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Men in suits with blood on their hands

By SUNDAY STAR-TIMES, October 10, 2004

So it's official: the Iraq crusade was based on a falsity. Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, according to the report of the UN weapons inspectors. The leaders of the coalition of the willing, faced with this embarrassing finding, do not even bother to blush. George Bush says Saddam was a bad guy anyway, and we're safer without him. John Howard sees no reason to apologise: but John Howard never apologises for anything. And Tony Blair simply adds more weasel words to the thousands he has already uttered over Iraq. Truth, so the cliche goes, is the first casualty of war, and the war against terror has proved no exception.

New Zealand's decision to stay out of the war is thus vindicated - but being right is not necessarily a political asset. And in this case, being wrong does not seem to be a fatal political liability. There has been a truly global campaign of lies and misinformation over Iraq - and the implications are disturbing. Western voters accept that politicians lie - but this form of dishonesty is unprecedented. The heart of the case against Saddam was WMD. The Bush administration said it "knew" Saddam had them. But it didn't know, any more than Tony Blair "knew" that the Iraqi dictator could launch Armageddon within 45 minutes.

These three leaders took their countries to war on false pretences, and they continue to insist that black is white. Bush says the US is safer now that Saddam has gone. A fair number of US voters appear to believe him - but a fair number still believe, it seems, that Saddam was responsible for September 11. Once again, sober official inquiries seem to have little effect on the debate. When the 9/11 Commission reported it could find no link between Saddam and al Qaeda, Bush continued to insist that there was. He just "knew" it - and here, perhaps, is one of the lessons to be drawn from the whole bloody shambles.

The war against Iraq represents the triumph of conviction over evidence. This is the common factor that unites the "sexing up" of the intelligence data in the US, in Britain and in Australia. The intelligence evidence was thin. Colin Powell's grainy photos, issued just before the war, persuaded nobody except the already persuaded. But what mattered was the deeply held values of Messrs Bush, Blair and Howard. They believed in the war against Saddam: evidence was a secondary consideration. Whether this form of dishonesty is called lying, or excessive fervour, or blindness does not much matter. What matters is the contempt for fact, argument, and thought.

It might be thought that such a comprehensive debunking of the reasons for the crusade would automatically end the careers of the chief crusaders. So why hasn't it happened?

Partly, it seems, because fear crowds out the normal scruples about honesty and accountability. Many Americans feel besieged, and for understandable reasons. Bush has stoked these fears. In such times, many voters turn to the tough-guy leader: how else to account, for example, for the success of the thuggish Ariel Sharon in Israel?

Bush has flouted basic human rights and freedoms in his war against terror - Guantanamo Bay is an international scandal - but his supporters think these are justifiably desperate measures for desperate times. So the scandals continue.

Bush argues that Iraq will somehow, miraculously, turn into a peaceful democracy. The puppet Allawi government continues to insist, in the face of all the evidence, that things in Iraq are improving. In fact, Iraq now suffers a form of civil war. The victims of the slaughter are more often Iraqi than American, but the murder goes on. Nobody but a handful of politicians believes this country could hold a fair and democratic election in just a few months' time. But only the ideologues really believed that democracy could be imposed on this fractured society.

The crusade did not make the world safer. It added fuel to the fire and boosted the terrorist cause. New Zealand has sensibly withdrawn its troops from Iraq. But no country that cares for democracy and decency can avoid the problem of Iraq. Unfortunately, it now looks insoluble. America cannot confer any legitimate authority on Iraq. Even opponents of the war had hoped some form of UN intervention might bring the chance of stability and legitimate government. This now seems impossible: Iraq burns in unquenchable fire. After the crusade, catastrophe.

Informant: Larry Ross