THEIR’S not to reason why. Their’s but to do or die. Into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, is absolutely right. The 600 Black Watch troops must go north to hold the Iskandariyah convoy route to Fallujah. This is Britain’s war, too, despite her ceding generalship to the Americans. The Americans are now in deep trouble and need military and political help. Britain cannot refuse it without a charge of cowardice.
Nothing has been so unedifying about Britain’s presence in Iraq as the fiction, notable in the House of Commons, that it could somehow operate “war-lite”. Tony Blair and colleagues crouch in their Basra bunker, spinning that they would “not have done it the Pentagon’s way”. They privately boast about the superiority of British tactics. They abjure “coalition”, when anyone mentions collapsing civil order, Abu Ghraib torture, the aerial massacre of civilians or the flattening of the Old city of Najaf. But they are responsible.
This has been a British war from the start, supported by both the Labour and Tory parties. They stood side by side with George W. Bush on the neoconservative platform. They promised to bring “peace, prosperity and democracy” to Iraq and a world saved from terrorism. Britain’s reputation is bound up in the outcome. This is not war à la carte. Churchill could not tell Eisenhower that he would bomb Berlin, “ but would rather not turn up on D-Day.”
Nor can the Government draw a fine line between operational and political decisions. It insults intelligence to describe as “purely operational” a major change in national deployment just two weeks before a presidential election. Mr Bush helped when Mr Blair was in trouble, with a gesture to calm the Labour Party on Northern Ireland and Palestine. Now Mr Bush is desperate for something quotable. A friend in need of a soundbite is worth a Charge of the Light Brigade.
That is not all. The American tactic of shoot first, intelligence afterwards has turned the Sunni towns along the convoy routes into a killing field. They are dangerous as hell. American commanders are fed up with the British leaking criticism of their heavy-booted performance. They want the Brits to “feel the Sunni heat” where it hurts. This deployment is political.
Even the most severe critic of the occupation must accept the need for an exit plan. This involves half-decent elections in January, a declared “victory for democracy” and withdrawal, with the winner left to cut his own deals with the local militias. For this to be plausible, the holding of some sort of election in Sunni territory is vital. Fallujah was turned anti-American by Paul Bremer’s mass public sector dismissals and by the 82nd Airborne’s brutal patrolling. Ninety per cent of the population has apparently fled the nightly bombardment. If the Americans can now take and hold Fallujah for just a few weeks, a swift post-election exit is at least possible.
No sensible person on either side of the Atlantic wants this occupation to continue much longer. The only debate concerns the degree of indignity attaching to departure. Iraq is not “getting better” under Western occupation. Wherever politics matters, Iraq south of Kurdistan is getting worse: worse for women, worse for the middle classes, worse for slum-dwellers, worse for local minorities, worse for Christians, worse for aid agencies and worse for their beneficiaries. Only a fool could see Iraq as being on its way to the tolerant, pro-Israeli, secular democracy of neoconservative fantasy. There are no fools left within a thousand miles of Baghdad.
I have no doubt that the first person to welcome early withdrawal would be Mr Blair. His remaining years in office look set to be blighted by the lies and failures of Iraq. The same surely goes for his American opposite number. A re-elected Mr Bush must come to see that he has been misled by the neocons, a view in which his whole family would concur. He sought power in 2000 as a non-interventionist. He cannot parrot for another four years that Iraq is a “serious threat to the American people”. Hovering over every president is the example of Lyndon B. Johnson, whose place in history was ruined by a war from which he found no exit.
Only Mr Bush can plausibly orchestrate withdrawal with dignity. Only he can spin defeat into a sort of victory. Neither the Democrats nor Washington’s military and diplomatic establishment would oppose him. The ranters who got him into this and now cry, “on to Iran, on to Syria”, will be of less account after an election. Mr Bush’s eye will be on posterity, and he is not stupid. He will have Mr Blair egging him on.
Consider instead John Kerry. He wants to involve “our European allies” in Iraq. He would plead with Mr Blair to stay, and plead for his help in securing a wider United Nations involvement. Desperate not to seem weak, Mr Kerry is likely to struggle ever deeper into the Iraqi quagmire. Any move to disengage will be seen as treachery by his enemies, as undoing the work of his Republican predecessors. Rather than hand Iraq over to the unavoidable next phase of civil upheaval and partition, Mr Kerry will postpone and let the mission creep ever forward. The hapless Mr Blair will be dragged along, too. Mr Kerry must make Iraq a success. Mr Bush need only to make it go away. For an early end to the war, I would vote Bush.
Britons have no such vote. But every one of them should watch BBC Two tonight. Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Power of Nightmares, is a cry of anguish against this whole farrago. It traces the evolution of the Iraq occupation to the rise of the American neoconservatives in the 1980s. It sees in the demonising of Islam the neocons’ need for an enemy to replace communism in “binding together the American myth” . They found it in the fragmented Islamist revolutionaries. They supported various Mujahidin groups against the Russians in Afghanistan, then reinvented them as a fictitious “worldwide network of terror in 50 countries” in the aftermath of 9/11.
Two years of searching, from the suburbs of Detroit to the hills of Tora Bora, have yet to find any sign of an “international al-Qaeda network”, though its existence is asserted as fact by Mr Bush and Mr Blair almost weekly. Despite thousands of arrests and widespread use of torture, there has not been a single relevant conviction in both America and Britain. While seeking to sustain the “big fear”, leaders risk losing sight of the isolated malcontent with a grievance and a bomb. Even 9/11 is now believed to have had little to do with Osama bin Laden, beyond his help in financing it.
Curtis’s essay is about the paranoia of fundamentalism, alike in totalitarian Islam and the democratic West. Politicians who no longer believe in anything “stop promising dreams and instead offer nightmares”, secret nightmares against which only they can defend us. Instead of wants, they create fears. And in their craving for fear, they destroy their own values and condone jailing without trial, bombing of civilians and pre-emptive war.
I share Curtis’s basic optimism. No, the world will not come to an end were it not shielded from doom by the West’s burgeoning scare industry, to which Curtis might add the BBC’s own outrageous pseudo-documentary on a “dirty bomb” last month. But I also believe that his message is hitting home. The vision of the West as facing daily terrorist armaggedon is being seen for the sham it is. Mr Blair cannot cry “smallpox on the Tube” for ever. Mr Bush cannot see anthrax under every American bed. Al-Qaeda is not “as big as the Mafia”, whatever that really is.
Iraq is the tragic victim of these leaders, made more miserable by every day they stay. But leave they will, because democracy can tolerate only so much deceit. Eventually it smothers its leaders in shame. The irony is that departure may come closer if Mr Blair and Mr Bush are still standing together next January, with history heavy on their collective shoulders and the Gallant 600 feeling the Sunni heat.
simon.jenkins@thetimes.co.uk
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