It has been a truly dreadful war and it is a long way from over. The number of dead is estimated so far at 4.7m. That is more than have died in any conflict since the second world war. The vast majority of them are innocent civilians — overwhelmingly women and children. About half a million died violently — tens of thousands literally hacked to pieces — and the rest from disease and starvation. This is the sort of human tragedy that, in the phrase a senior Washington official used last week in another context, “should not stand”.
It is the civil war that began in the Democratic Republic of Congo more than four years ago. A week ago another 1,000 were massacred in a single day. The bald statistics make what has been happening in Iraq seem insignificant. The level of suffering should have every one of us — whether world leader or occasional weekend peace protester — demanding something be done. Instead we have ignored it; our minds have been on other things.
What is happening in the DRC today results in part from American actions 40 years ago when the wind of change was blowing through the African continent, bringing independence to countries colonised by the Europeans. The Congo had been run shamefully by the Belgians. They stole its vast mineral wealth and gave it virtually nothing in return.
Then came hope in the shape of Patrice Lumumba, widely regarded as one of the most promising post-colonial leaders Africa had produced, respected by the majority of his divided nation. But there was a serious problem with Lumumba — the Americans viewed him as a communist sympathiser and his part of Africa was a cockpit of the cold war. Washington wanted its writ to run in the Congo and not Moscow’s. President Eisenhower wanted Lumumba “eliminated”. It was the Belgians who did the deed, but it was the CIA who engineered it.
Lumumba was replaced by General Mobutu Sese Seko, a vicious thug hated and feared in his own country in equal measures. He murdered his opponents in a way Saddam Hussein would have admired. He stole even more of his country’s wealth than the Belgians. While his people starved he became one of the richest men in the world. His eventual downfall led to the civil war that has raged since.
Mobutu might have been a monster through those terrible years, but he was the West’s monster and the West looked the other way. Now we have dealt with another monster in another part of the world, can we expect Washington to turn its attention to the heart of Africa? A naive question, you say, and you may well be right.
The Congo does not qualify for George Bush’s attention in the way that Iraq did. He is unlikely to regard the actions of his Republican predecessor Eisenhower as unfinished business, as he did his father’s involvement with Iraq. The Congo has not defied endless United Nations resolutions. It has no weapons of mass destruction, though the AK-47 and a sharp panga have killed many, many more people than even Saddam managed with his nerve gas and his chemicals. Neither does it give succour to terrorists in the way Saddam once did. All it does is kill its own innocent people in vast numbers. Why should Bush care? Well, Tony Blair cares for a start — or so he says. He told the Labour party conference that Africa was a stain on the conscience of the world. Based on that, it is not unreasonable to expect him to have a word with his all-powerful friend about it. Not that it would be easy to bring a semblance of order to the Congo; dozens of armies, rebel groups and militia have been at each others’ throats since the West lost interest. But nor would it require a mass invasion and tens of billions of dollars.
Still think I’m being naive? You’re probably right. There is no strategic interest at stake in that part of the world as there was in the cold war, and no massive oil reserves as there are in the Middle East. Yet there are plenty of Americans who genuinely believe they have a responsibility — an obligation even — to rebuild the world in their own image. They believe their country went to war against Saddam for selfless reasons.
I spoke last week to a senior American military man about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How could the war be justified, I asked, if they were neither used nor eventually found? He seemed genuinely hurt by the question. “When you look at the Iraqi people, when you see the way the regime has acted, when you see the riches Saddam has held on to and what he has done to his people, it really comes down to caring for your fellow human being.”
There was no doubting his sincerity. It reflects what many ordinary Americans and some senior figures in the administration think. They cannot understand the hostility shown to their country by so many foreigners. Bush has always said this was a moral war; regime change is what it has always been about for him. So maybe it’s not being too naive to think America really does want to use its position as the world’s only superpower to spread freedom and democracy. The truth is, it’s a question of where. Only last week James Woolsey, who once ran the CIA and has been appointed to run the new information ministry in Iraq, claimed America had been actively promoting democracy for most of the past century. When America entered the first world war in 1917, he wrote, there were “about” 10 democracies in the world. Now there are 120. “Needless to say,” he added modestly, “America had something to do with this.”
Woolsey believes we have now embarked on world war four. World war three was the cold war; this is the war on terrorism. It is a war “to extend democracy to those parts of the Arab and Muslim world that threaten the liberal civilisation we worked to build and defend throughout 20th century”. The countries he has in mind include Syria and Iran.
Support for terrorism in Syria and Iran is not in doubt. Iran created the Islamic terrorist organisation Hezbollah and continues to finance it. The dictatorship in Syria not only terrorises its own people — it once obliterated an entire town to deal with some opponents — but occupies part of Lebanon and uses it as a training ground for terrorists.
For Washington there is only one solution: regime change. To use the language of James Woolsey, it is about “changing the face of the Middle East”. That need not mean a repeat of the attack on Iraq. In military terms both countries would be tougher nuts to crack. Iran is three times the size of Iraq, has a far bigger and better equipped army and is developing its own nuclear capability.
Nor would a military attack on either country have the support of the British government. Jack Straw has gone to extraordinary lengths to make friends with Iran. The Syrian leader has been invited to London and wooed in person by Tony Blair. When I asked Straw about the possibility of Britain supporting an attack on Syria, he flatly rejected it.
There is, in any case, still the small matter of controlling Iraq, preventing it sliding into anarchy and installing something that bears even a passing resemblance to democratic government. Overthrowing Saddam is one thing; replacing him with a secure and stable alternative will take a little longer.
But Syria and Iran are next on Washington’s list; of that there is no doubt. As Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute writes in The Spectator this week: “Support for terror is an integral part of both regimes and it is impossible to win the war on terrorism so long as the two regimes are in power.”
The neo-conservatives in Washington know that will be a tall order. But it is not, says Woolsey, “as tall an order as what we have already accomplished in the previous world wars”.
From this side of the Atlantic we tend to see it differently. We were fighting for our survival against Hitler. But after September 11 many Americans are prepared to believe their government when it tells them the war on terrorism is a fight for survival, too.
America, says Woolsey, “is on the march”. If the suffering Congolese are hoping they will march in their direction any time soon, they are likely to be disappointed.
