George Monbiot is again on one of his intermittent witch-hunts against “the left” \u2013 on this occasion, against anyone questioning whether the Syrian regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in Idlib earlier this month.<\/p>\n
In a post on\u00a0his website<\/a>, called simply “Disavowal”, he dismisses those who have raised doubts about the official western narrative \u2013 such as MIT weapons expert Ted Postol; former UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Scott Ritter; and\u00a0former US military and government insider Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to\u00a0Colin Powell when he was secretary of state \u2013 as\u00a0a “few contrarians”.<\/p>\n I remember a time when Monbiot was a contrarian himself, on the environment and climate change. Then, he\u00a0would have proudly embraced such a\u00a0denunciation\u00a0as proof\u00a0of his independence and critical thinking. Now it is a weapon to use against his critics.<\/p>\n On foreign policy matters, Monbiot has regularly\u00a0shown poor judgment.\u00a0Since the attack on Iraq, he\u00a0has posed\u00a0not so much as\u00a0a cheerleader for intervention than\u00a0a weary onlooker, reluctantly conceding that whatever US, British and other western\u00a0intelligence agencies say\u00a0\u2013 and the\u00a0largely uncritical reports of these statements by liberal media like his own newspaper the Guardian \u2013 should be given the benefit of the doubt.<\/p>\n The fact that\u00a0these official assurances have so often turned\u00a0to mush on closer inspection, whether in Iraq, Libya or now Syria, never strengthens his resolve to maintain more critical distance next time. Nor does it seem to raise any concern that, by failing to\u00a0adopt a posture of rigorous scepticism, he is inadvertently conspiring in the promotion by\u00a0the west and its allies, like Saudi Arabia, of their right to\u00a0meddle in and attack\u00a0official “enemy”\u00a0states.<\/p>\n Monbiot\u00a0has repeatedly\u00a0denied\u00a0that\u00a0he wants a military attack on Syria. But if he then weakly accepts whatever narratives are crafted by those who do \u2013 and refuses to subject them to any meaningful scrutiny \u2013 he is decisively helping to promote such an attack.<\/p>\n Noam Chomsky made this point in a different context in the\u00a0book Understanding Power:<\/p>\n So when American dissidents criticize the atrocities of some enemy state like Cuba or Vietnam or something, it’s no secret what the effects of that criticism are going to be: it’s not going to have any effect whatsoever on the Cuban regime, for example, but it certainly will help the torturers in Washington and Miami to keep inflicting their campaign of suffering on the Cuban population [i.e. through the US-led embargo]. Well, that is something I do not think a moral person would want to contribute to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It perhaps goes without saying that, as Monbiot has become less and less of a “contrarian”, he has turned his fire on those who insist on the right to be one. A few years ago Chomsky finally suffered\u00a0Monbiot’s reproval, as I have previously discussed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of the\u00a0problems with Monbiot’s latest “disavowal” \u2013 presumably of\u00a0the leftists he castigates in his short piece \u2013 is that he\u00a0offers no justification for what he\u00a0claims\u00a0to be justifying.<\/p>\n In less than 48 hours after the attack in Idlib, Monbiot was tweeting that the evidence appeared to\u00a0show Assad was responsible, while suggesting that\u00a0anyone who doubted the Syrian regime’s role\u00a0was likely driven by nefarious motives<\/a>.<\/p>\n A day\u00a0later, he was\u00a0“99%” sure<\/a> Assad’s government was responsible. Trump’s illegal attack on Syria, he said, was\u00a0only “symbolic<\/a>” \u2013 a symbolic war crime, presumably \u2013 and would allow\u00a0Assad to\u00a0“carry on as before”. Did he mean Trump needed to launch more than a symbolic attack? That he needed to ratchet up the violence\u00a0to stop\u00a0Assad\u00a0“carrying on as before”? It is this kind of irresponsibly\u00a0ambiguous\u00a0language \u2013 from a journalist skilled in the use of words \u2013 that can serve only to aid\u00a0an agenda Monbiot says he opposes.<\/p>\n Then weapons expert Ted Postol muddied the waters. He offered a critique of the only real evidence for the attack that is publicly available\u00a0\u2013 Youtube videos, photos and a White House report.<\/p>\n Neither I nor Monbiot are chemical weapons or missile experts, so we have little to contribute to the technical arguments. But we can maintain a critical distance while others do, and weigh the evidence they produce.<\/p>\n But that is not what Monbiot\u00a0did. He was sure of Assad’s responsibility for the attack before there was any evidence that hadn’t been supplied by western intelligence agencies and western news outlets \u2013 the latter\u00a0depending on local sources from an area controlled by violent, ruthless jihadist groups. There is a good reason why independent experts, western journalists and neutral parties are not operating\u00a0in\u00a0these areas, after all.<\/p>\n Now Monbiot wants to point to recent critiques of Postol’s analysis as evidence for why he was right to blame Assad at the outset; and why, further, those who have refused to jump to conclusions, as he did, are exposed as Assad apologists.<\/p>\n Even if we assume the criticisms\u00a0of Postol’s work are based in evidence and factually right\u00a0(and neither he nor I are in a position to know that), he did not wait for Postol’s analysis, or for the subsequent\u00a0critiques of Postol’s work, to reach his own conclusions. In short, Monbiot’s\u00a0mind was made up from the beginning. That \u2013 and only that \u2013 is the reason\u00a0he has been\u00a0take to task\u00a0by the vast majority of his critics.<\/p>\n But there is an even more important\u00a0issue here, at least for anyone who is really interested in\u00a0getting to the truth of what happened in Idlib, and wants to stop the official narrative being abused to promote greater\u00a0western military intervention (and suffering) in Syria.<\/p>\n We need more debate about the evidence, not less of it. Postol, Blix and Ritter may be wrong. But they should have a fair hearing and their arguments should be fully aired in\u00a0the mainstream \u2013 especially, in supposedly liberal media outlets like the Guardian. Anyone who wants to understand what happened in Idlib must<\/em> also want a vigorous and open debate that most members of the public will have access to.<\/p>\n