The Left is wilfully blind to the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime and its weapons of mass destruction. Anyway, that's what the Guardian's Henry McDonald insists. I vaguely remember something about the antiwar Left objecting to the level of US and UK support of Saddam Hussein during the 70s and 80s, and would add to McDonald's article the reminder that it's a bit late to be warning of the possibility of civilian deaths and mass suffering in light of what we know about the UN's "pacific" embargo, but who needs facts when you can crib your arguments from a Vanity Fair article and indulge in faux-clever put-downs of the Western Left? I say, let's launch that pre-emptive nuclear strike on Baghdad and put this all behind us!
Inside a vile republic No one should be in any doubt about Saddam's depraved intentions Henry McDonald ObserverSunday April 28, 2002
Children aged between five and 10 are tortured and beaten. Their screams and cries are recorded on video. The horrific images are then shown to other men.
But this is no sick, paedophile, child-abusing fantasy captured on camera. According to one man who was forced to watch these vile scenes, the terror inflicted on these tiny victims was motivated principally for cold-hearted political reasons. Because whatever revolting pleasure was obtained by the torturers and the filmcrew alike, the main purpose of this recorded sadism was to brutalise, terrorise and wear down potential enemies and traitors.
This repulsive testimony of child torture as psychological warfare comes via a defector from the sinister Iraqi Mukhabarat or intelligence service and demonstrates the depravity of a regime objectively defended by Irish and other Western peaceniks.
The defector's claims appear in the current edition of Vanity Fair, compiled by David Rose. Never before has an article provoked such a feeling of disgust. For Rose's account of the extent to which Saddam Hussein's dictatorship will go to terrify its own servants and agents makes the flesh crawl. More disturbing still is the defector's allegations about the lengths the Ba'athist élite have gone in order to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
For example, the former Iraqi agent claims he travelled to Africa to buy highly toxic 'radioactive material with which to build a dirty radiological bomb' that kills thousands slowly through radioactive pollution and cancers.
He also outlines how Saddam's tyranny trains and finances Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist movement. According to the defector, it was Iraq which taught Hamas how to make bombs. Moreover, he says that Iraq has developed a new missile system to hit Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Iran as well, of course, as Israel.
Rose's courageous and thoroughly researched report will make uncomfortable reading for those on the Western Left most vociferously opposed to any United States-led attack on Iraq. Because if the defector is telling the truth (his evidence is supported by Charles Duelfer, the former deputy head of UNSCOM, the mission aimed at overseeing the destruction of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction), then there are serious challenges for the West and hard questions for Western peace groups.
For Western governments, especially those EU nations, including Ireland, which
still adopt an ostrich-like approach to Iraq's nuclear ambitions, the dilemma will not disappear - how to stop Saddam getting the bomb.
Every pacific avenue has been tried since the second Gulf War, from diplomacy to sanctions, and yet the Baghdad dictatorship, according to former agents such as the one who spoke to Rose, continues to search for the technology and raw material needed to build nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
The defector outlines how the regime evades sanctions through a series of front companies in the Middle East and Europe to import material into Iraq that forms the basis of 'dirty bio-bombs' that can kill tens of thousands. His evidence suggests that even targeted smart sanctions may not prevent the acquisition of these weapons. The United States and the EU are then left with only one other option - military intervention.
Some policy-makers express concern that an outright military assault on Saddam and the Ba'ath will set the entire Middle East ablaze. They argue that in an atmosphere of seething Arab anger over the Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory, invading Iraq would push the region over the edge into widespread, possibly global, conflict.
This thesis, however, entirely misses the point of Saddam's project to build a nuclear, chemical and/or bio-bomb. Iraq's acquisition of weapons of mass destruction is designed precisely to escalate the Arab-Israeli conflict into a nuclear confrontation. Young Arabs such as the polite Palestinian student I met last Thursday evening in Queen's University Belfast look forward to the day of the Arab bomb. And their goal, according to him, regardless of the rhetoric about two-state solutions from the PLO's apologists in the West, is the complete destruction of the state of Israel, if necessary through the use of, or threatened use of, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
The trouble with Western peace groups and their leftist support base is that they have held a starry-eyed or, in the case of the Irish Left, a Starry-Plough-eyed view of the Third World, especially those states that style themselves 'anti-imperialist'. What they surely cannot ignore any longer is the existence of a regime that endangers the stability not only of the Middle East but perhaps the planet itself and which will torture and murder even its own children in order to shore up Saddam's Republic of Fear.
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