Regards, Ivan
Posted on 02/08/2003 4:11:45 PM PST by MadIvan
If you add up all the scientists in Iraq who have been helping to produce weapons of mass destruction, the total comes to 3,500. That is not the estimate of General Colin Powell, still less of some notorious Washington hawk. It is the number on the list of those scientists whom the United Nations weapons inspectors wish to interview.
That is an awful lot of scientists — probably more scientists than existed in the whole world 100 years ago. According to Saddam Hussein, not one is currently engaged on a project for chemical, biological or nuclear warfare. They are all, it seems, on gardening leave — some of them, I like to think, pruning and manuring the date palms, a commodity in which Iraq used to lead the world rather than in the production of anthrax, ricin, aflatoxin and other flavours of the month.
Many of these scientists did their postgraduate training overseas, quite a few in Britain, particularly during the 1980s when we were pro-Iraq because we were so anti-Iran. So, of course, did many other Iraqis bent on more peace-loving activities, not to mention the thousands more who have been scurrying about the world on business, selling oil legally or illegally, scouting for forbidden machine parts, getting round the UN sanctions by one means or another.
On top of that there are estimated to be 1.5m Iraqis in exile. Some of these are poorly educated refugees in camps in Lebanon and Iran, but the majority are among the best and brightest of all their communities — Kurds, Sunni and Shia alike.
In short, a multitude of Iraqis have seen the western world and are pretty much at home in it. Even listening to Powell deliver his catalogue of Saddam’s misdemeanours to the UN — literally a tour de force — I was struck again and again by how modern this cradle of earth’s most ancient civilisations sounds. When Saddam’s people hide a mobile biological research laboratory, they do it in an ordinary garage or warehouse. When they want to conceal stocks of forbidden chemical or biological agents, they use civilian fertiliser or pharmaceutical factories.
Only once did Powell’s report carry us back to the Mesopotamia of TE Lawrence and Gertrude Bell — when he claimed that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was hiding launchers for rockets with biological warheads in large groves of palm trees. Not so much a smoking gun as a smoking camel.
Yet there remains a persistent reluctance in the West to believe that this relatively sophisticated people with such huge natural resources could ever make a go of democracy. At every turn we show our contempt for their political abilities and our underlying despair about their future. A sceptical Washington elite let down the Iraqi opposition after the Gulf war. And to this day the exiled political movements are dismissed as “quarrelsome” and “lacking support on the ground”, as though mustering support in Saddam’s Baghdad was like engineering a by-election gain for the Liberal Democrats in Orpington.
The exiles really can’t win. If they look and talk like us, they are corrupt smoothies whose suits are too expensive. If they talk Arabic and dress Arab, they are dismissed as fanatical towelheads. In the British media any London gathering of the Iraqi National Congress or the Palestinian leaders is damned with faint praise. For, alas, whatever we may say, we journalists tend to prefer a good atrocity to a composite constitutional resolution.
This mindset is part of a general pessimism about the Middle East — western fatalism, if you like. The best we can honestly hope for is a tolerable level of violence, an attitude not unlike the feelings of the late Reginald Maudling towards Northern Ireland — “What a bloody awful place,” he would say on the flight home and call for a large brandy.
Nothing works in that blighted region. Look what happened to the UN sanctions on Iraq (approved of by so many who now oppose military action). Saddam had no hesitation in letting his people starve. And how many people really believe that continued weapons inspection, not backed up by force, can really deter Saddam — or in due course his not much nicer son Qusay — from committing further massacres inside or outside his borders? Tony Blair’s critics mouth the usual pieties about putting the peace process first, but in their hearts many of them, I think, see little prospect of the region ever emerging from rubble, violence, dictatorship and despair. It is not just that they view with apprehension and repugnance the onset of war with all its unpredictable and so often uncontainable horrors. They have no confidence in the aftermath either.
We are told that there is no “end-game plan”, that any conflict will set the Middle East ablaze with hatred of the West for a generation or more, and that our troops will be bogged down for years in a futile and endless conflict. As it happens, we were told much the same — often by the same critics — before the American bombers took off for the former Yugoslavia and then again when they went into Afghanistan. The blood-thirsty warlords of the Northern Alliance would never fight together effectively, still less sit down together afterwards. The Americans were too isolationist to bother with nation-building after the war.
Yet looking back, any impartial observer would surely be struck by the surprising ease with which the present democracies were set up in Belgrade and Kabul — still ramshackle and fragile certainly but needing only relatively modest outside military support and above all no longer a danger to their neighbours or the rest of the world.
And in Iraq it is noticeable that the Americans are being much more proactive about the possible aftermath of hostilities. Already British troops have been asked to lead a post-war stabilising force. Richard Perle, the one-time Prince of Darkness, is all sweetness and light about a new, friendly Iran he hopes to see emerging, encouraged by Saddam’s demise. And there has been a dramatic shift from President George W Bush’s initially lackadaisical attitude towards the Middle East peace process.
Powell promised the Senate foreign relations committee last week that after the war Bush would take a more active role in pushing the process forward and that the creation of a democratic regime in Iraq “could fundamentally reshape” the Middle East.
The critics believe it should be the other way round: tackle the Palestinian issue first and the hatred will dissolve. But isn’t that just what we have been trying for half a century? And can it ever work so long as the Palestinian negotiators have the terrorists and their ruthless state sponsors prodding guns in their backs? The removal of Saddam may unlock more difficulties than we can presently imagine.
Whether critics or supporters of the prime minister, we heard nothing last week to remove our proper anxieties about the dangers of a war. But for the first time we have had an explicit commitment to make the peace worth fighting for.
Regards, Ivan
Once again, our President Bush has a vision more far-sighted than any of his generation. Only a few, in this case Mr. Mount are now cluing in to the magnitude of his imagination as a force for change.
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