IN MARCH 2003 Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, of the UN, secured a remarkable, last-minute deal that averted war and seemed to guarantee the disarmament of Iraq. “Saddam Hussein has finally consented to eliminate all his weapons of mass destruction,” they said, in a signing ceremony with the Iraqi leader.
Saddam, flanked by his two sons, Uday and Qusay, accepted the plaudits of the UN with pomp and grace. Beaming as he smiled at a hastily assembled crowd of French, German and Russian children, he said he had saved the world from the bloodlust of George Bush and Tony Blair with a magnanimous gesture of international friendship. There were approving murmurs of support in many Western capitals. In Oslo there was talk of a Nobel Peace prize.
To enforce the deal and ensure compliance, of course the US and Britain were required to remain on a war footing, with almost 250,000 troops in the neighbouring Arab countries. Over the following months Arab terrorist groups demanded the expulsion of infidels from Muslim lands and a series of attacks sapped the morale of allied servicemen and women. Steadily, over the next few months public support in the allied countries ebbed away.
Within months of the avoided showdown, the UN gave Iraq a clean bill of health — there were no stockpiles of weapons at all, it said. The US and the UK were sceptical, insisted that Iraq retained the capability to produce weapons quickly — the real test, they said, of the scale of the threat — and pressed to keep sanctions in place. But it was a losing cause.
Saddam invited news organisations to see that the sanctions regime now seemed to be killing even more innocent women and children than it had in the previous ten years And for what? The media hearts bled. Iraq had given up its weapons, had opened its facilities to UN inspectors: why should this punishment go on?
The reporters were not allowed to see the stream of foreign companies and officials treading a path to Saddam’s door with gifts, bribes and kickbacks to ensure their share of the wilting Oil-for-Food programme. Nor could they report that Saddam was channelling the money to terrorist groups around the world, as he had before March 2003: only this time, with more money and more international support, the funds got larger, the channels got wider and the terrorists got bolder.
Even further from the cameras, at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, dark stories of hideous abuse proliferated. These didn’t involve oddly perverted exercises — the piling up of naked bodies for bizarre photo-shoots. They were more in line with the sort of abuses that Saddam and his sons had always most enjoyed: the rapes, beatings and brutal murders of innocents. There were no congressional hearings or judicial proceedings. Saddam’s torture-mongers faced not a trial but promotion and honours. Elsewhere in Iraq Saddam strengthened his hold. Shia “enemies” disappeared by the tens of thousands; even Kurds no longer felt safe.
Outside Iraq, in the Middle East, it was business as usual. The region remained immune, as it had done for 600 years, to the currents of democratic change that had swept through the rest of the world. Syria tightened its grip on Lebanon, with targeted murders and intimidation. To distract attention from their own abuses, tyrants continued to support the Palestinian intifada against the Israelis, which grew steadily more murderous.
In Iran the theocrats’ regime interpreted Saddam’s reprieve as a green light. Iraq had defied international law and the UN for more than a decade. But Saddam had survived; indeed was looking stronger than he ever had.
An unknown scientist from Pakistan, A. Q. Khan, slipped into Teheran from Pakistan. With its Libyan ally the Iranian Government accelerated its nuclear programme. The two issued a statement saying they would use their military muscle to annihilate Israel. In March 2004 Islamists attacked railway stations in Madrid. Commentators condemned the attacks but noted that these were almost certainly the fault of US and Western policy — the plight of the Palestinians, the suffering of Iraqis, the unwelcome presence of US forces in the Middle East.
In July 2005 it was London’s turn, and again it was the UK and its allies that carried most of the blame. “Blair’s Bombs” said one magazine cover, attacking Britain’s slavish support of the US in the Middle East.
As pressure grew on governments, massive protests in solidarity with the Iraqi people were held around the world. When the US and Britain blocked a Security Council resolution to lift the sanctions, the other UN members simply ignored them.
Iraqi oil began to flow again. No one paid much interest when Iraq resumed its interest in uranium purchases from Africa. A. Q. Khan dined expensively in the best Baghdad restaurants, next to Islamist terrorists with suddenly realisable global ambitions.
I SUPPOSE in fairness I should say this is not the only alternative history of the past three years. You might prefer to believe another one in which the failure to attack Iraq produces the most benign consequences: perhaps Saddam really gives up his lifelong ambition to be the new Saladin; perhaps Iran meekly agrees under little pressure from the West to end its nuclear programmes; perhaps the tightening repression of the ever-more-restless peoples of the Middle East produces a real peace and stability. Perhaps.
The war in Iraq goes on, three years later, to the unfolding judgment of history. But that judgment should encompass not just the consequences of what was done but the consequences of what might have happened had it not been done.
The consequences of what was done in Iraq are easy to see and hard to look at. The consequences of what might have been are by their nature unrecordable. But we know that history’s greatest tragedies could and should have been avoided, but never were.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
