Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
But you don't think that the threat from the extremists in the Islamic world justifies our use of force?
The threat is terrible. In fact, the people who the Wall Street Journal was interviewing hate these guys. They're their main enemies. People like Osama bin Laden are aiming at them.
I want to be clear: Are you saying that because we're guilty of abuses against the Islamic world and elsewhere, the use of U.S. force to disable these violent extremists is not justified?
I thought Michael Howard's proposal was quite reasonable and that could very well have involved the use of force. If you have criminal atrocities, it is legitimate to use force to apprehend those who are guilty and give them a fair trial. Incidentally, notice that nobody, including you and me, believes that that principle should apply to us. So we're all hopelessly immoral, including me. None of us believes that that principle should have been applied to the people who were condemned by the world court.
You endorse a criminal pursuit of bin Laden and his cohorts -- but why don't you don't believe that the war in Afghanistan is justified in the wake of Sept. 11?
The war in Afghanistan targets Afghan civilians, and openly. The British defense minister put it very clearly in a front-page article in the New York Times. He said we are going to attack the Afghans until they finally realize that they better overthrow their government. That's a virtual definition of international terrorism.
Can you give an example of a situation where military force is justified?
Force was justified when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war against us. If you try to think of the last 50 years, have there been military interventions which really did bring massive atrocities to an end? There are actually two cases, both in the 1970s. In 1971, India invaded what was then East Pakistan and put an end to horrendous atrocities. In 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in self-defense and drove out the Khmer Rouge and terminated their atrocities. Why aren't those called humanitarian interventions? Why isn't the 1970s called the decade of humanitarian intervention when there really were two cases that ended massive atrocities?
There's a simple reason for that: The interventions were carried out by the wrong parties -- not the United States. And secondly, the U.S. strenuously opposed both of the interventions and punished those who carried them out. If we're honest, we would say yes, there were two humanitarian interventions in the last 50 years.
So you do think that violence can bring peace?
Yes, the Second World War brought peace. I was a child, but I did support the war at the time, and in retrospect, still do.
Do you not think that we're under the same sort of threat now?
We, under a threat? No, nothing remotely like it. We're under the threat of a criminal conspiracy which ought to be dealt with like a criminal conspiracy, pretty much the way Michael Howard said. We're probably under a bio-terror threat. Whatever the anthrax story was, I don't take it lightly and I think that's a serious threat.
What can or should be done about someone like Saddam Hussein, someone who has access to weapons of mass destruction?
Not only weapons of mass destruction but here it's exactly the way Clinton, Bush, Blair and everyone else says. He not only is a monster but his is the only existing country that used weapons of mass destruction, namely chemical warfare, against its own population. All that's missing in that description is three words: with our support.
Does that mean we should not go after him now?
Wait a minute. That's not a small point. He carried out a huge a massacre of his own population with our support. The U.S. continued, as did Britain, to support him right through the worst atrocities, turning against him when he disobeyed orders. That doesn't make him less of a monster. But we should tell the truth. We should not conceal those three words which everyone else in the world knows.
What should we say?
We should say, "Yeah, we supported him in his worst atrocities; now we don't like him anymore and what should we do about him?" And, yeah, that's a problem.
My own feeling, to tell you the truth, is that there was a great opportunity to get rid of Saddam Hussein in March 1991. There was a massive Shiite uprising in the south led by rebelling Iraqi generals. The U.S. had total command of the region at the time. [The Iraqi generals] didn't ask for U.S. support but they asked for access to captured Iraqi equipment and they asked the United States to prevent Saddam from using his air force to attack the rebels. The U.S. refused. It allowed Saddam Hussein to use military helicopters and other forces to crush the rebellion.
You can read it in the New York Times. It was more important to maintain stability -- that was the word that was used -- or as the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times put it, the best of all worlds for the United States would have been for an iron-fisted military junta to seize power and rule in Iraq the way Saddam Hussein did. But since we couldn't get that, we'd have to accept him. That was the main opportunity of getting rid of him. Since then it hasn't been so simple. The forces of resistance were crushed with our help, after the war.
Since then, there's a question of whether the Iraqi Democratic opposition forces could mount some means of overthrowing this monster. That's a tricky business. The worst way of doing it is to undermine opposition to him. That's exactly what the sanctions do. Everyone who observed the sanctions has concluded -- including the humanitarian administrators, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, who know more about it than anyone else -- that the sanctions have severely harmed the civilian population and strengthened Saddam Hussein. People under severe sanctions and trying to survive are not going to carry out any action against an armed military force.
So how would you feel about it if we were to continue the war on terrorism there?
There's no war on terrorism. That's a term of propaganda. There cannot be a war on terrorism led by the one state in the world that has been condemned for international terrorism and supported by major terrorist states like Russia and China. We can call it something but we can't call it a war on terrorism.
But do you think that we should move against Iraq now?
No, I agree with virtually the whole world, including our closest allies, that a military attack on Iraq would be a terrible mistake.
Why?
Same reason that everyone in the world, including England, is telling the U.S. government not to do it. They apparently have no evidence whatsoever that would tie Iraq to these atrocities, so an attack on Iraq would be for some other reason that existed before. If those reasons were there before, why didn't the U.S. do it then? For one thing, they're not going to do it because they don't want to get rid of Saddam Hussein; given the likely alternatives, they don't want to break the country up.
What real difference do you think it would make if we were more honest about some of the things that we've done? It seems like one of your main complaints is against American rhetoric and propaganda.
If we were honest, then we could at least evaluate what we do sanely. If we're dishonest, we know that whatever we do, only by the merest accident will it be justified. The first elementary step is honesty. After that you can go on and consider complicated issues on their merits.
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