How do we judge what is now going on in Iraq? I ask that question because the fog of war has in this case been more like an old peasouper.
Precarious security has meant few journalists have been able to report thoroughly across much of the country. Given their track record, predictions that we have “turned the corner” from American military officials need to be taken with some no-rub saline solution. Anti-war crusaders have taken shards of bad news and inflated them into a picture of complete failure; some Pollyannas on the right have done the opposite.
Nevertheless, fog dissipates eventually. And if the debate in Washington signifies anything, it appears that the Iraq adventure should be understood at this juncture neither as a phenomenal success but nor as a failure of any profound kind. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, it’s still a long hard slog. But the slog now has a clearer direction — and it’s not that far from what the dreaded neoconservatives once hoped for.
Saddam is gone and finished. So is Saddamism. We forget now the appalling squalor and brutality he inflicted on his country. But in the Kurdish north, where he had been banished for more than a decade, you can see the stirrings of what ordinary Iraqis call a “normal country”.
The same in the marshlands of the south, where a fraction of the priceless environment is beginning to revive and there is no more fear of Saddam’s weaponry and ruthlessness.
Yes, his former apparatchiks continue to intimidate and murder. But they appear to be weakening under steady assault from coalition forces and better intelligence from local Iraqis now convinced they have a democratic future. Attacks on allied forces are at new lows; and the hideous and often incompetent murders of Iraqi civilians — close to 30 dead in a couple of days last week — are becoming more insights into the nihilism of the insurgency than their brandishing of potential victory.
Why? Because the elections worked. They worked not by showing that Iraq is free of insurgents. The country was in a virtual military lockdown that day. They worked by changing the narrative, what American military leaders call the “IO” — the information operation. Until then, the scenario — brilliantly deployed by the insurgents and stupidly reinforced by the often-disastrous leadership of Paul Bremer — was that of resistance to western occupation.
After January 30, the scenario was that of a nascent democracy being strangled at birth by reactionary forces from within and terrorist forces from outside. That shift in narrative meant that there was little question that the US would stay the course — a critical element in persuading Iraqis to support the new government and in cajoling Americans to keep paying in money and blood for others’ freedom.
In insurgencies narrative is key. Captain Aaron Kalloch put it beautifully to Mark Danner, a liberal reporter, in The New York Review of Books. “The simple fact is that how things are perceived here is almost as important as how things actually are,” Kalloch told Danner. “And here IO is everything. Insurgency is relatively easy for the enemy because he’s got his own personal international IO platform . . . the US media.”
That IO platform was amplified by an American election much of last year, where journalists couldn’t help but report Iraq through the lens of domestic politics. Now, that is less evident.
The remaining difficulties are still reported. But the American press, even in its most lib- eral redoubts, has essentially changed its tune since January 30. And so the momentum slowly builds.
Above all we have not seen civil war, despite many, many attempts to ignite one. Even as the politicians in Baghdad jostled with seemingly unimaginable delay for months after the election, national unity held. We now have the beginnings of a working government, with ethnic and religious differences being hammered out in deals over ministries, boundaries and constitutional clauses.
Some told us that ethnic differences were so deep this would never happen. They were wrong. So the fact that the US is now seriously contemplating reductions in troop numbers in the medium term is not seen as a sign of cutting and running, but of slow, tentative success.
It isn’t the success war-supporters like me wanted. We drastically underestimated the potential for a Ba’athist-jihadist insurgency; we got the WMD issue grotesquely wrong. Nostra culpa. The Bush administration compounded these errors with dumb-as-a-post decisions, like co-opting Abu Ghraib to torture and kill innocents or delaying elections long enough to allow insurgents to seize the initiative.
One day we will find out with more precision who screwed up and how. But in one fundamental sense President George W Bush didn’t screw up. His simple conviction was that there would be no real solution to the threat of Islamist terror unless we grasped the nettle of Arab autocracy, unless we created a space for freedom in that part of the world.
He has yet to be proven right definitively. But the signs are there — from the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon to a thaw in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Under autocracies people are manipulated by paranoia and resentment. In democracies they force their leaders to give them better sewers and roads and schools and police. Autocracies breed terror. Democracies “banalise” it into submission. That’s the key.
Are we there yet? Of course not. Iraq’s infrastructure is still a shambles, security is still tenuous, and the Iraqi forces are still unable to keep the peace in their own country. The new leaders may have come to power democratically, but it is by no means clear that they appreciate or will defend liberal institutions — a secular judiciary, a free press, minority rights.
But recent visits by Rumsfeld and Bob Zoellick, deputy secretary of state, show that the Bush administration has not become complacent and has not decided to go for a second Mission Accomplished moment. They know the lurking danger of ethnic strife, petty manoeuvring in the construction of the new government, the settling of ancient grudges, and every other potential pitfall. But it now has a story to tell and to defend.
A fairy tale of easy liberation became a short story of war and then a rambling novel of endless conflict but diminishing violence. I’ve stopped hoping for a happy ending but I see no reason to expect a tragic one either. Just a long, hard, qualified and still not inevitable success.
