The Lesser Evil, by Mario VARGAS LLOSA
My opposition to the military intervention of the United States and Great Britain in Iraq, expressed without ambiguity on the 16th of February, has become very nuanced, not to say corrected, after my trip--- Le Monde published, from the 3rd to the 9th of August, an account of the trip of VARGAS LLOSA in Iraq.
It was precisely one of two reasons for my sojourn down there: to verify on the groung the Iraqi point of view, if the arguments advanced by the French minister of foreign affairs condemning the military intervention were mainly convincing while I was reasoning in the abstract on the subject, far from the theater of events, in Europe.
I continue to believe that it was a very grave mistake on the part of the governments of the coalition to brandish, as a justification for military action, the existence of WMDs in the hands of Saddam Hussein, and ties between Al Qaida and the authors of the massacre of September 11th, given the absence of definitive proof, so that they appear, in the actual state of things, rather like pretexts rather than conclusive reasons.
For the destruction of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, one of the cruelest, most corrupt, and demented in modern history, was in itself reason enough to justify the intervention. As would have been justified a preventive action by the democratic countries against Hitler and his regime before Nazism precipitated the world into the apocalypse of the Second World War.
"Saddam Hussein should fall, but by the internal actions of the Iraqis themselves", said French President Chirac, showing by such a phrase a profound misunderstanding of the regime of Saddam Hussein. As had Hitler and Stalin, his models, the Iraqi dictator had dispossessed the Iraqi people of sovereignty, and, by the use of vertiginous terror, colonized their spirits until annihilating, in the short or long term, any realistic prospect of an effective uprising against the regime opening the way to a process of democratization.
Criticizable, without doubt, for its unilateral character, and lacking the support of the United Nations, nevertheless the military intervention of the coalition opened, for the first time in the history of Iraq, the possibility of breaking the vicious circle of authoritarianism and totalitariansim in which it had slumbered since Great Britian accorded it it's independence.
Despite all the suffering brought about in the wake of the military intervention, it still is small if one compares it to what they endured due to the policy of genocide, impoverishment, and systematic repression of the Ba'athist regime.
Without doubt, it is dangerous to establish as a norm the right of democratic nations to act militarily against dictatorships to facilitate the process of democratization, for in certain cases the same principle could be used as a smoke screen for colonial adventures.
This conduct can only be legitimate in exceptional cases, when, by its extreme nature, its excessive criminality, its genocide, a dictatorship seals off the ways of liberty which could have permitted the people peaceful resistance, or when it becomes, by its belligerent initiatives against its neighbors and its attack on the rights of man, a serious danger for world peace.
The unanimous testimony of Iraqis that I was able to receive in my short stay in Iraq has convinced me that the regime of Saddam Hussein presented quite exactly this exceptional character.
It is certain that an intervention of this nature could have been legitimated by the United Nations. But the opposition of France, which threatened to use its veto in the Security Council, closed all the doors to that possibility.
The war in Iraq went beyoond the frontiers of ancient Mesopotamia. It served to bring to light, and aggravate, the differences between the United States and its veteran allies, like France and Germany, and to stir up hatred against the United States, legitimating a new anti- Americanism under the color of pacifism and anticolonialism, where stand side by side fascist and communist nostalgics with nationalists, social democrats, socialists, and antiglobaliazation movements.
By a strange twist of fate, the war in Iraq permits, in Europe and America, Saddam Hussein to appear as a David of the Third World resisting the colonialist and oil man Goliath- Bush, and to demonize the United States as the primary source of the first international crisis to arise in the world since September 11, 2001.
It is deplorable to see the frivolity, matching a growing nationalism, posted by the French government in this affair, contributing to the denaturalization of historical reality, of which one of the most serious effects is the division in the European Union, which threatens to slow, indeed, to paralyze indefinitely the process of European integration.
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