IS TONY BLAIR a lying hypocrite or just a deluded dreamer? This question can no longer be avoided after the events of the past few weeks. What justifies such language is not the predictably docile Butler report or the Prime Minister’s shiftiness in the parliamentary debates on Iraq, but the infinitely more shocking disaster unfolding thousands of miles from Westminster or Baghdad: the extermination of tens of thousands of Sudanese Africans by Arab death squads.
The officially-sanctioned slaughter of an entire people has elicited no more reaction from the British and US governments than a vague threat to suspend economic assistance and an offer to finance a “protection force” of 300 African soldiers in killing fields the size of France. As a result of this official indifference to the horrors in Sudan, Mr Blair’s one remaining moral justification for the Iraq invasion has been exposed as a total sham.
When the Prime Minister decided to join the American invasion of Iraq, he gave many different reasons for this risky and potentially illegal act. He claimed that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), defying the United Nations and threatening its neighbours. But none of these were adequate justifications for invading and colonising a sovereign country.
It always seemed clear that the true motivations of the war had little to do with WMD or UN resolutions, although there were many different versions of what they really were. The best summary of these motives — and the one most relevant today — was offered by Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist just before the war started.
There were three reasons for the war, he said. First there was the official reason: to eliminate Iraq’s WMD and keep them out of the hands of terrorists. Secondly, there was the real reason: America had to prove after 9/11 that nobody — especially not an Arab dictator — could defy the world’s sole superpower with impunity. Finally, there was what Friedman called the “good reason”: to create a prosperous, stable, pro-Western democracy in the Middle East which would act as a model for other Arab nations and would shift the balance of power throughout the region in favour of Western values and against the fanatical extremism of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi regime.
Friedman’s taxonomy of the war aims was an excellent beginning, but it did not go far enough. The real reasons went beyond America’s determination to throw its weight around in the Middle East after 9/11. There was also a legitimate concern about securing alternative oil supplies, without which it would be impossible to force Saudi action against the Wahhabi al-Qaeda scourge.
Then there were several less honourable reasons, which were nonetheless real: America’s generalised thirst for revenge after 9/11 which required a bigger military engagement than Afghanistan; the hope that Iraq would distract attention both from the culpability of the Saudis for 9/11 and from the Pentagon’s failure to capture Osama bin Laden; the longstanding pressure from Israel to take out Saddam; and the plan to run President Bush as a “war president” in 2004.
All these dishonourable motives contributed to America’s war fever — and they provided strong arguments against the war for the millions of intelligent and well-intentioned people around the world who were appalled by President Bush’s bellicose behaviour.
There was, however, another set of considerations which trumped these dishonourable motives, at least in the eyes of many principled supporters of the war — a group in which I would have included Mr Blair until recently. These were the “good” reasons for toppling Saddam.
The neoconservatives’ implausible dream of turning Iraq into a beacon of Western democracy in the Middle East and a counterweight to Saudi fanaticism was one of these motives, but not the most important. Another was the simple moral imperative that Saddam was a monster who had terrorised his people and committed crimes against humanity comparable to the genocides in Serbia, Kosovo and Rwanda and perhaps even to Cambodia and Nazi Germany before that.
The invasion of Iraq, the Prime Minister suggested in his speeches, was not just about releasing the Iraqi people from Saddam’s oppression. It was also supposed to create a precedent for a new global order, which would set a limit to the abuses which the civilised world was willing to tolerate. Of course, it would never be possible to protect all oppressed peoples from tyrannical rulers. Disproportionate military losses would always rule out humanitarian interventions in North Korea, Pakistan or China. But Saddam’s overthrow was supposed to send a powerful signal to the second division of world dictators.
The civilised world would not tolerate another Cambodia, Bosnia or Rwanda. According to the new Blair doctrine, the invasion of Iraq implied that the sanctity of sovereign borders would in future be conditional on observing a minimal level of human rights. If a government defied all norms of civilised behaviour, its country could be justifiably invaded at any time.
And who would provide the civilised world’s firepower? This question pointed to the other “good” reason for invading Iraq. Iraq was supposed to inaugurate a new era of international co-operation, in which America, with Britain’s encouragement and assistance, would use its Armed Forces to enforce civilised norms. For Mr Blair, who realised that the UN could never be more than a debating society in the absence of US military backing, the hope of channelling American power into a global order legitimised by the UN was probably the main strategic argument for supporting President Bush on Iraq.
How futile such hopes now appear. The genocide in Sudan is at least as monstrous as any atrocity committed by Saddam. The Sudanese Government does not use chemical weapons, but burning homes with children trapped inside, throwing families into wells to poison the water with their corpses, or raping girls as their parents are forced to watch are surely as bad. And nobody can maintain that Sudan is too powerful to be threatened with punitive intervention. The Sudanese regime is a tottering wreck, which could be overthrown without excessive loss of life by international intervention. The country could readily be dismembered, although not permanently colonised. Sudan is also a failed state, a breeding ground for Muslim fanatics and a threat to its neighbours, with its fundamentalist poison seeping into Ethiopia, Chad, Somalia and beyond.
Sudan, in other words, should have offered an answer to the question plaguing Mr Blair in the build-up to the Iraq conflict. If you are helping the people of Iraq by overthrowing Saddam, why don’t you do the same for the people of Zimbabwe by ousting Robert Mugabe? Mr Blair had a memorable answer: “I would if I could.” In Sudan, Britain and America could act, but have chosen not to. Instead of acting on his new doctrine of humanitarian deterrence, Mr Blair has demonstrated that his pieties about human rights apply only to white people and the denizens of oil-rich states.
If the atrocities in Sudan are allowed to continue, there will remain no shred of justification for the invasion of Iraq. Far from deterring future bloodshed, Iraq will have sapped the will of the international community, discredited the UN and exposed America’s Armed Forces as a paper tiger. If the genocide in Sudan is left unpunished, the only possible conclusion will be that the world is now even safer for despotic monsters than it was before the toppling of Saddam. If so, then Mr Blair’s one remaining justification for the Iraq adventure will be exposed as just a dangerous fantasy — if not a hypocritical lie.
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