An open letter to David Cameron and William Hague

Dear David Cameron and William Hague,

Firstly I would like to congratulate David Cameron on his speech to the conference yesterday. While you can hardly acknowledge this, it is going to be very difficult for you to win the next election—maybe it would be as well to get it out of the way. I do hope that the party doesn't panic and lurch to somewhere else as it surely needs some more time to recreate itself in preparation for government and some of the things I think you are right about are traditional conservative themes, like the value of structure: family, religion, community and so on. I can see two things going right out of fashion in the next political cycle (assuming we don’t have a complete breakdown): the further erosion of our social structures and war. Looking at the political scene across the Atlantic is downright depressing but one of its more interesting and hopeful aspects is the Buchananite conservatives who seem more collectively sane than any other group at the moment.

One such conservative who interests me a great deal is Scott Ritter who has, as you know, an immense experience in Arms inspection and had responsibility within UNSCOM for penetrating Saddam Hussein’s concealment programmes: if you haven’t already read it I thoroughly recommend Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of American's Intelligence Conspiracy. Indeed it is a great shame that you didn’t invite Scott Ritter to speak at the conference; instead we had John Bolton on the fringe spreading fear, hate and ignorance and preparing the ground for (another) cataclysmic war in the middle east, cleverly packaging it in realistic rather than idealistic garb (all the more palatable for our new PM), which brings me to a regrettable clause in David Cameron’s speech – ‘we have Iran trying to get hold of a nuclear weapon and threatening Israel’.

The excellent thing about Ritter is that, as Seymour Hersh says in the foreword to the above, Ritter ‘is a purist, an uncompromising believer in empiricism who has never been afraid to tell the truth to superiors’. William Hague has said in a speech to the Global Strategy Forum ‘David Cameron and I are determined that when we come to office, we and our relevant colleagues will be steeped in knowledge of the current events and indeed the history of the Middle East. And, accordingly, we are doing our utmost to learn.’ This is a bold and very wise promise, and if you show signs of sticking to it it would be almost enough to guarantee my vote by itself. If you haven’t already read it I recommend as essential reading Target Iran: The Truth about the US government’s plans for regime change, also by Ritter. If you had read this book I doubt very much if you would have placed that phrase linking Iran, nuclear weapons and the destruction of Israel into your speech.

The regime-change strategy in Iraq we can now see as a horrible disaster, starting with George H. W. Bush, picking up speed under Bill Clinton and Madelaine Albright and reaching its logical conclusion with Tony Blair and George W. Bush's invasion (Tony Blair being the true architect of the Iraq fiasco—reread his 1999 Chicago Speech). We built up Saddam to attack Iran, helped him to procure and manufacture WMDs and gave him cover while he used them and brutalised his own people, as long as he obliged us by attacking Iran, but when his war economy started to collapse in the after war we (and the Gulf states) ignored the warning signs. After he invaded Kuwait, rather than offering him the face-saving exit option the Russians had brokered we chose the military option. At this stage Iraq, you will recall, had a near first world infrastructure. The bombing campaign against Iraq itself was intended to destroy this infrastructure and combine with sanctions to bring about regime change. The brutality of then ensuing siege, and its heartless prosecution at the UN, was distressing for all those that witnessed it, including our neglecting to clean up the enormous quantities of depleted uranium left in Iraq (and still there to this day) and the embargoing of the medicines to relieve the consequences. What is abundantly clear from Ritter’s account is that an aggressive inspection regime was the best way of stripping Iraq of its WMDs and keeping them out, but the US governments destroyed the inspections regime when it looked like certifying Iraq free of WMDs, ending the sanctions and endangering the regime-change policy. We know that over a million people have died since 2003, nearly all of them violently, and there is evidence that a non-trivial proportion of that mortality may be directly attributed to the military occupation (see The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness; I have seen it suggested that an analysis of the places where mortality is highest coincide with the areas most heavily occupied by the US military).[1] By some estimates the increased mortality in Iraq since 1990 has lead to 3.9 million deaths. It is difficult to argue with the fact that pre-1990-Iraq’s surprisingly non-sectarian civil society with a flourishing middle class and near first-world infrastructure has been replaced with the second most dysfunctional state in the world according to Foreign Policy and a world-class training ground for highly-delusional Saudis bent on violently transforming the region into a caliphate.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is a disaster in which the UK and USA have no small hand, with successive governments of all stripes playing their part. The lack of any effective opposition on both sides of the pond in the latest phase, the 2003 invasion, is making it particularly difficult to break this destructive cycle, the pain and humiliation of the current situation making another war looking ever more attractive in the hope that it may distract us from the dismal consequences of the current one. Seymour Hersh is reporting that Gordon Brown is signalling to the US administration that he would be up for whacking the Iranians in order to restore honour after the Iranians lifted our sailors (and graciously handed them back after the a successful diplomatic campaign). If this is true then it is utterly pathetic and truly criminal. Would you not agree that, in hindsight, it was a dire strategic miscalculation of the Conservatives to disable all critical faculties and allow us to be stampeded into this disastrous war, leaving region unbalanced with Iran naturally free from the counterweights it had on its eastern and western borders, and clearly unsettling to both the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states alike. The irony of this situation is that this is not the doing of the Iranians at all, but a natural consequence of US-UK short-sighted and aggressive foreign policy. Now we have the spectacle of the American sponsored Iraqi and Afghanistan governments welcoming and courting the Islamic Republic of Iran while the US vice president tries to start a war with and Iran. This is complete madness, but it looks from your speech that you are signing onto a narrative which will leave you, again, in the slip stream of New Labour and the Neoconservatives.

Demonising Saddam’s Iraq was an essential step in creating the conditions for the last war and the same is evidently true of President Ahmadinejad and Iran for the next one. These are the facts, or at least the 'facts' that are supported by verifiable evidence.

• The Iranians have no nuclear weapons programme but they do have a pressing need for a nuclear energy programme, far more pressing than when the Americans persuaded the Shah to start a nuclear energy programme (see CASMII fact sheet). Iran and the USA are signatories to the NPT and under that treaty Iran is entitled to prepare nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes and further entitled under the treaty to assistance in this. Iran has repeatedly been frustrated in its efforts to develop its nuclear energy programme through contracts to supply it with materials being unilaterally broken, forcing it first onto the black market and latterly to insist on mastering the technology.
• Ayatollah Khomeini has declared nuclear weapons un-Islamic in a fatwa and Iran has always insisted that it has no plans for a nuclear weapons programme. No evidence has come to light of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme despite the most comprehensive inspections regime ever undertaken by the IAEA. This is not so say that they don’t have one or that the IAEA doesn’t have outstanding questions—the IAEA clearly does, but the kind of aggressive inspections regime that was so successful in clearing Iraq of WMDs is in play and the inspectors are indicating that the process is far from frustrated and should be allowed to proceed. Ritter’s Target Iran opens up this process in detail (see also his latest assessment Iraq Will Have to Wait).
  
• No (responsible) Iranian has threatened Israel with destruction. President Ahmadinejad in the October 2005 Future without Zionism conference quoted Ayatollah Khomeini in saying (in a direct translation of the Farsi) “The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” and likened the situation to Apartheid South Africa and the USSR, the ‘Zionist regime’ being both founded on injustice and unsustainable, and would in time be replaced by something more just and sustainable (see "Wiped off the Map" - The Rumor of the Century). We may vigorously disagree and even deplore this sentiment but it is very far from the threat to destroy Israel that is usually depicted. Ahmadinejad has said repeatedly (as has Ayatollah Khamenei) that Iran will not attack any state. Indeed Iran has not initiated an attack on any other state in modern times.

The demonising of President Ahmadinejad is one of the most reactionary and irrational campaigns I have ever seen. Maybe he was unwise to pick on the Holocaust theme to test our professed love of liberal free speech after the Danish cartoon affair, and if he ever really expressed doubts of the reality of the Holocaust then he overstepped the mark—the impression that Iranians would in any way retrospectively connive in the Holocaust has apparently caused deep irritation at home, as the Iranians have a flourishing Jewish community (which unlike in Iraq has been protected) and disapprove of Israel on a political level, not on religious or personal grounds.

Having said this there is some logic in choosing to inquire into American and European attitudes to the Holocaust. While there are no words to adequately condemn the Holocaust itself, the hysterical reaction to Ahmadinejad’s scepticism of Euro-American attitudes is revealing and worth inquiring after the cause. Ahmadinejad clearly sees a connection between Euro-American guilt and the pass that Israel is given to respond disproportionately to attacks on its civilian population or even armed forces.

Every comment of his has a tendency to be twisted, even his apparently incredible comments on Iran being a free of homosexuality are far from as silly as they sound once properly explained (see Getting Lost In Translation). Please bear with me while I try to peal back the layers of demagoguery which cannot be conducive to a rational and constructive response to the situation.

One thing that is consistent with President Ahmadinejad is that he is above all interested in ideas and believes that this is the best way to resolve differences; he has confidence in his ideas and is willing to go to some lengths to engage. From his letters to President Bush and to the American people, to the lengthy interview with Charlie Rose and his speech at Columbia University and even his blog, he has put great effort into engaging people with ideas and has not been content to simply preach to the choir but do so in the most hostile situations. From what I have seen of his recent speeches and interviews is impressive, whether grappling with the issues with Charlie Rose (bearing in mind the utterly divergent perspectives of Iranians and Americans on the issues that are diving them) or the discourse at the start of the Columbia speech on the importance of the ethical use of science founded on Old Testament scriptures, which ought to be shared by Iranians and Americans (though sadly, perhaps not by the typical American to be found in a bastion of liberal arts) President Ahmadinejad has shown himself more than capable and committed to reason and dialogue.

It is difficult to verify to what extent Iran is a 'state sponsor of terrorism'—many would not find their support of Hezbollah and the Shia of Southern Lebanon so despicable (bearing in mind that Hezbollah emerged as a result of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon) and the Iranians did offer in a proposal to the Swiss ambassador immediately after the 2003 invasion of Iraq a comprehensive plan of peace for the region which offered to accept much tighter controls by the IAEA in exchange for “full access to peaceful nuclear technology” and turned Hezbollah into an entirely political party; this was rejected out of hand, apparently by the vice president. David Milliband in a recent interview with the FT was explicitly pressed on whether he could provide any evidence that Iran was fuelling the Iraqi insurgency with materiel and acknowledged that he didn’t have any such evidence.

On the other hand we see the very people who sold us the Iraq adventure, and are most desperate to find a distraction from its baleful consequences, rerunning the same agitprop operation with Iran and it is working a treat, with apparently the liberal and conservative oppositions in the USA and UK trooping along like dutiful sheep. My question is this: does the whole world have to go up in flames before we catch on? Can we please have an effective opposition for this next fiasco, which if it is allowed to proceed, will make the whole Iraq adventure look like the cakewalk we were all promised. You might like to start by inquiring as to why the PM has placed an entirely token contingent of UK forces on the Iran-Iraq border if it isn't intended to suck the UK into a looming conflagration with Iran.

Chris Dornan

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[1] The John Hopkins survey published in The Lancet that reported 600,000 deaths for the first 30 months of the occupation represented an increase in mortality over the dire situation under sanctions and was conservative, the researchers bing able able to witness the death certificates in over 80% of their sample; the recent ORB survey that estimate of 1.2 million deaths was consistent with this conclusion.