When in 2003, George W Bush and his ally Tony Blair conquered Iraq and then led it down the road to destruction, it was widely given out by their friends and large sections of the Western media that freedom had come to the Iraqis. The fall of Saddam Hussain was touted as a victory for democracy.
And ignored was the truth that the invasion of Iraq was absolutely in contravention of international laws and basic morality. The pummelling of Iraq came through a peddling of falsehood: Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, weapons which the Blair government stated, in a brazen manner, could cause grievous destruction around the world within 45 minutes of detonation.
At the United Nations, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, armed with statistics and graphs that were at complete variance with the truth, “educated” the Security Council on the location of the WMDs. No one paid any attention to Hans Blix and his team. No one had any intention of seriously taking their view, which was that they had found no evidence of aggressive intent on the Iraqi regime’s part, into consideration.
Iraq was destroyed. The library in Baghdad was looted. The toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad became major entertainment in the western media. When Saddam was captured by the Americans, the indignity visited on him -- his teeth being subjected to examination in the way cattle are examined in markets by potential buyers -- was an image flashed around the globe.
A sense of glee was in the air.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis perished in the days following the Anglo-American invasion of their country. No images of Iraqi men, women, and children dying of hunger and thirst, of asking to be saved by the global community, of losing their homes, penetrated the living rooms in Western capitals. Saddam Hussein was subjected to a sham of a trial and swiftly despatched. Not a whisper was heard about the injustice done to the man.
Today, with the Russians invading Ukraine, politicians and Western media people as well as so many others, trip over one another to condemn Vladimir Putin’s action. Everyone in Europe and in North America has been pounding away at the Russian president, for all the right reasons. It was, and is, morally reprehensible that a country would have its soldiers march into another without credible reasons.
And yet there is that issue of double standards coming in here. The world, the Western part of it, did not think it proper to rise in defence of Iraq when those powerful but unethical men decided to invade Iraq. Indeed, the fall of Iraq was for them the coming of freedom to Iraq. And in these present times, the invasion of Ukraine is, ironically (for the powerful in Washington, London, and Brussels), an assault on the sovereignty of Ukrainians.
Everyone is in a relay race to demonize Putin. US Senator Lindsey Graham has been wondering why there is yet no one in Russia who can assassinate Russia’s leader. There are others who have been asking questions about the state of Putin’s mind. Back in 2003, not one media outlet, and certainly not those in power in the glitzy capitals of the West, questioned the psychological state of Bush and Blair. No one demonized them. There was no one who even remotely thought in the way Graham thinks today.
The West has been scrambling to impose sanctions on Russia. That begs the question: Do Western politicians really believe that Russia can be observed in a vein similar to Iran or Iraq? For endless years, Iran has borne the brunt of Western sanctions. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq paid a heavy price in terms of sanctions clamped on it. And, yes, for 60 years, Cuba has bridled under American sanctions, with hardly any ally of Washington calling for an end to the sanctions imposed on Havana when Fidel Castro’s band of guerrillas took charge of the country from a corrupt Fulgencio Batista.
What is not being acknowledged in the West, by such people as Ursula von der Leyen and Jens Stoltenberg, is that the world has to live with Russia. What is being unwisely ignored is that the knee-jerk reaction to the invasion of Ukraine in Western capitals is dangerously narrowing the scope of diplomacy, assuming that a diplomatic approach to the situation is yet possible. When all Western diplomats walked out of a conference of the UN Human Rights Council last week as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov prepared to speak, they violated the calling of diplomacy.
It was a move in terribly bad taste.
And of course Ukraine is in bad shape. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been nothing if not heroic in these dangerous times for his people. But when Nato and the EU and Washington begin to believe that sending him tanks and armoured cars and anti-aircraft missiles will enable him to confront Moscow and even beat it back, they are getting it badly wrong.
Western politicians were wrong to think that Putin would allow Russia to be encircled by Nato; they were wrong to not take his concerns about his country’s security into focus. They should not have thought Vladimir Putin was a politician in the mould of Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin. They underestimated him and only now are feeling the consequences.
Sharing the pain Ukraine is going through is only natural, for everyone who believes in freedom. That being the point, should Western politicians and their media not raise their voices in protest against the Biden administration’s move to pilfer half of Afghanistan’s seized assets and give them away to the families of the victims of 9/11 when Afghans were not the terrorists of 9/11?
Should a sense of morality not come into any and all deliberations on Iran? When the West bats for dubious regime change in Bolivia and Venezuela, the clear need arises for a re-examination of the role played by Bush and Blair in Iraq. They were aggressors in Iraq then as much as Putin is an aggressor in Ukraine today.
The world’s compassion goes out to every weeping, suffering Ukrainian. Back in 2003, we did not see, did not hear, did not feel the agony of Iraqis as they died in droves when foreign conquistadores pitilessly reduced their land to fire and dust -- because the media in the West did not hear their hearts crack in the way they feel the soul snap in Ukraine’s frightened citizens today.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.