This long, thoughtful piece by Ian MacDougall argues the case for war by means of a deep engagement with and considered response to Scott Burchill’s piece ‘Counterspin: Pro-war mythology’. I highly recommend it.
The annotated Scott Burchill
by Ian MacDougall
Scott Burchill’s Counterspin: Pro-war mythology, is quite thoughtful, and apparently is having some influence on the web, but a number of critical comments need to be made on it. Rather than submit these as a separate article necessitating continual reference by the reader to Burchill’s original, I have decided to make use of the possibilities offered by the Web and my own computer to produce this annotated version.
I am by training a biology teacher, but have retired from that now. These days I make my living, at least in part, by fattening cattle for the market. The current drought gives me the enforced leisure to pursue other interests, one of which is my lifelong interest in politics.
Orbiting around the issue of the looming war in Iraq we find a shoal, like unto a whole asteroid belt, of red herrings. Writers against the present positions of both opposition and government in Australia, and against those of the US and Britain, commonly point to inconsistencies of behaviour over the years of the US, Britain and Australia. Examples of hypocrisy and double standards are not hard to find in historical literature.
One can also find the issue of Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) linked to the asylum seekers and such issues as Aboriginal land rights. The question is often asked: If it is all right for the US and Britain to have WMD, why can’t Saddam have them too?
Others may speculate on such questions if they wish, but the answers to them are useless unless two fundamental questions are addressed, namely: (a) What are the likely consequences if the US goes in to Iraq to remove Saddam, with or without UN approval, and (b) What are they if it does not? My suggested answers are set out in my discussion of Scott Burchill’s article below.
The United States has a marvellous set of documents in its Declaration of Independence, its Constitution, and its Bill of Rights. But if democracy means rule by the people, then we can only allow that like Australia and Britain, it is ruled by an oligarchy appointed by the electorate and subject also to dismissal by it. To that extent, and to that extent only, it is a “democracy”. But that is clearly enough to satisfy most of its citizens, and until a better working model is built somewhere, and not just proposed, this situation is likely to continue. Until that situation arises, representative government will remain as assessed by Winston Churchill; the least worst system yet devised.
However, wherever found it has one major drawback: those elected by the people as representatives tend themselves not to be democrats. Machine politics as played in modern states is a game as much of ignoring the popular will and of manipulating it to one’s own advantage through expensive media campaigns as it is about finding out what that will is and putting it into effect. The concept of the non-core promise introduced by John Howard into Australian politics is significant here. As Lord Acton astutely observed: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is arguable that parliamentary democracy would be improved by observation of a simple rule: Power should never be given to anybody who seeks it.
In this contest between Saddam and the US alliance as formed to date we have fully corrupt absolute power on the one hand versus non-absolute power with a legacy of corruption on the other.
It is in the realm of their work where they are not subject to an electorate within their own country and the effects of their decisions impinge on the lives of (mainly poor) foreigners, chiefly in the Third World, that the undemocratic nature of democratically elected politicians comes to the fore.
As critics such as Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and now Scott Burchill never tire of pointing out, the history of the Twentieth Century is studded with examples of dictators put into power and supported by Western “democratic” governments; of outrages such as the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile by a junta operating with the support of the CIA, but more commonly of Third World democracy being stifled through Western assistance in the installation of local uniformed mafia as governments. Examples are easy to find, and Burchill provides a number.
In the 1930s, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly replied when told that the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza was a bastard, “Yes, but he’s our bastard.” The problem with such an approach is not just the embedded cynicism, but the fact that bastards have a way of being bastards and turning on their owners.
The moral principle to my knowledge first put forward by the great Jewish philosopher Hillel (c 100 BC) is relevant here: Do not do to others what you don’t want others to do to you. A simple rule for all politicians to observe: If you want the affection of the people of your own or any other country, don’t support their oppressors. It has unfortunately been a long time in the learning, and is easily forgotten. Actions taken in this regard by past US administrations are clearly having a deleterious effect on the level of domestic and international political support available to the present one.
Efforts to dress the looming war in anything that does not reek of petroleum are running into considerable difficulty as well. At the same time, few people in the West would challenge the contention that the removal of Saddam would be a good thing for the bulk of the Iraqi population, or defend his right to power or to the exercise of it in the appalling way he does. Many also would agree with the critics who say that his removal is an internal political problem for Iraq, ie a problem for the Iraqi people to solve, and outsiders should have no part in it.
However, the careers of two Twentieth Century politicians brought humanity face to face with itself in a particularly gruesome way. Adolf Hitler and his adversary Joseph Stalin (Saddam Hussein’s role model and hero) showed clearly what was possible through the exercise of power in the context of modern technology, communications and transport. The deeds of these two displayed to a degree unparalleled in history what humans organised into bureaucracies and authoritarian hierarchies are capable of in terms of the creation of death, misery, enslavement and debasement of the human spirit. But also they showed possibilities of power previously unheard of.
Stalin exceeded even Hitler. Hitler exercised power on the model of the Roman emperors, from which he borrowed much of the paraphernalia of the Nazi religion, including the salutes, the chants of “Heil!,” the banners and the methods. Surrounding the Roman emperor was the elite of the armed forces, the Praetorian Guard. Hitler’s version of this was the SS, which swore personal allegiance to him, and after a purge of rival power in mid 1934 (in which it is generally estimated that several hundred leaders of Ernst Rohm’s brownshirt organisation were arrested and executed without trial by the Gestapo) was subject to no routine of intimidation. That was not true for the rest of the German Army or the population of course.
But Stalin achieved something else again. His elite, which terrorized the whole USSR under his direction, was the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), forerunner of the KGB. But the cadres of the NKVD were no privileged elite in the sense of being free of fear of arrest and ‘liquidation’. Stalin in his time as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (the only office he held after his rise to supreme power) appointed three chiefs of this organisation – Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria. Only the last outlived him. The first two he had shot.
Nobody in the USSR was safe from Stalin. One man held no less than 190 million people in total fear of him, such that by 1937, in the observation of the poet Evgenia Ginzburg, people stopped communicating. In an atmosphere where a single slip of the tongue could land you in the Gulag or before a firing squad, small talk was the safest course. No assassination or coup attempts were ever mounted against Stalin, and his repetitive resort to purges and terror prevented any formation of a political opposition.
After 1944, during the period in which Eastern Europe was either controlled directly by the Red Army and KGB or indirectly through satellite governments, fear of Stalin extended from the western border of East Germany to the Pacific coast of Siberia, half a planet away. For the sake of that planet’s population, I sincerely hope that Stalin goes down in history as the most powerful man who ever lived. If someone else ever beats his record, we are all in for trouble, and many of us for a life of sheer terror. Needless to add, Saddam is the current contender on the block.
It could have been argued at the time that the removal of Stalin was a problem for the Soviet people to solve. Except that even 190 million strong, they could not do it. Likewise the Iraqis today with Saddam; 22 million of them cannot do it.
Saddam recently demonstrated his power in a presidential plebiscite in which he got 100 per cent of the vote. This more than anything illustrated the terror which dominates life in modern Iraq. Only from a population which is truly petrified of the consequences of voting against the ruler is such a vote possible. There is no need to hypothesise about stuffed ballot boxes or anything like that. Stalin is Saddam’s avowed hero, and I am sure the mentor would in turn admire the protege.
Of course the looming war is about oil, but by no means only about it.
In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, which started as a border dispute, Saddam fought not to settle the dispute, but to totally defeat Iran’s theocratic government and establish Iraq as the dominant power in the Gulf. An early strategic objective was the oil rich Iranian province of Khuzestan, and had Iran been defeated by the militarily superior Iraq, Saddam’s terms of settlement would likely have included increased control of Iranian oil, which forms about 9 percent of total world reserves.
The next country his forces invaded was Kuwait in 1990, which started the Gulf War. Kuwait holds close to 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves. His troops pillaged Kuwait and killed many Kuwaitis in the course of their occupation, and contemporary Kuwaitis have little time or love for the Iraqis. This move was widely read at the time as the precursor to a move on Saudi Arabia, whose feudal monarchy is widely unpopular amongst ordinary Saudis.
No doubt to his surprise, Saddam was driven out of Kuwait by the Gulf War coalition, and this was followed by the imposition of UN weapons inspections. An advance on Baghdad and the replacement of Saddam was ruled out in the interests of promoting ‘stability’, the key alliance partner Turkey being particularly concerned about possible autonomy or independence for Iraqi Kurds leading to similar demands from its own Kurdish population.
The United States is no longer self sufficient in oil, and buys much of its supply from sources in the western hemisphere. However, American oil companies are deeply involved in the world oil trade, and most authorities agree that around 2016 the Hubbert Limit will be reached. This represents the peak rate of oil production, after which, even with the pumps working flat out and everything possible done to maximize the rate at which crude comes out of the ground, production will go into steady and irreversible decline. Elementary economics dictates that either the price will rise in response until a new equilibrium between price and supply is reached, or rationing will have to be introduced as it was in World War 2.
So it is reasonable to conclude that this business is partly about oil – Saddam’s manifest desire to get into a position from which he can dominate both the oil market and the Middle East, America’s desire to stop him, and a desire on the part of France, Russia and China to come to some arrangement with him. It is reasonable to assume that he sees weapons of mass destruction as providing necessary protection while he engages in this, for if Iraq today had WMD and delivery systems intact and ready to go, the defeat of Saddam as presently contemplated by George Bush and his allies would be considerably more risky and potentially far more expensive.
But oil, despite what some commentators are saying, can only be part of it. The rest is the horrific possibilities the world faces if Saddam achieves his aims in the area of weapons capability. Critics of Bush, Blair and Howard should remember that the UN has declared such a low level of confidence in Saddam that it has demanded he disarm in the area of WMD. They should also remember that if war occurs, the primary responsibility has to lie with Saddam.
Saddam has been placed in a no win situation by the UN, and fully deserves it. He has been called upon to prove that he has no WMD, and so far has not been able to do so. If I was called on by the law to prove that I did not own a sawn off shotgun, I would invite inspection of my property. But when that turned up nothing and they said “OK so where have you hidden it?” no amount of denial on my part could prove that I did not own one, and had not hidden it somewhere.
Some forbidden items have been found in the homes of Iraqi scientists, which indicates that Saddam may have opted for a Dunkirk style solution. When the British Army was trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk early in WW2, evacuation was effected by a large number of small boats rather than a few large ones. There are around 20 million people in Iraq, and even at ten per house, that means 2 million houses. If the WMD and related equipment were broken up and distributed between those houses with the occupants sworn to secrecy on pain of dire consequences, the task of the inspectors would be way beyond the scope of possibility. Something like that is probably the present reality.
That said, here is my comment on Burchill’s original text. Scott’s remarks are in italics, my responses in bold.
***
Amongst the agitprop, disinformation and outright fabrications by commissars and politicians, the following questions and themes are prominent in the public discourse. Each of them deserves careful analysis.
Is Saddam Hussein likely to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the US and its allies?
First, many states, including the US, the UK and Israel, acquire these weapons for deterrence against external attack. You’ve got to wonder how Prime Minister Howard and the pro-war lobby have failed to understand the lesson that the Iraq-North Korea comparison is teaching the world: If you want to deter the war addicts in Washington, you’d better have weapons of mass destruction and resources of terror. Nothing else will work.
Why wouldn’t Iraq develop WMD for deterrence purposes given threats by Washington and London?
One moment, please. Iraq’s WMD program pre-dates the threats from Washington and London. As we read further on in his piece, it was begun before the Iran-Iraq war, and during that conflict had Washington’s support. Iraq only came into conflict with the US after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
We are discouraged from seeing things from Iraq’s point of view, but in many ways WMD make sense for vulnerable states. As the realist theorist Kenneth Waltz argues, “North Korea, Iraq, Iran and others know that the United States can be held at bay only by deterrence. Weapons of mass destruction are the only means by which they can hope to deter the United States. They cannot hope to do so by relying on conventional weapons” (Waltz 2002, p.351-2).
Wrong. The Vietnamese using conventional weapons inflicted on the US the greatest military defeat in its history, and were never at significant risk of nuclear attack throughout that entire conflict. North Korea is safe from US attack thanks to its land army, which is the sixth largest in the world, and to its proximity to China, which became involved in its 1950-53 war with the US (the latter fighting under the flag of the UN). North Korea’s present danger lies precisely in its attempts to become a nuclear power. Unlike Iraq, Iran has no significant population likely to side with the US against its own government, and Iranian popular hostility to the US is based on the latter’s abysmal history of intervention in Iranian politics, specifically via the joint CIA and British SIS organised coup which overthrew premier Muhammad Ali Mussadeq in 1953 and then supported the oppressive regime of the Pahlavis. Iran would be in no danger of a conventional attack from the US (the last effort by Jimmy Carter was a complete fiasco) and only in danger of a nuclear attack if it had nuclear weapons of its own and the means to deliver them onto a strategic US target. Iraq is the only country in the world at risk of US attack, now or at any time in the foreseeable future. Even Cuba, 90 miles from Florida, is safe, and only became vulnerable when the USSR moved to set up a nuclear rocket base there, thus provoking the missile crisis of 1962.
To make Iraq safe all Saddam would have to do would be to arm the whole population, as Castro did before the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. No dictator wants to do that. Stalin made possession of a firearm by an ordinary citizen a capital offence, and one would assume Saddam has followed suit.
As with every country, Iraq’s weapons inventory and systems tell us precisely nothing about its strategic intentions.
Is that so? Iraqi aggression started both the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. Its biological warfare capability is worse than useless within its own borders, and its powerful chemical agents would have to be used at locations remote from its own troops. While they could conceivably be used to counterattack against hostilities begun as external attack, such weapons inventory and systems considered in the light of Iraq’s recent history tell us a great deal about its (likely) strategic intentions. With WMD he will be in a better position to resume his drive to dominate the Middle East. The safest assumption to make about someone like Saddam is that his intentions are those of a ruthless megalomaniac, ie the worst possible.
Secondly, Iraq had chemical and biological weapons during the Gulf War in 1991 and chose not to use them. Why would Saddam Hussein be more inclined to use them now knowing the horrendous consequences (as they were explained to him by Brent Scowcroft in 1991), unless his personal survival was at stake and he had nothing left to lose? AS CIA head George Tenet reminded President George W. Bush, Saddam was unlikely to launch WMD against the US unless the survival of his regime was threatened.
Which is why a tyrant like Saddam seeks to develop such weapons. The range of responses available to the rest of the world through the UN include both (a) therefore leave him alone, (b) therefore take them away from him, and (c) therefore replace him and his cronies with others more agreeable. The UN has chosen (b) rather than (a), and given the failure to date of (b), is more likely in the near future to opt for (c) because they know that (a) is not an option offering peace to the region or the world even in the short term.
As Mearsheimer and Walt argue: “The threat of Iraqi nuclear blackmail is not credible. Not surprisingly, hawks do not explain how Saddam could blackmail the United States and its allies when a rival superpower like the Soviet Union [with 40,000 nuclear weapons] never seriously attempted to blackmail Washington, much less did it.” (Mearsheimer & Walt 2002, pp.10-11).
One would actually hope this to be true. However, throughout the Cold War both the leaders of the US and the USSR manifested at all times a desire for personal survival. Since 9/11 one cannot say this in confidence about any Muslim armed with a nuclear weapon, since unlike the majority of the world’s Muslims, such a person is likely to be motivated by the same goals as Muhammad Atta and his 9/11 colleagues. After Saddam’s Iraq, Pakistan is the wildest card in the nuclear pack.
***
Saddam Hussein has form: he has used WMD before
It is true that Saddam Hussein has used these weapons before, against those who couldn’t respond in kind – Iranian soldiers and perhaps most infamously on 17 March 1988 against “his own people” in the Kurdish city of Halabja. Within half an hour of this attack over 5000 men, women and children were dead from chemical weapons containing a range of pathogens which were dropped on them.
If Washington and London are genuinely concerned about Iraq’s WMD, why did they continue to supply him with the means to acquire them for 18 months after the attack on Halabja?
Simple: He was their bastard then, and they are now reaping the consequences.
Initially, the US blamed Iran for the Halabja attack, a particularly cynical ploy given Saddam had also used chemical weapons against Teheran’s forces during their nine-year conflict in the 1980s. In fact Washington continued to treat Saddam as a favoured ally and trading partner long after the attack on Halabja was exposed as his handiwork. At the time, the Reagan Administration tried to prevent criticism of Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurds in the Congress and in December 1989, George Bush’s father authorised new loans to Saddam in order to achieve the “goal of increasing US exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record”. Surprisingly, the goal was never reached. In February 1989, eleven months after Halabja, John Kelly, US Assistant Secretary of State, flew to Baghdad to tell Saddam Hussein that “you are a source for moderation in the region, and the United States wants to broaden her relationship with Iraq”.
I suppose a contemporary White House staffer would say that at the time, beating Iran had priority. One has little difficulty discovering cynicism and dishonesty on the US side. All governments lie, and thus prepare for themselves future difficulties of both credibility and alliance such as the US now faces.
According to the reports of a Senate Banking Committee, the “United States provided the government of Iraq with ‘dual-use’ licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programs. According to the report, this assistance included “chemical warfare-agent precursors; chemical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings; chemical warfare-filling equipment; biological warfare-related materials; missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment.” These technologies were sent to Iraq until December 1989, 20 months after Halabja.
According to William Blum a “veritable witch’s brew of biological materials were exported to Iraq by private American suppliers,” including Bacillus Anthracis (cause of anthrax), Clostridium Botulinum (a source of botulinum toxin), Histoplasma Capsulatam (causes disease which attacks lungs, brain, spinal chord and heart), Brucella Melitensis (bacteria which attacks vital organs) and other toxic agents. The US Senate Committee said “these biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction,” and it was later discovered that “these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program” (Blum 2002, pp.121-2).
After the recent leaking in Germany of Iraq’s 12,000 page declaration of its weapons program, it is now known that at least 150 companies, mostly in Europe, the United States and Japan, provided components and know-how needed by Saddam Hussein to build atomic bombs, chemical and biological weapons (for the list, see Always willing, we’re off to war again). Unsurprisingly, the US was keen to excise these details from Iraq’s report before its wider dissemination to non-permanent members of the Security Council (Newsday (US), 13 December, 2002; The Independent (UK), 18 and 19 December, 2002; Scotland on Sunday (UK), 22 December, 2002).
Historian Gabriel Kolko claims that “the United Stares supplied Iraq with intelligence throughout the war [with Iran] and provided it with more than $US5 billion in food credits, technology, and industrial products, most coming after it began to use mustard, cyanide, and nerve gases against both Iranians and dissident Iraqi Kurds” (Kolko 2002, p.34).
If the US is genuinely concerned by Saddam’s WMD, why did Donald Rumsfeld (then a presidential envoy for President Reagan, currently President George W. Bush’s Defence Secretary) fly to Baghdad in December 1983 to meet Saddam and normalise the US-Iraq relationship, at a time when Washington new Iraq was using chemical weapons on an “almost daily” basis against Iran (Washington Post, 30 December, 2002)? Why were no concerns about the use of these weapons raised with Baghdad?
Saddam has been successfully deterred from using WMD against other states with WMD. There is no reason to believe this situation has changed or will.
Except that the UNSC, concerned about nuclear proliferation and chemical and biological WMD, has seen fit to try to force Saddam to get rid of his whole arsenal.
***
Saddam Hussein has invaded his neighbours twice
True, but this can hardly be a source of outrage for Western governments or a pretext for his removal from power given they actively supported his invasion of Iran in the 1980s with intelligence (eg satellite imagery of Iranian troop positions) and weaponry and, in the case of Washington, told Saddam it was agnostic about his border dispute with Kuwait just prior to Iraq’s invasion in August 1990 (US Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam in 1990 that “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait”. The U.S. State Department reinforced this message by declaring that Washington had “no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait” (Mearsheimer & Walt 2002, p.5). This is mock outrage at best.
As noted above, Iranian hostility to the US is a reaction against the latter’s indefensible history of intervention in Iranian politics against the wishes and interests of the majority of the Iranian people. However, the second last sentence could not be construed as a State Department invitation to Saddam to invade Kuwait.
Saddam’s behaviour is no worse than several of his neighbours. As Mearsheimer and Walt remind us, “Saddam’s past behavior is no worse than that of several other states in the Middle East, and it may even be marginally better. Egypt fought six wars between 1948 and 1973 (five against Israel, plus the civil war in Yemen), and played a key role in starting four of them. Israel initiated wars on three occasions (the Suez War in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon), and has conducted innumerable air strikes and commando raids against its various Arab adversaries” (Mearsheimer & Walt 2002, p.3).
True enough, but long term strategic control of oil, as against territory, was not involved in the above examples. Saddam’s unique combination of oil strategy and WMD deployment is what has attracted UN concern. As for Saddam being no worse than his neighbours, tell that to the Kurds.
***
Saddam Hussein is a monster who runs a violent, oppressive regime
True again, though this didn’t prevent him from being a favoured ally and trading partner of the West at the peak of his crimes in the 1980s. As Mark Thomas notes, the conspicuous aspect of British Labour’s attitude to Iraq has been the failure of Blair, Straw, Prescott, Blunkett, Cook or Hoon to register any concerns about Iraq’s human rights record whenever the opportunities arose in the British Parliament during the 1980s and 1990s (New Statesman, 9 December, 2002).
Washington, London and Canberra never had reservations about General Suharto’s brutal rule in Indonesia, to take only one example of relations between the West and autocratic regimes around the world, and were in fact overjoyed when he came to power over the bodies of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens in 1965.
Here we are into ‘true, but …’ Had the US engaged upon the unlikely course of sending troops to block the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, some Scott Burchill of the time might have opposed it on a comparable basis – that the US supported the brutal regimes in South Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines (under Marcos) etc. If we are to base an assessment of the policy the US should follow now on selections from its past chequered record then any position we like is possible, but the most likely one is total paralysis, as Hitler found in the case of Britain and France after he moved into the Rhineland in 1936.
***
Only the threat of force by the US has forced Iraq to accept weapons inspectors
Possibly true, although this ignores the fact that the last time force was used against Iraq on a significant scale because of its non-compliance with UN Security Resolutions, the opposite effect was produced. After the Clinton Administration and Blair Government attacked Iraq from 16-19 December, 1998 (Operation Desert Fox), the result was the collapse of Richard Butler’s UNSCOM and the absence of weapons inspectors from Iraq for the next four years. Hardly a testament to the use of force, to say nothing of the precedent this kind of behaviour sets. The Prime Minister’s claim that “Hussein effectively expelled weapons inspectors during 1998” is untrue and he knows it (The Australian, 1 January, 2003). Richard Butler withdrew his weapons inspectors on Washington’s advice only hours before the Anglo-American attacks in December 1998.
There are many issues on which I personally disagree with John Howard, but this is not one of them. The key word here is “effectively”, which Burchill glosses over. Nobody who has read Richard Butler’s account of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) could accept this. Butler sums up his experience as follows:
“Three permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations – the lawmaker and enforcer in this field – have decided to end any serious effort to disarm Saddam, to oblige him to conform with the law. Russia, France and China have done this because they prefer to pursue their own interests rather than to carry out their international responsibility.
“Also, in 1998, at a key moment of extreme defiance by Saddam, the Secretary General of the United Nations, in many respects the guardian of the law, sought to solve the crisis through diplomatic means substantially disconnected from the matters of substance – weapons of mass destruction and the authority of international law.
“In addition, during my time at UNSCOM, members of the Security Council increasingly sought to shift political responsibility to me for their failure to enforce their own law. They asked me to make judgements about the threat posed by Iraq, an issue well beyond my mandate and one that they alone could settle. When I pointed out that they were asking me the wrong question, they resented it. When I gave them the facts as I knew them and for which I was competent and responsible, if they didn’t like these facts, they joined Iraq in charging that UNSCOM, not Iraq, was the problem.
“Nowhere in my mandate was it stated that I should decide on or recommend military action. But in November 1998, the Security Council instructed me to produce a factual report on Iraqi compliance against a background where, if my report showed Iraq was not in compliance, there was likely to be military action by the United States and Britain. My job was to report on the disarmament facts. I did so, and military action followed, in December 1998.
“It could be argued that I should have deciphered the political code: report negatively on Iraq’s conduct and there will be war; if you don’t want that, don’t report negatively; this is not about facts, its about politics.” (Richard Butler, Saddam Defiant, Phoenix, 2000. p.2)
Butler’s account is one of continuous Iraqi frustration of the work of UNSCOM, aided by divisions on effective policy and purpose in the Security Council. Burchill’s summary above leads one to the conclusion that the collapse of UNSCOM was the fault of the Americans and the British. Richard Butler’s UNSOM had effectively collapsed before Operation Desert Fox, which was a response to that collapse, not the cause of it.
To say that Butler left rather than was forced out (expelled) by Saddam and his cronies is to split hairs and accord to the latter a degree of innocence and victimization they do not deserve. We can of course play word games and legalistic petit point with this until the cows come home. I am sure Saddam would not mind at all.
Why wasn’t the threat of force an appropriate strategy for the West in response to Indonesia’s brutal 24-year occupation of East Timor? Or South Africa’s occupation of Namibia? Or Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus? Or Israel’s occupation of Palestine? Etc, etc,.
Yes, etc, etc, etc. Because in the case of East Timor, threats of force, however appropriate in terms of a human sense of justice, were not made. The people who could have made them were operating in a Cold War framework. But to give credit where it is due, that changed with the end of the Cold War. During the Indonesian rampage in East Timor in September 1999 the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff read the riot act over the phone to his Indonesian counterpart General Wiranto, and the US gave the Australian army vital logistical support for the East Timor operation. Henry Kissinger subsequently bleated about not knowing what atrocities the Indonesian army was capable of when he gave them the green light to invade East Timor in 1975. A very convincing performance, particularly in the light of the slaughter that brought Suharto to power following the “Untung Coup” of 1965, which could not have escaped Kissinger’s notice. But outside the Cold War environment, the US used the threat of unpleasant consequences against the Indonesians with quite telling effect.
What lessons should we draw from this claim? Presumably one is that if a state wants to get its way in international politics, it should threaten to annihilate its adversaries. Apart from the morality of such behaviour, the consequences of the broad adoption of such behaviour are worth pondering.
Saddam threatens to annihilate his adversaries as a matter of routine. His most recent target in this regard has been the government of Qatar. But it all hinges on what one calls an “adversary”. Australia has its differences with certain other countries, but these do not lead to threats of force. Saddam on the other hand has by his behaviour gained himself a long list of adversaries, and as usual is diplomatically isolated. He now faces annihilation. But he stands as an exceptional case in the modern world. Burchill says that apart from the morality of such behaviour, the consequences of the BROAD adoption of such behaviour are worth pondering. I agree. Like wormholes in space-time – of arguable significance in the everyday world we all know, but a nice academic exercise.
***
Has the threat posed by Saddam Hussein increased recently?
The West, particularly London and Washington, was solidly supporting Saddam when he committed the worst of his crimes at the zenith of his power and influence in the 1980s.
In terms of international support – especially Western and Soviet backing, the strength of his armed forces and the state of his industry and equipment, Saddam was considerably more dangerous then than he is now under harsh UN sanctions, (illegal) no-fly zones in the north (since 1991) and south (since 1993) of the country, political isolation and a degraded civilian infrastructure. His armed forces have not been re-built since their decimation in 1991.
Is that so? Given the wild goose chase he has been leading for the latest round of weapons inspections, who knows what Saddam has up his sleeve? He says he is ready to defeat the Americans if they invade. Keeping one’s weapon capacity secret from the enemy has long been part of the art of warfare.
Why are Saddam’s attempts to develop WMD a concern now if they weren’t when he actually used them?
Because when he used them against the Kurds and the Iranians, the US governments involved operated in the forlorn belief that he was their bastard. Since, he has emerged in his own true colours as his own bastard. The administrations of G. Bush I, Bill Clinton and G. Bush II have recognized this fact.
***
The events of September 11, 2001 have made disarming Iraq more urgent
The problem with this argument is that those in Washington who are now urging war against Iraq are the very same people who publicly called for Saddam Hussein’s overthrow well before 9/11. The argument about Saddam’s WMD and the likelihood that he will pass them on to terrorists has only been ‘added on’ to earlier calls for his removal by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Armitage, et al, which were made during the Clinton Administration.
Yes. Saddam’s record, his present policy of not to yield on WMD and to frustrate inspections, and his apparently retained objective to seek a wider role and status for himself and his regime in the Middle East makes him about the most dangerous megalomaniac alive today. And no. G. Bush Snr miscalculated badly in 1991 when he called on the people of Iraq to overthrow Saddam. It is reasonable to assume that he did not cynically calculate to flush them out into the open so they could be mown down by Saddam’s troops. On the face of it, the Gulf War had destabilized Saddam’s regime sufficiently enough for it popular overthrow to be achievable, given the right encouragement. That had been the fate of the Greek colonels and General Galtieri of Argentina, who had all made the mistake of getting their armies involved in foreign wars when their true and proper role within the context of their regimes was domestic repression. Mutiny brought them down, but Saddam proved to be the exception, and not through the love of the Iraqi people for him.
For example, in 1998 the US Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act which said that “It should be the policy of the United States to seek to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” The question of Iraq’s WMD should therefore be seen as merely the latest pretext for a policy of regime change taken well before terrorists attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre.
The US has had a policy favouring regime change in Iraq since 1991. But 9/11 showed the world what could be done by suicidal terrorists with significant resources behind them. Saddam has such resources, and the safest assumption to make is that he is totally ruthless – also supported by his domestic record. It is hard to conceive of any regime which replaced Saddam’s being anything but a change for the better as far as the Iraqi people are concerned. Behind the benign acronym WMD are nuclear bombs, rockets loaded with anthrax and other epidemic disease organisms, and chemical compounds of almost unbelievable toxicity, together with their means of delivery. Saddam has already established his credentials as a terrorist in his own right; Halabja showed that.
***
Saddam Hussein will pass WMD on to terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda
Despite forensic efforts by Washington to produce a pretext for war, no credible evidence for this claim has been found. All we are left with is unsubstantiated assertions by Bush Administration officials such as Richard Armitage that he has no doubts Iraq would pass WMD on to terrorists (though he doesn’t explain how an obvious return address resulting in reciprocal annihilation could be concealed). This may be enough for faithful conduits in the Australian media, but it cannot withstand even a cursory examination. Where is the evidence for such a claim? Osama bin Laden offered the Saudi Government the resources of his organisation to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990 instead of Riyadh relying on the US, such is the animosity between Islamic fundamentalists and secular nationalists in the Arab world. Saddam has responded by repressing fundamentalist groups within Iraq. Would Saddam be likely to hand over to Al Qaeda nuclear weapons so painstakingly built when he, himself might be the first victim of their use? Remarkably, the pro-war lobby reads this history as evidence of likely future co-operation between Baghdad and Al Qaeda.
Much of this is a smokescreen designed to conceal who the real proliferators of WMD are. Which states, for example assisted Israel to develop nuclear weapons – France and the US? What role did Pakistan and China play in helping North Korea build its nuclear stockpile? Why can’t we read the list of European, Asian and US companies which proliferated WMD technologies to Iraq? Instead of imaginary scenarios asking ‘what if Iraq acquires nuclear weapons in five years and what if it passes them on to terrorist organisations?’, why not more sensible questions about which rogue states (most of whom are members of the so called ‘war against terrorism’) are already responsible for the proliferation of WMD?
On the face of it, quite right. Chasing a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam has not exactly been a success for the G. Bush II Administration, and is the weakest part of the otherwise strong case put on February 6th 2003 by US Secretary of State Colin Powell. But must we assume that al-Qaeda is the only terrorist organisation likely now or in the foreseeable future to seek to acquire such weapons? The danger is not confined to al-Qaeda. The enemy is Islamic fascism, of which al-Qaeda is merely the most prominent part.
Burchill also states that most rogue states are already members of the ‘war against terrorism’, and are already responsible for the proliferation of WMD. I wish he had been more specific: Who is he referring to?
***
What happens if terrorists acquire nuclear weapons?
Conventional wisdom claims this is “the ultimate nightmare.” But is it?
Yes, it damned well is. One reads through the section that follows the above statement with great interest, hoping that Burchill will reveal a worse nightmare. But in vain.
The nature of the threat posed by terrorists with nuclear devices is presupposed, but rarely examined. The discussion below is by Kenneth Waltz, a US conservative and the leading theorist of neo-realism in international relations. It helps to place this “ultimate nightmare” in some perspective.
“With the devolution of nuclear weapons to three of the parts of the former Soviet Union, with shaky control of nuclear weapons materials in Russia, with the revelation in 1994 that the United States had lost track of some of its nuclear materials, with increased numbers of countries able and perhaps willing to sell components needed to develop nuclear capability to countries that lack them, and with a flourishing market in systems for the delivery of weapons, fear has grown that terrorists may obtain nuclear explosives and means of placing them on targets they choose. The worry is real, especially if terrorists are eager to have nuclear explosives and are backed by a state bent on disrupting international society.
“Terrorists have done a good bit of damage by using conventional weapons and have sometimes got their way by threatening to use them. By their lights, might terrorists not do better still by threatening to explode nuclear weapons on cities of countries they may wish to bend to their bidding?
“If we believe that terrorists could, if they wished to, wield nuclear weapons to threaten or damage their chosen enemies, then the important question becomes: Why would they want to? To answer this question, we have to ask further what terrorists are trying to do and what means best suit their ends.
“Terrorists do not play their deadly games to win in the near term. Their horizons are distant. Instead they try to offer a voice to the unheard, to give a glimmer of hope to the forlorn, to force established societies to recognise alienated others previously unseen, and ultimately to transcend given societies and found their own.
“Terrorists live precarious lives. Nobody trusts them, not even those who finance, train, and hide them. If apprehended, they cannot count on the help of others. They have learned how to use conventional weapons to some effect. Nuclear weapons would thrust them into a world fraught with new dangers.
“Terrorists work in small groups. Secrecy is safety, yet to obtain and maintain nuclear weapons would require enlarging the terrorist band through multiplication of suppliers, transporters, technicians, and guardians. Inspiring devotion, instilling discipline, and ensuring secrecy become harder tasks to accomplish as numbers grow. Moreover, as the demands of terrorists increase, compliance with their demands becomes harder to secure. If, for example, terrorists had told Israel to abandon the occupied territories or suffer the nuclear destruction of Tel Aviv, Israel’s compliance would have required that a lengthy and difficult political process be carried through. However they may be armed, terrorists are not capable of maintaining pressure while lengthy efforts toward compliance are made.
“One more point should be made before concluding this section. If terrorists should unexpectedly decide to abandon tactics of disruption and harassment in favour of dealing in threats of wholesale death and destruction, instruments other than nuclear weapons are more easily available. Poisons are easier to get and use than nuclear weapons, and poisoning a city’s water supply is more easily done than blowing the city up.
“Fear of nuclear terror arises from the assumption that if terrorists can get nuclear weapons they will get them, and that then all hell will break lose. This is comparable to assuming that if weak states get nuclear weapons, they will use them for aggression. Both assumptions are false. Would the courses of action we fear, if followed, promise more gains than losses or more pains than profit? The answers are obvious. Terrorists have some hope of reaching their long-term goals through patient pressure and constant harassment. They cannot hope to do so by issuing unsustainable threats to wreck great destruction, threats they would not want to execute anyway.” (Waltz 1995, pp.94-6) (Ian’s emphasis)
Please note the date Waltz wrote the above: 1995. But everything changed on September 11, 2001. Everything, including the currency of Waltz’s otherwise sound thought. We can play word games and define al-Qaeda as a small group or whatever we like, but the now redundant assumption underlying the above is that terrorists want to survive. I would not trust an Islamist terrorist who had got hold of a nuclear bomb of whatever kind to behave rationally. I don’t know why; it is just a feeling I have.
***
The US wants to democratise Iraq
There is no serious US interest in a democratic transition in Iraq, because this could ultimately encourage the Shi’ite majority in the country to pursue a closer relationship with Shi’ite Iran – a nightmare scenario for Washington. Washington was content for Saddam Hussein to stay in office for as long as he was useful to its geo-strategic interests in the region. There was no mention of a transition to democracy in Iraq during the 1980s.
As far as I know, the above is quite true, and the US cause is severely compromised. The past is weighing like a dead hand on the present. The Kurds are the natural allies of the US in Iraq, but were massacred in large numbers by Saddam following G Bush I’s call for them to rise against Saddam in 1991. The US support they expected and hoped for never came. Carving an independent Kurdistan out of Iraq would satisfy their cravings for independence, but would antagonize the Turks, who do not want to see Turkish Kurds involved in anything similar.
Similarly, the Shi’ite majority and the US have a common enemy in the Sunni “aristocracy” of Iraq who support Saddam. What this would translate into on the ground is still an open question, and I am in no position to offer suggestions, except that in the light of the counterproductive policies followed by the US over the 20th Century in the Middle East, perhaps the best thing for it to do now would be to help create the conditions wherein the Shi’ites on both sides of the Iran-Iraq border could work the issues out for themselves. A commitment against the breakup of Iraq in the interests of ‘stability’ is, to say the least, a joke in the light of the situation the US presently finds itself in.
It’s more likely that a dissident former General, possibly involved in war crimes against Iraq’s Kurdish or Shi’ite communities, will be returned from exile and presented as the “democratic opposition” to Saddam Hussein. The US is interested in compliance and obedience rather than democracy. It has rarely, if ever, expressed an interest in democracy in the Middle East where all but one of its friends and interlocutors are authoritarian states. Ideally, a pro-Western, anti-Iranian, secular “iron fist” would do. The recently rehabilitated Iraqi opposition in exile (with whom until recently the US refused to deal) has no democratic credibility and is largely unknown inside Iraq (or in the US for that matter).
What we in the West understand by ‘democracy’ is actually the periodic appointment or replacement of an oligarchy by popular ballot. In the Middle East the oligarchies are appointed and replaced by different means. Democracy is not native to the Middle East, unlike tribalism and feudal hierarchy, which definitely are. There is a tradition of stamping out democracy which goes right back to the wars fought by the Persians against the democratic Greeks in ancient times. Thus it is not surprising that traditionally the US has sought out rulers it can deal with rather than democratically oriented groups and parties which have potential but little in the way of actual assets on the ground.
Christianity in the Reformation period in Europe became a vehicle for the rise of what we in the West understand as democracy, but Islam has yet to undergo anything similar to the Reformation. In the huge Islamic arc that stretches from Indonesia to Nigeria, democracy is struggling to be born and liberalism is virtually an unknown concept. The safest thing for the politicians of the US to do is to refrain from supporting politicians and parties in the Third World that they would not like to see gain power if they were in the US.
***
What is the status of pre-emptive strikes in international law?
There is a regime of international law, binding on all states, based on the UN Charter, UN Security Council resolutions and World Court decisions. In summary, the threat or use of force is banned unless explicitly authorised by the Security Council after it has determined that all peaceful means for resolving a conflict have failed, or in self-defence against armed attack until the Security Council acts.
A number of points can be made about Canberra’s interest in retrospectively amending international law to legitimise a shift of strategic doctrine from deterrence to pre-emption. It would establish a precedent that others (Pakistan & India; North & South Korea) might be encouraged to follow; it would have a destabilising effect on international order; the difficulty (impossibility) of getting changes through the UN Security Council; the heightened sense of vulnerability for smaller states and for states in the region, etc, etc,. It would open up a can of worms.
That it would, and the Bush Administration knows it, which is why they are working so hard to get Security Council support.
Significantly, there is currently only one country which could seriously consider exercising a right to anticipatory self-defence under existing international law – Iraq. It has been directly threatened with attack by both the US and UK. There has been no reciprocal threat from Iraq.
Except that intimately bound up with the question is the fact that Iraq is in violation of a UNSC resolution.
The term ‘pre-emptive war’ isn’t strictly accurate. As Steven Miller explains:
“Though Bush’s approach has been almost universally described, in the media and elsewhere, as a doctrine of preemption, this is incorrect. Preemption refers to a military strike provoked by indications that an opponent is preparing to attack. The logic is: better to strike than be struck. But no one is suggesting that Saddam is preparing to strike the United States. There are no indications that this is the case. Bush is instead making the case for preventive war, for removing today a threat that may be more menacing and difficult in the future. The administration may prefer to label its policy preemption because that is an easier case to make. But it is not an accurate use of the term as traditionally defined.” (Miller 2002, p.8)
Given the inherent conflict between the strategic interests of the US (access to Middle East Oil, if not now then in the near future), her policy tradition (for US companies to gain as much control of that oil as possible) and Saddam’s recently manifested push in the same direction, conflict between the two will always be on the cards until the oil itself runs out. No other Middle Eastern ruler has the combination of strategic position, form and megalomania as Saddam.
Saddam’s drive into Kuwait constituted merely the opening phase of what was likely to be a campaign to secure control over the combined oil fields of Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia: 47 percent of the whole world’s reserves, and the best and most accessible ones at that. In such a situation of power it would be quite conceivable that Saddam would work to add the fields of the United Arab Emirates to those under his influence if not control: another 8 percent, to total 55 percent.
The safest assumption to make is that Saddam’s ambition remains. It is to become the Joseph Stalin of the Middle East, ruling directly where he can and through satraps where he cannot. If the US is going to get into a fight with him, it is understandable that it might choose to do so when he is weak rather than wait until he is strong.
According to international law specialist Michael Byers, “there is almost no support for a right of anticipatory self-defence as such in present-day customary international law” (Byers 2002, p.124). To the extent that pre-emptive action is permissible under Article 51 of the UN Charter, it requires very strong evidence and there is a heavy burden of justification. The United States, for example, would have to be facing a specific, grave and imminent threat from Iraq which could only be averted by the use of force. According to the test established in the mid-nineteenth century by US Secretary of State Daniel Webster – criteria applied in 1945 at Nuremberg – the need for pre-emptive action must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”.
Firstly, the justification offered by the Indonesians in 1975 for their invasion of East Timor was that if they did not there would soon be a Cuba in this region, with all that that implied: subversion of neighbouring states and foreign military bases in particular. It was presented to the world as a preemptive strike against a looming threat. They got away with it for 25 years in the face of what amounted to token objection from the UN, along with systematic genocide behind a total news blackout. Certainly there was no push for forces operating under the UN flag to intervene against Indonesia the way they had against North Korea in 1950. Both international and domestic politics, as practiced, is the art of what you can get away with. Law at times has precious little to do with it. Sad, but true. On the same basis, the UN is highly unlikely to make any move against the perpetrators of the militia violence in East Timor in 1999 following the independence ballot. The UN is only as good as the states that make it up, and a whole bunch of them are none too savoury. Which is why the permanent members of the Security Council have insisted on having their own club.
Secondly: With all due respect to Mr Webster, he was writing in the era before nuclear weapons. The world fortunately to date has not experienced a situation where a surprise nuclear explosion from whatever source occurs inside the territory of a nuclear power, and one must hope that it never does. But we can do more than hope: we can work to minimize the risk, which is what nuclear non-proliferation is all about.
Otherwise a unilateral strike not authorised by the UN Security Council would be an act of aggression and a breach of international law. As claimed earlier, Iraq has a stronger case at this point in time (given US troop and equipment movements in Qatar, to say nothing of Bush’s stated threats).
Christine Gray, author of a seminal modern text on the use of force under international law, argues that the reluctance of states “to invoke anticipatory self-defence is in itself a clear indication of the doubtful status of this jurisdiction for the use of force”. According to Gray, in cases where Israel (Beirut 1968, Tunis 1985) and the US (Libya 1986, Iraq 1993, Sudan & Afghanistan 1998) have invoked anticipatory self-defence under Article 51 to justify attacks on their enemies, “the actions look more like reprisals, because they were punitive rather than defensive”. The problem for the US and Israel, she argues, “is that all states agree that in principle forcible reprisals are unlawful” (Gray 2000, pp.112, 114, 115, 118).
By definition, pre-emptive strikes depend on conclusive intelligence. If the intelligence is wrong, as it was on 20 August 1998 when the Clinton Administration attacked the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, mistakenly believing it was an Al Qaeda chemical weapons factory, the results can be catastrophic for the innocent – self-defence becomes aggression.
Interestingly, the US has not always supported the ‘doctrine’ of anticipatory self-defence, even when its closest allies invoked it. On 7 June 1981 unmarked American-built F-16 aircraft of the Israeli airforce attacked and destroyed a nuclear reactor at Osirak in Iraq. The raid was authorised by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but had been internally opposed by Yitzhak Hofi, the director of Mossad, and Major-General Yehoshua Saguy, chief of military intelligence, because there was no evidence that Iraq was capable of building a nuclear bomb. This was also the view of the International Atomic Energy Authority. At the time of the attack, Israel itself had been developing and accumulating nuclear weapons for thirteen years, primarily at its nuclear facility at Dimona.
In response to Israel’s unprovoked pre-emptive strike, US Vice President George Bush Snr argued that sanctions had to be imposed on Israel. The US State Department condemned the bombing for its destabilising impact “which cannot but seriously add to the already tense situation in the area”. The basis of Washington’s concern, it must be said, was not its opposition to anticipatory self-defence per se but that Israel had violated the UN Charter by not exhausting all peaceful means for the resolution of the conflict – in truth no peaceful resolution had been sought. A few days after the raid, Ronald Reagan’s White House announced that the planned delivery of four additional F-16s to Israel would be suspended in protest against the attack. The suspension was discretely lifted soon after (Hersh 1993, pp.9-16).
Politicians tend to operate on the principle of a short public memory, an often somnambulant press, and what they can get away with. Thus pointing to inconsistencies in their behaviour is quite easy, as Burchill and others are presently showing. But one searches in vain in the writings of such people for alternative policy suggestion that might work in terms of bringing about the best outcome for the greatest number of people, Iraqi, American or whatever. The question as to what the outcome might be if the present alliance invades Iraq (with or without UNSC approval) is addressed in detail, with catalogues of past sins, hypocrisies and outrages of all kinds on the parts of the protagonists appended. (And let there be no doubt, it could be anything from a walkover to a total catastrophe.) But nothing beyond it in the direction of what the future might hold if Saddam is left working as he pleases within Iraq, except the oft repeated statement that so far no significant weapons have been found by the inspectors, with the unstated invitation to conclude that therefore it is likely none exist.
The work of the UNMOVIC inspectors is carried out in Iraq under the ever present threat to Saddam of UN sponsored military intervention if he does not fully comply with the UN terms and conditions. He has clearly chosen to play his usual games with the inspectors, and to retain his WMD capability.
If Burchill believes that under no circumstances should a military move be made against Saddam, then he should clearly say so. If not, he should say under what circumstances he would approve such action. Again one finds refutation of many common propositions about the present situation in Burchill’s document, but no attempt at refutation of the commonly encountered proposition that doing nothing is not an option to guarantee the long term peace of the region. Burchill has much to say on the consequences of acting against Saddam, but very little on those of not acting against him. This fits in with his reluctant concession at the start that the majority of the population of Australia have not so far bought what he and his co-thinkers have been throwing at them on a daily basis in the media, which is definitely not dominated by any gung-ho pro-war faction.
Significantly, Israel’s pre-emptive attack against the Osirak reactor had the opposite effect to the one that was intended. As Kenneth Waltz explained: “Israel’s act and its consequences…made it clear that the likelihood of useful accomplishment is low. Israel’s action increased the determination of Arabs to produce nuclear weapons. Israel’s strike, far from foreclosing Iraq’s nuclear career, gained Iraq support from some other Arab states to pursue it.” (Waltz 1995, pp.18-19).
In the current climate when pre-emptive attacks are being invoked as just responses to terrorism, it is worth recalling Princeton University historian Arno Mayer comments in Le Monde shortly after the 9/11 attacks:
“…since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of “pre-emptive” state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled. Besides the unexceptional subversion and overthrow of governments in competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Washington has resorted to political assassinations, surrogate death squads, and unseemly freedom fighters (e.g., bin Laden). It masterminded the killing of Lumumba and Allende; and it unsuccessfully tried to put to death Castro, Khadafi, and Saddam Hussein… and vetoed all efforts to rein in not only Israel’s violation of international agreements and UN resolutions but also its practice of pre-emptive state terror.”
This unfortunately, is quite correct; ‘but’ nothing.
***
The question of oil: access or control?
From the middle of last century Washington’s foreign policy priority in the Middle East was to establish US control over what the State Department described as “a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the great material prizes in world history”, namely the region’s vast reserves of crude oil. Middle Eastern oil was regarded in Washington as “probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment”, in what President Eisenhower described as the most “strategically important area in the world”.
Control could be most easily maintained via a number of despotic feudal oligarchies in the Gulf which ensured the extraordinary wealth of region would be shared between a small number of ruling families and US oil companies, rather than European commercial competitors or the population of these states. Until recently the US has not required the oil for itself though it needed to ensure that the oil price stayed within a desirable range or band – not too low for profit making or too high to discourage consumption and induce inflation. A side benefit of this control over such a vital industrial resource is the influence it gives the US over economic development in rival countries such as Japan.
The greatest threat to this control has always been independent economic nationalism, especially nationalist politicians within the oil-producing region who, unlike the feudal oligarchies of the Gulf states, would channel wealth into endogenous development priorities rather than to US transnationals.
True.
The US wants to secure reliable access to the world’s second largest oil reserves, 112 billion barrels already known with possibly double that figure still to be mapped and claimed, thus depriving France and Russia of commercial advantages they have developed in Iraq over the last decade when US companies have been excluded. Just as importantly, access to Iraqi oil would also make the US less reliant upon – and therefore less supportive of – the regime in Saudi Arabia. The geo-political dynamics of the Middle East would be transformed.
If Russia and France maintain their inside track on Iraqi oil, then US corporations will be partially shut out from an enormous resource prize. No US administration is likely to accept that scenario. Meanwhile, Iraqi dissidents close to Washington have promised to cancel all existing oil contracts awarded to firms which do not assist the US to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Regime change in Baghdad could therefore be a bonanza for US oil companies and a disaster for Russian and French companies which have painstakingly built up their relations with the Iraqi dictator since the Gulf war. When Iraq’s oil comes fully back on stream, as many as 5 million barrels of oil (or 6.5%) could be added to the world’s daily supply. The implications of this for existing suppliers, the global spot price, economic growth, OPEC and the world’s consumers are enormous.
This is not an issue of access, it is primarily about control. The US was just as concerned to control Middle East oil producing regions when it didn’t depend on them at all. Until about 30 years ago, North America was the largest producer and the US scarcely used Middle East oil at all. Since then Venezuela has normally been the largest oil exporter to the United States. US intelligence projections suggest that in coming years the US will rely primarily on Western Hemisphere resources: primarily the Atlantic basin – Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, probably Colombia, but also possibly Canada, which has huge potential reserves if they become economically competitive. Imported supplies accounted for 50% of US oil consumption in 2000 and by 2020 the figure is expected to rise to 66%.
Control over the world’s greatest concentration of energy resources has two goals: (1) economic: huge profits for energy corporations, construction firms, arms producers, as well as petrodollars recycled to US treasury, etc; and (2) it’s a lever of global geo-political control. For those trying to understand the motives behind US behaviour towards Iraq, it is impossible to underestimate the importance which oil has in the minds of Washington’s strategic planners.
True. But here we do have a ‘but’. Only a fool would assert that oil is not involved in this conflict. But Saddam’s means of closing his grip on the world’s oil is not just conventional forces. It is, to use that phrase immortalized by Graham Richardson, whatever it takes, chemical, biological, and nuclear means included. As noted above, Saddam’s past efforts, if they had all been successful, would have likely given him control over around 60 percent of the world’s oil, and arguably close to 70 percent had he defeated Iran in the Iran-Iraq war and extracted concessions.
Attempts to discredit arguments about US access to Iraqi oil by claiming that it if it is interested in access to supplies it could more easily strike a deal with Saddam to satisfy its “thirst for oil” rather than overthrow him, entirely miss the crucial issue – control. (The Australian, 2 January, 2003)
***
The credibility of the UN and Canberra
In September 2002, the Iraq issue in Australia suddenly centred on the honour and integrity of the UN, a subject not previously thought to have concerned the Howard Government. The international community “can’t afford” to have its authority “brushed aside,” argued foreign minister Alexander Downer, otherwise it will “look meaningless and weak, completely ineffectual.” According to the Prime Minister, “if the United Nations Security Council doesn’t rise to its responsibilities on this occasion it will badly weaken its credibility”.
Former chief weapons inspector and Australian Ambassador to the UN, Richard Butler, argued that the Security Council faces the “challenge of its life” and its future would be “terminal” if it didn’t hold Iraq to account this time. His predecessor at the UN, Michael Costello, agrees. “If the UN Security Council won’t enforce its own resolutions against Iraq, the whole UN collective security system will be badly wounded, perhaps fatally.”
One might have thought that the credibility of the UN Security Council had been badly weakened before now, say in Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994 or in East Timor in 1999 to cite only three recent cases when it failed to protect defenceless civilians from slaughter. Palestinians might wonder why the organisation’s authority hasn’t been “brushed aside” by Israel’s consistent non-compliance with numerous Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal from occupied territories, from resolution 242 in 1967 to resolution 1402 in March 2002.
There is no doubt about that, and the proposition that governments should be allowed to do as they please within their own (‘nationally sovereign’) borders is getting well past its use by date in the eyes of an increasing number. There is a court in the Hague to deal with offenders, and Saddam knows he could well follow his colleague Milosovic into it in the near future.
Washington clearly has an idiosyncratic view about states complying with UN Security Council resolutions. If the US objects to non-compliance, the country is attacked. If the US favors non-compliance it either vetoes the resolution or disregards it, in which case it is as good as vetoed. Since the early 1970s, for example, the US has vetoed 22 draft Security Council resolutions on Palestine alone – this figure doesn’t include 7 vetoes relating to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s.
Agreed, double standards are not hard to find. But how much does that tell us about how the world should handle an outlaw like Saddam Hussein? Is the answer to therefore leave him alone? If it is, then it should be spelt out.
At the National Press Club and later on commercial talkback radio, Mr Howard seemed to think that because Israel was a democracy it shouldn’t be judged by the same standards as Iraq. The future of the UN Security Council is not apparently terminal when its resolutions regarding Palestine and Israel are flouted. He should be reminded that democracies are just as obliged to observe international law as authoritarian dictatorships – there is no exemption. In fact we should expect a higher commitment to the rule of law from countries which pronounce their democratic credentials. Later, the argument shifted slightly. Israel wasn’t obliged to observe UN Security Council Resolutions because they are only invoked under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, rather than Chapter 7. This is a novel interpretation of international law, to put it kindly.
Agreed. If international law is a tar baby, then John Howard is Brer Rabbit.
Despite rhetoric which portrays the UN as a foreign body at its moment of truth, it is nothing more than the states which comprise it – including Australia and the US. If it has become dysfunctional, it is those member states which manipulate it for their own individual purposes which are to blame. Those who think the credibility of the UN is suddenly at risk over the question of Iraq might like to explain why non-compliance now is suddenly a pretext for an imminent attack on Iraq when Baghdad has been in violation of UN Security Council resolutions for four years.
The Prime Minister asks if Iraq has “nothing to hide and nothing to conceal from the world community, why has it repeatedly refused to comply with the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council”?
Perhaps it’s for the same reason that he restricts the UN from entering Australia’s refugee detention centres? Or for the same reason Israel would not allow the UN to inspect its research institute at Nes Ziona near Tel Aviv which produces chemical and biological weapons, a stockpile of chemical agents Mr Howard claims he is “not aware” of. If he had bothered to inquire, Mr Howard would have found that “there is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weaponswhich is not manufactured at the institute”, according to a biologist who held a senior post in Israeli intelligence. Nes Ziona does not work on defensive and protective devices, but only biological weapons for attack, claims the British Foreign Report (Chomsky 1999, pp.xiii-xiv).
The Prime Minister believes that Iraq’s “aspiration to develop a nuclear capacity” might be a sufficient pretext for war. He has repeatedly claimed that “there is already a mountain of evidence in the public domain,” though he didn’t say what any of it actually proved beyond the existing public record, or how it established that the United States faces a specific, grave and imminent threat from Iraq which can only be averted by the use of force.
According to the Prime Minister, the mountain of evidence includes an IISS report which actually found Saddam was much less dangerous now than in the past when he was backed by the West. Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, described the IISS report as little more than conjecture. “It’s absurd. It has zero factual basis. It’s all rhetoric…speculative and meaningless.” There was a similar response to President Bush’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 12 September, which outlined Iraq’s breaches of international law. According to conservative Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman, Bush’s speech was “clumsy and shallow” and little more than “a glorified press release.” It offered little, if anything, that wasn’t already on the public record. More a trough than a mountain.
At the UN on 13 September, Foreign Minister Downer claimed that “Iraq’s flagrant and persistent defiance is a direct challenge to the United Nations, to the authority of the Security Council, to international law, and to the will of the international community”. Four days later in the Australian Parliament Mr Downer repeated the charges, that Iraq “directly challenges the authority of the United Nations and international law,” that it poses “a grave threat” to the world, that it “has flouted and frustrated UN resolutionspersistently defied legally binding obligations” and is therefore “a serial transgressor.” Every one of these comments could also have been made about Israel. However, for reasons not explained there are to be no dossiers presented to the Parliament outlining its breaches of UN resolutions, it won’t be called “a serial transgressor” of international law, nor has it’s long history of defying Security Council resolutions ever meant that “the authority of the United Nations was at stake.”
If Washington bypasses the Security Council or cannot get UN authorisation for a strike against Iraq but unilaterally attacks the country regardless, it will have done much greater damage to the UN’s credibility than years of Iraqi non-compliance with Security Council resolutions.
***
Canberra’s new approach to the United Nations
“We have no intention, as Australians, of playing any part in anything which would be illegal in breach of the law Australia has no intention of doing anything which is in breach of international law (Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, Lateline, ABC TV 24 September, 2002).
“Until I know and the Government knows what has come out of the United Nations Security Council position – I mean you could have a situation where you have a resolution carried 13-2, and one of the two is a permanent member, and the permanent member says “I am going to veto the resolution.”
“Now in those circumstances we would have to make a decision, the Americans would have to make a decision, and potentially others. And I know there are other countries that would in those circumstances regard such a veto as capricious and regard a vote of 13-2 in favour of action as being Security Council endorsement and they wouldn’t allow that capricious veto to hold them back.” (Prime Minister John Howard, 7.30 Report, ABC TV, 23 January, 2003).
There is an obvious contraction in these two remarks. Five points are worth noting about the Prime Minister’s new attitude to United Nations Security Council resolutions.
(1) The process whereby international law is made – via the passing of UN Security Council Resolutions – can now be disregarded if the outcome isn’t welcome. The veto powers of the permanent five members apparently don’t count if the desired result doesn’t eventuate. This is an interesting approach to ‘due process’ and displays extraordinary contempt for the UN Charter which specifies the respective powers of UN Security Council members and the process for passing resolutions.
We have a crisis of UN credibility, and it has been building up for a while.
(2) If the UN Security Council decides not to authorise an attack against Iraq, the use of force against Baghdad would constitute a crime of aggression – a breach of international law. Few credible international lawyers argue that existing breaches of UN Security Council resolutions by Iraq provide a legal defence for the use of force against it.
The international community doesn’t only express its views when UN Security Council resolutions are passed. It is speaking just as loudly when it rejects draft resolutions passed by member-states. The rule of law may not be a high priority for Washington given that the United States is the only country to have vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on all states to obey international law, but this is not a precedent which Canberra should follow (Chomsky 1999a, p.74).
(3) If Canberra opposes the current process which allows the permanent five members of the Security Council to veto resolutions, what steps has it taken to alter this power through proposals to reform the UN?
(4) What are the implications of this new policy for relations with Israel? Since the early 1970s, the US has vetoed 22 draft Security Council resolutions on Palestine alone – this figure doesn’t include 7 vetoes relating to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s. The US has normally been outvoted 14-1 on these resolutions, though it is difficult to recall Mr Howard condemning Washington’s “capricious” use of its veto in these cases. According to the principle Mr Howard has recently articulated, 14-1 votes in the Security Council where the single vote against is a veto can nevertheless be regarded as constituting Security Council endorsement for, not against, the resolution.
Agreed again, double standards are not hard to find. But again how much does that tell us about how the world should handle Saddam Hussein? I fear here that the unspoken invitiation is to do as Baldwin and Eden did in response to Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, namely nothing.
The crucial opening step in Hitler’s drive towards WW2 occurred when he ordered his army to move into the areas of the Rhineland facing France which had been demilitarized under the Versailles treaty of 1918 and the Locarno pact of 1925.
The French Government wanted to move against him and asked the British to assist. The British led by Baldwin and Eden declined to do so. Hitler later said: “The 48 hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-wracking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military forces at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.” (Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, Fontana 1993, p.570)
This was not appeasement, which only came later. This was paralysis on the part of the only powers in a position to stop Hitler. From 1936 on Hitler held the initiative, and it was downhill all the way to WW2. But in 1936 he feared a crushing defeat, which unfortunately for the whole of Europe never came.
Had France and Britain moved against Hitler at that time it is likely that a movement to let Hitler advance no further would have been set in place, and WW2 might have been averted. (But bear in mind that ‘if’ and ‘if only’ are rather forlorn expressions as far as the historian is concerned.) None the less, had they done so, a contemporary Scott Burchill could have opposed such action, pointing to the relative weakness of Hitler, to the thousands of innocent civilians likely to be killed or maimed, and to the appalling historical record of the British in the world at large, including involvement in the trade in slaves and opium (which brought them to war with China in 1840) and the plunder of much of the world; and then could have gone on to catalogue the sins of the French.
I was in the Australian movement against the Vietnam War right from the start, but I try to keep my mind open and resist the temptation to a knee jerk response. (On a recent visit to the US I was amazed by the strength of both feeling and uncertainty against war in Iraq.) At the same time I make it my business to read all I can on the issues from journalists and commentators across the political spectrum. All my reading has convinced me of one thing: The issues in this are not simple, and the choice is not easy. Those who attempt to present the choice as a simple one, and the case against Bush, Blair and Howard as a lay down misere, are fooling themselves and, through their dismissive approach to those they oppose, clouding the issue.
Journalism and letters to the nation’s editors (11-1 against according to the SMH 5.2.03) are generally against intervention in Iraq. But a majority of the public according to the polls remains in favour, provided the UNSC gives its support. The UN certainly recognises the danger of a WMD armed Saddam, which is why the inspectors are there on their present wild goose chase. If Saddam were as weak as many portay him to be, I doubt the UN would bother.
Israel is a permanent thorn in the side of the world, and with hindsight a strong case can be made that it should never have been set up after WW2, and certainly not in the way it was, as a brutal act of colonization in Palestine under the umbrella of British occupation. It gives Saddam and his ilk a fine target on which to focus the frustration and anger of the Arabs in general, and should Saddam acquire nuclear weapons, an Iraqi-Israeli nuclear exchange in the not so distant future is a distinct possibility.
The Howard Government has stated that one reason Israel’s defiance of UN Security Council resolutions cannot be compared with Iraq’s is because the resolutions Israel ignores are not Chapter 7 enforcement resolutions (as Iraq’s are). The reason for this is because Washington routinely and capriciously vetoes all enforcement resolutions against Tel Aviv. Presumably these vetoes can be dismissed in the future? Or according to Mr Howard’s new principle, from now on member states of the UN shouldn’t allow Washington’s “capricious” use of its veto power to “hold them back” from bringing Israel to account for its breaches of international law.
Howard has left himself wide open here. Just because he developed the concept of the non-core promise, it does not mean that he can master everything.
(5) Canberra’s new policy echoes both the ALP’s and the British Government’s positions. According to the Leader of the Opposition, “the exception to this position [of only supporting UN authorised action against Iraq] might occur in the case of overwhelming UN Security Council support for military action, but where support for such action was subject to veto” (The Australian Financial Review, 15 January, 2003).
Prime Minister Blair has said that if one country on the Security Council imposed an “unreasonable or unilateral” block “we can’t be in a position where we are confined in that way” (The Age, 15 January, 2003).
Crean, Blair and now Howard are saying that the moral authority of the UN depends on whether it does the bidding of Washington and its allies. If it reflects a different view, it’s very legitimacy is in question and therefore the process by which it has been passing Security Council resolutions since the 1940s can be disregarded. You can see what they mean when they say that the future of the UN is at stake over the question of Iraq.
The UN Security Council was set up as a way to reconcile opening membership of the UN to all nations with the fact that the US and a small number of others either had nuclear weapons or were developing them with the resources than available to them, and demanded a privileged position on that basis. Again, there are consequences for the UN in not supporting regime change in Iraq, and others for doing so. The choice is not easy for any of us.
As the possibility of a new UN Security Council resolution authorising the use of force fades, it is increasingly clear that Washington, London and possibly Canberra will construct tortured and unconvincing legal arguments which claim that existing resolutions breached by Iraq since 1990 already legitimate the use of force (see Rai 2002, pp.145-50). This is disputed by most independent international lawyers. In Australia the argument has taken a novel turn.
Neil Mitchell: It does seem the United Nations is the key to it and the public support seems to be predicated on support for action with United Nations approval. Is there a possibility of the Australian Government supporting action without United Nations approval?
Prime Minister Howard: You can’t give a clear cut answer to that until you know the final outcome of the UN process and the reason for that is that the final outcome is very likely to be either black or white. People assume that at the end of the day the UN will either 15-0 explicitly, without argument, authorise the use of force or alternatively heavily say under no circumstances should force at any time be used. Now, I’m afraid that it’s not going to quite end up that way. You’re going to have something in between. You may remember the NATO intervention in Kosovo at the time when the NATO countries decided to attack Serbia because of the ethnic cleansing that was occurring in Kosovo. That was not authorised by the United Nations. (24 January 2003, Radio 3AW).
Washington’s wars in Indochina were never bought before the United Nations, for obvious legal and political reasons. However, the problem with the Kosovo precedent is that NATO’s attack on Serbia was almost certainly illegal. Security Council authorisation was not sought by Washington or London in 1999 because of Moscow’s likely use of its veto power, thus a very dubious claim to ‘the right of humanitarian intervention’ was invoked (Gray 2000, pp.31-42). No such right to humanitarian intervention can be, or is being claimed in the case of Iraq, so the Kosovo precedent is irrelevant to contemporary events.
***
Conclusion
Neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Minister have answered the key question: Where is the new evidence that makes military action against Iraq more urgent now than it has been since December 1998 when Richard Butler withdrew UNSCOM from Iraq?
Or more exactly, when Richard Butler withdrew UNSCOM from Iraq after Saddam’s men made its work impossible.
Prime Minister Howard claims the onus is on the critics of his Government’s approach to articulate an alternative (The Australian, 1 January, 2003). What about the policy of containment his Government comfortably lived with between 1996 and 2002? As two conservative realists have noted:
“… the belief that Saddam’s past behaviour shows that he cannot be contained rests on distorted history and dubious logic. In fact, the historical record shows that the United States can contain Iraq effectively – even if Saddam has nuclear weapons – just as it contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And that conclusion carries an obvious implication: there is no good reason to attack Iraq at this time” (Mearsheimer & Walt 2002).
I submit that the combination of Saddam’s past record, his present position and his clear and steadfastly held strategic objective of domination of the Middle East makes a statement like this unreliable at best, and at worst, an invitation to step into a fool’s paradise.
Had it not been for the demands made by members of the US led coalition in the Gulf War, Saddam could have been relatively easily ousted then. My weighing of the issues for and against has convinced me that the choice is certainly not easy. However, I am convinced that both Iraq and the world will be so much better off without Saddam and his WMD that I am prepared to join the 60 percent of Australians who support the Australian government on this issue, and the 6 percent who support the position of the US. I say this in full awareness that many of my friends and colleagues disagree. As the reader by now will be aware, the arguments of Burchill and others do not convince me.
Iraq must be relieved of both its WMD capacity, and preferably, of Saddam as well. Otherwise the world faces the disintegration of the non-proliferation treaties on WMD and a boxcar effect of nuclear and WMD armament continuing until such armament is the rule rather than the exception.
