THE whole world has been horrified by the pictures from Abu Ghraib. The sense of horror in Arab countries has been particularly acute. Understandably so, for torture is a reality which impinges on citizens of Arab nations in a way it does not directly on us. The systematic abuse of prisoners is a weapon of domestic political control in Arab nations, from Baathist Syria to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. The citizens of those nations know that the torture chamber is only a knock in the night away but, given the closed nature of those societies, they will have seen no pictures of what goes on in the jails of Damascus and Riyadh. And neither have we.
It is because I have a fundamental ethical objection to torture that I hope those guilty of abuses in Abu Ghraib are severely punished. But because my outrage is not selective, not part of any political agenda to posit moral equivalence between America’s President and Saddam Hussein, I also wish to see the systematic state torture of Syria and Saudi Arabia end. And I am delighted that the regime of Saddam Hussein, which was built on torture and fuelled by the murder of hundreds of thousands, is at an end.
Such reflections do not, and cannot, diminish the horror of what coalition troops may have done. I certainly hold my own nation to higher standards than any other. I do so because I believe in it and in liberal democracy. When the values which we collectively hold dear are besmirched by those acting in our name, then we must feel shame.
But it is only plain honesty to point out that some of those voicing outrage at what has been done by coalition troops seem to exhibit a determination to think worse of their own country than of foreign tyrannies. One academic commenting on Abu Ghraib in The Guardian was only too happy to draw comparisons between our forces and Hitler’s. One wonders what impels an intelligent man to look at the British Army and then think instantly of Nazi Einsatzgruppen. I am, at least, glad that in America, and Britain, we prosecute torturers. In Hitler’s Germany and Saddam’s Iraq they promoted them.
Maintaining one’s moral balance at a time like this is challenging. But never more crucial. For the horror rightly evoked by Abu Ghraib has been channelled by many into a further assault on the legitimacy and efficacy of our military action in Iraq. It is vitally important that we remember why it was right to act, and is right to hold to our values, for the forces which stand to win most from any crumbling of Western resolution are those which incarnate contemporary barbarism.
In the ten years before 9/11 barbarism made sweeping advances. The West stood by as ethnic slaughter scarred the Balkans and Africa. Traumatised by Vietnam, and scarred by Somalia, America temporised in the face of terrorism and the drive by rogue states to acquire terrible weapons. The West did not respond with steel to al-Qaeda’s embassy bombings, North Korea’s nuclear weapons-building or Saddam’s own defiance. We put our trust in negotiations, whether with Yassir Arafat or Kim Jong Il, and those who wished us ill saw only weakness. The result was the attack on the twin towers, conceived when President Clinton was most energetically engaged in the Middle East peace process.
The fightback against barbarism began, fitfully, at the end of the Nineties. And it is to his eternal credit that Tony Blair was in the vanguard. First in Kosovo, then in Sierra Leone, Britain’s Prime Minister intervened to halt ethnic cleansing and terrorist-backed murder. He did so without the help of a UN paralysed by its own undemocratic membership. It was in character, and admirable, that he should have been determined to help America bring barbarism to book in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As a direct consequence of allied interventions terrorists have been deprived of two state sponsors. Action in Iraq has also facilitated the rolling up of the nuclear proliferation network run by the Pakistani scientist, Dr A.Q. Khan, and promoted a thaw in relations between Pakistan and India. Libya’s WMD programme has been ended and key al-Qaeda figures have been apprehended. The Arab world has been forced, painfully but firmly, to address its undemocratic weaknesses which help to spawn terror. And in Iraq, let us never forget, the people now have the chance denied them for decades to choose freedom. A choice the majority are cherishing. In the 17 towns in Iraq which have so far held municipal elections secular democrats have been the winners.
The allied presence in Iraq, which brought that about, was characterised yesterday by the political editor of The Spectator, as “evil and bestial”. It is not a view I think they hold in Halabjah, where those Iraqis who survived Saddam’s gassing can fairly claim to know something about evil and bestiality. If we were to allow the rightful anger we feel at what happened in Abu Ghraib to weaken the West’s determination to face down those whose value system is rooted in evil, those who profited by murder under Saddam and those who would slit a journalist’s throat for the crime of being a Jew, then we would be compounding a horrific crime with one yet greater. We would be condemning the Arab world to the hands of those for whom torture is not a stain on their character but an article of faith.
michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk
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