British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s latest musing about Iraq shows how far he has come since the glory days of weapons of mass destruction. He now has only one justification for the invasion of Iraq: it ”rid the world” of the dictator Saddam Hussein.
This justification has serious consequences for British foreign policy. For if it is Britain’s aim to rid the world of dictators, where do we go next?
Here’s a suggestion. Twenty-six million people live in beleaguered Uzbekistan, almost exactly the same number of people who live in Iraq.
President Islam Karimov is a dictator who has perfected many of the techniques of repression developed by Saddam. There are at least 5 000 people unjustly imprisoned in Uzbekistan, many of them for their political or religious views. They are systematically tortured and murdered. There is in Uzbekistan nothing remotely resembling a free press or free speech.
Obviously Uzbekistan should be next in line for liberation by Blair and his armed forces. A sure sign of the impending British invasion of Uzbekistan is the attitude of the British ambassador there, a feisty Scotsman called Craig Murray.
Murray shocked the Uzbeks last year with a series of speeches complaining about, among other things, the rather un-British habit of boiling dissidents to death. He even incited the Uzbek people to ”fight for democracy”. That is how you would expect a representative of Blair’s government to behave.
But wait. Murray has been recalled and scolded by his Foreign Office bosses in London, who reminded him (as if he didn’t know) that the Uzbek dictator provided airfields and bases from which the United States air force could carry out their bombing raids on Afghanistan.
Surely Murray could understand that this generosity put Karimov’s dictatorship firmly on the side of the good guys, the democrats and the freedom fighters, and that Murray’s speeches had caused nothing but embarrassment in the lands of the free.
Dictators, in other words, can have their uses, and Murray should shut up. To his credit, he didn’t. He went back to Tashkent and continued to denounce the government there. Indeed, he committed the shocking sin of comparing the treatment of prisoners in Uzbekistan to what happened in Iraq under Saddam (and is still happening under the auspices of the country’s liberators).
Before long, I predict, Murray will be packed off somewhere safer.
But where? What about another country with roughly the same population: Saudi Arabia? If Murray goes there he might be asked about the terrorist atrocities that continue to plague that country. He would have to pay respectful attention to the views of Crown Prince Abdullah, the country’s de facto (and unelected) ruler.
Responding to the latest terrorist attack in the oil city of Khobar last week, the crown prince went public. He made a solemn vow ”to crush this corrupt and deviant group” that had carried out the terrorism.
Corrupt and deviant group! That is the most accurate definition I have yet come across of the feudal monarchy that governs Saudi Arabia. Nowhere on Earth is the gap between the quite disgustingly rich and the even more disgustingly poor more flagrantly flaunted than in Saudi Arabia. Nowhere is dissent or divergence more ruthlessly punished. No more appropriate target exists for the grand democratic crusade of Blair’s ”New” Labour project.
But wait. What is this statement slithering out of the British Foreign Office? In its hour of need, it assures us, Britain stands solidly behind the corrupt and deviant group that rules Saudi Arabia. Crown Prince Abdullah, in other words, is as secure from British invasion as is Karimov and scores of other dictators across the world who, by providing air bases or cheap oil or helpful United Nations votes, have proved themselves true friends of the West. — Â