26 February 2003
I do not know your name and that is already significant. Are you one of the thousands upon thousands who survived Saddam Hussein's chambers of torture? Are you one of the Kurds gassed in the north of Iraq, an Arab from the south displaced from his home, a Shia clergyman ruthlessly persecuted by the Baath party, a communist who has been fighting the dictatorship for long decades?

Whoever you are, faceless and suffering, you have been waiting many years for the reign of terror to end. And now, at last, you can see fast approaching the moment you have been praying for: the moment when the dictator who has built himself lavish palaces, the man who praises Hitler and Stalin and promises to emulate them, may well be forced out of power.

What right does anyone have to deny you and your people that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the US is about to wage on your country, if it could, indeed, result in the ouster of Saddam Hussein? Can those countless human rights activists who, a few years ago, celebrated the trial in London of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet as a victory for all the victims on this Earth, now deny the world the joy of seeing the strongman of Iraq tried for crimes against humanity?

As a Chilean who fought against the General's pervasive terror during 17 years I can understand the needs, the anguish, the urgency, of those Iraqis who cannot wait, cannot accept any further delay, silently howl for deliverance

Such sympathy for your cause does not exempt me, however, from asking a crucial question: is that suffering sufficient to justify an intervention from an outside power to end it, a suffering that has been ceaselessly cited as a secondary but compelling reason for an invasion?

Having spent most of my life as a firm anti-interventionist, protesting at American aggressions in Latin America and Asia, and Soviet invasions of Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, during the 1990s I gradually came to feel that there might be occasions when incursions from a foreign state or international coalition could, indeed, be warranted. I reluctantly approved of the 1994 American expedition to Haiti to return to office the legally elected President of that republic; I was appalled at the lack of response from the international community to the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, and, regarding Kosovo, though I would have preferred the military action to have taken place under the auspices of the United Nations and deplored the loss of life in Serbia from the bombs, I hesitantly came to the agonising conclusion that ethnic cleansing on such a massive scale could not be tolerated.

I am afraid that none of these cases applies to Iraq. For starters, there is no guarantee that this military adventure will, in fact, lead to a "regime change", or peace and stability for your region. In the balance are not only the dead and mutilated of Iraq (and who knows how many from the invading force), but the very real possibility that such an act of pre-emptive world-destabilising aggression could spin out of control and lead to other despots pre-emptively arming themselves with all manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to Armageddon. And if we add that I am unconvinced, along with so many others in the world, that your dictator has sufficient weapons of mass destruction truly to pose a threat to other countries or ties to criminal groups who could use them for terror, I have to say no to war. It is not easy for me to write these words. I write, after all, from the comfort and safety of my own life. I write to you in the knowledge that I never did very much for the Iraqi dissidence, hardly registered you and your needs, sent a couple of free books to libraries and academics in Baghdad who asked for them, answered one, maybe two, letters from Iraqi women who had been tortured and had found some solace in my plays.

But I also write to you knowing this: if I had been approached, say in the year 1975, when General Pinochet was at the height of his murderous spree in Chile, by an emissary of the American government proposing that the US, the very country that had put our strongman in power, use military force to overthrow the dictatorship, I believe my answer would have been, I hope it would have been: "No, thank you." We must deal with this monster by ourselves. I was never given that chance, of course; the Americans would never have wanted to rid themselves, in the midst of the Cold War, of such an obsequious client. Just as they did not try to eject the even more murderous Saddam Hussein 20 years ago, supporting his genocidal activities as long as he was a bulwark against militant Iran.

Heaven help me, I am saying that if I had been given a chance years ago to spare the lives of so many of my dearest friends, given the chance to end my exile and alleviate the grief of millions of my fellow countrymen, I would have rejected it if the price we would have had to pay was clusters of bombs killing the innocent, if the price was years of foreign occupation, if the price was the loss of control over our own destiny. Heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future of your unprotected children.

The author's 'Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet' has just been published (Pluto Press)