Irak et sidespor

Den franske anti-anti-amerikanisten Bernard-Henri Levy mener Irak-krigen var et feilgrep fordi Saddam ikke var den relle trusselen.

«I am strongly anti-anti-American, but I opposed the war in Iraq, because of what I’d seen in Pakistan,» Lévy said. «Iraq was a false target, a mistaken target. Saddam, yes, is a terrible butcher, and we can only be glad that he is gone. But he is a twentieth-century butcher—an old-fashioned secular tyrant, who made an easy but irrelevant target. His boasting about having weapons of mass destruction and then being unable to really build them or keep them is typical—he’s just a gangster, who lived by fear and for money. Saddam has almost nothing to do with the real threat. We were attacking an Iraq that was already largely disarmed. Meanwhile, in some Pakistani bazaar someone, as we speak, is trading a Russian miniaturized nuclear weapon.»

Den amerikanske journalisten Daniel Pearl, som BHL har skrevet bok om, ble ifølge BHL bortført og drept med stilltiende samtykke fra den pakistanske secret service. Pearl ble drept fordi han etter hvert visste for mye om samarbeidet mellom al-Qaida og Pakistans sikkerhettjeneste. Og om det store tabuet:

«… that the Pakistani atomic bomb was built and is controlled by radical Islamists who intend to use it someday.»

BHL skiller mellom arabiske islamister og asiatiske islamister. Det er de sistnevnte som er de farligste.

«The Asian Islamist threat, though, is of an entirely different dimension. There are far more people, they are far more desperate, and they have a tradition of national action. And they have a bomb.»

BHL har også sitt å si om Frankrikes stilling:

«The French opposition to the war was opportunist in part, rational in part, but mostly rooted in a desire not to know. What dominates France is not the presence of some anti-Americanism but an enormous absence—the absence of any belief aside from a handful of corporatist reflexes. (…) All that we have to replace it with is the idea of Europe; so far, we have overcome romantic nationalism, but we have nothing left to replace it with.»

BHLs våpenbror Andre Glucksmann mener det var en stor feil å begrunne Irak-krigen med masseødeleggelsesvåpen. I stedet burde det humanitære aspektet vært kjørt fram kompromissløst.

«Had the appeal for war been made on straightforward humanitarian grounds—the case against Saddam, this guy is a killer, we can do something about him and we must—I know it would have worked in France. (…) But people really did learn something from Bosnia, and had the case been made resolutely that we had another Milosevic it would have worked.»

Glucksmann har følgende dystre diagnose på vår tid:

«There are no longer battles, or Auschwitzes. But anyplace can become an Auschwitz. ‘I kill, therefore I am’ is the motto of the new generation of murderers.»

«It began against us (the French). Nine years ago, the G.I.A.»—the Algerian Islamists—»who are a group of the same kind, hijacked a plane and were going to fly it into the Eiffel Tower! The only difference? They didn’t know how to fly a plane!»

Fra The New Yorker.