Analysis: As US-led troops prepare to push north towards Baghdad, people around the world are probably asking the same basic question: what is the justification for America's war against Iraq? David Ignatius reports from Kuwait
I put that question to Abdulatif al-Hamad, who heads the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development here in Kuwait. It was his organisation that last year bravely co-sponsored the Arab Human Development Report, which presented a devastating indictment of the lack of freedom and economic progress in the Arab world.
Hamad gave a simple but eloquent answer: An Iraqi living in the slums of the southern city of Basra should have the same healthy drinking water as the man who lives next to Saddam Hussein's palace in Baghdad. To mobilize Iraq's resources for peaceful development in this way, he notes sadly: "There is no alternative to war, as things stand today. Iraq is a country that has been deprived of real development," Hamad says.
He estimates the cost of Saddam's military adventures over the past two decades at roughly $500 billion. "Imagine if that money had been used for economic development," he observes. Iraq could by now have emerged as the first economic "tiger" of the Arab world, as dynamic as South Korea.
A war for drinkable water, I can understand. A war to replace a regime that throws children from helicopters to force their parents to confess, this I can also understand. I still have trouble with President Bush's rationale about preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction. The UN inspectors seem to be doing a reasonable job of that, and I suspect the risk that I'll need my gas mask will be greater after the war starts.
We're all prisoners of our own experience when it comes to questions of war and peace. I cannot escape the impressions I formed of Saddam Hussein in 1980, when I first visited Iraq and sensed what it was like to live under a regime that governed by physical intimidation of its people.
In the years since then, I've interviewed dozens of Iraqi dissidents and heard their stories of imprisonment and torture.
My belief in the justice of this war is visceral. Reason has pounded away at it, but it's still there - despite all the diplomatic blunders the Bush administration has made over the past months and the damage its arrogance has done to American interests. I know America helped create Saddam; that's part of why I think we have a moral obligation now to help the Iraqis oust him.
Only a new Iraq built on the ashes of war can redeem the sacrifices that Americans, British and Iraqis will make in coming days. Despite its oil wealth, Iraq today is a country in collapse.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Iraq's gross domestic product fell 6 per cent in 2001 and another 3 per cent last year. The Iraqi dinar has become nearly worthless.
Consider the example, narrated by a Kuwaiti friend, of a retired Iraqi schoolteacher whose pension is the equivalent of $5 a month. To get by, he sells cigarettes at a roadside stand.
Iraq has been a symbol of the sickness of Arab politics, and the Arab world seems to understand that this war will bring change. Monday's edition of the Kuwait daily Arab Times carried an editorial titled: "Hurry . . . bury him."
Of course the Kuwaitis support war, you might say. But inside the paper was a story from Cairo quoting the liberal Egyptian intellectual, Saad Eddin Ibrahim: "Wars, bad as they are, they break empires, they break dictators, they leave the ground clear for new systems to be created."
The US, hopefully, has learned some lessons: It does need friends; diplomacy does matter; American arrogance has been self-defeating. President Bush also seems to have understood, in endorsing the "road map", that there will never be stability in the Middle East without creation of a viable Palestinian state, living in peace with Israel.
Soon, the world will need to unite in rebuilding Iraq and supporting this new Arab future. The French, Germans and Russians can be key players in this process, and the UN should be the locus. The sooner the US can share its burdens, the safer it will be for everyone.
These are signposts in the sand, marking the way forward as war begins. - (Washington Post Writers Group)