Regards, Ivan
Posted on 03/02/2003 3:36:32 AM PST by MadIvan
The Iraqi dictator, like Sinn Fein and the IRA, knows the value of procrastination, says Alan Ruddock
HISTORY, or experience, do not seem to teach us much. Over the past 10 years we have grown accustomed to the news management techniques of terrorists who care nothing for the normal democratic process. The Northern Irish peace process is pockmarked with deadlines and 'historic' breakthroughs, with promises and threats, intransigence and occasional, tooth-pulling progress. The analogy with Iraq is thin, but there are similarities: brinkmanship, dramatic gestures, propaganda and canny news management. Yet we seem to swallow it whole.
Twelve years after the Gulf War, years that have seen countless and fruitless weapons inspections, Saddam Hussein starts to destroy some missiles that have been in breach of the United Nations' requirements ever since the previous war came to an inglorious halt. The destruction of the missiles, which will be played out under the media's gaze, comes on deadline day and is hailed by Dr Hans Blix, the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, as a very significant development.
Saddam, we are meant to believe, has finally seen the error of his ways. After a dozen years of procrastination, deceit and contempt for the United Nations, he is now prepared to negotiate his way to peace, if only America would let him. It is a preposterous concept, but it will be believed by those who want to believe it and it will be used by those who want to thwart the overthrow of his regime because of their own political and financial agendas. We should be able to see through it because we know that these gestures are empty.
The IRA and Sinn Fein should have disarmed years ago, but they too know the value of playing for time. Why disarm once if you can milk it time and again as an indication of your goodwill? And why surrender the very essence of your power if you do not have to? And so our own homegrown terrorists cling to their weapons, beat and maim their own community with baseball bats and bullets, and we turn a blind eye. Nothing in our conduct since the Good Friday Agreement has shown that we, as a society, or through our government, are prepared to face down the terrorists. We reward their chicanery with votes and seats and allow their propaganda to lock our perception of unionists in a time-warp.
Saddam Hussein is not as skilled a propagandist as Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness, but he is playing to an even more credulous audience. No one in their right mind wants a war. So Saddam can push the obvious buttons and we fall over ourselves to believe in his sincerity. Containment is the palatable solution because it means we do not have to see the consequences of our inaction.
Just as millions starve unseen and uncared for in Zimbabwe, so hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will continue to suffer under Saddam's regime if we do not act. If France, Germany, Russia and their allies have their way, Saddam will emerge victorious from this crisis, more powerful and more dangerous to his people and to the Middle East. His heroic stature as the only leader in the Muslim world to stand tall and defiant before the West will be enhanced, even though his embrace of Islam is as cynical and as calculated as his eleventh hour conversion to missile destruction.
The consequences of a US defeat before the war has been launched are incalculable. The United Nations will cease to function and cease to matter. The future for the Middle East will be bleaker than ever. The consequences of war, if it ends in a swift victory for the US and its allies and the elimination of the Saddam regime, should have the opposite effect. The United Nations will be strengthened and the prospect for a resolution of the Middle East conflict enhanced by the removal of its most destabilising influence. In the process, the Iraqi people will be liberated from decades of violent oppression. This war will not be a pre-emptive war. If it happens, it will be because Saddam Hussein has consciously and consistently gambled that the UN does not have the will to enforce its own resolutions.
We, through the United Nations, have demanded that he disarm. He has refused and so must be disarmed. That is not pre-emption, it is enforcement. We have demanded his disarmament because Saddam is a threat to us all: he has waged war on neighbouring countries, has slaughtered his own people and has fostered terrorism. Those who cannot see the threat he poses, who will not see the damage he is wreaking on the United Nations, are blind to history and to the present. The case for war is compelling, even if the presentation of that case by the American and British governments has not been.
Opposition to war has been genuine and widespread, but it has been fuelled by misinformation, suspicion, age-old political enmities and a natural human revulsion at the thought of innocent casualties. There is also an undeniable element of anti-Americanism and specific anti-Bushism. The American president is caricatured as a stupid man who stole the presidential election, a warmonger out to avenge his father, an oil man who would risk his own citizens for grubby financial gain. None of those allegations can be levelled against Tony Blair, the British prime minister, yet he too endures vilification from his own party and from the opposition benches: the Tories, and their cheerleaders in the British media, see Iraq as a heaven-sent opportunity to bloody Blair's nose.
Mr Blair is sincere about Iraq, and is sincerely right, just as he was right about Kosovo. George Bush is also sincere: all the caricatures of a moron lusting for war ignore the truth of his restraint since September 11 and of his administration's determination to work with the international community to combat a universal threat. Our history, our experience, should have given us some insight to the workings of a terrorist mind, with its histrionics and its gestures, its game playing and its determination to buy time. Instead we have chosen to ignore our past and have swallowed the propaganda of a man who uses violence as an instrument of state policy.
No matter what the placards would have you believe, there is no moral equivalence between the two greatest democracies in the world and the blood-soaked dictator in Baghdad. There is no way that a democracy can negotiate successfully with a dictatorship and we are being simple-minded if we choose to believe that Saddam can be convinced by the power of our arguments. He can only be convinced by the threat of force, and only if that threat is real.
Our choices are straightforward, and uncomfortable: we walk away and leave him to his own devices, more powerful and more dangerous than ever before; we accept that the United Nations does not have the will to enforce its own demands and so is toothless and irrelevant; we delude ourselves that diplomacy and negotiation are adequate tools to dissuade dictators from their ways; or we accept reality and realise that, however unpleasant, however dangerous and however deadly, the only way to disarm Saddam Hussein is by force.
Our energies should be devoted now to ensuring that Iraq after Saddam is indeed a better place and that the enhanced will of the United Nations should be concerned with resolving the wider Middle East conflict after Saddam's defeat. Then, too, we can turn our attention to Robert Mugabe and make him realise that there is no place in this world for leaders who believe in genocide.
Regards, Ivan
Anyone who expresses an opinion against regime change in Iraq should be required to factually demonstrate why this paragraph is not true. It cannot.
Excellent idea. And after that little test, those who continue to assert it will have revealed entirely where they're coming from. That's actually been one of the few good things about this whole long drawn-out process: it has forced a lot of people (and countries) to reveal who they really are.
Yea, it's pretty good.
But then there's been a whole lot of nailin' going on up to this point, & now?
I'd say it's time to change the entire subject to one of past tense.
...it's time to roll.
The White House should hire this man!
He has rightly identified the masked stance toward this war, which is truly anti-American and anti-Bush.
Dear Ivan, I presently live with some peaceniks of the mentally deluded sort: See Human Shields as a species. Logic has no effect.
I'm glad he didn't leave out Robert Mugabe. We Yanks will look to you Brits to carry the torch on this one, but we'll back you up ALL the way.
We have piddled too long,
It is now time to Bomb.
Regards, Ivan
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