Disclosure: Jack Robertson is the co-convener of the Balmain branch of Amnesty International. These are his personal views.
In ‘Regime Change for Saddam’ (Take a risk for human rights: Back Bush, webdiary17Jan), almost none of Jim Nolan’s arguments supporting a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in the name of Human Rights really do anything of the sort.
His piece simply summarises what invasion proponents (for the last few months) and Human Rights NGOs (for over twenty years) have been telling the world: Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator whose HR behaviour is unacceptable. It’s a compelling read if you still need to be convinced of that; as a justification for invasion, it doesn’t get far.
What we’re now supposed to be arguing about is not whether ‘intervention’ in Iraq is morally requisite, but whether a pre-emptive invasion is the form of ‘intervention’ that can best achieve a HR net gain there. Far from being soft left appeasers, as Jim implies, HR activists have in fact been ‘intervening’ in Iraq since at least 1983 – as has Donald Rumsfeld, incidentally, who back then was busy kissing Saddam’s HR-abusing butt.
This is now largely moot, to be sure, but such historical fellow-travelling should at least inure even the soppiest lefty against accusations of ‘appeasement’ today; if anyone has been Saddam’s Chamberlain stooge, it’s Rumsfeld, not Chomsky. As a wussy activist myself, obviously I welcome Rummers’ belated discovery of his ‘bleeding heart’ on Iraq, but let’s not be blinded to the core matters by the zealous light beaming from all these HR Born-Agains’ eyes.
In a sense, US ‘calls to HR arms’ in Iraq now are more akin to those diehard isolationists who popped up post-Pearl Harbour to inform ‘everyone’ grandiloquently that Hitler was a mad tyrant who must be stopped, when ‘everyone’ had long been trying to figure out the best to go about doing it.
In this latter, deeper sense, Jim doesn’t move beyond the unsupported assertion that a full-on ‘second front’ is now the way to go, simply because: “(Not invading) cannot be tolerated when the realistic alternative is a short sharp military intervention which can now confidently be predicted to topple the much hated Saddam in a matter of weeks if not days.” His earlier detailed cataloguing of Saddam’s HR bastardry being irrelevant (because on this all HR activists heartily agree), my bold highlighting effectively gives us the unique essence of his pro-invasion argument: It would be quick, relatively cost-free and successful.
Now if this claim was backed up by the same quality of evidence and reasoning Jim uses to (redundantly) damn Saddam’s HR record, I’d be all for a ‘HR invasion’, too, but as it is not, his article is basically pointless, since the key HR question here isn’t, ‘Is Saddam a HR abuser?’, but rather, ‘Will a pre-emptive invasion right now do net HR harm, or net HR good?’.
Jim’s only evidential basis for asserting the latter – pre-emptive invasion as largely ‘painless’ HR new broom – are references to the Iraqi military’s quick collapse in the first Gulf War, a dangerously misleading comparison. It fails to consider the profound motivational difference in a soldier fighting to defend foreign invasion gains (Kuwait), and one fighting at home against an invader, especially a hated enemy who has vowed to radically restructure the conquered country in its own Imperialistic image.
To my mind, an inexplicable assumption is currently running riot in the warhawk camp; that the Iraqis will jump at the chance to surrender their ancestral lands with barely a fight, solely to trade Saddam’s familiar brand of oppression for what is surely still, to them, the scarifying unknown of ‘Americanism’.
This seems to me like a monumentally-haphazard presumption to make about the contemporary Iraqi soldier’s feelings on America and ‘Human Rights’. Against his corporate memory of Basra Road slaughter and homeland aerial bombardment by America in 1990; against his propaganda-distorted fear of Bush’s ‘evil’ intentions in Iraq; in the context of his likely religious conviction that the US ‘War on Terror’ (nb: Islamic ‘terror’ only, apparently, cf. North Korean ‘appeasement’) is in reality a new Judeo-Christian Crusade; having suffered under what he doubtless regards as American bombings, sanctions and trade blockades for over a decade; and with the knowledge that he is all that stands between the invading force and his wives and kids behind him, most Iraqi soldiers will still, the way Jim Nolan (and the White House) tells it, be easily ‘won over’. Despite everything, Bush & Co are counting on GI Joe from Idaho being able to convince Mushtiq Ali from Al-Hillah – in the chaotic heat of combat to boot – that the American Way is his best hope, and he should thus throw down his rifle rather than fire it.
I’m not saying another Iraqi military collapse is not possible, I’m suggesting the chances are (literally) immeasurably slimmer. Also, unlike in Kuwait, early ‘bloodbath’ tactical engagements are as likely to strengthen as weaken Iraqi resolve (at least up to a certain point), for each dead Iraqi is one more extended group of other Iraqis whose hearts and minds the ‘liberators’ can no longer quickly ‘win’. (Shoot a man dead, and his wife, kids, friends and comrades won’t care that you only did so in the greater cause of their Human Rights.)
Thus, the opening military engagements will be critical. If they go badly and a lot of Iraqis are killed, don’t expect many women and children to be tossing daisies in HR gratitude at the M-1s rolling into Baghdad later. He who scoffs at Iraq’s fighting commitment before asking himself how he would react to Saddam’s Armies appearing on his country’s borders is being at best foolish, at worse recklessly cavalier with the lives of his own invading soldiers who, for all anyone really knows, just might be in for a very nasty shock. Think Somalia in ’93, when all the poor old Yankee ‘liberators’ were trying to do was toss around a few sacks of free food and then bugger off home.
This – the manifest assumption among warhawks that the toughest remaining fight regarding a ‘regime change invasion’ is the battle to mobilise public support for it – is the main reason for my enduring scepticism. My chief beef about the scarcity of personal combat experience in the Bush Administration has little to do with hypocrisy (much less supposed ‘cowardice’); the real worry is that apart from Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, few of the top Bushies have direct experience of what happens to a nice theoretical plan once battle is joined.
Consequently, few seem terribly interested in addressing the many practical complexities that might turn out to lie behind the glib aim of ‘regime change’. Like every malleable motherhood statement uttered, this linguistic cure-all is a means of avoiding, rather than pro-actively grappling with, the operational realities to which it will give rise.
Jim’s piece illustrates well the skewing effect on this debate of this unwillingness – the unwillingness to think in advance about every conceivable awkward turn of events. As have too many others thus far, he wastes much intellectual energy and space telling us wussy HR activist appeasers dated monster tales about Saddam, apparently expecting us to coo and sigh and then accept without question his macho claims about the inevitable quick success of an invasion.
Yet it’s on this ground, not the universally-agreed hatefulness of Saddam, that media debate now needs to focus. Obviously I don’t know any more than Jim how an invasion will actually pan out, but – in the spirit ofScott Burchill’s ‘Counterspin: Pro-War Mythology’ (New year resolutions, 13Jan) I suggest that tackling questions of the following kind will better serve the pro-invasion lobby’s HR credibility than yet more waxing unlyrical on the Butcher of Baghdad:
1. Roughly how many total casualties – enemy and friendly, military (regular, conscript, militia) and civilian – could an invasion to remove Saddam in the name of Human Rights be reasonably allowed to ‘cost’ before the HR ‘net balance sheet’ moves into negative territory? If this is an unreasonable mode of assessment, define a ‘successful’ invasion outcome.
2. In describing the invasion’s primary aim as ‘regime change’, what exactly is meant by Saddam’s ‘regime’, and how will the invading forces delineate it? No totalitarian tyrant rules alone; the Iraqi political, social and military system is a network of mini-Saddams, each with commensurate degrees of HR blood on their hands. How will frontline invading forces simultaneously optimise the opportunities for a majority of Iraqi forces to surrender quickly, while applying maximum combat power to those Iraqis, at all command levels, who decide that their historical complicity in the ‘regime that must be changed’ affords them no option but to fight to the death? What worst case percentage of the Iraq population might regard themselves as irredeemably complicit in this way?
3. Much of the Iraqi civilian population, including women and children, has now been armed and primed for defensive jihad. Will the ROE of the invading forces make any formal distinction between an Iraqi soldier filling a military defensive role and an armed Iraqi civilian who considers herself to be defending her home and her children from a rapacious foreign invader, or will any such distinction be a matter of individual tactical judgement?
4. What will the ROE be? On what legal basis will this ROE rest? In the case of a non-UN authorised invasion, can the invasion authority indemnify all invading combatants from any subsequent HR-based legal action arising from errors of operational judgement?
5. Will the invading force categorically rule out any use of its own weapons of mass destruction, regardless of how the invasion unfolds?
6. Which members – at what level – of ‘Saddam’s regime’ suspected of HR abuses will be investigated (and charged, tried and sentenced, etc), and by whom, and how, and when, and within what legal framework? Which members of it will be granted indemnity, and by whom, and within what legal framework?
7. Is there any time or outcome-based limitation on the presence of the invading/occupying force in a post-Saddam Iraq? Against what HR criteria will eventual military withdrawal be assessed?
8. Are we now absolutely sure we can only change Saddam’s regime/HR behaviour with a full-scale military invasion?
If, as it seems, our country is going to participate in a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in at least the partial – if perhaps nominal – name of ‘Human Rights’, then the very least those soppy HR activists among us who remain sceptical can demand is that the pro-invasion lobby try to answer these and many other similar Human Rights queries with something a little more sophisticated than ‘But Saddam is evil!’