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Sunday Star Times
February 2, 2003
Where's the evidence for war?
by Frank Haden
When most Kiwis think of Iraq
they get a mental picture of just another primitive Middle
East country.
Sand everywhere, camels, stone buildings on the horizon, the occasional
grandiose Saddam Hussein palace, men with towels on their heads and women
wearing black sacks. Not the sort of place to inspire sympathy.
I talked to Christchurch
doctor Peter Little, who has a different view. Unlike the egregious George W
Bush, he has been there, done that. He has spent eight years in Iraq,
doing what he does best, setting up and running kidney transplant units.
Sophisticated places, paid for by Saddam's liberally-funded socialist health
system.
He's made a lot of good friends there and even went to one of Saddam's
birthday parties. He has been back several times since his tours of duty to
see friends and visit his patients in a country reduced from affluence to
penury.
Agreeing Saddam is brutal, he says the Iraqi dictator operates in a brutal
environment that has no tradition of democracy. However, Saddam has done
enough good things such as reducing most of the corruption and distributing
oil revenue to win popular support in his defiance.
Little sees no justification for Bush's determination to go to war, kill
civilians wholesale while defeating an almost non-existent defence force,
then sell Iraqi oilfields to pay the colossal costs of the punitive
expedition as "reparations".
One sad image will remain with him the rest of his life. He was in Turkey
before the Iran-Iraq war, near a special highway that ran straight to the
border, then forked left for Iran and right for Iraq, carrying
"thousands upon thousands upon thousands" of heavy trucks, carrying
a Niagara of weapons indiscriminately from US and European arms factories for
Iranians and Iraqis to kill one another.
No wonder words such as cynicism and perfidy sprinkle his conversation.
Now, as our frigate Te Mana heads proudly for six months in the Persian Gulf, it becomes increasingly obvious UN
inspections won't produce the excuse Bush desperately needs before summer
makes it hard to mount an invasion. This is why he now says the US
doesn't need the inspectors' so-called "evidence" of hidden weapons
after all.
Meanwhile, we find religion is playing a significant part in the drive to
war. Shared moral conservatism is a significant factor in British Prime
Minister Tony Blair's bizarre support for Bush in defiance of British public
opinion and the advice of his own Labour Party. The American leader let this
smelly cat out of the bag with his first words in his State of the Union
speech on Wednesday.
"Our faith is firm!" he brayed, before revealing he has nothing new
to justify his immoral bid to make the Middle East safe for western oil
cartels.
America's
top newspaper, the New York Times, saw this coming. In an editorial just
before the speech, it noted Blair consistently excuses attacking Iraq
as the "right thing" to do.
It said Blair's friends pointed to his deeply held religious belief as the
source of this certainty, citing it as a reason why he gets on well with
Bush, who also credits his faith with inspiring his policies.
The same paper's leading commentator, Thomas L Friedman, wrote Bush intended
to invade because weapons of mass destruction could give Saddam the leverage,
not to attack the US,
but to extend his influence over the world's largest source of oil. Friedman
said it was seen as immoral when Americans told the world they couldn't care
less about climate change and were entitled to consume however much oil they
liked. And when after occupying Iraq
they hand out drilling concessions to US oil companies, that perception
will be intensified.
Other respected US
commentators are increasingly alarmed Bush proposes to attack Iraq
willy-nilly. They say going to war in those circumstances would be a mistake
and with inspection teams only now approaching full strength it is too soon
to give up on all possibility of a peaceful solution.
They are, of course, at odds with the chauvinistic majority in the US,
signposted by home headlines referring to Europeans as "the Euros",
"the Euroids", "the 'peens", "the Euroweenies"
and "EU-nuchs" but responsible, thinking Americans are not fooled.
Bush is keenly disappointed he has support only from Blair, with European
leaders Germany
and France insisting the UN inspectors must have at least two more months to
uncover the supposed hidden weapons.
Peter Ellis, falsely accused in the Christchurch Civic Creche case, will have
recognised the cynicism of Iraq
being told the lack of evidence of hidden weapons is proof it has them. Ellis
was told the lack of evidence to back up the children's allegations was proof
he was guilty. We are told to prove we don't have any weapons, the Iraqis
say. How can we prove a negative? Ellis couldn't prove it, either.
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