Those Liberal Democrat predictions

Any war will cause a refugee crisis of huge proportions - not to mention the dangers of famine and disease.

Charles Kennedy MP, leader of the Liberal Democrats, speech to the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference, Torquay, 16 March 2003

Only a few hundred people tried to flee Iraq, according to aid and human rights and refugee agencies, and all but a handful of them were not Iraqis but migrant workers from other countries.

The only major movement of Iraqi civilians towards the border seemed to come last weekend, when there were reports that 30,000 people fled Baghdad east toward the Iran border. When Human Rights Watch investigated the reports, though, there were only 3,000 people from Baghdad in the town of Badrah, near the border.

"The report was either inaccurate to begin with, or lots went home," Allison Parker of Human Rights Watch said.

Dean Schabner, Crisis that Wasn't, ABC News, 17 April 2003

Some 630 Iraqis have returned home from camps in Iran and Saudi Arabia in the last two days.

A convoy carrying 330 refugees arrived today in southern Iraq, ending their long exile in Saudi Arabia. The convoy of eight buses and 12 trucks was the 14th group of Iraqis to leave Rafha refugee camp, where they had lived for nearly 13 years. UNHCR-facilitated returns from Rafha began from Saudi Arabia last July.

UNHCR, Iraq: returns from Iran and Saudi Arabia, 6 January 2004

Comments

[Simon]

Blair et al. said that there would be WMD, Michael Howard said that it would be sunny yesterday. People get things wrong...Certainly, it was a possibility that had to be considered. If it didn't happen then that is good news...

[Jamie]

It was put forward as more than just "a possibility that had to be considered". It was put forward as a reason for inaction. The "good news" is that they were largely ignored.

[don]

"It was put forward as a reason for inaction."
Baroness Williams (Today 7/1/04) still considers that containment was sufficient to deal with Saddam. (But perhaps there are also Lib Dem predictions about the suffering caused by the "US" sanctions against Iraq!)

[Eamonn]

I suspect Baroness Williams would have argued that containment of Hitler would have been sufficient to deal with the Nazis.

[Peter Bocking]

Containment,wonderful word that,conjures up a line in the sand,"Not one step further or else".Or else what? There was already international pressure to lift sanctions because of the suffering of the Iraqi people,suffering wholly induced by Saddam Hussein.Once the sanctions had been lifted Iraq would have rearmed and the Hussein family business reactivated and the "Or else" a little harder to enforce.How long did Mrs Williams envisage containment to be maintained, and at what cost. Slowly there would have been domestic pressure in the West to disengage, reduce expenditure,governments would come and go, each with different priorities.Saddam Hussein is master of media manipulation, with no compunction about feeding horror stories to the western media,so easy to manufacture disasters by placing military assets amongst civilians.
No, the West would have grown weary of containment and politicians would have had to think of another word to rein in Saddam Hussein.