Sending Troops To Iraq -
Unjustifiable Even If UN Sanction It
By Praful Bidwai
Hindustan Times
14 June, 2003
So India has at last arrived at the threshold of great power status in the world, if not crossed it! So our courtier-reporters tell us.
Didn’t Vajpayee share the table with Bush and Putin in St Petersburg? Wasn’t he invited to Evian as a guest just before the G-8 held their annual summit? Reinforcing the same spin is the grandiloquent announcement that India won’t bother to receive aid from any countries except six (the US, Britain, Germany, Japan, the EU and Russia). It is pre-paying bilateral debt of Rs 7,491 crore and turning from aid-taker to aid-donor — to poor developing countries, whose ranks it has left.This urgently necessitates a reality check. Vajpayee was one of 43 heads of government invited by Putin to the glittering ceremony in Russia. It was just that — a ceremony. Third World observers have been associated with G-8 summits right since 1996, when the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (ouch!) initiative was launched.
Last year, South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria and Senegal were formally invited to present their New Partnership for Africa’s Development idea. Whether they participated in ‘the informal fireside chat’ at the summit’s heart is another matter. This year, there were 11 developing-country invitees, besides India.
At any rate, G-8’s symbolism must not be exaggerated. Bush left halfway through the Evian summit. As for aid, it’s one thing to retire a minuscule 1.6 per cent of India’s $ 100 billion debt on the strength of $ 80 billion foreign exchange reserves. It’s another to be debt-free or aid-independent. This country cannot even run its primary education, rural water-supply or sanitation programmes without substantial foreign aid. Bloated foreign reserves are no more a sign of prosperity than granaries which overflow because the poor don’t have money to buy food. It’s sobering to recall that India belongs to the bottom third in UN Human Development Index rankings. It’s home to the largest number of poor, destitute and malnourished people in the world.
Yet, the same spin-masters who weave delusions about India’s ‘manifest-destiny’-driven meteoric rise have set it a test, in faithful imitation of the latest message from Washington to Advani: If you really want to cross great-power threshold and become America’s ‘strategic partner’, bite the bullet and team up with the US in Iraq by despatching troops.
This bizarre loyalty test has become the main criterion to judge how far New Delhi has understood the ‘realities of power’. If it wants to join ‘the only game in town’, it must stop singing paeans to multilateralism and UN peacekeeping and send a division or two to partially relieve and take the heat off the 150,000 US soldiers and 15,000 British troops occupying Iraq.
Contrary to the spin-doctors, India is not being invited to play peacekeeper in Iraq, where there’s no real peace. A ‘stabilising’ or ‘peace-enforcing’ force is only a euphemism for assisting, and imposing order on behalf of, the Anglo-American occupying forces in ways which will bring Indian troops into hostile contact with Iraqi civilians.
Our jawans will be forced to become bodily substitutes or cannon-fodder for the real power-wielders. They will be put in the line of sniper fire which now claims one Anglo-American life every other day. Such a humiliating role shouldn’t even be countenanced.
The US is pressing India hard on troops despatch not because the Iraq situation is ‘stabilising’ or improving, but because it resembles a horrible quagmire. Barring early military victory, virtually every single American plan for Iraq has gone awry — from Jay Garner to Paul Bremer, and from the Kurdish North to the Shia South.
Despite Washington’s best efforts, most of its own strategic allies have refused to send troops and bestow legitimacy on Iraq’s occupation. It now wants to recruit Indian soldiers as mercenaries — much in the way the colonial British did while conquering Mesopotamia in World War I, sacrificing thousands of Indian lives at Al-Kut during a 140-day siege leading to British military history’s ‘most abject capitulation’.
What’s the right thing for India to do? It must firmly resist pressure to reverse its own, correct stand on an invasion which violates every single criterion of ‘just war’ — including military necessity, proportionality in use of force and non-combatant immunity — as well as international law and the UN Charter. An unjust and illegal war cannot conceivably produce a legitimate occupation.
The Iraq war lacked a casus belli or logical rationale. Anglo-American claims on the ‘threat’ from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) always sounded unconvincing. It now turns out that they were based on deliberately ‘sexed up’, distorted and exaggerated intelligence reports. This has embarrassed even the Defence Intelligence Agency, the CIA and MI-6. Richard Butler, an unabashed war supporter, and former UN weapons-inspector says: “Clearly, a decision had been taken to pump up the case against Iraq.”
Britain’s Sunday Herald (June 8) reports that the Blair government ran a “dirty tricks” operation “designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence” to give Britain an “excuse to wage war”. ‘Operation Rockingham’ was set up to ‘cherry-pick’ and doctor intelligence.
The Washington Post says that Vice-President Dick Cheney paid multiple visits to CIA headquarters to influence analysts on Saddam Hussein’s WMDs and ‘links’ with al-Qaeda.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office has admitted that its February dossier on Iraq, written to justify an attack, did not meet the “required standards of accuracy”.
Colin Powell was so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing in the dossiers supplied to him that he exclaimed: “I’m not reading this. This is bulls***t.”
The shameful deception involved in all this — and the outrage it has created globally, especially in the Arab world — strengthens the principled case against despatching troops to Iraq. It would be morally and politically egregious to send troops even if there was a large payoff in terms of ‘reconstruction’ contracts: Self-respecting States and moral entities don’t put sovereign policy-making up for negotiation, whatever the price.
As it happens, the size of the contract pie is grossly exaggerated. The Americans are unlikely to seriously rebuild Iraq until they can pump enough oil to pay for it — which won’t happen in a hurry. They aren’t giving even loyal Britain a halfway decent share in the pie. After the Halliburtons and the Bechtels grab the prime contracts, and Shell and BP are given their share, there won’t be much left for India, barring a block or two for oil exploration, which the ONGC can get elsewhere too. Meanwhile, the meter of political costs will start galloping.
Joining US forces in Iraq is the surest recipe for antagonising Arab peoples and States and losing all credibility in West Asia. There couldn’t be a worse way of creating enemies out of friends at this sensitive, painful juncture.
The issue isn’t West Asia alone. As often argued here, Iraq’s invasion is part of a much larger plan for America’s global Empire, to be established by undermining or destroying international institutions, the rule of law and principles of justice and peace. It would be a historic crime if India were to collaborate in this project or legitimises it by becoming America’s client-mercenary in Iraq.
This is why it’s not enough that the opposition issue statements against troops despatch except under UN auspices. Despatching troops and legitimising Iraq’s occupation would be unjustifiable even if a manipulated UN sanctioned it. The opposition must firm up its case and back it with action — in the streets. This fight must not be lost by default.