'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Iraqi human rights-- the road not taken

Tuesday night, I drove over the foggy Blue Ridge Mountains to Harrisonburg, VA, where the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Quakers is holding its 332d annual session. I came over specially to hear a speech by Mary Lord, the head of the American Friends Service Committee's Peace-Building Unit.

Mary was great. At the end of her talk she laid some stress on the need, in time of war, to look at the "road not taken", in the hope that it might be taken next time this or any other country is faced with a challenge similar to the one that drove us into war.

It was a good point. Of course, the "challenge" the US leadership faced in early March 2003 was-- ahem-- let's say not quite what it was portrayed to be... But there were plenty of us, then as now, concerned about the human rights situation in Iraq under the Saddam regime.

These days, the US Prez is selling the main benefit of the war he (quite gratuitously) launched against Iraq as being that "at least it rid the world of Saddam Hussein's mis-rule". (Never mind that neither the touted WMDs nor the touted links with Al-Qaeda ever seem to have materialized.) And a general feeling of satisfaction with this aspect of the outcome has spread very much wider than the traditional pro-war circles in the US.

So here, in the spirit of looking at "the road not taken" in Iraq regarding Saddam's human-rights abuses, is a link to a post I put up here on June 28 in which I argued that an UNMOVIC-style, unarmed-but-rigorous UN body dedicated to monitoring, verifying, and inspecting Iraq's performance in the human-rights field could well have succeeded in improving the situation there quite radically. And without all the tragedies and genuine, large-scale infringements of human rights that any modern war involves.

I'm hoping that this suggestion can give pause to many people who still--four years after the war in Kosovo--think that launching a war might be a good way to deal with gross rights abusers.

A robust human-rights UNMOVIC could be applied, for example, in Burma... Or in a number of other places.

I hate that the term "intervention" these days is nearly always understood to mean "military intervention". And then, there's the Orwellian term "humanitarian intervention", which is understood to mean a war launched for allegedly humanitarian purposes.

But war harms civilians. No getting away from that. And meanwhile, there are thousands of other forms of "interventions" countries can make in each other's affairs-- for worse or, preferably, for better--that do not involve violence at all.

We certainly need to remember that!

Also on Iraq, if you haven't checked out the piece I posted on Tuesday about Juan Cole, and whether we should hope for a US "success" in Iraq, and the growing list of interesting comments there, I urge you to do so. Juan wrote his own very thoughtful reponse to the questions I raised in that post. I haven't had time to write a further response to that yet.

Actually, I've been really busy again. Between hearing Mary Lord Tuesday evening and now-- being back here in Harrisonburg at the BYM session-- I rushed back home to Charlottesville and wrote a contribution to a book about peace and a column for Al-Hayat. I have this strong sense I should simplify my life. But (1) I don't want to give up blogging and (2) I don't have time to simplify it....