Lessons The West Must Learn
**********************************
Western Intervention In Iraq Has Been Flawed; Our Reluctance To Act In Other Parts Of The World Has Been Equally Catastrophic
Mary Riddell
Sunday December 31, 2006
...Beyond the spectre of his atrocities lies the flawed evangelism of the invaders who sought to remove him. They have succeeded, but few tombstones have been more dearly bought. Many thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion began and more will perish before the New Year starts. As one more bloody dawn broke over Baghdad, Saddam's last post and requiem were the echo of bullets and the laments of the bereaved.
Many of his former subjects recalled another hanging day. Then the spirit of carnival prompted a few revellers to sling a noose round the neck of Saddam's statue, as an American marine briefly swathed the face in a US flag. It was April 2003 and many thought the war was over. Instead, the crash of his image symbolised other endings and beginnings: the death of hubris and the neo-con world vision; the birth of lawlessness and unimagined danger; the slow erosion of precious tenets of justice.
Saddam should not have hanged. Ending his life with a variant of the inhuman punishment he once meted out so lavishly was just another kick against human rights. But in the end, his death seemed more pointless than cruel...Saddam's death is less a righteous judgment on his bloodlust than an epitaph to Western folly. The ghastly final truth is that he taught us much more than we taught him.
Saddam Hussein made his attackers forget the limits of their influence and power. The wish to destroy him erased the fact that Iraq has never been moulded to British will and that enemies cannot easily be vanquished when history and logic are fighting on their side. And now his long shadow hangs over a New Year crowded by much else that the West forgot to remember.
The post-Saddam world splits down many fracture lines, almost all connected to the war on terror. Regions of Africa are facing terrible wars, partly because ancient crises simply slipped out of Western minds. Ethnic cleansing, torture and mayhem in Darfur and Somalia have been airbrushed away by disaster in Iraq, peril in Afghanistan, war in Lebanon and a deepening crisis in Palestine. Of the 'axis of evil' states, North Korea has the bomb and Iran races towards a nuclear deterrent.
...The doctrine that threats should be eliminated, not managed, is more or less defunct, though nostalgic neocons (and even hawkish Democrats) do not rule out a strike against Tehran. But the watchword is realism, larded with national interest. In America's case, that means co-existence rather than assault. Lie low, stay off the trigger. Prefer the negotiating table to the bullet, bomb and gallows.
By bitter irony, it took Saddam to drill home that reciprocity and compromise are far preferable to the delusion that Western military power can conquer all. But the paradox of 2007 is this. The West is contemplating a switch to tea-and-cake diplomacy at the very moment when parts of the world cry out in vain for muscular solutions.
Take Darfur, where rape and slaughter pass for social dialogue: As many as 300,000 people have died in three years and two million are homeless. The conflict has spilled over into Chad, and the world stands impotently by, in the hope that President Bashir might graciously put out the welcome mat for the peacekeeping force mandated by the UN.
Take Somalia. The Islamic grouping that maintained rough law and order has fled before the Ethiopian troops tacitly backed by George W Bush. Warlords are already moving into the vacuum at the heart of one of the most savage and anarchic capitals on earth, and the cornerstone of a new war of Christian versus Muslim has been laid...
...We get the UN we deserve. When resolutions are reluctantly passed and rarely implemented, then transgressors carry on killing with impunity. The old, great powers are effete and cowed by the dead Saddam. When leaders talk of victory in Iraq, they mean: never again. And so humanitarian intervention, the vital long-stop against genocide, becomes unthinkable.
War zones need more money, more peacekeepers and less of the military force that is either useless or unusable. That means scaling down Western nuclear weapons and redrafting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Britain, for all the influence it has squandered in Iraq, can help force change in 2007. It can band with Europe and demand concerted action to help Darfur and Somalia. It can lobby for the permanent membership of the UN Security Council to be extended. Its Parliament must stop Trident Two.
These are the lessons of Saddam and of a war that should never have been fought. If the West can reacquaint itself with humanity and history, then some debacles of the past year may yet be laid to rest alongside a dead dictator. As Saddam goes to his grave, it is time to remember who to help, and when to fight, and what to mourn.
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment