No War with Iraq
by Johan Galtung and Dietrich Fischer, December 18, 2002

The Bush administration argues that a military attack on Iraq is justified because Saddam Hussein's regime has assisted, even hosted, Al Qaeda and poses a threat of attacking Israel or others with weapons of mass destruction. But it has been unable to convince either world public opinion or the UN and the Security Council (except for the UK). Do the US military build-up around Iraq and plans for a regime change under US military occupation have other motives?

Saudi Arabia, up to now a key US ally in the Gulf region, looks increasingly unreliable, given that 15 of the 19 suspected 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and Saudi money may be a major source of financing for Al Qaeda, with which it shares a radical form of Islam, Wahhabism. So Iraq could replace Saudi Arabia as a regional base. This would also give the US access to Iraqi oil and would liberate Israel from the perceived Iraqi threat.

But a war with Iraq could have disastrous consequences for the region. The 1991 Gulf war caused about 300,000 direct Iraqi casualties, and an estimated one million deaths, mostly among children, from the economic sanctions. Bringing the war to Baghdad would hardly produce less suffering to a people that has already suffered enormously from inner and outer foes. Attacking Iraq because Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator would be like shooting down a passenger plane because the pilot has committed a crime.

Attacking Iraq could unleash a civil war along many fault- lines (for and against Hussein's Baath regime; Sunni-Shia; Iraqis- Kurds; Kurds-Turks). Other armies in the Middle East could be drawn in. The hatred of US/UK foreign policy in Arab countries and among the world's Muslims in general would reach new levels, at best only leading to a long economic boycott of US/UK goods and services, at worst to massive violence. The fragile tissue of world order would suffer enormous rifts.

There are alternatives to war! The UN inspection team should be enlarged to find and destroy any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, control potential production and storage facilities, and prevent their future acquisition. But why should similar inspections not also be conducted in other countries in the region?

From 1994-2001, 54 nations negotiated a treaty to verify the 1972 biological weapons ban and reached unanimous agreement, with the sole exception of the Bush administration, which wrecked the treaty. The US would be in a much stronger position to demand inspections in Iraq if it signed that treaty.

The UN has successfully ended wars in Cambodia, Namibia and elsewhere by organizing democratic elections. Only the Iraqi people--no outside powers--have the right to change their regime, and they should be given the right to do so if they wish. But after the debacle of the 2000 Presidential elections in Florida, it is embarrassing for the US to demand internationally supervised elections.

Equality before the law is a basis for world order, not as a utopian principle but as an order that derives legitimacy, and hence compliance, from treating equal cases equally.

For conflict resolution, the UN Security Council should appoint a "Wise People's Commission," e.g. with Nobel laureates Carter-Gorbachev-Mandela, to assess the goals of the parties, trying to bridge legitimate aspirations of all.

A significant step towards the end of the Cold War was the 1973-75 Helsinki Conference, which gave rise to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Similarly, the UN Security Council (four Christian and one Confucian country in the permanent nucleus) could cooperate with the Organization of the Islamic Conference, representing 56 Islamic countries, to sponsor an open- ended Conference on Security and Cooperation in the Middle East, to consider:

- An inspection regime for weapons of mass destruction in the region, opening Iraq for inspection and UN supervised elections;

- A democracy/human rights campaign in the region;

- Outstanding issues from the Iraq/Iran and Iraq/Kuwait wars;

- Moving forward on the Kurdish four-countries issue;

- The European Community as a possible model for a Middle East Community of Israel-Syria-Lebanon-Palestine-Jordan-Egypt.

With many parties involved in negotiations and many issues on the table, it is often easier to find mutually acceptable solutions to conflicts, because each party can gain something dear to it in return for something it considers less important.