Johann Hari

Johann debated against Robert Fisk, the Independent's Middle East correspondent, at Manchester Public Library last Thursday.

Robert Fisk said:

"Ladies and gentlemen, let’s start with the opposing point of view. Let’s say things are much safer now. Let’s face it, we’ve found the WMD; we’ve ended the regime that was behind the September 11 2001 international crimes against humanity; we’ve created an oasis of democracy with its centre in Iraq. We told the Middle East before we invaded that they would all want to be like Iraq very soon….

It’s all lies. One thing we did do was get rid of man we helped to create – Saddam Hussein – and we are now searching for other beasts to take his places. The name Zarqawi springs to mind. We need beast figures permanently in the Middle East. We used to have Khomeini, we had Nasser in Egypt, remember – the ‘Mussolini of the Nile’ according to Anthony Eden. We are constantly saying we are going to make the Middle East better and having wars; [we are] always going to rescue people. Pope Urban II originally started the first Crusade because he wanted to help the Christians of the Middle East. Napoleon, when he was advancing into Egypt, issued a declaration saying he wanted to free the people of Cairo from [those] who were hanging people for political reasons. When General Maude went to Baghdad in 1917 his proclamation – which hangs on my library wall – stated: "We come here not as conquerors but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny."

[But] there’s the Arabic version [of events] as well. On the streets of Baghdad in 1917, after General Maude invaded, British soldiers were murdered in a town called Fallujah, which he then, of course, besieged. We had another insurrection in a city called Najaf where a Shi’ite clereic was wanted by the British and had to be arrested. We ended up using air strikes and gas against the recalcitrant villages. And, the final touch: Lloyd George was informed by British intelligence that terrorists were crossing the border from Syria. It’s exactly, fingerprint, identical to the present.

The real issue however is who Saddam was and how we created him. Always [when we are] in a situation like this, we [ask] what do we do now? Are we feeling safer? But hold on a second. How did we ever come to this? How did we ever reach the state of anarchy and madness that Iraq is now, today?

I remember the days when Donald Rumsfeld was visiting Baghdad. I remember the day he was there because I was on a train, an Iranian hospital train, taking gassed soldiers back to Tehran. And I was going through the carriages throwing open the windows because I could smell the gas. They were coughing it out of their lungs as they sat in the compartment bleeding through the mouth and I remember that week when I ran the story in (ital)The Times(close), the then editor William Rees-Mogg was dined out by the Foreign Office, who said that my story ‘wasn’t very helpful’.

You see, we savage these people inside Iraq, we let Saddam have this despicable regime. We knew about the raping rooms, the tortures. We journalists were trying to tell the Americans, the British, and there was no response. I’ve got a letter here, from the Iraqi ambassador to London – 1985. "Robert’s extremely one-sided article withholds a tremendous advances made by Iraq. Outrageous is his statement that suspected critics of the regime have been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib prison and forced to watch their wives being gang-raped. Utterly reprehensible because Mr Fisk is prepared without any supporting corroboration to repeat wild, unfounded allegations against Saddam Hussein." No more visas for Bob for a while, then!

But the point is that while we journalists were trying to say at the time what this regime represented, our government went on supporting it, with gas, with funding and with ministerial visits – while the Iraqi people were being tortured. And then we gave them sanctions. And then we expect them to love us and be grateful because we’ve got rid of the person we’ve created. I’m afraid bombs speak louder than opinion polls.

Everything that has happened in Iraq has been a mirror image of what the British did in 1917 to 120 when, of course, we had Gertrude Bell, the Oriental Secretary, saying that the Iraqis wouldn’t really understand democracy. I think a lot of Iraqis do understand democracy but they are not getting it.

And the next question – the real issue: what are we going to give them now? What monsters are we creating today? Not the one who’s gone - the old man with the beard who’s put in the kangaroo court. We’ve got a man called Ayad Allawi for whom there is increasing evidence that he may have murdered seven prisoners just before he was created top dog by the Americans; a man who was a Ba’athist and who is a self-proclaimed former CIA agent.

The world is not safer. We are fighting a mass, nationalist insurgency in Iraq and we can cover it with as many Zarqawis as we want; as many Islamists; as many Al Qaeda people. I’ve met Bin Laden three times and I’ve not seen a lot of Al Qaeda people in Iraq but I’ve seen a lot of nationalist insurgency - people who want to kill Americans.

Who are they? I have one very good idea. During the Iran/Iraq war which we supported (we were on Saddam’s side) Iraqis in their millions learned to fight and die, and they did so with no initiative from the Ba’aths. They fought on and on. They used gas. Those [same] corporals and lieutenants who couldn’t use their initiative can [now use] all their training against another major army – only this time there’s no Saddam to put them in the wrong direction.

We have helped to create the very resistance that’s now destroying everything that we believe we can do in Iraq. The world’s not a safer place. Iraq today is so unsafe that most of my colleagues cannot even travel. The government does not even control Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country. It is total anarchy and the kidnapping of Margaret Hassan is a classic example that there are no more rules. The world is an unsafer place; the Middle East is an unsafer place and we have built up for ourselves a heritage of distrust and hatred that will take generations to go away."

Johann said:

"Before I start, I'd like to make an appeal to the audience. I've been trying to persuade Simon [Kelner, the Independent editor who was chairing the debate] to send me back to Iraq, but to no avail. So if you like what I say, please ask him to send me. And if you hate what I say, you can ask him to send me too, so you can hope I end up in the hands of the resistance.

But to begin, I'll level with you. There are days when you wake up and look at the news from Iraq and you think: ‘I supported this? This is what I wanted?’. Only a maniac would sit here and say they supported this war without doubts.

I have to go back a bit to the genesis of why I supported the war in Iraq to explain why I still think that elements of it are justified and why I believe Iraqis are safer now.

In the summer of 2002 I thought that the arguments that Iraq was linked to WMD were ridiculous lies – I wrote that at the time and I said it all the way through the war. I was sent to Iraq and I went there looking for confirmation of everything I thought (and which I still think, by the way): that George Bush is a serial killer (he executed more than 100 people in Texas). That George Bush is an illegitimate President. That there was no link between the mass murder of 9/11 and Saddam. Aall that was true and right.

But something happened to me in Iraq which disturbed me. I knew it was going to be a horrible tyranny. (This idea that most people, apart from a miniscule fringe, were pro-Saddam is offensive rubbish). But there was a series of events for me… I will give you snapshots.

We were taken to a house where there were some Marsh Arabs – some of whom had been poisoned by the regime - just after we stopped giving money and arms to Saddam, though he had been committing crimes on a par with that all the time we were supporting him. We were taken to this little shack in the desert where they had been dumped. And in the middle of this horrible, empty life, they had to hang a beaming picture of Saddam on their wall, always watching them. That got to me.

And when I could slip away from the Ba’aathist security people, I would ask Iraqis, very crudely, ‘What do you think about this war that’s coming up? Everyone in Iraq under Saddam spoke in code and it was very hard to understand it a lot of the time - but a woman said to me: ‘We really like British democracy’ and I said: ‘Well everyone in Britain hates Bush and Blair.’ I was trying to rerassure her – stupidly – that we were on her side. I didn’t heara what she was trying to tell me.

We went away and [a colleague] said to me: ‘What do you think she was trying to say?’ I didn’t think about it very much but there were a number of events like that in Basra and as we came back I said to myself: ‘What if the majority of Iraqis want this invasion? They’re not naïve. They know the Americans are doing this for oil and Israel more than they are going it for them. But what if they are more prepared to take their chances with Rumsfeld and Cheney than with Saddam? What then?'

So I realised if I’m going to campaign against this war I’m going to have to find out what a majority of Iraqis think – hard to do when they’re living under tyranny. The first thing I did was look for research. The International Crisis Group, an independent Brussels-based think tank, had sent 40 monitors into Iraq to do properly what I had done very crudely: try to find out what Iraqis wanted for their country. And they found that the majority of Iraqis still thought: ‘Better an American invasion than an eternity of Saddam and his sons.’

I then met a lot of Iraqi exile groups living in London. A fifth of the Iraqi population was in exile, and my home town, London, is one of the centres of Iraqi exile life, although many of them are now returning home at last. I said to them: ‘What do your relatives back in Iraq want to happen?’ And a very firm majority said: "They’re not naive but they want this to proceed. They do not see another way of getting rid of Saddam."

So what was I supposed to do, as a progressive person who believes the job of the left is to side with oppressed people? How could I march with people like George Galloway and say, ‘Give peace a chance’, when I knew most Iraqis preferred this war to the alternative, never-ending war waged on them by Saddam? Wouldn’t that have been a lie? Wouldn’t that have been a betrayal of an oppressed people? Wasn't there an obligation to back them in getting rid of their dictator and keep backing them during US occupation and IMF privatisations and god knows what else?

Of course in the logn term you work for a world where there are better choices than Saddam vs Bush, and I do that all the time. but it that world at that moment, that was the choice.

Once the war was over it was possible for the first time ever to conduct opinion polls. They are imperfect but unless we are going to use guess work or telepathy they are the best means we have of finding out what Iraqis think now. They were done by Iraqi questioners, using techniques that successfully predict general election results across the world. A month after the war ended, [when] asked the question ‘Did you think it as right to invade? 62% of Iraqis said yes, 24% said no. For that poll to be wrong it would have had to have had a 12% margin of error. That has never happened in the history of polling.

So what we now know is that on the day of the anti-war rally, with all the caveats and all the sentiments we share that the Americans were doing this for the wrong reasons, a majority of Iraqis were saying: ‘Better this invasion than what we faced otherwise.’ They would not have been marching with you. They would have been marching for the invasion. So I don't think i was wrong.

George Orwell once said, ‘Sometimes a war is right even if the Daily Telegraph says so.’ Well, sometimes a war is right even if George Bush says so.

But I would add a very important caveat to what I just said. If you go into a war saying you want to side with the Iraqi people then you damn well have to carry on supporting the Iraqi people afterwards. Occasionally I chide some of my fellow liberal hawks about this, asking why they aren’t saying more about the IMF programme of privatisations – far more extreme than anything tried in America or Britain - imposed on Iraq country undemocratically. If we are prepared to back Iraqis when it comes to a bombing campaign, we look like dupes if we don’t back Iraqis afterwards when the uses of US power diverge from the interests of Iraqis.

The best way of preventing that ongoing IMF assault – which is one of the great unreported issues about Iraq - is by supporting the Iraqi trade unions – and if you take anything away from this go to www.iraqitradeunions.org. They are the most secular, democratic force in Iraq: ordinary, decent people who want a democratic country. If you take one thing away from tonight, whatever your view of the war, please, go to that site and give what you can. The IMF model is one of the key reasons why the occupation is failing. Neoliberalism provides very low levels of employment – there’s 50% unemployment in most of Iraq. A sensible reflationary economics – an Iraqi Marshall Plan – would have given people jobs and minimised the pool of angry, bored, frustrated young men for the resistance to recruit. Bush threw away that chance, the IMF threw away that chance, by imposing the same disastrous programme of corporate rule they are imposed all over the world on the poor. If anybody interested in this read the work of Joseph Stiglitz, the former World Bank economist.

For the purposes of this debate, it’s important to clarify a difference between Bob and I. Earlier this year Bob [Fisk] talked about the Arab world’s "inability to seize democracy" because of "the environment, the make-up of the patriarchal society and the artificial states we created for them which cannot create or sustain democracy… Arab peoples have confidence only in their tribes."

I think that is the big difference between him and me. It is quite right to worry whether the Americans are sincere about bringing democracy to Iraq – given their record in the region, it would be insane not to be. But I don’t agree at all that if the Iraqis get the chance of democracy they won’t take it. If you look at all the opinion polls, they are absolutely unequivocal about his. They put tribe very low on their list of reason why they will vote for a candidate. The Ayatollah Sistani has emerged as a committed democrat – showing that democrats always emerge in the strangest of places. If Arabs are irredeemably tribal, then dictatorship is the only possible route for the region. I don’t believe that, and far more importantly, the evidence doesn’t show it. We shouldn’t be naïve about US power, but we also shouldn’t be patronising about the capacities of Arabs.

And please remember: if the invasion hadn’t happened we wouldn’t be talking about Iraqi democracy, ever. We would be talking about Saddam and Uday and Qusay forever. I say better a chance at democracy and trade unions and decency – even if you think it’s slim - than an eternity of Ba’athism."

There were various questions put to Johann from the audience:

Q. Do you think the Iraqis would still support the invasion? If you did an opinion poll today, wouldn’t they rather have Saddam and their electricity back?

A. We don’t have to guess. Look at the polling from last month. 3% want Saddam back. 3%. Iraqis are angry about the electricity and the sewers and unemployment, and rightly so. Can’t you understand that? And I side with Iraqis even when it’s difficult for me and I doubt their judgement: 51% want the coalition troops to leave very soon, so after the election I will support that too. Why can’t you support Iraqis in the same way?

Q. How can you possibly trust opinion polls from a country as chaotic as Iraq? How can they even be conducted now?

A. Well, firstly, they are imperfect, but do you have a better way to figure out what Iraqis want? Secondly, it’s not hard to conduct polls at all. It’s very easy. You could do it from you home in Manchester. Go home tonight and phone an Iraqi. (the audience laughs). I’m serious. What’s the area code again? I think it’s 00745 but I’m not sure. Dial that then make up a number. Make sure you get the time difference right, the last thing Iraqis need is to be woken at 3am.

You’ll get through to an Iraqi. Most of them speak English and nearly everyone has a phone – and now they are free to talk. If you phoned a thousand of them and you weighted it properly according to the varieties in the Iraqi population – so you weighted it so 60% of the votes went to the Shia and 60% to women and 20% to Kurds and so on – well, that’s an opinion poll. What’s so hard to understand?

At one point, in response to another question, Fisk said, "Now nobody is safe in Iraq. Under Saddam, if you kept your head down and stayed out of politics, you could be."

Johann replied later: "Really? What about the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs and the 60,000 people murdered in Baghdad alone? What about the conscription during the Iran-Iraq War? They all kept out of politics, and politics was forced on them. So I don't agree."

Q: You talk about how the US backs tyrants in many parts of the world today. How can you be sure they won't back a new Iraqi tyrant?

A. I'm not. There is, of course, a much greater chance the Americans will back something like a democracy (albeit with undemocratic IMF-style neoliberal economics) than Saddam, that's for sure.

But your question is a good one. What I hope - and I don't say this with any confidence - is that the US government has learned the lesson of 9/11. 9/11 happened because the US has been supporting, funding and fostering tyranny in the Middle East for fifty years. That was always going to backfire onto the streets of New York one day, killing innocent people. For the first time, US Presidents will pay a domestic price for backing tyranny abroad - because US citizens will pay a terrible price for it, in blood. This murder of US citizens will continue until the Islamic rage is quelled by democracies that can absorb some of that anger internally.

Some of Bush's speeches suggest he has learned that, and that he knows the culture of tyranny needs to be turned around. (I'm hoping Kerry wins, but nothing suggests he's learned that lesson, I'm afraid).

And Bush hasn't done anything on the fetid, corrupt, anti-democratic House of Saud - his good friends - or on Egypt, which the US gives $2bn a year to. Some of his political friends - like Newt Gingrich - are calling for the installation of a pro-US dictator. So I'm not confident. We have to fight and campaign for our governments to create a democracy in Iraq, but it's tough. But nobody could campaign for Saddam to create a democracy. not unless they were taking very powerful hallucinogens.

Q. A majority of North Koreans would probably want an invasion. Would you support that? What about Sudan?

A. North Korea’s is the most horrific tyranny in the world. Three million people have died in Stalinist government-induced famines in the past decade. There is a gulag in the far north of the country that contains 60,000 people, including children. I would dearly love that tyranny to fall. But if we invaded, unfortunately the psychotic government of North Korea would immediately destroy Seoul and Tokyo and kill millions and millions of people. I don’t think, sadly, that’s a price worth paying to save the North Koreans. There’s a very good and brave doctor who is sending information about the outside world into North Korea on balloons. I think we should support him and intensify that, and if anyone wants information it’s on my website. But for now that’s all we can do, I’m afraid, for the North Korean people.

As for Sudan, I’ve advocated massive intervention. 70,000 Darfurians have been murdered since March while we try the multilateral UN route. I know what you’re getting at: am I a consistent interventionist, or do I only want it when the US calls for it? In other words, am I principled, or am I some kind of American hooker, providing a nice humanitarian gloss for any rapacious US state action that comes along? I hope you can see which is the case. That’s why I lobby for our governments to stop supporting the tyrants they arm and fund and actively foster all over the world – from Saudi to Uzbekistan to China.

Bob added: Of course we can’t invade North Korea – because they have WMD. We could only invade Iraq because they didn’t.

Johann said: Yes, I agree. I probably wouldn't have been in favour of the invasion if I thought Saddam had serious stockpiles of WMD. That was never my argument.

[Special thanks to Ian Herbert and Saul Michaelson for typing up this transcript, and to the Independent Marketing Department for organising the event so brilliantly]

POSTSCRIPT: Over at harry's Place, a poster called Mary said:

"You say '9/11 happened because the US has been supporting, funding and fostering tyranny in the Middle East for fifty years. That was always going to backfire onto the streets of New York one day, killing innocent people. For the first time, US Presidents will pay a domestic price for backing tyranny abroad - because US citizens will pay a terrible price for it, in blood. This murder of US citizens will continue until the Islamic rage is quelled by democracies that can absorb some of that anger internally.'

The US is, most certainly, not the only nation that has been supporting, funding and fostering tyranny in the Middle East for fifty years.

Which nation gave the House of Saud control over Mecca and Medina, in a stunning act of idiocy that was comparable to handing control of the Vatican to the KKK?

If we believe that ‘Islamic rage’ is justified, and if we believe that they have the right to act out their ‘rage’ by slaughtering civilians by the thousands and forcing unwilling populations to live under their pre-medieval versions of Shariah law, many citizens, and not always US citizens, will continue to suffer.

On 9/11, wealthy Muslim fundamentalists, financed by wealthy Saudis, slaughtered 3,000 innocent people in an unprovoked act of war.

This ‘Islamic rage’ is financed by terror-supporting states, and they’re using it to gain power. Our Saudi allies are now financing the Iraqi insurgency, and they're profiting from the destruction that results.

(when I say 'our' Saudi Allies, I mean Britain and the US..and Canada, and France, and the many other nations that are allied with the House of Saud)

Democracies will not be able to thrive in the Middle East until this state-sponsored terrorism is disabled.

Islamic ‘rage’ (ie. Islamist imperialism) will continue for as long as we are willing to tolerate it."

I replied:

Mary - You can acknowledge causality without thinking the effect is justified. This is so obvious it's hard to even explain it. I assume you admit that the Versailles Treaty and the humiliation of the German people was a key factor in creating Nazism? (Every single historian does). Does that make you pro-Nazi?

You can talk about causes without condoning the effects, as any adult can understand. That goes to Paul's [another poster on that website] point too - he says, "the oppressed could only respond by ... using airplanes as missiles against an office building filled with noncombatants." Where do I say that or anything like it? Haven't I spent years condemning that mindset? Of course the Germans could have reacted in many ways to Versailles, just as the people of the Middle East could (and do) react in many different ways to their tyrannies. Does that mean we shouldn't talk about Versailles or US policy as a major historical cause, lest we sound sympathetic? This would be empty, vacuous political analysis.

To suggest I am somehow justifying 9/11 by talking about its roots in US policy towards the Middle East is so intellectually empty I find it hard to answer, especially if you know anything of my work. Why, in your empty conceptual framework, didn't the jihadists attack Switzerland or some totally unconnected country then?

So Mary - you make bizarre inferences from a simple statement, suggesting, I'm afraid, that you can only think in the simple homilies of the US right. You say:

"If we believe that ‘Islamic rage’ is justified, and if we believe that they have the right to act out their ‘rage’ by slaughtering civilians by the thousands and forcing unwilling populations to live under their pre-medieval versions of Shariah law, many citizens, and not always US citizens, will continue to suffer."

Hello? I state that some Islamic greivances are justified, many are not. (Surely you agree with that? Are you saying they have no legitimate greiavnces at all?) You then make the vast and incomprehensible leap to saying that therefore I am arguing in defence of slaughtering civilians and imposing Shariah law, causes I am constantly agitating against and taking a lot of flak for. This isn't grown-up analysis, I'm afraid.