AS I WRITE THIS, THE BBC reports that Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr — the belligerent young leader of an important section of Iraqi Shia — is calling for calm after a series of deadly bomb attacks on marketplaces in his stronghold of Sadr City, in Baghdad. He blames the Americans for not keeping order — an order he has threatened on several occasions. And there in microcosm, you have one story of Iraq since the American-led invasion exactly three years ago: death, insurgency, antipathy to the occupiers and civil strife. A story that has become the dominant narrative of this third anniversary: soldiers die, civilians die, leaders rant and there is no apparent way out.
Since before the first cruise missiles landed on Iraqi positions in March 2003, columnists such as I have been receiving, with each week’s post, books and more books about America, the Middle East and Islam. There have been books of advocacy and opposition, books of essays for and against, there have been memoirs, war stories, reporter stories, collections, personal accounts and polemics. Books have focused on oil, media “lies”, or international law; on the Hutton report or the Butler report and on weapons of mass destruction (WMD). There have been biographies of Saddam Hussein, excoriations of George Bush and the psychologising of Tony Blair. There have even been cartoon books. Everything, in fact, except a proper history.
The nearest to that, and probably the most valuable book about the lead-up to the war, and the period before the Iraqi election of January 2005, is The Assassins’ Gate, written by George Packer, of The New Yorker magazine. And Packer, who spent a lot of time before the invasion talking to policymakers, and much time afterwards dangerously unembedded inside Iraq, begins by asking himself the question, why did the war happen, and answering the question with a laconic: “It still isn’t possible to be sure.” His ambivalence is like clear, cold water in a landscape parched by certainty — too many books concerning Iraq are either essentially justificatory, or else a bizarre psychological attempt to undo the decision to go to war, to turn the world backwards — as Superman does — so that time is reversed, and the war (and, by implication, everything leading up to it) somehow doesn’t happen.
Packer is assiduous at tracing the way in which various influential groups in America became persuaded by the case for regime change in Iraq — a case that the United States and the President’s own father had not prosecuted at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. On the centre Left he notes how the experiences of Bosnia had — by 1995 — created a liberal constituency for “noble cause” military action. In November 2002 Packer himself saw the exiled Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya address a largely anti-war meeting at New York University. “I rest my moral case,” concluded Makiya, “on the following: if there is a sliver of a chance of what I just said (the democratisation of Iraq) happening, a 5 to 10 per cent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it.” On the basis of such an appeal Packer himself joined, as he puts it, “the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently pro-war liberals, who supported a war by about the same margin that the voting public supported Al Gore”. He is too modest. This tiny camp helped to provide the arguments that sustained pro-war Democrats and — in the United Kingdom — Tony Blair.
More important, however, given the Republican victory in 2000, were developments on the Right. Packer notes how George Bush and his most immediate associates — Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney — took office determined to not to repeat the “mistakes” of the Clinton Administration, in attempting to build nations in foreign lands. Another faction, a small number of “neoconservatives”, pressed the case for greater American involvement around the world, but as of September 10, 2001, they were the weaker group. September 11 changed all that. As they cast around for an explanation for the attacks, the Bushites found it in the arguments of the neocons and the histories of Professor Bernard Lewis. Islamism, said Lewis, was the product of catastrophic failure in the Arab world. Until there was movement towards liberal democracy and economic growth in the region, Islamism would grow.
Once this argument was accepted the question was, how should the United States proceed against the new enemy now that it had ousted bin Laden and the Taleban from Afghanistan? Early on it was mooted that the Iraqi regime should be the next target, for a variety of overlapping reasons. As seen by a senior British diplomat, Sir Christopher Meyer, Saddam was beginning a comeback after several years of enforced docility. “On the eve of 9/11,” Sir Christopher writes in his rather notorious book DC Confidential, “the policy of containment was on its last legs, with sanctions crumbling and the oil-for-food programme abused by corruption and incompetence”.
Iraq was seen simultaneously as a state that maintained an addiction to possessing WMD, that might have dealings with terrorist organisations, and which defied attempts at international policing. It was more important than Syria or Libya (as well as more truculent), but eminently more invadable than Iran or North Korea — the other points on the axis of evil. It was also, as a historically secular and more modern state, a better candidate for democratisation.
Did the Americans genuinely believe that Saddam possessed WMD? The insiders who have written about Iraq agree that they did. Interestingly, just last week The New York Times reported that Iraqi generals were told only shortly before the invasion that the chemical and biological weapons upon which they were depending to fight the invaders did not exist. They were, apparently, “stunned”.
But what of Britain? Why, many books have asked, did Tony Blair cast in his lot with George Bush, putting his position as Prime Minister at risk? Anti-war writers have variously ascribed his actions to vanity, proximity to power, enchantment with George Bush and — inevitably — pro-Israeli influence. But it’s worth quoting at length from those neglected parts of the Christopher Meyer book that don’t deal with what prime ministers wear on their lower halves. Blair, writes Meyer, “was a true believer in the menace of Saddam. To make the case against the Iraqi leader it was never necessary to have the horror of 9/11, never necessary to prove a link between the Iraqi regime and al- Qaeda, never necessary even to show that he had WMD which presented a clear and present danger. Saddam’s threat was his ambition and intent, as the ISG (Iraq Survey Group) report had demonstrated.”
The trouble is that some or all of those cases were indeed made. They constituted the “false prospectus” upon which the war was supposed to have been founded; a supposedly fraudulent series of arguments set out to justify a conflict that had, in reality, been decided upon some time earlier. Meyer shoots down this assertion, too, and makes a crucial distinction: “Sitting in Washington,” he writes, “working at the coalface, the road to war looked to me at the time anything but straight or the destination preordained.” Blair and Bush, argues Meyer, were sincere when they said that war could be avoided by Iraqi compliance, but were equally aware that — given Saddam’s history — war was the most likely outcome.
One explanation, currently fashionable, for the attempt by Blair in particular to get the famous Second Resolution at the United Nations is embodied in Philippe Sands’s book Lawless World, which zeroes in on the question of the war’s legality. Sands argues that the Attorney-General was leant on to supply a legal cover for an enterprise that the Government essentially knew was illegal. And Sands concludes that, once he has retired, Mr Blair will have to watch where he goes: “Those most closely associated with the initiation of recent events in Iraq,” he advises, “may want to avoid holidays in those countries that have criminalised the planning, preparation or conduct of aggressive war.” Personally I doubt it.
But the attachment of the word “illegal” to the war has formed a kind of inevitable pair for many anti-war writers, even where — in truth — their opposition has nothing to do with law. Forming one pole of the argument, the anti-war polemics are, in themselves, a fascinating exercise in exposed psychology. There are dozens of books, but it seems most topical to take the small 57-pager Not One More Death, rushed out by Verso to coincide with the third anniversary. In it, that staple of the movement, a collection of “prominent musicians, playwrights, scientists and writers”, lay into the war and its prosecutors.
Here John le Carré asserts (in 2003) that “the imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck”, and the musician Brian Eno explains that “it suited the Israeli Right, so disproportionately represented in the White House, to have a potential enemy neutralised . . .” Haifa Zangana, “novelist and artist”, who left Iraq in 1976, states of the “resistance” that: “Most fighters in Iraq are Iraqis who are outraged to see their country’s resources ransacked while they live in poverty, drink water mixed with sewage and have no say in the political process.” Not, as they would seem to the less tutored eye, Sunni supremacists who blow up the sewage works and murder those who take part in elections.
