Blair is jumping the gun in backing Bush's war...

-
Aa
+
a
a
a

Blair is jumping the gun in backing Bush's war on logic

August 1, 2002The Guardian

If President George W Bush goes to war against Iraq, the ensuing conflict will be without a close modern precedent. Each of the main western wars of the last 20 years, however controversial, was perceivable as a response to manifest aggression. The Falklands war in 1982 was one such case, the 1991 Gulf war another. The military actions in Bosnia and Kosovo were conducted for the defence of ethnic groups facing aggression at the heart of Europe. Each had a measure of international approval.

A war to unseat Saddam Hussein would proceed on a different basis, encompassed in the seductive word "pre-emptive". The attack would be unleashed to stop Saddam doing something he has not yet started to do with weaponry whose configuration and global, or even regional, potency is hard to determine but might be serious. The Pentagon civilians pressing the case envisage a gratuitous attack - one not preceded by an act of aggression - by one sovereign country on another to get rid of a leader who happens to worry and enrage them.

Europeans who opposed all those earlier conflicts will certainly oppose this one. The usual suspects are already mobilising for peace. But now we have something new. Many Europeans who supported the Balkan wars and the Gulf war, and even the Falklands absurdity, are getting ready to oppose a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. They suspect its political provenance. They reject its moral justification. They look in vain for the interna tional support it needs. They see nothing predictably good in its practical outcome. And if they are British, they fear the prospect of being sucked into all these absences of reason, these diplomatic and moral black holes, at the behest of a different country, with different political impulses, 3,000 miles away.

Nobody pretends that Saddam Hussein is other than a murderous tyrant. He has committed terrible crimes against his own people. He's a threat to his neighbours and a source of instability, one of many, in the region. There are signs he has restored some of the chemical and biological weapon-making capacity that was destroyed under the lengthy aegis of UN inspectors. It may well be the case that he is trying to acquire the capacity to build nuclear weapons.

But nobody is certain about the size of any of this. These ambitions, and some of these weapons, can be assumed to be there, but the advantage of the pre-emption doctrine is that its believers do not need to be specific. In Washington there's disagreement between the Pentagon civilians and both military and intelligence officials over how many, if any, ready-to-go missiles by which chemical and biological bombs could be delivered actually exist. No evidence has been published that begins to make the case for attack, as against the containment policy that has worked pretty well for 11 years. We're simply supposed to accept that it's there. Washington and London say airily that they have it. One begins to sense, in their reluctance to accompany the build-up to war with a display of evidence, the absence, in truth, of any justification enough to satisfy open-minded sceptics.

Until this is rectified, scepticism can only deepen. The moral case for pre-emptive attack needs to address issues of proportionality and collateral civilian damage. The protagonists have not even broached them. The legal case needs to take the UN seriously. So far, UN backing for an attack has been the object of casuistic evasion in both capitals. Conceivably this could be a negotiating tactic, winding Saddam up to concede. But nobody who has talked to any of the principals who are about to be involved in this decision can imagine them willing to risk losing in the security council as their juggernaut assembles at the gates of Baghdad.

The practical case hasn't been made either. What happens afterwards? Field Marshal Lord Bramall asked the question the other day. There are as many theories about this as there are operational plans for different modes of attack. A puppet regime of westernised Iraqis? A different sort of military dictator? A government that includes the Kurds, the greatest victims of Saddam's brutality: or, more likely, one that's guaranteed to exclude them in order to keep Turkey happy, and thus open Turkey as a base for the attack? These and many other scenarios are on the table. Washington is awash with them. There's a leak a day in the New York Times. With each one that appears we become aware not just of indecision, but of the colossal risks this speculative operation runs, and the divided assessments made by serious military men.

One faction, however, is indifferent to the arguments. The civilians driving the Pentagon have a less analytical agenda. They seem ready to sweep through all objections. A group of hard, obsessive officials, all much cleverer than the president, exploit the instincts he shares, which include the instinct to secure vengeance in a family feud after what Saddam did to his father. Their cocksure certainty that they have a mightier military force than Saddam, which of course is true, extends into a blithe assumption that the solution to Palestine lies through a cleansed and puppetised Baghdad. These are people who have shown many times how little they respect international law, still less the spirit of international collaboration. Having come to dominate the world, they tend to despise it. Faced with allies they can ignore, they duly prepare to do so.

Tony Blair doesn't like to hear any of this, and is disposed to deny it. He says that Bush is in charge in Washington, and Bush is a sensible as well as honourable man. Complaining that everyone who asks a question is getting ahead of the action and should pipe down, he asserts privately that he will not be pushed around by the president but act, as always, in the national interest.

But his interpretation of this is disturbing. We read, from Bush's aides, that Blair has already promised the president to commit British troops to action in Iraq. In private he talks more of the morality than the risks of doing this. Indeed, he sees so many dangerous immoralists around that, in an ideal world, there would be interventions against the lot of them. Very few of his closest diplomatic advisers support a war against Iraq or the manoeuvres now leading up to it, though the Ministry of Defence, with its frantic Washingtonitis, may be slightly different. Yet Blair is in danger of seeming helpless before the ferocious logic of Donald Rumsfeld.

I think he forgets the uniqueness of what is being prepared: its gratuitous aggression, its idle optimism, its moral frailty, its indifference to regional opinion, the extraordinary readiness of those proposing it to court more anti-American terrorism as a result. Is Britain really destined to tag along uncomplaining, behind an extended act of war that few people outside America and Israel consider necessary, prudent or justified? Very many British, I surmise, more than Mr Blair would ever expect, will say No.

[email protected]