Dan PleschFriday March 7, 2003
The idea that we can invade Iraq to bring democracy and freedom is a confidence trick designed to draw western liberals into providing legitimacy for old-fashioned conquest. We have been here before. In the late 19th century, Christian missionaries provided countless factual accounts of the barbarities of the heathen in Africa which were used to justify intervention and, in the end, the conquest, exploitation and partition of the continent. Iraq is a state created by the British empire after 1918 and was under London's influence until 1958. We have yet to come to terms with the cruelties of our own empire. But once again, local brutalities are being used to justify our own attacks.
We are told there is no alternative, and that we shouldn't refuse to do something good because we cannot set right every global wrong. But New Labour has, in fact, been working to make the world worse. Tony Blair personally intervened to weaken legislation to stop British companies selling arms to what he and President Bush call the world's worst leaders. If you want to set up in business selling killing machines you don't need a licence in Britain today. If you sit in Surbiton trading through the Cayman Islands using Russian pilots on Angolan registered planes, the prime minister wishes you well. Those who talk of Britain doing good in the world should explain why the government has still failed to implement effective arms export controls promised in opposition and developed in draft with help from Oxfam and Amnesty.
In 2000, the prime minister gave an "unequivocal" undertaking at the UN that Britain would negotiate the removal of its own (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction: another performance target that has been forgotten. Instead, he voiced no opposition as his closest ally consigned 40 years of global arms control treaties to the shredder. The list of abandoned agreements encompasses strategic cuts with Russia, the test ban treaty, the anti ballistic missile treaty, the biological weapons verification agreement and the small arms action plan. Blair then, with a straight face, tells us that controlling what he calls "weapons of mass destruction" is the greatest threat we face.
If the prime minister's concerns are to be taken seriously, he should pick up one of the many plans for the global management and elimination of these weapons developed by NGOs and other nations. And he should take these proposals to next month's conference in Geneva on implementing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Even aware of this background, some people have been convinced that the US is determined to bring democracy to Iraq. But when questioned, US officials reveal that there will be a "transition period" of several years before the Iraqis are deemed ready to go to the polls. Contrast this with eastern Europe after communism. In Czechoslovakia, its citizens were queueing up at the ballot box six months after the velvet revolution of 1989. If we are invading Iraq to introduce democracy, let us have a guaranteed date for elections, six months from the fall of Saddam.
Like the Czechs and Slovaks of the 1980s, the Iraqis know all about ballot boxes, trained to turn up and cast 100% of their votes for the regime. But, being neither white nor for the most part Christian, perhaps it's thought they will need a proper period of colonial administration to prepare them.
There is a workable alternative policy. EU engagement has helped strengthen democratic trends in Iran. Now Britain needs to support a return to the Oslo accords in Palestine and democracy in our central Asian and Middle Eastern allies. If there is a desperate hurry to install democracy, perhaps we could start in these countries. Meanwhile, in Iraq we should support containment with engagement - a strategy that has served us well with Iran, Libya and even the Soviet Union.
The final doublethink is to argue that we are doing all this to defend the UN and prevent it becoming another League of Nations. The Bushites are not the heirs of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. They are the heirs to those who kept the US out of the League, opposed involvement in the second world war and opposed the creation of the UN. Bush's head of arms control, John Bolton, has even argued that international law is not law at all. There will be no UN commander of the forces that attack Iraq and resolution 1441 does not provide explicit authorisation for the use of force.
People in Iraq will doubtless cheer at being freed from Saddam's gang - I would. But I would also have no illusion that the motives of the invaders are conquest of natural resources wrapped up in old fashioned racist stereotypes. Don't be conned into picking up the white man's burden.
· Dan Plesch is a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute[email protected]
