Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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Previous Convictions

Prospect Magazine, London, February 1998

Seven years ago, during the winter of 1990-91, I was contracted by BBC Television to be one of their commentators on the 'Gulf War', and I urged that Western leaders should resist any temptation to march on to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein, even though he really did have the most cruel record in the whole history of cruel Mesopotamia. I also aired my view in a weekly column in The Times and in many interviews given to other Western radio and television stations, including the big American networks.

My conviction was the product, not only of my acquaintance with the Middle East, but also with 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland. I had watched British soldiers being initially welcomed on the streets of Belfast by a wide cross-section of Catholics as their saviors from the bullies of the Orange Order, only to turn on the same soldiers a few months later as invaders. Who loves authority for long? Especially when it has a foreign accent? Not many of us.

But then, one day, on the afternoon of Thursday, February 28th, 1991, on the 44th day of the war, news suddenly came that president George Bush had ordered the forces of the 29 Coalition countries to stop fighting, without even entering any of the southern Iraqi towns that had been theirs for the taking.

I was shocked, and I might have looked it, for David Dimbleby (spelling?), the presenter, turned to me first among the several people he had with him in that session.

I hesitated for a moment. Britain was euphoric in its celebration of the victory. 42 Iraqi army divisions in Kuwait and southern Iraq had been routed in less than 100 hours of fighting on the ground for the loss of only about 200 (including 40 British) soldiers, and the celebration was understandable. But there was no escape.

"I must be one of a few people in Britain who're devastated", I said. "This means Saddam will now rule Iraq for many more years". He had not been weakened sufficiently for the population to overthrow him without arms or for the scattered remnants of the conscript army to turn on his various personal armies. I added that I had hoped for at least the southern half of the country to be turned over to the inhabitants and the conscript army. With foreign aid, that 'free Iraq' would soon have acted as a lure and, caught between it and the Kurds in the north, Saddam's own palace guards would, in all probability, have assassinated him.

The people did, of course, rise and thousands of conscripts also joined them. But both the Shias in the south and the Kurds in the north were crushed with ease, and we watched on, day after day, helplessly, until eventually a tide of anger sweeping Britain and America forced John Major and George Bush to send some troops back to the north to save at least the two million fleeing Kurds from certain genocide.

Later still, Saddam drained the extensive wetlands in the south to flush out the bands of guerrillas from among the Marsh Arabs who continued to resist him, and with the marshes also died one of the great spectacles of the world in the birthplace of the original myth of the Flood: the over-wintering in those wetlands each year of millions of birds from Siberia.

Despite these calamities, I persisted in believing for some time that it would have been unwise for American and British troops - the rest of the coalition would have dropped out - to push on to Baghdad, and I had to admit that my theory of Saddam being overthrown by his own people if the south had been liberated was just that, a theory.

But gradually I began to believe that the only morally acceptable outcome of the war would have been to continue until the despot and his henchmen had been toppled, and that the cost to the West would have been negligible. There would have been no need for British or American soldiers conducting traffic in Baghdad. Plenty of southerners and Kurds would have taken over such tasks and soon a government of national unity would have run the place.

It is, of course, naive to suggest that George Bush, the oil tycoon, would have listened to voices like mine instead of Nato-member Turkey or oil-rich Saudi Arabia, neither of which wanted democracy being given the slightest chance in Iraq. But we commentators probably made the work of the Turks and the Saudis easier. If a Kurd such as Hazhir Teimourian, whose people have been gassed by Saddam, cautions against pushing on to Baghdad, the policy must surly be right, both politically and morally.

It must be admitted that democracy would have found it hard to flourish in the culture of Islam and the passion of Iraq, and the country might have even broken up into its various pieces. But then, the Kurds should not have been forced by imperial Britain into Arab Iraq in 1920, in the first place, and the Shias have had a miserable time at the hands of the minority Sunnies since the country's creation.

Whatever the speculation, clearly the outcome of the war has been a disaster both for the West and for the people of Iraq. The country's neighbours, too, have every reason not to sleep soundly at night. Saddam and his sons are as tyrannical as ever, and they are poised, sooner or later, to become a regional superpower once more. Armed with their irrational sense of grievance and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, they could yet make the war of 1991 look like a tribal tiff.

Courtesy of Prospect Magazine, London, February 1998

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