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By Sadia Aashiq
The delivery may not have lived up to its Churchillian standards, but the prime Minister has always kept one promise, when addressing an increasingly wobbly public, behind the course of the military action against Iraq. And that is to justify his actions on the basis of ethics. In this case…. to liberate the people of Iraq from a tyrant regime of Saddam Hussein.
At the same time, as Blair was putting the finishing touches to his speech at the House of Commons, a BBC reporter was reporting on the plight of a 12 years old boy, called Ali Ahmad Hashmi, who survived the bombing in Baghdad. Limbless, orphaned, with dead siblings and three quarter of his beautiful body being turned into charcoal was struggling to survive. He appeared to have lost that little boy’s spark from his eyes and gazing into the smoke of his burns, told the reporter “I want my arms back”.
The Pentagon, as always insisted that civilians were never deliberately targeted. Later, Mr Blair reminded us of the collateral damage that we need to be prepared for. Because liberation comes with a price tag of innocent lives with an underlined ethics, as so convincingly portrayed by the Coalition forces. But what we tend to oversee is that Ethics are not black or white-they are white. Ethics cannot be left to the discretion of anyone who is frivolous or trigger-happy.
It is unethical to kill innocent Iraqis, in the name of liberation. It is unethical to control another nation to lead it to lose its humaneness. It is patently unethical to drop a cluster bomb in a civilian area and accepting the loss of human lives as `collateral damage`.
Our ethics are hanging by a thread, at the mercy of every soldier and politician. I am not at all sure that I am willing to delegate my ethics to them.
Perhaps Ali Hashmi will be comforted by the news, that he wasn’t deliberately targeted, who knows, it may even be possible that he will hear of Blair’s speech and perhaps in time accept that Iraqi liberation was only possible with the Apache gunships. It is, as we all know much more likely that Ali and many more orphans like him will never forget. They will never forget that they, once had a house, parents, brothers and sisters and it was an American bomb which blasted those they loved, to pieces, just as our Prime Minister was emoting about morality, liberation and justice.
The irony is that emotional responses cannot be turned off and on because of daily briefings by the tool of a political spin and wrestling to legitimise the causes or the deaths of human lives can only take the heat out of the most ethical equation. No matter how emotional or rhetorical a speech is, still we cannot shy away from the fact that in the course of any pre-emptive strike, we are talking about other people’s lives; this kind of talk is not only cheap but also equally dangereous.
Lives are at stake “ours” and “theirs”. The worst in my mind is not what has already happened but what I dread, one day might. And it will-because ethics are now being twisted and the political and military leadership does not even have the most basic integrity to say: “ we are sorry”. But then again dead cannot bear grudges but those who loved them can and do, and I am not so sure that they, the orphans of the `Operation Iraqi Liberation` would be prepared to accept the unsaid apology.