The Iraq War (15 page)

The succession of President Clinton deprived the neo-conservatives of direct influence on government. Clinton, though prepared to intervene abroad, as he eventually did in the Balkans, preferred to do so in concert with other states and through international organizations, and to proceed with caution. He did not share the neo-conservatives’ beliefs in the necessity of pre-emption nor in the desirability of régime change in countries overtly hostile to the United States and able to harm its interests or citizens. Although out of government, the neo-conservatives remained able to propagate their views, through such publications as the
Weekly Standard
and
Commentary
, a major organ of Jewish thought. Many of the neo-conservatives were Jewish; almost all were Zionist and pro-Israeli. That was to prove unfortunate for it entangled their policies for the Middle East, which were generally rational and enlightened if not always realistic, with their ambitions for the future of the Jewish state, which were contentious and nationalistic. The neo-conservatives believed, in a highly traditional American cast of mind, that the solution to the world’s problems lay in transforming absolutist, monarchical and autocratic régimes into free-enterprise democracies. They believed democracy to be transportable and to have a transforming effect; through its implementation, in societies previously tribal or theocratic or otherwise afflicted by divisive and unrepresentative systems, they
believed populations could be led to become politically enlightened and economically prosperous. They also believed in a ‘domino’ effect: that the transformation of one society in a region would lead to the same effect in others. They were particularly insistent that ‘régime change’ in Iraq, the focus of their antipathies, would foster change for the better in its neighbours, including Syria and Iran. Paradoxically, however, several of the neo-conservatives supported extremist politicians in Israel, who rejected compromise with the Palestinians; they wanted a larger and stronger Israeli state, empowered to deal with the Palestinians only on the basis of recognition of its right to exist and to command defensible frontiers. The confusion of policy, for confusion it was and remains – democracy for Middle Eastern Muslims but a particular version of state rights for Israel – weakened and continues to weaken the neo-conservatives’ message. To European liberals and leftists in particular, the neo-conservatives appear hypocritical. They interpret the contradictions of neo-conservative policy as an attempt to establish native versions of American democracy in the unreformed Arab states while supporting a selfishly Zionist regime in Israel. Needless to say, that view is widely shared in the Arab world and bedevils American efforts to win friends in the region.

The neo-conservatives farther alienated liberal and leftist opinion in Europe by their devotion to the idea of American ‘particularism’ – an idea, almost as old as the United States itself, that the country stands for certain superior principles of public and inter-state behaviour – justifying in their view, again a long-established American position, its right to act unilaterally in foreign affairs. From the earliest days of the republic American ideologues have sought to define America as not only detached from but better than the Old World of religious prejudice and political egotism. To the idea of American particularism – Ronald Reagan’s vision of ‘the city on the hill’ – the neo-conservatives conjoined that of ‘the American moment’. With the collapse of the Communist system, the neo-conservatives argued, the United States inherited an opportunity, unlikely to be long-lived or to
recur, to change by forthright action the world for the better. There had been such a moment once before, in 1918, when the idealistic President Woodrow Wilson had imposed on an exhausted world his plan for a League of Nations that would rid mankind of war. The chance to capitalize on his vision had been missed when his physical collapse allowed less enlightened politicians, some American, to dilute his plans.

With the return of an American moment, the neo-conservatives glimpsed a new opportunity and determined to profit by it. It would not be taken through the medium of the United Nations. An improvement on the Wilsonian conception though it was, with its powers to authorize the use of military force against transgressors of international order, the UN still lacked the capacity for peremptory action. Too many interests had to be placated; too many nationalities were allowed a voice. The neo-conservatives wanted the power to strike, without consultation and without warning. They believed in particular that enemies like Saddam could be disposed of only by unilateral action, with the assistance of such allies as would not quibble and could match American standards of military efficiency. That meant in effect Britain and any British associates, like Australia, that deployed equivalent forces.

Capturing a fleeting American moment required the return to power of a conservative American President. George W. Bush, elected in 2001, was such a figure. At his inauguration he did not seem a neo-conservative choice, though he appointed to office several highly conservative politicians, including Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney, his Vice-President, was also a neo-conservative favourite. The horror of 9/11 set the new President, however, on a neo-conservative path. He was quickly persuaded that the ‘war on terror’ which he immediately proclaimed was best prosecuted at the outset by attacking al-Qaeda, the perpetrator of 9/11, in its terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Having acquired American bases for the campaign in the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, he launched the counter-terrorist attack. By a combination of the commitment
of special forces (American, British and Australian), the enlistment of the anti-Taleban forces of the Northern Alliance and the deployment of heavy American airpower, the al-Qaeda units in Afghanistan and their Taleban supporters were quickly overcome. At the culmination of the campaign it was believed that Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind, had been cornered and killed. Later evidence, supplied by video and broadcast tape, dashed such hopes. Nevertheless, he thereafter became a fugitive figure, having scarcely substantial existence, while the material success of the campaign in Afghanistan was undoubted. The country was given a new, plausibly representative administration and the Islamicist régime of the Taleban was dissolved.

With the defeat of the Taleban, which destroyed al-Qaeda’s principal platform of support, the Bush Presidency could turn to engage the other main targets of the war on terrorism. Al-Qaeda was reported by American intelligence to have centres of support in as many as fifty countries but the main danger was identified as emanating from Iraq. Saddam, Iraq’s President, was indubitably a threat to peace in the Middle East and beyond. During his thirty years in power he had attempted to acquire the capacity to build nuclear weapons – a threat checked only by the Israelis’ destruction of the French-supplied Osirak reactor in 1981 – and used chemical weapons both in his war against Iran in 1980–88 and against his own Kurdish citizens. Saddam had also authorized an assassination attempt against the new American President’s father, George Bush Senior, who had organized the coalition war against him in 1990–91. Saddam was a wicked man, an aggressor, an oppressor of the Iraqi people and a menace to order in his own régime and the wider world. Whether he was a sponsor of al-Qaeda was more problematic. He had undoubtedly given succour to Abu Nidal, an earlier father of anti-Western terror, and he was generally well-disposed to anti-Western terrorists. His association with al-Qaeda escaped proof. Osama bin Laden was a
Salafist
, a believer in a Muslim world without political institutions. Saddam was an Arab secularist, a type particularly repugnant to Islamic fundamentalists. Had Osama bin Laden attempted
to propagate his beliefs in Saddam’s Iraq, he would undoubtedly have met the fate of all Saddam’s enemies.

Unfortunately for Saddam, official America after 9/11 was uninterested in distinctions between one sort of Arab extremist and another. Osama was violently anti-American. So was Saddam. The decision was taken to eliminate his régime. The steps to that decision were given in two public warnings, President Bush’s State of the Union address to Congress in January 2002 and his speech to the graduating class at the US Military Academy in June. In both he denounced Saddam’s régime – to Congress as part of an ‘axis of evil’ – and he threatened pre-emptive action. The decisive moment came, however, on 11 January 2003 when Secretary Rumsfeld ordered the deployment of 60,000 troops, together with military aircraft and warships, to the Gulf; on 20 January Geoffrey Hoon, the British Secretary of State for Defence, commanded the despatch of 26,000 British troops and 100 aircraft; with those already in the area, a quarter of the British army and a third of the Royal Air Force would be present in the zone of operations. Rumsfeld’s and Hoon’s announcements clarified a puzzling obscurity. Strategic analysts had pondered for months on the territorial difficulties of mounting an operation against Iraq, one of the most inaccessible countries in the northern hemisphere. Its tiny coastline at the head of the Gulf offered scarcely any space for a bridgehead. Saudi Arabia was proving uncooperative. Iran was almost as hostile to the West as Iraq itself. Turkey had suddenly turned contrary. Syria would not breach the Arab front. Jordan seemed too weak to violate Muslim opinion. There seemed no way in. At the last moment, though the Americans had known so for some time, Kuwait was revealed to be willing to offer basing and transit rights. It was a courageous decision, since it isolated the country in the Arab world and carried the risk of terrible retaliation if the coalition operation did not work.

Solving the difficulty of the military preliminaries did not, however, dissolve the political obstacles. The United States could count on the support of Britain and of Australia, which supplied
ships, aircraft and special forces (which may have included a New Zealand element). Otherwise it was bereft of allies. Worse; early in the crisis that developed in 2002 and persisted into 2003, right up to the unleashing of hostilities, its traditional European supporters began to object to and even oppose the taking of military action against Saddam. Spain, an unlikely militant, supported President Bush, so enthusiastically that he chose to stage a summit meeting in the Portuguese Azores on 16 March, the very eve of the war. France, however, made strong and increasingly loud protests; so did Germany. Objections by France were to be expected, for many reasons. Historically pro-Arab and pro-Muslim since the seventeenth century, when it had been the Ottoman Emperor’s only friend among the Christian powers, and led by the braggart President Chirac, who both gloried in trumpeting his differences with Washington and was deeply implicated in commercial dealings with Saddam’s government (dating back to the sale of the Osirak reactor to Iraq at the end of the 1970s), France was an odd man out in the Western world. Germany, by contrast, had always been an American insider. In the days when twenty Soviet divisions occupied the old East Germany, it had been America’s most devoted friend on the continent. Liberated, however, from the Soviet threat, thanks to the triumph of President Reagan’s policy of bankrupting the Soviet Union by competition in military expenditure, German public and much political opinion yielded to the temptation of seeking the softer way. The defeat of 1945 had altered the German psyche, transforming the most militarist nation in Europe into one genuinely devoted to the principles of peace and the resolution of international disputes by conciliation. The threat of Soviet aggression had forced the German people to embrace NATO and do the military duty membership of the alliance required. The elimination of the Soviet threat allowed German anti-militarism to surface and to predominate. The new German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, a Social Democrat, though lacking Chirac’s pro-Arab credentials, shared his anti-Americanism and by 2003 was on equally as bad, if not worse terms with Washington. The Americans were not
shocked by Chirac’s chauvinism since they had been taught French egoism by the master of the medium, Charles de Gaulle. German ingratitude both surprised the Americans and genuinely hurt; it exemplified de Rochefoucauld’s judgement that past favours are never forgiven.

Yet the attitude of France and Germany, shared by some of the smaller Western European countries, was not fully to be explained by personal or contingent factors. Something much larger was at work. Superficially it is easy to say that France and Germany had, during the second half of the twentieth century, become ‘European’. The rise of the European Union and the consolidation of its authority had undoubtedly encouraged first France and then Germany to look forward to a rebalancing of international power in the Atlantic world, in a fashion that would equalize the influence of its two halves, American and European. Economically that seemed attainable, for the combined population of the European Union countries exceeded that of the United States and, on the admission of new members, promised to be much larger. It was not impossible either that, with effort and by accepting economic sacrifice, an expanded Europe might eventually match the military capability of the United States. The attainment of economic and military equality, perhaps eventual superiority, depended, however, upon political evolution. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, France and Germany were pressing for the adoption by the states of the Union of a comprehensive constitution, regulating not only economic activity but also defining political institutions and their powers, including the Commission, its executive authority, the council of ministers, the parliament and the European court; the constitution also made provision for a Union president, foreign minister and military authority.

Yet the Europe envisaged by the framers of its constitution – a constitution not in the event adopted, because of the refusal of some of the constituent states to accept it – would not have imitated the United States of America of the Founding Fathers. It would initially have been less but eventually more; initially less
because it left to the constituent governments more power than the American constitution left to the states, eventually more because, by accretion, the powers exercised by the Union over its constituent members would have greatly exceeded those of the American federal government. The fathers of the European ‘idea’, the Frenchman Jean Monnet and the Englishman Arthur Salter, had conceived their vision of Europe’s future as officials of the League of Nations, after the First World War. They were inspired by the hope of creating a pan-European system that would render impossible war between its member states. The only way to assure that outcome, they persuaded themselves, was to create a central authority so strong that subordinate governments would lack the means to take independent decisions. Their ‘Europe’ was therefore to be not ‘intergovernmental’ in character but ‘supranational’.