Nothing to lose but their chains

A war against Iraq might destabilise the Middle East, says David Pryce-Jones, but that is precisely what the region needs

Iraq may soon be liberated. The Americans are building bases and runways in the Middle East, airlifting men and supplies, and passing the resolutions in Congress necessary to take military action. Regime change is what President Bush has set his heart on. Condoleezza Rice goes further: she calls for democracy, not only in Iraq but also in the wider Muslim world. From the reaction all over Europe, you might think that Washington was insisting on the sacrifice of the first-born.

In Britain, the Sir Andrew Aguecheeks and Sir Toby Belches, after long and calamitous careers in the Foreign Office, are bombarding the press with fictions about Arabs and a coming jihad against the West. The Left everywhere tries to set the moral tone with sniggers about cowboys. It’s an adventure, according to the Germans. Simplistic, according to the French. Mustn’t make Iraqis suffer; that would be wrong, according to Clare Short, as if all were otherwise milk and honey in their land. For people of their kind, it was never the right time to trouble Herr Hitler or Monsieur Stalin, and it is not the right time now to upset Saddam Hussein, destabilise the Middle East and see oil at $100 a barrel.

The expedients to which free people are reduced in order to avoid facing up to totalitarian tyranny are always a wonder. Any Iraqi in a position to utter his opinion without being tortured and killed has no doubt at all. Kanan Makiya, Iraq’s leading equivalent of the Soviet dissidents of old, asks America to ‘think big’. Iraq, he writes, is the best example of why the United States ‘should carefully excise the cancerous growth of extremism from the region’.