David Morrison, 14 July 2006
 1. Muslims have false sense of grievance against the West, says Blair
Just
suppose that a Muslim state had imposed collective punishment on 1.4
million non-Muslims by bombing their only power station and reducing
their supply of electricity and water to a bare minimum. You can bet
your bottom dollar that within a few hours the Security Council would
have passed a Chapter VII resolution condemning the military action and
threatening economic and military sanctions against the perpetrator, if
it didn't cease its action and make good the damage done.
When
Prime Minister Blair spoke to the House of Commons Liaison Committee on
4 July 2006 and declared the sense of grievance felt by British Muslims
against the West to be 'false', a week had passed since Israel had
meted out collective punishment to the 1.4 million Muslims in Gaza by
bombing their only power station. No Security Council resolution had
been passed condemning Israel's action, let alone threatening economic
and military sanctions against Israel for its action. No demands have
been made that Israel make good the damage it had done. And there had
been barely a murmur of disapproval from Western capitals.
This lack of reaction in Western capitals to Israel's collective
punishment of the Muslims in Gaza is hardly surprising since for the
previous few months the US/EU had been meting out collective punishment
to the 4 million Muslims in Gaza and the West Bank by depriving them of
the aid necessary for the barest existence – because a majority of them
had dared to vote in a manner disapproved of by the US/EU. The just,
who hadn't voted for Hamas, had to suffer with the unjust, who had.
Blair refused to condemn Israel
At
the Liaison Committee on 4 July, Glasgow Labour MP, Mohammed Sarwar,
invited the Prime Minster to condemn the Israeli collective punishment.
Sarwar asked [1]:
'Prime Minister, Israeli air strikes
against the infrastructure in Gaza, including the bombing of the
territory's only power station and demolition of bridges, has led to
the Palestinian people being deprived of power and water supply. This
collective punishment has caused immense suffering to innocent men,
women and children. Do you agree that this is the worst example of
might is right …?'
Blair refused to condemn the Israeli action, replying:
'I agree with this, that unless we
manage to get the situation into a different position then the Israelis
are going to continue to take punitive action and the Palestinians are
going to continue to have a burning sense of injustice. Now I have
learned enough about this situation over the years to realise that
going in and condemning either side is not deeply helpful.'
On the contrary, he justified the Israeli action by saying:
'Of course Israel has to protect its security.'
False sense of grievance?
Collective
punishment of Palestinians by the West, and the West's condoning of
Israeli collective punishment of Palestinians, has added to the sense
of grievance against the West amongst Muslims the world over. How could
it be otherwise? Yet, earlier in the session with the Liaison
Committee, the Prime Minister declared the sense of grievance felt by
British Muslims against the West to be 'false'. Speaking about how to
combat 'extremism' amongst British Muslims, he said:
'… if you want to defeat this extremism
you have to defeat its ideas and you have to defeat in particular a
completely false sense of grievance against the West.'
And
lest there be any doubt that this was a slip of the tongue, rather than
a line that had been prepared in advance for public consumption, he
restated it several times. For example:
'You can only defeat it [this
extremism] if there are people inside the community who are going to
stand up … and not merely say, 'You are wrong to kill people through
terrorism, you are wrong to incite terrorism or extremism', but
actually, 'You are wrong in your view about the West, you are wrong in
this sense of grievance that people play on within the community as if
Muslims were oppressed by the West. The whole sense of grievance, the
ideology, is profoundly wrong. There may be disagreements that you have
with America, with the UK, with the western world but none of it
justifies not merely the methods but also the ideas which are far too
current within parts of the community'.'
In Blair's view
then, 'extremism' amongst Muslims in Britain can only be wiped out by
Muslims that don't harbour this false sense of grievance convincing the
great majority that do that they are wrong. The corollary of this is
that any Muslim who does harbour this sense of grievance is an
'extremist' – in other words, the great majority of British Muslims are
now 'extremists' in Blair's eyes.
In the past, Blair used to
allow that, even though he knew he was always right, others were
entitled to a different opinion. Now, for British Muslims at least,
expressing a different opinion from his on British foreign policy
towards the Muslim world is a mark of extremism that is not allowed,
since expressing it is an inspiration to terrorism. His message to
British Muslims is you're either with me (and my foreign policy) or
with the terrorists.
But what's the purpose of this line, which
was presumably invented for the anniversary of the London bombings. Is
it designed to cow Muslims into silence about British foreign policy
towards the Muslim world? Hopefully, it will have the opposite effect.
2. Deaths in Iraq are not due to invasion, says Blair
Civilian
deaths in Iraq are not as a result of the invasion of Iraq or the
removal of Saddam Hussein. This was the Prime Minister's extraordinary
assertion at the Liaison Committee on 4 July 2006, in response to a
question by Conservative MP, Edward Leigh.
Leigh said to Blair [1]:
'I have only been to Baghdad once,
years ago before the invasion. I walked around and there was no
question of any threat to me personally or anything else. Nobody in
this room would dare walk around Baghdad now.'
to which Blair responded:
'Hang on a minute, Edward, you might
have been able to walk around in Baghdad because you were a Westerner
there. If you were someone who disagreed with Saddam's regime you ended
up in a mass grave. … 300,000 people are in mass graves there.'
Edward Leigh continued:
'Prime Minister, you are not surely
suggesting to this Committee that the ordinary life of Iraqis has in
any conceivable way been improved in terms of their personal security?
These are not politicians, not the people you talk to. Do you accept
that tens of thousands of Iraqis are now dead as a result of this
invasion?'
to which Blair replied:
'Well, hang on a minute, they are not
dead as a result of the invasion or the removal of Saddam. They are
dead as the result of the activities of a criminal minority who want to
stop the majority getting the democracy they want.'
Pandora's box
This
is an extraordinary attempt on Blair's part to evade responsibility for
the blood that has been spilt in Iraq over the past three years. The
plain fact is that Bush and Blair invaded Iraq in March 2003 and took
great pleasure in destroying the Ba'athist state. The carnage in Iraq
since then has flowed from this action and the political leaders who
initiated this action cannot evade responsibility for it. Had they not
invaded and occupied Iraq, the carnage would not have happened.
With
remarkable honesty, Zalmay Khalilzad, the present US Ambassador to
Baghdad, said recently that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime
had 'opened a Pandora's box of volatile ethnic and sectarian tensions'
(Los Angeles Times article US Envoy Offers Bleak View of Situation in
Iraq, by Borzou Daragahi, 6 March 2006, see [2]). Bush and Blair opened the Pandora's box and they are responsible for the afflictions that have come out of it.
Geneva Convention
What
is more, under the Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian
Persons in Time of War, by occupying Iraq Bush and Blair assumed a duty
of care for every Iraqi civilian. Article 27 of the Convention says [3]:
'Protected persons … shall at all times
be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts
of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public
curiosity.'
So, Blair cannot evade responsibility for
civilian deaths by saying 'we didn't kill all those Iraqi civilians, it
was a criminal minority that did it'. By occupying Iraq, Bush and Blair
took on the responsibility for protecting civilians against 'all acts
of violence or threats thereof' from whatever source, and they have
signally failed to do so.
Ultimately more lives will be saved
Blair
used to advance the proposition that the innocent lives saved as a
result of unseating Saddam Hussein would more that compensate for the
civilian lives lost as a result of the invasion and occupation. This
was the message he gave the House of Commons on the eve of the invasion
(19 March 2003) [4]:
'Of course, I understand that, if there
is conflict, there will be civilian casualties. That, I am afraid, is
in the nature of any conflict, but we will do our best to minimise
them. However, I point out to my hon. Friend that civilian casualties
in Iraq are occurring every day as a result of the rule of Saddam
Hussein. He will be responsible for many, many more deaths even in one
year than we will be in any conflict.'
The message is
clear: left alone, Saddam Hussein would kill more innocent Iraqis in a
year than will be killed in the upcoming conflict and, ultimately, more
lives will be saved by taking military action to unseat him.
So,
on 19 March 2003, how many innocent Iraqis would one expect Saddam
Hussein to kill in the next twelve months, if he were left alone?
Presumably, the Prime Minister had a figure in his head when he spoke.
Scores would seem to be a reasonable estimate: Amnesty International
estimated that 'scores of people, including possible prisoners of
conscience, were executed' in 2002 [5], a similar number in 2001 [6] and 'hundreds' in 2000 [7].
And nobody can accuse Amnesty International of being soft on Saddam
Hussein. So, had Saddam Hussein been left alone, a reasonable guess is
that a few hundred people would have been killed by his regime since
March 2003.
More than three years later, there is no reliable
estimate of Iraqi dead. 'We don't do body counts', General Tommy
Franks, the US commander of the invading forces famously remarked. If
the bodies are Iraqi, he should have added for accuracy. The carers
have been so irresponsible in carrying out their duty that they haven't
even bothered to count the Iraqis who have died in their care.
The
estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths that exist have been put together by
others. From the outset, the Iraq Body Count organisation has compiled
a count from online media reports of incidents in which civilians were
said to have been killed. This count is inevitably an underestimate
since not all civilian deaths are reported in the media. As of 9 July
2006, their estimate ranged from 38,843 to 43,273, the range reflecting
the fact that different sources often report differing number of
civilian deaths for a particular incident.
Perhaps, 60,000
Iraqis have been killed while they have been under the care of Bush and
Blair. Perhaps double that or treble that. Nobody knows. Judging by
what Amnesty International say, perhaps 300 people would have been
killed by Saddam Hussein's regime in the same time, had he not been
replaced by Bush and Blair.
So, it would have taken Saddam
Hussein's regime hundreds of years to match the carnage produced by
Bush and Blair in a few years.
What is absolutely certain is
that tens of thousands of Iraqis who are now dead would have been alive
if Bush and Blair had left Iraq alone. What is more, the rate of
killing has accelerated in recent times. And there is no end in sight.
No rules
Before
the invasion, when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, Iraqis knew that, as long
as they refrained from political activities against the regime, they
were likely to be free to get on with their everyday lives. They knew
the rules of the game, and they knew that they broke the rules at their
peril.
Now, under the Bush/Blair regime, in many parts of Iraq
outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, there are no rules, and individuals
don't know what to do to stay alive. That is the awful legacy that Bush
and Blair have visited on the people of Iraq. They destroyed a
functioning state and have brought about chaos.
The US
Ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, recently compiled a report on
daily life in Baghdad for his masters in Washington. It was leaked to
The Washington Post and published on 16 June 2006 [8]. It was based on the experiences of US embassy employees. It makes grim reading.
Humanitarian intervention?
The
Prime Minister has been fond of pointing to mass graves in Iraq, as a
justification for invading Iraq, in the absence of 'weapons of mass
destruction'. 'If you were someone who disagreed with Saddam's regime
you ended up in a mass grave. … 300,000 people are in mass graves
there', he told Edward Leigh. This is yet another example of Blair
giving false impressions about Iraq.
(I leave readers to puzzle
out how Blair knows how many Iraqis were killed and put in mass graves
when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, but he hasn't a clue about how many
Iraqis have been killed since March 2003 while he and George Bush have
been ruling Iraq.)
The vast majority of civilian deaths during
Saddam Hussein's rule occurred well over a decade before the invasion,
which they are now being used to justify. They occurred in the
aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war, when the US/UK backed Saddam Hussein,
and in the aftermath of the Gulf War, when the US/UK urged the Shia and
Kurds to rise up against the regime, and then stood idly by as Saddam
Hussein suppressed the revolt. As the Amnesty International reports
indicate, no such killing was going on at the time of the invasion in
March 2003.
A case can be made on humanitarian grounds for
taking military action against a sovereign state in order to prevent
actual, or imminent, killing of civilians on a grand scale within its
territory. A case cannot be made on humanitarian grounds for taking
military action in response to the killing of civilians years ago –
since such action inevitably leads to more civilians being killed. It
may even lead to a humanitarian disaster, as has happened in this
instance. For this reason, Human Rights Watch concluded in January 2004
that 'the invasion of Iraq cannot be justified as a humanitarian
intervention' [9].
Sage advice from a close friend
The
carnage in Iraq would have been avoided if only Bush had taken the sage
advice of a close friend about the difficulties that would begin the
day after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. Here is this advice:
'If
you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go
to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with
it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of
the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a
Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the
Ba'athists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How
much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the
United States military when it's there? How long does the United States
military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that
government, and what happens to it once we leave?'
The close colleague who gave this advice was Dick Cheney – in a New York Times interview published on 13 April 1991 [10]. He was explaining why US forces didn't overthrow Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War.
Postscript
It
is now over two years since the occupying powers handed over
sovereignty to a US-appointed Iraqi Government, and the US pro-consul
Paul Bremer went home. Since then, there have been two elected Iraqi
governments. The second was finally put together in early June by the
new Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, an event that was hailed in London
and Washington as an important milestone in the onward march to freedom
and democracy in Iraq. Why the second elected government should be any
more successful than the first is not obvious.
Shortly after
al-Maliki had put the finishing touches to his government, he was
invited to the US Embassy within the Green Zone in Baghdad and informed
that George Bush was in the next room. Bush had made a surprise visit
to Iraq, a surprise to the world and a surprise to the supposedly
sovereign government of Iraq. That says all that needs to be said about
which power is sovereign in Iraq.
Bush told al-Maliki that he had come to Baghdad to look him in the eye [11], as he famously did to Vladimir Putin in Ljubljana in June 2001 [12].
The real reason for Bush's visit to Iraq was to try to boost his
sagging domestic poll ratings, by associating himself with the
'success' of an Iraqi government being formed.
http://www.david-morrison.org.uk/
References
[1] UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 709-ii, House of Commons, MINUTES OF EVIDENCE, TAKEN BEFORE LIAISON COMMITTEE, THE PRIME MINISTER, Tuesday 7 FEBRUARY 2006, RT HON TONY BLAIR MP, Evidence heard in Public Questions 180-313
[2] Borzou Daragahi 'US Envoy Offers Bleak View of Situation in Iraq', The Los Angeles Times Monday 06 March 2006
[3] See ICRC website http://www.icrc.org/
[4] Hansard, Terrorism, 19 Mar 2003 : Column 927
[5] http://web.amnesty.org/report2003/irq-summary-eng
[6] http://web.amnesty.org/web/ar2002.nsf/mde/iraq
[7] http://web.amnesty.org/web/ar2001.nsf/webmepcountries/IRAQ
[8] Zalmay Khalilzad, Snapshots from the office, Memo to the State Department, June 2006
[9] http://hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm#_Toc58744952
[10] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20021111/infact
[11] http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060613.html
[12] http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060613.html
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