A week before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam outlined to the US ambassador in Baghdad the basis of future Iraqi-US relations, writes John Waters
There were as yet few hints of enmity between the two countries, and the conversation consisted mainly of the ambassador stressing that the US had no opinion about his quarrel with Kuwait.
Nevertheless, Saddam spelled out a warning. The US, he said, could harm Iraq; but Iraq could also harm the US. "Yours," he said, " is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle. . . . . We cannot come all the way to you in the United States, but individual Arabs may reach you. . . You can come to Iraq with aircraft and missiles but do not push us to the point where we cease to care.
"And when we feel that you want to injure our pride and take the Iraqis' chance of a high standard of living, then we will cease to care and death will be the choice for us."
Those who deny a connection between Iraq and September 11th must dispose of both the explicit nature of this threat and the precision of its prophecy.
Saddam was predicting that the differences between the two cultures would alter the ecology of world conflict, precisely the changes which have made this war inevitable.
To argue simply that the war is wrong is to say that we must choose the greater of evils on the basis that inertia is more moral than action. Those who so argue divide between straightforward pacifists, who abhor warfare, and anti-colonialists, who argue from a historical standpoint that the invasion of Iraq is a continuation of Western imperialism in the Middle East, and therefore the problem, not the solution.
But the arguments offered are contradictory: the Middle East should be left to sort out its own problems; and additionally, or in the alternative, Saddam should have been dealt with 12 years ago.
Few voices now appear to be arguing that the US was wrong to intervene in 1991. So the question arises: at what point did the US cease to be peacemaker and become an aggressor?
Or is it suggested that the morality of global conflict requires that the US intervene in certain situations on the basis of some vaguely-defined imperative concerning the interests of other peoples, but desist when it comes to either its own interests or the ideology of democracy it promotes?
The past is interesting but irrelevant. The records of British and French interference in the Gulf region are as disgraceful as their records elsewhere, but this helps us not at all.
The US can indeed be blamed for not finishing the job it started in ejecting Saddam from Kuwait, and for its shameful abandonment of the Kurds and Shia Muslims in 1991; but such recrimination likewise avails us nothing.
Indeed, the arguments about the West's previous actions in the Gulf region can be read as imposing a solemn responsibility to act one more time.
Hence the West cannot stand idly by, because, firstly, from, yes, a moral perspective, the mess that is the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular is mainly of the West's making.
Secondly, because this situation is no longer merely regional, but has acquired global dimensions: the chickens of Western colonialism threaten to come home to roost, raining destruction on the living generations of Europe and the US, who carry little blame for their nations' imperial pasts.
And thirdly, because we either believe in the prescription that is democracy or we don't. Many countries, including Ireland, have embraced the One Best Way and accepted the Yankee dollar as compensation for the loss of whatever indigenous belief-systems they possessed.
There is now no realistic global alternative to the political commodity offered by the US. It may appear contradictory to say that democracy must be enforced, but, when you strip away the cant, the essence of democracy is the enforcement of the will of the majority by rule of law.
Democracy is not the manifestation of some innate human impulse tending towards fraternity and peace, nor does it occur spontaneously out of the yearnings of the unfree.
It is an ideology which must be taught, and sometimes pressed upon those who would be happier without free speech and elections.
The US may give people a pain in the backside, but, as the franchise-holder on Western democracy, it is to be regarded as the obvious salesperson until a better idea comes along.
Imposing democracy on Iraq may be a long shot, but it's the only shot we've got with the remotest hope of not bouncing back to destroy us.