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Brian Brivati: 'We were right to go to war
in Iraq'
26.10.2006
Interview by Nick Jackson
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October 26, 2006
Brian Brivati is professor of contemporary history
at Kingston University in Surrey. He believes the
war in Iraq is right.
I still think it was the right thing to do. I
supported the war not on grounds of evidence of
weapons of mass destruction but on the grounds of
genocide. The UN resolutions in 1991 were pretty
straightforward. And the simple fact is that
Saddam's genocidal regime killed 180,000 or 200,000
Kurds.
The international community had a responsibility to
deal with that regime. It failed to do it in
1991-92. The leaders of the Ba'athist regime needed
to be brought to justice.
Saddam was responsible for the systematic murder and
arrest of his own people. If we let it stand, like
we did in the Cold War, we would be saying dictators
are OK as long as they're our dictators. We have to
say that some regimes are unacceptable. What's
happened since has been disastrous.
There have been some appalling policy decisions.
Which is the worst? But there have also been some
triumphs: drafting the constitution; the elections;
what's happening in Kurdistan.
There isn't a magic figure of civilian deaths that
if you go over this it was the wrong thing to do.
Who's made this humanitarian disaster? It's not us.
It's the sectarian groups in Iraq and foreign
fighters feeding the insurgency. Most of it is
Iraqis killing other Iraqis.
The point was to set up a sovereign state of Iraq.
We should withdraw when the Iraqi government say
they can deal with the security situation. I don't
think they're saying that now.
When people say the war has made us a target for
terrorism they seem to forget that we were being
attacked already. We were already a target for
Islamic fascism. Al-Qa'ida didn't have a shortage of
recruits before.
The war has neutralised some state actors who were
supporting terrorism; Libya's reaction is quite
interesting. And remember that the West is not al-Qa'ida's
primary target, their ultimate target is to create
an Islamic state across that region.
Have we helped them achieve that? Well, if we want
to move forward from that Cold War realist approach
we've got to change the rules. I supported the war
in Iraq because it gave us a chance to change the
rules. It says, we will not do business with these
kind of rulers. We can't go back to the way things
were.
Governments doing horrible things to people and we
didn't care because they were African or Asian.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't want to go back to
that.
independent co.uk
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