Saddam's palaces under attack, March 2003. Will the invasion of Iraq create the conditions for stability in the Middle East? Well, appeasement certainly hasn't succeeded.

22 March 2003

Public opinion is divided over the current war in Iraq. The diplomatic process leading up to war was riddled with mistakes which left the western world unneccesarily divided. Nevertheless I believe that the war is morally and legally justified, and that there is no practical alternative if there is to be a stable Middle East in my lifetime. I am therefore in support, and here are my reasons.

I do not subscribe to the fashionable notion of moral equivalence between all deeply-held beliefs. I believe in the rights of the individual over the collective. I believe democracy is better than dictatorship, both morally and practically. Not necessarily democracy as we or the Americans or the French practice it, but the idea that in every possible practical way, you should let people make their own decisions, and if these decisions need to be circumscribed in any way, then you should only do it with the explicit approval of a majority of the people in question. And above all that a people must be able to change governments and leaders without resorting to force.

A few days ago I got into a discussion with a young Algerian in my local kebab shop. He was anti-war, explaining that he didn't buy into the great benefits of democracy and the rights of a people to govern their destiny. He came up with all sorts of spurious conspiracy theories to explain his distrust of the "so-called" democracies. But the fact is that he was here because Algeria has been unable to provide a satisfactory life for him, probably unable even to guarantee his safety. I felt hugely saddened that he was so much the product of a pathological culture that he could not see how he had been disenfranchised, and even tried to defend that disenfranchisement.

So my ingoing position is that I am not comfortable with a world in which there are prosperous democracies and failing dictatorships, and we are supposed not to notice because somehow it would be disrespectful of the people living under the dictatorships. Are they a different species from us - homo indemocraticus - whose only human right is to choose to have no rights? I don't buy it.

The problem, of course, is that many peoples currently living under dictatorships might, if asked right now, come up with some deeply unpleasant policy decisions (like encouraging and financing suicide bombers, supporting military adventures etc). They might even, like my Algerian, vote against democracy, saying they don't want it. This is the worry in many countries with an Islamic fundamentalism problem: if they can get a majority the fundamentalists are committed to democracy under the slogan "one man, one vote, just this once". That is not democracy.

Democracy needs certain conditions to get started. It is an eco-system, not a single tree, you can't just plant it and sit back in its shade. But once it is established, it is hard to uproot. People talk about democracy needing a democratic "culture", but culture is the wrong word, it makes it sound subjective. What it really needs is a universal foundation based on respect for the individual: freedom of speech, freedom of association, primacy of the rule of law, relinquishing the use of political violence, the rights of women to participate fully in economic, social and political life. It may be (indeed it is) the case that these values are most clearly held in Northern Europe, North America and the English-speaking world. But they are not western values, they are all founded in the primacy of the rights of the individual. Where these values have had a chance to become established in other cultures, they take root - Southern & Eastern Europe, Japan & other parts of Asia, most of Latin America. Look at Venezuela - despite the obvious incompetence of Chavez and the desire of the West to remove him, they are sticking at trying to find a solution to the problem which is consistent with their democractic constitution. I hate Chavez but it is fantastic to see that the country has not reverted to type (yet) with a purely military solution. Same goes for Argentina: unthinkable 20 years ago that there would not have been a military junta in control by this stage in its crisis. Even the Asian cultures, where the rights of the individual have been routinely subsumed by the rights of the community, individual rights are winning.

The introduction of meaningful democracy, nurtured to the point it is self-sustaining, is the third of three "great steps" a state must take if it is to provide an environment in which people can thrive and reach their full potential. The first is they must create a legal system which is separate from their religious system. Any legal system which rests in the hands of religious leaders will inevitably be at best arbitrary and self-interested, at worst violent. The second "great step" is to separate the wealth of the nation from the wealth of its heads of state. The rule of law cannot be guaranteed by rulers who gain personally (and massively, and instantly) from the outcomes of the laws they pass. Advanced countries have leaders, not rulers, and the head of state cannot get rich by direct taxation or by stealing from his or her people.

The one region in the world where there is massive resistance to taking the three "great steps" is the Arab world. I won't say the muslim world, though it was tempting: Turkey is an example of a predominantly muslim country that is demonstrating commitment. In any case, the reason does not lie in religion. Islam is a uniquely inflexible religion, in that it relies exclusively on the teachings of a single book. Nevertheless, the past has shown that the impact of a scripture is heavily influenced by its interpretation. Jews do not stone adulterers any more, despite being told to do so in the Old Testament; Christians perpetrated apalling outrages on infidels and each other, despite the New Testament being reasonably clear about the need for restraint. The reason lies not in the nature of religion but in the nature of dictatorship.

Halabja, 1988, some of the 5000 Kurds gassed by Saddam Hussein. If international law does not provide the means to stop a repeat and bring the perpetrator to justice, then it is an ass.

It is a tragedy of global proportions that the world's Arab peoples, practically without exception, live under dictatorships which have systematically impoverished their socio-political, cultural and economic development. A report by 30 Arab researchers on behalf of the UN Development Fund in 2002 looked at 22 Arab countries with over 280 million citizens. It found that more than 50% of Arab women are illiterate; spending on scientific research was a pitiful 0.4% of GDP; 0.5% of Arabs had access to the internet; there are more books tranlated into Spanish each year than into Arabic in the last ten centuries; economic growth over the past decade averaged just 0.5% per annum due to lack of investment. The report also found that the Arab people enjoyed less political freedom even than the countries of sub-saharan Africa, and human rights, though enshrined in constitutions, were routinely ignored. The damning picture of the state of the Arab world painted in this UN report cannot be blamed on America, or Israel, or global capitalism. The blame lies squarely with the dictators under whom the Arab people have suffered - who have over a long period stolen and squandered the region's wealth, just as Communist apparatchiks did under the Soviet system.

How do they get away with it? Why do the people themselves not rise up? The aspect of dictatorship which gets most attention is the brutal suppression of domestic dissent, for which you need to take over the organs of internal security. But you cannot just plant yourself as a dictatorship and suck the wealth out of a country or a people. Dictatorship too is an eco-system. You need a way of legitimising your rule in the minds of a section of the population (preferably the largest or most powerful section), and someone to blame for the all of the evils for which evidence emerges. Once you have these things, you are in business with a nice, self-sustaining little earner.

The Soviet empire legitimised itself by claiming that only communism represented a fair distribution of the benefits of labour, and that it was a just response to the obvious excesses of the previous monarchy. This was so effective that millions of Soviet citizens over many decades not only acquiesced, but genuinely thought they were participating in a noble venture, even when all the evidence was to the contrary. It was so effective that for decades it fooled well-meaning western liberals; even now there is a resurgence of the belief that in some way, because communism and democracy were opposed, that they were somehow morally equivalent (note that communism is opposed to democracy, not capitalism).

Other dictators tap into other vulnerable beliefs among their people to give them a veil of credibility. It might be nationalism (Milosevic), anti-semitism (Hitler), feelings of angst and inadequacy (Jim Jones, Reverend Moon). In the case of most Arab dictators, it happens to be Islam. Islam contains a number of features that can be easily hijacked by unscupulous leaders: the disrespect for non-believers, the basis for non-independent religious courts, the concept of jihad, and the belief in the afterlife (an essential feature in the mental eco-system of any suicide bomber). Under an enlightened leadership, these concepts could be downplayed, interpreted, brought into line with the necessities of life in a modern, interconnected, multi-cultural world. In the hands of a dictator, they render people susceptible, easy meat for indoctrination. So susceptible, indeed, that when the Iranian people did rise up against the Shah, they were fooled into supporting just another dicatorship, which they are only now showing signs of being ready to cast off.

Palestine - Iraq's latest foreign adventure. The removal of Saddam will make peace for Palestinians more, not less likely. Saddam's support was crucial in Arafat's refusal to agree peace in 1999 (as was that of the European Union), and his financial support for suicide bombers is substantial and open.

As for foreign adventures and scapegoats, sooner or later in any dictatorship evidence emerges of how the elite is benefiting at the expense of the people. Such evidence, when it can no longer be supressed, must be explained. It can be laid at the feet of an unpopular minority - Jews in the case of Hitler, saboteurs in the case of the Soviet Union. Or it can be blamed on surrounding states. This sort of scapegoating is insidious. When Greenpeace confronted the Lebanese authority with evidence of 143 separate outlets churning raw sewage and toxic waste into the Mediterranean, the environment Minister's response was to ask "why are you helping Israel". What has Israel got to do with Lebanon's sewage? (And before you say Lebanon is a democracy, ask how often they have been allowed to vote against the presence of Syrian troops in their country).

Of course democracies engage in this sort of behaviour too: Tony Blair is right now blaming Jacques Chirac for the current war, when it's clear that the initiative lies far more with George Bush. The crucial difference is that democracies might engage in a bit of name-calling and posturing, but only dictatorships carry this to its conclusion by engaging in military adventures to create an external enemy. Galtieri's invasion of the Falklands, Hitler's annexing of Alsace, countless Soviet adventures in Asia, Africa and Latin America, China's occupation of Tibet - these are all adventures carried out for the benefit of the domestic audience, not for the material advantage that they can, of themselves, bring. America too has had its foreign entanglements in the last century: Vietnam, Cambodia, Bay of Pigs, Nicaragua etc. Not all of these have been honourably (or even legally) conducted, but they have without exceptions been wars of defence, not offence. The fundamental motivation was to resist the encroaching of an ideology or power which would without question have rolled back human rights far further than any offences perpetrated by the Americans in their resistance. It has also had its honourable involvement in two World Wars, the Korean War, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Does any right-thinking person say these were all military adventures to detract attention from domestic problems?

So you have a whole region or Arab states living under dictatorships of varying levels of brutality; sustained by an ideology that has been hijacked and put to use in order to sustain a system which has no moral foundation; and using international adventures and blaming Israel and America to explain its failures.

Do we simply accept this situation?

In a world of expensive travel, rigid borders, poor communications, conventional weapons, one could say it was a shame, but not our problem. Personally, I think that hundreds of millions of people living under brutality is always everyone's problem. Whenever I have travelled behind the Iron Curtain, or to Cuba, Egypt or other repressive dictatorships, I have felt profoundly sorry for the people who, sometimes without realising it, are being so degraded or even bestialised by their leaders. But in particular, in an age of ever easier and cheaper travel, permeable borders, rapid communications and unconventional weapons, walking away from the problem is simply not an option.

Hiding behind the supremacy of self-determination and the need to respect national sovreignty is nothing more than moral cowardice. These concepts have never been more than conventient expedients, for the simple reason that there are plenty of examples where different races claimed the same territory, with similar validity. Why is everyone agreed that the Kurds should not have their own state? Why should Syria own the Golan heights, which show archaeological evidence of Jewish inhabitants from a period 2000 years before Syria existed as a nation? Why can't Kosovo and Montenegro have their independence from the remains of Yugoslavia, like Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia? Why should the Spanish claim Gibraltar, given that they ceded it by treaty in perpetuity to the UK? Why is Peru allowed to keep a large chunk of Ecuador that it took by force? Why is the USA allowed to keep a large chunk of Mexico that it took by force (and which the Mexicans are now taking back by by immigration)?

None of these questions can be answered by calling on the principles of national sovreignty or universal law. There is no single point in time at which the international community as a whole is able to say "NOW!", this is the date on which the clock stopped, and all border changes since then are illegal. Harking back to a mythical time, either one for all the world, or one per region, at which everyone agreed on the borders, is simply fantasy.

I was always tought, if in doubt, go back to first principles. And my first principles in all these cases, as always, are the rights of the individual. And that means ALL the individuals involved NOW. Their rights may be greater or lesser, depending on how they got to be involved in a particular situation (as individuals) and how they have behaved (as individuals). But there are certain rights that are, to coin a phrase, inalienable: safety, democratic representation, the right to make a living, to make key life choices for themselves. Whatever sovereign power comes to rule over them, whether domestically validated or imposed by others, these are its responsibilities. The people, in turn, can legitimately fight for greater representation in the instruments of government, for a greater share of the economic pie or whatever, but cannot legitimately fight to deprive another people of their basic rights.

It is in this context that I think about the current situation. First, it is important note that the majority of the UN's members are themselves dictatorships. Libya chairs the Commission on Human Rights; on March 17th Iraq took over Chairmanship of the UN Conference on Disarmament; Syria currently sits on the Security Council, along with Angola, Cameroon and Guinea. It is, of course nice when the UN sanctions military actions against dictators, as it did against North Korea and in the first Gulf War. But I refuse to see why, if the big, moral democracies of the world perceive a case for intervention, they should allow themselves to be constrained by the likes of Angola, Cameroon and Guinea. We have allowed ourselves to be hamstrung by the exigencies of the Cold War into a structure which acts almost wholly against our interests; if we do not change that structure at some point soon, it will cease have any relevance. The world's minor countries want to use the UN as a forum to tweak America's nose. They have the cheek to want America not only to put up with this, but also to pay for the pleasure. This can plainly only go on for so long.

"Vote for the crook, not the fascist," Chirac's re-election, April 2002. Why should anyone care what Chirac thinks about Iraq, given that his entire career has been characterised by corruption and his links with Saddam Hussein?

So I am not bothered one jot by the refusal to ask permission from the Angolans, Cameroonians and Syrians before going into action. France is a more troubling case. It is a democracy, though one that has not really completed the second of the "great steps" I outlined above: the separation between the wealth of the nation and the pockets of its politicians is less complete in France than in any other of the major democracies. Less than a year ago, Chirac was elected in a run-off against Le Pen; people marched in the street with banners reading "Vote for the Crook not the Fascist". I am therefore not bothered by Chirac's personal position in the debate - he does not have the personal authority to dictate moral issues. And that is before looking into his own shady past of meetings with Saddam Hussein and sales of weapons and nuclear technology to Iraq.

Despite my contempt for Chiraq, I am troubled by the position of France as a country opposing the war. I would like them to be on board. But if they are poorly led, if they have to take care not to inflame their 5 million domestic muslims, if they take a narrower and shorter-term view of their national interest, so be it. That should not stop others more free to act.

I am not too bothered about Russia either, firstly because the ink is still wet on their own democratic credentials, and secondly because their opposition seems more a negotiating ploy - extracting concessions on Chechnya and domestic oil pipelines - than a position of principle. The Chinese response is a predictable and nauseating effort to extract advantage for future relations with America. Unlike the Russian position, it does not even have the virtue of being linked to an explicit negotiating position, it is simply playing the situation for a spurious moral advantage. What is the difference between America invading Iraq and our occupation of Tibet, they will ask. The answer, as we shall hopefully soon see, is everything.

Germany's response is interesting. To the extent that it arises purely out of Schroeder's desire to be re-elected last year it is, of course, discreditable. But that is not the whole story. Schroeder was, after all, only tapping into feelings of deep unease about the use of military force among Germans. Although their help and support would have been materially welcome, it is hard to feel that a world in which Germany has given up the use of force once and for all is not, in some deep way, a safer one than a world in which Germany's military is back in action.

That leaves only the narrow question of whether the war is legal, especially in the light of the ongoing UN attempts at arms inspection. I can understand how some people might believe Saddam was in the process of disarming before the invasion, and that Hans Blix's efforts were succeeding. I personally don't believe this. I believe he was doing the absolute minimum to keep liberal opinion in the West from endorsing war, as he has for 12 years now. Blix had some successes, notably the destruction of some of Saddam's Al Samoud missiles. It is worth noting for the historical record that these successes resulted directly from the pressure of 250,000 US military personnel in the region. They were, in essence, successes of the American policy, not the French policy. But Blix was in reality bouncing off the problem, as he has in the past.

The destruction of Saddam's Scud missiles was demanded by 17 UN resolutions. He concealed them, ready to fire at Kuwait in March 2003. Will those who oppose the war admit Hans Blix was comprehensively fooled? Will they explain whether Jacques Chiraq's faith in the inspection process was painfully naïve or disgustingly cynical?

In any case, if you were in any doubt before the current conflict began about whether Saddam had or had not disarmed, or whether he was or was not in the process of disarming, and whether Hans Blix was or was not succeeding in disarming him, then surely those doubts should have been dispelled when the first Scuds were fired towards Kuwait. Saddam was not allowed to keep any Scuds, he has consistently denied having them, Blix didn't find them. What it means is that those who were ready to vote against military action (or in the case of Chirac to veto it) were either naive in believing that Saddam was really disarming, or they were cynically opposed to intervention under any circumstances.

British schoolchildren, among others, have convinced themselves that a vote by UN and its serried ranks of dictators on a resolution explicitly authorising the use of force is necessary to legalise action. They are wrong.

The UN passed 17 resolutions demanding Saddam disarm; they contain all the wording required to legalise the use of force in order to enforce them. If, at the last moment, the UN decided not to pass an 18th resolution, that does not invalidate the first 17. Legality is not conferred by the numbers of laws under which an action is legal. If the members didn’t want their resolutions enforced, they shouldn’t have passed them, or they should have passed one saying that Saddam Hussein, having met the requirements previously placed on him by the UN, was now exempt from the previous resolutions. 1441 on its own gives the justification for military force; 1441, taken in the light of 16 other resolutions, and in the light of French unqualified refusal to pass any further resolutions under any circumstances, is unequivocal.

One final point on legality. Commentators, particularly left-leaning anti-American ones, delight in pointing out that America is selective in enforcing UN resolutions against Iraq but not resolution 242 demanding that Israel relinquish the territories it occupied after the 1967 war. As though this fact can invalidate all of the preceeding arguments in favour of action. The latest person the use this argument was, of course, Robin Cook in his resignation speech.

Apart from the obvious point that all UN members are always selective about which resolutions they get involved in implementing, it is worth reading Resolution 242 itself. Sure enough, it requires "Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict". At the same time, however, it requires "Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." The State referred to in the second part is, of course, Israel; the claims, threats, territorial incursions and violence are those visited on it by its neighbours since its creation and acknowledgement by the UN. The resolutions against Saddam Hussein were unilateral and unequivocal. They are materially different from resolutions that present a package of requirements that have to be carried out by both sides in a conflict, and whose implementation is going require the cooperation of both sides.

Nor does the fact that Saddam Hussein was, during his war on Iran, supported by the UK or the USA change anything. At the time, Iran seemed a bigger threat and Saddam Hussein hadn't revealed his full true nature. For many years Mugabe too seemed able to lead his country forwards, it is only relatively recently that it has become clear just what violence he is prepared to inflict on his people in order to stay in power. Situations change, allegiances change, facts emerge. To the extent that anyone has knowingly supplied Saddam Hussein with components biological, chemical or nuclear weapons programme, it is a disgrace and their name and conscience will be forever stained. Even an ally must be subject to rules of behaviour. The worst culprits in this were, of course, the French and the Germans. The biggest suppliers of Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons programme are still those who give him greatest succour in his hour of need. Plus ca change. But debate about who's friend Saddam used to be in different times is nothing more than a sideshow intended to detract attention from the real problem, which is a need for action in the present.

And there you have it. I think the intervention is morally justified, practically required, and legally based. That is why I do not have a lot of time for people who think singing “Where have all the flowers gone” will solve world problems, that you can somehow love-bomb dictatorships into abdication.

So, in the inspired words of Lt. Col. Tim Collins - "Our business now is North".