With enemies like these we need wicked friends
FRANK JOHNSON
Plenty of interesting things are said about this war by both its supporters and its opponents, by both Right and Left. Not that all on the Right are its supporters, nor all on the Left its opponents. I know plenty of Conservatives, some of them MPs, who — despite the Taleban's collapse — are privately against the war.
But it is the Left, and the rest of the war's opponents, who publicly say the most interesting thing of all about it. What they say is the latest manifestation of something they have often said before. They said it throughout the Cold War. It is: our allies, the Northern Alliance, are just as evil as our opponents, and that therefore the leaders of the democracies, especially the Americans, are hypocrites for saying that this is a war in defence of freedom. At successive stages of the Cold War, they said the same in connection with South Korea, South Vietnam, and the right-wing Latin American dictatorships, especially Pinochet's Chile.
The argument should be heard. True, the Left can easily be proved as equally hypocritical. All the world's left-wing regimes during the Cold War were tyrannies and torturers too. Admittedly, the Allende regime which Pinochet overthrew was democratically elected. But its hostile critics say it was undermining or abolishing democracy at the time of its overthrow. That is not hard to believe.
But, on any subject, hypocrisy is not disapproved because it is pointed out by those who are themselves hypocrites. Otherwise there would be much less political debate. Opponents of this war, who say that the Northern Alliance is just as bad as the Taleban, have a good case. More than that: it is a case which lies at the heart of all debate about the relations which liberal Western countries should have with the rest of the world.
The hack right-wing answer to it is to quote what the quoters claim to be 'the old Arab proverb': 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.' That is true, but it does not get us very far. The enemy of our enemy often fails to lift a finger against our enemy. He exploits the situation for his own advantage. Nor does the old Arab proverb, if old Arab proverb it is, help solve the moral problem. Is it moral for us to be allied with one evil to defeat another evil? Some Conservatives have no difficulty about it. They dismiss the need to justify foreign policy by reference to morality. They say that our foreign policy should be dictated solely by considerations of national interest. Many of us have sat at dinner-tables that have rung with competitive dismissals of 'international law'. Lady Thatcher, in her retirement, makes many a dinner-table thus ring. But she invoked international law when she wanted to retake the Falklands, or evict Saddam from Kuwait. There was a good reason. International law then suited those who favoured those respective wars. But there was another reason why international law was then invoked by those who at other times mocked it: a reason which seems to be rooted in human nature. Most of us wish to act morally. We often cannot, but we wish to. So when we support people like the Northern Alliance, we must convince ourselves and others that we are moral to do so. But how? The Northern Alliance is horrible.
It is not easy. But it can be done by pointing to the nature of the world in which we live. Here Christianity can help. The world is fallen. Its inhabitants are sinful. But we must live in it. We must not, however, live in it sinfully. We must try to rid it of as much sin as we can. Some countries are more full of sin than others. We go to war against those countries, not to rid them of sin — though the cases of postwar Germany and Japan prove that we go a long way towards doing so if we win — but to save our own countries from sin's power.
That is how Christianity can help. But the Enlightenment can help, too. Most of the world is ruled by tyranny, and much of it by torture. But, for reasons which lie deep in history and which perhaps cannot be explained, in one part of the world — Western Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries, spreading to North America — there gradually came into being countries not ruled by tyranny and torture.
But one of the biggest of those countries, Germany between 1933 and 1945, relapsed. It reverted to tyranny. Whereupon the Enlightenment countries discovered that the only way in which they could defeat Germany, and reclaim her for the Enlightenment, was by allying themselves to another anti-Enlightenment power: Stalin's Soviet Union. Here we have the rebuttal of the argument which says that we must not be allied to the Northern Alliance.
At this point, the Left would not concede defeat in the argument. Nor should it. The Left, and opponents of this present Afghan war, would point out that Germany attacked the Soviet Union after we were at war with Germany. But it should be remembered that the Left has always argued that the only way in which we could have stopped Hitler was to have allied ourselves to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Not just the Left; during the 1930s, it was also argued by Churchill.
Many of us do not believe that the Soviet Union would have entered into such a peacetime alliance. There was a long and distinguished correspondence on this matter in The Spectator a few years ago, which in my view was won by those who doubted the Soviet Union's good faith in seeking such an alliance in the 1930s.
But that is irrelevant to the moral issue. People who say we should have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in the 1930s effectively concede that we should, if necessary, ally with one set of tyrants and torturers against another if one set is considered a threat to us, and the other is not. The United States and its Western allies took that view in allying with disagreeable regimes throughout the Cold War. But the Left opposed the Cold War, whereas it approved of war against Hitler. (The Left's opposition to the 1930s British armaments and conscription which enabled us to fight that war is another matter. Presumably it would have been different had we had a peacetime alliance with the Soviet Union.)
But being allied with the wicked is difficult. We have no alternative but to indulge, and even flatter, wicked friends, because it is in the nature of the wicked that they can easily become our enemies. Hence Churchill's wartime praise of Stalin, and silence about his wickedness. Mr Hoon, Defence Secretary, found himself denying on television that the Northern Alliance, on taking those cities, had committed many atrocities; only a few, he implied. Instead of jeering at him, we must see him having to say what he said, not wanting to. It was the equivalent of Churchill and Britain having to deny that our ally, the Soviet Union, committed the Katyn Forest massacre. One of evil's effects is that it makes its enemies less virtuous than they would otherwise be. The alternative is for evil to prevail everywhere.
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