Veteran leftist Robert Reid says New Zealand’s at war with Yemen. Chris Trotter begs to differ

By Chris Trotter*

“Second night of NZ’s coalition bombing of Yemen!” This hair-raising statement, from veteran leftist Robert Reid, was followed by an even more jaw-dropping claim: “So NZ is at war without any debate, mandate, cabinet or parliamentary resolution and while its government is still on holiday!!”

While it is certainly the case that the New Zealand Left is currently in an excitable frame of mind, Reid’s posting on “X”, has taken that excitability to a whole new level.

To describe the countries involved in the air and naval strikes against the Houthi regime in Yemen as “New Zealand’s coalition” is merely the most egregious of the errors contained in Reid’s posting.

According to the statement released by the White House on 11 January, the strikes were launched at the initiative of the USA and the United Kingdom:

“In response to continued illegal, dangerous, and destabilising Houthi attacks against vessels, including commercial shipping, transiting the Red Sea, the armed forces of the United States and United Kingdom, with support from the Netherlands, Canada, Bahrain, and Australia, conducted joint strikes in accordance with the inherent right of individual and collective self- defence, consistent with the UN Charter, against a number of targets in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.”

Clearly, Reid has mistaken the ten UN members condemning Houthi attacks on vessels transiting the Red Sea with the six states involved in the air and naval attacks on Houthi military targets. Reid, like most New Zealanders, knows that the RNZAF possesses no aircraft even remotely capable of participating in attacks of the sort launched by American and British forces. Nor does New Zealand currently possess the necessary hardware and personnel to participate effectively in the US-led “Operation Prosperity Guardian”.

So, to be clear, New Zealand has not placed itself at the head of any military and/or diplomatic coalition. Nor has it participated in any military strikes against targets located in Houthi-controlled Yemini territory. The nation is not, therefore, at war with anyone. Hence the non-existence of any “cabinet or parliamentary resolution” authorising New Zealand’s participation in the escalating conflict.

Ever since he was a teenager, back in the 1970s, Reid has been involved in anti-military activism. A person of his vast experience knows full well that this country played no part in the US/UK airstrikes. Even assuming it wanted to, New Zealand couldn’t participate. Why? Because it is saddled with a defence force that is currently incapable of participating in anything more rigorous than disaster relief at home and, if it’s lucky, the South Pacific. Reid must also know that New Zealand’s adherence to the aims and objectives of Operation Prosperity Guardian is largely a symbolic gesture of support from the Coalition Government to its Five Eyes partners.

 So, why the loud alarums and inflammatory claims from a man whose powers of political analysis were, for years, celebrated across the New Zealand Left? What is driving old lefties like Reid into the arms of an army of fanatical Shia fighters for whom the destruction of the “Great Satan”, America, and the utter elimination of the “Zionist Entity”, Israel, are goals for which they are only too willing to martyr themselves? Reid and his left-wing comrades used to be aggressively secular revolutionaries who dismissed religion as the “opium of the people”. What happened?

In a nutshell, the enemy of their Twentieth Century ideological mentors – some in Moscow, others in Beijing – became the Western Left’s enemy also. They may not have viewed the USA as the “Great Satan”, but they certainly saw it as the planet’s foremost imperialist power, as well as the world’s most aggressive promoter of globalised free-market capitalism. And, if the USA constituted the world’s greatest evil, then simple political logic dictated that the Soviet Union/Russian Federation, the Peoples Republic of China, North Korea, Cuba, and all the other dubious propositions of the “Third World” and “Global South” must be “lesser evils”. Anti-Americanism became a left-wing reflex – as strong today as it ever was.

Indisputably, the Americans made it easy for them. What was morally arguable in Korea swiftly became indefensible in Vietnam. And then there were the dictators Uncle Sam kept in power: the Shah of Iran, the Somoza family, Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet, the list is as long as the historical record of those US-supported authoritarian regimes is bloody.

It never appeared to register with Western leftists, however, that they were able to condemn the USA’s actions because they could see them on their television screens and read about them in their newspapers. Moreover, those same left-wing activists could give vent to their moral outrage on the streets without being killed. Unlike the Peronist trade unionists, gunned-down by the Argentinian generals’ goons. Or the protesting students, slaughtered by the Peoples Liberation Army in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square. Hatred of US imperialism and the effects of global capitalism has blinded the Western Left to the much, much worse atrocities committed by the West’s alleged “victims”.

Nor was its moral clarity improved by the demise of the Soviet Union and the PRC’s embrace of capitalism with Chinese characteristics. With the great engines of proletarian liberation either shut down, or converted to less altruistic purposes, the Western Left was forced to cast about for an ideological substitute. In place of the now defunct doctrines of Marxism-Leninism and Maoism, Western leftists found themselves adopting the radically subjective nostrums of the so-called “New Social Movements” – better known today as “Identity Politics”.

Where Karl Marx had made the “proletarians of all lands” the heroes of his revolutionary drama, Identity Politics is driven by the horrendous depredations of its super-reactionary villain – the White Oppressor. All whites are complicit in the vast historical crimes – slavery, capitalism, imperialism – that had made the European peoples so rich and powerful, and the rest of humanity so weak and poor.

In this new ideological narrative, the pale, stale, former Marxists find themselves stripped of all positive agency. Immobilised by their “white guilt” and “white privilege”, Western leftists cannot hope to be the “good guys” of the ID-Pols’ emancipatory drama. Indeed, the only way they can avoid being lumped in with the “bad guys” is to back unreservedly the struggles of the non-white victims of Europe’s cultural cancer.

And so it is that we find Reid prophesying war with an almost reckless disregard for what is actually unfolding across the Middle East. A Left enthralled to the notion that the oppressed are always guiltless, and the oppressors guilty by definition, will not hesitate to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Houthis and Hamas.

As the British MP, Tom Tugendhat, lamented only yesterday on “X”: “It’s extraordinary to watch young men and women – who I’m sure would tell you they believe in freedom and equality – supporting groups like the Houthis who have reintroduced slavery, and systematically violate the rights of women and girls.”

Extraordinary, too, that the Palestinian poet, Mohammed El Kurd, can say “Our day will come. We must normalize massacres as the status quo”, and be cheered by his Western left-wing “allies” at a weekend pro-Palestinian rally in London.

It’s almost enough to make one wish that Robert Reid was right. That New Zealand was, indeed, unleashing war upon such reckless hate.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.