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How is deposing a tyrannical regime 'a mistake – whatever the motivation'?

By Jim Nolan - posted Wednesday, 21 January 2004


In a recent piece of gratuitous advice to American conservatives, journalist Christopher Hitchens remarked that despite their manifest shortcomings, they at least possessed the "confidence to rehearse [their] differences in public". This insight may usefully be called in aid to highlight the essential difference in the current temper of the Australian politics on the one hand, and that of the US and UK on the other.

In the US, the traditional Republican foreign policy right has fractured along fault lines with the "realist" Kissinger, Scowcroft and Bush Snr (in spirit) conservatives on one side and the "Wilsonian internationalists", Bush Jnr, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, most conspicuously, on the other. Likewise, the UK has been alight with incandescent debates within Labour and now the Tories and the anti war left are making common cause against Blair.

In marked contrast, in Australia neither side of the parliament has exhibited the slightest fraying of the lock-step position each has adopted on Iraq.

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This is a troubling phenomenon. The complete absence of any dissenting views within the somnolent liberal caucus is striking. There no John McCain figure prepared to criticise constructively the execution of the Iraq project even while accepting its moral justification. More significant still, perhaps, is the almost complete absence of any spirited polemical defence of the Iraq policy. In the ranks of Australia’s political conservatives the greatest foreign-policy issue since Vietnam has assumed all of the urgency of a sleepy summer afternoon at the beach.

Labor’s condition is similar but its predicament is in every respect worse – at least the Tories are on the winning side. It beggars belief that there are no Anne Clwyds or Joe Liebermans in the ALP caucus but a caucus "line" of singular monotony. While it has been easy to excoriate the Liberal’s support for the US as part of the "conga line of suck holes", the arguments of the most successful Social Democratic leader ever – Tony Blair – have been quietly overlooked without any felt need for explanation or justification. Passionate articles making a case for intervention on humanitarian grounds by, to name just two, Ramos Horta, and Vaclev Havel have been passed over without comment.

Since those events, however, Iraqis for the first time in three decades have a chance for a decent future, and the world has witnessed the capture of Saddam and the remarkable about face of Gaddafi. Even OBL (or his channeller) sees only devastation for the jihadists if the gloomy prognosis issued by and published in The Guardian is any guide.

One could be excused for hoping that these developments might herald a re-think by Labor on Iraq, and a loosening of the caucus line - especially after members of the federal caucus signed a letter to President Bush welcoming the removal of Saddam.

No such liberalisation appears to be in prospect. Just last week Mark Latham is quoted as saying that "they made a mistake in going to a war on Iraq. Whatever the reason or motivation was, I think it was a mistake." This statement seems to leave little room for the possibility that it was nevertheless justified on human-rights grounds.

Latham seems to have no regrets that he and others turned their backs on the desperate pleas of the Kurds and others for assistance against Saddam. In The London Observer last March, the Kurdish leader Baram Salih, (who had addressed similar remarks to the February 2003 Socialist International conference) wrote an impassioned plea for the support of the Left:

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As a Kurd, I know war is a devastating undertaking and should be questioned. But in the end a fundamental moral argument needs to be made for a war of liberation to save a people from tyranny. Many on the Left ignore the daily reign of terror the Ba'athist regime inflicts on Iraqis, yet the human rights of Iraqis should also be their cause.

In 1979, when Salih first went to the UK (as a refugee) he recalled:

... some principled people, mainly left-wing, understood our plight. … Where are these friends now? Regrettably, many are denouncing a war that would liberate Iraq. Like those who shunned us in the Eighties, some of our former friends find the martyrdom of the Iraqi people to be an irritant. They avert their eyes from the grisly truth of our suffering, while claiming concern at the human cost of war. … Iraqis are overlooked by an anti-Americanism that does not understand why we need military action to break our shackles. Some call for civil disobedience to impede the bid to free Iraq. In Iraq, civil disobedience is a death sentence.

Salih singled out the left-wing Welsh MP Ann Clwyd, as one of few UK politicians who had remained morally consistent on the issue of human rights in Iraq and had championed the cause of the Kurds for two decades. It was Ann Clwyd’s powerful speech to the Commons that is credited with delivering the additional votes necessary to make the majority for Tony Blair.

Ann Clwyd has, since mid 2003, been Tony Blair’s special envoy to Iraq on Human Rights. In a wide-ranging interview in The Observer last December, Clwyd described how she had recently visited Hilla in Iraq – one of the many sites of mass graves of Saddam’s victims. Clwyd – like many of us – believed that the barbarity of the Saddam regime was so acute that inaction was not an option. Clwyd, a former Greenham Common anti-nuclear protester said: “I couldn’t have looked my friends in the face if I had opposed the war.”

She contends that it is the UN – not Tony Blair - that must look to its role and charter in the face of its abject failure to rein in Saddam’s genocidal behaviour and enforce its own resolutions.

Clwyd’s assessment chimes with the words of new Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, an Iraqi Kurd. In his pre-Christmas speech to the UN, Zebari refreshingly avoided the usual diplomatic speak, reminding his audience that "The United Nations as an organisation failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years. And today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure. … The U.N. must not fail the Iraqi people again."

Can we expect a vigorous debate on these issues at Labor’s National conference – Ann Clwyd would have been an especially valuable guest speaker – or will it be more of the same lazy consensus which has persistently shrunk from confronting the real human-rights argument for intervention in Iraq? Will there be a ringing call for an overhaul of a sclerotic UN and a commitment of real resources and assistance to build a democratic Iraq? Or will Australian Labor retreat, to use Hitchen’s phrase describing the US Democrats, into a "facade of spurious unity" because other than token sympathy for the removal of Saddam will have the appearance of a concession to Howard?

Tony Blair, Ann Clwyd, Ramos Horta, Vaclev Havel, Baram Salih, Christopher Hitchens, now that’s a "conga line" any self respecting leftie should be proud to join.

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An edited version of this article was first published in The Age on 16 January 2004.



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About the Author

Jim Nolan is an old fashioned social democrat and Sydney Barrister with an interest in Human Rights. He is a long-standing member of the Australian Labor Party.

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