Rethinking Iraq

openDemocracy : It is nearly two years since Iraq was invaded. There proved to be no weapons of mass destruction. Elections have been held. What is your view now? Have you changed your mind at all? Learnt any lessons? And do you have anything to say to those you disagreed with when the war began?

Round One

Round Two

Huda Jawad, Forward Thinking

When I was two years old my family, who were under continuous and relentless persecution by Saddam’s regime, were forced to flee Iraq. For me, this war was never about weapons of mass destruction or terrorist links with al-Qaida. This war or invasion – call it what you will – was about reclaiming my freedom and that of many tens of thousands of Iraqis who felt Saddam’s arm of tyranny destroying their lives.

George W Bush and Tony Blair’s statements about assisting Iraqis in their fight for freedom, democracy and restoration of their human rights were empty words that left a bitter taste in my mouth. I bored my friends and family with my loud protestations at the television set every time I was confronted with a slick media-savvy soundbite about the brutality of the regime in Iraq by the very people who had put him there and helped him stay there.

I was enraged at the sheer arrogance of the pro-war governments and certain European supporters of Saddam, such as France and Germany, who thought that Iraqis and those with an interest in middle-eastern history would so easily forget the technological, financial and political support they afforded Saddam and his Ba’ath party.

How dare they talk about human rights when they were the ones who supplied Saddam with sophisticated know-how regarding “interrogation” and torture techniques? Did they think we would easily forget the chemicals and weapons that they provided him with when the events of Halabja and the Anfal took place? What about the promises of freedom and democracy in 1991? Shi’a and Kurds risked their lives in response to your calls for uprising; where were the fires of freedom burning? Certainly not in Basra, Najaf or Karbala!

Many supporters of Saddam’s removal were under no illusion as to the motivation of the coalition forces for their adventure in Iraq. But, despite the hypocrisy, historical betrayal, and greedy track record of previous endeavours of “freedom” in my part of the world, I, like many others who despised Saddam and all he stood for, could not help but see the window of opportunity that those in power had conspired to open. Perhaps the thirty-year nightmare of Saddam’s regime could finally come to an end?

Imagine the joy and relief of waking up one day and not having to hide who you are, or the thought of calling up an aunt you haven’t spoken to for over twenty-six years: it was all too tantalising to miss.

Maybe it’s a hypocrisy and double standard I could live with, for a while anyway, until the Iraqis were ready to take over and govern themselves.

The 30 January 2005 election was preceded and followed by violence from both sides: coalition forces and “insurgents” (including the elusive “foreign fighters”). This not only tempered celebration of the election’s historic importance for Iraq and the region but also cast doubt on its very legitimacy. This is a vitally serious issue: if the integrity of the election process is clearly suspect, and if those elected to draft the new constitution come to be seen as illegitimate or mere stooges of the “occupiers”, then all the sacrifices endured in the war would be in vain.

I agree that voters should be able to know whom they are voting for and what they stand for. But no electoral process is perfect, especially one arising from the ashes of the Ba’ath party and a two-year experience with western troops, who have no clear reason about the cause they are fighting for, especially since Saddam’s capture in December 2003.

We should be looking instead at the number of Iraqis who were willing to risk their lives in order to vote. Despite logistical difficulties and security risks, estimates quote an 8 million figure. Over half of those who were eligible turned out to the ballot boxes, a turnout many western democracies can only hope for.

Regardless of whether the electoral process was legitimate or its outcome pre-determined, opponents of the election must heed the significance of the 8 million people who exercised their will and freedom of expression to vote in the face of extreme insecurity and instability. If anything, this is a reinforcement of the desire for a new style of government based on popular support. This cannot be ignored or dismissed as yet another conspiracy theory or an imperialist whitewash, particularly since the coalition forces were reluctant to set an election date only a few months after the toppling of Saddam’s regime.

The eyes of the world, and more importantly the region, are on the majority Shi’a, who have won a significant number of seats in the assembly. But the election result opens more questions than answers.

First, will this democracy experiment, albeit still in its infancy, work? Will the Sunni be reconciled to an electoral process which they feel has so far marginalised them?

Second, will the Shi’a, often portrayed as a single homogenous bloc with strong loyalties to Iran, work to rebuild Iraq and go about the business of drawing the various minorities and factions of Iraqi society into the constitution-writing process, or will they use their power to avenge the repression and bloodshed of the past decades?

Third, will Iraq’s neighbours allow the new assembly to function without continual interference?

Fourth, and most important, will the Americans allow the democratic process to run its course even if the leader that emerges from it does not toe their line?

If the answers to these questions are not positive, then we will have to ask a fifth and final question: how long will it be before the current “insecurity situation” starts to unravel to a point of no return and people will start wishing for the old days of Saddam?

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Douglas Murray, author and journalist

Last month the Iraqi people turned out to vote in defence of their sovereignty and democracy. I, and many millions of others in the west who supported the liberation of their country, believe they deserve and have a right to expect the world’s goodwill and support in their present journey towards junta-free self-determination.

In my opinion, too many people – and too wide a section of the press – have found themselves on the wrong side in the battle for Iraqi freedom. I have always been critical of the anti-war movement, and the manner in which they mobilised. But I do accept that many among the millions who opposed the overthrow of the Iraqi dictatorship did so in a sometimes noble effort to resist bloodshed in Iraq.

Huda Jawad’s grievance against the “hypocrisy” of western powers in overthrowing a leader they are said to have supported is understandable, and she is not alone in feeling this. But I believed two years ago – and this belief is today reinforced – that a country’s cooperation with evil under one government does not negate a subsequent administration in that country from having the right to do right. It has always seemed to me that the argument for inaction on the grounds of a past relationship was just another attempt to avoid dealing with the long-overdue problem.

What has been sad to watch among those who opposed the war for reasons one could understand, was that once the overthrow occurred they too often found themselves willing the occupying forces failure. This was conscience-vanity of the most grotesque kind. When foreign jihadis invaded the country, too many free people condoned and encouraged the terrorists’ actions, covering up for them by claiming, for instance, that only “collaborators” have been targeted by the foreign-led “resistance”, and thus dishonouring the innocents murdered daily.

The sheer number of people worldwide willing to excuse this terrorism – even since 30 January – certainly highlights the ill-feeling which still exists over the invasion. There are understandable reasons for some of that ill-feeling. Elements of post-war reconstruction were certainly under-prepared, and no one yet seems to have been held accountable. Something of an “echo-chamber” seems to have existed among western intelligence agencies. Elements in the armed forces have disappointed, and in the eyes of many fatally undermined, the humanitarian objective of the conflict. And of course – crucially – despite the revelations of Mahdi Obeidi and the Duelfer report, the case that Iraq was an imminent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) danger to the west has been greatly undermined, and the urgent necessity of invading Iraq in 2003 undermined along with it.

In hindsight, both the British and American governments were misguided in the emphasis they put on WMD. I wish, with many others, that the case for regime change on humanitarian grounds had been held up as the only reason we needed for intervention. Signatories to the 1948 United Nations convention did sign up, after all, not just to the “prevention”, but also the “punishment” of “the crime of genocide”.

But reality breaks through, and persuades me that many, including, in Britain, the main opposition party, would never have supported the invasion on solely humanitarian grounds. Indeed, almost nobody would. The British Conservative leader, Michael Howard, has now stated that he would never have led his party to support the government in voting for war if he had known then what he knows now. Many instinctive Conservatives supported the war because they trusted their government – and they are justified in feeling let down. In addition, a significant number of Conservatives backed regime change for the somewhat basic reason, among others, that Conservatives don’t like to be seen “going soft” on these matters. A retrospective reminder of Iraq is that interventions launched to relieve human suffering will never achieve a popular mandate. Of course, the people of Darfur could confirm that.

Many of us, inside and outside Iraq, still trust and believe that the end result in that country will be a democratic state – one kept continuingly free from the shackles of despotic gangsterism by the Iraqi people themselves. Hopefully those who opposed the war may one day see that success in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, is a sweet enough draught to cancel out the bitter Bush-pill necessary to swallow in the process.

Meanwhile, the most appalling consequence for us all in this may be in quite another place. That is the danger that, Aesop-like, future warnings of WMD-cultivation around the world may be treated not as the monumental security threat of our time, but as sinewy attempts to repeat 2003. The danger of this is real, and cannot be overstated. Just because one dog turned out not to have the sharpest of teeth, doesn’t mean no dogs bite.

If Iraq can be assisted to stability then I still believe the war was justified, even if (and it is a heavy burden for all interventionists to bear) the casualty figures even approach those already independently guessed at.

The right thing was done, but it appears to have been done for the wrong reason. Tony Blair’s admirably unguarded remark made (to Peter Stothard) on 13 March 2003 speaks for me too:

“[People] ask why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let’s get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can, you should.”

I believe that Iraq will be seen in years to come as a justifiable deed which was done in 2003 – and not before – “because we could”.

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Khalid Jarrar, Environmental engineer and Blogger

I am a Sunni, but my mother is a Shia. My dad is a communist, my older brother is secular, and my youngest brother wears black t-shirts and listens to heavy metal. This is who I am, and where I come from. I learnt to accept others and live with them peacefully, and actually listen to them, no matter the differences. No prejudgments should be made, and no opinions are less worthy because they come from “different” people. This is what I learnt from my life experience and from my family.

Nevertheless, it is essential, to be in Iraq in order to understand what Iraq is going through right now. Iraq is like a hell on earth, and nothing truly describes what is going on here right now.

I want to make it really clear that I am one of the greatest enemies of Saddam and his regime, and his hardly-smart-enough-to-read-and-write gang. I am one of the biggest opponents of all his tools, his mokhabarat (intelligence service) and all the other security forces that he used to intimidate and kill those who opposed him, and most of all, to stay in power for 35 long years.

I live in Baghdad, I drink the water of Dijla, I feel the sun of tammooz (July). I lived under Saddam’s regime, and I still live in the ruins of Iraq after the war.

There are two things that bother me a lot when people talk about Iraq. The first is the attitude of westerners – especially American and British people. They talk about Iraq as if they think that they have a “say” in Iraq and Iraqi issues. They think it is their right to be involved in our internal affairs, to impose their ideas of democracy and right and wrong, and to control our lives and fates. Imagine Osama bin Laden invading the US, and imposing his idea of right and wrong on the American people, under the point of guns, and then telling the world in all his media channels that he has liberated them.

You might not understand what it is like in Iraq until that happens.

Second, whenever you hear someone talking about Iraq, they desensitise it. They make it a matter of mere numbers, theories and trial-and-error, names on papers, not real people with real lives, in a real country.

The war on Iraq was illegal and unjustified. Why did they choose Saddam and not any other brutal regime in the world? Or in the region? Was it because “they could”? I don’t know which is more shameful: the “because we could” explanation of Douglas Murray, or the “because I could” of President Clinton when he answered the question about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Before the war, life was stable and our everyday security was great: you could go out at 4 am alone in your car without worrying about being killed or kidnapped. You could basically live your life “normally” – as long as you didn’t criticize or oppose Saddam’s regime publicly – which my family and I did, but thank God we were never “caught” doing it!

Many people were killed for stupid reasons. That’s right! Mass graves? That’s correct! But at least, in the midst of all that, you could live your life and raise your children; run a business or go to work, everyday and anytime, feeling safe. On the weekend you could take your family to a restaurant or a park and have fun; you could visit your relatives and friends whenever you liked.

Let me tell you about Iraq now. The war has created so much destruction that we need years, if not decades, for reconstruction to take effect. The infrastructure is in a really bad shape and we have just a few hours of electricity a day. We have to queue up for 14 hours sometimes to get 30 litres of gas to fill our cars; the unemployment rate is over 75 per cent; the universities and all the governmental buildings looted.

Besides all that, we are occupied by an army that will never leave. So many military bases have been built for the American army to stay here permanently. I am an environmental engineer, and I know what I am talking about when I tell you that oil isn’t the only appealing natural resource that Iraq has.

WMD? If you are looking for them try looking in Israel. Links to al-Qaida? The only link found is the letter Q in the words Qaida and IraQ. Humanitarian reasons? Why don’t you take care of your own humanitarian issues? What is the number of homeless people in the USA?

In the past, we used to have one defined enemy (Saddam), now we have lost count. When you go out you are never sure where the bullet will come from: accidental gunfire from American troops or perhaps from one of the un-national guard soldiers? Or will it come from a thief or a terrorist?

Thanks to this horribly-planned war, Iraq has become the richest medium in the world for terrorism. It is now the main front for the war against America, anti-American people from countries all around the world are now gathering in Iraq.

Thanks to American foreign policy, we no longer know who the enemy is. You can be taken to Abu Ghraib, your house can be flattened because Zarqawi might be there, along with Santa Claus and Big Foot.

I have made documentaries for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Channel). I’ve talked to refugees from Fallujah who’ve been living in a mosque in Baghdad for over three months. There are more than 1,000 people, all with heartbreaking stories, who are living like this. Most of them found their houses destroyed: bombed or burnt down. I talked to one old man who used to work in a gas station. The Americans thought he was a terrorist and arrested him (the man can barely even walk). After two months in Abu Ghraib and Om Qasr prisons, they discovered that he was not a terrorist and released him. He came back to find his house destroyed and his wife and two daughters buried underneath.

You can hear thousands of these stories: just stop anyone in the street and ask. We all have plenty of stories: a friend, a brother, a wife or daughter who was killed or sent to prison for no reason; possessions looted by the Americans or the national guard during a house-raid.

And now, after two years of this, they decide that we are finally free and happy! Because we have had elections! I find it almost entertaining to read that Huda Jawad says “I agree that voters should know who are they voting for and what they stand for”. Really? That is very interesting! Finally someone out there thinks that it makes a bit of sense that voters should know the names of the candidates they are voting for.

These elections have been the first in the history of mankind where voters haven’t known the names of the candidates, or their political, economic and social agenda – if they have one in the first place.

People went to vote because they had the smallest hope that by doing so they would throw out the occupying forces, and get their basic needs looked after.

Over half of those who were eligible to vote did so, and that is a big statement. But those who didn’t vote have made just as big a statement. Why? Because they knew that the elections were nothing but an American theatre. Act one: put in place an Iraqi government that asks the Americans to stay. Act two: focus only on those who voted, thus “gaining points” for the Americans. This is exactly what happened. Bush celebrated the elections and considered them a political victory, and then told the world: “See, my war was right! I was right!”

The Shia list only won because it was one of the only lists that had an anti-occupation stand, and of course it had the blessings of Sistani, the religious-un-political leader, who “ordered” Shias to vote.

The question now is: should Saddam’s brutal regime have been left to rule? Should we have waited for another 10, 20, 30 years, or however long it would have taken for the Iraqis themselves to have started a revolution and be in a position to decide the fate of their own country?

Should we have let this “liberation” happen? A liberation which brought so much destruction, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the streets of Baghdad and throughout Iraq, and witnessed torture in Abu Ghraib and other prisons. A liberation which is really an occupation – planning and willing to stay in Iraq forever.

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Doug Ireland, Journalist, Direland

Douglas Murray’s comments unfortunately repeat a slur on the overwhelming majority of those of us who opposed the war which is equally false – to wit, that we coddled Saddam and were opposed to democracy in Iraq.

A war based on lies can never be a “just” war. And so it was, and is, with the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. The rationale offered to the peoples of the United States and Britain – and indeed to the entire world – for the invasion of Iraq now stands as an incontrovertibly false one, just as those of us who opposed the war said before it was launched. We said Saddam’s supposed WMD capacity didn’t exist. The U.S. government’s own chief weapons inspector now says that we were right. We said there was no proof of any link between Saddam and 9/11, as Bush claimed, which was obvious from al-Qaida’s long-proclaimed ideological opposition to the Ba’ath regime. The U.S. government’s own 9/11 Commission has now declared there was never any proof of such a link.

I was one of the hundreds of anti-war intellectuals and peace movement leaders who helped initiate and who signed the principled statement issued in the States back in November 2002 by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, and entitled, “We Oppose Both Saddam Hussein and the U.S. War on Iraq – a call for a new, democratic U.S. foreign policy.” And I am only one of many who opposed this war who have written critically of those misguided progressives and leftists – whose voices are louder than their numbers – who have failed to understand the essentially reactionary, anti-democratic character of most of the leadership of the ongoing Iraqi insurgency.

It is those who waged this war, however, who gave the fascist theocrats infinitely more fertile ground for recruitment. Bush and Blair claimed that their unprovoked invasion of Iraq was part of the so-called “war on terror” (as if the problem of Islamist terrorism was a military, not a political, one).

In a column I wrote the day after Bush’s war speech to the U.S. Congress in March 2003, I said, in analyzing the president’s mendacious bluster, that:

“…his war on Iraq is a gift to the Bin Ladens of this world and to the extremist theocrats; it will fuel the fiery preachments of the Islamist mullahs, facilitating recruitment by Islamist parties everywhere, and creating a climate in which the creation of new generations of terrorists will take a quantum leap.”

Now, Bush’s own new CIA director, Porter Goss, has given testimony before our Congress with more evidence that this prediction – made by many of us who opposed the war – has become a reality: because of the war and the bloody Anglo-American occupation, there are a lot more terrorists today, both inside and outside Iraq, than there were before the invasion.

Khalid Jarrar’s moving testimony about the reality of life in Iraq today – a reality which Murray seems not to have grasped – is eloquent in its description of why the occupation of that country has been, and continues to be, a tragedy for the Iraqi people and an obstacle to the creation of real democracy. While we must, as I have written elsewhere, salute the courage of those Iraqis who risked their lives to go to the polls (in elections which the U.S. long resisted), those elections were only a simulacrum of democracy (see Ronald Bruce St. John’s analysis for Foreign Policy in Focus, “One Election Does Not a Democracy Make”).

Finally, Bush’s exercise in Iraq of his “first-strike doctrine,” which proclaims the right of the American imperium to attack or invade any country any time it chooses, has had at least three damaging effects. It has severely undermined the fragile body of international law, contributed mightily to the nuclear arms race, and encouraged those countries which find themselves on Bush’s hit list (like Iran) to see nuclear weapons as their only protection against an American (or American-sponsored) assault.

For all these reasons, then, I see no reason to alter one whit my opposition to the war in Iraq: what has happened and what has been revealed since the invasion has only strengthened the case against it.

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Douglas Murray, author and journalist

After so much has changed, both in Iraq and internationally, it’s surprising to see some people still holding, unaffected, the opinions they do. If I were, say, Doug Ireland, there would be an astonishing number of details I’d at least feel impelled to consider.

Khalid Jarrar’s sentiment on the overthrow (“Why our dictator? – Why not take out someone else’s genocidal maniac”) finds a western complement in Doug Ireland’s camp. In the “principled statement” which Ireland, Noam Chomsky and others signed before the Iraq war – calling for some more inaction against Saddam Hussein – they came up with a list of things the United States and her allies should do (“the opposite of what it is doing today”) instead of acting against Hussein. As well as calling for the US to wait until it had sorted out world poverty and the Israeli-Palestinian question they called for it to “[End] its support for corrupt and authoritarian regimes, eg. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Egypt.”

I hate to break good news to people in the west so desperate for bad, but if you look at the results in the last few days alone you’ll see it’s looking good on all these fronts. The middle east is changing fast – and not due to pressure from people signing inaction circulars.

As I say – this is just the last few days:

• With US-backed pressure, the pro-Syrian government in Lebanon has been booted out, giving the people of Lebanon their best chance yet to run their own country
• Bashir Assad’s regime in Syria has suddenly “found” Saddam Hussein’s half-brother and a host of other Iraqi Ba’athists who’ve been sitting in Syria, directing terrorism against the Iraqi people
• After a run-in with Condoleezza Rice’s style of diplomacy, Egypt’s “President” Mubarak has agreed that next election he’ll allow someone to stand against him
• Saudi Arabia has admitted it might allow another half of its population – women – to vote in forthcoming elections
• A sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians is getting bigger backing, and looks more promising, than any attempt for the best part of a decade.

I don’t want to sound too Panglossian, but this is all within months of elections in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq.

Under these conditions, Doug Ireland and his co-signers generally feel compelled to do one of three three things:

• claim these events are not happening
• diminish the significance of these events
• claim they have got nothing to do with the United States’s actions.

Personally, if I was him , I’d rather say:

• ok – something has gone right
• it wasn’t an “Iraq – or [insert country name]” option we faced two years ago. It’s bigger than that.

But I’m hoping too much. In truth, the really popular response is to do exactly what Ireland and Jarrar have done – blame what goes wrong on the US, and deny it credit for anything going right.

As Noam Chomsky is there to demonstrate, there are certainly careers to be made in this school of politics. And, unlike governments, you never get held responsible when you’re wrong. There are no strictures or reprimands – it’s a win-win situation. As I’ve said before on openDemocracy, you get to die feeling your conscience is intact, even if your world lies in tatters. It’s the west’s cult of personal self-obsession at its ugliest end-point.

But I would say that to behave like this in today’s world is not just to abnegate responsibility – it is to remove yourself from the debate. So a country’s in a mess. So a dictator’s country provides a haven (as Iraq did) for terrorists. So a people are unable to overthrow a despotic tyranny unaided. Do we do something? Or do we hold historical blame-auctions and perpetually call extra-time for the dictators? We can ask, as Jarrar does, “why Saddam” and continue the blame-game that’s kept the peoples of the middle east on the floor all these years, or we can ask why these countries aren’t fully-functioning partners in the modern world – and do something about it.

The situation in Iraq as a whole is not perfect. We know that. But things are getting better and they will continue to get better – because this is not bin-Laden-ish death-cultism, but freedom that is at work. And Khalid Jarrar should not do himself the disservice of pretending the two are comparable. This is not a conspiracy. This is regime change followed by the setting up of a representative and democratic government. That’s not easy, but it is what is happening. It is being made hard by people like Kazem al-Duma Omar, shown on al-Iraqiya TV a few nights ago, who decided to come over to Iraq from Sudan to fight against Iraq’s future. These are the foreigners we should all join in ridding Iraq of. But if Doug Ireland and others think that people like Omar weren’t there all along, and weren’t going to strike somewhere, sometime, then they’ve read the world before and since 9/11 all wrong.

Meantime I’d like to take the opportunity to assure Khalid Jarrar that though he imagines the US and allied armies are not leaving, and seems convinced this is a permanent “occupation”, the talk in Britain and Washington is all exit-strategies. We don’t want our people to be under threat any more than you do, but as President Bush has said – we’ll stay until the job is done. The “job” is to secure your country from the Omars, and we are doing this because the brave Iyad Allawi (a “thug” according to Doug Ireland, elsewhere) has asked for it, and because we believe your great country, in the precarious dawn of a bright future, needs our temporary help. Do not mix up the medicine with the sickness.

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Huda Jawad, Forward Thinking

It has been interesting to read my fellow-panellists’ viewpoints on Iraq and the elections that took place there at the end of January.

Clearly the issue is very complex and in my opinion there are no morally clear-cut answers to whether Saddam’s despotic regime should have been left to continue abusing Iraqis or whether the British and American governments were justified in deceiving their citizens about the threats, in the form of WMDs and terrorism, the Iraqi regime posed to the “civilised” world.

Khalid Jarrar’s response to the question is a passionate and justified one. The stories of horror and destruction he relays to people via openDemocracy and CBC provide a glimpse of the many tragedies that have touched people’s lives as a result of the war in Iraq. He talks about stability and security during Saddam’s regime. Though this was true for a large number of Iraqis, many never felt the safety and security he describes.

For instance, during the 1970s, the forced repatriation of Iraqis who were deemed to be of Iranian origin destroyed and separated many families. They were ordinary people who did not express a hostile political opinion of the Ba’athist regime. This practice continued until the early 1980s. What about the thousands who were displaced, imprisoned, tortured and “disappeared” merely for knowing someone who may have expressed an anti-government stance or belonged to the Dawa or Communist parties? For them there was no semblance of security or “normal” life.

In addition, in the 1980s, nearly half a million young Iraqis perished in the war with Iran, which lasted for eight years and was perpetuated by Saddam, with the support of the west. For them and their families life was not normal and not much “fun”. In fact the campaigns of the so-called jaysh al sha’ab (people’s army) – into which people were randomly conscripted from the streets, then sent to fight on the frontlines after literally two weeks of training – caused much terror and fear for Iraqis regardless of their political persuasion.

The brutal repression of the intifada (uprising) in the south and north of Iraq after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 is further testimony to the horror and perpetual anxiety which characterised Iraqis’ lives on a daily basis. The burden of the economic sanctions placed on Iraq added further to the humiliation and misery of life. Very few people could afford to eat out in restaurants then. Let us be under no illusion as to the “safety” and “normality” of people’s lives before the war in 2003.

I agree that poor planning for post-war Iraq has contributed significantly to the country becoming a haven for terrorists of all colours and for anyone feeling frustrated with “western” imperialism or middle-eastern governments’ inaction in the face of American double standards. Iraqis now have more than one identifiable enemy and we are now faced with the mammoth task of defending our vulnerable borders and barely existent internal security apparatus against the organised and calculated attempts of our neighbours in Iran, Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Faced with the pre-war traumas, the humiliation and violence inflicted by the multinational forces in Iraq and the insecurity that is eating away at the fabric of Iraqis’ lives, how do we move on? What choices do we make to pick ourselves up and build a better present and future for ourselves and our children?

Perpetrating violence in the name of liberation from the occupation is a short-term and shortsighted approach that will only serve to cause maximum pain to Iraqis and delay the withdrawal of foreign troops. Supporting the so-called “resistance” serves in most cases to strengthen the anti-democratic and pro-Ba’athist ideology of those who long for the return of dictatorship whilst also being implicated in the carnage and bloodshed of innocent Iraqi lives rather than American or British losses.

So, for now, it seems that the only realistic and peaceful option is to play the so-called “American theatre” of elections. What Khalid Jarrar, and others who see the recent elections as nothing but an American cover-up, forget is that elections were held largely because Iraqis and their leaders have consistently been calling for an electoral process since the declaration of an end to major combat operations in summer 2003. Furthermore, the election result that delivered Ahmad Chalabi and Ibrahim Jafari as possible candidates for the leadership of Iraq is not the outcome that the United States would have favoured. Besides, all the lists that won a significant number of seats in the assembly have demanded a clear timetable for the withdrawal of American and British forces. Now that’s not what you’d call an Anglo-American puppet assembly of western imperialism.

I don’t believe that withdrawing from or boycotting the electoral process will provide critics with as much influence and leverage to effect change as could be had if one were to take part. As the saying goes, you’ve got to be in it to win it.

In fact, one could argue that the choice to boycott the elections is already a victory for democracy and popular political participation, since in Saddam’s time not coming out to the polling booth was certainly not an option.

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Doug Ireland, Journalist, Direland

Douglas Murray objects to my calling Iyad Allawi – the pistol-packing former Ba’athist conspirator and long time CIA footpad whom the U.S. arranged to have installed at gunpoint as head of Iraq’s puppet government – a “thug.” On 17 July 2004, Paul McGeough, the award-winning Australian reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, was the first to report that Allawi had personally shot seven handcuffed and blindfolded prisoners, who had been lined up against a wall in the courtyard of Baghdad’s Al-Amariyah prison, in a barbaric extra-judicial execution that can only be described as murder (I suppose this is what Murray means when he calls Allawi “brave”).

McGeough’s reporting was subsequently confirmed by The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson, who’d been present when McGeough interviewed witnesses to the cold-blooded killings. Anderson further quotes a well-known former Iraqi minister who told him “that an American official had confirmed that the killings took place.” This American official said, “What a mess we’re in – we get rid of one son of a bitch [Saddam] only to get another.”

In his current role as prime minister, Allawi has made another former Ba’athist thug, Falah al-Naqib, his Interior Minister. Under Allawi and al-Naqib, the Interior Ministry has been a sewer of corruption, and is run on the spoils system. Even worse, the Interior Ministry has been stuffed with former members of Saddam’s hated secret police, the mokhabarat, and other former Saddam henchmen (criminals who’ve also been prominent in Allawi’s party, the Iraqi National Accord). There are so many Ba’athist muckers in the ministry and the Allawi government that no less than Bush’s and Rumsfeld’s former favourite, Ahmed Chalabi, has now joined forces with the Association of Muslim Scholars to insist they be purged (as the excellent Iraqi expert, Juan Cole, reported just last week).

I’d really like to know what Murray is smoking when he adopts the method of Emile Coue to repeatedly insist that “things are getting better” for Iraqis in the face of these and other grim developments, including the mounting body count reported daily by the world press. Dead Italian security agents and Bulgarian soldiers – not to mention the growing heaps of civilian Iraqi corpses – who’ve all been killed by the occupying forces are powerful silent testimony to the contrary.

Murray is no more reliable when he offers a cartoon-like portrait of those of us who opposed the invasion as objectively favouring continuation of Saddam’s rule. The “invasion-or-Saddam” construction was always a false dichotomy. Anti-war intellectuals offered many concrete proposals as to how Saddam could be forced from power without war – and to find some of them Murray need only have consulted the archives of openDemocracy.

For example, in a pre-invasion debate, the left-wing Iraqi exile academic Faleh Jabar, proposed the indictment of Saddam and his cronies by an international war crimes tribunal (this and other proposals for getting rid of Saddam, Jabar spelled out in more detail in a perceptive openDemocracy article with the appropriate title, “Too soon to stop thinking”, which is what Murray did when he threw up his hands and acquiesced in letting the bombs fall.)

In another openDemocracy debate, Iraq: war or not?, an article by the Institute for Policy Studies’ John Cavanagh, “Against dictators: use law, not war,” suggested how the indictment of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet could serve as a model for the campaign against Saddam. There were too many alternatives to war put about by war opponents to mention them all in the brief space allotted to me here.

The current democratic ferment in Lebanon was produced by the assassination of Rafiq Harari – unless Murray thinks Harari was killed by Washington, it is difficult to see what role the US imperium has played in creating that movement for democracy.

Hosni Mubarak’s suggestion that he may allow opposition candidates to run against him means little in a police state where he has just thrown the principal opposition leader, Ayman Nour, into prison, and where Mubarak’s security apparatus continues to deploy the classic panoply of despotic tactics to stifle free political debate and emasculate his political opponents (actions from which Mubarak’s speech was cosmetically designed to distract Western attention).

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai is “no more than the mayor of Kabul,” in the words of the Washington Post’s Robin Wright, as the resurgent Taliban and drug-trafficking tribal warlords reassert their control over huge chunks of the country.

So the rosy picture Murray paints of developments in these countries is no more accurate or deserved than his hosanna to the “brave” Allawi.

Finally, Murray has, in this debate, continually dodged the essential question: by what right did he and other supporters of the Anglo-American invasion arrogate to themselves the power to decide that sacrificing 100,000 Iraqi dead was worth the simulacrum of democracy it has produced? Weeping Iraqis would like to know.

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Khalid Jarrar, Environmental engineer and Blogger

It has been very interesting to read all these contributions and to participate in this online discussion. After all, dialogues like this are the way to learn about each other, and to learn from each other.

It’s true, my dear Iraqi sister, Huda, that so many people suffered from Saddam’s regime. Actually, everyone did, those who lived in Iraq, and also those who were forced to leave, or chose to leave because they couldn’t take the brutality. I remember my mother telling me about her uncles who were rich merchants in Hilla, a city to the south of Baghdad. The government took over all their possessions and they were forced to leave Iraq – for no crime except that they originally come from a Persian family. They spent their lives touring the world, until they died, alone and poor, in different countries.

It’s also true that Saddam killed the Shi’a in the 1991 intifada in the south, and killed the Sunni in the many attempts that were made to overthrow his regime, and killed the Kurds in Halabja. All that is true, and there is much more.

We shouldn’t forget all this, nor the fact that Saddam was the main reason for the presence of the American army in the Gulf since the early 1990s. The Americans supported Saddam and gave him the green light to invade Kuwait, and supported him with all kinds of weapons and intelligence in his war with Iran – then did nothing when the Shi’a were slaughtered during the intifada and when the Kurds were burned by chemical weapons.

So if the question is: should Saddam be removed, then the answer is definitely yes! But when the question is: should the Americans remove Saddam? Then the answer is definitely, morally and practically no.

America, as a pragmatic imperialistic government, couldn’t care less about Iraqis and their suffering, otherwise they would not have killed over 1 million Iraqi children because of the lack of food and medicine during the 1990s – a direct result of the sanctions which were the real beginning of the end of the Iraqi economy, which caused the Iraqi currency to shrink in value thousands of times, which totally isolated Iraq from the rest of the world, and which inflicted untold misery on Iraqi people.

Iraqis suffered under these conditions for fourteen long years. They sold the furniture of their houses in order to buy food, they worked as taxi drivers using their own cars (even those who had scientific degrees and experience).

At the same time, Saddam was importing the best materials to build his castles and palaces from all over the world and eating the meat of gazelles that were fed with special kinds of food to give them flavour, while his son Uday was importing specially made cigars from Cuba that carried his name.

Meanwhile, the United States watched Iraqis dying, and did nothing to decrease their pain. And after the fourteen years were over, they decided to come and fix things, so they made a war, destroyed the countries buildings and infrastructure, and then occupied it. So please, don’t come and tell me that the Americans came to relieve Iraqis form their suffering, don’t tell me that they came here for humanitarian reasons.

I think it’s super-important what you said, Huda, that people who voted in the elections supported the lists whose priority was asking the Americans to set a timetable to withdraw from Iraq. But this actually totally supports my point: how many people in the west know this fact? How many people in the US know this fact? Compared to those who know the percentage of people who voted, almost zero!

This is exactly my point: the results of the elections were and will be totally neglected, what matters will be only the percentage of voters. This “proves” that the American project/war was a success, that the war was right and justified, and that the fruits are democracy and happiness!

Resistance in Iraq is a legal right, guaranteed by all laws of heavens and land. Despite all the attempts to defame it, using all kinds of criminal acts against innocent civilians – Iraqis and foreigners – it is still legitimate, and still widely supported by Iraqis, and Muslims, who distinguish clearly resistance from terrorism, since the Qur’an states that whoever kills an innocent soul is like a person who kills every soul ever created.

Iraqis by nature are peace-loving people who never had any internal conflicts that led to shedding blood in their history until Saddam came to power. We never witnessed internal Sunni-Shi’a, Muslim-Christian, Arab-Kurdish fighting. Yet this is what external hands are praying for now, and pushing towards it by killing important figures from all sides. This opens the field for accusations, and possible conflicts, and distrust between all different sides: divide and conquer.

Resistance is one of the things that Iraqis depend on to push the Americans to leave, or at least leave the cities. The more casualties they have, the more the American people will put pressure on their government and demand they withdraw. That is the only language that the American administration seems to understand: blood.

I agree totally with Huda on another point: that Iraq has become the haven of terrorists of all kinds, supported from all sides, carried out by foreigners (and Iraqis too at times). Their goal is to prevent a stable life in Iraq, maintain the lawless situation, and justify the presence of the American army to “protect” Iraqis from terrorism. Whenever a car bomb explodes among civilians, killing tens or hundreds of Iraqis, a lot – and I mean a lot – of Iraqis point their fingers towards the Americans.

One day, all the people who made this war, and participated in it, will stand before the court of history, and be pelted with the stones of reprimand. But even then, who will compensate Iraqis?

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