Why did I write these
things?
Two reasons. Firstly,
my political background. I grew up in a left-wing household. My father was
for a time a Communist. He believed in wars of liberation. He once told me
the Viet Cong were his friends. I took part in anti-US demonstrations during
the Vietnam War. I had a poster of Che Guevara on my wall.
A lot might have
changed when, in my 40s, I became a Christian. But I continued to believe
that people everywhere deserved liberty. And I viewed Saddam Hussein’s
regime as one of the world’s most tyrannical. My father was Jewish, and some
of my ancestors died in the Holocaust. Then the world said “Never again,”
and I supported wars of liberation. I believed in justice.
The issue of weapons
of mass destruction was virtually irrelevant for me. The title of my article
in support of an invasion was “Where is the justice in not attacking?”
The second reason was
the 17 years that I spent in Japan, from 1976 to 1992, when I naturally
learnt a lot about the country and its history. The Japanese relished
democracy. In fact, I recall a former correspondent from The Times
newspaper claiming to me that Japan was the only full democracy (at that
time) in Asia. Singapore didn’t count, he said, because it banned the
Communist Party. (I forget why India wasn’t, in his view, a full democracy.)
Anyway, democracy
hadn’t arisen naturally in Japan. It had been imposed on the country by the
US occupation forces after World War II. There’d been people at that time
who said the introduction of democracy and of concepts such as the right of
women to vote was a mistake. They said that the Japanese didn’t understand
the notion of freedom, that they wouldn’t know what to do with it. They were
proven wrong. I assumed that the Iraqis would also welcome an imposed
democracy (and to a certain extent I think they have), and that, like the
Japanese, they would set to work to build up their country.
I guess I stand with
West Australian Premier Alan Carpenter who just a couple of weeks ago told
our local Good Weekend magazine (not online) why he had been
“enthusiastically gung-ho” about removing Saddam Hussein.
“The picture I was painting, albeit flippantly, was ‘we’ll get in there,
knock them over, stick up the hamburger stands and they’ll all be playing
beat-box music on the streets’,” he says. The Premier now thinks the war a
calamity. “I realized that my analysis, my knowledge was just so shallow and
so deficient.”
I doubt that anyone
was influenced by my writings, but if they were, I apologise.
My articles were
part of a series attempting to discover (for my own benefit as much as for
anyone else’s) what God is doing nowadays when war occurs. The good news is
that God is surely active in Iraq. His ways will prevail.
September 20th, 2006
