- What a pleasure to hear someone actually opting for the
plain truth. One morning last week I heard a New York Times correspondent
being asked on the radio if he believed war could be averted with Saddam
Hussein in power. No, he said. The substance of the journalist's position
was that George Bush would not go into the next election with Saddam shouting
abuse from Baghdad. One can just visualise the Democrats' TV ads. They
flash up a picture of Osama bin Laden and the commentary says: "George
Bush promised to bring him in dead or alive." And then a picture of
Saddam: "He promised to bring him in." And then a picture of
George W: "Where are they George?"
-
- It is a prospect to chill the heart of the toughest campaigner.
Mr Bush knows he will have little good news on the economic front to woo
the electorate. There is muttering aplenty in the heartland about how he
is the rich son of a rich father who cares too much for rich folks. If
the President can't tell Americans that he's made their world (as distinct
from "the world") a safer place, he has nothing at all to offer.
-
- The op-ed pages of US newspapers have been full of sceptical
pieces about Bush and the looming war. Here's Frank Rich writing in The
New York Times on Pearl Harbor Day, last 7 December: "History will
eventually tell us whether Pearl Harbor Day 2002 is the gateway to a war
as necessary as the Second World War, or to a tragedy of unintended consequences
redolent of the First World War. A savage dictator is delivering a 'full'
accounting of his weapons arsenal that only a fool would take for fact,
and a President of the US is pretending (not very hard) to indulge this
UN rigmarole while he calls up more reserves for the confrontation he seeks."
-
- Yet many in media and political Britain have failed to
grasp this reality. Transfixed by the machinery of diplomacy, they have
not understood the opposite ambitions of Saddam Hussein and his nemesis
in waiting, George Bush.
-
- Over the past year numerous journalistic colleagues have
told me Bush didn't want to go to war, or that wiser counsel in Washington
would prevent the inexorable move towards conflict we are now witnessing.
Get real, my friends. If Saddam isn't on a plane to somewhere sunny soon,
then war is inevitable.
-
- I have been warned against writing a piece that howls
"I told you so"; but allow me just the smallest bit of space
to restate what I've been saying for 18 months. The game has always been
to get rid of Saddam. Regime change has never meant containing the threat
of Saddam or changing his behaviour. As Ari Fleischer, the White House
spokesman, put it: "Saddam disarming is the mother of all hypotheticals."
-
- Bush knew that he could depend on Saddam screwing up
the inspections and delivering a plausible justification to oust him. While
we can argue all day and night about the motives for ousting Saddam, don't
ever doubt the goal.
-
- Even if Tony Blair believed that disarmament is the goal,
President Bush has never had any doubts. When the White House talks of
ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, it means overthrowing Saddam
or forcing him into exile.
-
- We haven't been told the truth by Washington because
the White House believes, in the immortal words of Jack Nicholson in A
Few Good Men, we "can't handle the truth". According to this
world view, hard men must make ruthless choices so that we can sleep easily
in our beds. The choices made and the actions that flow from them will
be justified in the lofty rhetoric of human rights. Get ready for a new
generation of heart-wrenching images. Now Iraq's torture victims are poster
of the month, then it will be the inmates of North Korea's gulags. But
you can rest easy if you are a friend like General Dostum, the murderous
warlord in Afghanistan ö we won't embarrass you with denunciations
from the White House or disagreeable prosecutions or investigations.
-
- According to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike,
Saddam is a potential threat and is weak enough to be attacked. North Korea,
on the other hand, is also a threat but is not yet weak enough to be attacked.
The US may adopt different strategies, but it has determined that the political
system in North Korea is itself a weapon of mass destruction. The dear
leader in Pyongyang is also being sized up for the long drop. What Mr Bush
has in mind is nothing less than a reshaping of the world. He wishes to
turn it into a place without enemies. Part of his strategy will be to use
military as well as economic power. If he wins in Iraq with an "acceptable"
level of death and destruction, the President will be emboldened and we
will enter what is potentially a more dangerous period than any in the
last half century. Dangerous because military success too often invites
hubris and is never an automatic guarantor of a stable political order.
-
- In the aftermath of 11 September, America showed admirable
restraint. It did not lash out but worked to identify its targets and sought
international support for action. It has had unprecedented co-operation
from the rest of the international community in its pursuit of al-Qa'ida.
People can see a clear danger and need little persuading that tough measures
are needed.
-
- But on Iraq, the world knows it is has been told too
little, and often too late. Set aside the reflexive anti-Americanists,
who howl at every foreign policy move Washington makes, and analyse what
has happened to the so called middle-ground. These are the people who supported
the interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan and East Timor; they did so
because they were convinced of a moral case. They also broadly supported
America's right to pursue Bin Laden and his operatives and to overthrow
the Taliban. When these people feel they haven't been given the full story,
then the proponents of war have a potentially serious problem. Yet that
swath of public opinion that opposes or is sceptical about war hasn't yet
actively pressed the politicians. The sceptical have decided to wait and
see. They will not rise up at the start of war, but will watch how it unfolds.
-
- They will wait to see if the invading armies discover
secret stocks of banned weapons. Stand by for pictures of secret underground
chambers stocked with nerve gas and other delights. These will be used
to provide retrospective justification for military action. But the war
leaders must hope that conflict will be swift and the civilian and military
casualties light. They must pray that the dominant image is of Iraqis dancing
in the street at Saddam's overthrow, and not Baghdad as Sarajevo or, worse
still, Stalingrad. And even if it all seems to take place without too much
bloodshed, we will still not know how the guns of March will be heard across
the globe. Who will they frighten into submission and who will they inspire
to hatred of America and its friends? Not just for Bush and Blair or Saddam,
but for all of us, the stakes are unimaginably high.
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- The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent
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- http://argument.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=374440&host=6&dir=154
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