The recolonisation
of Iraq cannot be
sold as liberation
By Seumas Milne
Tony Blair's government is
running scared of the British people and their stubborn opposition to
war on Iraq. The latest panic measure is to try to ban what has been
trailed as the biggest demonstration in British political history from
Hyde Park, where a giant anti-war rally is planned for February 15.
As the US administration accelerates its drive to war, its most faithful
cheerleader is having to run ever faster to keep up.
Never mind that every single alleged chemical or biological weapons
storage site mentioned in Blair's dossier last year has been inspected
and found to have been clean; or that the weapons inspectors reported
this week that Iraq had cooperated "rather well"; or that
most UN member states regard Hans Blix's unanswered questions as a reason
to keep inspecting, rather than launch an unprovoked attack. Jack Straw
nevertheless rushed to declare Iraq in material breach of its UN obligations
and fair game for the 82nd airborne.
Most people have by now grasped
that regime change, rather than disarmament, is the real aim of this
exercise and that whatever residual "weapons of mass destruction"
Iraq retains are evidently not sufficient to deter an attack - as they
appear to be in North Korea. Since both the US and Britain have said
they will use force with or without United Nations backing, the greatest
impact of any new resolution blackmailed out of the security council
is likely to be damage to the UN's own credibility.
To harden up public support,
the US has now promised "intelligence" to demonstrate the
supposed links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, along with evidence
that the Iraqis have been secretly moving weapons to outwit the inspectors.
Since this will depend entirely on US sources and prisoners - including
those we now know have been tortured at the US internment camp in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba - it may not prove quite the breakthrough "Adlai Stevenson
moment" the US is hoping for either.
But if none of this seems
likely to make a decisive difference to public attitudes to an invasion
of Iraq, there is one argument which is bound to resonate more widely
in the weeks to come. This is the case made by President Bush in his
state of the union speech on Tuesday that war against Iraq would mean
the country's "day of liberation" from a tyrannical regime.
A similar point was made by a British soldier heading for the Gulf,
when asked whether he wasn't concerned about the lack of public support
for war.
"Once people know what
Saddam has done to his own people," Lance Corporal Daniel Buist
replied, "they will be fully behind us." It is a theme taken
up most forcefully by liberal war supporters in Britain and the US -
the celebrated laptop bombardiers - who developed a taste for "humanitarian
intervention" during the Yugoslav maelstrom. The Iraqi people want
a US invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, they claim, while the anti-war
movement is indifferent to their fate. Where was the "left movement
against Saddam" 20 years ago? one critic demanded recently.
In fact, leftwingers were
pretty well the only people in the west campaigning against the Iraqi
regime two decades ago - left activists were being imprisoned and executed
in their hundreds by Saddam Hussein at the time - while the US and British
political establishments were busy arming Iraq in its war against Iran
and turning a blind eye to his worst human rights abuses, including
the gas attacks on the Kurds in the late 1980s.
What changed after 1991 was
that the greatest suffering endured by Iraqis was no longer at the hands
of the regime, but the result of western-enforced sanctions which, according
to Unicef estimates, have killed at least 500,000 children over the
past decade.
Nor is there any evidence
that most Iraqis, either inside or outside the country, want their country
attacked and occupied by the US and Britain, however much they would
like to see the back of the Iraqi dictator. Assessing the real state
of opinion among Iraqis in exile is difficult enough, let alone in Iraq
itself. But there are telling pointers that the licensed intellectuals
and club-class politicians routinely quoted in the western media enthusing
about US plans for their country are utterly unrepresentative of the
Iraqi people as a whole.
Even the main US-sponsored
organisations such as the Iraqi National Congress and Iraqi National
Accord, which are being groomed to be part of a puppet administration,
find it impossible directly to voice support for a US invasion, suggesting
little enthusiasm among their potential constituency. Laith Hayali -
an Iraqi opposition activist who helped found the British-based solidarity
group Cardri in the late 1970s and later fought against Saddam Hussein's
forces in Kurdistan - is one of many independent voices who insist that
a large majority of Iraqi exiles are opposed to war. Anecdotal evidence
from those coming in and out of Iraq itself tell a similar story, which
is perhaps hardly surprising given the expected scale of casualties
and destruction.
The Iraqi regime's human
rights record has been grim - though not uniquely so - over more than
30 years. If and when US and British occupation forces march down Baghdad's
Rashid Street, we will doubtless be treated to footage of spontaneous
celebrations and GIs being embraced as they hand out sweets. There will
be no shortage of people keen to collaborate with the new power; relief
among many Iraqis, not least because occupation will mean an end to
the misery of sanctions; there will be revelations of atrocities and
war crimes trials.
All this will be used to
justify what is about to take place. But a foreign invasion which is
endorsed by only a small minority of Iraqis and which seems certain
to lead to long-term occupation, loss of independence and effective
foreign control of the country's oil can scarcely be regarded as national
liberation. It is also difficult to imagine the US accepting anything
but the most "managed" democracy, given the kind of government
genuine elections might well throw up.
The danger of military interventions
in the name of human rights is that they are inevitably selective and
used to promote the interests of those intervening - just as when they
were made in the name of "civilisation" and Christianity.
If war goes ahead, the prospect for Iraq must be of a kind of return
to the semi-colonial era before 1958, when the country was the pivot
of western power in the region, Britain maintained military bases and
an "adviser" in every ministry and landowning families like
Ahmad Chalabi of the INC's were a law unto themselves. There were also
10,000 political prisoners, parties were banned, the press censored
and torture commonplace. As President Bush would say, it looks like
the re-run of a bad movie.
Thursday January 30, 2003
The Guardian
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