The Iraq War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions
edited by Micah L Sifry and Christopher Cerf
(Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster)
In case we’ve all forgotten, there’s a war on in Iraq. Given the important news in the world today – the recent England/South Africa cricket tests, the Rugby World Cup and usual in-fighting and backbiting of SA Rugby – it may have slipped our minds that each day in Iraq roughly two British or United States soldiers die in ambushes. How many Iraqis die each day no one really knows. Baghdad has fallen, Saddam is still missing (though his regime is defeated), and rival factions are struggling against ‘the Americans’ while fighting each other for control of the ruins. And while we’re on the subject, there’s another little war going on in Afghanistan. Somewhere, too, perhaps in Kashmir, Qatar, a southern Philippine island or perhaps even Cape Town, Osama bin Laden remains in hiding.
How the Iraq war came to pass is the subject of this collection of essays and documents. ‘Instant history’, it went to press as the diplomatic process in the United Nations Security Council came to its ignominious conclusion and the United States (together with its handful of allies – called opportunists by some) went to war. (In the spirit of ‘kitsgeskiedenis’ the editors direct us to updates and further readings on their website IraqWarReader.com). What Sifry and Cerf have done is to draw upon a wide range of sources (articles in newspapers, congressional transcripts, interviews, academic analyses), mostly but not exclusively US, to show the many tangled roots of the war. Their ‘contributors’ are certainly varied – George Bush and Saddam Hussein, Colin Powell and Condeleezza Rice, Al Gore, William Safire and George Will, Fouad Ajami and Edward Said; Noam Chomsky and Thomas Friedman, among many others take their turn.
Key themes emerge. Least controversial is the fact that Saddam Hussein is really evil and nasty and deserved to be removed. Here one finds a very mixed bag of offerings on the subject. Some of the American rightwing commentators are shrill to the point of hysteria – indeed, they are hysterically funny, making me think of the recent South Park movie, with its hilarious dig at popular American perceptions of Saddam as the devil incarnate! The most convincing are the writings of Iraqi exiles like Kanan Makiya, author of the best-selling Republic of Fear, and established human rights activists – who often point out the unsettling truth that the USA has long backed Saddam in the Middle East as a counterbalance to Islamist states like Iran. Of course when we look at the Iraqi alternatives to Saddam – a report of the International Crisis Group in an appendix – any enthusiasm for regime change sags: they seem a hopelessly divided grab-bag of rival Kurdish nationalists, Shi’a and Sunni hardliners and Communists.
Highly controversial are the reasons advanced by President Bush for the war: Saddam’s support for terrorism, particularly Al-Qaeda, and his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Here once again, the right tend to support these claims, the left debunk them. Amidst flights of rhetoric on all sides, the balance – in terms of evidence – seems to come down on the side of the debunkers. Given Osama bin Laden’s loathing for secularist Islam, it is highly unlikely that he would form any working relationship with (until the last few months) one of the most secular Arab countries in the Middle East. Moreover, claims of ties with Iraqi intelligence have been shown to be hearsay. And the world still waits for the Marines to uncover vast caches of Iraqi WMDs. Why have these infernal devices not been found? Could it be that they don’t exist? Or could it be that they have been found, discovered to be made with components supplied by ‘allied’ companies, and the US is too skaam to reveal them to the Press? Perhaps the real answer is that Saddam has hidden them all under an Invisibility Cloak supplied by that known enemy of fundamentalist Christianity, Harry Potter!
More thoughtful authors consider the wider issues at stake: control of oil, US support for Israel, and the dominant political role played by the USA as the single superpower in the post-Cold War world. In an essay titled The United States Has Gone Mad, John Le Carré – former British Foreign Service and intelligence officer turned novelist – argues that the USA under Bush ‘has entered one of its periods of historical madness’ after 9-11, eroding human rights at home, going to war overseas in the name of ‘war on terrorism’, possibly to deflect public opinion from domestic issues – weakening economy and oil scandals. In addition, its foreign policy is skewed in favour of authoritarian regimes that suit its purpose. Most dangerously of all, Bush’s vision is coloured by a fundamentalist Christian agenda that holds that ‘God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America’.
Another thoughtful contributor, by another non-American, the Indian anti-globalization activist Arundhati Roy, challenges the USA and its allies to get off its altruistic high horse and recognise that wars are never fought for altruistic reasons, but out of political and economic self-interest. In India some have called the ‘war on terrorism’ (and now the war in Iraq) ‘Al-qaida vs Al-fayda – The Word vs The Profit (no pun intended).’
One could go on for pages, considering essays, transcripts and commentaries by the dozens of contributors in this book. What emerges is clear: there is no consensus about the war, whether from Right or Left, American or non-American. We see congressmen and senators from across the Republican-Democrat divide aligning them for and against the war. We also read of the widespread protests against the war both globally and in the United States. Nothing quite like this has happened since, well, Vietnam.
While I am generally weary of ‘instant history’, I must confess that I found this book important, fascinating and disturbing. I have some reservations. A few of the rightwing commentators are so vacuous in their argument and frothing at the mouth in their fury that one feels the need for a rabies shot after reading them – these articles should surely have been ‘put down’ by the editors in the interests of not contaminating the more intelligent and convincing pro-war contributors. In addition a few glaring exceptions are noted – the most obvious is the absence of a single piece by Robert Fisk, one of the most experienced and politically astute journalists working in the Middle East. Why was he excluded – and will this oversight be corrected in a new updated edition? And if not – why not? Despite such questions (and occasional concern about getting a rabies shot!) this is a very important book that is perhaps even more timely ‘after the fact’ (if indeed we can pretend the war is over) than in the months leading to the war.