Remembering the Second Gulf War, 2003

EDITOR’S NOTE

On the 20th anniversary of the Second Gulf War, we ask three commentators to look back on the tragic error of WMD, the invasion and its aftermath

Won’t get fooled again?

Sam Quilleris wonders how we got it so wrong

The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has prompted a slew of articles and broadcast programmes looking back on the war and the country’s subsequent unravelling, to use the title of Emma Sky’s excellent book on the catastrophic aftermath.

A tone of incredulity has flowed through many of these post-mortems that anybody at the time could have supported such an obviously disastrous policy.

The theme was exemplified recently in a piece by Ben Sixsmith (a child at the time of the invasion) in “How Were We So Wrong?” (The Critic, March 2023), which was evidently a rhetorical question, as the essay offers little by way of answer and is mainly a cry of bafflement.

For those of us who did support the invasion at the time, the tone of not merely disapproval but complete bewilderment from others is familiar.

After all, almost everyone thought it was crazy at the time: it gave rise to the largest protest march in British history. Most of the commentariat, with the exception of a few outliers, notably Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen, were vehemently opposed. MPs may have been whipped to vote for it—many reluctantly—but they were not in tune with the nation.

The WMD threat was always recognisable as obvious nonsense—a pretext to offer a tissue of legality in international law. Even if it were true Saddam Hussein had such weapons, it was likely other grim regimes did too. Only a handful of people whose job it was to be exercised by the legality of the invasion, such as government legal advisers and MPs, cared or persuaded themselves of it.

(Incidentally, the machinations about whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMD was a particular phenomenon of British politics and far less of an issue in the USA, where the need to assure the public of the legality of the war was less of a bar. Instead, in the USA, there were dubious commentators, especially “shock jocks”, who supported the invasion, suggesting to their audiences that Saddam Hussein had borne some responsibilty for the 9/11 attacks—a fabrication, designed to push the American public’s anger button and not something that got onto the radar in the UK.)

So why did we few support the invasion and the notion of “liberal interventionism”?

We were haunted by the non-interventions in the early ’90s, especially in Rwanda and, for several years, in the former Yugoslavia, where, in both cases, dictators massacred their populations while UN peacekeepers stood by and did nothing.

And, of course, the non-interventions in Iraq itself, the genocide of the Kurds at Halabja in 1988 and, after the First Gulf War, Saddam’s massacring of those in the Iraqi population whom the Americans had encouraged to rise up against the dictator and then abandoned. We understood that being a bystander, doing nothing to help the oppressed, left blood on our hands too. As Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of good is not evil but indifference.

If that is what haunted us, what encouraged us to think it could succeed? Firstly, what appeared to be several successful Western military operations to prevent bloodshed at the end of the ’90s, in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor (all championed in the UK by Prime Minister Tony Blair—with whom I usually had no truck). All seemed like appallingly belated interventions, but at least the West was, at last, doing something, though far from enough, to protect people.

The eventual interventions in Yugoslavia in the ’90s and the tardy imposition of a no-fly zone in Iraq to prevent further massacres of the Kurds had also saved lives. Even today I think it would be hard to argue that those were not morally better than the counterfactual of having done nothing. The “responsibility to protect” doctrine became our rallying cry, which we then applied also to the invasion of Afghanistan, which had at least got rid of the gruesome Taliban and appeared then to be assisting in the sowing of the seeds of democracy.

When any effective action at the United Nations was blocked by totalitarian regimes, gunboat diplomacy seemed the only way to save lives around the world. I think it was Nick Cohen who wrote of the need for someone to act as the military arm of Amnesty International.

Secondly, we were inspired by the Iraqi exiles, especially the Kurdish political types, many in London, who supported the invasion. Many were brave fighters for

democracy who had suffered terrible tortures under Saddam and whose comrades had died, and their vision of the democratic future that would unfold if Saddam was removed was reassuring and we felt that the least we could do, when they had risked so much for the values we hold dear, was to offer them solidarity.

The Kurds also seemed, under the protection of the no-fly zone, to have created an autonomous embryonic democracy in the North. It looked like a model of how all of Iraq might be, once the heel of the dictator had been removed from the necks of the population.

I particularly remember reading, before the war, a widely circulated speech by the Kurdish leader Barham Salih pleading for solidarity, saying that even were it true that the West merely wanted to improve its access to oil, as the cynics on the Western Left pretended, why shouldn’t the invaders’ thirst for oil, which had always been their curse, for once be their blessing?

Then we looked, on the other side, at our opponents, most tub-thumpingly led in the UK by reprehensible enthusiasts for dictators like George Galloway, who had fawned over Saddam, and other Far Left admirers of totalitarianism.

Meanwhile, looking across the Atlantic, the argument seemed to be between, on the one hand, the bloodstained Kissinger realpolitik conservatives who had notoriously propped up murderous dictatorships throughout South America and the rest of the world, and, on the other hand, a new breed of neoconservatives who were talking about ethical foreign policy and supporting democracy. The moral difference between the two camps seemed, at the time, starkly in favour of the latter.

More widely though, the argument one heard from most opponents of the war— “what gives us the right to interfere in other countries?”—sounded to us like precious, holier-than-thou, isolationism, intended to make the speaker feel good while doing nothing to help the oppressed of the world.

Moreover, its pretension to moral purity encompassed no recognition that Britain and the West might share some responsibility for the mess that the world was in, and therefore have some restorative duty to get involved. There also seemed a whiff of rascism: the underlying implication that democracy was natural and necessary for us but not for these faraway cultures of other races.

So what do I think now? Obviously it was a disaster; twenty years on one can no longer shy away from that, cling on to some illusion that enough will come out right in the end to in some way counterbalance the death and suffering. Would I support such an invasion today? No, having seen the horror it can unleash, of course not. Gung-ho idealism mixed with ignorance can be more deadly than anything else, I now see.

But was it inevitably a disaster? Could it have turned out otherwise? It was often said, as we tried to understand the wreckage, that we won the war and lost the peace—through unbelievable post-invasion mismanagement and lack of anticipation. The Iraqi politician Ali Allawi even took the phrase as the title of his book dissecting the aftermath.

Indeed it was not only exiles and starryeyed Western fools who thought, in the immediate aftermath, a successful, democratic could be built. Hope existed and died slowly even among many Iraqis. The Iraqi “blogosphere” that sprung up after the invasion was a record of that. There were a couple of English language bloggers, including the pseudonymous Riverbend and Salam Pax, who were cynical of the invasion from the outset (and whose books comprising extracts of their blogs were consequently published prominently in the West) but most were at first middle-class professionals discussing optimistically the future of Iraq for the first months and years. Eventually a large proportion of them fled the country and some were killed.

Furthermore, the way in which the disaster unfolded bore little resemblance to the loudest warnings emanating from opponents within the Western Left, who predicted that Saddam’s loyal people and the Arab world would rise up in his defence, that Baghdad would be a Stalingrad for the Americans, and that waves of terrorism would immediately be unleashed in Western cities. Few Leftist critics focused on insurgency prompted by administrative mismanagement after the successful taking of the country.

Was Gulf War Two correct in principle, then, but wrong in execution? It is hard to maintain that today. All the most thoughtful and knowledgeable commentators, such as Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, in his new book A Stranger In Your City, say that the disaster was inevitable and that there was no plausible alternative scenario where it all worked and I guess they are right.

And yet and yet … thoughts niggle. Would it have been wrong at the time to support the failed European revolutions for democracy of 1848? Or the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War? These are not analogous, in that neither was a foreign power trying to “export” democracy, but both illustrate the issue of hindsight: both, in failing, led to terrible, prolonged bloodshed, lives lost, families destroyed, in the end for nothing. Now those failures too seem inevitable but I know which side I would want to have been on.

By the same token, what if—perish the thought—Ukraine loses? And what if China supports Russia militarily, as a crucial power play against the liberal world? Will it have been wrong, in retrospect, for the West to have supported Ukraine and thereby multiplied the suffering?

And, if we accept that military interventions can sometimes save lives, as I think those in the late ’90s did, then was the failure principally a matter of scale? In a scenario perversely echoed by Putin’s genocidal invasions of former Soviet territories, was it that the others were smaller and winnable whereas in Iraq we bit off more than we could chew?

Hindsight can be very deceptive; unlike a fairground mirror which distorts a sane reality into a grotesque vision, it resolves a severely grotesque reality into an illusion of clarity. So when critics ask in disbelief how could we get it so wrong, the moral and political calculus was not perhaps as clear as it now seems. Nor, as it seems, to most people at the time.

Remembering Ahmad Shawkat

Michael Goldfarb

Somewhere along the road from Lalish back to Erbil in northern Iraq/Kurdistan, my driver, Sami Abdulqadir, and my friend and translator, Ahmad Shawkat, began an extended conversation in Kurdish. This was unusual. Both were polite and understood that it was rude to speak in a language I could not understand.

We had gone to Lalish because there had been some half-hearted bombing by Saddam Hussein’s crumbling forces in the area an hour north of Erbil, not far from Iraqi Kurdistan’s border with Turkey and the great dam across the Tigris that rumours said Saddam had ordered to be blown up to flood Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city.

There wasn’t much bomb damage to see, so Ahmad insisted we go to the Yazidi temple there. The temple is at least 4,000 years old. Ahmad had spent much of our time together teaching me about the cultural richness of northern Iraq, where humanity first organised itself into what we call civilisation: first major cities, first empire and first religions, like Yazidism, an early montheistic faith, still practised today.

The temple complex was full of Yazidi refugees from the plains of Nineveh below the town. We were welcomed and given a tour of the place. The temple was dark and smelled of tallow and unshod feet.

It was a mind-bending few hours, which may explain why I did not interrupt Sami and Ahmad as they carried on their conversation. Finally, I asked, What’s Sami talking about?

He is worried about what will happen to him if America loses, Ahmad said. I shouldn’t have laughed but I think I did.

Is he kidding? No, he worries about what will happen to him and his family if Saddam is still in charge.

This was a not unreasonable fear given what happened in Kurdistan at the the end of the first Gulf War when the first President Bush left Saddam in charge and Saddam launched a campaign against the Kurds, driving them into the mountains.

Tell him not to worry.

Ahmad said something in Kurdish. I reached over to the front seat and put my hand on Sami’s shoulder. I’ll make sure you and your family are safe. It was a promise I knew I could make, because it was a promise I would never have to keep.

By the time we got back to Erbil, the streets were jammed in celebration. Saddam’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square had been pulled down. The Americans had taken Baghdad.

A few days later the regime collapsed in Mosul, Ahmad’s home town, and we raced there and witnessed the violent anarchy that overtook the city. I recorded a gun battle outside the national bank. Ahmad nearly got lynched, arguing with people to stop looting.

The sense that the US could not be entirely trusted was a periodic topic in Sami’s Mitsubishi SUV. I had assured my friends that failure was not an option. Bush the son was determined to outdo his father. In a patriarchal society, this Oedipal theme was something they understood.

But I was wrong. Six months later Ahmad was murdered in Mosul. Twelve years later, Da’esh/ISIS commenced a campaign of genocide against the Yazidis. Once again the temple complex in Lalish filled with refugees.

Tragedy and the horror of anarchy

David Wineberg

Right up front, Kaplan admits shame for supporting the American invasion of Iraq. It has bothered him for two decades, and has resulted in this unusual book: a catharsis, a way for others to understand and avoid making his big mistake.

It focuses on tragedy, not the death of thousands, but the self-discovery of powerlessness, of fear in place of bold moves, of human failings clouding global accomplishments.

He finds this in all kinds of Shakespearean and Greek play characters. King Lear resists self-awareness. The Macbeths can’t figure out what happened. Hamlet is entirely an analysis of the impossible situation.

Kaplan has become conscious that societies need form and structure to flourish. To remove a government and replace it with nothing is his nightmare. Everything, including society itself, stops. Anarchy is entropy in action.

Leaders are there to prevent it: “It is the burden of leadership that provides tragedy, with many of its most searing and pivotal moments,” he says. This is the challenge leaders rise to, even if it ruins them, as so many did in Greek and Shakespearean plays.

One of the problems, according to Kaplan, is that current generations have no experience of war or tyranny or anarchy on their own territory. So they have no fear of it, and don’t care to be prepared to deal with it. In Kaplan’s terms they have not been trained to think tragically. This is also his personal issue, since he figured anything would be better than Saddam Hussein. Clearly not so.

Today’s pop culture is all about videogame superheroes, not the soul-searching decisions of men facing existential crises. So, few people are prepared to think in those terms. Nor do they see any reason to.

Kaplan says “There can be no worse burden on a leader’s peace of mind” than knowing he screwed up, costing the lives of millions, including many of his own countrymen—for nothing. History does not support this. Usually they don’t care. They just move on, and have no problem doing it again. In current culture, the high-minded concepts and tales of Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks are for entertainment purposes only. From where I sit anyway.