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| Iraq | |
| Lefty Brit Reporter Visits Iraq. He Sez, "Screw Saddam". | |
| 2003-03-05 | |
| I got this via Tim Blair Julius Strauss was sceptical about the merits of war - but then he met some of Saddam's victims. Strauss apparently writes for Daily Telegraph, but I got this from an Aussie newspaper. There is something singular about a man who has been severely tortured. Maybe it is the way he struggles against failing eyesight caused by repeated blows to the kidneys. Or his lopsided posture, the result of multiple broken bones that have failed to mend properly. Sometimes there is a tremor in the hands or a twitch, a minuscule outer sign of the torment within. The man who sat opposite me in a small, bare room at the Kurdish border post last week had all the symptoms of a man who had been systematically broken. Slowly, sometimes reluctantly, he relived for me the terror of the 21 months he spent in Saddam Hussein's torture chambers... When I came to autonomous northern Iraq - which, since 1991, has been protected from Saddam's reach by American and British warplanes — I was intensely sceptical of the wisdom of Washington's insistence on deposing Saddam. Its claims of links between al-Qaeda and Baghdad seemed tenuous. As for the assertion that Saddam will soon have the bomb, well, the evidence was pretty flimsy. Indeed, I could have reeled off a host of counter-arguments. At a time when the Western world is entering a long drawn-out struggle against Islamist terrorism, it made little sense to fritter away resources to oust a man whose regime was weaker than ever. A war also risked alienating tens of millions of moderate Muslims whose support would be essential if the threat of Islamist extremism was to be neutered. I agreed with the quietly spoken Muslim men I met in Pakistan, Afghanistan and central Asia who said a Middle East peace deal was a greater priority than ousting Saddam. As long as Palestinians continued to die in the streets, they said, the fires of Islamist extremism would keep burning. I have not renounced these arguments entirely. But after little more than a week in northern Iraq, my eyes have been opened to the sheer scale of savagery that Saddam has unleashed on his people... As the drums of war beat ever louder, I am still unsure of the strategic wisdom of opening a second front in the war against terror. But of the moral rectitude of such a course, there can be no doubt. I guess I can forgive this guy the "drums of war" cliche
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| Posted by:Patrick Phillips |
| #6 Interestingly, that Duke article instapundit linked to mentioned the fact that avoidance of trouble with the PRC is one of the reasons for ousting Saddam, and one of the reasons stability in that whole region generally is urgently required. (The PRC is going to be needing lots and lots of oil very soon to fuel its industrial expansion - if it can't get a steady commercial flow from an unstable middle east, it may try and capture the South China sea potential, and that might cause potential problems there.) Generally, in terms of spreading all that good stuff like democracy, I think the idea is to scare the shit out of dodgy regimes. Hopefully, they will get the message! The only really troublesome possibility seems to be North Korea - the economic situation in that country appears to be so dire that the regime may feel it has nothing to lose. Still, you never know what a display of superpower might can do in terms of making people think very, very hard. Here's hoping for the best outcomes all round! |
| Posted by: George Stewart 2003-03-05 20:33:05 |
| #5 The 'liberate Iraq because of human rights argument is a good one. However, it is too good. It also justifies, maybe even requires, invading other countries. There are at least a dozen regimes that have large scale, severe, continuing and egregious violations of human rights. Loosen the criteria a bit to just large scale and continuing and one of the violators is the PR of China. Anybody thing we should invade them? |
| Posted by: mhw 2003-03-05 19:30:16 |
| #4 There's a number of leftish British journalists who have come out pro-liberation - they understand the logic that the way to make people safe is to make sure there are no countries that don't have reasonable, workable democracies, and they even see the US's lead as a good thing, in that it almost expiates bad foreign policy moves of the past. They're not exactly gung-ho, but they're definitely not anti-American in the sickening, mechanical way most of the left is. Names like Johann Hari, David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Julie Burchill - and of course there's Hitchens, who seems to have burned his bridges with his leftist affiliation. To me, it looks like there's a big area where sensible, non-loony left and right wingers can agree, and that area, to me, defines classical liberalism, the pre-socialist form of revolutionary radicalism - for democracy and individual rights, strongly against tyranny, enslavement, dictatorship, etc. If this is the "middle ground" (it's actually a True Left), then all you have is two "flavours" - one side, the left, preferring to emphasise the importance of social freedom, and wary of economic freedom, the other side, the right, preferring to emphasise the importance of economic freedom, and wary of social freedom; but both of them aware that both social and economic freedom are necessary for a properly functioning society that benefits its citizens. It's sort of what "libertarianism" should have been, but its party political machine fucked up (and it was too much associated with cranky beginnings in the 60s). |
| Posted by: George Stewart 2003-03-05 17:09:11 |
| #3 Interesting, must have overlooked that part. How about material breach concerning "repression of its civilian population then?" Or would France, the beacon of civilisation and human rights, veto that too? The more I think about it, the more I deplore that this issue has been ranking so low in the U.N. After all, it might be a problem to find hidden WMD but to prove ongoing barbarism in Iraq shouldn't be a problem. Maybe the U.S. should have given this aspect of resolution 688 more thought. And Bulldog, yes they still say it. But unfortunately don't apply it. At least not when the terror is done to others. I think many people here (including me) have paid to much attention to the flawed, heavy handed way the U.S. diplomacy handled this affair (and its allies). So we had an easy excuse to ignore the "heart of the matter". But that "ruffled feathers" would have made my government to side with Moscow against Washington is beyond my understanding. I know what a dictatorship looks like. As a boy I lived in terror. 1944/45 my family hid in a filthy basement waiting for the Gestapo to knock at the door. It's hard to welcome bombs when you see women and children burnt to charcoal in the streets. But we knew that every bomb brought us closer to freedom. But freedom proved to be an illusion. The Americans conquered the city I lived in, only to leave it to the Soviets a few weeks later. I hope the Iraqis will get a better deal. I hope the Baathists don't get a second chance like many Nazis got, recycled as Communists or Democrats. |
| Posted by: True German Ally 2003-03-05 14:38:43 |
| #2 TGA, from 1441 (referring to 688): Deploring also that the Government of Iraq has failed to comply with its commitments pursuant to resolution 687 (1991) with regard to terrorism, pursuant to resolution 688 (1991) to end repression of its civilian population and to provide access by international humanitarian organizations to all those in need of assistance in Iraq, and pursuant to resolutions 686 (1991), 687 (1991), and 1284 (1999) to return or cooperate in accounting for Kuwaiti and third country nationals wrongfully detained by Iraq, or to return Kuwaiti property wrongfully seized by Iraq, It has been brought up, but seems to be regarded by the UNSC members as, at best, low on the importance scale, or ignored completely. So even with Saddam's WMDs in the bin there'd still be an argument to go in and sort the evil b****** out. Btw, like the German saying. Don't people use it any more?! |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2003-03-05 13:41:55 |
| #1 I think that human rights in Iraq should have been on the U.N. agenda much earlier. Was there ever a U.N. resolution demanding that Saddam has to stop killing and torturing his people? Resolution 687 (of 1991) talks a lot about weapons and not about human rights. If we could stop the genocide in Kosovo why can't we stop the mass murder in Iraq? I know, a human rights case could be made against at least hundred U.N. members. But it would be hard to find a more barbaric regime right now than Saddam's. The Germans have a say: "Better an end with terror than terror without end." |
| Posted by: True German Ally 2003-03-05 13:23:06 |