THE instinct among parts of the left to cheerlead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal ‘humanitarianism’, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones reveals in a column on the plight of the Uyghurs at China’s hands.

The ‘humanitarian war’ instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom; the western-sponsored butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi that unleashed a new regional trade in slaves and arms; and the west’s covert backing of Islamic jihadists who proceeded to tear Syria apart.

In fact, those weren’t really separate horror shows: they were instalments of one long horror show.

The vacuum left in Iraq by the west — the execution of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of his armed forces — sucked in Islamic extremists from every corner of the Middle East. The US and UK occupations of Iraq served both as fuel to rationalise new, more nihilistic Islamic doctrines that culminated in the emergence of Islamic State, and as a training ground for jihadists to develop better methods of militarised resistance.

That process accelerated in post-Gaddafi Libya, where Islamic extremists were handed an even more lawless country than post-invasion Iraq in which to recruit followers and train them, and trade arms. All of that know-how and weaponry ended up flooding into Syria where the same Islamic extremists hoped to establish the seat of their new caliphate.

Many millions of Arabs across the region were either slaughtered or forced to flee their homes, becoming permanent refugees, because of the supposedly ‘humanitarian’ impulse unleashed by George W Bush and Tony Blair.

No lesson learnt

ONE might imagine that by this stage liberal humanitarianism was entirely discredited, at least on the left. But you would be wrong. There are still those who have learnt no lessons at all — like the Guardian’s Owen Jones. In his column he picks up and runs with the latest pretext for global warmongering by the right: the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority that has long been oppressed by China. After acknowledging the bad faith arguments and general unreliability of the right, Jones sallies forth to argue — as if Iraq, Libya and Syria never happened — that the left must not avoid good causes just because bad people support them. We must not, he writes: ‘Sacrifice oppressed Muslims on the altar of geopolitics: and indeed, it is possible to walk and to chew gum; to oppose western militarism and to stand with victims of state violence. It would be perverse to cede a defence of China’s Muslims — however disingenuous — to reactionaries and warmongers.’

But this is to entirely miss the point of the anti-war and anti-imperialist politics that are the bedrock of any progressive left wing movement.

Jones does at least note, even if very cursorily, the bad-faith reasoning of the right when it accuses the left of being all too ready to protest outside a US or Israeli embassy but not a Chinese or Russian one:

‘Citizens [in the west] have at least some potential leverage over their own governments: whether it be to stop participation in foreign action, or encourage them to confront human rights abusing allies.’

But he then ignores this important observation about power and responsibility and repurposes it as a stick to beat the left with: ‘But that doesn’t mean abandoning a commitment to defending the oppressed, whoever their oppressor might be. To speak out against Islamophobia in western societies but to remain silent about the Uyghurs is to declare that the security of Muslims only matters in some countries. We need genuine universalists.’

That is not only a facile argument, it’s a deeply dangerous one. There are two important additional reasons why the left needs to avoid cheerleading the right’s favoured warmongering causes, based on both its anti-imperialist and anti-war priorities.

Virtue-signalling

JONES misunderstands the goal of the left’s anti-imperialist politics. It is not, as the right so often claims, about left wing ‘virtue-signalling’. It is the very opposite of that. It is about carefully selecting our political priorities — priorities necessarily antithetical to the dominant narratives promoted by the west’s warmongering political and media establishments. Our primary goal is to undermine imperialist causes that have led to such great violence and suffering around the world.

Jones forgets that the purpose of the anti-war left is not to back the west’s warmongering establishment for picking a ‘humanitarian’ cause for its wars. It is to discredit the establishment, expose its warmongering and stop its wars.

The best measure — practical and ethical — for the western left to use to determine which causes to expend its limited resources and energies on are those that can help oth