Dear Matthew

Isn’t it exhausting – this merry-go-round of argument, always in motion, but never going anywhere? I sighed to see ancient quotes, long repudiated, pressed into weary service yet again.

Let me repeat: had I known, at the beginning of 2003, when I took my own decision to support an Iraq invasion if it happened – that the human cost was going to be 150,000 dead Iraqis and that the political cost would be the discrediting of the doctrine of interdependence – then I would have argued hard against it. I would have said then that it wasn’t worth it. It had little to do with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), though dangers seemed to me always to be attendant on tolerating genocidal dictatorships (there, I know, we differ).

Had I known what failures in preparation and strategy were coming, had I known that there were people who would blow up holy shrines and everyone in them simply to provoke counter-slaughter, had I known just how pointlessly (pointlessly, Matthew) murderous some people could be . . . Of course, “we told you so”, but then “we” also told us so about so many other things that never happened.

But invading Iraq was not the only disaster. Not toppling Saddam was also a disaster. The sanctions were failing, people were dying, WMD was proliferating, the UN was complicit in the flouting of its own most solemn decisions. Jihadism, a rising ideology that was partly a product of failed states, and partly of a complacent foreign policy, was already waxing.

So at this point I turn to what, with admirable spirit, you tell me I “bloody well know” about jihadism. The trouble being that, even had you used a stronger word, I still wouldn’t have “known” that apocalyptic Islamism was made significantly worse by the invasion of Iraq – except in Iraq itself.

The year 2001 made it clear to almost everyone that there was already a disaster. In fact, we should have realised it long before, given the tourists and travellers murdered in Yemen, Bali, Luxor and Kashmir, the mosques blown up in Pakistan, the assassination of Muslim leaders.

That particular rough beast, Matthew, was vexed to nightmare while the cradle was being rocked by Parrisian fatalists or Kissingerian realpolitikers like Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind. It was incubated during the days of nonintervention in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Even now our domestic jihadism is more likely to be animated by Kashmir than by Iraq. You posit, with the most terrible elegance, a world where somehow you are rendered safer by putting your head in a paper bag. One of my greatest regrets about Iraq is that now many more people may believe that this is true.

Even so, your capacity to tolerate hundreds of thousands of deaths, as long as fewer of them are ours or “caused” by us, presents such a cold historical view, that – paradoxically – it entitles me to argue that we must also begin to look at the Iraq invasion in the longer term. Perhaps in our next exchange we should do just that.

Love,

David

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