Nice curtain, shame about the view

01Aug07

Published at UK Watch.

Sigh – again with the “shared values” routine. Providing we don’t go into too much detail, ‘values’ can mean anything to anyone – it is a concept so amorphous and vacuous as to be effectively meaningless, a quality that has made it a regular theme in official political discourse. Domestically, talk of ‘values’ functions to distract voters from the material policies being carried out in their names, the nature of the institutions that generate them and the uncomfortable fact that the major political parties are fundamentally in agreement over both.The same is true on the world stage. As Gordon Brown embarks on his first American odyssey, re-igniting the familiar debate about the nature of the relationship between the United States and Britain, the reliable old establishment ‘values’ workhorse has been dusted off once more to distort and confuse the discussion. According to Brown, our pan-Atlantic brotherhood is founded on “common values of liberty, opportunity and the dignity of the individual”. All very nice, of course. Liberty, freedom, justice, dignity, love…it’s enough to make Voldemort himself (yeah, I’ve succumbed) collapse into a fit of the warm fuzzies. Claps on the back all round, chaps – aren’t we just the best?

Amidst all the self-adulation, some important facts about our actual, concrete role in the world may be lost. For example, even as Gordon Brown waxed tedium about a “battle of ideas” in Iraq, Oxfam released a report (.pdf) showing that eight million Iraqis, roughly a third of the population, are in need of emergency aid such as water, sanitation, food and shelter. 15% of Iraqis cannot regularly afford to eat, 70% do not have adequate water supplies and 28% of children are malnourished – shockingly, this represents a significant increase from the pre-invasion child malnutrition rate of 19%, when Iraqis were still suffering under the U.S.-led sanctions regime – described by former UN humanitarian coordinator Dennis Halliday as “genocidal” – which led to the deaths of approximately half a million children under five. More than 11 per cent of newborn babies were born underweight in 2006, compared with 4 per cent in 2003.

According to the UN, over four million Iraqis have fled their homes, in what is the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world. According to recent reports, the situation for the refugees is so bad that as many as 50,000 women and girls have been forced into prostitution for survival. Syria has absorbed roughly 1.4 million refugees, with Jordan admitting 700,000 and Egypt and Lebanon taking in over 150,000 each. In contrast, the two countries that bear primary responsibility for this humanitarian catastrophe have done little to help, with the U.S. admitting less than 1,000 Iraqi refugees and the UK not only failing to match even this pathetic record, but actually forcibly deporting dozens of refugees back to Iraq. The attitude of the British government towards the refugee crisis they helped create has been described by Amnesty International as “truly shameful”, while Refugees International has labeled the U.S. response “inadequate“, noting that the amount of money set aside by the Bush administration to assist the two million internally displaced Iraqis amounts to a mere $17 million, or just over $3 per person per year. Indeed, despite the worsening conditions in Iraq, U.S. emergency humanitarian assistance decreased from $128.08 million in 2005 to just $43.1 million in 2006, whilst humanitarian aid from the UK dropped from $19.87 million in 2005 to $9.5 million last year (Oxfam: Table 2, p. 25).

Who gives a shit about “values” when this is the kind of suffering we are inflicting upon people around the world? The level of indifference displayed towards these monumental atrocities is sickening. At yesterday’s Camp David summit, Brown apparently attempted to shift the discussion away from Iraq and towards ‘less divisive’ issues like Darfur, a tactic that has been adopted by many pro-war Western intellectuals. After all, talking about our crimes is always a bit of a downer, and anyway, people with our “values” just don’t do that sort of thing. As Patrick Cockburn writes,

“while the US and Britain are willing to express sympathy for the plight of refugees in Africa, they are ignoring, or playing down, a far greater tragedy which is largely of their own making.”

Noam Chomsky has written that whenever you hear politicians start talking about ‘values’, reach for your wallet. He’s right, but in this case the consequences of failing to do so will be measured not in money but in blood. Who we are is best determined not by what some crook loudly proclaims us to be, but by what we actually do. So just ignore all the inanities about our “shared destiny” and “values” and stay resolutely focused on what really counts: ending the crimes for which we are responsible, paying reparations to the victims and holding the perpetrators to account. And then, by all means, hold as many orgies of self-satisfaction as you want – hell, you can even establish a national holiday, ‘Values Week’, where we all get a week off work to go around congratulating each other for being so goddamned awesome. But, to put it mildly, we ain’t there yet.

Filed under: Iraq, News and politics, UK   |  7 Comments
Tags: "values", International & Foreign Policy