The UN: What is to be done?
Blair's US visit, post-war contracts, US occupation & the UN
Maxine McKew: We go to London now, where I'm joined by author and historian Tariq Ali. His most recent work is The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity. Tariq Ali, welcome back to the program. We've heard your views before. You've been a long time critic of this operation. On this question of Tony Blair's visit to the US to see both George Bush and Kofi Annan as regards this latter, how do you see this? Was Blair trying to reopen lines to the UN perhaps to placate the Europeans?
Tariq Ali: I think that was the aim of the operation because he's totally isolated within Europe, and incidentally also inside Britain, and he was trying to show that he is not a total poodle and that, having made the war, they'd give the cleaning up operations contract to the UN so that Kofi Annan could go there as a cleaner. But this has failed because the United States is determined to maintain control of Iraq and the contracts for the cleaning-up operation in American hands, so even while Blair was on the plane, Colin Powell was making it clear the UN had no role to play at the moment, and so by the time he arrived there was nothing to talk about and the question being asked here is was his journey really necessary.
MM: So you are really saying in fact the past 24 hours that Tony Blair's talks have been as much about commercial lobbying as humanitarian assistance back into Iraq?
TA: I think this is what's go on. I mean, in the US they don't even try and hide it ... Halliburton, Dick Cheney's old company, is trying to gobble up all the old contracts. Richard Perle has just resigned because of too-close links with companies getting Defense Department contracts and I think Tony Blair was going to say we need a bit of the action. That's what really is go on. I cannot see the Americans allowing the French and the Germans part of the action because they refuse to support the war, and so the United Nations being brought in to give retrospective sanction to the war is not going to be acceptable to many people.
"Iraq has been a very weak country and there are many of us asking how come that the United Nations found it incapable to prevent an open act of aggression by the United States and Britain. So the United Nations is in a quandary ... either it acts as an instrument of US foreign policy, in which case everything is fine, but if it doesn't, then the Americans feel it has no place in the world."
MM: In terms of getting a slice of the action, surely the US must feel at some point that they owe Tony Blair, given that he has taken such domestic pain on this issue.
TA: Well, they have been nice to him. They'll make sure he gets a few crumbs, but I think ... you know, just before the war began, when there were votes taking place the House of Commons and Britain was wanting to delay it, Donald Rumsfeld let the truth out. He said "We don't need the British troops to take Iraq. If you don't want to give them, keep them away and we'll go in ourselves." Of course this bold talk has now been discredited by the resistance, not just of Saddam Hussein, but of the Iraqi people, who don't like being liberated. That's become very obvious.
MM: Just to go back to this question of contracts and who wants what. Is there evidence that already British companies are getting angry about possible exclusion? With news of the Halliburton, things like that?
TA: Well, obviously. I think, one reason Blair remains close to the States is Britain is a medium-sized northern European country totally outplayed by Germany inside Europe, so his only basis for being that close to the United States is that that gives Britain more importance and helps it economically, and if that is seen not to be the case, I think the mood here will be irresistible that Britain should go towards Europe. As it is, the Scottish national leaders are saying that if Scotland were independent they would have gone with France and Germany and not with Britain. So there's all sorts of things going on and the effects of this war are going to be very deep and with us for the next years.
MM: Let's talk just for a moment about post-Saddam Iraq, and I notice that the chief commander of British troops in Iraq, Brian Burridge, has said "We don't want to conquer a second Mesopotamia." The goal is to hand everything over to the Iraqi people. Surely any replacement Iraqi government is going to demand that?
TA: It depend what is the government is. I mean, the notion that the United States has gone to war, losing men in this war, spending billions to take Iraq just to hand it back to a democratically elected constituent assembly ... no-one believes that for a moment.
MM: But Bush and Blair are on record saying just that ... it's up to the Iraqis to run the place.
TA: Well, they were on record saying just that for Afghanistan, and what we've got in Afghanistan is a total puppet government which can only be sustained by foreign troops. I do not believe that they will allow elections to take place in Iraq because elections can always produce a government which is hostile to the West and which demands control of its own resources, so I think essentially what we are going to see for a long time, once they succeed in capturing Baghdad, when they do, is an American occupation team which will run the country for some time until they consider it safe to hand it back to the Iraqis, and who knows when it will be safe.
MM: And an American occupation then, right in the middle of Arabia, backed up by what could be a very, very considerable force ... what ripple effect do you imagine that might have on the rest of the region?
TA: Well, it's already beginning to have a ripple effect, that we've seen both from Jordan and from Syria, and other parts of the Arab world, young men going to volunteer and saying, question we want to fight for Iraq". This is now nothing much to do with the personal characteristics of Saddam Hussein. This has become a war in which large numbers of Arabs feel that a sovereign Arab state has been occupied and attacked by Britain and the United States of America and that they are determined to resist it, and I think this will create instability in this region for some time to come.
MM: Let me ask you just finally about the role of the UN. You'd be aware that there would be more conservative commentators arguing, as they are arguing in Washington these days, why should the UN have any role in Iraq when in fact it was the Security Council that was perfectly happy to go along with a regime continuing to be run by Saddam with all his weapons of mass destruction?
TA: Well, let's be clear about this ... Saddam was at his most dangerous when he was a close ally of the west in the middle '80s. That is when he was armed by the United States and Britain and other countries to fight both the Iranians and his own people. Subsequently, this situation has changed. Iraq has been a very weak country and there are many of us asking how come that the United Nations found it incapable to prevent an open act of aggression by the United States and Britain. So the United Nations is in a quandary ... either it acts as an instrument of US foreign policy, in which case everything is fine, but if it doesn't, then the Americans feel it has no place in the world. So it's something which has to be sorted out and maybe we will see big changes and debates about the future of the United Nations in the coming years. And it's from that that point of view that I say that the occupation of Iraq is going to determine the shape of the politics of the 21st century.
MM: In the short term the UN Security Council has agreed to a draft resolution to restart the oil-for-food program. Do you at least welcome that?
TA:I don't welcome that because this is money that belongs to the people of Iraq, and the Geneva Conventions state very clearly that when a war is being fought, the maintenance and care of the civilian population is the task of the belligerent states. So I see no reason why this money should be used to support the occupied cities or occupied villages of Iraq when the money belongs to the Iraqis.
MM: All right, Tariq Ali, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us tonight.
TA: Thank you.
Tariq Ali is editor of the New Left Review and author of The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London: Verso, 2002). This interview was broadcast on ABC-TV's program Lateline on 28 March 2003.
Also by Tariq Ali on the Evatt site:
- A second resolution is not enough, by Tariq Ali
- The US Vs Iraq: Gareth Evans and Tariq Ali are interviewed by Maxine McKew
- Tariq Ali on fundamentalisms
Also about the Iraq war on the Evatt site:
- One rule for them, by George Monbiot
- The First Casualty: Introduction to the revised edition, by John Pilger
- The first casualty, Editorial by Evatt Foundation President, Bruce Childs.
- 1,000 Voila Moments to stop the war, by Naomi Klein
- Musicians unite to win without war, by Emmylou Harris Lou Reed and 64 others
- The trans-Atlantic aftershock of September 11, by Immanuel Wallerstein
- Other methods, not madness, by Ghassan Hage
- Australia walks against the war, by Bruce Childs
- President's perspective, by Bruce Childs
- Blair's in the doghouse by Linda Heard
- Pro-war case turns into farce, by Fay Gervasoni
- Powell's dubious case for war, by Phyllis Bennis
- Courageous leadership for global transformation, by Nelson Mandela
- Deciphering the Bush administration's motives, by Michael T. Klare
- Somebody else's civil war, by Michael Scott Doran
- Can music make a difference? by Christopher Sheil
- Sydney's walk against war, speeches by Sharan Burrow, Pat Power, Judy Davis, Kassim Abood, John Pilger & Rawan Abdul Nabi.
- National weekend of action against a war on Iraq, by Nerissa Bradley
- Another century of war? by Gabriel Kolko
- Steve Earle's fighting words, by Vit Wagner
- An open letter from the academic community opposing a US invasion of Iraq
- Uncle oSAMa says, by Tom Paine.com
- Bali proves that war on terror isn't working, by Jonathan Freedland
- A letter to the Australian public, by Australia's elders
- Facts are the best cure for this outbreak of war fever, by Simon Tisdall
- The US Vs Iraq: Gareth Evans and Tariq Ali are interviewed by Maxine McKew
- A history lesson on Iraq, by Phillip Knightley
- George Bush channels George Orwell, by Daniel Kutzman
- Iraq: the Final Storm,
by Ron Jacobs - Our mission for this new millenium, by Tom Uren
- What Israel has done, by Edward Said