Last week, just before Valentine’s
Day, North Korea carried out its latest nuclear test. In a way this was a
greeting to the world, or at least to the United States. It was meant to
convey one core message: all members of the Axis of Evil are equal, but some
are more equal than others.
This test comes almost ten years
after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It’s time, I think, to recall
the words of Madeleine Albright, the former Secretary of State – “The message
out of Iraq is that if you don’t have nuclear weapons, you get invaded.
If you do have nuclear weapons, you don’t get invaded.” North Korea has
them, and is determined to show the world that it has them. Iran - also
on George Bush’s Axis - is on the way to acquiring them and there is really
very little to be done. The truth is simple enough: the invasion of Iraq
has made the world an immeasurably more dangerous place.
Perhaps if George Bush had read Carl von Clausewitz, the
great Prussian military strategist, things might have been different. My
goodness; what could a nineteenth century thinker have to say about a
twenty-first century military fiasco, what could he possibly say to Bush that
Bush would have understood? Probably nothing, but you might care to
consider the following passage from On
War, Clausewitz' magnum opus:
No one starts a war-or rather, no one in his senses should
do so-without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that
war and how he intends to conduct it.
You see, what is important here, what Clausewitz understood
and American strategic planners did not, is not so much the specific design,
the aims and objectives as these are conceived in advance of an attack, but
what unintended consequencesmay arise. War is then not a
‘continuation of policy by other means.’ Rather it can, and does, produce
entirely new lines of policy that turn the original objectives inside out. For
Washington the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq have, quite simply,
been endless.
So, what did the Bush administration not anticipate? For
one thing it did not anticipate that America casualties would be greater after
‘victory’ than before. Above all, it did not anticipate being involved in a
sectarian war. It was all so one dimensional: a deposed dictator, a grateful
people, a new democracy. The real consequences have been a more unstable Middle
East, an increased danger of terrorism, a growing threat to the civil liberties
of the democratic nations, and a widespread distrust of the United States and
England among the Islamic countries.
In response to a deteriorating strategic situation Donald
Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of Defence, said quite simply, in the crassest
possible way, ‘Stuff happens’. But you see, stuff should not happen if
war is a rational pursuit of policy in the sense that Clausewitz conceived. The
advice he would have given to Bush and Rumsfeld is to read the signs
of history for possible consequences, in an attempt to minimise the variables.
But they did not read history; they did not read Clausewitz and they did not
understand Iraq. The only certainty has been and more chaos.
I am convinced, in this anniversary year, that history will
look back on the Iraq War as one of the great political and strategic disasters
of our age. The whole escapade was built on a lie after lie: Saddam had
no weapons of mass destruction and he had no contact whatsoever with Islamic
terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. It was the invasion itself that gave
these murderous militants a major opportunity. Rather than a stable
democracy, the most pronounced of Bush’s many delusions, Iraq today is not that
much better than it was yesterday. Nouri al-Maliki, the present prime
minister, has been building up a new dictatorship, concentrating more and more
power in his hands and in the hands of his Dawa Party.
Out of sight out of mind, or hear no evil, see no evil,
seems to be the attitude of people who have the good fortune not live in this
benighted ‘democracy.’ But evil there is. We no longer hear of the
killing but the killing still goes on. Last year alone some 4500
civilians died in violence. So far this month another 253 have been added
to the list. The body count grows by the day. Yesterday seventeen people
were killed, fourteen by gunfire and three by bombs.
The overall picture is horrendous, a cost that almost
defies comprehension. In the nine year period from 2003 to 2012 almost
4,500 American service people were killed along with 179 British. But the
Iraqi deaths, what of those? According to theLancet, a well respected British medical
journal, in the three years from 2003 to 2006 alone over 600,000 died as a
result of violence, Yes, 600,000 – bombed, burned, stabbed,
shot and tortured to death. Proportionately that's the equivalent of 6
million Americans or 1.2 million Britons killed over the same period. Can
you conceive of such a Holocaust, can you conceive of the anguish and horror it
would cause? I can't.
According to recent polls, the majority of the Iraqi people
believe that they are worse off now than they were under Saddam, quite an
achievement by any reasonable measure, considering what a thoroughly unpleasant
person the former tyrant was.
Now instead of a strong secular dictatorship there is a
weak half-hearted democracy, torn by factional divisions and haunted by
unresolved tensions. A large part of its population in the south is more loyal
in political and religious outlook to Tehran rather than Baghdad. Quite
frankly, I don’t believe that Iraq will ever be a stable democracy in the
Western sense of the term. We wasted millions for what? For precisely
nothing, no political advantage, no strategic advantage; nothing. There
is a perversity here that, quite frankly, is beyond my comprehension.
There are other issues, other things opened up by the invasion
that people might not have been aware of. Did you know, for instance, that
women under the rule of Saddam enjoyed a relatively free lifestyle, in that
they had many of the same opportunities as men? They were not required to wear
the burqa or the headscarf. After the invasion women in the south around the
city of Basra were murdered for being considered ‘too western’ by the Shiite
militias. Female athletes have been threatened with death for appearing
‘immodest’. Teenagers have been killed because of their hair styles. The
whole thing, quite simply, is a nightmare.
I cast my eye over the disaster of Iraq and the Roman
historian Tacitus comes to mind. Into the mouth of a barbarian chef,
resisting a Roman incursion, he puts some powerful words;
A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust
for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only
people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally
tempting. To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name of
'government'; they create a desolation and call it peace.....
As we approach another milestone in this sad history you
might care to reflect that your country and mine, the United States and
England, President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, those emperors of
lying conceit, created a desolation and called it democracy. No wonder North
Korea is perfecting its nuclear shield.
Posts
