Daily Mail, July 29 2002

The lazy haze of summer may finally have descended, but in the distance the drumbeat of war grows ever more insistent.

According to weekend reports, Tony Blair has told President George Bush that Britain will support a war against Iraq, while British military planners are preparing for hostilities that might start sooner than has been thought.

Such action might split not just the Labour party but Britain itself down the middle. For a rampant and ugly anti-Americanism is being allowed to make the British political weather.

This prejudice can only be countered if Blair does what he has so far been reluctant to do and properly makes the case for war to Parliament. For it is Parliament where the national consensus is forged.

Real concerns are being expressed about action against Iraq, which the Prime Minister must lay to rest. For these claims are all eminently implausible, wrong and defeatable.

Take the argument mounted by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, that war against Iraq is morally permissible only if backed by the UN. At best, this assertion is dangerously naïve; at worst, morally blind.

On December 3 1982, a UN resolution which was opposed by the US and the UK but supported by a number of European countries proclaimed the legitimacy of resistance against foreign occupations ‘by all available means including armed struggle’ – a euphemism for terrorism.

The UN’s human rights commission consists of some of the most flagrant abusers of human rights in the world: Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria. Syria, indeed, is now a member of the UN security council, an incredible development considering that Syria is a principal state sponsor of terrorism.

The UN has deplored the fact that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights abuses and terrorism. It has not deplored the worldwide assaults on synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and Jewish individuals overwhelmingly promulgated by Muslims.

It has not deplored the torrent of anti-Jewish hatred and medieval blood libels pouring out of Muslim countries, and their incitement to mass murder against Israelis and Jews. Instead, it has repeatedly castigated Israel for seeking to defend itself against terror, and sponsored, moreover, the obscene ‘anti-racist’ Durban conference which turned into a disgusting carnival of anti-Jewish vilification.

It is truly staggering that anyone should seriously suggest that this most corrupt institution should be regarded as the moral arbiter of a nation’s actions.

The second argument is that war would be illegal under international law. Not so. A nation is legally entitled to make a pre-emptive strike in self defence against an imminent threat.

What’s more, since Saddam is in breach of the undertakings he gave which suspended hostilities in the Gulf War – to destroy his weapons of mass destruction and allow this to be verified by the UN – lawyers argue that war now would merely amount to a resumption of those hostilities.

The third argument is that Saddam does not pose an imminent threat to the west. Admittedly, the evidence is circumstantial; but it is still pretty persuasive. We know he has chemical and biological weapons, which he has used against his own people.

We know from defectors that he still has a clandestine programme to enrich natural uranium to weapons-grade material. We know that thousands of tonnes of chemical and biological agents in Iraq are unaccounted for; that is why the UN inspectors need to go in, and why Saddam’s refusal to allow them to do so is so alarming. We know he trains and collaborates with terrorists. We know he rewards the families of ‘suicide’ mass murderers.

It is argued that he would not use weapons of mass destruction because he knows the US would retaliate. But what’s to stop him providing others with chemical or biological agents for such weapons, so that the credulous would say -- precisely as they do now -- that there was no evidence to link Saddam with any atrocities?

In the light of all this, to wait for such a man to strike on the basis that we don’t have concrete evidence of an immediate threat seems not so much a moral position as simply mad.

But the appeasement factions claim the real reason for war is nothing to do with the above. Instead of President Bush’s ‘axis of evil‘ comprising those states that sponsor terror, they believe in an axis of evil comprising the US, Israel, Tony Blair and the intelligence agencies of the west.

So they would have us believe that the US would wildly expose its armed forces to the risk of heavy casualties; that it would wildly risk Iraq either re-occupying Kuwait or lobbing a chemical weapon at Israel; and that Bush would wildly risk the political obliteration that would result from failure.

All of this is deemed to follow not from any assessment of a clear and present danger but from some cynical, malevolent conception of self-interest. This certainty about such near-suicidal recklessness can surely only be explained by a truly pathological anti-Americanism.

The Americans believe unseating Saddam would deliver to other terror states the message: ‘You’re next,’ which would persuade them to abandon their terrorist ways. Maybe; maybe not. The consequences may be far messier.

But the bottom line is surely that we cannot sit and wait for the next atrocity. The war on terror cannot be won unless the world shows that it will no longer continue to support, condone or appease terrorism as it has done, the single most important reason why terror has taken such a hold.

People think terror won’t be stopped until the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians is solved. In fact, the reverse is true. Terror in Israel will stop only when its godfathers in the Arab world are tackled. Only then will the Palestinians have a realistic prospect of a state that lives in peace alongside Israel.

But in Britain, the belief has taken hold that the cause of terror is Israel, backed by America. This venomous circle is closed by the claim that America is controlled by the Jews, that ancient anti-Jewish libel now being endlessly recycled in the periodicals of the intellectual left.

The current anti-Americanism and its intimate bedfellow, anti-Jewish hatred, illustrate a decadent, self-hating culture which surfaced after September 11 when many people thought America deserved what had happened to it. Subsequently, many Britons and even more Europeans have come to sympathise with the terrorists who strike at the west.

This is surely the real reason that Tony Blair is so reluctant to make his argument in Parliament. He may have grasped that Saddam Hussein has to be stopped, but there is little sign he has understood that terror throughout the middle east is caused not by dispossession but by unquenchable hatred and despotic power.

For Blair to make the case for war properly would expose the pernicious British and European appeasement of Islamic fascism, and raise questions about the motivation of those who invert morality and truth in denying the wellspring of Arab terror.

Constitutionally, he may not need Parliament’s mandate for war but politically it is imperative that he makes this case, and well; or he could find that war against Iraq becomes his nemesis.

Posted by admin at July 29, 2002