"On the Brink of War" (1 February 2003)
Published in Western Daily News

Over the next few weeks, Tony Blair and George W. Bush will most likely be taking the decision to launch a large-scale military attack upon Iraq. Prior to making that decision, they will both be provided with briefings by their senior military and diplomatic officials, summarising the range of potential human and political costs of an invasion, as well as its possible benefits. They will take responsibility for weighing up the significance and likelihood of those consequences, the positive and the negative against each other, and reaching a position that will have enormous repercussions not only for the Middle East but for the entire international order.

What are the main factors that should feature in taking this decision? Perhaps the most clear negative consequence would be the immediate suffering caused to the people in Iraq by an invasion. A comparatively small number will probably die in the actual fighting. A far larger number of casualties will be caused by the breakdown of Iraq's basic infrastructure.

Most of Iraq's population is now desperately poor. Iraq has been under comprehensive economic sanctions since 1990, and is only allowed to export one commodity, oil. The United Nations controls the oil revenue, and those earnings are mostly spent in distributing a ration to the Iraqi population. Essentially, the country has been run along the lines of a refugee camp, with the majority of the population relying upon a regular hand-out for their basic provisions. According to the United Nations, 60% of Iraq's population are highly dependent upon the ration for their food.

In the event of an invasion, and as civil order inside Iraq disintegrates, this ration would be stopped. The basic health, water and sanitation sectors - at breaking point over the past 12 years - would similarly collapse. The scale of the tragedy that could befall the Iraqi people was revealed in a top-level UN report from last December that was leaked to a British group, the Campaign against Sanctions on Iraq. This report predicted that there would be as many as half a million casualties in the event of an invasion. It also finds that over three million people, including two million children, across the country will face "dire" malnutrition and require "therapeutic feeding", and that there would be almost a million refugees fleeing Iraq.

The humanitarian disaster following an invasion may seem almost unimaginable in its scale. However, another scenario invoked by Tony Blair could be equally - if not more - horrific: the prospect of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against the outside world. President Bush invoked the possibility that Iraq could have enough anthrax to kill millions.

The problem with these claims is that the UN weapons inspectors inside Iraq have found no evidence at all to back up these claims. Since November last year, they have been allowed to go wherever they wanted to inside Iraq, taking samples of soil and material, and using equipment that could detect even the tiniest levels of irregular radiation or chemical vapour. The US and UK claimed to have evidence of Iraq's secret programmes, but the material so far provided to the weapons inspectors has led them to long-time disused sheds, broken-down old factories and vacant lots.

The nuclear arm of the UN has now explicitly discounted the possibility that Iraq has an ongoing nuclear programme. The chemical and biological fields are more complex, but the possibility that Iraq has substantial weapons programmes in these areas are low. This doesn't mean that the weapons inspectors should stop: their work is vital in assuring the rest of the world that Iraq does not have major stocks of weapons, and in deterring Iraq the opportunity to restart any such programmes.

When pressed for evidence amidst the declining plausibility of his earlier claims about Iraq's weapons, Tony Blair has developed a habit of switching the topic: the problem is not Iraq's weapons, it seems, but Iraq's President. Here he is clearly on firmer ground: no-one doubts that Saddam Hussein has a record of brutality towards his own citizenry that only a few other leaders in the world can rival. Dictatorship and the systematic denial of basic human rights is a moral outrage, and recognising them as such is clearly a positive, if somewhat selectively applied, development in British politics.

Unfortunately, the democratic sensibility seems not to have been transferred into thinking about Iraq's future. The US and UK, needing allies inside Iraq to help with an invasion, and to help rule the fractious country afterwards, have turned to military strongmen who have now defected from Iraq, but who know how to run an army, and have experience in keeping the population subdued. As a result, different parts of the US administration sponsor competing wings of Iraq's former senior military officers. A large number of these officers themselves were involved in committing gross abuses of human rights inside Iraq.

The British government recently allowed a conference of exiled Iraqis favoured by the US to convene in London, where they set up under the guidance of a senior White House official what was in effect a provisional government for Iraq. Among its members were individuals who planted bombs on civilian and diplomatic targets, planned assassinations, and organised the systematic repression of the Kurdish population of northern Iraq. The future of Iraq would bear an obvious similarity to the past if the groups favoured by the US are allowed to take control.

Many of those who favour an invasion talk about the opportunity to establish a government in Iraq that will set a positive role model to the other countries of the troubled Middle East. In almost every opinion poll conducted throughout the Muslim Middle East, over 90% of the population state their opposition to plans to invade Iraq. If the US and UK are interested in promoting democracy and responsible government in the region, using the surrounding countries as staging posts from which to launch a potentially devastating and hugely unpopular war does not seem to be the best way to go about doing it.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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