Dear David and Matthew,

Thank you for starting this debate about the war on Iraq. This is a debate that we are much concerned about, not only because we are paying the price of this war for the past five years, and have no idea how much longer we will have to continue to pay, but also because of the effect it will have on the world. Hence, what worries us more is how to contain its effects and consequences, especially with regards to Iraq.

To a certain extent, we understand the war's reasons as well as its goals, but what we find hard to understand is why and how and with what legitimacy our people were sentenced to all this harm?

Is it because of our values, or because of a person or a group of people? And does that justify all the destruction that happened to us?

During the sanctions years Madeleine Albright [former US Secretary of State] said that the death of half a million Iraqi children could be justified to continue the sanctions. Is this the price we must continue to pay?

There is no doubt that there are differences in the understanding of the war, its causes, results, legitimacy, and legality.

At the moment we are facing two main problems: The first is ethical because the intervention in general, and the war specifically, seem to have become an accepted policy for a country with supreme power to achieve its foreign policy goals wherever it has vital interests, without any considerations to humanitarian values and the cost in terms of the lives of innocents lost and the tragedies faced by those who survive.

The second is the difficult security problem. It is made more complicated because of politics, which is now the cause of the violence. The reason for the deterioration of Iraq’s security, and that of other countries in the region, is because of the strategies that have been adopted to intervene and the policies behind those strategies. The use of violence to achieve policy objectives and the failure to understand the consequences of the violence — or possibly ignoring the consequences — have left a terrible legacy in Iraq.

Change may have been needed, but no one wanted an occupation. Also, no one wanted 650,000 to be killed. That figure is probably below the real total of people who lost their lives because of the war and its consequences.

Apart from overthrowing Saddam’s regime — without discussing its causes — the war against Iraq has succeeded in destroying the country’s valuable military and economic assets. It also destroyed its institutions and targetted its its traditional, social and spiritual heritage.

This tendency to use overwhelming power hugely contradicts Western democratic and freedom values, the central message being promoted to the world. For sure this message has not been delivered to Iraq and other populations in the region in the way that encourages them to adopt a dialogue and to abandon violence and also to help to secure long-term Western interests. If there is what might be considered an achievement or success, then is not worth the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who died because of violence and terror in which the whole country sank, driving millions from their homes. It is not worth the feeling of bitterness and the lack of security inside the country all for some vague promise of a better future.

Yours sincerely,

N Younis

Nabil Mohammed Younis is a professor of strategic studies at Baghdad University

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