TWELVE months on from the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, the folly of the war against Iraq is now clear to all but the most wild-eyed occupants of Planet Neo-Con.
Neil Clark, The Australian, 12 April 2004
In launching their war of aggression, George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard brushed aside those who warned that deposing a cigar-smoking, Sound of Music-loving secular dictator – whose long-serving deputy was a practising Christian – would only play into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. They rubbished those who doubted their claims that Iraq possessed WMDs. They scornfully dismissed the millions who marched against war in Washington, London and Sydney as "appeasers". And they ludicrously sought to portray themselves as the successors to Winston Churchill.
Now, as the insurgency in Iraq enters a new and even bloodier phase, it's time for all of us who predicted the consequences of military intervention to make our political leaders pay the price for their arrogance, deceit and recklessness. That means calling for independent public inquiries – not into the workings of the intelligence services, which our leaders now find it so convenient to use as scapegoats – but into the high-level political decisions which led our nations into such a disastrous conflict. It means exercising our democratic right not to vote for any MP, senator or political representative who supported the illegal invasion of a sovereign state in defiance of world public opinion.
And it means campaigning for an immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all coalition forces from Iraq. Blair calls a withdrawal "running away". Bush vows there will be no U-turn in policy. And Howard has made similarly resolute statements.
Yet, for all the tough talk, the reality remains: all coalition troops should be replaced by a temporary UN/Arab League peacekeeping force authorised by a new UN resolution. This is the only way out of the morass that our three would-be Churchills have led us into.
Examine the arguments for finishing the job and you'll see that they are as full of holes as the ones were for starting the job in the first place. Pulling out now, the neo-conservatives say, would be a setback for the war on terror.
But, after the long-running sore of Palestine, it's hard to think of anything more likely to fuel Islamic hatred for the West than the continued forcible occupation of an Islamic country against the wishes of its population.
Who needs al-Qa'ida recruitment videos to warn of the evil of Western imperialism when you have the US military firing missiles at a mosque in Fallujah, killing 40 people during afternoon prayers? With their bull in a china shop foreign policy, Bush, Blair and Howard are the sort of recruiting agents Osama bin Laden could only dream about.
Withdrawing troops now, the war lobby warns, would lead to Iraq descending into civil war. But if the coalition forces were to be replaced by a UN/Arab League force of peacekeepers – not including troops from any country that had taken part in the invasion of Iraq – the chances of full-scale hostilities would be considerably less than they are today.
The coalition troops will never be able to bring stability to Iraq for the simple reason that they have no business to be there. US, British and Australian troops have no more right – morally or legally – to be patrolling the streets of Basra, Baghdad or Fallujah than Iraqi troops would have to ride in jeeps down the streets of New York, London or Brisbane.
Once we acknowledge this, and accept that coalition troops in Iraq are an illegal army of occupation of the same status as the Wehrmacht in Poland in 1939, then we can make progress. Peacekeepers must be perceived by the population to be genuinely impartial before they can gain public consent for their operations.
Armies of occupation, by contrast, are there to be shot at. The "coalition of the willing" chose force as a way of implementing the political change they wanted in Iraq. They can hardly complain now that indigenous Iraqis are following their example.
The alternative to an immediate withdrawal of coalition forces really is too terrible to contemplate. The US, Britain, Australia – and any other country foolish enough to have sent troops – would have their forces bogged down for years.
They'd be occupying a country and a people who do not wish to be occupied. Billions of dollars, which could have been spent on domestic health and education programs, would instead be spent on sieges of Iraqi cities and a never-ending war against one group of insurgents after another. "Fallujah remains one of those cities in Iraq that just don't get it," says Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq.
But Kimmitt and those who share his view that coalition firepower will ever be able to stop a people determined to free themselves from foreign occupation are the ones who just don't get it.
Neil Clark is a tutor in history and politics at Oxford Tutorial College in England.
Originating File: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,9251997,00.html
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