Over the summer, I viewed the looming war with Iraq with a mixture of contempt and sinking depression. Tony Blair’s support for this unprecedented assault had thrown me off balance. Could the words of the far-left critics who called him Bush’s poodle really, after all, be true? Would he be prepared to send thousands of Iraqis to their graves for – um, what, exactly? I could hear echoes of that old Vietnam slogan ringing in my head: ‘Hell, no, we won’t go, we won’t die for Texaco.’ Liberal imperialism in Kosovo and Afghanistan were necessary and moral acts to rebuild these desperately poor nations; but this invasion seemed to stink of old-style, resource-stripping imperialism.
When I was sent by the Guardian to tour Iraq, I expected all my fears to be confirmed, and then some. I expected to find a country which was certainly in a bad state but which could not possibly be helped by American bombs. Of course, like everyone I knew that Saddam was a bad man – we can all recite the lines about the 5,000 of his own people who he murdered with chemical weapons at Halabja, the one million people who have ‘disappeared’ since he came to power, the three million who have died in wars of aggression that he started. But nothing can prepare you for what you find in Baghdad.
The images of the Great Leader everywhere, are I suppose, the least shocking of all the nightmares there, but there is still a strange, queasy feeling that hits you when you realise that they become more sinister and aggressive in the areas where some brave dissidents rose up in the early 1990s (only to be blasted to pieces and to have their families murdered). The once-belligerent people of Mosul now wake up to huge billboards of Saddam shaking his fist at them, standing before a fiery red backdrop which is the colour of hell.
If you try, even in the most oblique way, to talk with Iraqis about their president, they turn ashen and walk away. You might expect that a group of Brits and Americans would be pretty unpopular in Iraq right now, but you’re wrong. People would hug and embrace us when they found out where we were from; one old man, in hushed tones, told me how much ‘I admire British and American democracy.’ Others would try to communicate their fear and hatred of Saddam by telling you that ‘we are not sure what will happen in the world – our television is, um, not very good. Not very reliable.’
They were desperate to hear news from the outside world. They will be the first people to dance in the streets the day Saddam falls from power and, it must be hoped, is put on trial alongside Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague for his crimes against humanity. The Iraqi people treated the farce of the ‘election’ in October with the contempt it deserved. A sign of how predictable the result was, our hotel had been ordered to arrange a celebration party for the night before the polling booths even opened.
But just when you think that you are finally absorbing the horrors which the Iraqi people are exposed to every day, you meet the Marsh Arabs. Until the early 1990s, they lived a self-sufficient and peaceful life in the South, living off the land much as they had for 5,000 years. But they were too ‘unpredictable’ for Saddam: he spent tens of millions of dollars desperately needed in Iraq’s hospitals and schools on draining the marshes. Suddenly, their entire way of life collapsed, and they were ‘relocated’ into dingy shanty towns in the middle of the cruel Iraqi desert. I had tea with one lovely Marsh Arab family, who were forced to hang a large portrait of their torturer Saddam in their tiny shack.
Well, you might be thinking, we already knew Saddam was terrible. Yes, it’s true that apologists for his regime are few and far between (although George Galloway has, to his eternal disgrace, written a number of articles which fawn over Saddam and rarely refer anywhere to his horrific human rights abuses). But there has been an unquestioned tendency for many of us on the left to act as though we are doing the Iraqi people a favour by advocating the continuing policy of ‘containment’. In practice, we have been arguing that the best case scenario for the 23 million people of Iraq is to leave them to rot in the massive open prison that their country has become. We have claimed the moral high ground for a stance which condemns Iraqis to a life under tyranny.
It is not enough to mouth platitudes that Saddam is bad but US intervention would be worse. Would it really? Yes, a war would mean innocent people would die. We on the left cannot hide behind grotesque euphemisms like ‘collateral damage’ to ease our consciences. Every innocent death would be a tragedy for a mother, husband, father, son. Yet how many people will be murdered by Saddam’s regime if we stand by and do nothing? Amnesty International explains that ‘Torture is used systematically against political detainees in Iraqi prisons and detention centres. The scale and severity of torture in Iraq can only result from the acceptance of its use at the highest level. There are no attempts to curtail or prevent such violations or punish those responsible. This total disregard for a basic human right, the right not to be tortured or ill-treated, grossly violates international human rights law.’ They have interviewed hundreds of people who have been punished for daring to oppose Saddam by having their eyes gouged out and electrodes attached to their genitals. Even ‘normal’, non-political prisoners are often punished by having their ears sliced off, their foreheads branded and their arms and legs ‘amputated’.
For a moment, forget about the threat to Saddam’s neighbours (especially Israel) from chemical and biological weapons; think just about the Iraqi people. Let us suppose that, like in Afghanistan, 3,000 people die in the forthcoming war. Do you really think that there would be fewer casualties if we left Saddam in place? Even if the worst estimates are true and the war killed 50,000 people – a horrendous thought – it would still be fewer people than Saddam has murdered in the last decade and which we have good reason to believe he will murder in the next. If you want to minimise the number of innocent Iraqi people who will die horribly, then you must support this war.
Bush is a terrible, rightwing moron and it would be absurd to argue that the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are motivated by concern for the plight of the Iraqi people. They, after all, are the people who were happy to embrace Saddam when he was ‘their’ pet dictator. But at this moment, the interests of the Iraqi people and the interests of the USA in preventing Saddam from building up weapons of mass destruction (and, perhaps, pillaging Iraq’s oil) happen to coincide. We cannot allow our (legitimate) hatred of Bush to prevent us from seeing that Saddam is even worse. American foreign policy has done some monstrous things in the last 50 years, but this war will not be one of them.
If you want to oppose Blair’s support for the conflict because you think that preserving national sovereignty is more important than preventing tyranny, then fine; at least you have an argument, albeit a conservative one. But if you oppose this war because you are concerned for the welfare of the Iraqi people, then I beg you to think again. If you doubt my case, go to Iraq, choose any random pedestrian, look them in the eye and tell them that ten more years of Saddam is the best they can hope for.