NOVEMBER 11, 1918, is still the date when we remember the Great War, as it used to be called, though that war ended 86 years ago, and several major wars have been fought since, including the Second World War. The British have been again remembering those who had fought in these wars, particularly those who died.
On Saturday the Festival of Remembrance in the Albert Hall was shown on television, followed yesterday by the wreath-laying at the Cenotaph. I thought both ceremonies particularly moving, because the events they record are passing into history and because Britain is again at war, with our soldiers dying in Iraq. The Queen’s dignity and seriousness were remarkably impressive.
When British soldiers are being killed, people have a more vivid sense of the sacrifices being made, and about those who have made the same sacrifice in the past. When the poppies floated down from the ceiling of the Albert Hall one thought both of the million soldiers who died in the world wars and of the relatively few soldiers from The Black Watch who have died in the last week or two. We are still getting television pictures of the American marines clearing Fallujah. That is an immediate reminder of what war is about.
No one can reflect on the present war in Iraq, or on the world wars, without feeling the waste and cruelty of the whole bloody business. Yet for most of us who remember the Second World War that does not tempt us to pacifism.
The Nazi peril from 1939 to 1945 included the threat of conquest for Britain and Russia, actual conquest for almost all Europe and the Holocaust. It was something that had to be defeated; there was no option. The counter-attack on Germany, by the RAF bombers or by the Red Army, was very ruthless, but the ruthlessness was a reaction to the original attack. Nations, like individuals, pay a price for their crimes.
Pacifism has no answer to the question: “Would you have allowed Hitler to win?” Certainly there is no answer that satisfies most of us who can remember those years.
Yet no one feels the same confidence in replying to the pacifist case on Iraq. There is, of course, the parallel question: “Would you have allowed Saddam Hussein to stay in power?” In fact, I do accept that the need for a change of regime was a justification for the invasion of Iraq, but the cases are not parallel.
Hitler was out of Saddam Hussein’s class in every respect. Hitler was a genius of evil; Saddam is a relative mediocrity. Hitler aimed at world power, and fought a world war to achieve his ambition. Saddam was a local tyrant, though both aggressive and genocidal. The world had no reasonable choice but to defeat Hitler.
Two out of three Presidents of the United States, including his own father, would probably not have taken the decision George Bush took after 9/11 to invade Iraq. Both the original decision to invade Iraq and the justifications that were used will always be matters for historic debate; my own support for the action at that time is now a minority view in Britain.
The present Iraq war is justified because Iraq is now as it is. There is, no doubt, a range of possible outcomes. The most favourable is that there will be an election in January; that this will produce a legitimate government; that the new Government of Iraq with American and British help will restore security; that Iraq will become a democratic and ultimately prosperous nation. That is what most Iraqis want, though the terrorists will try to prevent it. It is obviously what the American and British governments want.
The worst possibility is that Iraq should fall into anarchy and civil war, with rising poverty and unemployment. That is what some residue of the Saddam regime presumably wants — some Sunnis, though certainly not all, and some al-Qaeda-type terrorists who entered Iraq from abroad. Such an outcome would obviously be a disaster for Iraq and for the whole Middle East. It would also be bad for the rest of the world, including continental Europe, Russia and China, as well as the United States and Britain.
Again, one comes back to the pacifist case. We watch the US marines on television as they attack the insurgents in Fallujah. We see active and well-trained young men using deadly force, perhaps against a population we cannot see, and certainly against enemy fighters of whom we do get a glimpse. We are not comfortable with deadly force; it does not normally come into our lives. We naturally wish there were some better way of restoring security to Iraq.
This is human and understandable.
Yet the logic of the situation in Iraq goes the other way. Suppose that the 5,000 terrorists in Fallujah, or however many there were, had been left alone. That would have meant that Fallujah would have been a “no-go” area for American or British troops and for the forces loyal to the Government of Iraq.
In that case, the war in Iraq would have begun to be lost. Fallujah, and other cities in the Sunni triangle, would have become so many bases for terrorism. An expanding area of Baghdad itself would have gone the same way.
The Iraqi Government would not have been able to establish security or its own authority. There could have been no election. The morale of the pro-democratic Iraqis would have collapsed. In the end, the Anglo-American forces would have withdrawn. At best, there might have been — or could still be — not a democratic government but a military government based on the Shia majority.
Man, we may concede, is the nastiest of the primates; the most given to murdering his own kind. Man ought to be a co-operative monkey, herbivorous, peaceable and perhaps even monogamous. We could then build the ideal society, the City of God or at least of the Buddha. Such an ideal is to be found in many religions. “The lion shall lie down with the lamb.”
The trouble is that we do not live in prophetic times. The lion refuses to lie down with the lamb; he seizes the lamb and gobbles him up. We may wish it were otherwise. We may feel distressed by the efficient use of violence by the US marines.
Unfortunately we are the lambs and the US marines and The Black Watch are guarding us, the great, soft, free world, from the terrorist lions of the Sunni triangle.
