Pacifists ignore the Iraqis' plight

Carlos Alberto Montaner

The incident occurred in one of those strange Cuban buses called ''camels.'' The day was blazing hot, and you couldn't have fit another passenger in that socialist jumble of people and tropical sweat. Suddenly, an old man looking like a madman or a wino, hollered at the top of his lungs: ``I wanna see all gringo soldiers hanging . . . !''

The passengers stared at him in silence. The old man smiled mischievously and shouted again: '' . . . Hanging from parachutes all over Havana!'' The passengers burst into merry applause.

I remembered the anecdote in connection with the imminent war in Iraq. I don't know whether it's to the advantage of the United States and Britain to invade Iraq, but I am convinced that most Iraqis, Saddam Hussein's victims for 24 years, will breathe a sigh of relief when the British and U.S. troops liberate Baghdad and put an end to the nightmare of torture, repression, arbitrariness and multiple abuses.

It won't be the first time that something similar occurs. The U.S. invasion of Panama in December 1989 was devised to remove narco-dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega from that country and deliver him to U.S. justice. The rest of the world rose to condemn the American intervention. Everywhere, pacifists shouted insults at Yankee imperialism -- everywhere, except Panama, where the people welcomed the invaders and revealed to them where the dictatorship's thugs were hiding.

Years later, Panamanian President Ernesto Pérez Balladares confessed to me softly what was already evident: Without the U.S. invasion, Panamanians couldn't have rid themselves of the den of thieves and murderers that the army had become. That institution was dissolved and constitutionally eradicated by Ricardo Arias Calderón, vice president in the first post-Noriega government and a key figure in the Panamanian transition.

Something like that happened again in 1994, when the Marines disembarked in Haiti and ousted Gen. Raoul Cedras and a gang of delinquents who had turned the country into Ali Baba's cave. Again the planet shook as shouts of protest rang. Not so in Haiti, where the population celebrated the arrival of U.S. soldiers who came to impose order, return President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office and try (without success) to institute some sort of democracy in that wretched country.

TO COLOMBIA, TOO

And what would happen in Colombia if U.S. troops helped the national army to wipe out the guerrillas and bring to an end the 35,000 yearly killings and 3,500 kidnappings? The polls show that 85 percent of Colombians would support them -- with the same enthusiasm with which the French welcomed the U.S. soldiers who defeated Nazism; with the same illusion with which the Spanish Republicans waited in vain for an invasion by democratic Allied troops that might have prevented the triumph of Francisco Franco and his fascist armies -- an invasion that never came.

It is odd that today's European demonstrators -- who fill the public squares with their anti-American slogans, Che Guevara posters and alleged love of humanity -- care so little for the fate of the Iraqis. But we must acknowledge that that petty attitude is not the same throughout the Old Continent.

In the former Eastern bloc, where people suffered the tyranny of communism until recently, the reaction is different. The Hungarians -- who in 1956, while being massacred by Soviet tanks, pleaded for a Western intervention that never arrived despite the harangues on shortwave radio urging them to rebel -- can understand the pain and defenselessness of the Iraqi people.

PREVENTIVE WAR

The Romanians -- who suffered the insane fury of Nicolae Ceaucescu and dreamed of somehow breaking those chains -- feel solidarity with Hussein's victims and view with sympathy, not horror, the possibility that someone may come to relieve that awful pain.

In October 1962, John F. Kennedy invented the doctrine of preventive war with the ultimatum he gave Moscow and Havana. He was not going to wait unconcernedly for the Russians to install weapons of mass destruction in Cuba that might endanger the safety of the United States. Either they removed the missiles from Cuba, or the United States attacked the island and destroyed it. The Russians removed their rockets hurriedly, and the United States did not intervene. Peace was saved.

Ever since, the old man in the bus has been looking at the sky, waiting for the paratroopers who never floated over the Havana skyline.

March 5, 2003