241 Pizza

If Iraqis are reduced to those relatively few Sunnis who blow up marketplaces (and who, then, is it that they are blowing up?), then Bush is as bad as Saddam, who though, according to Richard Dawkins, was “a catastrophe for Iraq . . . never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood”. By contrast, “George W. Bush is a disaster for the world”.

And Harold Pinter invents a statistic. “At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraqi insurgency began.” This is probably some mangling of a controversial estimate of Iraqi civilian fatalities published in The Lancet in 2004 and based, it was claimed, on standard epidemiological methods.

All this is told with a contra mundum self-pity (“Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally — a small item on page six” — Oh, and an award-winning film and five books, and endless profiles . . .) and validated by the mythologised two million people who attended the great march in London in February 2003. That figure was made up by the organisers.

But annoying, diversionary and damaging as such books may be, they don’t have to explain what has actually happened in Iraq. For the simple fact is that things have been far, far, far worse than most pro-war people ever thought possible, and it is the hawks — people such as me, in fact — who need to account for what has gone wrong. There have been a number of books, by people such as William Shawcross, Christopher Hitchens and Oliver Kamm, that have made the case for the war. They have (as have I) noted the achievements of post-invasion Iraq: the return of land to the Marsh Arabs, the availability of goods, the number of newspapers, the remarkable support for democracy as evidenced by Iraqis turning out to vote. But we have been slower to tell the world what has gone wrong.

Meyer thinks the invasion was hurried, Packer argues that it took place with too few troops. Others believe that the wrong eventualities were planned for. Paul Bremer’s memoir of a year spent running Iraq indicates a social and regional complexity and a societal demoralisation and violence for which the invaders were utterly unprepared. No senior figure resigned after the scandal at Abu Ghraib.

We await the books by Iraqis themselves analysing what went right and what went disastrously wrong. Far too much of the time Iraqis are a kind of imagined people, donated attitudes and characteristics by Westerners who argue over them. While we wait for them, however, I find it hard to better the conclusion reached by George Packer. “Swaddled in abstract ideas,” he says of the invaders, “convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.”

Some of us, on bad days, wonder if the authors include us.

Read David Aaronovitch's weblog

The books

THE ASSASSINS’ GATE
by George Packer
(Faber), £14.99

DC CONFIDENTIAL
by Christopher Meyer
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson), £20

LAWLESS WORLD
by Philippe Sands
(Penguin), £8.99

NOT ONE MORE DEATH
by John le Carré and others
(Verso), £5

MY YEAR IN IRAQ
by Paul Bremer
(Simon & Schuster), £18.99

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