Action will have grave risks but turning away could be even riskier

ALTHOUGH it is not immediately obvious to me why the Irish Congress of Trade Unions should take up a position on the war in Iraq, I am glad that ICTU’s general secretary, David Begg, has done so.

Begg is one of the more thoughtful figures in Irish public life, he is humane and sincere, and his words command respect.

He presents the anti-war case well and articulates it most effectively from a humanitarian standpoint, which is no more than you would expect from a former chief executive of Concern. He warns that 16 million people are depending on the UN Oil-for-Food programme, which could collapse in the event of war. He reminds us that Iraq is a country of 13 million children, 500,000 of whom are acutely malnourished or underweight. And he forecasts that four million people will be displaced by the war and hundreds of thousands will be killed.

None of us can afford to be glib about such predictions, or to dismiss them from our minds. Depending on how the Allies fare in the event of war, things may go better or worse. But the sad inevitable truth is that thousands of innocent people will be displaced, maimed or killed before Baghdad is taken.

There will be major casualties, not just because of America’s military might, but because of Saddam’s political cunning. Just as he used people as “human shields” in the last Gulf War, this time around he will plant weapons systems and soldiers among the civilian population. It will make for effective war propaganda in countries already agonising about the morality of the whole enterprise.

Begg’s arguments give the lie, therefore, to the portrayal of all anti-war protesters as militant leftists motivated by anti-Americanism. Yet the rather intemperate reaction of the Irish Times and others, to Mary Harney’s comment that some campaigners were stirring up anti-Americanism, suggests that there is a penchant for caricature and mudslinging on all sides. Begg himself referred, unwisely, “to the war-mongering of the current US administration” in an article last Monday. Even America’s tabloid media has been used as a stick to beat the Americans. When the tabloid New York Post referred dismissively to France and Germany as an “axis of weasels” and a right-wing columnist dubbed the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” it was seen as more proof of American political idiocy. As if we in Ireland didn’t have our own tabloid newspapers with their peculiar take on news and current affairs.

What has to be grasped is that neither side in this debate has the monopoly on good intentions. Just as we should remember the likely victims of an Allied invasion, we should also consider those who will suffer if Saddam remains in power. Saddam has already tortured and murdered thousands of his opponents, unleashed chemical weapons on his own people and allowed UN sanctions to crucify the Iraqi population. “Such a regime has no legitimacy, no moral entitlement to respect,” says Seamus Murphy, a Jesuit moral philosopher lecturing in Milltown Institute. “Given the UN’s concern about human rights, it has a moral duty to liberate Iraqis from their oppressor.”

It is surprising then that the US hasn’t built up more support for the proposed campaign in Iraq. This is partly due to the heavy-handedness of its diplomacy, the perception that it has too many vested interests, resentment of its economic and military might, and a general horror of war. But the Americans have played their hand badly in a number of other ways.

Firstly, they were outmanoeuvred when Saddam re-admitted the UN weapons inspectors. While their stated role was to verify that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction, this wasn’t the public perception.

Somewhere along the line the burden of proof shifted, and the inspectors would have to find actual weapons of mass destruction before military action could be justified. So, while Iraq failed to give a proper account of its weaponry in its 12,000-page word declaration last December (yet another material breach of a UN resolution) much more was made of the failure of the UN inspectors to find a smoking gun.

But looking for such a smoking gun is “a fool’s mission,” says David Kay, who led the UN nuclear weapons inspection team in Iraq in 1991. Kay tells how, after the first Gulf War, Iraq’s nuclear weapons complex was discovered, followed four years later by the uncovering of Saddam’s biological weapons programme “But it is often forgotten that the weapons themselves were not found by the inspectors. Iraq told the inspectors that it had destroyed the biological munitions, which it said had been stored inside abandoned railroad tunnels and buried along the runways at two military airfields. Even the best inspectors have almost no chance of discovering hidden weapons sites such as these in a country the size of Iraq.”

America also finds itself having to show a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida before sceptical Europeans will support a war. But from the American point of view, by then it could be too late. Files and film captured in Afghanistan show that al-Qaida has been seeking chemical and biological weapons to wreak maximum destruction on civilian populations.

Meanwhile, defectors from Iraq, past admissions by Saddam and previous reports from UN inspectors all affirm that Saddam had large stores of such weapons. Saddam has the weapons, but no delivery system; al-Qaida has the delivery system but doesn’t have the weapons. Draw your own conclusions, says Bush.

America’s third problem is that many people are reluctant to believe that all other methods of making Iraq accountable have failed, and that it is not yet time to turn to war as the last resort. The sceptics include church leaders like Westminster’s Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who in a joint statement warned of “the unpredictable humanitarian and political consequences” of military action. The Pope agrees, saying that “war is always a defeat for humanity.”

His antipathy to the use of force and his constant call for negotiation show a religious leader who is as much concerned about the means employed to overcome evil as he is committed to struggle against it. But even he accepts that war may sometimes be the last resort in restoring a just international order.

Church leaders are rightly slow to support war in the absence of support from the UN, and while there is still hope that Iraq might comply with UN resolutions. But what happens if neither of these things materialises? Monday night’s announcement from Saddam Hussein that he will not destroy missiles in compliance with an order from the UN weapons inspectors does not augur well.

In such cases, Section 2309 of the Catholic Catechism suggests we should depend on “the prudence of those responsible for the common good.” In other words, political leaders. Saddam’s latest defiant gesture may yet unite these political leaders around the need for military action. If it doesn’t, the US and Britain are left with a decision. If sanctions have failed, and there is a risk that Saddam may give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, how can they best defend their populations from attack?