Across the Islamic World there is despair among moderate Muslims. Looking closely at the three primary justifications used by the US administration for the war in Iraq—weapons of mass destruction, the need for regime change and the promise of democracy—it is not difficult to see why.
America’s obsession with weapons of mass destruction has always left many in the Middle East a little bewildered. In the Iraqi context, many of the weapons that were believed to form part of Saddam Hussein’s formidable arsenal came from American and European sources. It has been said before, but cannot be said enough, that when the Iraqi Government was using chemical weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq, Saddam Hussein was a friend of America. In the 1980s, the now-Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, visited Iraq and shook hands with Saddam Hussein. At the time, Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were indispensable to America, enabling it to use a proxy in the war against Iran. When chemical weapons were used extensively against Iranian forces with massive casualties, America remained silent.
For President George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld to say that these weapons posed a fundamental threat to Iraq’s neighbours and to the safety of the people of the region is decades too late. When the Iraqi leader had the inclination to use them there was no coalition of the willing. In the aftermath of the most recent war, when not a single weapon of mass destruction has been found but many have been used against the Iraqi people, it is scarcely surprising that Iraqis don’t rejoice when the new American administrators of Iraq tell them that they have been liberated. After all, the Iraqi people suffered at the hands of Saddam’s weapons for almost 25 years and no-one acted to save them.
America’s assurances that Iraq’s weapons were the main legal basis for war are also not believed in a region where the only nuclear power—Israel—is a close ally of Washington.
It is true that Iraqis interviewed by Western journalists have largely supported America’s true aim of regime-change. Saddam Hussein’s government was one of the most brutal dictatorships in modern history. To escape persecution, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled their homeland as refugees. Millions more remained behind, unable to leave.
In the late 1990s, I represented numerous asylum seekers from Iraq, each one bearing stories of tragedy and irreparable loss. Tariq’s brother was arrested when Iraq’s feared