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Eshin Direct

May 20, 2004 Change of Heart on Iraq?

[Post altered to remove link to external site and comments deleted to remove reference to that site in accordance with referred site's wishes. The bulk of the post remains intact however since I can't be bothered to rewrite my comments.]

This was my response to a blogger’s post on the why they had changed their mind’s about the US involvement in Iraq. The comparison was made between China’s past record on human rights and Iraq’s human rights records and that US involvement might not be such a bad thing after all.

I believe the point here is that if you really want to achieve a sense of freedom and self-determination in a nation or peoples, it will never be possible to do it through external force. The “change within” component is very much a part of creating that believe in oneself and a nation’s self in having the responsibility and empowerment of forging their own destiny.

Comparing Iraq to China is an interesting point of view. Some of your initial argument seems to be based on, “well, they are trying to come clean about this fiasco” so that makes it alright. That is not the point. I don’t think we’d be saying to a murderer who was caught with a bloody knife in his hand, and who decided to exercise an open/honest dialogue with the authorities, the same thing. We might offer them leniancy on some level, but we would never condone their crime.

Likewise in Iraq. The prisoner abuses in Iraq are presumably criminal under various international and US local laws. The fact that the US is being open about them and going through a trial procedure (even if only show-boating), should not be a call for praise and justification for the invasion of Iraq. And to date, the reason why it hasn’t been, is because that Western mindset takes this as a given. It is assumed that they should take responsibility for this.

But the fact remains that a crime was perpetrated by forces representing the US, who had gone into war on the platform of benevolent liberators. This is independent of Iraq’s past histories.

What I believe you hold up so dearly is the system of accountability by those in power. By your new change of mindset, we could praise the Chinese government for telling us that their current injustices are far more lightweight than say previous regimes and governments of China. As you can see, it makes a piss-poor argument.

When you take the moral highground, the US should be held accountable for any atrocities that its soldiers commit in their name. This is how they sold their little war to the world and now the world wants them to be accountable, and justly so. If they didn’t want to be concerned with that, then they should have simply stated a more simple and humble approach to their invasion of Iraq. One, at least, that they can live up to.

If you are going to position yourself as a liberating benevolent force, then the honus is on you to have better control on your troops.

But in all honesty, what did you expect? It’s was always going to be a war of conquest and subsequent occupation. I’m still against the US involvement in Iraq but even I know that these things were bound to happen, and these things have always happened to establish dominance of an enemy people and affirm a power that was taken and not given.

And therein lies the crux of the matter. The power still has not been given to the people. To continue your comparison, how well do you think it would go down in China, today, if US troops and tanks started to roll down the streets?

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