Smash hit

Some years ago, a fawning biography of Chomsky described him as “one who will be for future generations what Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Mozart or Picasso have been for ours”. Tell that to the US Marines as they patrol the streets of Al-Fallujah.

William Shawcross sets out in his short book to develop some of the themes he pursued three years ago in Deliver Us from Evil — “How can the international community best deal with tyrants, rogue state, and terrorists who threaten not only their own people but also others — and who defy the world’s attempts to restrain them?” He does so through the prism of recent events in Iraq. “Iraq is at the centre of the mission to face down fundamental malevolence and reactionary despotism.”

In August victims of that fundamental malevolence included Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative in Iraq. Shawcross had known him for many years, and one senses that outrage at the murder of his friend has sharpened the tone of his writing.

Allies covers some of the same ground as Chomsky’s book, though from a very different standpoint. Shawcross points out, for instance, that the rationale advanced by President Bush and Mr Blair for the disarmament of Iraq bears a remarkable similarity to the wording of the Atlantic Charter signed by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1942.

The Bush Administration’s frank recognition of the reality of US military and economic pre-eminence, and its commitment to pre-emption, are therefore by no means as radical a departure as some of America’s critics have argued. (Perhaps it has slipped Noam Chomsky’s mind that in 1951, his hero Bertrand Russell proposed that the Soviet Union be attacked to pre-empt its acquisition of nuclear weapons.)

Shawcross gives a useful account of the development of neo-conservative thought, providing a useful corrective to some of the more absurd travesties that have hindered helpful debate. (He cites the lead-in to a BBC documentary — “Tonight: Will America’s superhawks drag us into more wars against their enemies?”)

He points out that its intellectual origins were on the left in the late 1960s, and that although neo-conservatives are often described as radical, some of their arguments about human rights are close to mainstream liberal internationalist thought. And he reminds his readers that even Kofi Annan has conceded that sovereignty must be qualified and can no longer be accepted as providing carte blanche for mass murder.

Shawcross is far from uncritical of the record of the coalition in Iraq. He regrets the failure to anticipate the extent and relative sophistication of the guerrilla attacks that have followed the military victory and thinks more should have been done to seal the borders with Iran and Syria to lessen the influx of Islamic terrorists.

He deplores the turf wars in Washington that have slowed the pace of reconstruction and he also accepts that the Americans were too slow in recognising the need for civilian police. Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner belatedly charged with creating an entirely new force with training in human rights as well as discipline, found it a challenging assignment: “We had to teach cops that when you pull a man suspected of a crime into the station, you can’t just hang him upside down and beat him with an iron bar.”

Shawcross reserves his severest strictures for the cynical wrecking tactics employed throughout 2003 by France. Commercial considerations, his long friendship with Saddam, a streak of anti-Americanism, concern over the reaction of France’s five million Muslims — all played a part in President Chirac’s calculations. As did thoughts of his own political survival.

He quotes a telling rejoinder to French complaints that the temporary loss of Iraqi sovereignty was an intolerable affront. It came from Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-born director of the programme in Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Dream Palace of the Arabs: “A political culture that averts its gaze from mass graves and works itself into self-righteous hysteria over a foreign presence in an Arab country is a culture that has turned its back on political reason.”

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