Johann Hari: War of liberation must be fought

Picture the scene: protesters have clogged the streets of Washington, London, New York and other cities chanting: "Bush is an empty warhead. Stop the war!"

American public opinion shifts; Tony Blair, crumbling in the face of domestic opinion and his backbenchers, refuses to back the war; the American troops are brought home; the American bombs are safely parked back in their bunkers.

This, presumably, is what most anti-war campaigners want.

Do you think the Iraqi people would be dancing in the streets of Baghdad on such a day? Do you think the five million Iraqi exiles scattered across the globe would be jubilant that, again, their country had been brought within inches of freedom from Saddam Hussein, only to be betrayed by another Western coalition led by a man called George Bush?

Do you think the political dissidents - most of them democrats - rotting in Saddam's torture chambers would weep tears of joy? Do you think the Kurds, who have inhaled his poison gas more than once, would be delighted that Saddam was free to gather as many biological and chemical weapons as he liked?

Do you think the Marsh Arabs, ethnically cleansed by Saddam from swamps they had lived on for millennia, would rejoice in their desert shacks? Would you celebrate the fact that hatred for Dubya had overwhelmed the desire to help the Iraqis overthrow one of the world's worst dictators?

Of course, this war will not be fought to save the people of Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld helped to equip Saddam with chemical weapons. When Saddam was "our son of a bitch", we let him butcher, murder and enslave as much as he liked.

World War II was not fought to end the Holocaust and save Jews, gypsies, communists and gay people, either. Winston Churchill was not opposed to gassing people who he considered to belong to an "inferior race".

"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," he said in 1923. He did not undergo a Damascene revelation in the wilderness.

He fought Hitler for Britain's own selfish reasons, mostly self-defence, and amen for that fact. Without those motives, however imperfect, all the Jews of Europe, all the gays and gypsies and dissidents, would have ended up in the gas chambers.

The war to remove Saddam Hussein will be fought for the wrong reasons, and by some unpleasant people - but when it is over, we will be similarly thankful that it was fought.

The war does not need to be fought in the interests of democracy and human rights for me to support it; all I need is to be convinced that what will be built after the war will secure those two pillars of decency.

It is perfectly legitimate, however, to be sceptical about the United States' willingness to build a democracy in Iraq. Isn't this the country that describes Ariel Sharon as "a man of peace" and praises the House of Saud?

There is an example that demonstrates clearly what will be built when Saddam's Baathist regime is toppled.

Following the Gulf War, northern Iraq - where the Kurds were sheltering in the mountains from Saddam's thugs - became an independent statelet guarded by, yes, US and British military might.

What does it look like 10 years later? Is it governed by another mini-Saddam circa 1980, a cheap pro-American puppet? No, it is a self-determining democracy.

It elects, freely, its own leaders. It has freedom of speech and of the press (in Sulaymaniyah alone, there are 138 media outlets, including literary magazines and radio channels). It lives under the rule of law, upheld by male and female judges.

As Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government in Sulaymaniyah, explained recently: "In 1991, we had 804 schools. Today we have 2705. We started with one university in Arbil in 1991; today we have three.

"In 10 years of self-government, we built twice as many hospitals as were built for us in seven decades. Then we had 548 doctors. Today we have 1870 doctors. I'm not going to tell you that everything is rosy ... but it's remarkable what we have achieved."

If it were not for US military power, this democratic entity would not have existed for 10 years. Without US military power, it will not be extended throughout Iraq.

Of course, it would be better if we could establish a democratic Iraq without a war that will kill thousands of innocents. War is horrendous, but a small number of things are even worse: Saddam's tyranny is one.

Has the left forgotten the fundamental principle that it is worth fighting to free 23 million people from tyranny and to help them to build democracy?

The Iraqi exile leaders gathering in London late last year - disparate and fractured though they are - agreed that northern Iraq must be the model for post-Saddam democracy.

Since there are many identities and ethnic groups in Iraq (which is, after all, an artificially constructed state cobbled together by the British at the death of the Ottoman Empire), it must be a federal state. It will be a democracy. We don't need to take this on faith; we can look at the US' record in the north of the country.

Some argue that the US is too morally compromised by its own foreign policy to have any right to act in Iraq. Chileans, Palestinians and the Vietnamese will understandably be cynical about the concept of the US as a liberator of the oppressed.

The people of northern Iraq do not feel that way. Nor do the peoples of Eastern Europe - Vaclav Havel, the former President of the Czech Republic, supports the US. He remembers what it is like to live under an oppressive dictator and to look to America as the only hope for liberation.

The US can act in good and bad ways. That many figures on the left deny this shows they are blinded by hatred.

Of course, the US is morally compromised. I wish there were a perfect state with no oil interests and the military power to help the Iraqis, but there isn't.

Many people on the British left argued in the 1930s that Britain was too compromised by its disgraceful colonial occupation of India, and that our motives for joining World War II were far from pure. If they had prevailed, we would have squabbled among ourselves about our own immorality while Jews burned.

We must not repeat that mistake by turning our gaze from those living in the open prison of Saddam's Iraq.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald feature: Iraq