A friend asked me last week, before Foreign Minister S. Jayakumar's 14 March statement in Parliament, why Singapore had not taken a stand on Iraq. When I said, “on this, silence may be golden”, he thought I was being facetious.

I explained that with the mounting anti-war tide, while it had been a season for posturing and grandstanding, it was also a time for sober reflection. It might be necessary sometimes to stake clear public positions quickly because of pressing domestic or international reasons, but should Singapore be rushed into taking a stand?

Unlike Britain, Australia or some countries in the Middle East, Singapore was providing neither combat troops nor attack bases. It has no direct political or economic interest in Iraq. As a small country, it could not afford to join the French game of trying to bring the American hyper-power down by a notch or two. Nor did Singapore have a restive Muslim majority to manage, as the leaders of Pakistan or Indonesia have, or a fundamentalist Islamic challenge as the Parti Islam SeMalaysia poses in Malaysia.

So if there were no compelling international or domestic reasons for it to rush to take a stand, I said, Singapore could take its time to do so. The political culture here is pragmatic, but on most issues of importance, the Government will eventually state its position, honestly and forthrightly.

But my interlocutor would not let me off the hook so easily. With debates raging in the world on issues like a possible American attack without United Nations authorization, and on the moral dimensions of the coming war, Singapore's silence seemed like a shirking of responsibility, he opined.

I tried to put across the complexities and misconceptions surrounding the Iraq issue. Was war as unambiguously immoral as some anti-war activists make it out to be? Ask the Kuwaitis who have experienced Iraqi invasion and a brutal occupation, or ask many ordinary Iraqis themselves. Or even ask the Iranians, whose country was also attacked by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. There will be loss of civilian life during an American invasion, but these will probably be a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen that Mr Saddam has killed.