Reply #1: Louis de Bernières [View All]

[Chicago Democrat]

Louis de Bernières

In principle I am in favour of forcibly deposing all Stalinist and fascist regimes, and establishing democracies in their place. My parents' generation did this on our behalf, and we owe them eternal thanks. In this case it is a shame that weapons of mass destruction were used as a pretext, especially if they turn out to have been illusory. If they do turn out to be illusory, and I was Tony Blair, I would put a gun to my head and shoot myself out of sheer embarrassment.

Arabs have no natural tradition of democracy, and their religion gives them an ultra-conservative, patriarchal, authoritarian and absolutist cast of mind. I fear that in Iraq they will simply vote to abolish democracy and create an Islamic state, in which case deposing Saddam Hussein would have been fairly pointless. The alternative would be an unelected American-supervised puppet regime, which is not what we were fighting for.

The intervention will no doubt have served as a salutary warning to various surrounding states, but there will be no peace and stability in the region until the Israelis feel secure and have given up Nazi tactics such as driving people off their land and creating ghettoes. A Palestinian state has to be established, and Arabs in general must democratise, get educated, and stop blaming everyone else for their own mess-ups. I look forward to the day when every synagogue and every mosque has become a concert hall or a cinema.

All this is to say that peace and stability are unlikely to happen in the region for a very long time, because none of the above is likely to come about. Western countries should make urgent efforts to stop sourcing their energy from that region, so that we have as little to do with them as possible. I might point out that most of the troubles in the region derive from the western powers' dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, which for centuries had preserved the peace by sitting heavily and impartially on everyone. Are we really prepared to do that in our turn?