Gav's View

Saddam after his arrest

I am pleased that Saddam Hussein’s trial is being considered, by virtually all observers, as fair. What this means is that if Saddam is not guilty of crimes against humanity there is a real prospect of him being found innocent.

But, as Leanne suggested, this puts us in a difficult position.

An innocent Saddam can stand for election at the next Presidential elections. In fact he absolutely must be allowed to stand for election. But what if he wins? If Saddam wins is there any chance he will agree to continue operating Iraq as a democracy? What moral justification for the war can there be if the majority of people in Iraq were actually happy with their previous leader? Afterall the toppling of Saddam has been the justification ever since Bush’s terrorism claims, and Blair’s WMD claims were found to be lacking.

I think the problem with the questions above, though, is their blatant hypotheticalism. There is little doubt that Saddam is guilty of crimes against humanity and, even if he is found innocent, there is little chance of winning an election with free and fair elections. With that in mind it puts the last two questions beyond the need to answer.

There is another hypothetical question that occurs to a lot of people when discussing war in Iraq: What if we’d finished the job in 1991?

I believed at the time, and continue to believe now, that we should have continued into Iraq at the time and finished Saddam’s rule. A leader that will attack another for no reason (Kuwait) is bad enough but, when he was being forced to retreat, that he started targetting Israel with Skud missiles is beyond reason and suggests that he should not have been allowed to peddle his hate on his people any longer. Bush Snr. compounded matters by encouraging the Shia in the south to rise up against Saddam. But without the coalition’s support this uprising was visciously put down by the Republican Guard. Another ‘what if’ leads us to question what may have happened then too.

The whole Iraq affair is littered with ‘what ifs’ and ‘what might have beens’ but the real question is: Is the war ultimately good?

Personally I think it is too early to answer that question. If the sum of the failings to do not result in an absolute failure, then the war will have been good. If having not planned for terrorism, having not supported earlier uprisings, having used chemical weapons and having started the war using false justifications, Iraq is not improved – then we must decide, I think, that the war was not, afterall, justifiable.

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Israel, Politics, Religion

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Gavin Ayling's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.