From: word_chemist@hotmail.com   
      
   'Well, the democratic impulses of the people of Palestine and Iran (and   
   Egypt) soon put paid to that idea; given a free vote (and I accept that the   
   Iranian vote was corrupted - in favour, though, of the losing candidate) the   
   people of the Middle East wish for governments more antithetical to the   
   West, more inclined to abuse human rights, more anti-Semitic, more   
   authoritarian.'   
      
      
   The Spectator 18 March 2006   
   Other articles by this author Features   
   Liddle Britain   
   Let's just admit that Iraq was a disaster   
   Rod Liddle   
      
      
    'April 9 - Liberation Day! What a wonderful, magnificent, emotional   
   occasion - one that will live in legend like the fall of the Bastille, VE   
   Day or the fall of the Berlin Wall.'   
      
      
   Those are the words of the born-again neocon journalist William Shawcross,   
   written in a fit of hyperbolic glee when he saw that hideous, lowering   
   bronze statue of Saddam Hussein brought crashing to the ground on 9 April   
   2003 - the day the allies took Baghdad. You could not read those words today   
   without either flinching or assuming them to be a sort of dark, heavy-handed   
   satire; still less his contention (paraphrasing an Iraqi dissident) that 9   
   April saw the blossoming of Iraq's 'Eternal Spring'. A little later on the   
   same day an American soldier hoisted the Stars and Stripes aloft over the   
   Iraqi capital; it flapped about in the breeze for a bit before the Western   
   politicians saw it on their evening news channels and, aghast, immediately   
   reached for their phones. Both the destruction of that statue and the   
   raising of the US flag are pretty potent symbols; the latter maybe a shade   
   more subtle, calling to mind not simply a crude and inappropriate US   
   triumphalism, but also a sense of misplaced action, confusion, incompetence,   
   a not knowing of why we were there or what we would do next. And a none too   
   discreet message beamed across the Arab and Muslim worlds.   
   To be fair to Shawcross, the debate about the Iraq war has been   
   characterised by many such examples of hyperbole and over-statement, on both   
   sides, the respective positions ludicrously entrenched and inviolable, the   
   facts distorted to fit each polarised perspective. For example, it seemed   
   impossible for those who initially opposed the war to accept that the   
   invasion was, militarily, superbly prosecuted. Those rare military setbacks   
   were pounced upon with a kind of grotesque delight: there, we told you so.   
   As if the immoral basis for the war (as they saw it) precluded the   
   possibility of it being successfully effected.   
      
   And then there's this: if you were in favour of the war, then you were   
   likely to discount entirely the possibility that it had any bearing   
   whatsoever upon the minds of those British-born lunatics who carried out the   
   bombings in London on 7 July last year. Whereas if you were opposed, the two   
   events were a simple case of cause and effect. Both positions seem to me   
   wrong and illogical; I suspect that the war served to legitimise - in the   
   minds of many Muslims, including the bombers - atrocities against civilian   
   Londoners; we were aggressors and thus combatants by direct association. But   
   this was not the main reason that the bombing was carried out and nor did it   
   retrospectively mean that the war in Iraq was unjust.   
      
   Another anomaly: those who were in favour of military action found it almost   
   impossible to concede that the British public was deliberately misled and   
   arguably lied to over the originally stated reasons for the war. The   
   Conservatives adopted this position, of course, but more out of political   
   expediency, I suspect, than objective, rational contemplation. The truth   
   seems to me blindingly obvious; we were all terribly, unforgivably misled by   
   a government which felt that the real reasons for military action would not   
   be swallowed by either the general public or Parliament. But that does not   
   mean that the war was, per se, wrong. That's a different and in effect   
   unrelated question, which I'll come to later.   
      
   And then there's the manipulation of the statistics, the totting up of the   
   body counts - the black maths. Some 2,500 Coalition troops killed, including   
   103 British servicemen. More than 17,000 wounded. The total number of Iraqi   
   civilians killed since the overthrow of Saddam, at a conservative estimate,   
   is 37,754. The murder rate has increased each month since April 2003. Some   
   20 killed per day in year one, 31 per day in year two, 40 per day in year   
   three. You can juggle these how you like. A year or so ago I suggested that,   
   practically, Iraqis had been better off under Saddam Hussein than they were   
   now, since liberation. It was a response to the relentless, dumb insistence   
   from those who had ordered the war - Bush, Blair - that 'at least we've got   
   rid of that genocidal murderer Saddam'. As if this were the irreducible,   
   unanswerable truth which nothing could possibly gainsay; all other arguments   
   being thus rendered impotent. And yet, of course, for the vast majority of   
   Iraqis life was much better under a Saddam Hussein scrutinised and policed   
   by the international community; fewer of them died every day, fewer were   
   maimed, there was only limited sectarian violence, and civil war did not   
   hover and crackle just out of sight. This assertion was pounced upon by   
   Shawcross and other increasingly shrill neocon cheerleaders as evidence of a   
   leftist moral degeneracy; how could one stick up for Saddam? But that was   
   never the point. Saddam was and is a vicious and murderous gangster (who,   
   over the course of his stewardship of Iraq, murdered an estimated 60 people   
   every day, on average. But not, crucially, in those last five years when he   
   was being harassed by the West). The point was this: have we made things   
   better? Might things get better in even the medium term? Was the thesis upon   
   which the war was predicated correct? Was war preferable to continuing to   
   'contain' Saddam? And the answer to all of these questions is - never mind   
   which side your original position might have been - surely an unequivocal   
   'no'.   
      
   Let us put the stuff about oil to one side; in fact let us, for the sake of   
   argument, assume that oil does not exist and is thus removed, as a motive   
   for the war, from the equation. The reason we contrived to share the US   
   thirst for military action has been explained to me, quietly but with force,   
   from three fairly senior sources. Firstly, the belief that a sort of   
   Western-friendly, semi-secular but still kind of Islamic democracy could be   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)