Locke Keith: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Locke Keith: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
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KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party comes to the debate we have been having on the impending war on Iraq with a mixture of happiness and sadness. We are happy that the Labour Government has not signed up to a unilateral US-led attack on Iraq despite the pressure it must have been under from George Bush Tony Blair and John Howard but we are sad that Helen Clark said in her speech yesterday that New Zealand would be obliged to consider contributing to a war against Iraq if it were sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Helen Clark has talked about providing logistic support or sending medical units. That disturbs us deeply. Regardless of whether an invasion was unilateral or UN-endorsed it would needlessly lead to the deaths or injury of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and devastate much of the country. It is clear that the killing and destruction would be needless in that no one claims that Iraq is about to launch an attack on a neighbouring country.  
Helen Clark argues that as a loyal member of the United Nations we are obliged to implement Security Council decisions. Such an approach has no moral or legal credibility. It was clearly established by the Nuremburg tribunal that obeying orders or implementing the decisions made by a higher body was no excuse for participating in mass murder—and we are talking about mass murder. United States strategists are talking about sending 800 cruise missiles against Iraq in the first 48 hours and crippling water and electricity supplies. It has been described as the “shock and awe” strategy. “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad” a Pentagon official told America’s  
CBS News 
 after a briefing on the plan. “The sheer size of this has never been seen or contemplated before.”  
It would be tragic if the Security Council did endorse the murder of many thousands of Iraqis. It would hugely undermine its credibility and threaten its future. It is precisely because the Greens are such strong supporters of the UN that we think our Government would be obliged to do everything possible to stop such a disastrous decision from being implemented. The Security Council would support an invasion of Iraq only as a result of arm-twisting by the Bush administration. Minister Jim Sutton has already explained that that is going on between America and other countries. It is clear from the speeches and questions in this House over the last couple of days that some parties are feeling the pressure to go along with the American superpower. If some of us feel pressured let us just think what it must be like for a developing nation that is reliant on the US for support in aid loans and a market for its goods. We would not be alone if we did not join a UN-endorsed assault on Iraq. Most of the members of the General Assembly would be opposed to it and would not contribute anything.  
When Helen Clark was an anti-Vietnam War protestor she would never agree that because the then National Government had committed us to that war constitutionally we were obliged to go along with it. She probably admired Mohammed Ali for resisting the draft in the US. In those days too she would have wanted the anti-war voice of New Zealanders to be heard as loudly as possible in the corridors of Washington. Some of the biggest anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in New Zealand were against visiting US dignatories such as then President Johnson. What has changed for Helen Clark? There was only an oblique criticism of the Bush administration in her speech yesterday. She even gave credibility to US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation justifying a war saying that “he did present a case based on intelligence that strongly suggested a pattern of deception” by Iraq “and concealment of such programmes.”  
It was shameful for our Prime Minister to give any endorsement to a speech that was itself full of deception and concealment of the truth. Colin Powell described as the liberal of the Bush administration was telling barefaced lies about the al-Qaeda link to Saddam Hussein. As the  
Dominion Post  
tells us even America’s intelligence community is outraged at that. The spooks have told Bush and Powell that there is no link between al-Qaeda and its fundamentalists and the secularist Saddam Hussein regime. By echoing some of the Bush administration’s arguments and being rather meek in any criticism of it the Labour Government is betraying New Zealand’s mission as an advocate of peace.  
The world is at a critical juncture and it is incumbent on all of us politicians to do what we can to stop this disastrous drive to war. It is not something that we must leave up to the big countries like France and Germany. We should be out at the front edge working publicly and privately with all those countries opposed to the war. We should never offer as an excuse that we are small and cannot do much. That was not the attitude that Helen Clark took when she was in the fourth Labour Government marching on anti-nuclear protests and pushing through our antinuclear legislation. Her argument then was that we could make a real difference. Our nuclear-free stand resonated around the work and gave a little more hope to millions of people on all continents. We were then the mouse that roared; now we are the mouse that can hardly squeak.  
Achieving peace is a cumulative thing. The efforts of every individual and every Government can add up to a powerful force that can stay the hand of the war-makers in Washington. We appeal to the Labour Government to become an advocate of peace in Iraq and not to stand on the sidelines or half in the Bush camp. We appeal to individual MPs in the Labour Party many of whom have been on peace marches. We ask them to stand up in this House and oppose the war—to oppose any war on Iraq. We would also like them to join the Green MPs on the big peace marches this weekend. We will be all around the country—in Auckland Hamilton Nelson Rotorua Wellington Christchurch and Dunedin. We will be part of an outpouring of protest around the world that will see huge marches in places like London Berlin Melbourne and Sydney.  
One of the slogans in all the protests will be: “ No blood for oil”. Green Party MPs are proud to carry such a slogan. Would Labour MPs do so? Do they have the honesty and the fortitude to address one of the main reasons for the war which is the desire of the big corporates behind the Bush administration to achieve greater control over Middle East oil including the oil reserves of Iraq which are the second-largest in the world? Unfortunately I do not think the Labour MPs will do that. The Labour Party seems to still have a dollar each way with the United States: it gently offers some criticism and then tells the Bush officials that it is really in the US’s camp. Why else would we have chosen this critical time in the build-up to an invasion of Iraq to send a frigate and soon an Orion to the Persian Gulf? One of the frigate’s tasks is to escort US and British warships through the Straits of Hormuz into the southern Persian Gulf. Another is to track all ships in the area and to pass that information on to the US aircraft carrier on board which an invasion of Iraq is being planned. Surely both those things are useful to the American preparations for war. And Helen Clark says that the frigate will not be brought home even in the event of a war.  
Of course the Greens do not want Iraq to have weapons of mass destruction but there is an inspection process in place which is continuing and so far it has not found any such weapons. At this point there is no reason to believe that the inspectors cannot successfully and peacefully complete their mission. We only wish that the inspection process and the destruction of nuclear weapons would be extended to all the nuclear states—America Britain France Russia China India Pakistan and Israel. Perhaps we should start with the country with the biggest stocks: the United States which is also the only country to have actually used nuclear weapons. It has also been the biggest user of chemical weapons having dropped 17 million tons of Agent Orange on Vietnam during its war there. That brings us back to Vietnam and to the horrors perpetrated on that country by the same superpower that now threatens Iraq. Many people who sit in this House were then proud to march against war and injustice. I ask again: what has changed?