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Never again? A modest proposal: the question of why we went to war remains unanswered.

Article Excerpt
The banner headline read 'Saddam Falls'. The grainy picture showed a statue, in central Baghdad, pitched face-forward.

In scenes reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, jubilant Iraqis jumped and danced on the fallen six metre statue in open contempt for Saddam and celebration at the end of his reign. Age, 10/4/03

The end of dictatorships has a familiar iconography. Fallen statues with men dancing on them, the posters and pictures publicly defiled, reminiscent of other euphoric scenes--the eye of the storm of the failed Hungarian uprising in 1956, with Stalin's monumental statue broken and toppled from its plinth, Lenin's statues felled along with the Berlin Wall.

The war was over and as soon as it was clear that the scale of destruction and the death toll and burden of human misery it produced was lighter than some predicted--even though tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers have been killed, along with over a thousand civilians, with many more maimed--the triumphalist chant began. 'So, will the Left apologise?' asks Janet Daley of the Daily Telegraph (in the same issue of the Age). It should not, for the Left and many others have been arguing that, in Iraq especially, the ends--which remain particularly unclear in the longer run--never justified the means. Moreover, as I will argue, the rush to war has highlighted some deep-seated and disturbing problems precisely in those states most eager to be warriors for democracy.

What next? Indeed, now that the war on Iraq appears to be drawing to a close, new questions arise and old ones resurface. What future for a radically destabilised Middle East? The prospect for the coalition establishing a genuinely democratic system of government in Iraq is slight given widespread nationalist and anti-American sentiment. Veiled threats by the US towards Syria and Iran have raised tensions in the region, as has the possibility of an Iranian and Turkish pact to suppress the Kurds. And the Palestinian question, a root cause of instability, seems nowhere on the real road map for peace.

The old questions, still left answered, remain...

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