One of the things we all know, don’t we?, is that George Bush and Tony Blair duped their respective parliaments and electorates into waging war to remove Saddam Hussein from power on the false pretext he possessed, or was just about to, weapons of mass destruction and thereby posed a substantial and imminent threat to the security of the West and its strategic allies.
Now, both of their countries seem immured in a seemingly un-winnable war in a country these two leaders had hoped to liberate from tyranny that is fast descending into the far worse state of anarchy in an incipient civil war between various contending factions and ethnicities.
Meanwhile, the US and UK invasion of Iraq has antagonised Muslim opinion around the world, radicalising their domestic disaffected Muslim youth, as well as emboldening and enabling Iraq’s neighbour and long-standing rival, Iran, to make a power-play in the region by becoming the first Muslim country there to acquire nuclear weapons and with them to become a regional superpower in the Middle East with potentially highly detrimental consequences.
All in all, then, the war against Iraq has been a total and unnecessary unmitigated disaster.
Or has it?
For a long time, ever since the invasion of Iraq, a series of still small voices coming from the Middle East can be heard who have consistently claimed, after all, Saddam did possess substantial stocks of WMD on the eve of hostilities that he was able to remove to Syria just in time.
Moreover, despite all the current set-backs in Iraq the claim continues to be made that the shoots of democracy have succeeded in being implanted there which one day soon will bear the fruits of a peace that will extend beyond its borders to cover the entire region and beyond that the entire world.
The latest Middle Eastern voices to assert Saddam possessed substantial stocks of WMD which he removed from the country just before it was invaded belong to two high-ranking former officers in Saddam’s armed forces. One is Georges Sada, Saddam’s number 2 ranking officer in his air force. The other, who has corroborated Sada’s claims is Ali Ibrahim, a fellow Iraqi commander.
In an interview with the American journalist and radio broadcaster Larry Elder part of the transcript of which was posted on the Townhall website yesterday, the former Iraqi general had this to say about the quantity of WMD Saddam allegedly transported to Syria:
‘We are talking about hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons… because a Jumbo aircraft easily can take more than 50 tons. And [a] Jumbo was doing two sorties a day, so it will be hundreds of tons were transported to Syria.’
As to the peace the US is allegedly failing so miserably to win, it is worth reflecting on the reply Victor Davis Hanson gave to a reader of his web-site who questioned his persistent assertion that it is making consistent progress, by citing a recent poll of nearly 1,000 US troops stationed in Iraq that found only 23% backed President Bush’s position that they should stay for as long as needed, with as many as 72% of those polled saying they should pull out within a year, and nearly a third of these saying they should withdraw immediately.
Hanson responded so:
‘All soldiers wish to come home. Had anyone interviewed [US] soldiers in, say, Italy in 1944 there would have been a great deal of unhappiness. Few soldiers look beyond a year or expect to be fighting “as long as is necessary”. … I was surprised … that only 70% said one year, since to agree with the other 23% about as long as is necessary might seem to cast doubt on the ability of the very people they are training. So for all the rhetoric about as long as it takes, I am sure both in Iraq and in the US, there is a feeling that about 4 years, $100 billion in aid, 3 elections, and 4000,000 Iraq new troops can – and should – be sufficient to finish the job and show our firmness in honouring our commitment to clean up the Iraqi mess that we have been directly involved in since 1991.’
While not professing to be any expert in such a difficult field where genuine informed opinion and fact mixes so freely with copious quantities of disinformation and propaganda, there remains room for thinking the war justified as well as for cautious optimism.
As to Iraq’s belligerent neighbour, Iran, no one said that the War Against Terror and
against the Axis of Evil that made it necessary is going to be easy, nor won without being prosecuted in stages. Certainly, there have been mistakes made by the US and UK. In what war hasn’t there been?
In some ways, the most dangerous enemies of the West remain within it in the form of that curious and unseemly, unholy alliance between its left-leaning and largely secular elite of politicians and opinion-formers and those recently implanted Muslims there who remain in thrall to, or more likely as not merely at the mercy of, those expounding aggrandising, aggressive and intolerant versions of their religion.
Here, the fight must be carried out in the realm of ideas by those desirous of the West continuing to preserve its tolerant and liberal democratic traditions in face of those who would sell out that birthright for a mess of Muslim votes.
The victory of the left in the recent Dutch municipal elections, plus the decision of the Amsterdam borough of Bararsjes to remove from a site there near a mosque a white cross commemorating the dead of World War Two lest it offend local Muslims, both have a salutary lessons to teach western politicians of all stripes as to the dangers of seeking to win the Muslim vote by pandering to Muslim prejudices.
Those whose will needs steeling for the fight against Islamism and against western capitulation to it can do no better than consult today's frontpage website where they will find a stirring call to intellectual arms by American psychologist Phyllis Chesler.
Comments (1)
I was under the impression that Pakistan already had nuclear weapons! And from my recollection, they happen to be Muslim!!
However, apart from the nitpicking, the drift you take, seems likely to me, to reflect rather more the reality on the ground than the unmitigating doom and gloom that comes from the papers and TV, especially here in the West.
I cannot say George W Bush is my favorite person, but I think the US coalition was right to go into Iraq and remove SadMan Hussein, with or without WMD.
It always seems odd to me that if something similar happened in the UK albeit on a smaller scale (i.e. authority was being flouted, bullying carried on regardless) everyone would be clamouring for someone (namely the Government) "to do something about it", yet take it out of the UK, and we become apathetic.
I do wish we had planned the victory as well as the war itself, but I also believe (perhaps niavely) that it will actually all work out OK in the end.
Posted by Bill Ives | March 14, 2006 4:43 PM
Posted on March 14, 2006 16:43