http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,773102,00.html

This is a recipe for global turmoil and endless war

Britain must respond to the shift signalled by Saddam Hussein

George Galloway
Monday August 12, 2002
The Guardian

Saddam Hussein raised a dyed black eyebrow when I asked him last week in
an underground bunker in Baghdad if he'd seen the picture of the British
Foreign Office minister, Mike O'Brien, kissing Colonel Gadafy under the
canvas on a Mediterranean beach. As well he might. Here was the ultimate
example of preferring jaw-jaw to war-war, in Churchill's famous phrase.
In the not too distant past, Gadafy armed and financed terrorists to blow up
British cities, while his men shot dead a policewoman in a London street and
have been held responsible for the biggest act of mass murder, at Lockerbie,
in British criminal history. Yet, rightly in my view, the Foreign Office has
concluded that we can't choose who rules Libya and would be better off
talking to those who do.

Iraq, on the other hand, has never harmed Britain. Indeed, Britain helped
arm the Iraqi dictatorship to harm others, including Iran and Iraq's own
Kurdish population, while people like me were demonstrating for human
rights outside Saddam's Tottenham Court Road "cultural centre" in London.
Yet now it seems only war-war can be contemplated for Iraq - even a war in
which perhaps tens of thousands will die and the Middle East be plunged into
chaos and bloodshed.

O'Brien's attempt to square this circle contained a masterpiece of
doublespeak. Libya, he said, was moving towards compliance with
international law, while Iraq was moving in the opposite direction. This
came in a month when Iraq had offered access for British experts to inspect
suspected sites of weapons of mass destruction; invited the US congress to do
the same; asked Hans Blix, head of the UN arms inspectorate, to come to
Baghdad for talks on "the next stage" of inspections; and, most crucially,
declared it "accepted and would implement" all UN security council
resolutions (which contain the demand for unfettered access to Iraqi sites)
concerning their country. And it comes after more than a decade of war and
sanctions - which have cost the lives of a million Iraqis - during which not
a single act of international terrorism has been proved to emanate from
Baghdad.

These diplomatic moves by Iraq would, in a sane world, be followed up and
put to the test. They represent all that the British government, at least, has
been asking for. After all, if their sincerity was found wanting, what would
the US government have to lose? It would still be the world's only
superpower, able to invade countries and overthrow governments with
impunity, and would be doing so having gone the extra mile for peace, with a
strengthened international consensus behind it. That Bush shows every sign
of trampling on the olive branch gives the lie to any claim that the only
interest is in Iraqi disarmament.

We can understand that Bush, elected against the popular vote and courtesy
of a distinctly Takriti-style fix, insists on picking other people's
presidents. Thus he has ordered the popularly elected Palestinian president
Yasser Arafat into the dustbin of history and now insists the Iraqi president
must follow. But who next? The mullahs' regime in Tehran, the unstable
autocracy in Saudi Arabia, the Ba'ath party dictatorship in Syria, its
neighbour Lebanon - home to Hizbullah - or the heavily armed communist
state of North Korea? This is a recipe for endless war and global turmoil. It
is also a recipe for a proliferation of terrorism and the creation of
thousands of Bin Ladens throughout the Muslim world and beyond.

In my meeting with the Iraqi president last week, he seemed to believe that
our own government, with its special relationship to Washington and its
more nuanced take on Arab affairs, might be the one to break the log jam.
Seeing Britain as Greece to America's Rome, many Arabs feel that Britain -
the older though faded power - might guide the gunslinging Americans back
to the negotiating path and adherence to UN resolutions and international
law.

Mr Blair would be doing himself as well as the world a favour if he picked
up this possible role. The stakes could not be higher. Some of Britain's oldest
friends in the region may well be swept away in the aftermath of a
quarter-of a-million-strong "crusader" invasion of an Arab Muslim
country: friends with whom Britain maintains a trade surplus of many
billions of pounds; friends who sit on top of the worlds largest oil
fields, the
interruption to whose production could easily lead to ballooning prices and
deflating western economies. In the age of Arab satellite television, every
burning building will illuminate every home from the Atlantic to the Gulf
and each picture of the ribbons of Iraqi civilians being swept from the
inferno will inflame an already seething Arab world.

If it comes, this will be a war of movement rather than position. There will
be no Iraqi lines stretched across the desert waiting to be cut down, indeed
no battlefields as such. This will be a war of the cities, where invader,
defender and civilian population will be up close. Saddam warned me that if
the invader came, he would be resisted from street to street. He pointed to
the fate of Sharon's army bogged down in a tiny part of Palestine against a
small, largely unarmed population. Many Iraqis would cheer the downfall of
Saddam, but many - especially in the central Sunni heartlands - would be
likely to rally to defend their country. Enough of the Republican Guard, the
Saddam militia - potential suicide bombers, every one - the volunteer
"Jerusalem Army" and the armed membership of the Ba'ath party can be
expected to ensure high casualties and make the whole operation a
potentially fatal gamble.

And then there's trouble ahead at home. Mr Blair is nothing if not a skilled
sniffer of the political wind. He knows that a gale of laughter is the British
people's response to the idea of their fate being in the hands of George Bush.
He knows that, from the cabinet peak to the foothills of the labour
movement, there is massive, perhaps critical disagreement with his "we'll
follow the old man wherever he wants to go" attitude to the US Republican
leadership. He is well aware that ministerial resignations and a full-scale
parliamentary whirlwind - likely to be foreshadowed at the TUC and Labour
conferences - lie ahead if he joins the new crusade.

The public is making its voice heard in opinion polls, petitions, on radio
phone-ins and in letters columns. Never has Mr Blair been in such a
comprehensively losing position on any political issue. If he joins this
absolutely illegal, immoral and counterproductive war, not only will he not
be doing so in our name: he may find he will soon cease to speak for us on
anything at all.

· George Galloway is Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin and senior
vice-chairman of the parliamentary Labour party foreign affairs
committee. He is a columnist for the Scottish Mail on Sunday.

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