Leaders Playing With Fire Over Iraq
allafrica.com OPINION January 29, 2003 Posted to the web January 29, 2003 RW Johnson Johannesburg
THOSE who oppose the idea of an Anglo-American war against Saddam Hussein are wont to argue that "really it's just about oil". This view is not to be lightly dismissed, although the conclusion it leads to is less obvious.
When Saddam tried to annex Kuwait in 1991 there were two reasons why this aggression had to be resisted.
Firstly, it was a wholly unprovoked act of aggression; secondly, because if the Kuwaiti oilfields were added to Iraq's enormous oil reserves the world's second biggest Saddam would at once have been the overwhelming power within the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The Saudis and the rest of the Gulf states would have had to pay him tribute, to avoid Kuwait's fate.
That power grab was extraordinary in its ambition, comparable only to Hitler's invasion of the USSR. Hitler knew that if he won, no power in the world could stand up to someone whose realm stretched from Brittany to Vladivostock.
We are all forever in the debt of the Red Army and the Russian people that they prevented mankind from being put at the mercy of a man who used the gaschamber as an instrument of policy.
But Saddam is exactly the same, right down to using gas against the Kurds and Iran. In Kuwait many of his fellow Arabs were put to tortures of mediaeval ferocity at his instruction. Personally, once I heard that when the Iraqi soccer team lost the players were routinely beaten and tortured.
I felt you could read off the rest. I won't read any more accounts of Saddam torturing children to get information out of their parents and so forth (he apparently plays a personal part in such sessions). It makes me sick, literally. The point is that the man is, provenly, a monster of Hitlerian proportions, in his methods and his ambitions.
US policy doubtless takes fully into account the imperative need to diversify its oil reliance. The US is in a vulnerable position when its oil imports come mainly from Saudi Arabia (home of Al-Qaeda), Angola (corrupt one-party regime) and Venezuela (when it's working).
Having Iraq under a friendly, democratic pro-western regime would clearly be in the US national interest. National interests not only exist but are legitimate and must be factored in. Let's not pretend. But I am from SA, not the US, whose national interest is not mine. I am far more concerned that Thabo Mbeki has chosen to flirt with Saddam, sent Aziz Pahad on a mission there and is clearly taking Saddam's side in the war.
Within months, let alone years, this could come to seem like the actions of Petain, Peron or Franco who had collaborated with Hitler. Once Hitler was beaten, Auschwitz and Belsen were revealed. There was no saving anyone who had sided with that. It will be the same with Saddam. SA is already backing the murderous and antidemocratic regime of Robert Mugabe. Truly, Mandela's legacy has been squandered.
What history remembers is that Hitler was so evil that for all one's detestation of Stalin's Russia we must all be eternally grateful to the Red Army.
Whatever one's reservations about Bush's US, we shall probably all feel exactly the same once Saddam has also been defeated and his murderous and utterly evil regime is laid bare.
When Iraqis are dancing in the streets at Saddam's fall and it will surely happen Bush and Blair, whatever their other motives, will seem like liberators.
Mbeki and Pahad will then be viewed not just by the US and Britain but by democratic Iraqis rather in the same light as Peron and Franco were viewed after 1945, men who had revealed their true colours by showing friendship to Hitler even while he was invading Russia and carrying out his terrible pogroms. Our leaders are playing with fire.
Johnson, former Oxford academic and former director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, is a freelance writer.