Culpable and whingeing

The BBC reports:

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy has reacted furiously to suggestions by Jack Straw that his policies would have strengthened Saddam Hussein. Mr Kennedy branded the foreign secretary's comments a "scandalous" insult to the millions of people who had opposed the war in Iraq. He accused the government of trying to rewrite the history of the conflict. Mr Straw said the Lib Dems "dare not admit" their policy would ultimately have created a stronger Saddam.

It took the Government enough time to go on the attack against the Liberal Democrats, and I’m pleased to note Charles Kennedy’s flush of recognition of the damage that the truth poses to his party’s reputation. It is of course entirely accurate to say that Liberal Democrat policy would have strengthened the regime of Saddam Hussein. Before the war, Kennedy argued for the “better alternative” of containment of Saddam. Containment of a regime means leaving it in power. In the Cold War, there was no alternative to the West’s policy of containment of the Soviet Union, for direct confrontation would have risked nuclear war. No such risk attended the war in Iraq, because – and I fear the point must have escaped the Liberal Democrats – Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

Containment would have meant persisting with UN sanctions. Yet we now know that those sanctions were porous, ineffective and so incompetently administered that Saddam was able to profit from them directly through bribery. As Con Coughlin observed in The Telegraph earlier this month, after the publication of the ISG report:

Saddam skilfully worked the system so that the profits were diverted to fund his regime rather than feed his people. An important element of this fraud was that a significant percentage of the funds was diverted to set up a voucher system that could be used to bribe a wide network of international politicians who could be counted upon to do Saddam's bidding.

Between them, France and Russia received 45 per cent of the vouchers, with China coming third. In late 2002 and early 2003, France, Russia and China led the anti-war movement at the UN. In France, the vouchers were given to a number of politicians with close links to Mr Chirac, while in Russia they were paid directly to Mr Putin's private office, providing him with his own ready-made slush fund.

Saddam's clever manipulation of the voucher system was a brilliant success: it not only caused a deep split within the security council, it helped him to make irrelevant the much-vaunted policy of containment that was supposed to prevent him from re-emerging as a dominant force the the Middle East. It also enabled him to fund illicit imports of weapons and the technology needed to resume production of weapons of mass destruction, which was his declared aim once the sanctions had been lifted.

This is the system of “containment” that Liberal Democrat leaders and spokesmen – Kennedy, Baroness Williams, Menzies Campbell – continue to insist was a great success. Their anti-war argument has coagulated into dogma, against which no amount of evidence can prevail.

Let us suppose, however, that UN sanctions had been applied consistently and with solidarity among UN Security Council members. I believe there were important reasons to impose sanctions on Saddam’s regime, as there were to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa – partly as moral symbolism to indicate the depravity of the regime, and partly for practical purposes of stymieing the regime’s ambitions. But I don’t imagine that on their own they could have brought down Saddam’s regime; their effectiveness was inherently limited. (The corollary is, of course, that the anti-sanctions campaign in the West was at best misdirected, and in fact quite fraudulent - as the investigative journalist John Sweeney brilliantly demonstrated in a BBC documentary in 2002.)

Saddam Hussein cared nothing for the condition of Iraqis; he could have allowed Iraq’s economy to run down indefinitely without being swayed from his policies. And indeed, those policies never did alter. They comprised throughout his rule a determination to acquire weapons of mass destruction if he could, territorial aggrandisement and support for terrorism. Had the Liberal Democrats had their way, Saddam’s ability to realise his goals would indeed have been enhanced. That is the fact of the matter, and Charles Kennedy would be better-advised to apologise to the British people – and more particularly to Iraqis – for his party’s stand than whinge when its consequences are fairly and accurately pointed out.