It was predictable that the pro-war press would react with sharp hostility to Tony Benn’s eve-of-war interview with Saddam Hussein. The Spectator published a dollop of stale, badly-written bile by the Guardian columnist Rod Liddle.
But socialists too have reason to be hostile to Benn’s enterprising trip to Baghdad.
Benn sat across a table from the mass murderer Saddam Hussein and respectfully fed him questions designed to stimulate him into explaining his point of view. It was essentially a “party political broadcast” from Baghdad. Benn invited Saddam to speak directly to the people of Britain and the USA, and he duly did so.
Benn posed not one awkward or unfriendly question to the dictator. After the interview was shown on Channel Four TV news, Benn heatedly defended himself, insisting that “the question now” is peace and everything else is irrelevant.
The advocacy of peace does not depend on Saddam Hussein being not quite as bad, not quite as unreasonable, as the warmongers say he is. The case against a US-British attack on Iraq is not that the Iraqi butcher, close-up, talking to Tony Benn on camera, looks not like a monster but a human being. Saddam Hussein is a monster. He is not only comparable to Hitler, but worse by far than Hitler up to 1938-9.
Saddam used poison gas on Iraq’s Kurds; locked Iraq into an eight-year war with Iran, 1980-8, during which he used chemical weapons on teenage Iranian troops and half a million people died; pillaged Kuwait in 1990; and fired rockets at Israel in 1991.
The argument against war is that vast numbers of innocent Iraqis will die, and that afterwards the US and British, whose fundamental concern is oil, may choose to replace Saddam only by a more biddable dictator, just as they armed and backed Saddam right up until he invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Socialist opponents of the upcoming war should not let the warmongers force us into the dishonest and unprincipled role of saying “Saddam is not so bad, really”. We should not talk as if we would approve war if only Bush could convince us that Saddam is evil, or that he has more chemical weapons than he admits.
In September 1938 the Munich agreement postponed the outbreak of the Second World War by just one year. James Maxton, the leader of the Independent Labour Party, an organisation of a few thousand members which stood somewhat to the left of today’s SWP, welcomed the pact. Leon Trotsky, commenting on Maxton, said:
“The leader of the [ILP], Maxton, thanked [prime minister Neville] Chamberlain in Parliament after the Munich pact and declared to astonished humanity that by his policy Chamberlain had saved the peace—yes! yes! had saved the peace!—that he, Maxton, knows Chamberlain well and be assured that Chamberlain had ‘sincerely’ fought the war and ‘sincerely’ saved the peace, etc., etc. This simple example gives a conclusive and what is more a pretty crushing characterisation of Maxton and of his party.
“The revolutionary proletariat rejects Chamberlain’s ‘peace’ just as it does his war. The ‘peace’ of Chamberlain is the continuation of the violence against India and other colonies and the preparation of the war in conditions more favourable to the British slaveholders. To take upon himself the slightest shadow of responsibility for the policy of ‘peace’ of Chamberlain is not possible for a socialist, for a revolutionary, but only for a pacifist lackey of imperialism; and the party that tolerates as leader Maxton, and actions like his public solidarisation with the slaveholder Chamberlain, is not a socialist party but a miserable pacifist clique.”
The situations are not exact parallels. Saddam Hussein has committed crimes—especially against the peoples of the Iraqi state—unparalleled by Hitler up to 1938, but Iraq is not the equivalent of the powerful German imperialism at whose head Hitler stood. The responsibility of socialists now, however, is exactly what it was at the time of Munich: to tell the truth, to maintain their political independence, to refuse to let themselves be contaminated to any degree at all by a pro-Saddam response to the warmongers’ propaganda against him.
The pressure to counter the war propagandists by trying to see something ‘good’ in Saddam is, of course, immense. Yet socialists who do not resist it will cease to be socialists. To be propelled by unreflecting pacifism—“the question now is peace”, as Benn in self-justification insists—into taking sides against the Americans and British and for one of the worst regimes on the planet would be a shameful self-betrayal.
We must oppose the US and British governments for the reasons outlined above. And we must oppose Saddam Hussein and his regime, too.
To put it at its sharpest, adopting any attitude other than implacable hostility to Saddam Hussein’s regime is too high a price to pay for peace. Things like Tony Benn’s “party political broadcast” for Saddam Hussein can make no contribution to the struggle for peace: they can only spread confusion on the left.
We live in a world where the US hyperpower and its allies can make war at will. The only fundamental answer to that is to overthrow capitalism and replace it by socialism. The first and all-conditioning responsibility of socialists is to prepare the working-class forces that will do that. That means telling the truth. Listen to Trotsky once again: “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be… to be true in little things as in big ones…” Those standards must govern the activity of serious socialists and consistent democrats.
