The Israeli writer Uri Avnery once delivered a wickedly sharp open letter
to Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister who sent his army to defeat
in Lebanon. Enraged by Begin's constant evocation of the Second World War
likening Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Hitler in his Berlin bunker in 1945
Avnery entitled his letter: "Mr Prime Minister, Hitler is Dead."
How often I have wanted to repeat his advice to Bush and Blair. Obsessed
with their own demonisation of Saddam Hussein, both are now reminding us of
the price of appeasement. Bush thinks that he is the Churchill of America,
refusing the appeasement of Saddam. Now the US ambassador to the European
Union, Rockwell Schnabel, has compared Saddam to Hitler. "You had Hitler in
Europe and no one really did anything about him," Schnabel lectured the
Europeans in Brussels a week ago: "We knew he could be dangerous but
nothing was done. The same type of person [is in Baghdad] and it's there
that our concern lies." Mr Schnabel ended this infantile parallel by adding
unconvincingly that "this has nothing to do with oil".
How can the sane human being react to this pitiful stuff? One of the
principal nations which "did nothing about Hitler" was the US, which
enjoyed a profitable period of neutrality in 1939 and 1940 and most of 1941
until it was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. And when the
Churchill-Roosevelt alliance decided that it would only accept Germany's
unconditional surrender a demand that shocked even Churchill when
Roosevelt suddenly announced the terms at Casablanca Hitler was doomed.
Not so Saddam it seems. For last week Donald Rumsfeld offered the Hitler of
Baghdad a way out: exile, with a suitcase full of cash and an armful of
family members if that is what he wished. Funny, but I don't recall
Churchill or Roosevelt ever suggesting that the Nazi fόhrer should be
allowed to escape. Saddam is Hitler but then suddenly, he's not Hitler
after all. He is said TheNew York Times to be put before a war crimes
tribunal. But then he's not. He can scoot off to Saudi Arabia or Latin
America. In other words, he's not Hitler.
But even if he were, are we prepared to pay the price of so promiscuous a
war? Arabs who admire Saddam and there are plenty in Jordan believe
Iraq cannot hold out for more than a week. Some are convinced the US 3rd
Infantry Division will be in Baghdad in three days, the British with them.
It's a fair bet that hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqis will die. But in
the civil unrest that follows, what are we going to do? Are American and
British troops to defend the homes of Baath party officials whom the mobs
want to hang?
Far more seriously, what happens after that? What do we do when Iraqis
not ex-Baathists but anti-Saddam Iraqis demand our withdrawal? For be
sure this will happen. In the Shia mosques of Kerbala and An Najaf, they
are not going to welcome Anglo-American forces. The Kurds will want a price
for their co-operation. A state perhaps? A federation? The Sunnis will need
our protection. They will also, in due time, demand our withdrawal. Iraq is
a tough, violent state and General Tommy Franks is no General MacArthur.
For we will be in occupation of a foreign land. We will be in occupation of
Iraq as surely as Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And
with Saddam gone, the way is open for Osama bin Laden to demand the
liberation of Iraq as another of his objectives. How easily he will be able
to slot Iraq into the fabric of American occupation across the Gulf. Are we
then ready to fight al-Qa'ida in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan and
Pakistan and countless other countries? It seems that the peoples of the
Middle East and the West realise these dangers, but that their leaders
do not, or do not want to.
Travelling to the US more than once a month, visiting Britain at the
weekend, moving around the Middle East, I have never been so struck by the
absolute, unwavering determination of so many Arabs and Europeans and
Americans to oppose a war. Did Tony Blair really need that gloriously
pertinacious student at the Labour Party meeting on Friday to prove to him
what so many Britons feel: that this proposed Iraqi war is a lie, that the
reasons for this conflict have nothing to do with weapons of mass
destruction, that Blair has no business following Bush into the
America-Israeli war? Never before have I received so many readers' letters
expressing exactly the same sentiment: that somehow because of Labour's
huge majority, because of the Tory party's effective disappearance as an
opposition, because of parliamentary cynicism British democracy is not
permitting British people to stop a war for which most of them have nothing
but contempt. From Washington's pathetic attempt to link Saddam to
al-Qa'ida, to Blair's childish "dossier" on weapons of mass destruction, to
the whole tragic farce of UN inspections, people are just no longer fooled.
The denials that this war has anything to do with oil are as unconvincing
as Colin Powell's claim last week that Iraq's oil would be held in
trusteeship for the Iraqi people. Trusteeship was exactly what the League
of Nations offered the Levant when it allowed Britain and France to adopt
mandates in Palestine and Transjordan and Syria and Lebanon after the First
World War. Who will run the oil wells and explore Iraqi oil reserves during
this generous period of trusteeship? American companies, perhaps? No,
people are not fooled.
Take the inspectors. George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and
now, alas, Colin Powell don't want to give the inspectors more time. Why
not, for God's sake? Let's just go back to 12 September last year when
Bush, wallowing in the nostalgia of the 11 September 2001 crimes against
humanity, demanded that the UN act. It must send its inspectors back to
Iraq. They must resume their work. They must complete their work. Bush, of
course, was hoping that Iraq would refuse to let the inspectors return.
Horrifically, Iraq welcomed the UN. Bush was waiting for the inspectors to
find hidden weapons. Terrifyingly, they found none. They are still looking.
And that is the last thing Bush wants. Bush said he was "sick and tired" of
Saddam's trickery when what he meant was that he was sick and tired of
waiting for the UN inspectors to find the weapons that will allow America
to go to war. He who wanted so much to get the inspectors back to work now
doesn't want them to work. "Time is running out," Bush said last week. He
was talking about Saddam but he was actually referring to the UN
inspectors, in fact to the whole UN institution so laboriously established
after the Second World War by his own country.
The only other nation pushing for war save for the ever-grateful Kuwait
is Israel. Listen to the words of Zalman Shoval, Israeli Prime Minster
Ariel Sharon's foreign affairs adviser, last week. Israel, he said, would
"pay dearly" for a "long deferral" of an American strike on Iraq. "If the
attack were to be postponed on political rather than military grounds," he
said, "we will have every reason in Israel to fear that Saddam Hussein uses
this delay to develop non-conventional weapons." As long as Saddam was not
sidelined, it would be difficult to convince the Palestinian leadership
that violence didn't pay and that it should be replaced by a new
administration; Arafat would use such a delay "to intensify terrorist attacks".
Note how the savage Israeli-Palestinian war can only according to the
Shoval thesis be resolved if America invades Iraq; how terrorism cannot
be ended in Israel until the US destroys Saddam. There can be no regime
change for the Palestinians until there is regime change in Baghdad. By
going along with the Bush drive to war, Blair is, indirectly, supporting
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (since Israel still claims to
be fighting America's "war on terror" against Arafat). Does Blair believe
Britons haven't grasped this? Does he think Britons are stupid? A quarter
of the British Army is sent to fight in a war that 80 per cent of Britons
oppose. How soon before we see real people power 500,000 protesters or
more in London, Manchester and other cities to oppose this folly?
Yes an essential part of any such argument Saddam is a cruel, ruthless
dictator, not unlike the Dear Leader of North Korea, the nuclear
megalomaniac with whom the Americans have been having "excellent"
discussions but who doesn't have oil. How typical of Saddam to send Ali
"Chemical" Majid the war criminal who gassed the Kurds of Halabja to
tour Arab capitals last week, to sit with President Bashar Assad of Syria
and President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon as if he never ordered the slaughter
of women and children. But Bush and Blair said nothing about Majid's tour
either so as not to offend the Arab leaders who met him or because the link
between gas, war crimes and Washington's original support for Saddam is a
sensitive issue.
Instead, we are deluged with more threats from Washington about "states
that sponsor terror". Western journalists play a leading role in this
propaganda. Take Eric Schmitt in TheNew York Times a week ago. He wrote a
story about America's decision to "confront countries that sponsor
terrorism". And his sources? "Senior defence officials", "administration
officials", "some American intelligence officials", "the officials",
"officials", "military officials", "terrorist experts" and "defence
officials". Why not just let the Pentagon write its own reports in TheNew
York Times?
But that is what is changing. More and more Americans aware that their
President declined to serve his country in Vietnam realise that their
newspapers are lying to them and acting as a conduit for the US government
alone. More and more Britons are tired of being told to go to war by their
newspapers and television stations and politicians. Indeed, I'd guess that
far more Britons are represented today by the policies of President Chirac
of France than Prime Minister Blair of Britain.
http://argument.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=373102&host=6&dir=140
