CUMHURIYET- Columnist Ergin Yildizoglu comments on a possible US-led war against Iraq. A summary of his column is as follows:
Those who favor a war in Iraq have gradually, bit-by-bit, exhausted all of their arguments. Their evidence hasn’t convinced anyone. Now they have only one last place to hide: Reasons of ‘morality.’ Moreover, as they get more and more distant from the realm of concrete facts, they find strange companions for themselves on the road to war.
There are basically two lines of arguments armed with ‘moral’ reasons intended to justify a war that could kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people.
The first is that Saddam Hussein is a deranged dictator, so the Iraqi people should be set free from his chains. It’s not important who does it! Unfortunately, many Muslim, mostly Arab and sometimes ex-left-wing writers seem to have adopted this logic. For example, an Iraqi ‘enlightened’ writer, in order to dissuade people from marching in anti-war demonstrations in Britain, can even dare to say: ‘I beg you! Even if you have no trust in the British government and don’t consider Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to be a threat, please think of the Iraqi people.’ And he adds on behalf of them: ‘When will you free us? When will we start living as we deserve?’ Reading between the lines, we can see sentiments along these lines: ‘We have to be realistic. The US will win this war anyway, so we have to get aboard that train to get access to at least the leftovers of the victors’ spoils. What’s the point in opposing the inevitable?’
The second line of argumentation is, so to speak, a bit more ‘sophisticated,’ as it is pursued largely by ex-socialists. They say that it’s not enough to oppose a war alone. Those who do so should also come up with a project which would lead to the democratization of the whole region. Thus, this approach highlights a key point: The region truly needs democracy. So there’s no problem if this is achieved through the peaceful means of the UN. But what if there’s no way besides war, and the UN Security Council approves such a war?
Here, I won’t get into the business that the call to be ‘realistic’ almost always implies ‘just accept what is given to you,’ and try to show you that this call is a ‘respectable’ way of finding a cover for ideological cowardice. Instead, I’ll pose these two questions: Democracy, but for whom? And by whom?
Won’t the democracy established following a war in Iraq be an exclusivist one founded for the people whom the very forces who established it see as appropriate? Aren’t the Bush administration, which came to power through a democratic glitch, and the most militarist right-wingers in Israel and Washington’s well-connected oil and weapon lobbies’ friends among those who will establish democracy in Iraq?
As the respected social critic Edward Said asked, ‘Will such grotesqueries be champions of progress? Who gave them such an assignment?’ For God’s sake, on what moral or logical grounds does the foundation of a militarist regime in Iraq fit in ‘bringing democracy’ at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives?
On the other hand, those who argue that the region needs a democratization project implicitly carry an orientalist logic, one that they feel deep inside supported by the belief in the inferiority of the East before the West. The East can barely achieve anything on its own. It is passive and immature, and cannot establish democracy or achieve development without Western aid.
Today, the most moralistic attitude is opposing a war in Iraq which would kill hundreds of thousands of people without doing a single thing to bolster the image of the omnipotent US and veiled under the disguise of being ‘realistic.’ One cannot bargain about morals.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION