No time for war games

In the pantheon of contemporary despots, few are matched in callousness by Iraq’s military dictator Saddam Hussein. His eventual exit from power will be widely unlamented.

Objectionable though Saddam is, the war talk emanating from the White House is disquieting. The hawks in the Bush administration have sought to justify the prospect of a strike against Iraq on grounds of Saddam Hussein’s putative possession of arms of mass destruction (the tools for which were initially provided by the Reagan and Bush Sr administrations during Iraq’s war with Iran).

President Bush has not persuasively outlined the extent of Iraq’s arsenal, or how Saddam poses a concrete risk to the security of the United States. It remains vague what precisely an attack on Iraq would pre-empt.

Indeed, some observers have suggested that rather than posing a security risk, Saddam is an obstacle to US economic interest. By that logic, the replacement of Saddam with a more pliable ruler (who may not necessarily be a champion of liberty) would open Iraq’s vast oil reserves to the US market.

Unless the Bush administration can demonstrate how its security is threatened by Saddam, no US aggression on Iraq can be justified in international law, and even less so in moral terms.

It is significant that the thrust of worldwide opinion, liberal and conservative alike, is largely united in its objections to a US-led strike against Iraq. This represents a conspicuous contrast to the resolute international support the US enjoyed just a year ago in the aftermath to the terror attacks of September 11.

Last month’s petition by the Catholic peace movement Pax Christi to British prime minister Tony Blair—the only world leader likely to back a US strike on Iraq—aptly pointed out that “it is deplorable that the world’s powerful nations continue to regard war and the threat of war as an acceptable instrument of foreign policy, in violation of both the United Nations and Christian moral teachings.”

At the time of writing, Pope John Paul had yet to comment on the spectre of a second Gulf War. It is reasonable to assume that the Holy Father would, at the very least, counsel the United States to explore all alternative options before engaging in military action.

The pope has for many years deplored the UN-sponsored embargo on Iraq. According to Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, auxiliary in Detroit, the embargo causes the death of 147 Iraqi children every day. Even if this figure is exaggerated, bombs over Iraq will exacerbate an appalling situation.

Former US attorney-general Ramsey Clark stipulated the cost of a US attack on Iraq strikingly when he asked: How many children do you kill because Saddam Hussein is a bad man?

He may have added that many may die without a guarantee that such military action would in fact dislodge the tenacious Saddam—just as the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan has failed in its stated objective to neutralise terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

It is fair to presume that in the event of US military action in the Persian Gulf even some of those Islamic countries that condemned the terror of September 11 may tolerate, even sanction, retaliatory terror attacks on the US and its allies.

Whatever President Bush may hope to gain from unilaterally declaring war on Iraq, the cost will be borne by the rest of the world. And that is too high a price to pay.