Attack on Iraq is history - now we must back US to win the peace
First, sounds and pictures from a US warplane targeting people on the ground in Fallujah. Humans being treated like ants. A split-second decision to kill. A shocking moment of glee: “Oh, dude!”
Then Ken Bigley’s murder. We saw his humiliation and terror. We prayed for his release. But as the days went on, our suspicions grew. We were being drawn in to Bigley’s story. And wasn’t that, in the end, his captors’ plan? He was to be ritually sacrificed. But only after the world began to care about the man in the cage. Our horror and our fear would be all the greater then.
Can there be any hope after that? Perhaps some. Not as noticeable and not as dramatic as the bad news. But two consecutive news reports on Saturday evening suggested that, for all the chaos, events in the Middle East can still go in the right direction.
If Afghanistan, people were voting. Imperfect though the election was. And the sight of RTÉ’s correspondent Margaret Ward with her head covered, and the women lined up in their burqas, reminded us that Western-style freedoms will not come overnight. But at least the women were voting.
The news from Australia was nearly as positive. Prime Minister John Howard won a fourth term in office. Howard backed the decision to go to war in Iraq, but more important is his willingness to keep Australia’s troops in Iraq. His opponent, the Labor leader Mark Latham, would have brought them home.
Imagine the damage that would do. What a morale-booster for Ken Bigley’s killers and all those terrorists who loathe democratic values.
Many of those who opposed the war feel justified by the events that have occurred since. Now that the Duelfer report has revealed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction since 1991, the death and destruction may seem pointless.
The sight of dozens of possibly innocent people being vapourised by a US bomber, provokes outrage.
Many are confirmed in their opinion of American foreign policy - that it is cynical, brutal, arbitrary, self-centred, and deeply immoral.
Those images from the US warplane are especially troubling. They remind us that armies can be magnets for people with a lust for violence, and that the process of training for war itself dehumanises people.
Most of us believe that war is sometimes necessary in the defence of freedom and human rights. It should be undertaken more in sorrow than in anger. Yet how can you train a soldier to twist a bayonet into another man, or an army fighter to immolate a crowd of faceless people below, unless you convince them, temporarily anyway, that their victims are less than human?
That’s why war should never be undertaken lightly. That’s why anti-war critics are so angry with Blair and Bush.
But the argument in favour of the war has never gone away. It is there in the sight of Afghanis voting, and the Iraqis’ preparing to vote. It is there in the description of life under Saddam. And it is there in the Duelfer report.
Duelfer showed that Iraq was not developing weapons of mass destruction in recent years. But he also revealed that Saddam was gradually undermining the UN sanctions regime and the oil-for-food programme. Iraq was doing sweet deals with UN officials, and influential individuals in Jordan, Syria, France, Russia and China. Saddam’s “weapons of mass corruption” was how Reuters news agency described it.
The report contains information on Saddam’s illegal oil-funded contracts to buy anti-aircraft equipment, missile components and missile-guidance electronics from various Russian companies.
It is clear that Saddam’s ambition to create weapons of mass destruction had not gone away. He was merely preparing for the day when he could recommence activity. According to Duelfer, he could produce mustard gas in months and nerve agents in less than a year. Sooner or later, therefore, it would have been desirable to remove him.
EVEN if anti-war critics don’t buy all this, they face a paradox. They may be right, or partly right, about the case for war. They may be right, or partly right about the haste with which it was undertaken. But they ought to quit talking about it now. Each day that argument continues, the harder it becomes to bring democracy and stability in the Middle East.
The decision to go to war is a fact of history. The history we must now make is the re-creation of an Iraqi society in which people can participate, and which is peaceful and prosperous. That is a mammoth task and, as we can see, it has powerful enemies. The west must present a united front or it will lose momentum.
People have started to play politics over the war in unacceptable ways. The British Tory leader, Michael Howard, has used the WMD issue to target Tony Blair. Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, announced he would withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. In France, Chirac refuses to countenance putting troops in to help the reconstruction.
All these politicians, whether they admit it or not, are helping the terrorists’ cause. As politicians become more fearful of taking courageous decisions to support the Iraqi reconstruction, the terrorists and insurgents are encouraged to hang in there for an eventual victory. Failure by Western governments to support the reconstruction - whether with troops or money - is immoral. It’s a form of sanctions against the Iraqi people.
This leads to a critical question as tonight’s final debate between Bush and Kerry takes place. Which candidate offers the better prospect for peace? We know where Bush stands. Rightly or wrongly, he took out Saddam and now wants to stay the course. It is too early to say if Bush’s Middle East policy will stabilise the region and make the world a safer place. The current chaos in Iraq is deceptive. It could be the shape of things to come. Or it may be the battle which will disable a terrorist ideology that has been around since long before September 11.
What are we to make of Kerry?
He’s a man who is consistently opportunistic. He made his career as an anti-war activist yet chose to make his Vietnam service the centrepiece of his campaign. He voted against the Persian Gulf war in 1991 (a war which was fully backed by the UN) yet voted for the invasion of Iraq this time around. Then to placate his anti-war political base, he voted against the $87 billion reconstruction package for Iraq. He talks of better diplomacy towards Europe, even though France has issued a flat ‘non’ to putting troops into Iraq. And the same Kerry earned a rebuke from the Polish Prime Minister for referring to Poland and other western allies as the “coalition of the bribed”.
Some people see Kerry as morally superior to Bush. Yet one of Kerry’s latest lines is that America was suffering 90% of the casualties in Iraq and American taxpayers are paying 90% of the costs. Never mind that these figures are wrong. How does such a preoccupation with America’s interests qualify as more moral than Bush’s approach? Who is better for the world right now - a candidate who will persist with the reconstruction of Iraq, or a candidate trying to undermine it?
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