A question of guilt

Quick to damn others, Robin Cook is lamentably slow to accept his part in the deaths of many Iraqis

How many Iraqis has Robin Cook killed? Not by the favoured Baath Party means of feeding them into plastic shredders or gassing them in their villages, but indirectly through the policies he endorsed? It's hard to be precise - the body counters in Saddam's Iraq always needed more time - but the death toll must run into five figures and hits six if you believe the more gruesome claims about the effects of the sanctions he enforced. Like many other opponents of the Iraq war, Cook shows no trace of self-doubt or any inkling that he may be required to answer hard questions. In an article in the Independent last week, he was certain that the only person who must explain himself was the Prime Minister. Tony Blair 'owes the country answers to some troubling questions,' he wrote.

The failure to find chemical and biological weapons had made the Government's justification for war 'palpably absurd'. The war was unnecessary, he implied; a capricious campaign mounted by a lying Prime Minister whose sole aim was to fawn before the Great Satan, George W. Bush.

Cook was right in one respect: we could have carried on following the policies he advocated when he was Foreign Secretary. There was no pressing reason to upset the status quo, beyond the fact that the status quo was barbaric. The world's refusal to support the attempted Iraqi revolution of 1991 had left the country in the worst of all possible worlds: ravaged by the consequences of Saddam's 'pre-emptive' wars against Iran and Kuwait; stuck with Saddam and his torture chambers; and crippled by sanctions.

How many were killed isn't as easy to judge as it appears. In August 1999, Unicef said that 'if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half-a-million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight-year period 1991 to 1998'.

Denis Halliday, the UN's humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998, saying: 'We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.' To their evidence must be added the human cost of leaving Saddam in place: the tens of thousands he massacred in 1991; the 100,000 Kurds and Turks ethnically cleansed between 1991 and 2003; and the routine rape, mutilation and execution of political opponents.

Then there was the bombing. There are many questions Cook isn't asked by the BBC. Are you pleased Saddam's gone? is my favourite, but there's also: what do you feel when you see the mass graves being opened up? How would you explain your effective support for the continuation of the regime to its victims? Good follow ups would be: why did you join with the Clinton administration in launching a vicious and pointless bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998 without international agreement, and the bombing of Kosovo without UN agreement? Why did you support freedom for the peoples of Yugoslavia but not the peoples of Iraq?

The strikes of 1998 were merely the most spectacular attacks. The aimless bombing of Iraq continued on a smaller scale throughout Cook's time as Foreign Secretary. No one knows how many Iraqis were killed, but it's fanciful to imagine that the raids were bloodless.

Add these figures together and the price of containment was about 600,000 lives. The last estimate I saw for civilian deaths in the war was 2,500, although, again, precision is impossible. The case against containment and for overthrowing Saddam - or against Cook and for Blair - appears overwhelming.

The uncertainty is in the formulation 'sanctions have killed half-a-million children', which ignored the culpability of the tyrant of Iraq for the state of the tyranny of Iraq (a Stalinist refusal to look a murderer in the eye, which was born on the far Left in the 1990s, and had spread just about everywhere by the spring of this year).

Infant mortality in the Kurdish independent statelet in northern Iraq, which was protected from Saddam by the RAF and USAF, was half the rate of the rest of Iraq, even though it had to cope with the same UN sanctions. The Baathist elite could live very well on the proceeds of smuggling oil and stealing bread from the mouths of the starving. As General Tommy Franks said when his troops broke into Saddam's apartments, the UN wasn't running an oil-for-food programme in Iraq, but an oil-for-palaces programme.

But the ease with which Saddam survived and prospered under sanctions makes the disaster of containment all the grimmer. The peaceful alternatives were to drop sanctions and, presumably, the air cover offered to the Kurds and Shia, and pretend that Iraq was a normal country, or have 'smart sanctions' which caused fewer deaths.

Beyond the obvious difficulty that both these options would have left the Baathist secret police forces free to go about their business lies the record of the Clinton administration Cook and Blair followed in New Labour's first term. It showed no desire to take Iraq off the rack. If the chads in Florida had hung differently, and Al Gore was in the White House, sanctions and Saddam would still be in place, and Cook would, presumably, be happy.

During the war, I heard many a bishop say that violent means don't justify noble ends. None addressed the greater evil of means without an end; perpetual torment without the possibility of relief.

The war has exposed a parochialism among many right-thinking, Left-leaning people. We've seen passionate opponents of the smallest infringement of human rights in Britain evading slaughter in Iraq; left-wingers who count themselves the friends of the oppressed abandoning their Kurdish and Iraqi comrades; and the British cheerleaders of Baathism treated as dissidents who deserve fraternal protection from fascist New Labour. At the root of all such casuistry is the inability of the comfortable inhabitants of the developed world to realise how bad the worst can be.

I suspect the reason journalists aren't asking Cook if he is finding the air on the moral high ground too rarefied for his leathery lungs is that the liberal-minded can't come to terms with the miserable history of sanctions against Iraq. Not so long ago, sanctions were the favoured tool of the Left. They were the best weapon in the arsenal of 'soft diplomacy'; a means of applying pressure without resorting to war. They worked against South Africa but not against Iraq because, in the end, the South African ruling class preferred democracy to being cut off from the global economy. Saddam's sole motivation was to keep himself in power. If tens, or hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis starved, if Iraq's trade was wrecked, how did that harm him?

In short, Iraq was worse than South Africa, whatever Nelson Mandela says. Hundreds of thousands had died in failed uprisings since 1975. There wasn't a half-free press or quarter-free judiciary or single independent element of civil society from which opposition could grow, which is why the Americans are having such trouble rebuilding the country.

The options for dealing with so thoroughgoing a tyranny were pathetically limited. You could have left it alone, continued with sanctions or invaded. Blair's critics include many who are fond of beginning the answer to any question with: 'It's more complicated than you think.'

In the case of Iraq, it wasn't: the choices were brutally and terribly simple. The desire not to face them explains the evident relief with which the media class has turned to discussing who said what to Andrew Gilligan or the sexing up of dossiers. These are satisfyingly small issues which confirm prejudices - 'Alastair Campbell's a bastard!' 'You can't trust Tony Blair!' - rather than confront them.

You'd never guess from the papers and television of the past month that the British Army controls a third of Iraq and that Britain will have a large voice in its future governance. With the honourable exception of a few Labour backbenchers, whose number, I should say in fairness, includes Robin Cook, no one has been pressing Blair on the nature of the postwar settlement.

Readers may object that Britain went to war to destroy weapons of mass destruction rather than to bring an end to despotism, and those weapons haven't been found. All I can say in reply is: so what? The consequence of the war was an end to despotism and, for a few weeks, the British Army was the armed wing of Amnesty International, whether it knew it or not.

After noting all the valid objections to war, I suspect historians may still look back with amazement at a British centre-Left which put up with everything Tony Blair did for years, but couldn't forgive him for his part in the downfall of the worst tyrant on the planet.

Once you get past Tony Blair...there isn't much left to talk about on the left side of politics in the UK. Robin Cook simply tries to get himself into position should the Tony fall. Robin Cook has little if any public support other an being a mouthpiece for the liberal cause.

The most interesting item is that the BBC has rarely, if at all, talked about human rights abuses of Saddam since the war ended. They avoid the topic totally. In fact, you don't even hear Amnesty International talk about the change in government...and the improvement of human rights in Iraq. But both groups do want to talk about Gitmo and the US prisoners there.

I don't know about the history of Amnesty International, but I do know that in the last couple years they have been a vulgar lefty joke; they are more willing to denounce alleged human rights abuses in the USA than to denounce bloody dictators.

They were positively resentful that America liberated Iraq: they ignored Saddam's mass graves, questioned our motives, and refused to support the liberation as that would be too "political." I'm glad I never gave these disgusting people a penny.

In the eyes of Amnesty International, heavy-handed regulation of the citizens by a regime that styles itself as 'socialist' and gives Judeo-Christian religions principles short shrift is not oppression, it is merely re-educating its population in the new realities. By that standard, the US is guilty of high crime in its treatment of foreign and domestic prisoners, and its regulation of various ethnic groups. But if this nation were to systematically root out all traces of religious influence, and embark on a program of fully nationalizating various industries, beginning with medicine and extending to most industrial enterprises, most of their objections to "injustices" in this country would disappear. Their agenda is similar to that of ACLU in many ways.

Their objective has little to do with the physical well-being of people in prison. It has everything to do with political correctness taken to an international level.

Wow and in the Guardian! I cannot understand the people who are blind to the facts of the improvement for the Iraqi people and whose finger pointing is reserved for the US or Tony Blair.

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