My heart was with the hundreds of thousands of people marching for peace on Saturday. War is terrible and the Iraqis have suffered horribly already. The heart does protest at the misery that more bombing will bring down on them.
Besides, there are any number of powerful political arguments against war on Iraq. It hardly matters that many of these arguments are expounded by unreasonable people with bad or mixed motives.
The imagination lurches from an illiterate and impoverished Arab, whose anger has been cynically turned against the West, to a self-indulgent, anti-American lounge lizard in Paris or Berlin. But let’s not be nasty to the Germans or the French. A good argument is a good argument, regardless of who makes it, and besides, many of those opposed to the war are both good and reasonable people.
Their arguments for peace are legion. Nobody, they say, can hope to predict the wider consequences of crushing Iraq. Far from deterring Muslim terrorists and the states who support them, it might inflame them to still worse atrocities. It might even, by some miracle, actually unite Islam against the West. War in Iraq might provoke the apocalyptic Muslim-Christian conflict that we all fear so much. And if not the war, then the defeat. History suggests that America is not good at dealing with the aftermath of war:
Pulling out and leaving behind ruins and resentment will only make things worse. Think of Afghanistan, both after the Soviet war and now. The rise of Osama Bin Laden and Saudi-born terrorists is a fearful reminder of how poor the United States’ foreign policy judgment has sometimes been.
The world might well be better off without Saddam Hussein, the doves would argue, but would it be better off with the United States and hangers-on as self-appointed neocolonial enforcers of a Pax Americana? Iraq may indeed be full of rockets and poisons and nuclear components, but there doesn’t seem to be any incontrovertible evidence so far, even after the weapons inspectors’ report to the United Nations on Friday. Surely containment would be just as effective as war and much less risky.
Saddam’s connections with Al-Qaeda are tenuous, at best. Besides, after Alastair Campbell’s absurd “intelligence dossier” fiasco, cribbed off the internet, the public are deeply sceptical about any claims made by either George Bush or Tony Blair.
Our trust has been persistently abused with spin, news manipulation, exaggeration and mission creep; we are too cynical now to respond to any supposedly moral appeal that the government might make. We even thought the tanks at Heathrow last week were probably window-dressing.
Throughout the run-up to this war it has seemed that what is most important is probably what we are not being told. If so, how can we support anything so terrible as war in good conscience? And so on. To say all this is to make only a few of the most obvious arguments for peace — or, rather, for doing nothing.
Yet despite all this, and although my heart is for peace, my head is not. I mean my considered response. After months of opposing the war, I’ve finally and reluctantly, after many bitter arguments, come to support it, if it comes to that. There does seem to me to be a clear way to be hacked through the thick undergrowth of morality, hypocrisy and ignorance. The only real question is whose side you should be on. This is, or ought to be, easy. Westerners who are not on the side of the United States are somehow ignoring the values upon which our civilisation is based.
Forget gratitude. Forget what America has already done for Europe, for the Third World, for science. (Incidentally, President Bush has just promised $15 billion to fight Aids in Africa, yet another example of American generosity which anti-Americans prefer to ignore.) And forget contempt. Forget Donald Duck and gas-guzzling obesity.
The fact is that the United States is the greatest power in the history of the world and, to our astonishing good fortune, it is — warts and all — a benevolent and civilised power. It is wholly committed to universal values that all civilised people think, in the end, are worth dying for. That is not true of any Muslim state in the Middle East. By any standards we respect they are not really civilised; their governments are mostly repressive, backward, totalitarian and horribly corrupt. Religion shows its most shameful, unenlightened face in the Middle East. So whose side are you on? What’s more, we are entirely dependent on the United States to protect both us and our values. Whether we want to be on their side or not, we have to be.
All the wishful thinking about our special relationship is irrelevant. They don’t really need us, but we really need them. Only vaingloriousness or silliness can have tempted the French and the Germans to ignore that brutally obvious fact. The Americans don’t really need the UN either — that bunch of kleptocrats, bandits and murderers. The Americans can stand alone and if they must they will.
Personally, I am proud to be on the side of the Americans, however little difference it may make to them. My father was American and he met my English mother in England during the second world war, when the Americans were over here to defend us. I’ve always felt great affection and respect for the United States. They have been and are the defenders — right or wrong — of everything that matters to me, of everything that Europe has struggled over centuries to create, of freedom, justice, tolerance and invention.
Stripping away all sentiment, what confronts America is a very unstable, very angry part of the world which produces rogue regimes, terrorists and oil. It is also a miserable place for most of its inhabitants — they might come to welcome American intervention if it made some of their lives better, as Americans are well aware.
What centrally concerns the United States (and its hangers-on) is to try to get control and keep control of this region, as far as possible — and, starting with Iraq, to pre-empt serious conflict in the future. This is a matter of survival.
I wish people wouldn’t talk so sanctimoniously about oil — “It’s all about oil”. Of course oil is a factor. The West is heavily dependent on it. However, shortages and blackmail are unlikely to be serious; oil producers have to sell their oil and are heavily dependent on western buyers and their dollars.
It seems to me that what all this is really about is nuclear proliferation, and its threat to our basic values. The bottom line is that the rogue states of the Middle East (and elsewhere) cannot be allowed to go nuclear or to equip nuclear terrorists. America must pre-empt that, starting now, and maybe at unthinkable cost. Maybe Iraq is the wrong place to start, for the wrong reasons, but it is a start to the right war.
All the other concerns and arguments are a side-show. And this makes everything very simple. Which side would you like to have nuclear weapons; which states would you trust with them — the United States or the rogue states? Whose side are you on? It is easy in the end.
