By the time you get into bed tonight, more people will have died brutal deaths in Iraq. The toll in the two weeks after the destruction of the Samarra mosque was 500, which averages 35 people a day — men, women and children.
The explosions and the deaths have become so routine, they barely register with public opinion any more.
The words of Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States envoy to Iraq, were so chilling last week because they gave voice to a growing fear. He warned that ”we have opened a Pandora’s box” that ”would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child’s play”. He was referring to the nightmare scenarios of civil war provoking wider regional conflict drawing in Iran, Turkey and Syria.
Afghanistan’s violence is on a smaller scale but still vicious. Last year 1 400 Afghans were killed. The choice of targets is particularly cruel — teachers and schools have been attacked, along with administration officials. The introduction of suicide bombings indicates new outside support, which prompted the gloomy recent assessment to the US Congress by the director of the Defence Intelligence Agency that attacks are likely to increase.
The war on terror has failed — it has been the most catastrophic blunder in half a century of British and American foreign policy. Ill-conceived and spectacularly badly implemented, it was redolent of an old-fashioned understanding of conflict and quaint faith in superior military technology.
It has had precisely the opposite impact from that allegedly intended, by significantly increasing the threat of terrorism while alienating Muslim opinion across the globe. Yet the politicians who made the decisions, who lied, and ignored and manipulated expert opinion are still in power and uttering the same platitudes.
Take Tony Blair at prime minister’s questions session in the British Parliament last week, in which he declared he was proud to have helped remove the Taliban and that he would have thought ”anyone, whatever their beliefs or faith, would stand up for democracy against terrorism”. George W Bush, in Bagram this month, declared: ”It is possible to replace tyrants with a free society.” Their fantasies are a world away from the garrison democracy increasingly suborned by the warlords they’ve installed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush’s ”free society” and Blair’s democracy is, in reality, the most efficient narco-economy in the world. About 90% of Europe’s heroin comes from Afghanistan. These world leaders have so prostituted words such as democracy and freedom that they have lost meaning.
All of this should be part of the vigorous debate required around the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on March 19. But there’s a real danger it won’t happen in the United Kingdom: the angry are hoarse with outraged indignation, the confused are numbed by the bloodshed.
Meanwhile, the sirens of the status quo, who have been insisting we ”move on” ever since Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled, now claim no one is interested any more: Iraq is boring, the debate is exhausted. They declare that the only question worth asking is not how we got into such a mess but how we get out of it.
This last is a particularly insidious piece of political management. By deleting the past, it presents the conflict in Iraq as the sole creation of Iraqis, fighting sectarian feuds among themselves. It absolves the US and the UK of responsibility for the vacuum of political authority in the country, while neatly casting Iraqis as mad irrationalists — tribal, sectarian or backward. The aim is to circumscribe the debate to one just for an elite of Iraq experts — those who can talk knowledgeably about which bits of the Iraqi security forces the Badr and the Mahdi militias have infiltrated and which clerics are backing which factions in the internecine Baghdad politics.
But the question that it is vital to persist in asking is how the British ever got into Iraq. There have been some answers over the past three years. We have seen, bit by bit, a picture of how a powerful coterie around the executive can bypass much of the machinery of government — intelligence, and diplomatic and military expertise. That’s been a chilling revelation of how executive power in Britain and the US can manipulate the system. But what is still lacking is a convincing explanation for the hubris that was at the heart of the Iraqi and Afghan invasions. So much of the rhetoric about both conjured up a dolls’ house view of nation-building: the people, the furniture, the decor could be rearranged at will.
The ”regional redesign” of which the pro-war advocates talked sounded much like applying the principles of a house makeover to countries. This callow arrogance about the political cultures of other countries, more than any other issue, prompted my opposition to both wars. Such arrogance could only be extremely dangerous — as it has been proved by the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo — and completely counterproductive in combating terrorism.
The hubris and naivety are the subject of inquiry in the US by neoconservative former advocates of the war on terror. In his piece, ”What I got wrong about the war”, last week for Time, Andrew Sullivan blamed the US for narcissism about the ”inevitability of democratic change and its ease”, and the naivety of the government in grasping complex, tribal, sectarian cultures. Francis Fukuyama’s new book admits the error of the assumption that ”democracy was the default condition to which societies reverted once coercive regime change occurred”.
As we gain distance on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US’s waning enthusiasm for nation-building only strengthens the impression that the neocons were naive idealists manipulated to window dress a much simpler and more brutal post-9/11 imperative: Afghanistan and Iraq offered opportunities for revenge and for spectacles of US power designed to assuage the wounded pride of the American people. The wars have not made the world a safer or better place because that was not their aim.
The neoconservatives’ disillusionment and honest acknowledgement of it has proved rare on this side of the Atlantic. The UK commentariat fought its own guerrilla war over Iraq. The military victories prompted choruses of ”told you so” to those who opposed the war. Three years on, there’s been one apology (David Aaronovitch), but no explanation in reply to columnist and former MP Mathew Parris’s call for the ”armchair warriors of Fleet Street” to account for themselves in providing Bush and Blair’s venture with intellectual cover. One can understand the eagerness to topple Saddam might have blinded some into backing a recklessly foolish war. But one can’t understand the lack of honesty to acknowledge what a terrible mistake that has proved to be. We’re waiting to hear. — Â