The war on terror being fought in our name implies that there are two sides struggling for two diametrically opposed visions of the world. Instead, our fear has created a world where these two visions have become increasingly indistinguishable from the other.
The principles of the international rule of law, and the fundamental human rights precepts that underpinned them, took much of the 20th century to refine. They may have been imperfectly applied, but the ‘civilised’ nations of the world all agreed that they were not to be abrogated.
But ever since terrorists laid waste to the World Trade Center in New York, these principles—conceived as bulwarks against international chaos—have become expendable. The prohibition against torture and extrajudicial killings, the equal protection of all as innocent until proven otherwise, the right of a nation to live free from foreign invasion and occupation, and the right to liberty were once hard-and-fast rules designed as much to protect our enemies as our own societies from tyranny. Each has now been so comprehensively undermined that it is questionable whether such rights exist at all.
It is now a matter of record that Iraq had no involvement in September 11 and possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and that secular Iraq was as despised by the grim visionaries of al Qaeda as were we. That we shared with Saddam Hussein.
What we also shared with the deposed Iraqi dictator was a world view so obsessed with survival that invading another country could be justified as an act in the name of freedom. In Saddam Hussein’s fevered mind, he ‘liberated’ Kuwait, in the same way that our proxies ‘liberated’ Iraq.
True, Saddam Hussein never spoke of democracy. But in attempting to impose it through force, we have disenfranchised an entire nation and retained the right to a casting vote.
What was the US-appointed Iraqi government that ruled Iraq in the year after the invasion if not an unelected government installed by military means? What was Abu Ghraib—whose fetid cells were home to Saddam Hussein’s dissidents, real or imagined, and are now home to our own—if not a manifestation that we are as guilty of torture as one of the world’s worst dictators? What was our failure to hold to account those who carried out the torture, those who redefined torture’s definition until it became meaningless, if not a certificate of impunity for state agents who commit violence