LONDON: Saddam Hussein raised a dyed black eyebrow when I asked him last week in an underground bunker in Baghdad if he’d seen the picture of the British foreign office minister Mike O’Brien kissing Colonel Qadhafi under the canvas on a Mediterranean beach. As well he might. Here was the ultimate example of preferring jaw-jaw to war-war, in Churchill’s famous phrase.
Iraq, unlike Libya, has never harmed Britain. Indeed, Britain helped arm the Iraqi dictatorship to harm others, including Iran and its own Kurdish population, while people like me were demonstrating for human rights outside Saddam’s Tottenham Court Road “cultural centre” in London. Yet now it seems only war-war can be contemplated for Iraq — even one in which perhaps tens of thousands will die and the whole Middle East region be plunged into chaos and bloodshed.
O’Brien’s attempt to square this circle contained a masterpiece of doublespeak. Libya, he said, was moving towards compliance with international law, while Iraq was moving in the opposite direction. This in a month when Iraq had offered access for British experts to inspect suspected sites of weapons of mass destruction, invited the US Congress to do the same, asked Hans Blix, head of the UN arms inspectorate, to come to Baghdad for talks on “the next stage” of inspections and, most crucially, declared it “accepted and would implement” all UN Security Council resolutions. And it comes after more than a decade of war and sanctions — costing the lives of more than a million Iraqis — during which not a single act of international terrorism has been proved to emanate from Baghdad.
These diplomatic moves by Iraq would, in a sane world, be followed up and put to the test. They represent all that the British government, at least, has been asking for. After all, if their sincerity was found wanting, what would the US government have to lose? It would still be the world’s only superpower, able to invade countries and overthrow governments with impunity, and would be doing so having gone the extra mile for peace, with a strengthened international consensus behind it.
We can understand that Bush, elected against the popular vote and courtesy of a distinctly Takriti-style fix, insists on picking other people’s presidents. Thus he has ordered the popularly elected Palestinian president Yasser Arafat into the dustbin of history and now insists the Iraqi president must follow.
But who next? The mullah regime in Tehran, the unstable autocracy in Saudi Arabia, the Ba’ath party dictatorship in Syria, its neighbour Lebanon — home to Hezbollah — or the heavily armed communist state of North Korea? This is a recipe for endless war and global turmoil.
It is also a recipe for a proliferation of terrorism and the creation of thousands of Bin Ladens throughout the Muslim world and beyond.
In the age of Arab satellite television, every burning building will illuminate every home from the Atlantic to the Gulf and inflame an already seething Arab world.
Saddam warned me that if the invader came, he would be resisted from street to street. He pointed to the fate of Sharon’s army bogged down in a tiny part of Palestine against a small, largely unarmed population.
Never has Blair been in such a losing position on any political issue. If he joins this illegal, immoral and counter-productive war, not only will he not be doing so in our name: he may also find he will soon cease to speak for us on anything at all.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service. (The author is a Labour MP in the British Parliament)