The War on Iraq
by Prof. Rashid Khalidi
From: Mazin Qumsiyeh
Yale University debate on the war in Iraq
April 17, 2003

I have been asked to speak tonight on the war in Iraq. The last time I spoke at Yale against a foreign war was almost exactly 33 years ago. That was a very different time, and a very different war, and I was a very different person. I was a student here then, like most of you.

But some things do not change. Go back and look at the pretexts that were given at the time for the war in Indochina, and see how hollow they look today. I submit to you that in far less than 33 years, the pretexts for this war, which now appears to have ended, will be revealed as being equally hollow, equally shortsighted, and equally mendacious.

Let me list some of the main reasons this war was unjustified, unwise, and will ultimately prove to be unwinnable, like the war in Indochina.

1. This was explicitly described as being a preventive or preemptive war, meaning that it absolutely had to be waged in order to prevent an imminent, present danger to the national security of the United States. It is already crystal clear, if it was not already before the war began, that there was, is, and almost certainly would have been, no demonstrable danger to the United States from Iraq. This was a country that was so debilitated after the 1991 war and the subsequent sanctions that even its immediate neighbors did not feel threatened by it. In consequence, most of them did not support this war, even though all of them had strong grievances against the regime in Baghdad. We have now seen just how feeble Iraq was: barely four divisions of American and British troops were able to crush its military and occupy the country in little more than three weeks. This shows that Iraq's execrable and tyrannical regime posed no threat to anyone but its own people. Moreover, there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, none whatsoever. I am quoting an unimpeachable source in saying this: President George W. Bush.

2. Its backers justified this war largely because of the dangerous arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that Iraq allegedly possessed. We can already say several things about these weapons. The first is that, if they existed, the Iraqi regime did not use them defensively against U.S. forces in a situation where its very existence was in the direst peril, let alone offensively. This means that Iraq was eminently deterrable, contrary to the hysterical frothings of the proponents of war about the irrationality of its regime. Secondly, U.S. forces have not yet found these weapons, meaning at the very least that they were probably not issued to military units. Indeed, they may all have been destroyed, as the defector Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel stated during his interrogation before his ill-fated return to Baghdad. Thirdly, it is clear from evidence from a variety of sources that Iraq had no nuclear or biological weapons, although we know that it had had programs to develop them before the 1991 war.

On the other hand, we do know that Iraq had chemical weapons: declassified government documents have revealed that the United States facilitated their acquisition and acquiesced in their use during the 1980's against Iran and Iraq's own Kurdish citizens, and that when Donald Rumsfeld visited Baghdad as a Presidential envoy in 1983, he never mentioned them. If chemical weapons still exist, they are illegal, and should be removed. But chemical artillery shells and short-range rocket warheads were and are no direct threat to the United States, and were no reason for a war. Nor are such weapons if they exist in Syria: these and all other non-conventional weapons in the Middle East, notably Israel's huge nuclear arsenal of well documented weapons of mass destruction, should be removed (just as Israel should be brought into compliance with Security Council resolutions it has flouted). This should not be achieved by war, but rather as part of a multi-lateral effort to end the proliferation of non-conventional weapons and resolve disputes throughout this dangerous region.

3. This war was unjustified and foolish because it represented a dangerous challenge to international law and morality, to the stability of the international system, to traditional alliance systems, and ultimately to the security of the United States and its nationals in the world. Preemptive war on flimsy pretexts, and to carry out externally directed regime change, establishes dangerous precedents which will now be cited by other would-be aggressors, for whom the United States' elevation of the law of the jungle to the guiding principle of international morality will be most convenient. We have benefited enormously from the existing post-World War II international order anchored in the United Nations that the Bush administration has cavalierly decided to discard. While it did so, and similarly discarded much of the multilateral alliance framework which served the United States so well since World War II, it deceived much of the U.S. public via its compliant organs of war propaganda, Fox/CNN/MSNBC, with transparent fictions like the existence of a "coalition" consisting of Britain and the likes of Tonga and the Solomon Islands, together with a few other states that were ashamed to be publicly associated with this disreputable effort.

4. This war was unjustified and indeed dangerous because it has completely and utterly alienated virtually the entire world. You will not see that stark reality conveyed in the pap served up by the five American cable TV outlets, but you need just look at TV, listen to radio or read papers produced literally anywhere else in the world, and it is immediately apparent that the United States is totally alone in its effort in Iraq, except for Sancho Panza Blair in 10 Downing Street. This makes no sense, even in the short term. In the long term, it is potentially disastrous, even for a state as powerful as the United States. We need international cooperation to achieve many national purposes, not least among them dealing with the real purveyors of terrorism directed against this country, like that of al-Qaida, rather than the fantasmic conglomeration of enemies that pose no current, direct threat to the United States that is conjured up by the Bush administration to justify what amounts to a permanent state of war domestically and globally, the "war on terrorism."

5. This war was allegedly fought to bring liberty and democracy to Iraq. The war party that has imposed this adventure on our country would have been more honest if they had stuck to their original stated objective: "regime change" in Baghdad. This has now happened. The United States has changed the regime in Baghdad, and has done so relatively easily. However, I would venture to predict that we are unlikely to see true democracy on the banks of the Tigris any time soon, and that such liberty as today exists in the chaos that afflicts Iraq will probably not last for long. The Iraqis do not want U.S. bases established in their country, do not want others to control their own oil resources, and are undoubtedly not eager for their country to recognize Israel and provide it with oil, all things that we have been told explicitly will take place under the shadow of the U.S. occupation of that country. Such things would be incompatible with a democratic reflection of the views of the Iraqi people. Moreover, most Iraqis are Shi'a and may want an Islamic government. They are unlikely to be allowed to have one by their occupiers. Finally, what you will not hear in the flow of muscled sarcasm and aggressive bullying Donald Rumsfeld so enjoys engaging in from his podium in the Pentagon are four words: the rule of law. That is something else we are unlikely to see in Baghdad any time soon. Instead, we are already seeing stooges, carpetbaggers and convicted embezzlers like Ahmad Chalabi installed in positions of power, we will see rigged elections, we will see hand-picked assemblies, and if the Iraqis get anything but chaos, they will get the regime the Pentagon wants, a regime which will last only as long as U.S. forces occupy the country and can maintain it in power.

6. The demise of the Iraqi regime must be counted an unmitigated good. But against this unquestioned gain must be set the unknowable losses. Fortunately, only about 150 American and British soldiers have been killed and under 600 wounded so far. How many thousands or tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts died in the hail of fire our forces rained on them. The figures will be concealed from us, as a matter of firm, unstated Pentagon policy. How many civilians died in Basra, Hilla, Nasiriyya, Diwaniyya and Baghdad. Again we will not be told by our government, and most members of the compliant U.S. media, who should be finding out these things as a matter of professional responsibility, are too busy writing down the ineffable gems uttered by Rumsfeld and the generals. One British reporter has mentioned 1000 civilians killed counted in one day by one Baghdad hospital during the capture of the city. Another on BBC-TV reported that an Iraqi doctor in Hilla stated that 240-300 wounded patients had passed through his clinic alone. Where is the investigative reporting that would verify or disprove these numbers and provide us with serious totals of civilian casualties. We will not see it from most of the U.S. media, especially not from the five cable TV outlets: it would mar the jubilatory-triumphal tone that became obligatory for them since soon after the war began.

To assess what to set against the plus of disposing of the Ba'th regime, besides Iraqi casualties, we must know how much damage was done to Iraq's educational, health and administrative systems by the war, and by the extensive looting and pillage thereafter, and how much will be done in the future. We already know that two universities in Baghdad and one in Basra, the museums in Baghdad and Mosul, most hospitals in Baghdad, and 38 government ministries have been looted, and many of them burned. Of course, the oil wells are safe, thank God! We were all so worried about the oil wells. Fortunately, ours is a government run by men (and one woman) with long experience in the oil business, and they know what is really important in Iraq: its oil wells and its oil ministry, which escaped virtually unscathed from the war, and were carefully protected by U.S. troops thereafter. This was unfortunately not the case for the greatest collection of antiquities from perhaps the greatest and oldest civilization on earth that were contained in those two museums, or for the national archives of Iraq going back for hundreds of years, or for an extensive collection of Islamic texts including the oldest known copy of the Qur'an. These are all gone, looted or burned, and this tragic loss for the entire human heritage (which under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict are the responsibility of the occupying power) will be remembered and mourned by history long after the shabby, deceitful pretexts for this war have been forgotten. And as it has begun, in looting, chaos, and deceit, so will this occupation continue, notwithstanding the relentlessly optimistic fairy tales about how everything is getting better every day in Iraq that are provided by the Bush administration, and are passed on without critical comment on the five fantasy channels of Fox/CNN/MSNBC.

Two final points are in order: As someone who has studied the history of Middle Eastern responses to foreign intervention for over three decades, I can assure you that like the rest of the region, Iraq has a long tradition of fierce resistance to foreign occupation. Most Iraqis probably wanted to see the end of the tyrannical regime that ruled them for 35 years. But most of those Iraqis who have expressed themselves to Western and Arab reporters (these facts are accessible only in the print media: you see little if anything of Iraqi reality on TV; instead we have been seeing Rumsfeld and Tori Clarke and the generals and the narrow perspective provided the embedded reporters, endlessly repeated), have almost without exception said clearly that now that Saddam is gone, American troops should leave quickly. However, they will most likely not go quickly enough, since the Bush administration seems to have too many sinister plans for installing in power carpetbaggers who are the personal friends of the mandarins in the Pentagon, for the long-term establishment of U.S. military bases in Iraq, for private (read American) control of Iraqi oil, for scandalous profits for the likes of Bechtel and Halliburton, for Iraq to recognize Israel and send it oil, for them to leave soon enough to escape the wrath of enraged Iraqis. We should remember that this was a country that Britain had to conquer, and re-conquer, and re-conquer again with the greatest difficulty, in 1914-17, 1920 and 1941. It is a country that never willingly accepted British bases on its soil, or British control of its oil. The protests against the continued American military presence that we are already seeing in different parts of the country are only a harbinger of what is to come if the hawks prevail, and try to keep control of Iraq, against the will of the Iraqi people.

Finally, the people who sold us the shabby justifications for this war, the neo-con hawks who emerged from their lairs at "think"-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, and who now infest the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the Vice-President's staff, have been very explicit in saying what they really want: Iraq, they have said publicly, is only part of a larger plan for a larger war. And this is the most profound reason why the war in Iraq was wrong. A muscular international effort to disarm Iraq, by force if necessary, governed by an international consensus, and with strictly limited aims, would have been one thing. It might well have been achievable, were it not for the fact that the transparent ulterior motives of the Bush administration terrified the rest of the world, and prevented them from joining the United States. But the hawks did not want such a limited, multilateral effort under any circumstances. They were lusting for a unilaterally-controlled preemptive war to change the Iraqi regime, install another subservient to U.S. and Israeli dictates, begin a process of radical, destabilizing change in the entire Middle East, and thereby create an entirely new international dynamic totally dominated by the United States. This is not only wrong, it is profoundly misguided, for it ignores the history and present-day realities of the Middle East, and seriously overestimates the power of the United States to reshape the international system single-handedly. It is a doomed project, but if the hawks in Washington continue to carry all before them, as they have since 9/11, it is a project whose cost will be borne not only by the soldiers called on to sacrifice in Iraq and on the next battlefield, and the one after that, but by all of us here at home, and by the entire world.

In the end, the best justification for having opposed the war in Iraq, futile though such opposition may temporarily seem today in light of the current orgy of chauvinistic triumphalism led by the cheerleaders at Fox/CNN/MSNBC, is this: this war was wrong because it was unjustified, was in fact driven by base motivations, and was intended by its authors to lead to another unjustified war, and perhaps another after that. That way lies empire, and the end of our republic, for the history of Athens and Rome teach us that no republic can long survive at home when it becomes an empire abroad. This country already has imperial pretensions and an imperial presidency, as John Kerry recently found out when he tried to question the emperor's mandate, and was immediately set upon by the praetorian guard, led by Tom De Lay.

However, this transition from republic to empire is not an inexorable process. We, the citizens of this country, are not yet imperial subjects, and we can halt it. We can do so by halting the drive to the next war, by questioning the flimsy, shifting, deceitful rationales for the last one, and by exposing the corrupt nature of the anaesthetizing, shameless propaganda offered up by the Pravda and Izvestia of our era, Fox, CNN and MSNBC, which give us the exquisite choice between the government line and the party line, purveyed with virtually the same images and virtually interchangeable talk show hosts braying patriotically on five "different" cable channels.

Over two centuries ago, the founders of this republic, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, all wisely warned against foreign adventures and dangerous entanglements of the sort we have just embarked on in Iraq. Perhaps they could not have foreseen the awesome power of the United States, or its global reach, or the depths of shamelessness to which so much of its media have sunk. Nevertheless, the wisdom of their advice remains highly relevant to us today. We should heed it, and oppose the senseless march towards empire which this war, and the next war, are meant to lead us to.