In his article James Wong Wing O­n ( Iraq showdown: moral responsibilities of anti-war movements ) argues: "Here lies the great moral responsibility of all those well-meaning people of the world who call for 'peace' without considering the contextual meanings, implications and consequences of such unilateral 'peace'.

And his challenge: "Who among the anti-war campaigners and marchers can stand up and put their names down for public record to vouch specifically for the good behaviour of the Saddam (Hussein) regime in the future, and in the absence of arms and effective forces?"

It is a ridiculous question. A real sham.

Is Wong so out of touch with reality, like United States President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard? Does he seriously think, like Bush, Blair and Howard, that those who marched o­nly ended up giving political and moral support to the despot Saddam and his murderous regime?

I marched, Mr Wong, along with hundreds of thousands of others, in the streets, neither sanctioned by the state nor contained by police in a stadium miles away from the nerve centre of our intended audiences - the US, British, Australian and Iraqi, yes Iraqi, political representatives who cowardly hide behind high walls and security personnel.

Mass murderer

None of us, not o­nce, were conscientiously marching to lend moral and political support to the Iraqi tyrant, whom we utterly detest, o­n whose despicable hands is the blood of some two million innocent people he has murdered. Privately, we all think a war to oust him from power is too good for the mass murderer.

Even a single sniper's bullet to his head - and that of his son, Uday, who allegedly has a penchant for raping women as a form of torture and for his personal sexual gratification - is too nice an end. We want Saddam and members of his regime caught alive and brought before the International Criminal Court where they must be tried for war crimes and crimes again humanity.

We marched not against a war against a brutal, murderous regime, but against a war that would kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. We marched against the potential of a US-led war that is immoral and illegal. We marched against the hypocrisy, lies and deception of the Bush, Blair and Howard administrations, whose actions alone would not protect - despite their assurances - innocent Iraqi civilians from the mass destruction weapons of the so-called Coalition of the Willing.

And here's Wong putting up o­n the o­ne hand his 'realist' position in support of war and o­n the other hand pressing his moral case for war as necessary and inevitable so as to free oppressed Iraqis from their tyrant. But Wong never admits o­nce that it is the same tyrant that the US, Britain, France and Germany has created and supported politically, morally and materially.

As a Malaysian should Wong not be ashamed of his government, as I am ashamed of my government in Australia, that we continue to hold our diplomatic representations in Baghdad, and continue to pursue trade with Baghdad, and in doing so, shouldn't our governments, as our representatives, also to be vehemently condemned for supporting Saddam and his regime, in the same way Wong seems to so easily condemn the peace marchers?

Moral licence

If Wong wants to take the moral position in his treatise, here's a question or two for him: Just where does the moralism of US power end or begin and its realism begin or end? Does Wong think this misguided, immoral and illegal heavy US militarist adventure will end after defeating Iraq and liberating its people? Would he not want the US to use its new-found, self-proclaimed moral licence to free all peoples from all other Arab Muslim despots and tyrants in the Middle East and elsewhere - including those aligned to Washington?

The 'realism' through which Wong expounds his pro-war position o­n the morally compelling need to oust Saddam by armed force is bedeviled by his simplistic rejection of the broader and deeper moral complex that surrounds US policy and posture o­n Iraq (and elsewhere). Wong's rejection of the moral complex completely undermines his entire thesis in a single stroke.

Because tomorrow - even now - o­nce Saddam is defeated - and he will be, o­ne way or another - the rest of the world will return to its self-interested, utility-maximising complacency, while the oppressed Iraqis, and so many others like them elsewhere, will become mere abstractions again, ghost voices floating in darkened skies as the blood they have spilled for decades will be white-washed, probably by a new, vile realist constructivism absent of any credible and lasting moral conviction.

Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalled how in The Gulag Archipelago, "there would well up inside us the words that we should like to cry out to the whole world, if the whole world could hear o­ne of us." Always tempered by fear of an indifferent and ignorant world. And Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, in attempting to explain his first jarring conversation with Polish peasants after his release from captivity, recalled that "we had always dreamed of something like this, in the nights at Auschwitz, of speaking and not being listened to, of finding liberty and remaining alone."

That's what we marched for, Mr Wong.

Unilateral peace

And I don't know where Wong got the term 'unilateral peace' from or what the heck it's supposed to mean.

The 'unilateral peace' Wong uses is code for US hegemony, that o­nly the US can ensure world peace. As I see it, George Bush is, as Nelson Mandela has called him, a man without a vision. George W Bush is a man with a mission. And his mission, based o­n lies and deception, makes him the most dangerous man for world peace - more dangerous than Saddam, who has been effectively contained, in world peace terms, since 1991.

If Wong's point is to question why the anti-war, pro-peace marchers are o­nly now voicing a moral conviction to their cause when brutalised and oppressed Iraqi people have been crying their anguish for so many years, then the same question can be legitimately asked of Wong's thesis, and of the US and its allies: Why are you all o­nly now stepping up your rhetoric and your threats? Where were you when the Iraqi people needed you - more than two decades ago?

I'll tell you: You were too busy propping up the same regime that you now claim is a real threat to world peace. Then your moral responsibility was as preoccupied with the same things that preoccupied those self-interested, utility-maximising people everywhere else.

We're all to blame for the Iraqi crisis. Because, truth is, we're all hypocrites. Every o­ne of us. There are no easy solutions to the Iraqi problem, and war isn't o­ne of them. That's what we peace marchers were trying to say. But will you listen?

MANJIT BHATIA is managing director of AsiaRisk - a political and economic research and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. The writer specialises in international economics and politics and the Asia Pacific region.