there is (some remnants) of free speech. David Braddon-Mitchell and Caroline West in "What is Free Speech" (The Journal of Political Philosophy, 2004)differentiate democracy from free speech. They imagine a democracy in which all were empowered, but that did not require free speech, since, at least for a time, all the empowered agents in the democracy closely shared certain ideas (very unlikely in any real human society, but a possible state of affairs). On this model, democracy is the ability to act on the basis of interesting ideas, while free speech means interesting ideas can compete with each other. Since the ideas Kelly espoused, namely that without any WMD discovered there was no pretext for the war in Iraq, did retain some ability to get aired, on the Braddon-Mitchell/West model Kelly’s murder does not tell us there is no free speech in western society. What it does tell us is there is no democracy, because if you are in a position to act and endanger the plans for war, then you will be treated in the same way any non-democratic system treats dissidents, repressively and even murderously. See also my post "Comments on some Recent Media" (I have revised my position on this matter from that informing my post below of 3rd July 2007).

In place of the argument that dissidents about the war fall into a practical contradiction when they air their dissent, it could then be argued the Iraq war is not justifiable. If the western system opposing Saddam’s is not in fact democratic, then there is no practical contradiction in opposing the war. The demonstrators are then not in any way inconsistent. It could also be pointed out that other means could have got rid of Saddam that do seem to give us democracy, but these were thwarted by the ruthless, non-democratic west (most notably on the road to Basra, 1991: http://www.bhopal.net/alliedcampaigns/archives/2006/09/19901991_iraqi.html).

To get back to "Bahias in my Backyard", we find the secret services using the befuddlement that accompanies religious beliefs. Kelly should have known better than to trust Pederson. It was hardly a surprise when Pyritz found Pedersen to be a lax Bahai, not trusted by well-meaning working class members of the faith. In other cases I believe religion is a cover for the role the secret services play in role in terror plots. It could also assist in brain washing the gullible and unstable who are attracted to religion (see the post below from December 2006: "Motives and the Operative").

Someone who is now ruined once sung “L.Ron Hubbard can save your life/ Superboy takes a plutonium wife.” Pyritz did not seem to mean to gesture at the usefulness of a new “feel-good” religion to power, but then neither did she directly or deliberately raise the issue of the falsity of western democracy. However as we poets have known for many years, sometimes important things that need to be said are at first said seemingly accidentally, or uttered under the breath