Why This War Was Just

So the war is over. It lasted just three-and-a-half weeks, and almost as bitter as the divide betweenthe two sides fighting it was the estrangement between those supporting and opposing it. Anti-war activists felt avisceral hatred for the men who began this war, and the amoral/immoral people who supported it, and whoswallowed all the rightwing propaganda; pro-war types looked with contempt upon those who did not understandthe rationale for it but took recourse to left-wing rhetoric while ignoring the facts. The irony about bothpositions is that while their generalisations about the other side were often simplistic, the broad principlesthey adopted were, in fact, similar.

Terminology can be misleading. The two sides of the ideological divide over Iraq are routinely describedas, respectively, pro-war and anti-war. To state that those who believed in the Allied intervention in Iraqare actually in favour of this war, and not pro-war in general, is not just pedantry. It is central tohow the Iraq war is being misunderstood.

Everybody is anti-war. The reasons for this are obvious: war is a violent act, and leads to unnecessarydeath and destruction. No-one is his right mind would welcome a gratuitous war. The reason so-called pro-warpeople supported the intervention in Iraq is they believed that it would bring to an end a cycle of violenceand destruction that had gone on for too long, and would prevent violence and destruction that could be evenworse. The principles that both sides of the divide held were essentially the same; but their interpretationof the facts were different.

One reason why it’s easy to be against this war is George W Bush. He’s speech-dyslexic, artificiallystilted, and has an air of insincerity around him. He seems to typify that vilified stereotype of the Americanwe all hate: the cowboy who arrogantly and self-righteously believes that he can do just what he wants and therest of the world, or what he knows of it, does not matter. Regardless of the truth in this impression, Bushis an easy man to ridicule, and even loathe. He is the face of Gulf War II. It is a natural reaction, thus, tooppose the war because we dislike Bush.

And yet, this instinctive reaction, bolstered by a latent anti-Americanism that so many of us have,is wrong. It prejudges the issue based on the protagonists. This writer, like almost everybody he knows,reacted with outrage when the move to topple Saddam was first mooted. And yet, a close perusal of the facts,and the rationale behind the war, soon made it obvious that to not remove Saddam would be a greatercrime on humanity than the negative repercussions of it could possibly be. That much of the opposition to thewar was based on either rhetoric (no war is justified, America is unilateral, and hypocritical etc) or sillyconspiracy theories (it’s all about the oil etc).

Let’s have a look at how it all began, and why the war was necessary.

Unfinished Business.

The seeds of this war were sown in the first Gulf War. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait called for intervention.Saudi Arabia was next on their radar, and the region was set to explode into turmoil. As the US put together acoalition to fight a battle that almost everybody agrees was just, two objectives became clear. One: To driveSaddam out of Kuwait. Two: to separate him from the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which he had used onmultiple occasions in the past, and which made him such a threat to the region.

(It may be asked here: why only Saddam’s WMD? Did not many other countries have them? Yes they did, butthe others had them for security and deterrence. Saddam’s hegemonistic inclinations made him a threat to theregion and the world which no other nation was. Not one country in the world - not France, Russia or any ofthe Arab states - disagreed with this objective.)

The big question was: how much force was necessary to achieve these two objectives? Clearly, force would berequired to remove him from Kuwait. However, a vast section of international opinion was against using forceto get rid of his WMD. Teach Saddam a lesson by getting him out of Kuwait, the thinking went, and imposesanctions on him that would force him to destroy his WMD. To bring together the alliance for the war, the USwent ahead with this line of thinking.

The Big Game

And then began the tragic farce. The sanctions imposed by the UN, to begin with, were a humanitariandisaster. If one goes by UNICEF figures, more than 700,000 children below the age of five have died since thefirst Gulf War as a direct result of the sanctions, and the process of impoverishment which began in Iraq withSaddam’s regime gained momentum. Net-net, the sanctions hurt the common people of Iraq more than they hurtSaddam. Never a man known for compassion for his countrymen, Saddam did not comply with the resolution (687)that asked him to disarm.

Two things must be understood here about resolution 687 (which apply to the recent resolution 1441 aswell). One, the onus of proof was not on the UN weapons inspectors to find WMD, but on Saddam to demonstratethat he had destroyed them. Two, the compliance asked for was not a piecemeal activity; the resolution askedSaddam to present his inventory of weapons and the evidence of destroying previous weapons - he could eithercomply with this or not. There wasn’t a question of degree here.

Saddam, displaying native cunning, drove UNSCOM (the weapons inspectors) round in circles. He wouldoccasionally present isolated scraps of evidence of having destroyed some weapons, but the only times theweapons inspectors actually found any arms were when they were tipped off by defectors. Much of his arsenal ofchemical and biological weapons was unaccounted for, and it all reached a head in 1998, when Iraq, after yearsof putting up hindrances in the path of the UNSCOM, decided unambiguously to cease all co-operation with them.[1]

Despite force not being used, there was a military cost to all of this. With Saudi Arabia shaken andinsecure, the US had to station troops there for the region’s security - one of the key things that riledOsama bin Laden so. The military budgets of all the countries around Iraq shot up, in view of the threatSaddam and his WMD posed to them. The stability that existed in the region was tenuous.

The objective of disarming Saddam had, thus, clearly failed. The sanctions-and-weapons-inspectors methodhad not worked. The only other way to achieve that objective was thus the use of force. Bill Clinton, the thenUS President, seriously contemplated it, but, as the New Yorker pointed out recently, refrained because he wasbeing impeached at the time [2]. His domestic problemsseemed more urgent, and with Saddam under control in Iraq, policed by no-fly zones, with plenty of US forcesin the vicinity, there seemed to be no need for immediate action.

Why September 11 changed everything

September 11 brought about the realisation that War was no longer bound by geographical parameters; thatinvisible groups of individuals with a purpose, and the means to deliver on that purpose, could causeimmense damage. Al Qaeda, a terrorist network with as many global outposts as any multinational, had earlierdone limited-intensity attacks on the US, like the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, the 2000 attackon the USS Cole, and of course, the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. But their enemy was hardly shakenby those. Something more spectacular was needed to shake them out of their stupor.

The 9/11 attacks were innovative and brilliant in their conception, but will be near impossible to repeatin terms of methodology. To create that kind of impact, or even something greater, the terrorists would needmore than the weapons of stealth that terrorism conventionally resorts to. They would need weapons of massdestruction.

This is where Saddam came in. Before 9/11, Saddam’s WMD did not seem to be a global threat. As theweapons of a state, hemmed in and contained within its geographical borders, Saddam’s WMD were undercontrol. But the new dialectic of terrorism made those confines irrelevant.

Al Qaeda and Saddam shared a visceral hatred of America. But both lacked what the other had to hurt itsgreatest enemy: Al Qaeda has a delivery system but not the big weapons to cause spectacular damage; Saddam hadthe big weapons but not a way to use them. It is true that they were once anathema to each other. But a sharedobjective can unite enemies, and given that they both craved to hurt America above all else, is it nota no-brainer that they would have, sooner or later, come together. Even if one chooses to disregard theevidence Colin Powell presented before the UN thisyear of the links between Al Qaeda and Saddam, the logic that pointed to their coming together is far toocompelling. Imagine for a moment, that you were Osama or Saddam, and you want to hurt America badly.What would you do? Would you ignore the means of inflicting maximum damage?

And if terrorists were to get their hands on WMD, it would be irreversible. The language of terrorism wouldchange, and deterrence would lose its meaning. Imagine a radiological device in a suitcase going off in acrowded city like New York or LA or even, as a soft target, Mumbai. Imagine biological weapons or chemicalweapons, so far the stuff of science fiction (and gassed Kurd villages), being unleashed in our cities. Wherecasualties from terrorist attacks typically reached double figures in the past, they would easily reach thethousands - add zeroes to that if you wish - if terrorists had access to WMD technology. It would threatencivilisation itself, and it would be impossible to turn the clock back.

But can’t Al Qaeda develop their own WMD, or get them from elsewhere? In theory, yes. In practice, nocigar. The level of expertise and the resources required to develop chemical and biological weapons - leavealone nuclear devices - are far higher than science fiction books and pulp thrillers would have one believe.Al Qaeda’s attempts to get WMD have, as far as is known, met with failure so far. And the Aum Shinrikyo cultin Japan, which had some of Japan’s finest scientists and researchers in its ranks, messed up badly withtheir attempt at using Sarin gas in a Tokyo Subway in 1995. But Saddam already had demonstrated his expertisein these matters, as the gassing of Kurdish villagers in Halabja with chemical compounds - reportedlyincluding Sarin - in 1989 indicated. Had the Aum cult possessed Saddam’s Sarin, thousands could have died inthe Tokyo attack, instead of the 11 who did (over 5000 were injured in that attack).

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Not just pre-emption

The above logic might have injected urgency into the Iraq issue from America’s point of view, but the basisfor removing Saddam was already clear, from all the UN resolutions Iraq had ignored. The world did not needthe threat of terrorism to realise that Saddam’s WMD must be destroyed - it was already united on thatobjective. The big question was: How?

Time magazine, in a report on the build-up to the war, had written of how Dick Cheney, who was secretary ofdefense and a party to the US pulling out short of toppling Saddam after the first Gulf War, was keen that theUS waste no time and go it alone. But Colin Powell and, importantly, Tony Blair advised going via the UN. Thecause was just, they argued, the objectives were identical to those the UN had already stated in the past, andthe UN would surely agree to enforce the implementation of its own prior resolutions.

Resolution 1441 followed. Agreed upon by everyone, including France, it renewed the demands that had beenmade in resolution 687, accepted that he had been in gross violations of all previous resolutions on thesubject and put the onus of declaring his inventory and proving the destruction of his WMD squarely on Saddam.Emphasizing that compliance was a one-time activity and could not happen by degrees, the resolution set astrict timeframe. If Saddam failed to comply, the resolution threatened ‘serious consequences’. Indiplomatese, that meant the use of force.

But wasn’t he complying? 

No. Saddam again began the deadly game he had perfected during the last decade, of pretending to co-operate,of proffering mountains of documents that revealed nothing new, and denied outright that he had any WMD. Then,as the Americans kept the pressure on, he began to make piecemeal gestures of compliance, each contradictingprevious denials. He was playing for time.

Sceptics argue that since he was "beginning to comply", why not give him time. Simply because hissupposed co-operation was coming under the threat of war. For four years between 1998 and 2002, he disregardedthe UN’s demands of him. Then, with half-a-million allied forces surrounding Iraq, ready to wage war, hesuddenly acted compliant again - just as he had been after Gulf War I. Then, as the hostile forces and thethreat had diminished, so had his ‘compliance’. This was clearly a loop, and there was only one way out ofit. [3]

(Even the French, by the way, seem to have accepted that Saddam was not complying. Implicit in theirsuggestion that he be given more time to comply was the acceptance that he wasn’t complying. Isn’tthat obvious?)

Was war the only solution? 

It was universally agreed - by the French, the Russians, by his fellow Arabs - that Saddam and his WMD were aproblem. The first solution that the UN tried out - of sanctions and weapons inspectors - clearly didn’twork. War was the obvious solution. Now, if one accepts that a problem exists, is it not irresponsible tooppose a particular solution without offering an alternative? [4]

Why not go through the UN? 

Because the UN had failed in its duty. A body that seeks to lay down International law must also have thewill to enforce it. Iraq has defied 17 UN resolutions to date, and the UN replied to every breach of itsresolutions with a further resolution. It was a joke. Resolution 1441 was an attempt to bring matters tofinality. Pushed by the US and UK, and endorsed without reservation by the UN Security Council (includingFrance), it asked Saddam to comply, without which "serious consequences" - or war - would result. ForFrance to claim that a further resolution was required was sophistry, and would have further eroded thecredibility of the UN.

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But why should the US act unilaterally? 

The US has often gone it alone in the past, but this war is not an example of that. The coalition fighting thewar is a multilateral coalition. Some of the countries supporting the US are: Britain, Australia,Spain, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Holland, all of Eastern Europe and most of the Arab states. The support forthe war was enough to get it a majority in either the EU, NATO or the UN, where they only stopped short ofproposing a final (and gratuitous) resolution because France threatened a veto - a power given to it at a timewhen geopolitical realities were drastically different.

But wasn’t public opinion strongly against this war? Not as much as is being made out. In a pollconducted by the Washington Post on March 18, 71% of the American people came out in support of the war as itwas being waged; an April 8 poll commissioned by the Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper, showedthe corresponding figure there to be 56%. The noisy minority made a lot of noise [5];the silent majority went with reason and logic.

(In India, most people seem to be against the war. The level of one-sided discourse in the media isresponsible for that. I have yet to see the reasons for why this war is being fought be clearly represented inan Indian publication. India has pre-judged the war. Besides, anti-Americanism makes for good copy.)

Why did France, Germany and Russia oppose the war then? 

The politics of power have a lot to do with this. US dominance in the UN, and in a post-Cold-War unipolarworld, has often rankled the European states with pretensions of playing an important role in the world. Thiswar gave them an opportunity to jostle for position and to state their own importance. Ego had lot to do withthe stands they took which, by accepting that Saddam’s WMD had to be removed but proposing no crediblealternative to war, defied logic.

For Jacques Chirac, of course, it was also a chance to do some good to his own popularity ratings. Chirac -for those with short memories - was once one of the most reviled politicians in the world, as much so thanBush is today. He was the French president who arrogantly dismissed the protests of environmentalists andcarried out nuclear tests in the Pacific in 1995 - ironically, against a UN resolution that called for ahalting to the tests.

Chirac’s alleged involvement in a number of corruption cases - illegal party financing from his days asMayor of Paris, holidays for family and friends financed by the what the BBC described as "bundles ofdubious cash" - also tarnished his reputation [6],especially when he cited presidential immunity and refused to take the stand in any of those cases. And hisvictory in the last presidential elections came mainly because his chief rival was the ultra-right-wingJean-Marie le Pen - it was a case of the crooked defeating the venal. The war - which French public opinionwas against - was a perfect chance for him to be the people’s hero that he craved to be.

Russia, the country that fought the highest number of pre-emptive wars in the 20th century and affected thehighest number of regime changes, had opposed intervention during the Kosovo crisis in 1999, and were provedwrong. Also, they have allegedly sold military equipment - including night-vision implements crucial for urbanwarfare - to Iraq in recent times, in contravention of the UN sanctions. And if we look for ulterior motive,one could turn back for a moment to France - TotalFinaElf, a French oil company, had secured post-sanctionsdeals to exploit oil in Iraq, most lucratively in the Majnoon oil-field in Southern Iraq, which has 20 billionbarrels of oil. If the war went ahead, France would lose those revenues.