Dear
Prime Minister Blair:
I
congratulate you; you gave an impassioned and thrilling speech in Congress! It
has been a long time since I heard such a stirring speech in that body. Of
course, it is ironic that the prime minister of the nation against whom we
fought to gain our independence should now come before us to remind us of our
idealism and of the values of “freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule
of law.”
Before
you apologize too quickly, however, for your countrymen’s burning of the
Congress Library in 1814, let me remind you that your countrymen certainly
regarded rebellious American colonials as terrorists of sorts in 1773 when they
dumped your tea into Boston Harbor, burned the tea and the ship in Annapolis,
Maryland, and by 1775, were killing your troops who were there to restore order.
When American colonials confiscated the property of British loyalists and even
hung a number of non-combatant loyalists, these acts can certainly be defined as
acts of terrorism. These acts were also designed to force the “either-or”:
either one was for the revolution or one was against it, and, thus, an enemy.
You
raise the shining beacon of freedom, but you must also remember the excesses
done in the name of freedom. These excesses simply cannot be pushed under the
rug by saying that history provides “so little instruction for our present
day” and that today’s new terrorist threat “turns upside-down our concepts
of how we should act.” To say that the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq should be
excused because we had no historical models and because we were morally confused
by the threat of terrorism is to say that we are no longer capable of rational
moral and political thought. With all due respect, I find this claim totally
unacceptable for a nation that prides itself on the rationality of its politics
and ethics.
What
would it have cost you to wait two more months for the UN weapons inspectors to
complete their work? You yourself wanted to have the mandate of the UN before
you invaded. Why did you abandon this ethical and political position and opt for
pre-emptive invasion, especially at the very moment when the UN said the report
about Iraq’s attempt to buy uranium from Niger was a forgery? Why did you
consistently and forcefully question, deny, and disbelieve what the UN weapons
inspectors presented? This, of course, gave the appearance to the British and
American peoples you had incontrovertible proof that Iraq was an imminent threat
to them. And now you cannot provide this incontrovertible proof.
From
Lt. General T. Michael Moseley, chief allied war commander, we know now that 606
bombs were used to hit 391 targets during the six months even before the war
started. If the bombing was already underway months before the undeclared war
officially started, was the time spent at the UN a hoax to try to appease the
British people? It seems to me the decision to go to war had already been made.
What
disturbs me most of all in your speech is your attempt to justify this
pre-emptive invasion not by providing the incontrovertible evidence that Saddam
was indeed an imminent threat, but rather by asserting it does not matter
whether Saddam was an imminent threat or not. You seem to be saying that even if
all the intelligence presented to the British and American peoples was a lie,
the end of removing Saddam still justifies the means. This I find most
disturbing. The end of removing Saddam from power did not justify lying to the
British people to create the illusion of the necessity of war. In your speech,
you say that “if we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its
least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am
confident history will forgive.”
The
question, however, is not about your interpretation or second-guessing of the
future. The question is not whether the end of removing Saddam was right.
Everyone, I think, would agree that the end was right. The question is whether
you and George W. Bush were justified in lying to the British and American
peoples about the necessity of attacking Iraq. If you lied and there was no
necessity of attacking Iraq at that time, then the other non-military options of
coercion were still available. The immense cost of the war and the deaths of
soldiers and civilians alike could have been averted.
It
is true that history judges the ends of political action, but it also judges the
means used as well. To give only one example from U.S. history, manifest destiny
is badly tainted as an end because the means used to achieve it included the
near genocide of native Americans. Indeed, as early as Pontiac’s war of
1763-64, Delaware Indians were invited to peace negotiations at Fort Pitt only
to be given – intentionally -- blankets infected with smallpox from the
hospital at the fort. This would most certainly qualify as an early example of
terrorism.
The
rosy picture you paint of the Middle East’s future after the invasion is
cloyingly sweet, a form of wishful thinking meant to divert our attention from
the troubling questions directly before us: “how hollow would the charges of
American imperialism be when these failed countries are and are seen to be
transformed from states of terror to nations of prosperity; from governments of
dictatorships to examples of democracy; from sources of instability to beacons
of calm?” To speak frankly, your picture of the future is somewhat
self-serving, not to mention that it begs the question of the necessity of
invading Iraq.
When
your speech is stripped of all its rhetoric – and you are an excellent
rhetorician – your position is the same as that of Paul Wolfowitz: three
cheers for American imperialism!
Mr.
Prime Minister, you cannot have it both ways; you cannot assert American
imperialism and assert a partnership between America and Europe at the same
time. If you want a partnership, you must respect, dialogue with, and listen to
your partners. Even if you are first among equals, the others are equally
deserving of respect. I find it curious that the word ‘equality’ does not
appear in your speech. I am sure you know it is as significant a word for us as
the word ’freedom.’
The
reason I am writing to you than my own President is that I do not believe he
understands the word ‘equality.’ I write to you because as the leader of the
Labor Party you must understand the weight and significance of this word. My
President responds to a “No” by taking it as a personal affront that
deserves some kind of punishment or retaliation.
I
do not think Mr. Bush learned anything from the gentle suggestion of your speech
to promote a partnership “built on persuasion, not command.” One of his
comments, as you know, to a question from a reporter concerning the prisoners
held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was the following: “All I know for certain is
that these are bad people.” I ask myself how does he know this for certain?
I
mention this comment because I think it is indicative of a general tendency in
the Bush administration to pre-judge and categorize things before all the
evidence is available. This is precisely the tendency that may have pre-judged
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He certainly had them in the 1980s and
early 1990s, but did he really reconstitute those programs in the late 1990s to
the point that he posed such an imminent threat to Great Britain and the United
States that pre-emptive war was the only alternative? I think not, but we shall
see.
In
the meantime, I hope my President learns how to read.
Sincerely,
Dr.
Frank Edler