Tomorrow, at 1am GMT, George Bush, “president” of the United States, will be broadcasting to the State of Texas and the nation, and will almost certainly be laying down a final ultimatum to Saddam Hussain. His choices are now to go into exile or be invaded. Upto 300,000 British and American troops are amassed on the Iraqi border, and it is almost certain they will invade within days. United Nations weapons inspectors are being withdrawn, as has the Security Council Resolution authorising war after UN Security Council permanent member France determined it would use its veto against it. So the invasion will lack any UN authority, and will breech international law and the UN Charter.

Britain drew out Iraq’s borders in the early 1920s, provided them with a king the French threw out of Syria (elected in a Saddam-worthy plebiscite with a majority of 96 per cent), and reinforced his rule by having the RAF fly regular sorties from their airbase at Habbaniya, outside Baghdad, from where they sent lumbering Handley-Page biplanes to bomb “recalcitrant Arabs”. Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air, the future Colonial Secretary, said that, “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” In the end we didn’t use gas; not because we lacked the will, but because we lacked the technology. Being uncivilised enough to be late in paying your taxes was grounds enough for an attack; it was the first systematic bombing of civilians in history. Ever economically prudent, the Empire charged the Iraqis for the bombs used against them.

A Whitehouse aid in the Regan administration said of Saddam: “He’s a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.” Donald Rumsfeld, now crusading US Secretary of Defence, visited Iraq in 1983 to discuss military and economic support for Saddam’s regime, at the same time as he was launching gas attacks on Iranian soldiers. The US and Britain sold Saddam millions of dollars worth of weapons, and helpfully gave him credit to pay for them with. Saddam had no problems with using poison gas; the attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 was the “most notorious and the deadliest single gas attack against the Kurds,” killing 5,000 civilians. Shortly after that, Britain approved an extra £340 million of credit, and the Americans lent him another billion dollars. The US Senate wanted to condemn the attack, but was blocked by the Republican White House, under Ronald Regan. Before Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he visited the US Ambassador and was told: “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts.”

In his State of the Union address in 2003, President George Bush condemned the “torture chambers of Iraq”, while apparently suffering a temporary state of amnesia about the torture chambers of regional allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

We are told President Saddam presents a threat to the entire world of such gravity it justified an illegal pre-emptive attack on his country (not that Blair has actually released the Attorney General’s advice about this, but Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, has made the position quite clear), yet neither the US or Britain has managed to produce one iota of evidence to this effect. And if Saddam actually has weapons of mass destruction, what would make him more likely to use them than a military assault on his country? Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis may die, yet no firm plans for keeping the unstable country Britain invented eighty years ago together has come to light; in fact, until the Ankara Parliament vetoed it, the US was perfectly willing to allow 40,000 Turkish troops, independent of US command, to have a free hand against the Kurds of Northern Iraq, which has had de-facto independence from Saddam since 1991.

The moral case for war is strong, says Blair; inaction would be worse than action. In 1991, President George Bush Senior encouraged a rebellion against Saddam. But an uprising by Marsh Arabs and Shia Muslims was brutally repressed by Saddam’s helicopter gunships, because the US declined to intervene; it had been decided it would be better for US interests in the Middle East if they maintained troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Now we’re asked to trust that our governments have the best interests of the Iraqis at heart as they prepare to bomb the hell out of them.

While Britain was bombing the recalcitrant Arabs in the 1920s, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, the Secretary of State for War, said: “If the Arab population realised that the peaceful control of Mesopotamia ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children, I’m very doubtful if we shall gain that acquiescence of the fathers and husbands of Mesopotamia to which the Secretary of State for the Colonies looks forward.”

Who says we never learn from history …

(Edited by Byron 18/03/2003 00:26)