From: kharin (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Fri Aug 02 2002 - 03:29:04 MDT
"No, the justifications for deposing the Iraqi regime were clearly laid out
previously (six separate points, I believe). They have to do with the
bloodthirsty lust for power evident in the Tikrit-based Saddam Hussein
clan which rules that nation."
So, the plan is to take out the only substantial secular state in the area, and impose a new regime which may later turn into an Islamic theocracy? Clearly, the reassurances made by the US that they did not regard religion as having anything to do September 11th were all true, in which case it looks like you can forget all about any jihad for secularisation. In which case, the issue of the legitimacy of pre-emptive attacks remains.
I think this article sums up the problems here quite neatly:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-370088,00.html
If we must go to war, for God's sake tell us why
simon jenkins
This is becoming surreal. Soldiers do not want a war. Diplomats do not want a war. Politicians do not want a war. This is exactly how wars start.
When Tony Blair was asked at a press conference last week about an early attack on Iraq his body language went absent without leave. His cheek muscles twitched, his eyes darted and he reached beneath his desk for help. Was he seeking a panic button or a White House messager? The answer was worse. He raised a comfort mug to hide his lips and took a large caffein hit. He stumbled out a no comment.
I cannot recall a time when British policy towards a troubled part of the world was so incoherent. Mr Blair has no clue what America intends to do in Iraq. This is understandable since, as yet, nor does America. But other governments are not thereby reduced to treating their publics as idiots. Britons are served a burble of “no decision ... not ready ... weapons of mass destruction ... regime change in Baghdad... nothing imminent”. Yet every leak conveys a Government preparing for war. Mr Blair is like an East European leader in the Soviet era, forced to support anything Moscow does without knowing what it is.
Let us help poor Mr Blair in his predicament. Let us examine the case for a war. The customary reason would be that Saddam Hussein threatens the security of the British State and the lives of its citizens. Mr Blair has been unable to convince anyone of this. He must therefore fall back on a generalised threat posed by the Iraqi leader to the outside world, one so grave as to justify early military intervention.
That threat is conceivable. Saddam controls a big and rich country.Whereas the Taleban merely gave houseroom to those planning an attack on Western targets, Saddam has gone to war with two neighbours and with some effect. Nobody studying the reports of the last United Nations weapons inspectors could doubt that he must still have nasty chemical and bacteriological weapons. He used them against Kurds and Shias. The arrival of Russian nuclear technicians also suggests that Iraq is trying to put them to evil purpose.
These activities are not new. Countering them has been the objective of 11 years of so-called “containment”. This has involved economic sanctions, ostracism and regular bombing. Mr Blair appears to feel that the containment policy has failed. As many predicted, it has weakened Saddam’s opponents and made him, on one estimate, the sixth richest man on earth. It may have enabled him to replenish his arsenal.
If so, containment has indeed been a catastrophe. But its failure does not necessarily negate the need for war. Mr Blair now hints that Saddam not only has nasty weapons — as do many unpleasant states — but that he intends to use them against the West. This is a wholly different matter. It suggests that Saddam’s past stance, dedicated to cementing himself in power in his region, has now changed. Mr Blair even hints that he may be employing the al-Qaeda network, which is still a threat to the West according to bloodcurdling and recession-inducing statements from Washington. That presumably is why the Government yesterday denied habeas corpus to suspects it seems incapable of bringing to trial.
If all these alarming assumptions are true, the war games being played in Washington and London make some sense. Should American and British forces march directly on Baghdad? Should they occupy a region of Iraq and proceed only with surrogates? Should they go “Baghdad-lite” and use bombers and paratroops against the capital alone, relying on Saddam’s enemies to rise up and depose him? The ghosts of Beau Geste and Lawrence of Arabia are stalking the war rooms of Nato. What to the country at large may seem unreal and implausible is to Mr Blair a desperate crisis. As he puts it over and again, despite a decade of containment “inaction is not an option”.
The first objection to any war is that it may be lost. The American military has a dreadful record in trying to topple declared enemies. In Cuba, Libya, Somalia, Serbia and now Afghanistan, a named individual was targeted and survived. Assassination attempts against Castro, Gaddafi, Aideed, Milosevic and bin Laden gave all of them a sudden elixir of life. Aideed died in his bed. Milosevic lost power only to a democratic vote. The rest are said to be going strong. As Gaddafi might reflect, an American precision bomb is the next best thing to immortality.
Yet America can surely defeat Iraq. While President Bush may survive his failure to capture bin Laden, he could hardly excuse a failure to eliminate Saddam when “regime change” was his sole objective. Provided an invasion is sufficiently massive, there is no reason why “the mother of all victories” should not be achieved. The Republican Guard may exact a heavy price. But with Baghdad laid to waste and to hell with collateral damage, regime change is surely do-able.
A second objection to a war is whether, though winnable, it is “legal”. To that we may reply, so what? No particular legality attached to the bombing of Belgrade or Kabul, in both of which Britain participated. As America has made plain, it regards international jurisprudence as a discipline for losers, not winners. George Bush and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, never cease to assert that war on Iraq is not an act of international policing, demanding United Nations authorisation. It is a matter of American self-defence. In such cases, international law is indulgent.
This may not help Mr Blair. He appears to see this war as partly self-defence but partly moral crusade. For the latter he needs more authority than a phone call from Mr Bush, especially as he means to disregard his own Parliament. But a poodle knows only one master. I suspect that the United Nations will not feature prominently in Britain’s “war aims” against Iraq.
A third objection to war is quite different — that all my assumptions above are not true and that a war is unnecessary. The aggression which it means to forestall is not real. The evidence is not sufficient to justify bloodshed and destruction. This objection would point out that the containment policy towards Iraq has not failed. It has merely not succeeded. After the Gulf War, America made a mistake. It should have treated Saddam as it now treats Libya, Syria, Iran and other dictatorships, and as it once treated Saddam himself. It should have smothered him with “constructive engagement”. That was the way to keep tabs on him. To attack Iraq when Saddam’s standing is high in the region is, as Lord Bramall wrote on Monday, to fan the flames of anti-Americanism and set al-Qaeda back on the recruiting path.
I would love to see Saddam go. He is a thoroughly nasty job of work with a nasty arsenal at his disposal. I would scheme in every way to bring about his downfall. But Britain must have a casus belli, a reason to wage aggression against a foreign state. Mr Blair has none. He taps his nose and says in effect, “I will have a reason when I have a reason”. But this is extraordinary. There is no known or leaked evidence that Saddam is about to attack Britain or anyone else. There is no reason for him to do so. The only reason is recklessly supplied by the Prime Minister, that Saddam should now regard Britain as an enemy and retaliate first.
If America wants to go to war with Iraq that is America’s business, on a rationale buried deep in the psychology of the Bush Administration.America’s friends are not being “anti-American” in questioning it, any more than her critics help by failing to understand the continued catatonic state of American foreign policy since September 11. But Britain has no influence in Washington and need not pretend otherwise. America will do what it chooses. Besides, Americans are perfectly able to hold their own leaders to account, more outspokenly than Britons seem able to hold Mr Blair.
An American war is not always a sufficient condition for a British war. If the Government is right and al-Qaeda remains a threat to Britain the more reason for caution in the minefields of Middle East politics. It is a reason for listening and watching, not blundering into the region with bombs and tanks. But if Mr Blair knows something nobody else knows, if he knows why “inaction is not an option”, surely he has a duty to tell us what that something is.
---- This message was posted by kharin to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25860>
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