Right and wrong of war lost in the Iraqi mire

By Pamela Bone

The Age

March 25, 2005

 
Iraq's future is the issue, not further argument about the invasion.

In Ian McEwan's extraordinary new novel, Saturday the protagonist, Henry Perowne, on his way to his Saturday game of squash, is watching the crowds gathering to protest against the forthcoming Iraq war. It is February 15, 2003. It is said to be the biggest protest march ever held in London; up to 2 million people, by some estimates.

The scene "has an air of innocence and English dottiness". Perowne is struck by the "celebratory nature" of the crowds, people holding banners saying "Not in my name", secure in the knowledge of their own goodness. He later wonders why, among those 2 million idealists, there seemed to be "not one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam".

Perowne, a neurosurgeon, is ambivalent about the coming invasion. He has treated an Iraqi professor who was a victim of Saddam Hussein's torture chambers. He cannot feel, "as the marchers probably can, that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment". He imagines himself as Saddam, "surveying the crowd with satisfaction from some Baghdad ministry balcony", telling himself that "the good-hearted electorates of the Western democracies will never allow their governments to attack his country".

The imaginary Saddam was, of course, wrong. The peace marchers didn't stop the war. What they probably succeeded in doing was making sure the war lacked the legitimacy of being backed by the United Nations.

Indeed, by then, with coalition troops already on Iraq's borders, how could the war not have gone on? What if, after the millions had marched, after the years of failed sanctions and broken UN resolutions, after the Security Council had spent months squabbling and then failed to agree on action, after so many threats and ultimatums, America and and its handful of the willing had simply backed down and gone home? How would Saddam, and every other murdering dictator in the world have been encouraged, knowing the West was weak?

Whatever their views about the war, anyone of goodwill should now be hoping Iraq can be rebuilt."McEwan's book (which may or may not reflect his own views) will not please many of his readers who, I am guessing, are likely to have been opposed to the invasion; for it is on the liberal, book-reading, intellectual left that opposition to the war was strongest. Here it was taken for granted that all good-thinking people would be anti-war.

Yet as McEwan (or his character Henry Perowne) reflects, opinion in support or opposition to the war could also be accidental. In Perowne's case it was having known the Iraqi professor, seen his torture scars and listened to his stories, and because of him, having taken the trouble to find out as much as he could about the regime running Iraq.

In my case, it was having talked to Iraqi women exiles who told me of the atrocities of the regime, including Saddam's orders that prostitutes - who were in some cases not even prostitutes but critics of the government - should be beheaded and their heads nailed to the doors of their houses as a lesson to others. And by having been in Rwanda after the genocide, and seeing how the world failed to stop that horror. And by a strong and long-held personal conviction that genocidal dictators should not be allowed to get away with it.

"I was appalled at your stance on the Iraq war," said a journalist friend I hadn't seen for a while. I thought, then and now, that it was possible for people of goodwill to be for or against the invasion. Whether it happened or not, innocent people were going to die. The cost of removing Saddam was war. The cost of no war was leaving him in place. Thinking people made a judgement about what was likely to be the lesser evil. Who was right and who was wrong is unknown.

By one estimate (some say this is greatly exaggerated) 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war. The number killed by Saddam, in his wars against Iran and Kuwait and his reign of terror at home, has been put at close to 1 million. As many as 300,000 Shiites were killed in the six months following the collapse of the 1991 uprising against his government. How many more would have been killed or tortured by (a greatly emboldened) Saddam and his monstrous sons, even in the past two years, had he been left? If we, the "pro-war" lobby, have the deaths of Iraqis killed by American bombs on our conscience, does not the anti-war movement have the victims of Saddam's torture prisons on theirs?

It's true humanitarian considerations were not the reason the leaders of the coalition put forward for invading Iraq. It's true the US made a mess of the occupation. It's true we can't wage war on every murdering dictator in the world. But just because not all dictators can be removed, should none be? There were no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion. But since when do liberal principles teach that we should only act to protect other people when we are also threatened?

Because of the war, Iraqis face threats from suicide bombers that were not there before. Yet they no longer face state terrorism. They have voted in their own parliamentary elections. There is a new air of hope, not only in Iraq, but in other countries across the Middle East.

And now some on the anti-war side are almost disappointed, and some on the pro-war side are gloating. Yet whatever their views about the war, anyone of goodwill should now be hoping Iraq can be rebuilt as a decent democratic state, where people have the same right to happiness and security as we do. That, surely, is far more important than who, two years ago, might have been right and who wrong.

Pamela Bone is an associate editor of The Age.