le carré writes on the iraq situation, page-8

Agree with you Olive.
And what makes a writer of fictional novels, an expert?
Maybe with the fall of the Soviet Union, hes just narky coz he no longer has an arena in which to set his fantasies .
Or is it his left wing leanings colouring his judgement.
No matter, there are more than a few of his contemporaries who reject his point of view.

Roger Scruton - English philosopher, novelist and composer


AMERICAN INTENTION, TO LIBERATE NOT TO ENSLAVE
When assessing US foreign policy it is important to remember that America has often intervened around the globe, and is unique in seeking instantly to withdraw thereafter.

It withdrew from Europe after the two world wars, and from Korea, Japan, and (wrongly) Kuwait and Iraq last time round. The Americans tried to withdraw from Vietnam, having established what they believed to be a friendly regime in the South. Of course, the Americans do not withdraw, as a rule, until securing a settlement in their own favour. But such a settlement, they believe, will be one in which the people of the countries involved have acquired the right to elect their own governments. It is very difficult to object to a policy of intervention, when the intention is not to enslave a foreign people, but to liberate them.

Of course, Americans are bluff optimists, often insensitive to history, to local culture, to traditional allegiances and to the balance of power. This may mean that things are less stable after an American intervention than before - as was Europe after Woodrow Wilson’s input into the Treaty of Versailles.

But compare the Soviets in Ethiopia and North Yemen, in Eastern Europe or the Baltics; compare the Chinese in Tibet or the Syrians in Lebanon.

The vices of the USA are always before us; but the virtues are not sufficiently remembered.

America attracts blame because it responds to blame. Criticism of the Soviet Union was always met with a blank wall of indifference, and in any case could not be publicly voiced within the Soviet Empire itself. Hence, during the Cold War, the US was continually singled out as the source of conflict - notably by people on the Left, who often turned a blind, or at any rate myopic, eye, as did Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm to name but two, to the incredible and still unatoned-for crimes of the Soviet Communist Party.

With tyrannical regimes there is no point in criticism from outside, and death or imprisonment is the reward of criticism from inside. That is why intellectuals brought up under tyrannies end up in the USA. It is the one place where they can criticize freely, not just the countries they have fled from, but the country which has offered them refuge. In the face of virtues like these, the Chomskian and Pilgerish criticisms of US foreign policy begin to look, to say the least, one-sided.

US foreign policy isn’t always right. But it emerges from a rational process - one in which criticism is permitted, and accountability assumed. The foreign policies of North Korea and Iraq issue from no such rational process: which is one reason for using force in order to prevent them from issuing at all.
..........

Philip Bobbitt, author of The Shield of Achilles


TIME TO ACT
Saddam Hussein has spent the last twelve years breaching every provision of the Ceasefire Agreement that ended the Gulf War. Though required to “unconditionally accept” disarmament of his weapons of mass destruction under UN supervision, he has actively sought to acquire such weapons, expelled the inspectors and hidden the WMD he already had. After the defection of the head of his biological weapons program in 1995, Saddam Hussein was compelled to acknowledge that he had produced no fewer than 183 biological weapons in violation of the Agreement. Since 1998, he has repeatedly attempted to acquire weapons-grade uranium. He has replaced the original design for a nuclear warhead with a new design that could accommodate a Scud missile. Nine such missiles are still unaccounted for in the Iraqi inventory.

When Saddam Hussein attacked the unprotected Kurds in violation of the Agreement, the Coalition should have acted, immediately and decisively. But for the same reasons one hears now - concern about post-Saddam governance, anxiety among local allies over domestic reaction, fear of retaliation - the US could not marshal support for action at that time or at any time during the following decade in which Saddam Hussein flagrantly violated the Agreement that had allowed him to maintain his dictatorial power over Iraq. Indeed the US was barely able to keep the sanctions in place even after Saddam had threatened and expelled the inspectors. During those years, nothing changed - until 11 September 2001. What happened on that day had little to do with Iraq - but a great deal to do with the willingness to respond to the ongoing situation in Iraq.

So those who are looking for a “smoking gun,” or for something new in Saddam Hussein’s behavior that would compel us to act now, or for some link between al-Qaida and Iraq in order to justify a change of regime by force are looking in the wrong place. It is not new evidence that is driving the response now; I for one pray he hasn’t been able to get nuclear weapons, despite his best efforts. Rather there is a new resolve, and a new urgency.

For we must act now. In August 2002, former weapons inspectors for the UN testified that “the current leadership in Baghdad will eventually achieve a nuclear weapon in addition to their current inventories of weapons of mass destruction.” Once Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons, the West will be deterred from using force to thwart an Iraqi move against it neighbors; the chances of an attack by terrorists using these weapons increases significantly; and Iraq’s neighbors will scramble to acquire nuclear weapons of their own.

If we could avoid Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of weapons of mass destruction through a combination of sanctions and inspections, I would surely favor this instead of war, in spite of the human cost an indefinite continuation of the sanctions would impose on the people of Iraq. But Saddam Hussein’s unique combination of vast wealth (which can quickly replace any weapons decommissioned under pressure), aggressive risk-taking, and resolute mendacity makes inspections hopelessly inadequate, even if they were to be continued indefinitely, which we all must know is impossible. Given the divided, impotent nature of the Western response to Saddam Hussein’s shredding of the Ceasefire Agreement and all the UN Resolutions that, pathetically, repeatedly called on him to respect its provisions without success, I see no grounds for confidence in a system of sanctions and inspections.

If we want to restore Iraq’s wealth to its people, to avoid nuclear proliferation, and to lessen the dangers of terrorism, Saddam Hussein cannot remain in power. If he cannot be persuaded to leave, he must be forced to leave.


..................

Arnold Wesker, dramatist


AN END TO ALL TYRANNY
There seem to be two kinds of left-wing reasoning. (Many more, of course, it's in the nature of the left to fragment itself - which is both good and bad.) The kind that reasons all tyranny must be brought down; the kind that reasons anything the right supports must be wrong.

By March 1933 in Germany the Communists refused to join a United Front with the Social Democrats thus leaving the way free for Hitler to come to power. British Communists later opposed the war with Hitler because it had been declared by a right-wing government. They changed their minds when the Soviet Union entered the battle.

Having campaigned for years against the tyrannical Argentinean generals who slaughtered thousands, many unaccounted for - 'the disappeared ones' - the 'right-is- wrong' left then refused to support the war against Argentina's invasion of the Falklands because it was lead by the right-wing leader, Margaret Thatcher. She brought down the fascist generals, and democracy returned to the Argentine.

One of the most dangerous, murderous tyrants of recent times, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, has usurped the sovereignty of his people and dragged them through three bloody wars, one of them against his own Kurdish people. Bush and Blair are attempting to lead an international force to physically disarm and overthrow him.

The 'right-is-wrong' left opposes a war with Iraq.

I belong to that part of the left that reasons all tyranny must be brought down

......................


Sonja Linden, playwright and theatre director


GENOCIDE IN IRAQ IS THE ISSUE
I have been feeling confused about my attitude to this proposed war - a lone and rather timid voice amongst all the people I know. I share their feelings about American dominance and the US’s profound abuse of its economic and military supremacy. Yet I have been amazed at the absence of concern for a totally oppressed population; there is almost no mention of it. All the talk is about whether action over Iraq is good or bad for 'us'.

My feeling is that all this resurgent energy against war should be directed to finding ways to aid populations in getting rid of regimes that murder and oppress them. The left's natural sympathies here have been skewered by virulent suspicion and hatred of the US. That's why people are clamouring for a United Nations lead; but the UN as it stands has proved to be a weak and much manipulated tool (not least by great powers like the US). In my opinion, changes are urgently needed in the functioning and remit of the UN, including reform of Security Council membership.

The premise for action in cases like Iraq is genocide. Along with the likes of Milosevic and Pinochet, we should be able to indict and extradite Saddam Hussein. Terror and murder of one's own population is in my mind a much more legitimate reason for intervening in another state than weapons of mass destruction (how to intervene is of course the next big question). So many states currently fall under that category and the world still stands by. So much for 'Never Again'!

We have more information now than at any other time in history about what is happening behind closed borders, and yet we are still paralysed. The current Iraq war hysteria has so many subtexts that the real issues are being totally fudged. The people of Iraq have suffered too long under this brutal regime. In this they share the fate of many countries in the Middle East and Africa. It is the casualties of these regimes that are washed up on Britain’s unwelcoming shores. These are the voices we should be hearing from now - the fugitives of hideous oppression.

.....................

Ralph Giordano, German Jewish writer


STANDING BY ISRAEL
You ask me where I stand?

My immediate reaction: any question about the Iraq crisis which mentions George W. Bush, but not Saddam, contains per se a tendentious answer. Which prompts me to ask back: "And where do you stand?"

My second spontaneous reaction is to say: "I am on Israel’s side, ladies and gentlemen, primarily on Israel’s side!"

No, I do not want this war, I dread it and its consequences – but I strongly oppose the impulse which lets the arch crook Saddam off the hook, leaving intact this terrible status quo, and delegating sole responsibility for the crisis to "the Americans". I am fed up to the point of nausea with the pathology of anti-Americanism and refuse to identify oil greed as the motive for the escalation of the crisis in the Middle East.

I am not a blind defender of the United States, and I have often raised my voice against a foreign policy which connived in the Cold War with all right-wing dictators around the globe. America, however, does not have one face. It has many. And it is a good thing to have America – I owe her my life after all, even though the 8th British Army liberated me on 4 May 1945.

I hope that Saddam will be defeated without a war – but he has to be defeated! And the UN must be behind it.

Again it rings true: pacifism in a non-pacifist world means nothing but the continuation of murderous and terrorist regimes. It cannot be the answer to the chief rogue Saddam Hussein.

....................

Hazhir Teimourian, commentator on the Middle East


GENOCIDE AND DIRTY HANDS
If this war really does take place, it will save many more lives than it will cost, and millions of Iraqis (if no-one else) will show their gratitude for that. I’m not an Iraqi, but I shall rejoice with them as if I were. Shame will be on the faces of those political activists who opposed it for base reasons, in the same way that those who opposed the attack on the Taliban state in Afghanistan ought to feel shame whenever they see pictures of smiling Afghan girls going to school once more. But most of them will not feel any shame. They will start looking around for yet another pretext to vent their inbuilt hatred – or secret jealousy – of America.

As someone who has been warning the world about the ultimate ambitions of Saddam Hussein since 1973 - when I sneaked into northern Iraq to report on his preparations for his first war, on the Kurds - I am convinced that only the removal of this psychopath will prevent more conflicts in the future. When he waged his second war, on Iran in 1980, the world rightly felt reluctant to act to stop him, for that would have helped the only slightly less repugnant regime of the ayatollahs. But when the full extent of the gassing of over 280 Kurdish villages and small towns became clear in the summer of 1988, after the end of the war with Iran, surely there was then no excuse to tolerate the vile regime any longer.

To my disgust, and after my pleadings in BBC programmes and press articles, Mrs Thatcher’s government doubled Saddam’s Export Credit Guarantee to £320m a year, and the leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, refused even to add his name to a dozen other prestigious figures in a statement in The Times to condemn the gassings.

If resort had been made then to the 1948 Geneva Protocol on Genocide to overthrow Saddam, perhaps more than a million people would not subsequently have lost their lives: in the deportations and disappearances of some 180,000 Kurds, the eviction of the Iraqi army from Kuwait, the massacres of the Shia in the south of Iraq, the destruction of the Marsh Arabs, all those dead Iraqis who were deliberately deprived of food and medicines supplied by the UN in order to blame their deaths on sanctions.

Just before the war of 1991, the foreign minister of India asked me to advise him what position to take at the UN. When I failed to persuade him that backing Saddam would be a complete betrayal of Gandhi, under whose portrait we had just had lunch, he felt ashamed. "I can’t oppose Saddam", he said. "If I do and he still ends up in possession of Kuwait, India will pay an extra £2bn a year in oil imports". Now the pleadings of those two big sleazebags, Chirac and Putin, to bind America and Britain to their vetoes in the Security Council reminds me of that Indian minister and how politicians determine their moralities. Russia and France have been offered massive contracts to work for the survival of Saddam.

Twice recently, I have questioned Tony Blair in Downing Street. I do not know about George Bush, but I have the firm impression that Britain’s leader hates war and hates having to spend £4-5bn on overthrowing Saddam just as much. I’d rather be on his side than on the side of men like Chirac.