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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: False Alibis What did Tony Blair say in his interview with David Frost just before he agreed that Iraq has been a disaster? In the excitement over the two words "it has", the previous question and answer have been overlooked. This, from the al-Jazeera website, is what they said: Frost: "In terms of Iraq, prime minister, in the light of the latest figures from the Iraqi health ministry, that the number of Iraqis who have died is between 100,000 and 150,000 and so on, with those scale of figures, if you had known that that was the scale of bloodshed, would you have still gone to war?" Blair: "Well the alternative was leaving Saddam in charge of Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of people died, there were a million casualties in the Iran/Iraq war, Kuwait was invaded and four million people went into exile. So the idea that Iraqis should be faced with the situation where they either have a brutal dictator in Saddam or alternatively a sectarian religious conflict, why can't they have in Iraq what their people want? Which is a non-sectarian government, a government that is elected by the people and the same opportunities and the same rights that we enjoy in countries such as this." There are two points here. First - and I believe for the first time - Blair got involved in the numbers argument instead of rejecting it (as most defenders, and critics too, of the war have done) as inappropriate. Second, and more familiar, he suggested that the purpose of the war was to avoid the unacceptable alternative of "leaving Saddam in charge of Iraq" - i.e. the purpose was regime change. 1. If we are going to talk about numbers - though that does not address the issues of principle and policy involved - Blair is on dubious ground. (a) It is disingenuous for a start to cite the "million casualties" of the Iran/Iraq war - a war which the US was happy to see unfold and during which, without dissent from Britain, it, for the most part, favoured the Iraqi side. (Which is why Donald Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam in December 1983 and visited Baghdad again in March 1984, on the same day that the UN released a report about Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops). (b) If the figure of four million exiles under Saddam is correct, the comparison with post-Saddam Iraq is not re-assuring. Last month the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 1.6 million Iraqis have left for foreign countries in a "steady, silent exodus". To Syria and Jordan alone, the flow continues at a reported 100,000 monthly. In addition, there are some 1.5 million internal refugees in Iraq - a number which is also growing rapidly. (c) Hundreds of thousands died during two decades of Saddam's rule; hundreds of thousands have died since then. (d) That leaves the invasion of Kuwait. Yes, Saddam was guilty of this act of aggression, in 1990, but is Blair suggesting that he was going to commit another such act, in or after 2003? 2. On the fundamental issue of regime change, how often do we have to remind Blair (though his questioners usually fail to) that this was not the stated object of the war? "The objective is the ridding of Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, and while Saddam's regime stands in the way of that it is an obstacle that has to be removed if it is not prepared to disarm voluntarily", Blair told the House of Commons on 25 February 2003. And a Downing Street spokesman spelt it out two days later in the Independent: "If Saddam Hussein co-operates, if he's serious about disarmament, then he can stay in power". Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, was equally explicit: "...on the issue of regime change, the position of the British government is very straightforward. Yes, of course, in a different world we would like to see a different government running Iraq, but so far, as [Resolution] 1441 is concerned, the purpose of 1441 is to secure the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; that and that alone. We have made it clear, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, has made clear repeatedly, that if Iraq complies with 1441 and disarms of its weapons of mass destruction, we accept that the government of Iraq stays in place". The idea that the war was launched to promote a democratic Iraq is simply an alibi for wrong decisions, which have led at huge human cost to disaster. And we can look forward to a new alibi if Iraq splits up and the US and British get out - that the Iraqis threw away the chance they were given. There is a hint of that already in Condoleezza Rice's warning this weekend that the Iraqis "don't have a future if they try to stay apart." ***John Gittings was for many years the Guardian's foreign leader-writer and China specialist, and is now researching the history of nuclear threats and nuclear proliferation. He has worked in the past at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the University of Chile, the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Polytechnic of Central London.*** scrapper: my favorite of the UK readers' feedback is as follows... If the crimes of a regime are sufficient justification to launch a murderous war then presumably Blair has no problem with Hitler invading the Soviet Union. Indeed, Hitler could have used Blair's words and Goebbels did use something very similar.
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