Even More Terrible Things

As, in the last few minutes, the British Ambassador flees Tripoli, Stephen Glover writes:

The tragic events in Gaza and Ukraine may be dominating the news, but even more terrible things are happening in Libya and Iraq.

In both cases a naive and stupendously ill-conceived Western foreign policy is almost entirely to blame.

Many western embassies in Tripoli, including America’s, have closed, with diplomats deserting the city as fast as their legs will carry them, leaving the Libyans to their fate. Britain retains only a reduced embassy staff.

Meanwhile, in the north of Iraq — a country allegedly delivered into freedom from Saddam Hussein in 2003 — a psychopathic organisation called Islamic State (previously known as ISIS) is executing thousands of Shia Muslims and Christians as the central government in Baghdad looks on, powerless to intervene.

The largely untold story of the persecuted Iraqi Christian minority is especially shaming for those avowedly Christian leaders, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, who were responsible for the invasion of Iraq.

For however revolting Saddam Hussein may have been, he did at least tolerate Iraq’s Christian community, which at one time was almost 1.5 million-strong.

In the years following the invasion, the number of Christians dwindled to 300,000.

Then, last month, Islamic State captured Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, which still had a sizeable Christian minority.

Islamic State issued them with an ultimatum: if they did not convert to Islam by noon on July 19, they would pay a fine or be executed.

A vast exodus has taken place so that, according to Canon Andrew White, a brave Anglican priest resident in Baghdad: ‘It looks as though the end [of Christianity in Iraq] could be very near.’

This is a Christian community that was one of the oldest in the world.

The earliest church building to have been discovered is at Dura-Europos in Syria on the Euphrates, close to the border with Iraq. Its murals were painted between 232 AD and 256 AD, three quarters of a century before the Roman emperor, Constantine, recognised Christianity.

I dwell on the Christians in Iraq obviously not because their lives are more precious than those of the no-less-terrorised Shia Muslims, but because one might have expected Christian leaders to have spared a thought for them before they set about tearing apart the country’s social fabric.

It is certain, however, that if the admittedly odious Saddam Hussein were still in power, Islamic State would not be on the rampage in northern Iraq and the lives of thousands of Christians and Shias would not have been lost.

And it is also certain that the number of people who have died since the invasion — as many as 500,000, according to reputable studies — far exceeds the number of victims of Saddam Hussein during his much longer period in power.

No doubt thousands more innocent people are doomed to be killed.

Cruel and despotic though he was, Saddam did offer Iraq a measure of stability, which was destroyed by the invasion.

This repulsive strongman at least held his country together, which the divisive Shia-dominated government in Baghdad cannot do.

A similar point can be made about the no less repellent Gaddafi.

In the Libya over which he presided for more than 40 years, there were no factions of militias killing innocent people and destroying their homes and livelihoods.

Where would you prefer to try to live a half-normal life — in Gaddafi’s mostly peaceable Tripoli or in a city fought over by pitiless gunmen?

Would it be better to inhabit Saddam Hussein’s Mosul or the city now transformed into a killing field by Islamic State? I know where my preferences would lie.

Of course, this is not the choice that western statesmen had in mind when they intervened in Iraq and Libya. 

They genuinely believed that, when the tyrants had been removed, better and more competent rulers would replace them.

But such a belief constituted a triumph of hope over good sense.

It arose from a toxic combination of naivety, ignorance and vanity. Tony Blair displayed these fatal characteristics in all his foreign excursions.

His habit was to divide the world into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.

Before the British-led invasion of Kosovo in 1999, Blair demonised the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, while representing the Kosovans, and their leader Hashim Thaci, as noble and blameless victims.

I’ve no doubt that Milosevic was a brute and a war criminal, but Thaci was hardly a saint.

This week, a special EU prosecutor has alleged that Serb prisoners may have had their organs removed and sold by Hashim Thaci’s Kosovo Liberation Army during the war.

When it came to Iraq, Blair unhesitatingly identified Saddam Hussein as a ‘baddie’, which he undoubtedly was.

But neither he nor President Bush considered the consequences of removing him, and they grossly exaggerated the moral qualities and competence of the Iraqi opposition.

In 2011, David Cameron made a similar error in forcing out Gaddafi.

Earlier that year, he had rushed to Tahrir Square in Cairo after the ousting of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak to celebrate what he appeared to think was the birth of democracy in the country.

As it turned out, it was no such thing. The Egyptian army is back in charge.

The Prime Minister — in his innocence — thought that democracy was much easier to establish in the Middle East than it has turned out to be.

Last year, again in the Blair mould, he tried to involve us in the Syrian war on the side of the rebels against President Bashar al-Assad’s undeniably nasty regime. Fortunately, he was thwarted by Parliament.

It has since become increasingly clear that the rebels are far from being ‘goodies’. Indeed, they include the genocidal Islamic State.

Under Tony Blair and, to a lesser extent, David Cameron, our foreign policy has been driven by a kind of do-gooding naivety rather than a hard-headed assessment of our own interests or a sophisticated appraisal of the consequences of getting rid of disagreeable, but efficient, rulers.

Our leaders have idiotically assumed that democracy can be imposed with the barrel of a gun.

Of course it can’t be — as Iraq and Libya have demonstrated, and as we will see in Afghanistan once the last American troops have left.

One day, perhaps, Iraq and Libya will be democratic, but if they ever are it will not be as a result of western meddling but because that is what people in those countries, and their rulers, want.

The lesson of Kosovo, Iraq and Libya is that we should cease judging the world in simplistic moral terms. In all these cases there are no ‘good guys’.

And there are ‘bad guys’ who are even worse — and more dangerous — than Col Muammar Gaddafi (above), President Bashar al-Assad and Saddam Hussein.

Before the Iraq War, Mr Blair and George W. Bush famously prayed side by side.

If they should ever get together again, I hope they may consider saying a joint prayer for the ancient Christian community of Iraq, whose death warrant they so carelessly signed.

To which Rod Liddle adds:

While trawling down the Mail Online’s right-hand-side of the page porno strip, to consider analytically the latest photographs of Jessica Alba in a swimming costume, I came across a rather good piece of journalism by Stephen Glover.

Yes, yes; you know this already.

But the horrors inflicted by US/UK liberal evangelism on the world (and then later, by extension, on ourselves) cannot be understated. Liberal evangelism and, as Glover has it, arrogance and narcissism on the part of primarily Tony Blair. To which we might add an abiding stupidity, too.

And a messianic fervour.

It was always the case that no matter how foul the despots who ran those ghastly regimes in the Arab world, they were substantially less ghastly than the regimes which the local people would wish to impose upon themselves.

And that’s before you consider the endless warfare between competing armies of deranged jihadis.

I suspect our adventures in Iraq, and our encouragement of the ‘Arab Spring’ rebels, will come to be seen, a century from now, far more disastrous for the locals than our colonialism (of which liberal evangelism is merely a modern variant).

And of course, far less helpful for us.

Will Rod's appearance on this evening's Any Questions have annoyed "the Guardianistas"? Only if they are the supporters of neoconservative foreign policy, and of cheap labour for big business.