Debate: Was the war worth it?

This is an extended version of an article that appeared in 'The Cambridge Student' newspaper June 2003, between Dr Nick Megoran, anti-war campaigner, and Rabbi Julian Sinclair, outgoing Rabbi of the Cambridge Jewish congregation.

Dear Julian,

This may be a premature discussion, as mounting US losses in Iraq demonstrate the intensification of guerrilla resistance to the occupation.

Meanwhile at home Bush and Blair have been discredited by revelations that they comprehensively misled over Iraq's 'weapons of mass destruction' threat. Intelligence service leaks show that Blair repeatedly returned a report to be 'sexed up'. A British 'intelligence dossier' was exposed as a decade-old Ph.D. plagiarised from the internet. The International Atomic Energy Agency dismissed the US-UK 'evidence' that Niger supplied Iraq with uranium as a crude forgery. Hans Blix accused the US of systematically undermining him to fabricate an excuse for war.

Why? Last December George Friedman, head of pro-war intelligence agency Stratfor, dismissed Bush's WMD allegations as a 'bodyguard of lies'. He urged Bush to admit that he planned to end reliance on Israel and Saudi Arabia for regional dominance by conquering Iraq and using it to 'pressure' Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia itself. Thomas Woodrow, until recently a senior US government defence analyst, advocated war on Iraq as a 'marvellous opportunity' to control oil supplies.

I don't think that US interests were worth the thousands of casualties and the discrediting of our political system. Do you?

Regards,

Nick

Dear Nick,

No war can be justified easily or glibly. They all involve terrible suffering, including and this war was no exception. Nevertheless, I believe that the Iraq Conflict was justified.

Since the fall of Baghdad, journalists have discovered mass graves for thousands of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi victims. In Kirkuk last week they uncovered the grave of 200 children who had been buried alive. WE know about the extent of the torture and repression and we have seen the opulence of Hussein's numerous palatial residences, built while many of his people were starving. Baathist Iraq was a particularly awful place. It is hard to imagine that whatever regime replaces it won't be a big improvement for 20 million Iraqi's probably saving the lives of thousands. All this was not the main public rationale for going to war, but it cannot be excluded from a moral reckoning of the war's justice.

You claim that Bush and Blair "sexed up" intelligence reports to make the case for war more compelling. If true, it would be deplorable. But that's a long way from asserting that Iraq didn't have WMDs before the war. The UN inspectors documented Iraq's extensive inventories of illegal weapons throughout the 1990's, including 6500 litres of VX agent, Anthrax and Sarin etc just before the inspectors were thrown out in 1998. To credit the notion that Iraq had no WMDs in 2003, you have to believe that after the inspectors left, Iraq destroyed the weapons that it had refused to own up to when the inspectors were present. I find that a bizarre claim, whether it comes from George Galloway or from Donald Rumsfeld.

Yours, Julian

Dear Julian,

According to UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, by the time Clinton withdrew inspectors in 1998, 90-95% of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons had been 'verifiably eliminated', along with all WMD factories. After that, the potency of remaining agents would have expired, and Iraq lacked delivery systems to turn them into genuinely threatening weapons. Isolated components do not form a composite threat. Whilst 100% certainty is always impossible, there is no reliable evidence even remotely suggesting that Iraq posed any present threat.

The million Iraqi Shiites who recently made the pilgrimage to Karbala, chanting: "No to America!" lack your optimism over the war's impact. They despised Hussein, but understand US-UK hypocrisy. In the 1980s the US and UK helped Hussein acquire WMD and invade Iran, bolstering his regime against domestic and foreign opposition- when his brutality served our interests. This support vanished immediately he invaded pro-Western, oil producing Kuwait. In 1996 Madeleine Albright described the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by sanctions on medicines and sanitation systems as 'worth it'. Do you think we fought the war out of some suddenly-discovered love for the Iraqi people, or in pursuit of national interests? And what guarantee is there that our priorities have now changed?

Regards, Nick

Dear Nick,

Other former UN inspectors have given a very different view from Scott Ritter's. We won't resolve the evidential claims here. The truth will come out, one way or the other. At this point the argument is over the extent of one's cynicism about Western governments. Did they touch up the evidence to make it more compelling - reprehensible if they did - or did they fabricate the whole case ? My cynicism does not extend to embracing the latter claim.

This takes me to your question, did we go to war for ethical or self-interested reasons? The binary form of the question suggests to me a certain lack of moral discrimination which I sense in the anti-war movement. The answer is both I can agree with you that Bush is too close to the oil industry and Blair too concerned for his place in history, without either opinion invalidating the case for war. Both of them are amalgams of principle and self-interest. If one heaps the full weight of one's execration on Western hypocrisy, what moral register is left in which to speak of someone like Saddam Hussein? Bush and Blair are, like most of us, flawed people with mixed motives, but they don't kill and torture opponents with their bare hands.

Yours, Julian

Dear Julian,

I agree that the reasons for the war were complex, and do not doubt that Bush believed he was fighting evil. I suspect the deception over Iraq's threat convinced even himself, like the proverbial cop manipulating evidence to nail some man he believes to be dangerous. In such cases, precise facts do not matter.

But the facts matter profoundly. The list of the late twentieth-century's most bloody tyrants (Saddam, Pinochet, Suharto, Pol Pot), most infamous terrorists (the Contras, Al-Qaeda), and most repressive dictatorships (contemporary Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Uzbekistan) that the US has backed in recent years out of political and economic self-interest is melancholically long, and lengthening.

The pro-war lobby overlooks this, ensuring the perpetuation of repression and counter-violence. The anti-war movement, however, desires equal treatment of all malefactors through procedures of international law, such as the International Criminal Court. The arrest of Milosevic following the Hague Tribunal indictment, which gave domestic opposition a rallying target, is evidence that alternatives can work. Such a world would be less hospitable to tyrants, yet make it harder for the US to use violence and violent proxies to further its economic interests. Therefore the US vehemently opposes the ICC and continues backing tyrants around the world, emboldened by each new military success.

The result is a world less safe and less fair for all. No war is worth this.

Regards, Nick

Dear Nick,

I also applaud Milosovic's indictment in the ICC at the Hague. However, I´m surprised that you cite it to show the sufficiency of the multilateral approach to dealing with tyrants. Without the US-led intervention in former Yugoslavia, (after the UN had refused to get involved) Milosovic would not have been brought to justice, and the civil war and slaughter would have continued. The ICC can only punish tyrants post-facto. It cannot halt their tyrannies.

The UN and ICC are not yet the benign supra-national founts of international justice and legitimacy which I imagine we'd both like to see. They also run on political self-interest. The UN did not take military action against Saddam despite his flouting 17 Section 7 threats to International Peace) UN resolutions since 1991. France and Russia´s opposition to war had as much to do with the multi-billion pound oil contracts which they stood to lose as with pacifist ideals. We might wish that an international peace-keeping force had been available to remove Saddam Hussein. In fact only the US and UK were able and willing to. I think they did an incalculable service to Iraqis and the whole Middle East by doing so.

Yours, Julian

Dear Julian,

I certainly do not unreservedly support US-UK policy towards Serbia: the Hague Tribunal was a kangaroo court that refused to indict western leaders for war crimes. The ICC has been opposed by the US precisely because it is intended as a supra-national judicial body to which they would also be answerable, rather than a political tool of victors.

I was merely drawing a comparison. Milosovec was not removed by the US-led war, but an indictment acted upon by the Serbian population some time later. There was no 'second invasion'. Just as Hussein was not toppled by the first US-led Gulf War, there is no reason why he too could not have been removed by his own people under an ICC indictment, which would have given legitimate opposition groups an achievable target. As it is, the sanctions and threat of war helped bolster his own position as the champion of a people beleaguered by a tyrannical foe.

However, a popular nationalist or Islamist government, using oil revenues for the benefit of Iraq rather than multinationals, would certainly not have suited US strategic or economic plans for the region. US policy has consistently prioritised the avoidance of such a scenario.

Regards, Nick

--
'Debate: Was the war worth it?', The Cambridge Student: News Review 2002/2003 (June 2003): 3