It was the fashionable stance to take to be against the war in Iraq, and now, obviously, it is the fashionable stance to take to be for the withdrawal of troops and a summary end to occupation. Some are simplistically honest in their views and want the European and American soldiers out because they are “getting killed” (what do they imagine armies are for, I wonder, and more to the point, why do people join the army if they don’t want to risk being killed or injured?). Others say it is wrong for foreign troops to occupy a country, regardless of the circumstances. They are extrapolating from their own experience, which can sometimes be a mistake. Others still have revived all the old arguments against the war (there were no weapons of mass destruction; is the West going to invade every country where there is a savage dictatorship?).
These arguments seem more vacuous now than they did before Saddam Hussein was toppled, captured and jailed pending trial, and before we saw television footage of determined Iraqis braving sniper firer to cast their vote in the first democratic election most of them had ever experienced. People who take democracy for granted because they were the first to have it – the Americans, the British – are apathetic about elections and their precious right to vote, so relatively few of them bother. Those who are relatively new to democracy – the Maltese, particularly Maltese women – queue up at the polling booth and take their vote very seriously. Those who are completely new to democracy after years of oppression too atrocious for us to imagine, brave death to vote. That should tell us something, but it apparently does not.
Please don’t try and tell me that those people would rather return to the days when everyone lived in fear of a knock on the door, and when the Saddam males ruled with cruelty and no respect for human life. Yes, the transitional period is terrible and fraught with civil strife and death, but the point is that it is a transitional period. You would have had to be very, very naïve indeed to imagine that it could have been otherwise, that Iraq could switch overnight from decades of pain and torture to British-style democracy, and Germanic law and order. The transitional period could take many years, decades even, but one day the Iraqis will live the normal life we all take for granted.
Some in the West have had their views shaped by televised street interviews with people in Iraq, who say that what they have to endure now is worse than what they had to endure before. Such personal views are unlikely to be representative of the population as a whole, and even if they were representative of the way large numbers of people think, this does not mean they are correct, nor are they visionary. There are Maltese people who still look around at the way we live today and sigh for a return to the grey days of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. Even the most apolitical among us would wonder about their judgement and their priorities (not to say their intelligence), but that’s the way of human nature.
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Usually, when confronted with anti-war, anti-occupation arguments, I don’t even bother going into the politics of it all, because the truth is far simpler than that. When people ask me why I was in favour of the war, I said that it was because, had I been an Iraqi living in Iraq, then I would have been praying and hoping for a deus ex machina to swoop in and rid my country, my people and myself of the monster who had racked and ruined it for so long. It would have had to be a deus ex machina because nobody could do it from within. Then one day, a deus ex machina did turn up and do the job – and thank heavens for that.
When I’m asked why I favour continued occupation, I say that if I were living in Iraq I would feel even more unsafe without American and British troops there than I did with their presence. The violence is great now; it would be 10 times greater should the troops pull out. The violence is not because of the presence of the troops. It is because of the warring internal factions that come to the fore when the restraining presence of a dictator is gone for good. It happened in the former Yugoslavia, the example we are most familiar with. Those of us who lived through the 1970s remember that the dominant word was Beirut; because of a similar situation there and then, the name became a cipher for destruction and chaos. We still use it today, even though Beirut is now a vibrant city, full of life and commerce. Nobody thought it could happen, but it has happened, and restored Beirut puts Malta to shame.
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As to the question, is the US going to invade every country that has a harsh dictatorship, all I can say is this: no, of course not – but those in a position of privilege have a duty to do what they can, when they can, to help those who are suffering. To ask this question is fall prey to the selfishness that shapes another, similar question which springs from the same spiritual source. When confronted by unmitigated poverty, some people ask: where do I start giving? What difference will my donation make? So they stand back and do nothing, their conscience barely troubling them.
Perhaps the other reason for the invasion would appeal more to their sense of selfishness: that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein would have eventually destabilised the entire region and imperilled our very own way of life. He was a ticking time-bomb, and that bomb was detonated thanks to the heroism of others to whom we should be immensely grateful, rather than carping and critical.
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The Sunday Telegraph, which does not support Tony Blair and his Labour government, but which backs him unequivocally on Iraq despite vociferous public opinion against, carried an impressive leading article about the issue last Sunday. It was called “Our path is perilous – but the right one”. I cut it out and kept it. Please allow me to quote parts of it. “The September 11 atrocities presented the West with a choice. The attacks could be treated as the work of a criminal conspiracy and pursued by the police and security services; the policy of ‘containment’ against rogue states such as Iraq and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan would continue. The alternative strategy was to recognise 9/11 as an act of war, and to acknowledge the potentially horrific convergence of Islamic terror, weapons of mass destruction, and rogue regimes such as Saddam Hussein’s. It was the second course that President Bush and the Prime Minister chose to follow. The path has been perilous. There have been moments of failure and shame alongside the successes. But it was the right path to follow: to persist with the old strategies would only have postponed and compounded the horror of the day of reckoning. Whatever the deceits the Labour Government may have practised in its use of intelligence material, the case for the liberation of Iraq in 2003 was iron clad. The terrifying arsenal for which Saddam himself provided an inventory in the 1990s – including at least 3.9 tons of VX gas, 8,500 litres of anthrax, and 550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas – was still unaccounted for in March 2003, and remains so today (the question which should be asked is not ‘Why were no WMD found?’ but ‘Where is Saddam’s stockpile now?’). The Iraqi dictator was in breach of 12 years’ worth of UN resolutions. By deposing him, the coalition liberated an entire people from one of the most deplorable tyrannies of the 20th century. In January, the Iraqis held their first multi-party elections for 50 years. Further elections are to follow in December… We have grown used to campaigns that are won more or less immediately: the Falklands war, the liberation of Kuwait, the destruction of the Taliban. But most wars have been long and arduous, requiring endurance as well as military might. The war on terror is undoubtedly one such conflict.”
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The Sunday Telegraph leading article pointed out that every time people in the West march against the war and against occupation, they give more power to the elbows of those who favour terror, and to Islamist extremists. Of Tariq Ali, a leftist MP in the British Parliament, the leading article remarked: “Who is Tariq Ali to tell the troops that it is time to come home? On whose behalf does he speak, other than the Jurassic Left that has fastened on the Iraq war because it has failed in every other arena? Mr Ali and his friends can be sure only that the images of their rally (in London, a week ago) yesterday will have gone down very well among the insurgents in Baghdad and Basra.” So be it.