| Whatever the outcome of the current debate on the pros and cons of the liberation of Iraq, one thing is certain: a substantial segment of opinion in Western democracies believes that politics is too important to be left to politicians.
The alternative, offered implicitly, is the rule of lawyers supported by spooks. In the proposed post-politics system, the intelligence services supply the information to lawyers who will check it, and decide which part is "hard evidence", and which not. Action is taken when, and if, the lawyers unanimously pronounce it to be legal. Now let us apply all this to the case of Saddam Hussain. The first move that a lawyer would make is to reduce the many complex issues involved in a case to a single and relatively simple one. In the case of Iraq, this reductive approach has created the illusion that the problem with Saddam was limited to the issue of weapons of mass destruction. It no longer matters whether or not Saddam was violating the many other provisions of 12 mandatory resolutions, often passed unanimously, by the United Nations Security Council. All the resolutions made it clear that unless and until Iraq had ceased to be a threat to regional and world peace, it would remain in a state of war with the UN. Even opponents of the liberation of Iraq, including the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, cannot claim that Saddam fulfilled those obligations. The lawyerly trick used by opponents of liberation is to ignore all those issues and focus solely on weapons of mass destruction. But even then the pro-Saddam lobby has a weak case. All relevant Security Council resolutions demand that Saddam prove to the UN that he no longer had any WMD programmes. The WMDs in question were identified and precisely defined, and formed the basis of the complex check-list developed by Rolf Ekeus, the first UN weapons inspector in Iraq and his successor Hans Blix. In March 2003, on the eve of the war, Blix still had 19 unanswered questions and could not give Saddam a clean bill of health in front of the Security Council. At that time as President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair pondered whether or not to go to war, they had at their disposal a mass of information from all major intelligence services. That information carried the caveat that intelligence services attach to their products, that it should not be regarded as "hard evidence" in the lawyerly sense. No intelligence service could say with the kind of certainty required in an American or British law court that, in March 2003, Saddam did or did not have any specific amount of weapons of mass destruction. Nor could any intelligence offer the assurance that Saddam would not re-start WMD programmes in April 2003 or any other time. Human endeavour It is precisely at such times and over such issues that politics, which Aristotle saw as the highest form of human endeavour, earns its credentials. Political decision-making is fundamentally different from decision-making by spooks or lawyers. The spook is seldom able to take a decision because he is never one hundred per cent sure of the information he has obtained. At its best intelligence provides pieces of a puzzle that only the political leader can put together and make sense of. At its worst it could be dangerously misleading. In 1940 intelligence services were unanimous that Japan would remain focused on empire-building in Asia and, thus, would not attack the United States. The same services were sure that Hitler would not violate his treaty with Stalin by invading Russia until after the British had been defeated. In September 1979 the CIA reported that the Shah of Iran was "firmly established" for another 20 years. The Shah was overthrown and exiled three months later. In 1989 as the Soviet Empire was crumbling, the CIA was adamant that the Soviet economy was on the mend and that the Communist system remained viable for the foreseeable future. Now, let us suppose that the CIA and the British intelligence had reported in March 2003 that Saddam had, indeed, abandoned his WMD programmes. Would that have changed the big picture which includes Saddam's past performance, his clear political strategy, and his failure to meet all his other obligations under the UN resolutions? Would that have provided any guarantee that Saddam would not re-start his WMD programmes at the first opportunity? Would anyone have been able to provide assurances that Saddam would not provide WMDs to terrorist groups that shared his hatred of the United States? A lawyer might argue that a serial killer cannot be touched unless he kills again. A political leader, however, must restrain the serial killer before he commits another crime. The pro-Saddam lobby claims that the policy of containment had worked, and should have been continued ad infinitum. The truth, however, is that, as far as Iraq's various obligations under Security Council resolutions were concerned, containment had failed, and the sanctions had begun to crumble. Even on the issue of WMDs it had not worked because Saddam had kicked UN inspectors out four years earlier. The lawyer would say: but we had the inspectors back in Iraq in 2003, and should have given them time to find out whether or not Saddam, for once, was telling the truth. Such a position is, theoretically, plausible. The US and its allies could have kept 200,000 soldiers in the Arabian desert for an indefinite number of years as a stick with which to persuade Saddam not to re-start WMD programmes. That, however, would have created a new status quo in which Saddam, assured of the survival of his regime, would have had even less incentive to fulfil his obligations under UN resolutions. The decision that Bush and Blair faced in 2003 was not about the intricacies of spooking or the fine shades of legalese. It was a political decision. Ultimately, politics is about choice, about making a judgment. And this, by definition, involves controversy. As soon as one option is chosen, those who favour another option would try to knock it. There are people who will never be persuaded that the world and Iraq are better off without Saddam Hussain. Unanimously condemned Even when Iraq, having invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, was clearly in the wrong and unanimously condemned by the United Nations, there were people, including Senator John F Kerry, who believed that Saddam should not be touched. Kerry may have been right; we shall never know. But what mattered at the time was that he presented his opposition to action against Saddam in political, not legalistic terms. The debate today should focus not on lawyerly matters but on political judgment. The question is whether we want a lawyer in charge or a statesman. Those who want rule by lawyers may not be pleased, but, politically, Bush a |
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