By Oliver Kamm, author of 'Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy' (THE GUARDIAN, 14/03/06):
With the advantage of three years of hindsight, politicians' failed predictions about Iraq make dispiriting reading. "Any war will cause a refugee crisis of huge proportions," insisted Charles Kennedy. Iraqis proved him wrong by distinguishing perfectly well between a war on tyranny and a war on them, and stayed put. "The same doctrines [of pre-emptive war] could equally be applied by India vis-a-vis Pakistan, or in any dispute where a state feels threatened," warned Shirley Williams, shortly before India and Pakistan initiated talks to resolve the Kashmir dispute. In his tirade before the US Senate, George Galloway eulogised his own wartime perspicacity, which presumably included his assessment of Saddam Hussein: "I think he will be the last man standing in the bunker."
It is not a vulgar tu quoque to point out that those who supported regime change in Iraq are far from exceptional in having some explaining to do. Mistaken ideas have consequences, even when the inference drawn from them is a counsel of inaction. Had we not overthrown Saddam, Iraq today would be far from tranquil. Many argue that the absence of WMD shows that western policy had been working. It was in reality unravelling fast, and few opponents of war treated the problem seriously.
Saddam allowed intrusive inspections only because of the threat of force. Containment of his regime would have meant continuous military deployment in neighbouring states and the no-fly zones; intensified economic sanctions; inspections coercive enough to withstand Saddam's intimidation and fraud; and the support of France and Russia. Even with personalities of greater competence than Hans Blix and higher morals than Jacques Chirac, that commitment would have been inconceivable. Of the permanent members of the security council, only the US and UK could have been relied on.
Recall also the alacrity with which some commentators attributed the 7/7 bombings to the provocation of the Iraq war. Disgracefully, the New Statesman carried a cover picture of a rucksack with the caption "Blair's bombs". But containment would have meant persisting with what most outraged Osama bin Laden: western troops in Saudi Arabia - and Bin Laden urges "Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God".
Mainstream opponents of the war accepted a delusory picture of containment's accomplishments, and understated the costs. Even the Islamists and Leninists of the Stop the War Coalition were less evasive; they can be faulted for lack of candour only in describing themselves as anti-war, rather than anti-American and anti-British. "While war lasts by far the lesser evil would be reverses, or defeat, for the US and British forces," declared Socialist Worker when war broke out.
The failures of the occupation are legion: delayed elections, inadequate security, eroding infrastructure, complacency over the tortures at Abu Ghraib, and a heavy death toll among Iraqi civilians and our troops. But had we allowed Saddam's regime to persist, in defiance of its obligations under 17 UN security council resolutions, the consequences would have been an unalloyed catastrophe. The Uday-Qusay dynasty would have ensured further extreme oppression, unless and until the regime collapsed in chaos. It is a fine judgment whether a rogue state or a failed state, prey to the barbarities that jihadists are trying to inflict on Iraq now but without hindrance, would have been the worse prospect. The notion that terrorism has been brought to Iraq uniquely by the west's overthrow of Saddam, who bankrolled it and was the most likely conduit for Islamist groups to obtain WMD, is astonishingly ahistorical.
Against those disastrous scenarios, there are clear advances. We no longer have to bear one major risk: a psychopathic despot overcoming a porous sanctions regime, and using oil sales to pay for resumed WMD production. The absence of WMD was a huge intelligence failure; so it is fortunate that we are no longer reliant on Saddam's word. As Professor Graham Pearson, of the Bradford University school of peace studies, has written, focusing on stockpiles is misconceived: "In an aggressor state, there is no requirement to have such stockpiles as the national strategy is not one of having an ability to retaliate in kind but rather ... to use chemical and biological weapons at a time of its choosing." Saddam did possess dual-use facilities that, according to Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group, could quickly have produced chemical and biological weapons.
We have no assurance that the struggle to establish a constitutional society in Iraq will succeed. But we can be certain that the security of the region and of ourselves, as well as the welfare of those to whom we have obligations, will be damaged if we fail to support Iraqis against theocratic and Ba'athist totalitarianism. We at least have the advantage in that struggle of having confronted Saddam at a time of our choosing.