Whose interests at heart? Article from the Guardian

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Whose interests at heart?
 

 
The invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot give my people their freedom.
 
That's why MPs should vote against war
 

 
Sami Ramadani
 
Tuesday March 18, 2003
 
The Guardian
 

 
A couple of weeks ago I went with my partner and our little boy to see our
 
Labour MP, Bridget Prentice, in the House of Commons. We waited for
 
two-and-a-half hours but she neither showed up nor sent a note. I wrote her
 
a brief letter but she hasn't acknowledged it yet.
 

 
We are British citizens of Iraqi origin. My wife, who is Kurdish from
 
Sulaimaniyah, fled Iraqi Kurdistan in the mid-1980s, risking her life in the
 
process. I am also an exile and cannot go back to Iraq because of my
 
resistance to Saddam's tyranny. Our son is four, and was born here.
 

 
As a family, we wanted to tell our MP how we feel now, with war against Iraq
 
imminent. So far, she has supported the government; we went to see her in
 
the hope that, even at this late hour, she will change her mind and vote
 
against war.
 

 
My wife sees Iraqi victims of torture every day where she works, at the
 
Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture; we wanted to tell
 
Bridget Prentice that Iraq is in desperate need of regime change and the
 
establishment of a democratic order. The Iraqi people need it much more than
 
Bush and Blair could ever understand. But democracy for Iraq will not be
 
achieved by bombing and invading the country. It cannot be trusted to George
 
Bush. The US will not accept a democratic verdict which is not to its liking
 
in a strategically important country, possessing the world's second largest
 
oil reserves. They strangled just such a verdict in Congo in the 1960s and
 
in Chile in the 1970s, and they are working hard to reverse it in Venezuela
 
today.
 

 
In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself: it backed Saddam's party, the
 
Ba'ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists,
 
communists and democrats of all shades; it backed the Ba'ath party in 1968
 
when Saddam was installed as vice-president; it helped him and the Shah of
 
Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement; it increased its
 
support for Saddam in 1979, the year he elevated himself to president,
 
helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980; it backed him
 
throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a
 
million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he
 
was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs; it encouraged
 
him in 1990 to invade Kuwait when the Arabic-speaking US ambassador in
 
Baghdad, April Glaspie, told him on July 25 1990 that the US had "no opinion
 
on Arab-Arab conflicts" when she knew that Saddam's forces were only one
 
week away from invading; it backed him in 1991 when Bush suddenly stopped
 
the war, exactly 24 hours after the start of the great March uprising that
 
engulfed the south and Iraqi Kurdistan (US aircraft were flying over the
 
scenes of mass killing as Iraqi helicopter gunships were aiding Saddam's
 
forces crush the uprising); and it backed him as the "lesser evil" from
 
March 1991 to September 11 2001 under the umbrella of murderous sanctions
 
and the policy of "containment".
 

 
Then, having caused the death of about half a million Iraqis, mostly
 
children, through sanctions, Bush and Blair declare that containment and
 
sanctions are not working after all. Blair must reconcile his strongly and
 
suddenly found conviction that war is better than containment with the fact
 
that the US hawks, now prominent in the Bush administration, have been
 
advocating a war on Iraq for the past 12 years - not to liberate the Iraqi
 
people, or to protect the world from weapons of mass destruction, but to
 
impose US hegemony on a strategically important country. September 11 gave
 
them their opportunity. Blair's "sincerity", and his sympathy for the Iraqi
 
people are, alas, nothing but grist to Rumsfeld's mills of war.
 

 
Indeed, one of the strongest arguments against war, that should prompt all
 
its supporters to re-examine their consciences, is the fact that if Saddam
 
does still possess weapons of mass destruction then it is probable that this
 
amoral tyrant will use them if his removal from power becomes imminent.
 

 
Our MPs must raise these questions in the Commons and oppose the US war
 
plans, even at this late hour. The US desperately needs Britain as a
 
political and moral prop, a fig leaf for claiming the existence of an
 
international alliance for war. It is our MPs' duty to expose this and side
 
with the Iraqi people's own struggle to remove Saddam's regime and establish
 
democracy in Iraq. In this, they will also be acting in the British people's
 
best interests.
 

 
If allowed to run its course, the Blix programme of inspections would have
 
emboldened the Iraqi people to challenge Saddam's regime in the knowledge
 
that Saddam would not be using chemical weapons to crush future uprisings.
 
This would have been particularly likely if the inspections and monitoring
 
regime had been combined with strict military and diplomatic sanctions,
 
while lifting the economic sanctions, which have not only caused so much
 
death and pain for the people but also strengthened Saddam's hand against
 
them. If all this had been coupled with an international campaign to aid the
 
Iraqi people to remove Saddam and establish democracy, we are confident that
 
they would have succeeded; their past heroic struggles were always hampered
 
by US, wider western and Soviet backing for Saddam's regime.
 

 
The acceleration of war plans coincided with Blix's announcement of active
 
Iraqi cooperation and his demands for a few months to complete his work. The
 
US administration was clearly panicked by the prospect of a peaceful
 
disarmament of Saddam. They are fearful of the prospect of seeing the Iraqi
 
people taking on the tyrant and his dictatorial state.
 

 
Much is made of Tony Blair's courage. We are told that he is being brave in
 
his deafness to majority opinion in Britain and the world. The truth is that
 
he is mesmerised by US power, convinced he will be on the side of the
 
victors and bask in the glory of their might once they raise the US flag in
 
Baghdad, that beloved city of my childhood. But Blair's glory, even if it
 
comes to pass, will be short-lived.
 

 
· Sami Ramadani is an Iraqi political exile and a senior lecturer in
 
sociology at London Metropolitan University.