Previous convictions

Hazhir Teimouran changes his mind about Saddam.
February 20, 1998

Seven years ago, during the winter of 1990-91, I was contracted by BBC Television to be one of its commentators on the Gulf war. At the time I repeatedly urged that western leaders should resist any temptation to march on to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein, even though he had the cruellest record in the whole cruel history of Mesopotamia.

My conviction was the product not only of my acquaintance with the middle east, but also with "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland. I had watched British soldiers being welcomed on the streets of Belfast by Catholics as their saviours from the bullies of the Orange Order, only to turn on the same soldiers as invaders a few months later. Who loves authority for long-especially when it has a foreign accent?

But on the afternoon of Thursday 28th February 1991, on the 44th day of the war, the news came that US President George Bush had ordered the forces of the 29 coalition countries to stop fighting, without even entering any of the southern Iraqi towns which had been theirs for the taking.

I was shocked. I must have looked it, because David Dimbleby turned to me first among the several people he had with him in the studio. Britain was at that moment celebrating a famous victory. Forty-two Iraqi army divisions in Kuwait and southern Iraq had been routed in less than 100 hours of fighting on the ground, for the loss of only about 200 (including 40 British) soldiers. The celebration was understandable. But I had to be honest: "I must be one of a few people in Britain who are devastated. This means Saddam will now rule Iraq for many more years." He had not been weakened sufficiently for the population to overthrow him or for the scattered remnants of the conscript army to turn on his various personal armies. I said that I had hoped for at least the southern half of the country to be turned over to the inhabitants and the conscript army. With foreign aid, that "free Iraq" would soon have acted as a lure and, caught between it and the Kurds in the north, Saddam's own palace guards might have assassinated him.

The people did rise, and thousands of conscripts joined them. But both the Shias in the south and the Kurds in the north were crushed with ease; and we watched day after day, helplessly, until eventually a tide of anger forced John Major and George Bush to send some troops back to the north to save at least the 2m fleeing Kurds from genocide.

Later, Saddam drained the extensive wetlands in the south to flush out the bands of guerrillas from among the Marsh Arabs who continued to resist him. (With the marshes also died one of the great spectacles of the world, in the birthplace of the original myth of the Flood: the over-wintering in those wetlands, each year, of millions of birds from Siberia.)

Despite these calamities, I persisted for some years in believing that it would have been unwise for US and British troops (the rest of the coalition would have probably dropped out) to push on to Baghdad. My theory of Saddam being overthrown by his own people if the south had been liberated was just wishful thinking.

But gradually I began to believe that the only morally acceptable outcome of the war would have been to continue until the despot had been toppled, and that the cost to the west would have been negligible. There would have been no need for British or US soldiers to conduct traffic in Baghdad: plenty of southerners and Kurds would have taken over such tasks and soon a government of national unity would have run the place.

There is no reason why George Bush, the oil tycoon, should have listened to voices like mine rather than to those in Nato member Turkey or oil-rich Saudi Arabia-neither of which wanted a democratic Iraq. But I now fear that commentators such as myself made the work of the Turks and the Saudis easier. If a Kurd such as Hazhir Teimourian, whose people have been gassed by Saddam, hesitates about pushing on to Baghdad, the policy must surely be right.

It might have been difficult for democracy to flourish in Iraq, and the country might have even broken up into its various parts. But then the Kurds should not have been forced by imperial Britain into Arab Iraq in 1920 in the first place, and the Shias have had a miserable time at the hands of the minority Sunnies since the country's creation.

Whatever the speculation, the outcome of the war has clearly been a disaster both for the west and for the people of Iraq. Iraq's neighbours, too, have every reason not to sleep soundly at night. Saddam and his sons are poised, sooner or later, to become a regional superpower once more. Armed with their irrational sense of grievance and with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, they could yet make the war of 1991 look like a tribal tiff.