IN PASSING you may have noticed that a cartload of Shia bully-boy militiamen removed the Mayor of Baghdad from office this week and installed their own man, who now says he is too scared for his own life to hold on to the job. It has not been suggested that America and Britain, the guarantors of the security of the free Iraq that we went to war to create, were in any position to stop this. It came days after a great many more American soldiers were killed in Iraq: 45 already this month, as I write.
You may also have noticed that, according to The New York Times: “If the political process in Iraq remains on track and security improves, perhaps up to 30,000 troops could pull out by next spring.”
You may have asked what was meant in that sentence by the words “remains on track”. The “track” looks a curious railway with some unconventional destinations. But where it leads is ever-clearer: to a resolve by politicians to stand everyday observation on its head, and conclude that we have “won” in Iraq — and sprint back home during the incredulous pause before everyone begins to laugh.
You may have noticed, too, that our own Government is talking about massive British troop reductions in southern Iraq, possibly for “redeployment” to Afghanistan (“or tsunami relief, or Oxfam, or anywhere”, gulps Tony Blair into his shaving mirror).
The game is nearly up: not the military game, the psychological one. We can no longer take the strain in Iraq. We are going to make a bolt for it. You know that, don’t you? I suspect most British people do. It’s bearing down on us with a terrible inevitability.
Well? I am waiting. A number of us are waiting. We were expecting an angry chorus from a particular quarter. So why the silence? You could hear a pin drop. Why don’t they sing out, the armchair warriors of Fleet Street? George W. Bush and his friends are preparing to scuttle Iraq, and nobody’s complaining.
Where are they, those editorialisers whose confident “Tally-ho!” cheered our lads into Basra and Baghdad and whose cry was that we were “in this for the long haul”, to “finish the job”? Finish the job indeed — do they really think, does anybody think, that the job is finished? Does anyone seriously suggest that a free and democratic Iraq is now heading into the home straight?
Of course not. The place is going to hell in a handcart. So where are those who urged our forces in, now that the political will to keep them there is faltering?
This should be their moment. Anyone can cry “Forward!” when the tanks are rolling. It’s when the operation gets bogged down, when people are dying, when the end looks further off than ever, that the voices of the prophets are needed to rally morale. If hearts are growing faint in Washington and resolve is faltering in the capitals of the Coalition of the Willing — if the whispers of “time to start scaling back the commitment ” are growing more insistent — then where, when their instincts should surely tell them they are needed most, are the bugle-boys of the British media?
For here we are, barely two years into what every wise head in Fleet Street declared was going to be a long job with many setbacks, but upon whose success the advance of the new world order and possibly the security of Western civilisation was said to depend — a mission that George W. Bush and Tony Blair have called nothing less than the War against Evil, which cannot be allowed to fail — and what’s happening? The sucking of teeth and the rethinking of military commitments — and so soon?
A few reverses, a few thousand deaths among coalition troops, a rather more obstinate insurgency than some expected, and the talk is of cutting and running. Hey there, soldier-boys of media commentary, wasn’t this the time you warned us we were to anticipate, and to keep our nerve? So let’s hear from you. To your watchtowers, pundits! To your pens, scribes! To your studios, broadcasters!
Pull yourself together, Dubya. Get a grip, Tony. Your media supporters are surely still here to keep the faith. A siren should be sounding at the Beefsteak Club. The neoconservative fire brigade should be kitting up and slithering down poles at The Sun, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Michael Gove should be calling on the Commons to hurry back and hold the Cabinet to its promises to create a Free Iraq. William Shawcross should be dashing up to London for a round of blood-curdling television interviews. David Aaronovitch should be revisiting his liberal scruples in order to brush them manfully aside again and reach for the bayonet. Mark Steyn, of The Spectator, should be reminding us how he characterised those who doubted the Iraqi adventure: cheese-eating surrender-monkeys and Proust-fancying faint-hearts. Dare he now describe those he has admired in Washington in such terms?
When an argument has been as bitter as has the argument about the invasion of Iraq, it is tempting, I know, to get personal. The hawks have done so about us opponents and doubters of the war, and they should expect no quarter from us now that their case is falling apart. But beyond the polemic I do have a serious question for media supporters of the war. Despite all you said about being ready for a long and costly struggle, and all you said about the great price we should be ready to pay for the spreading of freedom, did you — secretly — think it was going to be easy? And did you support the invasion because of that?
If so, will you now admit that the rhetoric about an elemental war between good and evil was overblown, that to win this battle you were not, in fact, prepared to pay any price, and that all you really meant was that here was a mess that could be cleaned up relatively easily, cheaply and fast if we were prepared to crack the whip and cut a corner or two in the presentation of evidence and in international law?
If so, fine. You just miscalculated. Kindly admit it and apologise, and the rest of us, I’m sure, will be prepared to move on. We all make mistakes.
Or did you — do you — honestly believe this is about the future of Western civilisation? Do you honestly believe the insurgents in Iraq are mostly foreigners, and a minority inhabited by Evil, determined to thwart the earnest desires of the overwhelming majority in Iraq? Do you really think this is a cosmic struggle, not just a bitter regional tangle?
In which case, shame on you for faltering, Bush and Blair, and all power to your pens, Gove and Aaronovitch. You have the intellectual and moral courage to keep the politicians to the mark. You are wrong, but you will not betray your principles. Please never write, though, that Iraq was a brave attempt, confounded by circumstances, to do the right thing. If it is the right thing, then you know well that only our own infirmity of purpose can confound us.
And me? I never thought either that this was the right thing, and never assumed it would be easy. This week it looks to me as if things are worse in Iraq there than they ever got in Algeria (when the French decided to quit) or Cyprus (when Britain gave up), or even South Vietnam at the point when the Americans pulled the rug. In all three cases the occupying power was able to leave a functioning state in place, at least for a while. This is now beyond us in Iraq.
When we begin to quit Iraq, a process that should be under way by this time next year, we shall leave one big question: a question which will be (as it has all along been) for the Iranians to decide. Would Tehran prefer a stable, Shia-dominated state, under Iranian influence and in control in at least southern Iraq? Or shall Tehran continue to encourage the devil it knows — total mayhem — among its old enemies?
This will not be a question for us.
