The joint American-British occupation of Iraq is five years old this week and
shows no sign of ending. There has been a fall in civilian deaths due to the
intensive American policing of Baghdad, the legitimising of a 60,000 Sunni
militia to fight Al-Qaeda and sheer exhaustion at the horror. But these are
entry rather than exit tactics. They make departing more rather than less
hazardous.
Nowhere in non-Kurdish Iraq is there a stable political or security regime.
There are even indications that the anarchy of the Baghdad area has shifted
north, witness the terrible killing of a Christian bishop in Mosul and a
surge in deaths over the past month. The relationship between Kurds and
Arabs, for instance over oil and the status of Kirkuk, is unresolved.
There are two stark indicators of the state of this occupation. One is that
after five years power supplies in oil-rich Iraq are still no better than
they were under Saddam Hussein and many utilities are worse. The other is
that no leader of the two occupying countries dares to appear in streets
that he claims to have liberated.
The mood was best summed up by an American soldier who, on radio last week,
said simply, “We have broken this country. Our violence had bred violence,
but we cannot leave until we have put the place back together again.” Any
question of how to exit the quagmire is thus begged, since nobody has an
idea of what putting Iraq back together again involves.
History is now sliding the invasion into focus. Lessons are raining from the
sky like bombs once did over Falluja. None that I have encountered, not one
book, article or film, reflects well on the venture. Even the memoir of Paul
Bremer, the early proconsul, was a howl of frustration against Washington.
The forthcoming apologia from Douglas Feith, the occupation’s chief Pentagon
planner, refers to it as “grimly incomplete”.
I have never doubted the integrity of those perpetrating this war. I do not
believe it was secretly about oil or money or regional hegemony. Even the
stupidest strategist knows that these are determined by markets, not armies.
Those within Washington’s elite for whom the invasion was really about
Israel were open about the fact, nor is Israel’s security in itself an
illegitimate concern.
There are reasons for invading foreign states that are justified at law and
before the court of pragmatism. They embrace forestalling a humanitarian
catastrophe (Kosovo) or reversing an attack on a foreign state (Kuwait).
Neither applied in Iraq but I accept that many listening to Tony Blair’s
deceptive Commons speech in March 2003 might have thought they did.
What is astonishing is the sheer scale of the self-delusion that consumed two
powerful, nuclear-armed nations and, quite separate, their incompetence in
converting that delusion into action. Britain’s only defence, and it is
thin, is that at no point did Blair pretend to do anything but limp
pathetically in Washington’s wake. Britain could hardly rebuild Iraq if
America refused to do so.
The plan of Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, was not initially
implausible. It was “invasion lite”: topple the regime, install a puppet as
in Afghanistan and leave. The puppet was Ahmed Chalabi. US commanders were
told to assume they would leave within six months.
This was why Rumsfeld cut out the State Department and even those “neocon”
nation-builders who saw their Iraq as an island of pro-western, pro-Israeli
capitalism in the Middle East. The occupation plan was drawn up in
Rumsfeld’s office by Feith, who rejected all help from experts and relied on
interns from right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. He was
dubbed by General Tommy Franks as “the f****** stupidest guy on the face of
the earth”.
George Bush himself told Bob Woodward, the writer, that in Iraq “the degree of
difficulty had to be relatively small in order to make sure that we
continued to succeed in the first battle”, Afghanistan.
Reconstruction would be financed, said the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz, from
Iraq’s own oil revenues, much to the enrichment of the vice-president’s
various companies. Iraq was the nearest to a private war in modern history.
What both Bush and Rumsfeld ignored was the power of mission creep. It was
this that led to the catalogue of executive and military errors: the absence
of a plan for Iraq’s governance, the lack of skills in the coalition
authority, the failure to police Baghdad, the treating of Iraqi civilians as
“the enemy” and the army’s brutal imposition of order. A nation was
alienated and nation-building turned from mission improbable to mission
impossible.
Even the early remedies, such as flooding the Iraq economy with reconstruction
money, corrupted local government and financed gang warfare under the guise
of sectarian strife. It was not until last year and General David Petraeus’s
recourse to private militias and the “surge” that anything like a plausible
occupation strategy emerged from Washington. It was far too late to ease
withdrawal.
The implications of Iraq for intervention generally are awesome. In The Three
Trillion Dollar War, Joseph Stiglitz, the former World Bank economist
(writing with Linda Bilmes), points out that war has become cripplingly
expensive. Risk aversion and over-mechanisation lead to massive destruction
and loss of civilian life, not to mention the imputed cost of military
deaths and injuries long into the future.
Stiglitz puts the cost of the war at 60 times the official figure of $50
billion, apart from such additional costs as the higher price of oil. He
blames it for the collapse of America's public finances and for aiding the
descent into recession.
To British participants such as Hilary Synnott, the Basra administrator, what
was most tragic was the inability to build civil order on military victory.
His memoir, Bad Days in Basra, out last week, charts the collapse of liaison
between London and Washington as the coalition lost control in autumn 2003.
It was a shambles reminiscent of 19th-century wars. Synnott pleads for a
corps of administrators not obsessed with “Whitehall’s fixation with a duty
of care which prevents them being exposed to the risks which soldiers face
every day”.
In other words, Synnott is saying occupation lite must mutate into imperialism
lite if such adventures are to have any hope of success. As Colin Powell
warned Bush before the invasion, “You know that you’re going to be owning
this place.” Blair’s interventionism, set out in his 1998 Chicago speech,
displayed that most dangerous of military illusions: that establishing a
bridgehead wins a war. Blair could explain his interference in other
countries’ affairs - to end some evil - but not what to do next.
Our soldiers now hunkered down in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq
went with the noble aim of righting a wrong. But they have induced in London
a renaissance of the imperial urge, the desire to impose one’s own values on
foreign peoples through the barrel of a gun. They then do not know how to
leave. British ministers deny this is their intention. But that denial is
fatal to their cause.
The strength of the British Empire was that both occupier and occupied
expected the British to stay. Promising to leave “when the job is done” may
satisfy a domestic audience but it ensures the worst of both worlds. It
stirs political and financial dependency for the present while creating
uncertainty about the future. The job is never done. Autonomy is not imposed
but postponed. Today’s imperialism lite, by constantly debating its
departure, induces instability, encourages rebellion and so undermines its
declared mission.
The occupation of Iraq was a shocking case of a great power wounded by one
terrorist incident thrashing out against any Muslim state that came to mind.
As Kabul crumbled, Rumsfeld turned his gaze on Iraq, as “Afghanistan is
running out of targets”.
Even then, had he confined his objective to revenge, Iraq might have been a
short-lived affair. Instead it slid into a wider crusade to bring western
values to an often ungrateful world. Revenge has cost the American people
some $3-$4 trillion – so far.
Visiting Baghdad in 2003 I recall being asked what I would write if, against
all odds, Iraq became a Mesopotamian Sweden. That unlikely outcome, I said,
would still not justify the invasion but success would probably atone for
the sin. Five years on nobody would even bother to ask the question.
simon.jenkins@sunday-times.co.uk
