There is a piece in today's Times by Anatole Kaletsky soberly and reasonably titled "Why we must break with the American crazies". The tone of febrile caterwauling continues throughout the piece, making it quite difficult to read- the visual equivalent of listening to an anecdote being screamed directly into your ear. It touts itself as a vital message for Gordon Brown. I don't know what Mr Browns views on our alliance with America are, nor indeed of those on the Iraq situation, but I'm pretty sure that this stop-start, highly emotional, fact-lite tirade won't be figuring large in his decision-making process.
Especially as he starts out with by insulting Tony Blair, and also by implication Brown himself. Tony Blairs foreign policy has been 'backward-looking and self-deluding'. We are meant to just take this as self-evident, I guess, as there is no evidence proffered, nor terms defined. In what sense, might we ask, is Tony Blairs foreign policy 'backward-looking'? What delusions does Tony Blair have about the world which determine his foreign policy? Anatole?
Everywhere Anatole looks, he sees catastrophes. Apparently, the world is one mass of them. "...the parochial British obsession with WMD and 'sexed-up dossiers' bears no relationship to the catastrophes now unfolding in the Middle East and beyond- not only in Iraq, but also in Gaza, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, and soon maybe Syria, Iraq and Pakistan." Chicken Little talk about multitudes of catastrophes doesn't take us to any useful point. Iraq is a catastrophe in some ways and in some parts, but is it a catastrophe like Lebanon? Is Lebanon a catastrophe at all, or is it just a chronically disjointed, balkanised complex of problems perennially fighting with itself often violently? Every middle eastern country has problems, some of them critical and many others not so much. But are they comparable? Are they the same kind of 'catastrophe'? No. And that means the solutions will not be the same. Some might need the help/intervention of the US/UK, some won't. Some are gradually working towards a more sustainable and positive situation (Jordan, Libya, Iraq) and some are moving towards unsustainable and negative situations (Saudi, Egypt, Iran).
The shrivelled, impotent snivelling that passes for 'opposition' to the ongoing intervention in Iraq symbolically parallels the stunted and trivial role that Britain now plays on the world stage. At the end of World War 1, Britain had an army of over a million men in Syria/Lebanon. Although our 7,500 men in Iraq are excellent troops, there are just 7,500 of them. In part, our Iraq intervention critics are parochial because we have shrivelled as a nation.
As far as I can tell, Britain and America went into Iraq clear out a den of thieves and murderers, to protect British and American interests in Iraqi oil, and to give the Iraqi people the opportunity to have a free and prosperous society without the evils of dictatorship and murderous repression. Those all seem like perfectly valid reasons for an intervention from the point of view of a British or American person. Nowhere does Anatole mention any of these, and yet any opinion piece intended to persuade a politician to change a policy must surely consider 'why?' questions. Why did we embark on this intervention? Why is it necessary to continue with high force levels in Iraq? Why is it that the execution of any war will generate tactical and logistical errors? A sober consideration of those three questions, were the answers damning in relation to the Iraq intervention, might persuade Gordon Brown that the case for removing our forces from Iraq should be considered.
But this is no sober consideration: "There is now strong evidence that President Bush didn't even know the difference between Shia and Sunni moslems when he decided to attack Iraq." Tittle-tattle about How Stupid George W Is will not swing Gordon Brown's views on geopolitical issues we can safely assume. There is also a constant veering between two types of criticism about Iraq- what a complete botch-up the conduct of operations has been, and the 'crazy' nature of the current US Administration. Its tempting to wonder whether a superbly efficient US counter-insurgency would be getting praise from the people who currently castigate its cack-handedness? "OK, George W may be mad as an Ahmadinejad, but he sure does run one slick counter-insurgency operation"...
People like Kaletsky are moving on to Iran. They all want to able to say five years from now "I was the first to bewail the stupidity and insanity of an intervention in Iran".
I think there may well be some kind of regional war in the Middle East. Its a volatile mix, and with the intrusion of a very unwelcome democracy in the sea of dictatorships, oligarchies and Royal Kleptocracies. But what will the battle lines be? How much does Shia vs Sunni actually matter when the most vibrant and juiced-up beast in the Islamic jungle is the Wahhabis? As I pointed out not long ago, in the 1980's, Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shia Arab Iraqis all fought against Shia Persians. If it weren't for Wahhabi Al-Qaeda operatives blowing up Shia shrines, how much Shia-Sunni violence would there have been by now? Does Wahhabi Saudi Arabia see itself as genuinely threatened by Iran? Does it care about the fate of the Arabs of Khuzestan any more than it does the Arabs of Gaza? How is it possible that Sunni Syria is an ally of Shia Iran? Doesn't that imply that politics and power-dealing are more important to both than religious scruple? My point is, nobody on the planet could guess who would line up with whom in a regional middle eastern war, including the protagonists.
Would a regional war in the middle east be America's fault? Yes, in at least one way. In the very short period of genuine nation-states in the middle east, there has never been an economically strong, equitably-governed, secular success story. Turkey? Sort of, but with strong undercurrents of fascism and the heavy hand of the military constantly in the background. Everywhere else, one, some or all of those conditions are not present. And I think its fair to say that if oil money ceases most of the economic success stories will evaporate. So the explosive entrance of an Iraq which has all three of those things would be a sore vexation for all the basket-cases around it. Jealousy is right at the top of motivations in the middle east. Arabs can't stand to see other Arabs succeeding (see Gamal Abdul Nasser, Saddam Hussein etc). I predict that some pretext would be found to try to 'prove' that Iraq was an aberration, a freak, and a threat.
But from Iraqs point of view, and from our point of view, it would be fantastic. Because it would prove that Arabs can run a perfectly good, viable, fully-functional state and the citizens of every Arab country would see that to be the case. And the reverberations of that fact would be huge, I suspect.
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