William Shawcross: Justice demands invasion of Iraq

The Australian ^ | March 20 2003 | William Shawcross

[knighthawk]

AS the war against Saddam Hussein comes closer, the prospect becomes more daunting. No one should be blithe about going to war. All wars have unintended and unexpected consequences.

But the flip side is also true. When all other avenues have been tried, war sometimes becomes the necessary last resort. To flinch from it becomes far more dangerous than to accept its dread inevitability, as we learned between 1933 and 1939.

The French would like us to believe we are rushing into war. Nonsense. For 12 years Hussein has defied UN demands that he hand over and destroy his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs. They have been "12 years of humiliation for the UN" in the words of Britain's Foreign Minister Jack Straw. Twelve years in which the international community has failed to enforce its own laws against one of the vilest dictators on earth.

This is a man who has caused the deaths of more than a million Muslims, used chemical weapons against the Iranians and the Kurds, invaded and terrorised Kuwait, tried to murder a former US president, been linked to the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Centre, used Stalinist methods of terror on his own people and made the most diabolical attempt to create the deadliest weapons known, in defiance of the world. And yet the French and others say he needs more time? This is not a joke, it's a mockery of any hope for a system of collective security.

Remember resolution 1441, whose every word the French co-authored and which the Security Council unanimously approved on November 8? That gave the Iraqi dictator a "final opportunity" to obey the 16 other binding resolutions he had ignored since 1991, and to disarm fully, completely and immediately. Inspectors were to be allowed back into the country from which he had illegally barred them since 1998. They were not there to search for weapons but to verify his disarmament. U2 surveillance flights under UN control were to resume. Iraqi scientists were to be interviewed privately, or even abroad.

None of this has happened. Instead, Iraq's response to 1441 has been complete contempt of its legal requirements. In place of disarming, it has published a blatantly false declaration of its WMD, forced the inspectors into wild-goose chases in which (to mix a metaphor) they are having to look for noxious needles in a haystack the size of France, made it all but impossible for its scientists to give unmonitored interviews to the UN, and blocked, until recently, U2 overhead surveillance flights.

I recently went to see Ken Pollack, the author of The Threatening Storm: The Case For Invading Iraq. Pollack used to deal with Iraq on Bill Clinton's national security council. His book has been praised for setting out clearly and coolly the choices the world has faced with Hussein. Pollack is no cheerleader for the Bush administration, but he does applaud the fact that they have finally grasped this dangerous, painful nettle. Why? "I think that after 9/11 they were deathly afraid of the combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists," he says.

Hussein has always been further ahead on his WMD programs than we thought. In the late 1980s, US intelligence thought Iraq was five to 10 years from building a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Authority thought he had no such program. In 1991, the IAEA's inspectors found he was less than two years from producing a weapon. In the '90s, the inspectors found important weapons mostly because of information from defectors. Since the inspectors were compelled to leave in 1998, new defectors have said that Hussein has started a new nuclear bomb program with new methods of concealing it.

Terry Taylor, a British former senior weapons inspector, says that in 1998 "Saddam had everything to make a nuclear weapon except the fissile material. We don't know if they have yet got fissile material, enriched uranium." But we do know it is around. A few months ago, some was intercepted on the Bulgarian-Turkish border. And, as Taylor points out, Hussein has still not accounted for 34.4 tonnes of highly sophisticated HMX explosive, crucial to any implosion device (and the IAEA inspectors have reported it missing).

We simply do not know how close to a nuclear bomb he now is. But if he gets one, he has said he wants to turn Iraq into a "superpower" that will dominate the Middle East and "liberate" Jerusalem. Remember, we are dealing here with a psychotic mass murderer who is also an insane optimist.

Hussein's victory in acquiring nuclear weapons would encourage others, such as North Korea, to believe there are no restraints. It would be a defeat for the UN and would risk far worse conflagration. It is not a risk any responsible leader can take.

We cannot walk away yet again while this man conspires to build weapons that he thinks will make him untouchable and with which he could kill millions of people.

William Shawcross is author, most recently, of Deliver Us from Evil: Warlords, Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2000). A longer version of this article appeared in The Independent.

[knighthawk]

Why this paper (The Independent) is wrong about Bush and Blair's stance on Iraq

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=376643

Attacks on the premier and the president are ignorant and simplistic, writes William Shawcross
09 February 2003


The abuse that Tony Blair is receiving for his stand against Saddam Hussein is outrageous. You would never know from his more intemperate critics that the world faces a really serious dilemma. How does it best deal with the intransigence of evil, made manifest by the Iraqi dictator?

Argument and anxiety over going to war are proper and vital, but Mr Blair's opponents go way beyond debate. Churchmen line up to denounce Mr Blair (a committed Christian) as immoral, unchristian or both. The Prime Minister is attacked as President George Bush's poodle, and his alleged owner is abused as an "idiot". The Independent on Sunday has published many assaults which I think are quite wrong. On Thursday night, Newsnight's invited audience treated the Prime Minister as if he had crawled out from under a stone.

The Daily Mirror recently filled an entire front page with a montage of Blair with red stained hands. BLOOD ON HIS HANDS it read. This was the cover of yet another two-page rant by John Pilger. He wrote that the Bush administration is "the Third Reich of our times". He denounced Mr Blair as a "liar" and a "coward".

Then there is Tony Benn. Before his self serving jaunt to Baghdad, Mr Benn had the temerity to declare, "I will see women and children who will die in a few weeks because the Prime Minister has decided to kill them."

The odious nature of such remarks was compounded by Mr Benn's unctuous interview with Saddam Hussein. Viewers would never have guessed from Mr Benn's words or demeanour that President Saddam is a bloodstained psychopath who has oppressed and tortured his own people for decades, has invaded two neighbours and killed at least a million people.

Nor, crucially, could they have understood that for the last 12 years he has mocked the United Nations and international law by refusing to surrender the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons he is known either to have or to be seeking. Mr Benn did not blink when the tyrant told him, "Every fair minded person knows that when Iraqi officials say something they are trustworthy ... Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever."

The Prime Minister's critics are so certain of their rectitude that they can never even consider whether the world, as well as Iraq itself, might benefit from the strong stand taken by him and by President Bush. Mr Benn sees himself as a peacemaker, Mr Blair as a warmonger. The opposite is true.

In 1991, after Iraq was expelled from Kuwait (in the face of just such criticisms as are being made today) the Security Council passed binding resolution 687 which stressed that "international peace and security" could not be restored to the area unless Iraq gave up all its weapons of mass destruction. Over the next 12 years Saddam defied this and all subsequent resolutions. As a result sanctions, imposed by the UN until he disarmed, had to remain in place and his people have suffered greatly.

Last November, challenged by Mr Bush and Mr Blair to enforce its resolutions, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 unanimously – an extraordinary achievement. This offered Saddam a "final opportunity" to disarm and warned of "serious consequences" if he did not.

The chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, has now said that Iraq is still not disarming. Last week the US Secretary of State Colin Powell described in compelling detail the way in which the Iraqis are trying to conceal their illegal weapons. Jack Straw says there are 20,000 Iraqi counter intelligence agents working to frustrate the 110 men and women from the UN. It is quite evident that Saddam is in "material breach" of 1441, as he has been of 687 and other resolutions for years.

A choice has to be made. Either the world can continue to be steadfast and compel Saddam to disarm as 1441 and many other binding resolutions require. Or we can return to the path of least resistance, as proposed by the French, the Germans and others, and "give the inspectors more time" – much more time.

Superficially, that is the easier road to take. But consider what it would mean. The inspectors will still not be able to disarm Saddam – because disarmament can only happen if the Iraqi regime takes the lead – and it is not doing so even while faced with "serious consequences". They will remain only at his pleasure. The US and British troops around Iraq's borders cannot stay indefinitely in the desert. Their departure would be a huge victory for Saddam, showing that he had outfaced not just the United States but also the United Nations.

The French and the Russians would soon argue that Saddam containment had worked, sanctions were no longer needed and normal business could resume – particularly with French and Russian oil companies.

Saddam would proceed apace on his infernal factories for weapons of mass distruction, financed by his new oil revenues. He would still murder and torture Iraqis. He would soon have nuclear devices and thus the means to terrorise the entire region. He would seek to dominate the world's oil market. He would threaten Israel. He would be untouchable. That's not all. America's friends could no longer trust the United States and its enemies would no longer be daunted by it. Chaos, radicalisation and proliferation would be the name of the new game – it is beginning already in North Korea.

The protesters demand that any action against Saddam must take place through the UN. I sympathise with that principle. But remember Slobodan Milosevic, another recalcitrant tyrant. While Europe temporised in Bosnia in the 1990s, he terrorised.

In early 2000, he ignored all warnings that he would be bombed unless he stopped his assault upon the Kosovar Muslims. A Security Council resolution was impossible because the Russians made clear that they would veto it. None the less, Nato, led by Mr Blair and President Clinton, attacked – despite protests from Mr Benn and many of the same people also opposed to action against Iraq. As a result, the Muslims of Kosovo were liberated from ethnic cleansing by the Serbs and Milosevic later fell. Was it immoral to achieve this without a Council resolution? No.

Over 12 years we have failed in our promise to protect the Middle East by disarming Saddam. The consequences have been awful, especially for the Iraqis. Do the critics of Mr Blair and Mr Bush think that the UN should now just forget about the "serious consequences" threatened in Resolution 1441? If so, we can say goodbye to the United Nations as the principal forum for seeking peace and security worldwide.

The Prime Minister's critics maintain that the entire Arab world will be united against an attack on Saddam. Really? Is that why Arab governments are now desperately trying to persuade him either to accept 1441 in its entirety or to go into exile? The neighbours are longing to see the back of him. Washington has made clear it would welcome such an outcome. The US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday that no one wants war and there is still time for Saddam to decide to disarm.

I hope that Saddam can be disarmed or removed without war. If it does happen, Mr Bush and Mr Blair should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. If there has to be war, it will cause suffering and innocent deaths. (Many innocent Iraqis who have died since 1991 would have been saved if the world had long ago compelled Saddam to obey its rules.) But the consequences of appeasing Saddam yet again risk much more death and destruction. Tony Blair told Parliament recently. "The threat is real, and if we do not deal with it, the consequence of our weakness will haunt future generations."

He is right. There are times when the use of force is essential in the pursuit of peace.

And yet marchers burn effigies of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, not Saddam. This seems to me to be a terrifying moral myopia. It is grotesque to call Mr Blair and Mr Bush criminals – the criminal is the odious despot of Baghdad.

William Shawcross is the author of 'Deliver Us From Evil – Warlords, Peacekeepers and a World of Endless Conflict' (Bloomsbury)

[knighthawk]

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