Wars, duplicity and worlds destroyed

THERE are just wars and there are wars based on duplicity. There are the wars you wage in defence of a human cause and there are the wars you impose on others because of the ego and the arrogance in you. All that ego and all that arrogance leads up to lies. And wars pursued through lies end up leaving tens of thousands, even millions, dead.
Think here of the war the Pakistani military junta of Yahya Khan imposed on the Bengalis in March 1971. The dictator took unabashed recourse to lies when he accused Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of engaging in conspiracy to dismember Pakistan even as the Bengali leader attempted negotiating a constitutional way out of the crisis with Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
As the Awami League waited, all day on March 24 and 25, for word from the regime about a transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people of Pakistan, the regime stayed silent. On the evening of March 25, Yahya Khan surreptitiously flew out of Dhaka only hours before his henchmen launched their genocide.
The lies that General Yahya Khan employed in aborting the negotiations, banning the Awami League and declaring a war against the Bengalis would cost Pakistan hugely. You do not need to go for a recapitulation of history, but you do need to remember that the pass in which the state of Pakistan found itself at the end of 1971 was a condition its glibly lying leaders had brought upon it.
Yahya Khan and his cohorts were to go to their graves shorn of any respect they might have acquired in the course of their long career as soldiers. Lying strips you of substance. Respectability is the first casualty of a recourse to untruth. Or to a concealment of the truth.
You imagine here the predicament in which Kurt Waldheim found himself once it became known that he had been in the service of the Nazis. At one stroke, his record as secretary general of the United Nations was wiped off. And as president of Austria, he found himself ostracised by the outside world.
Which brings you to the kind of life Britain's Tony Blair lives today. Once regarded as a bright young man set to make a mark in history, the former British prime minister is today a much maligned figure, and justifiably too, because of all the chaos he caused during his years as prime minister. In tandem with George W. Bush, Tony Blair peddled the lie that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be set off within forty-five minutes against any nation Baghdad considered its enemy. The WMDs were never found, for they had never existed.
Nevertheless, Bush and Blair, in true cowboy fashion, went ahead with invading Iraq and destroying that country, once considered a model of secularism in a largely parochial Middle East. Consider the picture: here was Iraq, a sovereign country, suddenly pounced upon by two powerful nations on the basis of lies. Its government was overthrown, its fallen leader hounded into capture and executed on the holy day of Eid-ul-Adha.
That was criminality in war. Had the gods been just, had life been fair, Bush and Blair would be hauled up before an international tribunal, much like Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor, to be tried for the death of tens of thousands, for putting a beautiful country to the torch. And yet Blair remains unrepentant.
He tells a disbelieving world, without batting an eyelid, that even if he had known back in 2003 that Iraq possessed no WMDs he would still have marched into Baghdad to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It is the sheer audacity of the man that leaves you feeling outraged.
He has just lost out in the race to be the first president of the European Council, all because of Iraq. He will, early next year, face questioning in a public inquiry into his role over Iraq. He is not embarrassed at all, indeed speaks of God and religion and recalls not at all that his actions have led to the murder of countless numbers of Iraqis. Hypocrisy defines him.
But lying in war or about the need for war is not new. In the 1960s, determined to keep South East Asia from falling under communism, US President Lyndon Johnson invented the lie about the North Vietnamese provoking his country in the Gulf of Tonkin. And, presto! Congress gave him more powers to prosecute the war in Vietnam. It was a war America would lose, with 58,000 of its soldiers dying for a cause they did not identify with.
The ramifications of Tonkin would be grave: American helicopters would frantically pluck their own people from the rooftop of the US embassy to safety in spring 1975 as North Vietnamese troops rammed the gates of the presidential residence in Saigon. Brazen lies had led to unmitigated disaster.
In December 1979, Leonid Brezhnev invented the lie that Hafizullah Amin, having seized power from freshly-murdered Nur Mohammad Taraki, had asked the Soviet Union to send its troops into Afghanistan. The resultant invasion would push Afghanistan into decades of war and destruction and would in time pave the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
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