Why the Left is wrong on Saddam
With or without a second UN resolution, I support action against Iraq
David Aaronovitch
Sunday February 2, 2003
The Observer
If you were to draw a map of the world based on the writings and speeches of the most fervent anti-war figures in Britain and America, two names would be found at the far edges of the known world, if at all: Bosnia and Rwanda. In the mid-1990s, events in these places convinced me that Noam Chomsky's definition of the sovereignty of nations as 'the right of political entities to be free from outside interference' had become a millstone around the neck of the world.
Bosnia and Rwanda made the case for action, because inaction was far worse and its consequences were morally intolerable. In the former, the West (rarely acting in concert) took the course of diplomacy backed up by the incredible threat of mild force. The Yugoslavian situation was deemed to be too complicated and too dangerous to resolve by firm action. Didn't they all just enjoy killing each other?
There were sanctions, international mediations, peace brokers shuttled hither and yon arranging ceasefires that were broken, usually by the Bosnian Serbs. The United Nations Security Council declared six safe areas for Bosnian Muslims to be protected by lightly equipped UN troops. One of these was Srebrenica.
On 11 July 1995, almost in slow motion, we watched the Serbs enter the safe haven, disarm the Dutch protectors and separate the men and boys from women and small children. And as I saw General Ratko Mladic pacifying a crying Muslim woman, I think I knew, as he certainly did, what was going to happen to her husband or son.
A year earlier, on another continent, we had again looked on while one of the peoples of a sovereign nation, Rwanda, slaughtered another in their hundreds of thousands. Once more, a small UN force was brushed aside in the early stages. Intervention was never seriously considered.
If leaders must take responsibility for these terrible failures, then so must those who always urge inaction. Over Bosnia, Kosovo and over Afghanistan, voices on both the Left and Right have been consistently raised to object to the use of force. Where these voices have belonged to pacifists, they have my respect, but most often they have belonged to the purely selfish, the pathologically timid, or to those who somehow believed that however bad things were in Country X, the Americans were always worse.
In last week's edition of the New Statesman, one of the latter, John Pilger, takes this newspaper to task for allowing that it might be right to depose the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, by force. Even suggesting such a thing, he said, was a betrayal of the great traditions of the newspaper. Pilger, of course, has a way of turning disagreements with him into betrayals of the entire human race. But for many of us, this has become the most difficult and painful judgment to make. It is the kind of issue that divides families and friends.
Nothing about Iraq is hard for Pilger. He was opposed to using force to get Iraq out of Kuwait, opposed to the containment of Saddam through the enforcement of the no-fly zones, dismissive of the threats to the Kurdish people of the North. Many in his camp were in a favour of sanctions when the alternative was force, and were against sanctions when the alternative was nothing.
It isn't like that here. In the offices of this newspaper, as you turn left out of the lift, just by the pigeonholes, is a photograph of a dead Observer journalist, Farzad Bazoft, who was hanged by Saddam Hussein in 1990. Bazoft's photo always has flowers beneath it, placed there by his family and friends. As the journalist Robert Fisk subsequently commented, it was characteristic of Saddam that the first Bazoft knew about his imminent execution was when a British diplomat turned up at his prison to say goodbye. Saddam joked that Mrs Thatcher had asked for Bazoft to be returned and now he was being returned 'in a box'.
Saddam Hussein, who both the West and the Soviet bloc shamefully lionised during the Cold War and tacitly supported as a counterweight to fundamentalist Iran, never was just another tyrant. Not only is his regime exceptionally brutal internally (and I mean exceptionally) and aggressive externally, but it is not a matter of contention that he made chemical and biological weapons, that he used some of them, and that he would have, if left alone, produced nuclear weapons. He should have been deposed by force in 1991 when, instead, the Iraqi opposition forces were effectively betrayed by the coalition.
I don't believe that Saddam is a major backer of al-Qaeda (though he gives support to other groups) and I think it quite likely that he has had no effective nuclear programme for years. He would if he could, but he can't. But I want him out, for the sake of the region (and therefore, eventually, for our sakes), but most particularly for the sake of the Iraqi people who cannot lift this yoke on their own. If they could, that would be best; if he would agree to go into exile, that would be just dandy. The argument that Saddam's removal will of necessity lead to 'chaos' or the democratic election of an unsuitable Islamist government is worthy of Henry Kissinger at his most cynical. It is pretty disgusting when heard in the mouths of 'left-wingers'.
The Iraqi people, however, can't shift their tyrant on their own. Again, it would be preferable if an invasion could be undertaken, not by the Americans, but by, say, the Nelson Mandela International Peace Force, spearheaded by the Rowan Williams British Brigade. That's not on offer. It has to be the Yanks.
I do not believe that George Bush is the manic oil-chimp of caricature. His administration really does have a view that it is necessary to remove Saddam pour décourager les autres. It will, they have convinced themselves, show resolve, deter state terrorism, discourage proliferation and permit the building of a rare non-tyranny in the Arab world. There is something to be said for all this.
What some in the White House cannot see (and what I think Tony Blair can) is why establishing some set of rules for intervention is so important. If intervention seems arbitrary and depends upon the strategic whims of particular administrations, then many are bound to interpret it merely as an expression of short-term American interests. It won't be a new world order, but simply a Pax Americana. This is a perception that would be bound to cause massive resentment and - in time - lead to real resistance. So UN resolutions matter. Like American military power, they're all we have.
If, in a few weeks time, the Security Council agrees to wage war against Saddam, I shall support it. If there is no resolution but the invasion goes ahead, I will not oppose it, though most of the people I like best will. I can't demonstrate against the liberation, however risky, of the Iraqi people.
As ever, though, war will have been the easy bit. Peace requires far more effort. There are some encouraging signs here. President Bush's announcement in the State of the Union speech (an announcement completely overlooked here) of an extra $10 billion on combating Aids around the world is simultaneously welcome, insufficient and tardy. But, above all, welcome. America did not cause the Aids epidemic, but as the world's richest nation it has a duty and an opportunity (with our help) to address it.
And if international activism is in vogue, and requires support, then it must deal with the greatest source of instability in the Middle East, if not in the world - Israel and Palestine. Here again, two peoples are held captive, not by tyrants, but by men of blood and their own weaknesses. It is surely time to consider the international imposition of a settlement which would provide statehood and some justice for the Palestinians and some security for Israel.
That is another article but not, as they say, another story.
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