Times Online
We need Bush and not Saddam calling the
shots
michael gove
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT="}
The cartoons all tell the same story. Whenever
they depict the President of the United States
the same props reinforce the same message.
We™ve got ourselves a cowboy in the White
House.
George W. Bush is a trigger-happy, ten gallon-
hatted, good ole boy who just won™t listen to
his more civilised friends. Who does he think
he is planning to take on the bad guys when
wiser heads counsel caution? Gary Cooper?
Let™s hope so. Because we are perilously close
to High Noon.
As the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney,
pointed out on Monday night, we are running
out of time to deal with President Saddam
Hussein. He is racing to acquire a nuclear
capability and enhance his other weapons of
mass destruction. He has no moral
compunction about their use, to attack his
neighbours, to blackmail the West or to
strengthen the radical Islamist terrorist
organisations with whom he has worked.
Experts may differ about precisely how close
Saddam is to possessing the most terrifying
threat of all, nuclear weaponry, but the record
does not give cause for comfort. As Mr Cheney
recalled, śprior to the Gulf War America™s top
intelligence analysts would tell me that
Saddam Hussein was at least five, or perhaps
even ten, years away from having a nuclear
weapon. After the war we learnt that he had
been much closer than that, perhaps within a
year of acquiring such a weapon.ť
No responsible Western leader can afford to
discount the consequences of Saddam
possessing deliverable weapons of mass
destruction. He is a practised mass murderer
with unassuaged territorial ambitions towards
his neighbours. He is an unstable tyrant who
aspires to hegemony over the Arab world by
providing its most radical elements with
political leadership and military support.
Terrorists who menace Israel and have
operated throughout the West have been
trained, financed and armed by him.
Defectors have warned us of the camps in
which his confederates practise the hijacking
of airliners. The $25,000 he gives to suicide
bombers in the Palestinian Authority helps to
ensure that terror™s cutting edge remains
bloodied.
Possessed of of suitable weaponry, Saddam
would create geopolitical chaos of a kind more
dangerous than any we have known since the
fall of communism. He would be able to
destabilise the entire Middle East to the
detriment of all its peoples and he could then
place his boot on the world™s windpipe by
threatening its oil supplies.
Possessed of suitable weaponry, Saddam
would threaten Western democracies as no
murderous tyrant has done since the Thirties.
He could directly threaten the security of the
Jewish people as no one has done since Hitler.
And he could hold Europe and the US, our
interests, people and values, to ransom. For he
would be able to equip terrorists with the
means to unleash attacks more devastating than
those visited on America on September 11.
The danger posed by Saddam existed long
before last September. Indeed, I have argued
on this page for his removal for many years
now. But the World Trade Centre attack
brought home, in the most horrific fashion, the
requirement for action to protect the West from
threats it had neglected or had believed could
be managed by diplomacy and containment.
Saddam™s record, pathology and allies require
a response from the West wholly different
from the doctrine of deterrence that governed
Western security thinking for 50 years. They
also force us to rethink our inherited, and
proper, respect for the principle of non-
intervention in the affairs of sovereign states.
As Henry Kissinger pointed out earlier this
month, śpolicies that deterred the Soviet Union
are unlikely to work against Iraq™s capacity to
co-operate with terrorist groups. Suicide
bombing has shown that the calculations of
jihad fighters are not those of the Cold War
principals.ť
The international order has hitherto depended
on the principle that national borders are
sacrosanct and, however unattractive a tyrant,
military action to remove a regime can be
justified only by its breaching another state™s
sovereignty. But, as Dr Kissinger has noted,
Iraq™s imminent acquisition of weapons of
mass destruction challenges that doctrine at
root. For not only is Saddam™s programme to
acquire such weapons in breach of treaty
accords and the international order, it also
gives him the potential to threaten global
security at will, possessed of the means of
inflicting irretrievable damage on other states
and peoples. Saddam, and his terrorist allies,
would be horrifically empowered. Our capacity
to protect our citizens, and interests, would be
grotesquely weakened.
The scale, and imminence, of the threat we
face requires action of a kind it has become
hard to contemplate. We have no alternative
but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to
prevent Saddam completing his drive to
acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive
military force must be deployed to remove
Saddam™s regime. Such an action will
inevitably lead to significant casualties, both
Western and Iraqi. No reasonable, or moral,
human being can regard such a course with
equanimity. But reason, and morality, tell us
that there is no alternative.
Because the costs inherent in such a course are
great, and because it would mark a departure
from the paths with which diplomatic elites are
comfortable, powerful voices argue for other
strategies. There is no doubting their sincerity,
or seniority. But then those who practised
appeasement in the 1930s and detente in the
1970s were honourable men. It was never their
intention to give tyrannies time and space to
extend the reach of their oppression. Although
that was the inevitable consequence of their
inaction.
So, today, those who argue that we should wait
until it can be proven that Saddam actually
possesses a nuclear capability are wrong. By
then the costs of action would be hugely
greater. And those who argue, like Jack Straw,
that we should rely upon UN weapons
inspectors to neutralise the threat are wrong.
Saddam is a past master at frustrating the
efforts of the best of them.
As Mr Cheney again pointed out on Monday,
śduring the spring of 1995 inspectors were on
the verge of declaring that Saddam™s
programmes to develop chemical weapons and
longer-range ballistic missiles had been fully
accounted for and shut down. Then Saddam™s
son-in-law defected. Within days the inspectors
discovered that Saddam had kept them in the
dark about the extent of his programme to
produce VX, one of the deadliest chemicals
known to man, and far from having shut down
Iraq™s prohibited missile programmes they
found that Saddam had continued to test such
missiles. A return of inspectors would provide
no assurance whatever of Saddam™s
compliance with UN resolutions. On the
contrary, it would provide false comfort that
Saddam was somehow back in his box.ť
The faith placed in the UN, in inspectors, in
containment, in all the tools of the old
diplomacy, reflects the world-view of men
such as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft who
see foreign policy as an exercise in managing,
rather than confronting, dangers. But the age
upon which we have entered requires, like the
1930s and 1980s, a relinquishing of false
comforts and a clear-eyed confrontation with
evil.
It also requires a recognition that the
traditional diplomacy which placed stability
above morality only succeeded in
compromising both. The realpolitik which led
Republicans, and Tories, in the past to
acquiesce in the propping up of regimes in
Baghdad, and Riyadh, has not bought us
security. It has allowed evil to incubate. And
we have been forced to pay, in the innocent
blood shed on September 11, for that folly.
Now, however, America is determined to
ensure that danger is defeated by liberating
those whom its past policies have betrayed. It
is an irony, and one perhaps not welcome
among the old Left or the old Right, that
morality has been restored to international
affairs by a conservative American President.
Just as it was in the 1940s by a Conservative
British Prime Minister. While Europe stands
irresolute and divided, while America™s old
managerialists cavil, while the Left temporises
in the face of tyranny, the White House
recognises that Western democracy™s future
depends on democracy taking root in Iraq.
Cynics might call it cowboy diplomacy, but
putting its faith in freedom is how the West has
always won.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Sep 22 2002 - 05:06:20 MDT