Johann Hari

In response to one of Johann's articles earlier this year, Richard Dawkins wrote a letter to the Independent. It sparked a correspondence between them which follows:

Sir: Oh, do please tell Johann Hari to grow up ("The threat to Iraq comes from Western defeatists", 29 October). Of course nobody thinks Iraq would be better off with Saddam. That is not the point. The point is that the world thought it had left behind the bad old days when a strong country could unilaterally impose regime change on a weak country by invading it. We had painstakingly built up international law, and Bush (with contempt) and Blair (in agony) broke it.

By Mr Hari's logic, we should all go and blow up McDonalds, and then challenge objectors to deny the resulting improvement in children's diet.

If Bush and Blair had honestly admitted that their motives were to remove a spectacularly evil dictator, world opinion might have supported them and even proposed Mugabe next. Instead, they chose to lie. Bush lied about connections between Iraq and 9/11. Bush and Blair lied about "weapons of mass destruction", which do not exist and we now learn they had no intelligence grounds to think existed.

RICHARD DAWKINS

New College, Oxford

Dear Professor Dawkins,

I should begin by explaining that your writings on
atheism have shaped my own thinking to a considerable degree. I am extremely grateful for your role in the fight against superstition and the absurdities of religion.

Your objections to the recent war seem to be based
primarily on international law ñ by far the best
argument offered by the anti-war movement. I
eventually supported the overthrow of Saddam after
visiting Iraq and getting the strong impression that
the Iraqi people wanted us to act. This has been
entirely vindicated by the opinion polls that followed
the liberation, which have all shown that a majority
of Iraqis wanted the US-British troops to proceed.

However, this does not mean that I want lawlessness in the international arena; I want different laws. We
created one set of laws for the world of 1945. The
protection of sovereignty involved in those laws has
kept humanity safe from some things but not others. It
has protected people from conflict between states by
establishing clear boundaries and non-interference
pacts ñ no mean feat. Yet it has too often left people
to horrific ravages within states. Sovereignty did
nothing to help the 800,000 people murdered in six
weeks in Rwanda less than a decade ago. And, of
course, it did not help the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds
ñ not to mention ordinary Iraqis ñ when Saddam decided to butcher them.

I do not dispute for a second that you (and the vast
majority of those who opposed the war) despise Saddam Hussein and his acts of genocide. My problem is that, when the American and British armies were poised on the border to actually overthrow Saddam, you wanted them to retreat. Your hatred of Saddam didn't overwhelm your respect for one particular, outdated form of international law. Mine did. If you cannot agree, surely this is a position with which you can empathise?

Yours sincerely,

Johann Hari

First Dawkins:

Sunday 2nd Nov 2003

Dear Johann Hari

Thank you for your thoughtful letter, which distances you from the article that provoked my letter. Then, you wrote, "I want one person to dare to write to this newspaper and say with a straight face and a clear conscience that the Iraqi people would be better off now if we had left Saddam Hussein in power. Just one." Now, you recognize that the Anglo-American invasion was probably unlawful but you want a better law. That is a defensible position, although there are still the usual worries about taking the law into one’s own hands. Let’s see if we can move things on a bit further.

You are probably right that international law is too respectful of the rights of nation states that happen to exist, at the expense of their citizens. If Hitler had not invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland, but had implemented the ‘final solution’ strictly within Germany's sovereign borders, you could certainly have made a powerful case for armed intervention. The counter-argument, that what Germany did to its own people was Germany's business alone, would have been hard to defend. Zimbabwe might be a contemporary parallel, along with Kosovo, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda.
When Tanzanian forces ousted Amin, few complained that Uganda's sovereign rights had been violated. The same was true when Nehru's troops threw the Portuguese out of Goa. It helped that Nyerere and Nehru both had impeccable credentials as men of peace. One could believe war was truly their last resort. Bush, by contrast, is closely associated with the Project for the New American Century. This sinister club, whose members include Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other unsavoury characters, has for ten years made no secret of its military ambitions, especially in oil-rich parts of the world, warning followers that it would be a long process ‘absent some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’. Bush subsequently called 9/11 ‘our Pearl Harbor’ and he has consistently worked to heighten the confusion in American minds between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Blair’s appetite for war, too, has been almost embarrassingly evident. These men are not Nehru or Nyerere.

Operation Desert Storm was justified, and a genuine coalition of allies mustered, because Iraq had invaded a sovereign nation. After his victory President Bush, showing a scrupulous respect for international law which is wholly foreign to his son, declined to pursue Saddam into Iraq itself. Perhaps President Bush was wrong and his son right? You could certainly make a case that the wrongs Saddam did to his ‘own’ people far outweighed the wrong he did to Kuwait. Anyway, who is to say that the unfortunate people who live in a dictator’s ‘own’ territory should be condemned to remain his 'own' people. They did not choose it. I assume this would be your point, and I have great sympathy with it. That was why my letter regretted that Bush and Blair didn’t offer some such honest grounds for their war, instead of telling a lot of stupid lies about 'weapons of mass destruction' and, in Bush's case, lies about Iraq's alleged complicity in 9/11.

Other things still worry me, however. It is a dangerous precedent that a country unilaterally invades any other country whose internal policies it happens to dislike. Many governments in the world disapprove of at least one of their neighbours. What if India invoked the precedent to invade Pakistan? Or North Korea, to invade South Korea? I suspect that, to the small extent Bush junior thinks at all, he thinks intervention is great as long as only the United States does it. But we are going to have to do better than that if we want to come up with your improved international law.

It seems to me that we have our work cut out, but that is not a reason for not trying. Yours is a worthwhile goal. So how do we set about updating the rules of 1945, to make it easier for the international community to police the internal affairs of nations, instead of just their misdeeds outside their borders? How do we draft a clause that says intervention is allowed if almost the entire world is outraged by the internal policies of a country, but not if it is just a private quarrel between one country and another? And – more difficult – how can we legislate the grey area between these comparatively straightforward extremes?

With best wishes
Richard Dawkins

SECOND JOHAN:

Dear Professor Dawkins,

Thank you for your very stimulating letter.

You ask, essentially, how can we trust America ñ and
George Bushís America at that ñ to liberate Iraq? I
have agonised over this. America is the country that
funded and armed Saddam as he gassed the Kurds and
launched the worst, most savage trench warfare (in the
six-year fight with Iran) since the First World War.
And even if we could trust America, how on earth can
we trust this American government? Dick Cheney, the
current Vice-President, even voted against
Congressional resolutions in the 1980s calling for the
release of Nelson Mandela, on the grounds that he was
a ìterroristî. Donald Rumsfeld embraced Saddam. The
Project For the New America Century opposed even the
moderate compromises involved in the Oslo peace
process.

I have no illusions about these people. They are not ñ
as you so rightly point out ñ Nehru or Nyerere. And
yet my Iraqi friends tell me to look at Northern Iraq.
This territory ñ reclaimed from Saddam in 1991 ñ is
now the site of a stunning democracy. It is not
perfect by any means, and the Americans even allowed
Turkish forces to attack Kurdish freedom fighters
there on a few occasions, but it has ñ at the heart of
the Arab world - a democratically elected parliament
and Prime Minister, tens of newspapers, no
restrictions at all on freedom of speech, and female
high court judges. If this could be achieved ñ under
American military supervision ñ in Northern Iraq, I
see no reason why the rest of the country ñ similarly
filled with educated, smart, brave people ñ cannot do
the same. Of course there are some anti-democratic
forces who must be defeated along the way. What we are
witnessing on our TV screens today is not the Iraqi
people versus the coalition, but a few thugs (possibly
Baíathist, certainly a few jihadists, but the truth is
that we donít know their real character) versus the
Iraqi people and the coalition forces combined. The
opinion polls provide plain proof of this; support for
the murderers of the Red Cross and United nations is
low.

Should I have allowed my plain distaste (indeed,
hatred) for George Bush to stand in the way of
supporting a movement which was poised to end Saddamís
rule and spread the Northern Iraq model? Donít Iraqis
have a better chance (although, I agree, no certainty)
at human rights and democracy under a time-delimited
US occupation than under Saddam? I wish there had been
a wholly benign force ñ what the journalist David
Aaronovitch called ìthe Nelson Mandela Peace Corpsî ñ
available to overthrow dictatorships. Alas, there
wasnít.

Of course this was deeply imperfect. I worry that
neoconservative wars create democracies that are
bounded within neoconservative precepts, like
extremely limited government and considerable
corporate power. I dislike these ideas - which are
being put into practice in an increasingly privatised
Iraq - intensely, and they do terrible harm, but they
are far better than Baíathist fascism. Corporate
semi-democracy is better than no democracy at all.

You are right: we need a different system of law. But
before we discuss that, we need to discuss who the
police are. Law without anybody to uphold it is pretty
useless; and at the moment, the only people with the
military force to uphold any system of law are the US.
You and I could have an intelligent and sincere debate
about international law but it will come to nothing if
it exists only on paper. This was painfully
illustrated by those who said before the war that
their solution to the problems in Iraq was to indict
Saddam for genocide and human rights abuses. So we
issue that call on paper, and what then? Without a
police force (read: army) to go into Iraq and get him
(i.e.: invade), the call was meaningless.

We need to build up a European army so we have an
alternative force to appeal to, in order to uphold
whatever laws we decide upon; if another Rwanda
happens and the Americans arenít interested in
preventing it, we should be able to. Letís talk
practically about how to enforce the law; the
character of the laws can only follow.

Looking forward to your next letter,

Johann

SECOND DAWKINS:

Dear Johann

You express your dilemma well: "Should I should have allowed my plain distaste (indeed, hatred) for George Bush to stand in the way of supporting a movement which was poised to end Saddam’s rule and spread the Northern Iraq model?" Difficult. But doesn’t the welfare calculation come out differently if you consider the whole world, not just Iraq?

Suppose we accept your belief that the Iraqis, whether they know it or not, are better off under American rule. There are 26 million Iraqis in a total world population of 6 billion. Admittedly, the 6 billion are not suffering under Bush in the same way as the Iraqis suffered under Saddam (although Bush’s know-nothing contempt for Kyoto and other constructive agreements is not to be ignored). But the precedent of a strong country marching into a weak country in breach of the UN could be serious for the whole world. Bush’s cynical (if it wasn’t naïve) use of America’s 9/11 hysteria as a cover to attack Iraq was a reprehensible case of taking his eye off the terrorist ball. There wasn’t a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda when Bush lied to us that there was. Now there probably is, as a result of his action. And those new Osamas, recruited by worldwide resentment at America’s war, won’t lack arms. Contrary to the Bush/Blair lies, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. But such weapons as it had, from rifles to shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, instead of being under some sort of supervision, however nasty, are now as openly available as the treasures looted from the Baghdad Museum.

Perhaps you are right that most of the 26 million Iraqis welcome the American invasion. But I am unconvinced that the crowds dancing in triumph on the downed helicopter were Baathist remnants or Jihadist fanatics, still less what Rumsfeld calls ‘foreign fighters’. They looked like ordinary people to me, objecting (as ordinary people will) to foreign fighters invading their country. The near daily attacks on Americans could not succeed without substantial support among the populace. If the majority of Iraqis thought as you do, wouldn’t they keep the Americans better informed? Indeed, wouldn’t they have shopped Saddam Hussein by now?

I don’t think we are going to agree over this in a hurry. You make good points, doubtless coloured by the fact that you have been to Iraq and I haven’t. It is finally a matter of judging unknowns, and that is always difficult. But there is one thing we probably do agree on and I’d like to close on it. In an act of staggering insensitivity, Blair has invited Bush to make a state visit to Britain this month, presumably in the hope that he will be welcomed at least by those who supported the war. My proposal is that you, who supported it, should join me who opposed it, in publicly disowning our country’s invitation to this swaggering, strutting, smirking vote-thief. Here, at least, we might agree on a form of words: "Not in our name."

All best wishes
Richard