They make it a desert…
It has been quite a week, and I’ve been watching it all from my fevered sick bed, metaphorically speaking. Despite everything that’s wrong about this war, it was a joy to see the statues coming down. Many people made a connection with the imagery of the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, including IDS who claimed to have initially believed he was looking at archive footage of the fall of the Ceauşescu regime — of course he did, Romania is well known for its sand and palm trees — without understanding how fatuous the comparison was.
Why fatuous? Because when the Soviet bloc collapsed, there were no US/UK troops on, say, Romanian soil, no invaders had pounded Bucharest with artillery, no Romanian children had been maimed, there were hundreds of thousands if not millions on the streets: the people themselves were saying, “Enough!” and taking power from the tyrants; and it was glorious.
The images from Baghdad were very different. Not only were there not
hundreds of thousands of people on the streets, there were not even
thousands; it is difficult to be certain from the television images, of
course, but there could not have been more than about three hundred
there when the big statue of Saddam in Fardus Square was pulled down — three hundred or
so out of a population of five million — and the statue was pulled down
in the end by Americans. As for the city, in the words of an Independent headline it is a city in flames
in a nation in chaos
. Robert Fisk describes the city now:
Baghdad is burning. You could count 16 columns of smoke rising over the city yesterday afternoon. At the beginning, there was the Ministry of Trade. I watched the looters throw petrol through the smashed windows of the ground floor and the fire burst from them within two seconds.
Then there was a clutch of offices at the bottom of the Jumhuriyah Bridge, which emitted clouds of black, sulphurous smoke. By mid-afternoon, I was standing outside the Central Bank of Iraq as each window flamed like a candle, a mile-long curtain of ash and burning papers drifting over the Tigris.
As the pickings got smaller, the looters grew tired and — the history of Baghdad insists that anarchy takes this form — the symbols of government power were cremated. The Americans talked of a “new posture” but did nothing. They pushed armoured patrols through the east of the city, Abrams tanks and Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles, but their soldiers did no more than wave at the arsonists. I found a woman weeping beside her husband in the old Arab market. “We are destroying what we now have for ourselves,” she said to him. “We are destroying our own future.”
None of this was unpredictable. The Iraqi regime was many things, but inefficient was not one of them. Remove a repressive regime and its police force and only an idiot would not see that anarchy is the predictable outcome. It seems, though, to have taken the “coalition” commanders by surprise, and although they are supposed to ensure order in the country they have invaded they have made little provision so far for doing so. Yes, some British troops shot bank robbers on Friday, but this was in self-defence rather than in the course of maintaining order. Some have said that it isn’t the job of soldiers to maintain civil order, but an invader who destroys the infrastructure of a country has certain legal responsibilities:
Bradford University peace studies professor Paul Rogers told BBC News: “Any occupying power that has destroyed a regime is responsible for maintenance of hospitals, medical services and food supplies.
“The British are failing to fulfil their responsibilities under the Geneva Convention.”
UK troops were “neither sufficient nor properly trained” to “maintain public order”, Professor Rogers added.
But then, one of the disturbing things about this war has been the application of double standards, almost at times as though the Geneva Convention should apply only to the Iraqis and not our forces. Americans taken prisoner are shown on television and this is disgusting, it is an appalling breach of the Geneva Convention; yet there is, apparently, nothing wrong with the many television images of US/UK troops forcing Iraqis to kneel on the ground, putting bags on their heads all the while bellowing at them in a foreign tongue.
The Iraqi regime was a brutal dictatorship, and the world is better off without it. Iraq, though, was not in every respect a terrible place to live, in much the same way as a German who was not actively an enemy of the Third Reich (of course, if you were Jewish you were an enemy whether you wanted to be or not) could live a good life until surprisingly late in the day. Leaving Israel aside, Iraq had the best health service in the Middle East, it had the cleanest water, it had electricity and before the imposition of sanctions a decent standard of living for its people, not all of whom were by any means hard core Saddamites. It was, paradoxically, the least corrupt regime in the area. Well, no, there is nothing paradoxical about it: a brutal regime will not hesitate to be brutal when it comes to punishing those who steal, and there is no reason why a brutal dictatorship need be a corrupt brutal dictatorship.
Those who so forcefully advocated the war, for all the claims that the “legal” basis for invasion was to disarm the regime of WMD they insisted it had (if so, then where are they and why has Saddam not used them?), made no secret of the wish to remove Saddam from power, to “liberate” the Iraqi people, and claimed that anyone opposing the war would be morally responsible for anyone killed by the Iraqi regime. Those of us who argued that war should be the absolute last resort, the final option when all diplomatic options had been exhausted, never said that removing Saddam would be a bad thing, or that if he stayed in power some people would not suffer; what we were saying was that waging aggressive war on the Iraqi people was wrong, and that the price of war would be misery and suffering for the ordinary Iraqis on a potentially vastly greater scale — however good the motives, however much the effort to limit the destruction, war changes everything, it is a wild card with uncontrollable and unpredictable effects; start a war and you are pretty much lighting the blue paper and standing back to see what is going to happen.
Thousands of Iraqis have been killed and maimed and injured, but the US/UK forces have been on the whole remarkably good at targeting what they want to target — OK, sometimes that seems to be their own troops, but let’s skip over that for now — so the slaughter has not been as bad as it might have been. Still, thousands of Iraqis — ordinary Iraqis, not Ba’ath Party thugs — are dead or crippled who would otherwise have been alive and healthy. If those whom a surviving Ba’ath regime had persecuted would have been the responsibility of the anti-war side, then these victims are the responsibility of the advocates of war, above all of Tony Blair who did so much to give G.W. Bush the war he wanted. And it is not yet over.
What of those who will die of disease because of the lack of clean water and the destruction of the Iraqi hospitals? Those who die in violence at the hands of their compatriots in the anarchy of the post-Ba’ath power vacuum? Those who develop hideous cancers because of the use of uranium-coated shells by the “coalition” forces? This is all assuming that this is more or less the end of it, that we get away with it, that a humane regime eventually comes into power in Baghdad, that there is little destabilisation of the Middle East as a result of the invasion and no further wars happen as a result of this one.
All of this death and suffering — to say nothing of those who die in terrorist attacks which take place because of the invasion, directly or indirectly — is our responsibility because our nation has waged a war of aggression on a country which was not threatening us. I can’t help thinking of the words of Galgacus (according to Tacitus, anyway): “They make it a desert and call it peace.”
In the past sixty years, there have been a number of wars we have been directly involved in: the Second World War, which we might have got away with staying out of but were certainly justified in entering as Hitler’s Germany was a blatant threat to anyone his weapons could reach; the Korean War, which was a UN-sanctioned multinational effort; Suez, which no one thinks was anything other than a catastrophic folly (as well as an illustration of how little the UK can depend on its oh-so-close allies in the USA); the Falklands War, a clearly justified response to an invasion (and incidentally another illustration of the undependability of the USA); Gulf War I, the very justifiable expulsion of an invading army from a sovereign state; the interventions in the Balkans, which were not legally justifiable but did at least have solid, humanitarian aims behind them, even if the execution seemed designed to make the humanitarian situation worse, not better.
This time, though, British tanks have rolled into a nation which was not threatening us (and if you insist that it was in fact threatening us, why has it collapsed in only three weeks while exacting so few casualties on the invaders?), without any legal sanction from the UN. The last time I saw such images of invading tanks advancing into a country like that I was looking at film of the Third Reich’s panzer divisions entering Poland, entering France, entering the USSR. I never thought I would see British forces do this. Unprovoked invasion should not ever be something civilised, liberal democracies undertake. It is profoundly dishonourable for the most powerful nations on Earth to set about the destruction of one of the weakest (again, if you deny it is one of the weakest, why did it collapse so rapidly?). It is a betrayal of our heritage, of everything our society is supposed to stand for, and it is shameful that we have done this thing.
© DC 2003. All rights reserved.