No end of a lesson
Five years after the invasion of Iraq, Gordon Brown is right to concede the need for a full-scale inquiry into the war. He is wrong, however, to postpone the investigation on the grounds that it might ‘divert attention from supporting Iraq’s development as a secure and stable country’. There have already been four limited inquiries into various aspects of the conflict and its aftermath. What is required is an independent and unsparing inquisition that examines the war in its totality and tries comprehensively to address public disquiet about this most divisive and controversial of interventions.
Self-evidently, the mere fact that the insurgency is still raging is a measure of failure. Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, spoke with admirable candour on the Andrew Marr Show last Sunday, admitting that ‘we were kind of preparing for the wrong sort of aftermath... what we hadn’t, in my view, really thought through was the long-term nature of this’.
Mr Powell was on less certain ground when he said: ‘Yes, of course it would have been better to have gone in with more troops, to have been better prepared to hold the streets and all the rest of it. But no one was urging us to do that at the time.’ In fact, this is precisely what Colin Powell, the then US secretary of state, was urging upon the White House: a rapid destruction of Saddam’s dictatorship, followed by a huge influx of troops to bring interim stability to the liberated country, lay the basis for civil order, secure basic infrastructure, and nip uprisings in the bud. Then, and only then, would Iraq be left to its own democratic devices. Sadly, this detailed blueprint was ignored in favour of the Pentagon’s combination of ‘shock-and-awe’ tactics and a naive belief that Jeffersonian democracy would spring fully-formed from the sands of Iraq as soon as Saddam had gone.
Mr Blair’s great failure was not to back the State Department with sufficient vigour. It has often been asked why he did not do so. The most compelling answer is that he was so completely absorbed by what he likes best — trying to convince everybody that he is right. Hence, he embarked in 2002 and early 2003 on a futile campaign to sell a pre-emptive war to a deeply sceptical Parliament and public. The fruits of this strategy were the disastrous dossiers, a nail-biting parliamentary vote and a pointless ‘masochism strategy’ in which the then Prime Minister sought to win over those most implacably opposed to the war — and was slow hand-clapped for his pains.
The disastrous consequence of this campaign was that — in the public eye, and not unreasonably — the test of success in Iraq became the discovery of weapons of mass destruction. Yet the precise casus belli was never that Saddam was in possession of WMD, but that he had given the world every reason to believe he might have such an arsenal, or be developing one, and that he was in material breach of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 (and many other such resolutions) which promised ‘serious consequences’ if he did not comply fully.
It is now an all-but-unchallenged orthodoxy that the Iraq war was a recruiting sergeant for al-Qa’eda and its affiliates in this country. That may be true, but only in the sense that everything is a recruiting sergeant for this cause: the existence of the state of Israel, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the end of the Muslim Caliphate in 1924, the removal of the Taleban, the way women dress in the West. Last June, a bomb was found outside a popular West End nightspot in Haymarket. How much did the planting of the device really have to do with the removal of Saddam Hussein? Murderous theocrats do not need Iraq to justify slaughter.
As important as it is to audit the past, it is no less vital to keep a clear eye on the future. As John McCain, the Republican candidate for president, said on the night he secured his party’s presidential nomination, ‘it is of little use to Americans for their candidates to avoid the many complex challenges of these struggles by re-litigating decisions of the past’. It is a strategic and moral imperative that the West does not flee liberated Iraq until the insurgency has been quelled and the foundations of a stable, prosperous democracy laid. Clearly, this will take decades rather than years. The error was in ever pretending it would be otherwise.
The symmetrical error is wilfully to ignore the progress of the surge masterminded by General Petraeus, and the turning of the Sunni tribes against al-Qa’eda. There were fewer civilian casualties in January 2008 than in any previous month — a decline from almost 3,000 a year ago to around 600. A little over a year ago, only 8 per cent of Baghdad was under control; now the figure is closer to 75 per cent. The number of insurgent attacks on US forces has been reduced from 180 a day to an average of 60 a day in January.
There will be more horrors: witness the suicide bomb in the holy city of Karbala on Monday which claimed at least 43 lives. But this is precisely the wrong moment for the West to set a rigid timetable for a full withdrawal just as the security situation in Iraq is turning. Petraeus should be given the chance to testify to Congress in April, and strategic decisions taken on the basis of that testimony, rather than the pressures of the US presidential race.
We face a still-unfamiliar landscape in which Islamist terror, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction form a new, deadly and intertwined triple threat. It is right — essential, indeed — that we scrutinise the errors of Iraq and learn the right lessons. But it would be a terrible delusion to conclude that this landscape would not exist had the invasion never happened; worse still to imagine that it would be made safer by precipitate withdrawal.
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