14 February 2004
Bring your TV cameras, bring your microphones.Soldiers to the broad gate, soldiers to the fire.Oblivion is their name, vultures to their bones,While far behind, with proper melancholy,The ineffectual poet strums his lyre.
I was against the attack on Iraq, not because of any considered understanding of the reasons for such a conflict, rather because I lean towards the belief that wars have been waged for centuries and that victory has never been of any use to the dead. I also believe that Saddam Hussein was bound to die sooner or later, and that, judging by press reports, his successors were too demented, drugged and diseased to hold on to power for very long. As the Americans and ourselves have reportedly been bombing Iraq for the last 12 years, I couldn't imagine why it would be necessary to stage an invasion.
My own experience of war, that of England against Hitler, in which the death toll came to 55 million, was played out during my childhood in Liverpool. I carried a gas mask to school, and when the air-raid sirens sounded, filed in a crocodile line to the shelters in the dug-up hockey field. At night, my brother and I were put to bed under the dining-room table.
We had a picture of Marshal Stalin on our kitchen wall. My father said Uncle Joe was the saviour of the world. I was introduced in the Kardomah Café to a man called Mr Gerhart, who had fled Germany in 1938. He had a dent in his forehead where he'd been hit for being Jewish. Mr Gerhart said the war was being fought because the Nazis wanted to wipe out the Jews.
I kept a diary in 1942 - there are only two entries:
September 2 1942. The Germans kill 50,000 Jews in Warsaw ghetto. Daddy upset.
September 18. Battle of Stalingrad. Uncle Joe worried not a bit.
Five years later, on July 18, a ship named the Exodus carrying 5,000 survivors of the Holocaust to the port of Haifa was attacked by British troops and forced to return to Cyprus. Twenty years later my children came home from school and told me Joe Stalin was a monster, the equal of Hitler.
Since then people have blown one another to pieces in Vietnam, Korea, Libya, Ireland, Britain, the Falklands, Kosovo, Bosnia, America, Burma, Egypt, Russia, Iran, Palestine, Africa, Israel and Iraq.
In the last two decades methods of war have undergone a change. Hand-to-hand fighting has gone out of fashion and it is no longer acceptable that soldiers should die in battle. With the invention of smart bombs, murder is now best committed from a great height.
I have no idea whether the recent conflict will lead to peace or stability. Why should it? Judging by the lessons of history, it is not bloody war but merely time that brings about change.
The reasons put forward by the British government to justify the Anglo-American invasion were at best flimsy, at worst mendacious. The British "dossier" was feeble and plagiaristic; the American presentation to the UN astonishingly thin. Finally, when these justifications seemed insufficient, the humanitarian argument was invoked, a sudden, hypocritical rush to caring where little had previously been evidenced.
We went to war because America had already decided to go to war for - unsurprisingly - American reasons (9/11, Bush family history, oil, military cojones). The nearest the government came to admitting this was when Jack Straw said Europe would "reap the whirlwind" if America went in alone: a pathetic and morally inept line of reasoning.
Lasting peace and stability? American and British military occupation of an Arab country is a great free advertisement for terror groups generally. Nor is America likely to arrange elections which Islamists might win. As for the Israel-Palestine question, if the best chance of a solution is US diplomatic muscle, why could that not have been applied without a war? Or are we meant to conclude that a vast demonstration of military power will scare the region into democracy, obedience and a new friendliness towards Israel? If so, dream on.
It was never likely that the violent overthrow of a regime with base standards by a couple of govern ments with double standards would add much to the gaiety of nations.
In principle I am in favour of forcibly deposing all Stalinist and fascist regimes, and establishing democracies in their place. My parents' generation did this on our behalf, and we owe them eternal thanks. In this case it is a shame that weapons of mass destruction were used as a pretext, especially if they turn out to have been illusory. If they do turn out to be illusory, and I was Tony Blair, I would put a gun to my head and shoot myself out of sheer embarrassment.
Arabs have no natural tradition of democracy, and their religion gives them an ultra-conservative, patriarchal, authoritarian and absolutist cast of mind. I fear that in Iraq they will simply vote to abolish democracy and create an Islamic state, in which case deposing Saddam Hussein would have been fairly pointless. The alternative would be an unelected American-supervised puppet regime, which is not what we were fighting for.
The intervention will no doubt have served as a salutary warning to various surrounding states, but there will be no peace and stability in the region until the Israelis feel secure and have given up Nazi tactics such as driving people off their land and creating ghettoes. A Palestinian state has to be established, and Arabs in general must democratise, get educated, and stop blaming everyone else for their own mess-ups. I look forward to the day when every synagogue and every mosque has become a concert hall or a cinema.
All this is to say that peace and stability are unlikely to happen in the region for a very long time, because none of the above is likely to come about. Western countries should make urgent efforts to stop sourcing their energy from that region, so that we have as little to do with them as possible. I might point out that most of the troubles in the region derive from the western powers' dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, which for centuries had preserved the peace by sitting heavily and impartially on everyone. Are we really prepared to do that in our turn?
I was against the military action against Saddam Hussein's regime, because it was undertaken without an international mandate and it threatens international law. It suggests a dangerous trend of creeping American imperialism, also illustrated by the detaining of so-called illegal combatants without charge in Guantanamo Bay. The war was inadequately justified, and the justifications for it have kept changing in recent months. A very dangerous precedent has been created.
I doubt if the intervention will bring peace and lasting stability in the region, though if it does, I will eat some of my words. It seems to me more likely that it will further destabilise the region, and that we may see a tragic situation develop like that in Algeria, where the death toll has been very high. The intervention is perceived as an attack by the richest in the world on the poorest in the world. This is not very surprising and does not augur well. It is clear that the Americans will not tolerate a regime that does not suit them and their interests, and it is not clear how such a regime will legitimately emerge.
Militant Islam is the totalitarianism of the 21st century. It has shut down the life of the mind in its own countries and is seeking to do the same to ours. Unless we are prepared to succumb to a new Dark Age, the west has no alternative but to confront militant Islam in its various secular and religious forms.
As for a lasting peace in the region, well, the Middle East has been a nightmare since the end of the Ottoman empire. It has all but choked to death on the three gruesome religions which have been its tragic legacy to the world: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It is kept going on a life-support system of petrodollars. The only hope for the Middle East is to shut off this vast stream of money from the west by finding an alternative to oil. The region might then sink back into a relatively tranquil world of date palms, desert sunsets and kif.
I was strongly against it. Tony Blair predicted confidently of this interventionist war: "History will forgive us..." But history is not about predictions for the future - leave that to soothsayers and spin-doctors - it is about the study of the past, and trying if possible to learn something from it.
More to the point, the philosopher George Santayana, a Spaniard educated at Harvard, wrote in 1905 in The Life of Reason: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfil it." The study of history in advance would have shown Blair and his government that Anglo-American co-operation at its most successful must include the possibility of holding back (as the infinitely cleverer, wilier Wilson managed to do in Vietnam) and never slavish adherence against the will of most of their countrymen. Even a quick look at the inception and development of the Vietnam war would have done more good than an awestruck trip to Bush Jr's Texas ranch.
One should always hope for lasting peace even if one is always disappointed. Apart from anything else, that way, the relatives of those who have died, Iraqi, English and American, would have some kind of consolation. All I can say is that there is no sign of it yet.
I was totally against the American war on Iraq, and I deplore the almost general laissez-faire attitude of the world to the obvious power-manipulations evidenced in the bungled and bloody "reconstruction" of the country... It was clear from the beginning that the invasion would result in a situation amounting to near-civil war, the scenario for that readied in the wings of the scene by history. The consistent factor in all present conflicts is the vast gap between rich and poor, and the subliminal racism that continues, under the seven veils of democracy, to justify it.
I deplore the American-led military action against Saddam Hussein's regime in March and April of 2003. If the American government's express purpose is national and global security, it seems patently clear to me that these aims cannot be achieved through unilateral aggression. America will only have peace and security when it sincerely addresses the legitimate grievances arrayed against it around the world. Will this happen? I'm highly doubtful. The blind greed of American capitalism, its inherent immorality, means many more centuries of horrendous suffering, much of it perpetuated by America in the Orwellian name of peace and freedom.
I was taken aback by the lying. George Bush lied when he pretended Iraq represented a threat to the United States. He lied, saying it was a current or increased threat to its neighbours. He lied when he pretended it possessed nuclear weapons. He lied shamelessly when he sought to relate Iraq to al-Qaida and September 11, with which it had no connection. And finally, as I write, he may be found to have lied when he said it still had chemical weapons of mass destruction.
Beyond the mendacity, Bush sought deliberately to work outside the authority of the United Nations, and to blacken the name of its weapons inspectors and other members of the Security Council, who were, in retrospect and at the time, right about everything. The pre-emptive attack had nothing to pre-empt, so it was doubly wrong in principle. It was also hideous in execution.
Will an illegal invasion bring peace? Has one, ever?
I was for the war, though with some reservations. In fact I am inclined to think it should have followed from the first Gulf war. Although WMD have not been found, Saddam's previous actions made it likely that he would have them.
There is no guarantee that the intervention will bring lasting peace.
I was against the American-led invasion of Iraq. I thought the reasons given for it were inadequate and the evidence presented in support of them largely fabricated. Iraq has no nuclear weapons (which are the only real "weapons of mass destruction") and did not threaten New York or London. Did you feel threatened? Nor did I: but I feel more vulnerable now since we must obviously and understandably be prime targets for violent retaliation.
That would be acceptable perhaps if the ethical justification for war was overwhelming. But it never was. When I listened to Kofi Annan or Robin Cook I heard the sound of truth. When I saw Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush on television I was reminded of those ambitious businessmen who rose to power after the disgraceful Versailles treaty. And when Jack Straw stood up to speak, dressed in his brief authority, some lines from King Lear came back to me: "Get thee glass eyes; / And, like a scurvy politician, seem / To see things thou dost not." But what of Tony Blair? He was as sincere as believers in the Flat Earth were sincere. He was sincerely wrong, sincerely self-deceived, sincerely praying to love one's enemies and turn the other cheek on a Sunday, and sincerely going to war on a Monday. In short, he was, with deep sincerity, drawn to the magnet of power: the United States. I believe that history will show him to have been a sincerely dangerous man.
I was and am strongly for the military action taken against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq in March and April 2003, as I was for the war to expel his forces from Kuwait in 1991. I was also, with reservations, a supporter of the British government's decision to recover the Falklands in 1982 and the American intervention in Vietnam.
It is impossible to say what effect the intervention will have in the region, where neither peace nor stability has prevailed since the high days of the Ottoman empire. In general I am pessimistic about the future of the historic Muslim lands - Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Algeria (though not Morocco or Egypt) - for reasons which have to do with the late medieval decision in Islam to renounce the pursuit of progress. I except Egypt because of its persisting tradition of non-Islamic nationalism and Morocco because of the strength of its monarchical institutions.
In general, I believe that the use of force, by states and armies that embody civilised values, can achieve good. I have no sympathy with those who shrink from the use of force as if it were in itself a bad thing.
I was dead against the military action against Saddam Hussein's regime. I thought it gratuitous and likely to create more terrorists in the west and also to be an intervention that did not bring lasting peace but exposed all the conflicts within Iraq and would commit the Allies to a virtually endless police action, which is now happening. And I don't know how a dumbcluck in Australia, who knew about the divisions between Shi'ites and the Sunni, could work that out while the State department in Washington couldn't. It is a breathtaking act of irresponsibility on the part of at least three governments, the British, the Americans and the Australian.
During the second world war I became a pacifist landworker. But as the war progressed and more and more acts of Nazi barbarism came to light, I began increasingly to wonder whether my youthfully idealistic decision had been the right one. I still wonder. It is impossible to balance what actually occurred against what might have occurred and so to arrive at a comparison between an actual sum of suffering and a hypothetical one. On the one side of the scales there is the terrible reality of the millions killed and maimed, historic cities ravaged or totally destroyed, the obliteration of works of art of incalculable value, the Soviet domination of eastern Europe, the Gulag, and the atom bomb. On the other side, if there had been no resistance to the Germans, there is - what? We can only guess.
I waver similarly over the recent war (I hate the euphemism "military action") in Iraq. No one could have been unmoved by those pictures of mutilated children and grieving adults, or of the chaos of cities deprived of all public services and subjected to mindless looting. But what would have been the sum of suffering if the coalition had never taken action? Again one can only guess. Saddam Hussein's regime was a monstrous one, which killed many more people over a period of years than the coalition did in a few weeks. The Marsh Arabs alone, subjected to a campaign of unrelenting genocide, died in far greater numbers. It seems certain that the barbarity and corruption would have continued.
In the end, my conclusion is that this was a righteous war but one started for the wrong reason. Repeated acts of genocide and the shameless violation of human rights, not the possible continuing existence of weapons of mass destruction, constitute the justification that works for me.
The most I now hope for is an emergence of some form of democracy in Iraq, and that Iraq's neighbours, frightened by the example of the nemesis that engulfed a state so close to them, may gradually retreat from their own despotic and intolerant forms of government.
The region is far too volatile and the Israeli-Arab conflict far too long-standing and bitter for me to have any expectation of a lasting peace.
I opposed the war before it began, wrote against it in the Times and marched against it in London. I believed then, and believe now, that this illegal and unprovoked invasion will lead to greater instability and suffering in the region than existed before it was launched.
But we should not overlook the damage it has done to us, and to our leaders: the damage to our reputation in the world, and to our self-respect. The lies and falsifications concocted by the two main aggressors and cravenly echoed by the appallingly docile American and British media will reverberate to our disgrace for generations to come. We in the west will of course quickly forget. The victims never will.
On April 2 2003, about two weeks into the war, I published an article on the subject commissioned by the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. I wrote:
"I have a bad feeling about this war. I think Saddam Hussein is an evil monster and I would rejoice to see him removed from power; but I don't think our soldiers should be in that country, killing its citizens and risking their own lives, to achieve that end... Saddam is not a serious enough threat to our safety to justify, either legally or morally, a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq; we cannot be certain of keeping civilian casualties within acceptable limits; even if victory is achieved the consequences of the war for the Iraqi people are unpredictable and may well make a bad situation worse; the war can only have the effect of inflaming Arab opinion against us and encouraging Islamist terrorism."
I still take this position, but I did not find it easy to reach, and I have not found it easy to hold to subsequently. I differ from those of my fellow-countrymen, on both the left and the right, who believe that whether to support or oppose the war was a simple issue, and who are 100% convinced of the rightness of their own opinion. Once this exceptionally arrogant, intransigent and imperialistic American administration had made up its mind to go to war, Britain was faced with the uncomfortable choice of either opposing the policy but not affecting the eventual outcome, or supporting it in the hope of exerting some control over it, and its sequels. I don't condemn Tony Blair unreservedly for taking the second course.
It is increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein's regime was an exceptionally evil one, and very unlikely that it would have fallen without armed intervention from outside. But in the end the question of legality still tips the balance for me. The ostensible justification of the war - to remove the threat of weapons of mass destruction - was always unconvincing and seems increasingly so as (at the time of writing) they fail to materialise. Invading a sovereign country without satisfying the normal criteria of a "just war" sets a very dangerous precedent in the post-cold-war era, and is unlikely to produce lasting peace and stability in the Middle East or the world. But we won't know for years whether the war did more harm than good, or vice versa.
I was against the war in Iraq because the American and British governments produced no evidence to substantiate their stated reasons for going to war. It thus appeared that either they were liars, or their intelligence services were half-witted.
It seems to me inconceivable that lasting peace and stability will come to the area. On the other hand there is evidence that fundamentalist terrorism has to be fought, and so some good may come out of acts of savage arrogance.
I was against the American-led military action in Iraq. I did all in my power as a citizen to oppose this action, including writing and calling Congress and the president, submitting letters to the editor, marching and giving money to the effort. I believed, and still do believe, that, however despicable Saddam Hussein was, nothing warranted our attack on the country. On the contrary, I believed this was wrong in setting a precedent for any other country wanting to dislodge another country's government. I also believed this action would seriously destabilise the Middle East and would prove - as in fact it has proven - a fertile recruiting ground for terrorists.
The invasion of Iraq was simply yet another monstrous assertion of American power and British subservience to that power. Weapons of mass destruction? Rubbish. Liberation of the Iraqi people? Rubbish. The invasion demonstrated utter contempt for the concept of international law and has brought about the death of thousands, anarchy and chaos. The invasion was a gangster act, a further step towards US domination of the world and control of the world's resources. But in this case it's not working.
Quite obviously the opposite - in spades.
I was in favour of the war in Iraq. Let me quote a poem by the great John Milton, called "The End of Violent Men":
Oh, how comely it is and how revivingTo the Spirits of just men long opprest!When God into the hands of their delivererPuts invincible mightTo quell the might of the Earth, th' oppressour,The brute and boist'rous force of violent men...He all their AmmunitionAnd feats of War defeatsWith plain Heroic magnitude of mind...Their Armories and Magazins contemns,Renders them useless, whileWith winged expeditionSwift as the lightning glance he executesHis errand on the wicked, who surpris'dLose their defence distracted and amaz'd.
Who could put it better than that? One can only congratulate the United States forces, and the soldiers of Great Britain.
And, as for settling things in the Middle East, if this won't help the process nothing will. Israel and the west must stick together.
The pre-emptive strike against Iraq was really an assault upon our native intelligence and whatever sense of decency we still possess. It now turns out - as though we didn't know it beforehand - that it was based on an outrageous lie - and will, if anything, encourage "terrorism" and imperil what chances we may have for world peace.
There is only one course for us Americans to take - an old-fashioned one: turn the scoundrel out. This applies to your chieftain, Tony Blair, who has played Jeeves to a doltish Bertie W - our (God help us) appointed chieftain, George W.
1. Utterly against military action.
2. Peace and stability in the Middle East might be possible when Israel withdraws from the land it has illegally occupied and tried to colonise since 1967; when a political (not military) solution is found to resolve the conflict; and a viable Palestinian state is established.
I would much rather trust the views of taxi-drivers on any matter of great political importance than those of writers and intellectuals. History shows that the latter almost always get it wrong. The Falklands war is a good recent example. I was one of a mere handful of writers contributing to Authors Take Sides on the Falklands who supported the action. In the event, that war freed the islanders from a tyrannous occupation; delivered a lesson to aggressors; and destroyed the wicked Argentinian junta in favour of democracy. The people of Britain, who supported the war by a large majority, were right; the authors, wrong.
I have felt no such certainty about the war in Iraq. Both for and against there were strong arguments. It always seemed unlikely that Saddam Hussein could be a threat to us; and so how could we justify an invasion of a sovereign country? I believe that the sovereignty of individual nations is a guarantee of liberty for all, against the very real threat of liberal fascism. I was opposed to Nato's interference over Kosovo, for that reason.
Nonetheless, in the case of Iraq, this was an evil regime, responsible for millions of deaths. I was impressed by Ann Clwyd's quiet but passionate witnessing to Saddam's horrors. A war would, in the end, save lives, and give freedom from fear to millions who had never known it, and who had otherwise no prospect of it. One had to trust one's leaders - now, it seems, mistakenly - that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; but for me this carried much less weight than the monstrousness of the regime. I felt too that Blair's conviction was - for once - convincing; that a man of sincere Christian faith would not make himself responsible for death and destruction without good reason. There are times when one simply has to trust one's country's leaders, who know more of the facts than we do.
So I supported the war, and still do; firmly, though never without self-doubt. When France and Germany came out against it, I became a stronger supporter of war. An alliance of Britain and the US has always been for the world's good; whereas Germany and France standing together reminded me too much of Vichy.
I certainly don't believe that intervention will bring lasting peace and stability in the region. Only justice for the Palestinians can bring any hope of that.
· Edited extracts from Authors Take Sides on Iraq and the Gulf War, to be published on March 7 by Cecil Woolf ( [email protected]).
http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4858153-110738,00.html
