No to Saddam Hussein!
No to war!
Julie Burchill, paid to be controversial by The Guardian, attacks those “who thought that a population living in terror under the Taliban was preferable to a bit of liberating foreign fire… On this principle, if we’d known about Hitler gassing the Jews all through the 1930s, we still shouldn’t have invaded Germany; the Jews were, after all, German citizens and not our business.”
Her history is not very impressive (the plight of the Jews-though not, yet, their gassing-was no secret in the 1930s, and war was declared when Germany invaded Poland, not because of the plight of the Jews). The point is, she supports war against Saddam.
With more angst, David Aaronovitch writes in The Observer: "If, in a few weeks time, the Security Council agrees to wage war against Saddam, I shall support it." Others who consider themselves to be broadly on the left put the same case, from Salman Rushdie to Christopher Hitchens.
These are people who backed the war in Afghanistan after September 11, and who felt their stand was vindicated. Those opposing war, including this newspaper, warned of dire consequences and thousands upon thousands of dead. But, in the event, the Taliban were defeated quickly. Far fewer Afghans died in the process than we had anticipated.
Delighted by this, Christopher Hitchens wrote, addressing the anti-war left, "well, yah boo and sucks to you, too."
As Aaronovitch notes, his own current of left-wing opinion really emerged over Bosnia and Kosova, and-negatively-over Rwanda, where the failure to intervene led to a million dead. It is not simply gung-ho for Western imperialism; in part, it is motivated by disgust at the moral emptiness of much left-wing argument-at those who opposed self-determination for the Kosovars, who played down the awfulness of the Taliban, or who side now, openly or covertly, with the butcher in Baghdad. When the dominant forces on the left are prepared against the coming war to promote the Cairo Declaration, issued at a conference addressed by representatives of the Ba'th regime, you can, sadly, see their point.
How strong a point is it? It's true that a part of the case against war in Afghanistan depended on an assessment of likely casualties, which turned out to be erroneous. Could it be the same with Iraq? Estimates vary, but many think there could be tens of thousands killed, and many more made refugees. What if this turns out to be wrong, and Saddam is overthrown by a quick, "clean" war, and replaced by a democracy?
Saddam's regime is very unlikely to be so easy to defeat as the Taliban.
Although Saddam has been president only since the end of the 1970s, his regime is a decade older than that. It has survived war with Iran and the last Gulf war. His army is not what it was, after military defeat and sanctions, but it is still not negligible. If it was that easy to overthrow, someone would have done it by now. Indeed, the US has sponsored attempts to do so "from within", but abandoned them at the last minute. One of the most remarkable things about Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is that it has survived so much and for so long.
It will be defeated, of course. There is no chance that Saddam will win this war.
But there is equally no chance that Bush and Blair will replace it with any kind of democracy. On the contrary, their stated aim is for "regime change" in a much more limited sense-any old alternative dictator less hostile to them will do. If democracy comes to Iraq, it will be despite Bush and Blair, not because of them.
If democracy comes And at what cost? We can't know. If the war led to freedom for the people of Iraq, you might argue that it would have been worth anything but the most colossal number of casualties. But we can't know how colossal that number will be.
And who, really, is prepared to lay bets on it? Who's prepared to gamble with untold thousands of Iraqi lives in the hope that all will be well that ends well? Julie Burchill might be, and Christopher Hitchens, and all the rest. I hope, with such clear consciences, they have no trouble sleeping.
Who is prepared to lay bets on other incalculable consequences of war? On whether Ariel Sharon will use it to expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank? On the boost militant political Islam, from Pakistan to Egypt, will get - more than compensating for the Taliban's defeat? On whether the US will roll on, like a drunk, from whatever success it has in Iraq to the next location for the "war on terror", and where it will go from there?
If we had our own army of democrats, we might set off for Baghdad tomorrow to help the Iraqi people throw off their oppressor. The techno-might of the US marines is no such army. They will deliver death and destruction first from the sky, then from the ground, and we don't know with what result.
Aaronovitch is right that Saddam is a terrible dictator. For this reason, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty is promoting, as an alternative to the Cairo Declaration, the statement "No to war! No to Saddam!"-which is gaining support world-wide.
But the liberation of the Iraqi people can only be the task of the Iraqi people themselves. We can assist it by preparing to build solidarity with any genuine democratic movement which emerges there. If Bush and Blair's war calls such a movement into being, it will be by accident not design. Any genuine popular movement will find that Bush and Blair are its mortal enemies.
