GEORGE BUSH has Tony Blair round his little finger. Indeed I wonder sometimes if Mr Blair is his little finger. When the hand waves the finger waves. When the hand bombs the finger bombs. When the hand says come, it comes.
Mr Blair’s intention, as yet unannounced, to send 3,000 Royal Marines to the holy places of Iraq is near unbelievable. This must rank with Churchill’s Dardanelles folly and Gladstone’s sending of Gordon to Khartoum. The latter is the most ironic parallel. Gordon too was an imperial hubris too far. His defeat was at the hands of fanatics who also called themselves “madhists”. But at least Gladstone was driven by jingoist public opinion. Mr Blair is driven only by Mr Bush.
The Najaf expedition will increase the British presence in Iraq by a third. Mr Blair still refuses to admit his decision, already communicated to Marine commanders, for fear of the June 10 elections. Sixty-six per cent of Britons oppose sending more troops. I am told that all military advice is against the expedition, which takes Britain north from Basra almost to the gates of Baghdad. The Army is already saying it will refuse to accept orders on the ground from what it regards as inept and reckless US commanders.
Why cannot Mr Blair simply say no? It is Mr Bush who has turned a peaceful region of Shia Iraq into a cauldron of militancy by allowing Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr to draw the Americans south into the Shia heartland between Karbala and Najaf. Al-Sadr enticed the Americans into desecrating cemeteries, blasting mosques and creating martyrs. The Pentagon converted unemployed Baghdad hoodlums into Mujahadin heroes on a world stage. Moderate Shias looked on in horror.
The Marines will go to Najaf to show that the coalition is still alive, but with no clear military objective. If they are to continue America’s feud with al-Sadr, they will get killed and Britain’s name will be damned across Shia Islam. If they negotiate with the madhists and withdraw, the latter will boast a victory, humiliating Ayatollah al-Sistani into the bargain.
Or is the Marines’ objective merely to guard fledgeling local administrations in these towns? If so, they will taint it as collaborationist and become sitting targets for those eager to kill foreigners anywhere and everywhere. Or will the Marines squat in their sweltering desert shelters and man roadblocks outside the towns? In that case they will achieve nothing yet suffer constant attacks on their convoys.
The marines will arrive in the burning heat of mid-summer just when so-called “full sovereignty” passes to another interim Iraqi administration. Mr Blair asserted yesterday, in one breath, both that the new government will have right of veto over British operations and that it cannot tell British troops what to do. It can tell them to leave Iraq altogether, yet they are to stay “until the job is done” of setting up “a stable and democratic Iraq”. This ambiguity is reminiscent of Lord Raglan before the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Suppose al-Sadr’s fighters continue goading the Americans and British into retaliation. Suppose the new interim government, fearing for its life, refuses consent? Suppose the new government pleads for troops against the Kurds or the Sunnis and is refused? These are not hypothetical questions but highly likely. American troops will do whatever their generals want, as Colin Powell said last night, slapping down Mr Blair’s futile pledge on Iraqi sovereignty.
The truth is that there is no sovereignty to be transferred. America and Britain did not acquire sovereignty when they invaded Iraq. They overrode it. South of Kurdistan there is no government authority worth the name. No foreigner leaves the semi-protected zone of central Baghdad except under military protection. Reconstruction work has all but stopped. Public administration means just doling out dollars to middlemen. Law and order lies with vigilantes, gangs, sheikhs and religious militias. Only the gun is sovereign. Iraq has not been “bombed back to the Stone Age”, it has been misgoverned back to it.
So why is Britain going deeper into the morass? The answer is that Mr Blair is enmeshed in Washington’s internecine feuding. Britons keep describing American tactics in Iraq as counter-productive. But these tactics are part of a different war, that of “Iraq-in-Washington”. The heavy-handed policing, the shelling of mosques and the bombing of wedding parties serve a purpose. So do generals telling Senate committees that they are “staring into the abyss” and “going over Niagara”.
America, unlike Britain, is an open democracy. Congressional committees are in continuous session on this war. The hearings all testify to the bitter bureaucratic conflicts it has spawned, among intelligence agencies, between the State Department and the Pentagon and within the Pentagon between Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The prospect of failure intensifies these conflicts. Everyone plays I-told-you-so. Most fingers are pointing at Mr Rumsfeld, breaking surface last week with the Baghdad raid on his friend, Ahmed Chalabi. No revenge is going to be sweeter than that of the Joint Chiefs.
They never owned this war. As Bob Woodward says in Plan of Attack, they tried to thwart Mr Rumsfeld at every turn. They ensured that the Iraq commander, General Ricardo Sanchez, reported to General John Abizaid in Florida, not to the Pentagon’s Mr Bremer in Baghdad. They made Iraq ungovernable. During my visit in November, General Abizaid bombed Tikrit in the midst of a “hearts and minds” campaign among local Sunnis. The mayhem was worthy of Catch-22.
The American Army has no interest in “democracy in Iraq”. Like most armies, its interest is in finding an enemy and smashing him without getting hurt. If the outcome embarrasses Mr Rumsfeld, so much the better. Hence the tardy response to the prison scandal: let Mr Rumsfeld apologise. Hence the pounding of the Karbala and Najaf shrines: it infuriates the State Department. This is what happens when wars are about to be lost. Blame is the name of the game.
Hence too the invitation to the British to go to Najaf. The message is crude: “We got beat in Fallujah. The Brits rubbish our fighting methods. Now they can get beat for once.” If I were the American commander in Iraq I might do likewise. I too would put pressure on Washington. I would snap my fingers at his poodle, Mr Blair, and tell him to send his smart-ass generals to cover my retreat.
What amazes me is that Britain kowtows to this, not just Mr Blair but his Cabinet, the Labour Party and half the press. The Tories cannot think what to say. The Liberal Democrats are in the woods dancing with United Nations fairies, unaware that the UN is hated in Iraq as much as the Americans. Only public opinion, or two thirds of it, is sane. As for the army chiefs, General Sir Mike Jackson and his colleagues, they must be close to mutiny.
The future of Iraq will not begin with more troop deployments. They are party to the anarchy. When the Americans either leave or retreat to fortress bases, Iraq will fragment, as it has already between Kurd, American and British sectors. Sovereignty begins with security and that will lie with localities, with families, tribes, mosques and militias. The institutions on which democracy might have been built, including the Baath party, have been smashed. As with Afghanistan, the Pentagon has handed Iraq to warlordism.
Friends returning from Baghdad now say one thing. Nobody moves. Iraq is like a nation eerily awaiting possible execution. It knows that American imperialism “flies by night” but what follows is uncertain. Kurdistan is gone. The rest is a land of the desert and to desert it may return before it finds a new nationhood.
It knows only one thing. The presence of foreigners does not secure the future but postpones it. The final Western arrogance in Iraq, the final imperial sneer, is that “it will be worse off if we go”. Only when we go can it start getting better.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
Join the Debate at comment@thetimes.co.uk
