A Con Trick for Western Liberals

The News: Jang (Pakistan) 8 March 2003

OPINION: Media Watch

The idea that we can invade Iraq to bring democracy and freedom is a confidence trick designed to draw western liberals into providing legitimacy for old-fashioned conquest.

We have been here before. In the late 19th century, Christian missionaries provided countless factual accounts of the barbarities of the heathen in Africa which were used to justify intervention and, in the end, the conquest, exploitation and partition of the continent.

Iraq is a state created by the British empire after 1918 and was under London's influence until 1958. We have yet to come to terms with the cruelties of our own empire. But once again, local brutalities are being used to justify our own attacks.

We are told there is no alternative, and that we shouldn't refuse to do something good because we cannot set right every global wrong. But New Labour has, in fact, been working to make the world worse. Blair personally intervened to weaken legislation to stop British companies selling arms to what he and Bush call the world's worst leaders.

If you want to set up in business selling killing machines you don't need a licence in Britain today. Those who talk of Britain doing good in the world should explain why the government has still failed to implement effective arms export controls promised in opposition and developed in draft with help from Oxfam and Amnesty.

In 2000, the prime minister gave an "unequivocal" undertaking at the UN that Britain would negotiate the removal of its ownweapons of mass destruction: another performance target that has been forgotten. Instead, he voiced no opposition as his closest ally consigned 40 years of global arms control reaties to the shredder. Blair then tells us that controlling what he calls "weapons of mass destruction" is the greatest threat we face.

If the prime minister's concerns are to be taken seriously, he should pick up one of the many plans for the global management and elimination of these weapons developed by NGOs and other nations. And he should take these proposals to next month's conference in Geneva on implementing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Even aware of this background, some people have been convinced that the US is determined to bring democracy to Iraq. But when questioned, US officials reveal that there will be a "transition period" of several years before the Iraqis are deemed ready to go to the polls.

In Czechoslovakia, its citizens were queuing up at the ballot box six months after the velvet revolution of 1989. If we are invading Iraq to introduce democracy, let us have a guaranteed date for elections, six months from the fall of Saddam.

The final doublethink is to argue that we are doing all this to defend the UN and prevent it becoming another League of Nations. The Bushites are not the heirs of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

They are the heirs to those who kept the US out of the League, opposed involvement in the WWII and opposed the creation of the UN. Bush's head of arms control has even argued that international law is not law at all. People in Iraq will cheer at being freed from Saddam -- I would.

But I would also have no illusion that the motives of the invaders are conquest of natural resources wrapped up in old fashioned racist stereotypes. Don't be conned into picking up the white man's burden.

© The Revival 2003