Toppling Saddam

Now here's something you don't see every day - a Labour MP who's prepared to say that toppling Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq was the right thing to do.

Most Labour MPs these days including the Labour leader - Ed Miliband - give the impression  they would rather eat a rat sandwich than answer any difficult questions - about the last Labour government's decision to invade Iraq.

So it's interesting to hear Dave Anderson's views all these years later - because the present Labour leadership are all falling over each other - in their great haste to say that Iraq was a big mistake.

I heard the preposterous Lord Prescott on some TV programme the other week - he said that 'with the benefit of hindsight' it was a mistake to go to war in Iraq and - by implication - topple the great dictator Saddam Hussein.

Well knock me down with a feather.

Because since the stated reason for the UK going to war with Iraq was the existence of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) - the subsequent failure to discover any WMD makes the 'hindsight' point both trite and meaningless - unless like the conspiracy theorists you believe the whole business was a complete put up job from the start.

But having taken the decision to invade Iraq - the military forces on the ground were never going to do anything else other than remove Saddam Hussein from power - and to suggest otherwise is completely disingenuous.

So whether you agree with Dave Anderson or not - I find it refreshing to hear a Labour MP debating the issues surrounding Iraq - without using the mealy-mouthed language employed by most of his Labour colleagues.     

The Times newspaper - 12 March 2013

"I was wrong. We were right to topple Saddam"

By Dave Anderson

Britain looked the other way while genocide took place in Iraq. We could have prevented it.

Ten years ago I was utterly opposed to the invasion of Iraq. At the time I was president of Unison and sat on the TUC General Council, so like a lot of others in the labour movement I did my bit to lobby against Western intervention, believing that the reasons given for invasion were not justified, that the argument about WMD was not proven and that inspections should have been given a chance to work.

But in the years since I have had to face new facts, having been to Iraq to see things for myself. I now see that the international community should have toppled Saddam Hussein much earlier than 2003.

One benefit of Saddam’s removal — one very close to my heart — was the re-emergence of a trade union movement that had been brutally suppressed by his regime. I was really proud when Unison established a training school for shop stewards in Kurdistan in 2006.

Early in that year I joined a Labour Friends of Iraq delegation to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. I was struck by the attitude of the trade unionists: comrades and friends keen to develop their skills so that they could better stand up for working people.

The first thing that they said was: “We need your help. We need your Government to start investing in this country, because if they do not invest we will not have work, and without work we do not have a trade union movement.” That was a very simple equation. What they also said, very clearly, was: “We thank you, as a nation, for what you did for us in 1991, and we thank you even more for what you did for us in 2003, when you liberated us.” That was a shock for me. I saw 2003 as an invasion by an unwanted occupying power.

However, it was all very well for me, sitting in the comfort of Blaydon, to say that it was really, really wrong for the allied forces to invade. It was not me being wiped off the face of the earth by Saddam’s thugs. It was not my parents being buried alive. It was not my village being flattened.

It did not change my view that we invaded Iraq for the wrong reasons, but what became ever clearer to me was that we should have liberated Iraq many years earlier. If we had, we could have stopped genocide being unleashed against the Iraqi people.

In the 1980s, before Saddam invaded Kuwait, we did nothing to curb his murderous instincts. We sat on our hands, supporting Washington’s position, and watched while the Iranians and the Iraqis wiped out one million of their own citizens in their bloody, pointless eight-year war.

And when Saddam, under the cover of war, launched a genocidal campaign against the Kurds, we ignored it. It was a price worth paying for Saddam to control the Ayatollah and his acolytes. Indeed, not only did we ignore such terrible bloodshed and repression, but we sold arms to both sides.

Many who have been to Kurdistan have, like me, visited the “Red House”, the torture chamber in the northern city of Sulaimani. It is a huge building in the main street. No attempt was made by the Baathist authorities to hide what went on there; indeed, every horror was documented in triplicate.

While they were there I saw some guards — Kurdish men — watching the trial of Saddam live on television. The juxtaposition was extraordinary: for those men, sitting in what had been one of Saddam’s torture chambers, the trial of the dictator being played out on the TV screen was a chance to get their lives back. For people such as me who were against the war in Iraq, it was a wake-up call that could not be ignored.

I visited villages where people saw their way of life terminated. Squads of Baathists snatched men from their homes and killed them. But they were not even given the quick death of a bullet in the brain; they were chucked in trenches and then bulldozers got to work, burying them alive.

I also visited a former concentration camp in Erbil. There we found the children and women who had been snatched from the countryside, once the breadbasket of Iraq. All that they wanted to do was return home to their abandoned fields and farms. But they cannot because they no longer know how to farm — their fathers had been killed years before, so they have nobody to tell them how to do things.

A close friend of mine, Hangaw Khan, a Kurdish union leader, asked me to campaign to recognise the genocide against the Kurds “in the name of our burnt country, the pure pink blood of our genocide martyrs, buried alive innocent women and children, burnt and drowned ... by chemical gas”.

His words should haunt all of us. The uncomfortable lesson I draw is that Britain could have stopped this. We and the rest of the world could have taken real action before Saddam’s genocide and repression became industrial. We could have, and should have, toppled Saddam years before we did.

Dave Anderson is Labour MP for Blaydon