Shame on you Tutu

(First published in October 2011)

It is not often that one finds oneself being compelled to talk against someone as ubiquitously praised as Desmond Tutu. However his recent, frankly lazy and scurrilous defamations of Tony Blair are in need of the firmest of ripostes. The Archbishop, in early September, criticised the ex-leader as a 'playground bully' in supporting the US invasion of Iraq and claimed that the death toll from this action alone is a sufficient enough charge for him to be dragged in front of the Hague. He also went on to comment that Blair and his American allies 'have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand - with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us' and that 'the question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level.'

Where to begin? Indeed it is very hard to know where once you sit back and begin to realize just how devoid of any ethical content Mr Tutu's arguments are. Though, if one is brave enough to make the plunge the question of casualties is a good place to start. It can only be assumed from Mr Tutu's comments that a just war is one in which nobody is killed or injured, as he neither offers to propose what the correct amount of casualties would have been to topple Saddam nor what is so extra legal about the amount so far accrued (somewhere in the region of 200,000). Mr Tutu's position is one of pacifism, which in practice throughout the history of the 20th century has proved to be, and by its very nature is, the acquiescence of evil. Has it perhaps occurred to Mr Tutu that pacifism is not the stance that is shared by his good friend Nelson Mandela who bravely took up arms against Apartheid. This is because it is a contemptible conviction that unless they can be talked out of power then dictators should be allowed to stay put because it would be simply unforgivable for somebody to get hurt trying to close a concentration camp. Mr Mandela even though forgotten by many was imprisoned because he faced up to the reality that when men can not longer use words to halt injustice then they must reach for their swords even though former are clearly by far the preferable instruments.

As for the comparison between the 'moral level' of Mr Blair with Saddam the facts, if people can be bothered and seemingly unfashionable enough to remember them, should speak for themselves. Saddam managed to commit arguably no less than two genocides during his reign of terror, one against the Kurds in the late 1980s using chemical weaponry and a second against the Shia in the early 1990s as well as persecuting the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. All totalling somewhere near 400,000 deaths by conservative estimates. Whereas Mr Blair prevented one from occurring in Kosovo in 1997 as well as helping evict Slobodan Milosevic and lest we forget, the British intervention in Sierra Leone's civil war which restored the country to peace whilst toppling Liberia's war lord Charles Taylor. Saddam's foreign interventions include the annexation of Kuwait in 1991 and his earlier invasion of neighbouring Iran which together costs over half a million lives. Instead if creating a police state like that which Iraqi historian Kanan Makiya has described as a torture chamber above ground and a mass grave bellow it, Mr Blair has managed to directly dissolve two such states in an attempt to replace them with at least the embryo of what can be called a free society in their place, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. Mr Tutu's comparison has no counterpart in reality, unless his calculation was grounded in Michael Moore's film portrayal of Saddamist Iraq as a veritable land of milk and honey.

Thirdly, briefly covering the justification for the invasion of Iraq itself, which could and deserves a much more extensive coverage, Mr Tutu seems to come across as being quite ignorant about both the function and the realities of international law. As far as rogue regimes go Saddam's Iraq presents itself as a strong candidate for the title of 'playground bully'. Having been in breach of no less than 17 separate UN resolutions and in violation of just about every vital UN convention whilst escaping anything resembling serious reprisals jaw jaw had clearly failed and sadly had to give way to war war with no less than the credibility of international law at stake. Mr Tutu, along with the likes of George Galloway and Tony Benn, fails to realize that western armies can sometimes be used to confront evil which similarly should apply for the thugs in Syria and Iran that Tutu mentions so candidly and it seems that the future of the credibility of international law will rely on it.

So, needless to say Mr Tutu's claims can easily be demonstrated to be fatuous and as much as the list of facts above could be added to those so far presented if you havn't got the point by now then you most likely never will. And to end it would do no harm to remember that it was one of the last acts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn the great knight of opposition to Soviet totalitarianism to praise Vladimir Putin as a great leader of the Russian people showing once again that even moral giants can sometimes stumble, just as Mr Tutu has shown us once again that placing a religious title before your name can gain you immunity from what should otherwise be much needed criticism.