GIVE
PEACE A CHANCE, 1400 words, shorter more focussed version with no
preamble on Sally Clark. It examines this proposed war on the basis of
pragmatism, justice and historical perspective. Fully up to date to take
account of the developments, by France, Germany, Belgium and Russia,
and plots a path for peace. Would be prepared to update rapidly after
Hans Blix’s statement tomorrow. Interested? Give a prompt response
please?
Brian Corbett
62 Radyr Avenue, Swansea, SA3 5DT
01792 424702
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
How often have we seen the pressure on the prosecution to win lead through use of suspect evidence to a miscarriage of justice? When the military is involved the consequences of a misjudgement are no longer on a scale to which we can relate. Justification for a pre-emptive strike is particularly difficult, for by definition it is based on hypotheses of what might or might not occur. As Donald Rumsfeld said recently, ‘there are risks in acting and risks in not acting’. In such reasoning the assumptions made are all important.
Ask yourself, ‘Would America have sought the UN resolution against Iraq but for September 11’? It’s accepted that no evidence exists of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida at September 11. The majority of those terrorists were Saudi, non were Iraqi. Iraq had been contained by sanctions for a decade. Many countries have weapons of mass destruction and many have bad human rights records. So why did Iraq pose such a threat that it had to be singled out? Oil? Unfinished business? Confronting Saddam Hussein by forcing through a UN resolution threatening war if he did not disarm, or abdicate, was never a rational response to the diffuse threat from al-Qaida.
What attempt was made to balance the argument by the certainty of casualties (predominantly Iraqi civilians) in a war, the possibility that it will escalate into internal chaos or reverberate far outside Iraq’s borders, the probability that such a course will harden the resentment felt by the have-nots of this world and fuel terrorism against the west for another generation. Whatever else, war will underline the case for pursuing political aims by violence.
Saddam Hussein’s greatest crime was to make a pre-emptive strike against Ayatollah Khomeini and his new Islamic Republic of Iran. He expected to win easily but the war lasted eight years and left over a million dead. At that time he was viewed as the acceptable face of Arab leadership. Britain, France, America and Russia all sold arms into that conflict. The source of his biological and chemical weapons would seem to be America. (Check out the entry for Dec 30 on www.jonathanpollard.org/2002/). Saddam Hussein wasn’t such an ogre then, more one of us, even though he regularly used gas when faced with defeat. His biggest mistake was to attack Kuwait and expect the west to turn a blind eye.
The vast majority of the world’s proven oil reserves are in the Middle East. Iraq’s reserves are surpassed only by Saudi Arabia’s. America’s economy depends on imported oil. The world economy depends on the availability of oil at a reasonable price, think back to the crash in 1974 when the price suddenly quadrupled.
Last week it seemed that an unstoppable inertia was gathering behind the massive preparations for an early pre-emptive war. The loss of face alone in pulling back and handing a propaganda scoop to Saddam Hussein was becoming enormous. The stock market floundered whilst this uncertainty existed, the oil price rose raising fears of a world recession. The military build up continued. War, it seemed, was all but inevitable if Saddam Hussein remained in charge.
Now it is starting to look different. Russia has joined France and Germany in wishing to see a peaceful resolution of the dispute through inspection and disarmament. A European, like me, would welcome the sign that Russia was willing to throw their hand behind Europe. A cynic, like me, might conclude that it merely shows that this is a big power struggle, dressed up as a UN morality trial. Why should control of the oil go to America? Saddam Hussein might be more willing to disarm given the support of friendlier European states than if faced only by, winner takes all, aggression. He, like Colonel Nasser of Suez before him, might quite genuinely turn from an ogre to a statesman if he sees it is in Iraq’s and his interest. The UN freed from dominance by a single power might be more powerful, not less.
Are France and Germany merely flexing anti-American muscles? Those countries know what it is like to have long and bloody wars fought on their soil. It was a madness that could not be allowed to continue, and so after World War 2 they buried their differences and formed the European Union. The rest of the world needs to get that message, given the increasingly terrible power of modern weapons. I like to believe there are powerful moral forces at work as well as power politics.
‘La Peste’, the allegorical novel that Albert Camus wrote after that same war, pictured evil as a plague, which we all carry. Dr Rieux knows that ‘la seule facon de lutter contre la peste c’est l’honnetete’. Remember the spin during the foot and mouth epidemic. We must play straight. Honesty in this context means acknowledging our current interests in the region, accepting our part of the responsibility for the mess that is the Middle East, from crusades through colonial intrigue to setting up the state of Israel, and to accept our part in building up Saddam Hussein before knocking him down over Kuwait.
Making peace instead of war, sharing instead of exploiting, is a solution that would appeal to me. Is it really a pipe-dream to think of building on the secular state of Iraq, and letting the people of the region prosper from the fortune of having been born on an oil field? The terrorists might be found to depend more on the anger of the dispossessed, than fundamental Islam. We never talk of their motives. If fundamentalist Islam is the key then they are certainly opposed to a secular Iraq. Let’s outflank them for once. War will play into their hands.
Even judged by self-interest alone ask, ‘Is war a solution or will it actually ramp up the terrorist threat’? We are now being told the inspectors can’t hope to find chemical and biological weapons in Iraq because they are so small, mobile and easily hidden. In a war they will simply disappear, like Osama bin Laden did from Afganistan, and be an even greater threat for being dispersed?
Colin Powell’s case for the prosecution, at the UN, was impressive but largely based on the compounding of inferences based on intelligence material. A month ago President Bush was so sure of his intelligence that he expected to present ‘smoking guns’. But intelligence does not have a good record for accuracy, witness the current Radio 4 series on the CIA.
The compounding of suspect evidence and suspect hypothesis led to a faulty verdict for Sally Clark, convicted of killing two of her infant children. That damaged just one family. If the UN verdict is wrong here, or the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, there will be a disastrous miscarriage of justice. War carries the ultimate death penalty, massive destruction, and potentially catastrophic long-lasting repercussions. Let’s give peace a chance.
BRIAN CORBETT 13 February 2003 v13.0
Mike Holland of the Observer. Sorry mate. Bad news I’m afraid there is no space with the way we are reorganizing the paper to cover Saturday’s Peace March.
Alice Miles of The Times. Thank you for sending this and I apologise for the (my) confusion over
replying. It is a perfectly nice piece but unfortunately I can't see when we
would run it. Our regular columnists write so often about the war that a
piece on that subject by an external contributor has to really stand out
before we would run it. With apologies for being the bearer of bad news, and
thanks for your efforts, Alice Miles
Personal Notes
Pioneer in the development of computer systems for industrial process control. Electronic engineering graduate of Imperial College and Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, I was author of several international conference papers. Now I am a young OAP who writes. My other current interests include independent travel in Europe and Asia (with my wife and a rucksack), languages (both European and Asian), politics (as an observer), tech stocks, ball sports, ‘modern’ jazz, and photography.Brian Corbett
62 Radyr Avenue, Swansea, SA3 5DT
01792 424702
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
How often have we seen the pressure on the prosecution to win lead through use of suspect evidence to a miscarriage of justice? When the military is involved the consequences of a misjudgement are no longer on a scale to which we can relate. Justification for a pre-emptive strike is particularly difficult, for by definition it is based on hypotheses of what might or might not occur. As Donald Rumsfeld said recently, ‘there are risks in acting and risks in not acting’. In such reasoning the assumptions made are all important.
Ask yourself, ‘Would America have sought the UN resolution against Iraq but for September 11’? It’s accepted that no evidence exists of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida at September 11. The majority of those terrorists were Saudi, non were Iraqi. Iraq had been contained by sanctions for a decade. Many countries have weapons of mass destruction and many have bad human rights records. So why did Iraq pose such a threat that it had to be singled out? Oil? Unfinished business? Confronting Saddam Hussein by forcing through a UN resolution threatening war if he did not disarm, or abdicate, was never a rational response to the diffuse threat from al-Qaida.
What attempt was made to balance the argument by the certainty of casualties (predominantly Iraqi civilians) in a war, the possibility that it will escalate into internal chaos or reverberate far outside Iraq’s borders, the probability that such a course will harden the resentment felt by the have-nots of this world and fuel terrorism against the west for another generation. Whatever else, war will underline the case for pursuing political aims by violence.
Saddam Hussein’s greatest crime was to make a pre-emptive strike against Ayatollah Khomeini and his new Islamic Republic of Iran. He expected to win easily but the war lasted eight years and left over a million dead. At that time he was viewed as the acceptable face of Arab leadership. Britain, France, America and Russia all sold arms into that conflict. The source of his biological and chemical weapons would seem to be America. (Check out the entry for Dec 30 on www.jonathanpollard.org/2002/). Saddam Hussein wasn’t such an ogre then, more one of us, even though he regularly used gas when faced with defeat. His biggest mistake was to attack Kuwait and expect the west to turn a blind eye.
The vast majority of the world’s proven oil reserves are in the Middle East. Iraq’s reserves are surpassed only by Saudi Arabia’s. America’s economy depends on imported oil. The world economy depends on the availability of oil at a reasonable price, think back to the crash in 1974 when the price suddenly quadrupled.
Last week it seemed that an unstoppable inertia was gathering behind the massive preparations for an early pre-emptive war. The loss of face alone in pulling back and handing a propaganda scoop to Saddam Hussein was becoming enormous. The stock market floundered whilst this uncertainty existed, the oil price rose raising fears of a world recession. The military build up continued. War, it seemed, was all but inevitable if Saddam Hussein remained in charge.
Now it is starting to look different. Russia has joined France and Germany in wishing to see a peaceful resolution of the dispute through inspection and disarmament. A European, like me, would welcome the sign that Russia was willing to throw their hand behind Europe. A cynic, like me, might conclude that it merely shows that this is a big power struggle, dressed up as a UN morality trial. Why should control of the oil go to America? Saddam Hussein might be more willing to disarm given the support of friendlier European states than if faced only by, winner takes all, aggression. He, like Colonel Nasser of Suez before him, might quite genuinely turn from an ogre to a statesman if he sees it is in Iraq’s and his interest. The UN freed from dominance by a single power might be more powerful, not less.
Are France and Germany merely flexing anti-American muscles? Those countries know what it is like to have long and bloody wars fought on their soil. It was a madness that could not be allowed to continue, and so after World War 2 they buried their differences and formed the European Union. The rest of the world needs to get that message, given the increasingly terrible power of modern weapons. I like to believe there are powerful moral forces at work as well as power politics.
‘La Peste’, the allegorical novel that Albert Camus wrote after that same war, pictured evil as a plague, which we all carry. Dr Rieux knows that ‘la seule facon de lutter contre la peste c’est l’honnetete’. Remember the spin during the foot and mouth epidemic. We must play straight. Honesty in this context means acknowledging our current interests in the region, accepting our part of the responsibility for the mess that is the Middle East, from crusades through colonial intrigue to setting up the state of Israel, and to accept our part in building up Saddam Hussein before knocking him down over Kuwait.
Making peace instead of war, sharing instead of exploiting, is a solution that would appeal to me. Is it really a pipe-dream to think of building on the secular state of Iraq, and letting the people of the region prosper from the fortune of having been born on an oil field? The terrorists might be found to depend more on the anger of the dispossessed, than fundamental Islam. We never talk of their motives. If fundamentalist Islam is the key then they are certainly opposed to a secular Iraq. Let’s outflank them for once. War will play into their hands.
Even judged by self-interest alone ask, ‘Is war a solution or will it actually ramp up the terrorist threat’? We are now being told the inspectors can’t hope to find chemical and biological weapons in Iraq because they are so small, mobile and easily hidden. In a war they will simply disappear, like Osama bin Laden did from Afganistan, and be an even greater threat for being dispersed?
Colin Powell’s case for the prosecution, at the UN, was impressive but largely based on the compounding of inferences based on intelligence material. A month ago President Bush was so sure of his intelligence that he expected to present ‘smoking guns’. But intelligence does not have a good record for accuracy, witness the current Radio 4 series on the CIA.
The compounding of suspect evidence and suspect hypothesis led to a faulty verdict for Sally Clark, convicted of killing two of her infant children. That damaged just one family. If the UN verdict is wrong here, or the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, there will be a disastrous miscarriage of justice. War carries the ultimate death penalty, massive destruction, and potentially catastrophic long-lasting repercussions. Let’s give peace a chance.
BRIAN CORBETT 13 February 2003 v13.0
Mike Holland of the Observer. Sorry mate. Bad news I’m afraid there is no space with the way we are reorganizing the paper to cover Saturday’s Peace March.
Alice Miles of The Times. Thank you for sending this and I apologise for the (my) confusion over
replying. It is a perfectly nice piece but unfortunately I can't see when we
would run it. Our regular columnists write so often about the war that a
piece on that subject by an external contributor has to really stand out
before we would run it. With apologies for being the bearer of bad news, and
thanks for your efforts, Alice Miles
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