Left Should Support War, Independent
The Independent (UK)
January 10, 2003
Forget the UN: Saddam Hussein is the best possible reason for liberating
Iraq; If Britain were governed by such a man, I might be prepared to risk my
own life to end my country's living death
By Johann Hari
Why do we need evidence of a stash of anthrax or sarin to convince us that
Saddam, the gasser of the Kurds and butcher of Baghdad, should be
overthrown? Hans Blix and his UN inspection team issued an interim report in
New York yesterday.
They have found no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), so war, it seems, will
not come this month. Why does this make so many of us on the left relax?
What has become of the left which argued that we had a moral responsibility
to defend our fellow humans from fascist dictators? By taking the route of
hunting for WMD, and only accepting the overthrow of Saddam on those
grounds, we have made a crucial mistake. The greatest possible evidence for
this is that, while some in the West celebrate today, the Iraqi people will
be weeping.
Who, you may be asking incredulously, would want their country to be bombed?
What would make people want to risk their children being blown to pieces? I
wondered this too until, last October, I spent a month as a journalist
seeing the reality of life under Saddam Hussein. Strangely, it's the small
details which remain in the memory, even now, three months later. It's the
pale, sickly look that would come over people's faces when I mentioned
Saddam. It's the fact that the Marsh Arabs - a proud, independent people who
have seen their marshes drained and been "relocated" to tiny desert shacks -
are forced to hang a small, menacing picture of Saddam in their new "homes".
It's the child wearing a T-shirt saying "Yes, yes, yes to Daddy Saddam".
If Britain were governed by such a man, I would welcome friendly bombs - a
concept I once thought absurd. I might be prepared to risk my own life to
bring my country's living death to an end. Most of the Iraqi people I
encountered clearly felt the same. The moment they established that I was
British, people would hug me and offer coded support (they would be even
more effusive towards the Americans I travelled with). They would explain
how much they "admire Britain - British democracy, yes? You understand?"
This evidence is, admittedly, anecdotal, and I would be wary of supporting a
war based simply on these impressions. But now there is concrete evidence.
The International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based independent
think-tank, by no means pro-war, conducted extensive interviews with people
in Iraq last autumn, and, as their report explains, "a significant number of
those Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candour, expressed their view
that, if [regime change] required an American-led attack, they would support
it. The notion of leaving the country's destiny in the hands of an
omnipotent foreign party has more appeal than might be expected - and the
desire for a long-term US involvement is higher than expected."
There are important conditions, however, attached to Iraqis' support for the
war. They expect it to be quick - one person I spoke to said that "the few
soldiers who fight for him will be defeated in a weekend" - as happened in
1991. The extremely unlikely scenario of a protracted, Vietnam-style
conflict would almost certainly lead to a change in their attitudes.
And, crucially, the Iraqi people expect the Americans to help to rebuild
their country after the war. This, surely, is what we should be marching in
the streets for - not to oppose a war that will remove one of the world's
worst dictators, but to secure a guarantee from Blair and Bush that after
the conflict we will stay and help its people to build a peaceful, federal,
democratic Iraq. Those who scorn this possibility, either with the racist
notion that Arabs are incapable of democracy or with a fashionable cynicism
about political progress, should remember that their sneers could equally
have been directed towards post-Second World War Japan and Germany.
The Japanese had no history of democracy or freedom, and the Germans had
only the memories of the disastrous Weimar Republic, but American
occupations oversaw their transformations into successful democracies. We
must campaign, then, to make sure that Iraq becomes a Japan or Germany and
not an Afghanistan, bombed and then starved of the funds it needs to
establish stability and basic human rights for its people. There is more
hope for Iraq because its people are highly educated, it has a developed
infrastructure, and because it would be morally obscene if the profits from
Iraq's vast oil reserves did not go towards rebuilding the country.
It is time that, in light of the ICG report, we in the West admit that we
have misunderstood the Iraqi people's position. We have been acting as
though an attack on Saddam would be the beginning of another hideous ordeal
for the population, the interruption of an otherwise peaceful situation. In
fact, as the ICG report explains, "for the Iraqi people, who since 1980 have
lived through a devastating conflict with Iran, Desert Storm, sanctions,
international isolation and periodic US-UK aerial attacks, a state of war
has existed for two decades already". Do not imagine that if we fail to act,
the Iraqi people will be left in peace - quite the opposite. We can act to
shorten their suffering.
Nor can we criticise this war, as figures such as Tariq Ali have, as an
"imperial adventure". The Iraqi people are already living under imperial
occupation. The 80 per cent of the population who are Shia Muslims live
under the imperialistic rule of the minority Sunni clique with whom they
feel no common identity. You might be thinking that if they are all Iraqi,
it is not foreign occupation; if so you are misunderstanding the nature of
Iraq. This is an artificial state created by Europeans in 1921 at the end of
the Ottoman Empire, comprising many divergent groups (Kurds, Shia, Sunni,
Christian, Jews and more). We have no reason to believe that they now have a
collective national identity, so to be ruled by a Sunni is indeed akin to
being under foreign occupation. Would you rather be ruled indefinitely by a
totalitarian imperial ruler who will cling to power down to the last bunker,
or a temporary American imperial ruler which might offer a democratic and
stable future?
If your hatred of Dubya overwhelms your hatred of Saddam, then I
sympathise - that is the reason why I too once viewed this war with dread
and contempt - but I strongly suspect that if you were confronted with the
reality of Saddam's Iraq, you would change your mind. Of course, forming an
alliance with George Bush is an unpleasant experience, but we formed an
alliance with Stalin to defeat Hitler. It is also possible that Bush, like
his father, will betray the hopes of the people of Iraq - and we must
campaign to prevent this.
We do not need Bush's dangerous arguments about "pre-emptive action" to
justify this war. Nor do we need to have the smoking gun of WMD. All we need
are the humanitarian arguments we used during the Kosovo conflict to remove
the monstrous Slobodan Milosevic - and this time, we can act in the certain
(rather than probable) knowledge that the people being tyrannised will be
cheering us on.
