![]() ![]() I support military sanctions against Saddam and a strengthening of the UN weapons inspection teams. Hans Blix and Mohamed El Baradei, in their report to the UN Security Council on February 14, said that they had uncovered "no evidence" that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And we are pressed to answer the question: well, what would you do? It seems to me the question is itself dubious: first, it assumes that Iraq currently poses a threat of major proportions, that we take at his word the prime minister when he says that Saddam is capable of hitting British targets, and Bush when he says that Iraq poses a danger to the US, and that a greatly militarily enervated Iraq would repeat its strikes against its now much more powerful neighbours. Now I find that I and the dozens who signed the petitions against war in Iraq, along with the millions around the world who marched on February 15, stand accused of more or less the same things: playing into Saddam's hands, lack of moral judgment, stubborn failure to understand that bombing is the only answer. The only thing to do was to continue the 25-year-old policy of military intervention and defeat the enemy. Indeed, I can remember in 1993 an up-and-coming Labour politician earnestly explaining to me that the Irish problem was intractable (none other than Tony Blair). ![]() What seemed to me a sensible, not to say obvious, course was angrily denounced in some quarters: it would reward the "men of violence", it would be immoral given their unspeakable history, it wouldn't provide a solution. In the early 1990s I wrote a series of articles arguing that the only way out of the bloody impasse in the north of Ireland was for the British government to start talking to Sinn Fein. ![]()
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