Why Basra and not Baghdad? -------
Jim Nolan: Despotism the Left's too blind to see The Australian 21jan03
WHY won't Labor and the Australian Left call for the removal of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein on human rights grounds alone? After all, the party and its ideological soul mates in the community have had a proud and noble record in championing the democratic cause of the oppressed and condemning the evil ways of their aggressors.
>From the West's intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo to rescue European Muslims from ethnic cleansing
at the hands of the Stalinist fascists to the liberation of East Timor from the Indonesian military
rulers, the Australian Left has supported the great humanitarian interventions in recent years. The
lesson? That a blanket principle of non-intervention cannot rationally be sustained.
Yet the Left's opposition to regime change in Iraq stands in stark contrast to these principled campaigns. But turning a blind eye to the Iraqi tyrant's regime will only lend aid and comfort to one of the most brutal and murderous regimes on earth. And opposing the Bush-Blair-Howard position of regime change in Iraq will only prolong the life of an ugly, brutal, fascist state.
Conventional wisdom among the Left holds that the international community should act in the face of widespread human rights abuses. An important task for the Left, the argument goes, is to take their own governments to task to require intervention in the name of democratic and human rights values. Campaigns against the racist regimes in South Africa and Zimbabwe and more recently, Cambodia, East Timor, Burma and Tibet bear this out.
Yet faced with a tyrannical and murderous regime in the Persian Gulf, many in Australian Labor are looking away. Former foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton has forcefully stated that any intervention is none of Australia's concern. And Simon Crean has echoed Brereton's call, telling The Australian Financial Review last week that he has all but ruled out support for a US-led attack on Iraq.
But neither Brereton nor Crean has offered any real analysis of the alternatives to regime change. It's almost as if the British Labour Government's detailed dossiers showing the horrors Hussein has inflicted on Iraqis and the build-up of weapons of mass destruction never existed.
A few strident voices on the Left overseas have not been afraid to stake out a position in favour of regime change. Leftist UK journalist Johann Hari, writing in The Independent earlier this month, asked: "What has become of the Left which argued that we had a moral responsibility to defend our fellow humans from fascist dictators?" And Washington-based English leftist Christopher Hitchens has coined a new term for the prevarications of the Left on Iraq – "subject change". The embarrassment created by too close exposure to, and concentration upon, the true facts of the Iraqi regime is avoided by always changing the subject to familiar anti-Americanism. "Regime change" is avoided by "subject change".
And so it was with Brereton's article on this page two weeks ago ("Keep us out of Bush's war" Opinion, January 7). Instead of pointing his finger at the true culprit (the Iraq dictator), the Labor backbencher engaged in undergraduate anti-Americanism, even implying that a war was somehow George W. Bush's way of finishing off daddy's business.
What appears to be beyond the grasp of many of my comrades in the Left is the scale and scope of a modern totalitarian regime such as Hussein's. It is truly – to use Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya's eloquent term – a republic of fear. It is a police state which conducts its ruthless totalitarian control through more than 100,000 secret police. It is a regime which treats its populace with complete contempt – consider the recent humiliation dealt to the Iraqi people by Hussein's referendum. And it is an outlaw state that has acted in continuous violation of the disarmament conditions of the post-Kuwait ceasefire in 1991.
How could this leopard possibly change his spots?
In the event of intervention, will the Left excoriate regime change? Or will it champion the removal of one of the worst human rights abusers since World War II.
Regrettably, a visceral knee-jerk anti-Americanism pervades the debate. It stands in the way of thinking through the implications of intervention as against inaction. America's past sins, it's argued, disqualify it from any legitimacy in a struggle against Iraq. A case in point is Washington's past support for Hussein against Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. This may be true, but it doesn't necessarily hold that the US and her allies should turn a blind eye to today's madman in Baghdad.
Indeed, past sins to which the US and its allies were a party make the obligation to put things right all the more imperative. What better gesture to make amends to those who have suffered under the Ba'ath regime than to be their liberators – albeit belatedly. Disqualification based on past conduct, remember, would have disqualified Australia from any role in liberating East Timor in 1999.
Lest anyone is fooled into believing that ordinary Iraqis strongly support their nation's dictator Hussein, consider the work of Brussels-based International Crisis Group, headed by former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans. In its informal survey of Iraqi opinion in September and October 2002 in large Iraqi cities, it noted that a significant number of the Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candour, supported the overthrow of Hussein, even if such a change required an American-led attack.
The international community should meet its obligations to the people of Iraq to rebuild the country, to develop democratic institutions based on tolerance and to allow its people access to the benefits derived from its oil wealth. The price of that intervention must be that the international community is to be kept to its word in Iraq as much as in Afghanistan – even when more immediate issues distract the attention of decision-makers. This task to redouble the campaign for human rights, the rule of law, and secular, tolerant democracy is the far, far preferable option than do nothing.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has articulated such a challenge powerfully and persuasively. It's just a pity his Labor party comrades here have failed to heed his message.
Jim Nolan, industrial relations barrister, has been a member of the Australian Labor Party since 1968. © The Australian