There is No Lesser of the Two Evils

For those of us who have no safe ideological haven, things are getting tougher. If you are neither with them nor against them when it comes to the war on Iraq, you are likely to find yourself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

It is easy to deal with abstractions, historical precedents and broad predictions, and the simplest of minds in such contexts can formulate the clearest of perspectives. The United States wants Iraq’s oil. To defend Iraq is to defend the Arab nation. To defend the Arab nation is to defend Islam against the new Crusaders.

Unfortunately, even if you accept all that, it still leaves the reality of day-to-day existence to be dealt with. And that is something the ideologues never have much time for.

Take the apparently unobjectionable statement that, by opposing a US invasion of Iraq, you are effectively supporting the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps it is better to explore this by way of an analogy. Suppose you know of a family who live on a farm. You know for a fact that the husband is a brute who rapes his wife and regularly beats his children. You also know of a notoriously unscrupulous multinational corporation, which wants to purchase the farm and use any means necessary to get rid of the brute. It is using the excuse of “liberating” the mother and children to achieve those ends.

Suppose further that, under pressure from the community, the husband has allowed the social worker into his house, and denies the presence of a belt on the premises. The social worker has not been able to get his hands on the belt. Perhaps the husband has hidden it. Perhaps the social worker, a pusillanimous individual, has simply overlooked it. In any case, you are not satisfied that things do not return to normal as soon as the social worker goes home.

Do you therefore help further the ends of the immoral multinational in order to bring the suffering of the beaten wife and abused children to an end? If you say yes, you do so in the knowledge that such an organization can only cause suffering in other ways, as the vehicle for exploitation there and elsewhere.

But if you say no, you are in effect saying that you accept that this poor woman and her children could be black and blue for the rest of their lives. That is not an easy thing for any decent person to live with.

Another dimension to this quandary is the ever-sensitive subject of religion. Something extraordinary happened the other day, the implications of which were largely ignored. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz was interviewed by the BBC and said that “all Arabs and Muslims support Iraq” while praising a suicide bomber who had killed four US marines earlier that day - all in the lofty rhetoric of Islamic jihad.

But hold on a second. Tariq Aziz is a Christian, as are many other of Saddam’s most trusted men. Indeed, Iraq’s Christian community was long since co-opted into the Ba’athist regime, which prides itself on its secularist credentials. Saddam Hussein himself was never seen praying in public until after he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Moreover, the words “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) were only added to the flag when the then US-led forces threatened to kick Iraq out of the country it had occupied.

Now here he is again, secular Saddam, telling the world’s Muslims that it is their religious duty to defend Iraq. And the irony thickens when you think that he is addressing a primarily Shiite population, whom he and his henchmen have persecuted for decades on religious and other grounds.

So does this mean that those going to Iraq for jihad are wrong? Well, not entirely, because the fact remains that Iraq is largely an Islamic country and home to many of Islam’s holy shrines. The American administration is wholly aligned with Israel, which itself occupies Islamic holy ground.

Having said this, you can’t help feeling that, however just the cause, the 6,000 or so Arabs who have flooded into Iraq have been duped.

In the end, perhaps turning a blind eye would have been the moral thing to do. After all, many beaten women, despite everything, keep on loving the brute who beats them, as do their children. Ultimately, it is their choice, and to go knowingly against their wishes by jumping on the back of the multi-national corporation, which pretends to be helping them only to get their land, is really only to sink further into the moral quagmire.

Or perhaps the only honest statement to make under the circumstances is that you don’t honestly know what to think. Of course, the problem with this is that the world now wants only the fog of war to be lifted by a whirlwind of simple answers and deceptively short-term solutions.