Posted on 09/07/2002 8:07:32 PM PDT by What Is Ain't
A year on, it is astonishing how quickly memory has faded in some quarters, and moral clarity yielded to cowardly evasion. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the world united in its recognition of something appalling and new: unimaginable vulnerabilities had been exposed, and the rule book ripped up.
America swore to pre-empt further attacks, and the world nodded. "We are all Americans," declared an editorial in Le Monde - scarcely a journal known for its supine Atlanticism. Now, however, as battle with Iraq draws closer, the nodding has stopped. From the densely populated moral high ground one can hear only tutting and clucking.
Some of the most voluble of the tutters and cluckers are this country's most senior churchmen. The Archbishop of Canterbury designate, Dr Rowan Williams, was among 2,500 signatories to a petition drawn up by the Christian "peace group", Pax Christi, last month which - in its own pre-emptive attack - called any miltary action against Saddam Hussein "immoral and illegal".
On Thursday, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, expressed doubts that the prospective conflict would pass his own ethical tests - which included the endorsement of the UN, the support of the EU, and the compatibility of military action with "international law".
The absurdity of this position is that it elevates the UN and other supranational organisations to the lofty position once held in Christendom by the Holy See: instead of actually addressing the ethical content of the arguments advanced by the United States, the Archbishops pass the moral buck to Kofi Annan - and perhaps even to Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief.
They seem to imply that whatever the UN says is inherently moral - a feeble abdication of religious leadership at a time when it is most needed. Obviously it would be better if permanent members of the Security Council such as Russia and China back the US. But if they are persuaded, does that make an attack on Iraq more moral?
The loudest demands made of Britain and America are that they produce "evidence" of Saddam's development of weapons of mass destruction. In fact, there is no shortage of such evidence already in the public domain, thanks to the findings of the UN arms inspectors finally barred from Iraq in 1998, and the additional intelligence provided by defectors from Saddam's regime. That the Iraqi dictator has developed chemical and biological weapons is beyond question - his use of nerve gas against the Kurds in 1989 was the nearest modern equivalent to Hitler's gassing of the Jews.
The only point of controversy is how close Saddam is to constructing a nuclear device. But there is no serious doubt that if he has not done so already, he will do all in his power to achieve that terrifying objective as soon as possible - months, rather than years, from now.
All this is known to all the governments which could conceivably participate in a military strike on Iraq. The difference is that only Britain and America are prepared to do anything about it. President Chirac promised a year ago that "France will be in the front line in the combat against international terrorist networks, shoulder to shoulder with America, its ally forever".
Since then, he has shown how slippery the French definition of "forever" can be. In Germany, Gerhard Schröder fights for his political life, and swears that his country will play no part in a war with Iraq under his chancellorship (which may, of course, end this month).
There is a patronising tone to many of the objections emanating from continental Europe, as if Saddam were - to borrow the words used by Queen Elizabeth in Richard III - no more than a "bottled spider". But the Iraqi dictator is patently much more than that. It may be that he himself would never dare use his weapons of mass destruction pre-emptively against the West, knowing that to do so would trigger instant and overwhelming retaliation.
But much of the evil that Saddam has perpetrated has been perpetrated through intermediaries. There is strong evidence that Ramsi Yousef, convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was an Iraqi agent. Two weeks ago, The Telegraph disclosed that Saddam killed the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal because he refused to train al-Qaeda fighters based in Iraq.
Saddam has indeed waged war on two neighbouring countries: Iran and Kuwait. But it is no longer his ambitions to establish a regional imperium - such as they are - which are now most worrying. It is his vengeful determination to make Iraq the factory of weapons which will be used by other groups, under his sponsorship, against their mutual enemies in the West. Just as the Taliban facilitated al-Qaeda, so Saddam threatens to facilitate the next cohort of aggressors who hope to wage their Islamofascist war against the West. This threat, as the Prime Minister said last week, is "real and unique".
Twelve months after the destruction of the World Trade Center, there are still those who say that, on that day, America reaped what it had sown. In a sense, though not the sense they mean, they are right. September 11 marked the end of the old doctrine of "containment" with which Bill Clinton was so infatuated. The foreign policy of his presidency can be described as inertia punctuated by aggressive gestures which failed to solve the problems they sought to address and therefore compounded them.
Clinton's strikes against alleged al-Qaeda sites in Afghanistan and Sudan in August 1998 were seen in the Muslim world as such a paltry response to the threat posed by Osama bin Laden that they almost certainly made the attacks of September 11 more rather than less likely. Operation Desert Fox against Saddam in December of the same year was entirely justified: but it did not dislodge the Iraqi dictator.
Saddam's evil - repeatedly and bloodily demonstrated - should be the starting point of all debate about Iraq and the need for "regime change". It is hard for some, including, strangely, our religious leaders, to confront the reality of evil: it is easier to see the good in people, to hope for human decency and the scope for compromise. Sometimes, however, it is also morally lazy.
A year after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the West can no longer afford such indulgence. Even as we commemorate the dead this week, we must accept, sombrely but with a clear eye, that the task of preventing another such horror has only just begun.
All that tutting and clucking is coming, not from the high moral ground but from the fetid swamp of liberal socialism (densely populated as it might be).
On the high moral ground stand only one American and one Briton,
George w. Bush and Tony Blair.
Yes. Nice to see this openly stated in a widely-read newspaper.
Good point. An action may be immoral, even with UN approval - or it may be the only moral thing to do, even without UN approval.
UN approval has nothing whatsoever to do with the morality of an action, and implying that it does is a scary precedent.
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