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CounterPunch
February
11, 2003
The Dupes of
War
Blessed are the Peacemakers
by MAHIR ALI
BY the end of this week the world will have a
better idea of how soon hostilities are likely to erupt on the
Iraqi front. Hans Blix's statement to the UN Security Council
on Saturday is widely construed as crucial. Even the mildest
hint of Iraqi procrastination amid a welter of evidence of Baghdad's
compliance with UN demands will probably suffice as a trigger
for the US and Britain.
But what if the Swedish diplomat is not
obliging enough to offer such a hint? Would that interfere with
Anglo-American war plans? No. The Bush and Blair administrations
have made it amply clear that their minds are already made up.
And they are disinclined to put their brave soldiers through
the inconvenience and discomfort of summertime turkey-shoots.
They'd much rather make sure that most of the killing is done
well before the Gulf gets too hot.
There are two reasons why they haven't
blundered in thus far, and neither of them has anything to do
with the weapons inspections. The first is that the US and Britain
would prefer their aggression to bear the UN stamp of approval.
Secondly, they are concerned about the surge in pre-emptive popular
protests against the war. George W. Bush probably recalls that
Daddy was humiliated in 1992 by an upstart from Arkansas despite
unprecedentedly high approval ratings (whereas Dubya's have lately
been spiralling downwards) during the first Gulf War. And Tony
Blair knows that the Labour Party could subject him to the treatment
that the Tories meted out to Margaret Thatcher once it became
painfully obvious that she had "lost touch with reality".
Both these reasons lay behind US secretary
of state Colin Powell's multimedia presentation to the Security
Council a week ago. Powell has in recent weeks been thrust into
the role of chief US spokesman on behalf of the war effort precisely
because he was previously perceived as something of a dove in
an unprecedentedly hawkish White House. It was presumed that
his pronouncements would carry considerably more weight than
any banalities uttered by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld or
vice-president Dick Cheney, both of whom display greater psychopathic
tendencies than any of Saddam Hussein's henchmen.
Unfortunately for Powell, he comes across
not as a dove driven to hawkishness but as a hawk who has cast
off his erstwhile disguise. As such, his performance last Wednesday
did not unduly impress any sceptics. There was at least one Straw
that Powell did not have to clutch at--Jack, the British foreign
secretary, was obsequiously eager to endorse every utterance
of his American counterpart. But other permanent members of the
Security Council proved to be a lot less gullible, and the BBC's
correspondent noted that Powell visibly squirmed in his seat
when the Russian foreign minister noted that American allegations
would have to be studied by experts in Moscow. China was at least
equally non-committal, while the French foreign minister commented,
sensibly, that a reasonable case had been made for tripling the
number of inspectors in Iraq.
The council's non-permanent members were
almost united in their support for continued inspections. This
was clearly not the reaction that the US had anticipated, and
there have lately been indications that the "coalition of
the willing"--the US, Britain and Australia, plus a swag
of Nato membership aspirants in Eastern Europe--will revert to
Plan A by claiming that another Security Resolution isn't required
as a pretext for war.
Given that a war is more or less inevitable,
from the UN's point of view it would be better for it to be waged
without Security Council sanction. The US and Britain claim that
failure by the UN to give its imprimatur to the hostilities would
render the world body irrelevant. The truth is that the UN, which
was set up to preserve peace rather than endorse aggression,
would become the object of universal ridicule were it to go along
with Anglo-American designs. It must be hoped that China, Russia
and France will keep this in mind if a second resolution ever
comes to a vote in the council.
The cumulative impact of Powell's compendium
of information and allegations old and new, most of them unsourced,
was to betray the US administration's degree of desperation.
At best, he succeeded in reinforcing the impression that Saddam
is not to be trusted. But we knew that already. If anything,
it would be surprising if Iraqi apparatchiks were being completely
forthright with the inspectors. It would be even more surprising
were it to turn out that Baghdad is not concealing any stocks
whatsoever of what are classified by the US as weapons of mass
destruction. In order to make even a semi-successful case for
war, it would be necessary to prove that Iraq poses an imminent
threat to the US. That proved to be beyond Powell's capacity.
Even US and British intelligence agencies
have been appalled by the White House and Downing Street's attempts
to establish that some sort of a nexus exists between Iraq and
Al Qaeda, on the basis of evidence so vague and circumstantial
that even a biased jury would be inclined to dismiss it as wishful
thinking. Neither the Abu Musab Al Zarqawi nor the Ansar Al Islam
strand of investigation appears to have yielded anything particularly
fruitful from the American point of view. And as far as the Ansar
camp--which exists purportedly in an area where Saddam's writ
does not operate--is concerned, the question inevitably arises:
If it is indeed a proxy Al Qaeda training site, why has the US
made no effort to dismantle it?
It is highly unlikely that anything Powell
said--or for that matter subsequent pronouncements by Bush, Blair,
Rumsfeld and Straw--will cut any ice with the millions of people
who intend to participate next weekend in mass anti-war rallies.
Organisers in key Western cities expect the mobilizations to
be the largest show of force thus far by peace campaigners. In
contrast, it is worth noting that there have been no demonstrations
in support of war.
"There's never been a time that
I can think of," Noam Chomsky points out, "when there's
been such massive opposition to a war before it was even started."
It is equally significant that the anti-war coalitions in various
countries straddle the ideological spectrum, ranging from from
religious and conservative organizations to Trotskyites. It is
probably true that many of the Islamic groups involved in the
movement would have displayed scant interest in the proceedings
had the intended target of aggression not been a Muslim nation.
Nonetheless, their willingness to share a platform with atheists,
Christians and Jews is a positive sign and could translate into
a mind-broadening experience.
A few decades ago, it was customary in
the West for anti-nuclear activists to be derided as "Moscow's
dupes", and a parallel effort to dismiss anti-war protesters
as Baghdad's dupes has been under way for the past year or so.
Unfortunately for the British and US governments, the propaganda
has singularly failed to arrest the momentum for peace. After
all, the vast majority of those opposed to a military strike
against Iraq have no illusions about Saddam. They do not condone
his tyranny, and most of them would have little objection to
regime change in Baghdad. They are utterly unconvinced, however,
that the use of massive force by the world's sole superpower
is the ideal means of achieving such an outcome.
They are motivated by the recognition
that tens--perhaps even hundreds--of thousands of Iraqi civilians
will perish in a military onslaught. They are aware that upward
of a million deaths, more than half of them those of infants
and children, have already been caused by 12 years of evidently
meaningless sanctions. They do not wish another monumental crime
against humanity weighing upon their consciences. What's more,
they are able to see through the falsehoods, hypocrisy and hubris
emanating from Washington, London and Canberra. (In Australia
the US ambassador has had the gall to interfere in the domestic
political debate over the deployment of troops to the Gulf by
advising the opposition Labour Party to desist from ridiculing
Bush and condemning prime minister John Howard's efforts to outdo
Blair in kowtowing to Dubya and the demons that surround the
US president. This approach won't surprise Pakistanis, for we
have grown accustomed over the decades to US envoys behaving
like imperial proconsuls.)
Bush, Blair and Howard, all of them church-going
Christians, must be disconcerted by the fact that, barring fanatics
of Jerry Falwell's ilk, virtually all factions of Christianity
are united in their opposition to the coming war. But they are
driven apparently by an irresistible urge to commit mass murder,
believing that even God can't stand in their way.
The war may have begun by the time Worldview
returns after a two-week break, and the only hope one can cling
to is that blinkered patriotism will not supplant the longing
for peace in the Western popular imagination.
The clouds of war are invariably bereft
of a silver lining, but it is at least possible that an unintended
consequence of the Bush clique's empire-building ambitions may
ultimately be a gentler, kinder future--a world in which children
will no longer ask "What did you do in the war, Daddy?"
but will be rather more inclined to raise questions along the
lines of: "What did you do for peace, Mummy?"
Mahir Ali
writes for Dawn. He can be reached at: mahirali@journalist.com
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