Saddam Is Gone \u2013 But At What Cost?<\/i><\/p>\n
On Saturday 15 February 2003, more than a million of us \u2013 students, toddlers, Christians, Muslims, nuns, Telegraph<\/i> readers \u2013 gathered in Hyde Park for the biggest public demonstration in British history. \u201cNot in my name,\u201d we chanted, as a series of speakers \u2013 from Charles Kennedy to Jesse Jackson \u2013 lined up to denounce the impending invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n
In Glasgow, a sombre yet defiant prime minister delivered a speech to Labour Party activists. Responding to the march in London, Tony Blair declaimed: \u201cThe moral case against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case for removing Saddam.\u201d He continued, \u201cIt is not the reason we act. That must be according to the United Nations mandate on weapons of mass destruction. But it is the reason, frankly, why if we do have to act, we should do so with a clear conscience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whether or not Blair\u2019s conscience remains \u201cclear\u201d is, as he once pointed out, between him and God. But a decade on from the debate about dodgy dossiers, WMDs, 45-minute warnings and various clauses and subclauses of UN Resolution 1441, those of us who marched against the war stand vindicated. We were right; the hawks were wrong.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t the size of our demonstration that those of us against the war should be proud of, it is our judgement. Our arguments and predictions turned out to be correct and those of our belligerent opponents were discredited. Remember the rhetoric? There was \u201cno doubt\u201d that the invaders would \u201cfind the clearest possible evidence of Saddam\u2019s weap\u00adons of mass destruction\u201d (Blair) as well as evidence of how Iraq had \u201cprovided training in these weapons [of mass destruction] to al-Qaeda\u201d (Colin Powell); the foreign troops would be \u201cgreeted as liberators\u201d (Dick Cheney); \u201cthe establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East\u201d would be \u201ca watershed event in the global democratic revolution\u201d (George W Bush).<\/p>\n
It was a farrago of lies and half-truths, of delusion and doublethink. Aside from the viewers of Fox News, most people are now aware that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no ties between secular Saddam and Islamist Osama. The fall of the Ba\u2019athist dictatorship failed to usher in a democratic or human-rights revolution. Every argument advanced by the hawks proved to be utterly false.<\/p>\n
The Iraq war was a strategic disaster \u2013 or, as the Tory minister Kenneth Clarke put it in a recent BBC radio discussion, \u201cthe most disas\u00adtrous foreign policy decision of my lifetime . . . worse than Suez\u201d. The invasion and occupation of the country undermined the moral standing of the western powers; empowered Iran and its proxies; heightened the threat from al-Qaeda at home and abroad; and sent a clear signal to \u201crogue\u201d regimes that the best (the only?) means of deterring a pre-emptive, US-led attack was to acquire weapons of mass destruction (see Korea, North<\/i>).<\/p>\n
There may have been a strong moral case for toppling the tyrant and liberating the Iraqi people \u2013 but there was a much stronger moral case against doing so. Brutal and vicious as Saddam\u2019s reign had been, a \u201chumanitarian intervention\u201d could not just be justified in March 2003, given the complete absence of an ongoing or imminent mass slaughter of Iraqis. Some of us warned that the cost of action, in blood and treasure, would far outweigh the cost of inaction.<\/p>\n
And so it came to pass. The greatest weapon of mass destruction turned out to be the invasion itself. Over the past ten years, Iraqis have witnessed the physical, social and economic destruction of their country \u2013 the aerial demolition of schools, homes and hospitals; the siege of cities such as Fallujah; US-led massacres at Haditha, Mahmudiyah and Balad; the biggest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.<\/p>\n
Between 2003 and 2006, according to a peer-reviewed study in the Lancet<\/i> medical journal, 601,000 more people died in Iraq as a result of violence \u2013 that is, bombed, burned, stabbed, shot and tortured to death \u2013 than would have died had the invasion not happened. Proportionately, that is the equivalent of 1.2 million Britons, or six million Americans, being killed over the same period. In a typically defensive (and deceptive) passage in his memoirs, Blair described the Lancet<\/i> report as \u201cextensively challenged\u201d and said its figures were \u201ccharged with being inaccurate and misleading\u201d. Sir Roy Anderson, the then chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, told ministers in an internal memo that its methods were \u201cclose to \u2018best practice\u2019\u201d and the study design was \u201crobust\u201d.<\/p>\n
Presumably, denialism is how hawks sleep at night. They dispute the studies that have uncovered the human cost of the war \u2013 whether it be the civilian casualties across the country, or the torture and abuse inside Iraq\u2019s prisons (which a UN investigator described in 2006 as \u201cworse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein\u201d), or the fivefold increase in birth defects and fourfold increase in cancers in and around Fallujah. Or they try to blame the violence and turmoil in Iraq exclusively on terrorists, \u201cjihadists\u201d and \u201cIslamofascists\u201d. Few would dispute that most of the killings in Iraq have been carried out by the sadistic monsters who fight for al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But to focus only on the crimes of AQI (or \u201cal-Qaeda in Iraq\u201d) represents a gross moral evasion.<\/p>\n
First, according to the Lancet<\/i> survey, 31 per cent of the excess deaths in Iraq can be attributed to coalition forces \u2013 about 186,000 people between 2003 and 2006. Second, most studies show that only a minority of Iraqi insurgents were card-carrying members of AQI. The insurgency kicked off in Fallujah on 28 April 2003 as a nationalist campaign, long before the arrival of foreign jihadists but only after US troops opened fire on, and killed, 17 unarmed Iraqi protesters. Third, there were no jihadists operating in Iraq before our Mesopotamian misadventure; Iraq had no history of suicide bombings. Between 2003 and 2008, however, 1,100 suicide bombers blew themselves up inside the country. The war made Iraq, in the approving words of the US general Ricardo Sanchez, \u201ca terrorist mag\u00adnet . . . a target of opportunity\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Iraq invasion turned out to be the best recruiting sergeant that Muslim extremists could ever have prayed for, radicalising thousands of young men from the Middle East to the Midlands. Listen to the verdict of the former head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller: \u201cWhatever the merits of putting an end to Saddam Hussein, the war was also a distraction from the pursuit of al-Qaeda. It increased the terrorist threat . . . [and] spurred some British Muslims to turn to terror.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately, say some hawks, such arguments are irrelevant. Didn\u2019t Iraqis welcome the removal of Saddam? Despite the bloodshed, isn\u2019t their nation better off as a result of the war? Not quite. \u201cLet me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts,\u201d wrote the Iraqi blogger known by the pseudonym Riverbend on her blog Baghdad Burning in February 2007. \u201cIt\u2019s worse. It\u2019s over. You lost… You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out… You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power…\u201d<\/p>\n
In September 2011, a Zogby poll found that 42 per cent of Iraqis thought they were \u201cworse off\u201d as a result of the Anglo-American invasion of their country, compared to only 30 per cent of Iraqis who said \u201cbetter off\u201d. An earlier poll, conducted for the BBC in November 2005, found a slim majority of Iraqis (50.3 per cent) saying the Iraq war was \u201csomewhat\u201d or \u201cabsolutely\u201d wrong.<\/p>\n
Should we be surprised? The post-Saddam government, observes the noted Iraqi novelist and activist Haifa Zangana, is \u201cconsumed by sectarian, ethnic division, but above all by corruption\u201d. The Human Rights Watch 2012 report shows how the rights of the Iraqi people are \u201cviolated with impunity\u201d by their new rulers. In his book Iraq: from War to a New Authoritarianism<\/i>, Toby Dodge of the London School of Economics documents how the war has produced an Iraqi system of government not so different from the one it replaced. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Dodge argues, is leading his country towards \u201can incredibly destructive dictatorship\u201d. The establishment of a liberal democracy on the banks of the Tigris remains a neocon pipe dream.<\/p>\n
So, Saddam is gone \u2013 but at what cost? Iraq has been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of innocent people have lost their lives, as the direct result of an unnecessary, unprovoked war that, according to the former chief justice Lord Bingham, was a \u201cserious violation of international law\u201d. \u201cIt was worse than a crime,\u201d said the French diplomat Talleyrand, responding to the execution of the Duc d\u2019Enghien by Napoleon; \u201cit was a blunder.\u201d Iraq turned Talleyrand\u2019s aphorism on its head \u2013 it was worse than a blunder; it was a crime.<\/p>\n
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Mehdi Hasan is the political director of the Huffington Post UK and a contributing writer for the New Statesman. This piece is also published on huffingtonpost.co.uk<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n You are invited to read this free preview of the latest issue of the New Statesman, out on 14 February. To purchase the full magazine – with our Iraq cover package including this piece by Mehdi Hasan alongside articles by John Lloyd, Caroline Hawley, Adnan Hussein and Ian Taylor, as well as our signature mix of opinion, longreads and arts coverage – please visit our subscription page<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n