Is the Iraqi war legitimate?
Can a crime be said to have been committed in the absence of any material evidence attesting to its commission? asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Now that senior American and British officials admit that Iraq's alleged cache of weapons of mass destruction may never be found, can they continue to claim that the war launched for the express purpose of finding those weapons was a legitimate war? The argument now being put forward is that the weapons had indeed existed but that they were dismantled or hidden beyond discovery before the arrival of allied troops. Of course, one cannot altogether discount the possibility that these elusive weapons are too well hidden to be found, although this is becoming less plausible every day. Another possibility that comes to mind is that these banned weapons could have been obtained by the former Iraqi regime under arms deals it concluded in happier times with the United States, Britain or any other power, who are today understandably loath to admit their involvement in any such deals. But for the war on Iraq to be considered legitimate, its alleged arsenal of WMD's, for the dismantlement of which the war was launched in the first place, have got to be found. Otherwise the war cannot be justified (the argument that Saddam was a tyrant does not in itself warrant the use of military force to remove him), and will acquire the character of an unlawful aggression against a sovereign state.
In the feverish days leading up to the war, much was made of supposedly reliable intelligence reports that Iraq had reactivated its WMD programmes. Until President Bush announced in his State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to procure uranium from Niger, a statement he has since admitted was based on inaccurate intelligence, the world was left pretty much in the dark as to why exactly Saddam posed a clear and present danger to world peace. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for example, presented no evidence to support his astounding assertion that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, calling on the British people only to "trust" him on the grounds that he was privy to highly classified information he could not share with them. In other words, he required them to suspend their critical faculties and to accept what he said without question, in flagrant violation of the rules of democracy.
One argument used to justify the war on Iraq is that it is part of the war on terror, which entails going after any part that is clandestinely harbouring weapons of mass destruction. These weapons have two main features. The first is that they are generally developed in secret, and there is no telling when and where they will be used; the second is that their destructive capability is such that, in the wrong hands, they can cause serious damage to the planet as a mainstay of human survival. According to this logic, it is nonsensical to talk of aggression and legitimacy when our very survival is at stake.
The attacks launched on 11 September, 2001, against the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington are held up as an example of our vulnerability in the face of terrorism. The success of the operation is an encouragement for similar operations to be undertaken in future, and faces us with an entirely new type of confrontation for which we are ill prepared. But does this justify depriving suspected terrorists of their basic human rights? As matters now stand, they are not subject to the Geneva Convention concerning prisoners of war, and thousands of suspected terrorists are being held under dreadful conditions in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Human rights groups and international jurists are contesting the right of the United States to try them in military courts, and are calling for due process of law to be applied in the upcoming trials of Taliban prisoners and other detainees of the war in Afghanistan. The same treatment is likely to be meted out to captured Iraqi officials. The rationale is that as terrorists are the enemies of humankind, they should not benefit from any form of human right or immunity. It is a rationale that belongs more to the Dark Ages than to our present day.
For Bush, terrorism is evil personified, its proponents part of an Axis of Evil that practices terror with enhanced efficiency thanks to the use of weapons of mass destruction. He has named the states making up this so-called axis as Iran, Syria, North Korea and pre-war Iraq. It is an arbitrary choice based largely on personal perception. Now that Iraq has been put out of commission, the next target could be any other member of the axis, which the current American administration is determined to dismantle.
Making the distinction between evil elements and others is based on some kind of arbitrary "trust" (even if, by definition, trust cannot be arbitrary!). According to Bush, Abu Mazen is to be trusted, Arafat is not, notwithstanding the fact that Abu Mazen has been one of Arafat's closest and most trusted associates over the years. But Bush has decided that the line of demarcation must be between these two specifically: one is "good", the other is persona non grata. Arafat is to be seen as the source of all corruption, of all the PLO's subversive activities while Abu Mazen is looked upon as the personification of the very opposite. Incidentally, Bush has applied a similar type of scenario to Russia. Contrary to many other figures in the top Russian leadership, Vladimir Putin is to be trusted. Such scenarios are bound to be counter-productive. They are built on arbitrary accusations and endorsements, on the fabrication of assumptions aimed at supporting decisions taken beforehand.
Today the British and American governments are under growing pressure to conduct a full-scale investigation into the now discredited arguments on which they based the case for war, notably the allegation that Saddam tried to obtain uranium from Niger for a nuclear programme. The Independent reported that the US State Department furnished the International Atomic Energy Agency with intelligence reports indicating that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger, and that the Agency investigated the matter and determined that the documents were forged. But the head of the agency, Mohamed El-Baradie, waited a whole month before revealing this crucial information, a month in which the false report was used to drum up public support for the war.
A few days ago, White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer admitted that the uranium purchase issue should not have been included in Bush's State of the Union address last January, but claimed that at the time there were no doubts as to the accuracy of the intelligence reports. This claim has been challenged by Joseph Wilson, a former American diplomat who was sent to Niger last year, long before the presidential address, to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. According to Wilson, he reported back that the intelligence was most likely fraudulent.
In the middle of the furore over Wilson's revelations, and despite the admission of the White House, the CIA and the State Department that the uranium story was unfounded, Blair insists that his own intelligence information confirms that Iraq did try to purchase uranium from Niger. Speaking before a parliamentary committee last week, Blair maintained that he had not exaggerated the menace of Saddam's weapons to bolster the case for going to war, and expressed his "absolute confidence" that "material relating to biological, chemical and nuclear weapons" will be found.
But his credibility has been severely undermined in recent days, not least by a BBC broadcast asserting that a top official close to the prime minister's office had "sexed up" an intelligence report by claiming that Iraq had WMD's capable of being launched within 45 minutes.
The official was eventually cleared of the charge but the BBC refused to apologise, which brought the confrontation to a new climax.
President Bush, on the other hand, acknowledges the fact that his administration faces a "security problem" in Iraq, but also insists that the US forces will overcome the present difficulties resolutely. Bush attributes the resistance to Saddam loyalists, whom he accuses of harming themselves and the new freedom they now enjoy by continuing the fight. It is difficult, however, to believe that the occupier is better placed than the occupied to determine where the latter's true interests lie.
The deliberate exaggeration of the Iraqi threat was a logical consequence of adopting a preemptive stand. One cannot exclude the possibility that evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction could still be discovered or fabricated. Rumours have once again been received concerning a meeting of an Iraqi official with Mohamed Atta, the man who led the Al- Qa'eda team which blew up the World Trade Centre, to try to establish a connection between Al-Qa'eda and Saddam. Washington still apprehends that the situation could degenerate into a long-term guerrilla war, an eventuality that cannot be dismissed in a war waged outside the rules of international legality.
