David Wood – Professor of Philosophy

The symbolic trophies of the Afghan War – the heads of Osama Bin Laden or Mullah Omar on a plate – never materialized. The idea of going after Saddam instead was not launched until September 2002 because, as White House Chief-of-Staff Andy Card put it, “August is a bad month to launch a new product”. But no month is a good month to launch a bad product. The subsequent series of implausible justifications for such a war, suggest that there are really other motives at work: such as economic and political interests (both domestic and regional). We may in time be convinced that Iraq has WMDs; I think it likely. And there is no contesting that Saddam is a villain of the first order. But many other dangerous regimes possess such weapons, including Korea, Israel and the US itself. Propaganda machines have drummed into us that war is the only answer. But that is not so. We can and should commit to the patient work of diplomatic and economic containment. Why? Leaving aside the regional chaos and further dangers to our own security that such a war would bring, UN estimates of civilian casualties (dead people) in the event of war with Iraq range from 46,000 to 500,000. The moral and legal question then is: Do we have any right to ‘protect our interests and security’ by acting in a way that will predictable kill so many innocent people? The international lawyers promising to bring Blair to the International Criminal Court at The Hague on charges of War Crimes think not (the UK signed up to the ICC, the US has refused to!). I agree.