Anyone for Iraq

I got this one TOTALLY wrong. A right war for the wrong reasons. And don't get me started on the lack of a plan for after the invasion...



So then, this Iraq business: what's going on? (hey, it's a miserable Monday morning; what do you expect to be on my mind?!)

Well, firstly of course we should look at the good news. Firstly, there are now UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. They are doing their job rather well (despite attempts by Dubya's cronies to smear the reputation of Hans Blix, the chief inspector. So desperate are they for the oil...erm, I mean for the war, that they leaked numerous stories to the press questioning his ability, his impartiality and, as we're talking about the Republican right here, probably his sexuality) and should have conducted numerous inspections at hundreds of sites by the time January 27th, the deadline for the inspectors' first report, rolls around.

Secondly, Iraq actually bothered themselves to produce what they say is a full and complete list of all weapons in the country. As both Europe and America could check the veracity of this document by simply having a look at the receipts for the millions of pounds worth of weapons that we sold to Iraq in the 80's, one would hope that Iraq would have provided a full and complete list.

Finally, the nations of the Gulf are quietly starting to make it clear that they will comply with any fresh UN resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq should they fail to comply with the program of inspections. The prospect of a Middle-Eastern conflagration of pant-shitting proportions has thus receded somewhat, though one should always remember that the will of the Middle Eastern governments does not always (or in some cases, ever) represent the will of the Middle Eastern people.

Okay, so that's the good news. Well...good if you're anti-war in Iraq anyway. However, as is always the case, there is ample bad news to balance it out. And that bad news has led to my amending my rather fervent belief that we should not be joining Dubya in his quest to get more oil by means of force. But I'll get to that presently; for now, on with the bad news from the Gulf:

First of all, the weapons inspectors are not getting what they call "genuine co-operation". In other words, it looks like that nice Mr. Hussein is going to stall and procrastinate just like he did last time. That will mean that America will have all the reasons they need to attack. With luck, they'll bother themselves to get a fresh UN resolution to authorise such a course of action, but don't hold your breath expecting them to do so.

If that were not enough, despite this lack of co-operation the weapons inspectors have still been able to find some weapons that were not declared by Iraq. They only amounted to a few empty chemical warheads, but that would seem to be an indicator that Iraq does indeed have or is developing weapons of mass destruction. Again, this alone is pretty much all America needs to attack. Maybe it's not strictly speaking the "smoking gun" that Dubya is itching for, but it's close enough.

Finally, and probably most convincingly, the build up of American (sorry, Allied) forces in the Gulf is now so large that it would be economic suicide not to use them. The reason being, once you've spent so much money getting an Army to the other side of the world, feeding them, and equipping them, it would be disastrous for that money to effectively be poured down the drain by not using them. In other words, no matter what is said in the UN, no matter what else the inspectors find (or don't find) in the coming weeks, and no matter what Dubya's speechwriter tells him to say, it would seem 99% certain that there is going to be a war. If we take it as read that there is going to be a war, there would seem to be only one pertinent question.

What the hell are we going to do? By 'we' I mean the UK. At the moment, our Glorious Leader Blair is taking a lot of criticism from both domestic and overseas critics. As the leader of a supposedly left wing political party, many of his own supporters are uneasy to say the least about our taking part in a war of questionable motivation. And as America's only ally, he is being accused of lending legitimacy to the actions of a...well, I don't have enough time to list the derogatory terms that have been applied to Dubya, but I'm sure you get the idea. This would appear to be a lose-lose situation for Blair and the Labour party in general.

However, this is not necessarily the case. At the moment, various dignitaries of sundry other nations are pontificating at length about what SHOULD be done to Iraq. Deposing Saddam and replacing it with a regime that will treat the Iraqi people with the respect and dignity due to them as human beings comes (rightly) top of this list. All of these nations seem to have the rather sweet and naive belief that, once America has done the business and deposed of Saddam (assuming that they do; a recent US military war game exercise that was essentially a dry-run for the war ended in embarrassment when the Iraqi side inflicted massive losses on the American team), they will listen to these mainly European anti-war advocates when it comes to drawing up the plans for a postwar government in Iraq. This view is about as far removed from reality as the idea that Dubya is a statesmanlike leader who wants peace.

Can you explain to me just why America's leadership will be inclined to share responsibility for the running of this oil-rich country? The American people will be almost as one in supporting their government’s rejection of any outside interference. After all, it will have been their country who did the fighting (though if we're brutally honest, it won't be their country that provides most of the corpses...), and as Americans are by and large a patriotic bunch, it will take barely any rabble-rousing and demagoguery to shift public opinion to the "Fuck you, we're going to do what we want!" mindset of the Dubya and his merry men.

As a brief interjection, lest you still doubt that this war is about oil and not, as the rhetoric would have it, improving the lives of innocent Iraqi's and removing an unelected and brutal dictator, I would point to the fact that the US today offered amnesty to all of the "evil and brutal" Iraqi leadership if they give up without a fight. Not exactly the actions of a nation who wish to bring an evil man to justice (though Operation Paperclip and similar initiatives, which saw Nazi scientists being granted amnesty by the Allies in exchange for their knowledge, shows that justice has never been high on the agenda in international relations...). And should we believe that a US sponsored Iraqi leadership would be any better? Why not ask the people of Uzbekistan, who's current paranoid despot, Karimov, is one of the world leaders in human rights abuses...but who, thanks to his decision to allow US troops to be stationed in his country, enjoys the full support of the US government. Maybe these two facts don't add up to a dim future for Iraq no matter who wins, but history would tend to suggest that they do. Unless....

Well, unless Tony Blair actually has does possess the morals and conscience that he has rammed down our throats at every opportunity. If we are the only other nation involved in an attack on Iraq, then we're the only other nation with the authority to have any say in a postwar Iraqi government. And that might actually mean that Dubya doesn't get things entirely his own way as he did in, for example, Afghanistan (where you can now barely get moved for American Oil men who are involved in setting up the new government).

And lest we forget, getting rid of Hussein would be a very good thing. That is the one thing that both pro and anti war pundits are in total agreement about. It's just that I have a nasty suspicion that if the US was left to this war on it's own, it is extremely likely that the misery of the Iraqi people will continue. As I've said, America doesn't have a good record for installing benevolent puppets in it's client countries (check out http://www.rimbaud.freeserve.co.uk/dictators.html if you want confirmation of this), and I don't imagine that anyone in the White House will give a crippled crap about their further suffering in Iraq just so long as the oil is flowing.

For that matter, no one nation has a good record on that sort of thing. It's only when more than one country gets involved that anything is done to address human rights abuses (the Nuremburg trials after WW2 and the current trials of the assorted nefarious Balkan Bastards would seem to be proof of that), and even then I'm not so foolish as to believe that the UK alone would make much difference. Yet if more nations bit the bullet and committed themselves to this inevitable war, we could perhaps ensure that the criminals of Iraq get punished, that the people get some sort of relief from tyranny, and that the criminals in America who pushed this just war for selfish and unjust reasons onto us all don't get the money out of it that they're hoping. All of these reasons are good ones, and that's why I for one am no longer opposed to war. Have fun making your own mind up.