August 25, 2002The Observer
It's important to beware of arguments that depend upon the mantra 'the enemy of my enemy', and it's likewise important to be immune to charges of keeping bad company. In the days of Vorster and Botha I didn't mind in the least working with Stalinists in the anti-apartheid movement (anyway, it's better to have them where you can see them), and when it came to helping imprisoned dissenters in Czechoslovakia I couldn't care less that Roger Scruton thought it was a good cause as well. If you pay too much attention to the shortcomings of your allies, or if you worry about being lumped together with dubious or unpopular types, you are in effect having your thinking done for you.
I must say, however, that Henry Kissinger has never let me down, as a person to consult before making up my own mind. Stepping lightly over his one-man rolling war-crime wave, extending from Bangladesh through Indochina to Chile and East Timor, I pause to notice that he was the man who persuaded President Ford not to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House. He was the chief defender in the West of the right of the Chinese Communists to massacre their own students in the centre of Beijing. He made himself conspicuous on the American Right by being one of the few to argue that Slobodan Milosevic should be left alone.
A week or so ago I wondered when he was going to pronounce on the impending confrontation with Iraq. And I bet right. He is against it. So is his former colleague, and partner in the dread firm of Kissinger Associates, General Brent Scowcroft. The general is known to be a ventriloquist, or rather dummy, for George Bush Senior, who is now widely reported as being in the dove-camp, or dovecote. (This incidentally demolishes one facile argument, or taunt, about George W. picking a fight with Saddam Hussein as part of some Corsican conception of family honour.)
Those who don't want a 'regime change' in Iraq now include the Saudi royal family, the Turkish army, the more prominent conservative spokesmen in Congress and the Kissinger hawks. General Sharon, at least in his public pronouncements, appears to be against it as well. And somebody with a good contact among the Joint Chiefs of Staff seems to be leaking pessimistic or pacifistic material at a furious rate. Those who like to think of themselves as anti-war or anti-imperialist might wonder what there is left for them to say: all the war-loving imperialist hyenas are barking for peace at the top of their leathery old lungs.
It would be knee-jerkish to conclude merely on this evidence that there might be a respectable radical case for eliminating Saddam Hussein. But it's certainly worth examining the motives of the anti-war establishment. The Saudis do not want an Americanised Iraq because it might favour the Shia Muslim majority, which in turn might favour Iran, and they also know that with Iraqi oil back on stream their own near-monopoly position - the profits of which have been used to finance bin Ladenism worldwide - would be much diminished.
The Turks are hostile to the idea because it would almost inevitably extend the area of Iraqi Kurdistan that is currently ruled by its own inhabitants, who abut the restive Kurdish zone of Turkey. A sizeable chunk of the American military and business elite is peacenik as well, either because it fears damage to its polished and expensive arsenal or because it fears the disruption of Opec and the corresponding loss of business and revenue. Jordan's operetta monarchy thinks that it might fall if Iraq is attacked and - even though this collapse might give an opportunity for cleansing the West Bank in the confusion - the Israeli hard-liners are sceptical also.
Shall we just say that the anti-war position is the respectable status quo one? That's interesting in itself. Who would be the beneficiaries of an intervention, always supposing it went well and Saddam's vaunted army fought no better than it did the last time? Only the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples. Well, from the Kissinger-Saudi-Turkish viewpoint, and from the vantage of the Dallas boardroom, where is the fun in that? The consequences might be - if we employ the revealing word of choice among the conservatives - 'destabilising'.
I have spent a good deal of time over the past year in conversation with the Iraqi opposition factions and the Kurdish forces, who have misgivings of their own about the Bush strategy. They have been used as cannon-fodder in the past, sometimes for operations that were called off at the last minute. They are well aware that from the empire's point of view, the ideal government in Iraq is a centralised Sunni Muslim military regime, though one preferably not run by a homicidal megalomaniac. They know that the United States is perfectly capable of intervening in Iraq's internal affairs, as it did when it supported Saddam's invasion of Iran, or when it provided him with weapons and diplomatic cover during his genocide in Kurdistan in the 1980s. I have been in Halabja, the town that was annihilated with Iraqi chemical weapons, and I have read the Pentagon report that with a straight face blamed the attack on the Iranians. (Those Washington interventions did not arouse the moral ire of the usual anti-war forces.)
What the Iraqi and Kurdish democrats would like is American aid for and endorsement of their own efforts to replace the regime. And what they fear is what I also fear - a heavy-handed US attack which results in an Iraqi puppet government that is designed to placate the Saudis and the Turks. That, it seems to me, is where a principled critique of the war-planning might begin. But it's depressing to see the status quo Left preferring to parrot the arguments of pacifist realpolitik.
· Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair
