The war we never should have fought

It didn't take long for the capture of Saddam Hussein to be hailed as a great triumph by coalition leaders and the pro-war lobby.

The news, we are told, will be a powerful boost for President George W. Bush's re-election prospects, and will increase public support for the hard-line positions of John Howard and Tony Blair.

In the short term, this may well be true. But if we look beyond the next few weeks, there are strong grounds for believing that last weekend's dramatic developments will only add to the coalition's problems.

First, the unpalatable fact for those crowing most loudly over Hussein's capture is that the worst of the crimes he is likely to be charged with took place at a time when he was enthusiastically sponsored by the West. If Hussein does receive a fair and open trial, as both Bush and the Iraqi Governing Council have promised, it will surely reveal just how much support, both moral and material, the Iraqi dictator received from Washington and its allies during his murderous heydays of the 1980s.

Details of how the US encouraged Hussein to attack Iran in 1980 and start a war that would cost a million lives, and how the US Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad in December 1983, not only to assure the Iraqi dictator of continued US support in the Iranian war, but also to tout the case of a specific US co-operation for building a new pipeline in his country.

And most embarrassingly for the present government of Israel, details of how Rumsfeld carried on his 1983 visit a letter from the then Israeli prime minister Itzak Shamir offering to sell arms to a man whose capture Israel now regards as great news "for the democratic world and for the fight for freedom and justice".

Fairfax columnist and former Howard adviser Gerard Henderson claims that "without intervention an appalling regime would still be in power". Yet he conveniently overlooks the fact that without the assistance of the CIA four decades ago, the appalling regime would never have come to power in the first place.

Second, it is clear that from his hidey-hole in the ground near a deserted farmhouse, the haggard-looking Methuselah we have seen paraded on our television sets in recent days was not, as was claimed on repeated occasions this year, co-ordinating the Iraqi resistance to the US-led occupation. Tim Hames, a columnist at The Times in London believes that after the weekend's developments "the war is over".

But with Hussein under lock and key, and the prospect of a return to his dictatorship gone for good, the non-Baathist section of the Iraqi resistance is sure to become even more emboldened. And we are likely to see an escalation, and not a reduction, of hostilities on coalition targets. The bombing of police stations in Baghdad after Hussein's capture is yet more evidence to back up the conclusion of a recent CIA report that "the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".

Globally, of course, the main terrorist threat to the US and its allies was never posed by the secularist Iraqi dictator and his government, but by the religious fanatics of al-Qa'ida, whose global operations will be unaffected by the Iraqi dictator's seizure.

Hussein may have been a domestic tyrant, but aside from his payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, the man denounced by Osama bin Laden as a "socialist infidel" had no connection to international terrorist networks and his violence was strictly not for export.

Third, we must remind ourselves that despite this week's headlines, the war against Iraq was not fought to capture Hussein. As late as last February, Howard and Blair were still insisting that if Hussein came clean on his WMD program, there would be no need for war. Furthermore, they argued that although regime change was desirable, it was not a casus belli.

Now, it appears that, lo and behold, the war was about the Iraqi leader after all.

Despite the triumphalism of the past few days, Hussein's capture in no way diminishes the arguments against war, as Henderson and other pro-war activists contend. On the contrary, the case against war, strong enough in March, grows more compelling with each passing day.

The coalition may have Hussein (hardly a Herculean achievement considering the $US25 million - $33.6 million - bounty on his head) but there is still not a scrap of credible evidence that Iraq possessed the WMDs that in Howard's words were "capable of causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale".

That Hussein was a brutal and ruthless dictator is not in doubt. That he posed a threat to our security that justified an illegal $US100 billion war that has killed thousands and made the world an even more dangerous place than it was before - most certainly is.

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Neil Clark is a tutor in history and politics at Oxford Tutorial College in England.

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