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The war that will not end
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/arc...l_not_end.html
By Simon Jeffery / World news 05:00pm
It is, without doubt, the worst prediction I ever made. Shortly before the Iraq war I was – as was the fashion back then – arguing with friends about geopolitics when I said I did not believe history would judge the impending conflict to be as important as we did at the time.
It would be seen, I suggested, as the sad and sorry coda to 12 years of disastrous western policy towards Iraq, stretching from the betrayal of the Shia uprising after the 1991 Gulf war through more than a decade of sanctions and bombing raids.
I was clearly wrong.
Part of that was my failure - but more damningly the Pentagon's - to foresee the collapse of postwar Iraq in a manner that makes even the use of the word "postwar" read like a sick joke.
The three-week invasion that ended with US troops toppling Saddam's statue in Baghdad is in danger of turning into a three-year crisis: more than 900 people killed since May 3 and thousands more before. The peace studies professor Paul Rogers, writing on the excellent Open Democracy, calls it an "unwinnable war". The Abu Ghraib prison abuses and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's murderous campaigns will sear the conflict into the history books for a while to come.
Another factor has been the refusal of the war's original opponents, and those who came on board later, to let go of the arguments.
The war has remained roughly as important as they wanted it to as the relentless questioning of the motives and methods of the political leaders who started it has, in Britain at least, been a dominant thread of recent politics.
The Hutton inquiry, the campaigns to see the attorney general's full legal advice and the decline in Tony Blair's personal popularity - which has a lot to do with whether or not he lied over WMD - all go back to the war.
What was not seized on so strongly - or at least became overshadowed by other events - was the leak of a 2002 Downing Street memo to the Sunday Times in the week before the May 5 general election.
In it, Whitehall officials noted that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".
It was, the Guardian reported, evidence that Mr Blair was "privately preparing to commit Britain to war and topple Saddam" almost a year before the invasion.
The latest issue of the New York Village Voice has a good primer. Why now, you may wonder. Well, it is because - as the Village Voice puts it - after several weeks in which the editorial pages of some of the US's biggest newspapers, including USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, all ignored it, smaller outlets and groups such as Democracy Now have pushed it to a higher profile. Daily Kos launched a campaign to "lift the virtual news blackout" on the story.
In the most recent development, senior Democrats in the US congress yesterday convened a public meeting to call for a full investigation into the Downing Street memo. As this CBS news story explains, George Bush has always maintained that the use of force was a last resort, but the memo "could be the first documentary proof that [he] deceived the American people".
That could be a problem for the president. Campaigners such as After Downing Street want an inquiry to determine whether Mr Bush misled congress. If he did, it could be an impeachable offence.
Mr Bush's spokesman accused the congressmen of "simply trying to rehash old debates", and the White House refused to respond to requests for an inquiry. A piece in Salon (very readable) asks whether it is "just hearsay, or the new Watergate tapes".
Whichever it may be, what is all too obvious is that the Iraq war and its aftermath are not going to go away quietly any time soon. Historians will certainly be writing about it.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/arc...l_not_end.html
By Simon Jeffery / World news 05:00pm
It is, without doubt, the worst prediction I ever made. Shortly before the Iraq war I was – as was the fashion back then – arguing with friends about geopolitics when I said I did not believe history would judge the impending conflict to be as important as we did at the time.
It would be seen, I suggested, as the sad and sorry coda to 12 years of disastrous western policy towards Iraq, stretching from the betrayal of the Shia uprising after the 1991 Gulf war through more than a decade of sanctions and bombing raids.
I was clearly wrong.
Part of that was my failure - but more damningly the Pentagon's - to foresee the collapse of postwar Iraq in a manner that makes even the use of the word "postwar" read like a sick joke.
The three-week invasion that ended with US troops toppling Saddam's statue in Baghdad is in danger of turning into a three-year crisis: more than 900 people killed since May 3 and thousands more before. The peace studies professor Paul Rogers, writing on the excellent Open Democracy, calls it an "unwinnable war". The Abu Ghraib prison abuses and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's murderous campaigns will sear the conflict into the history books for a while to come.
Another factor has been the refusal of the war's original opponents, and those who came on board later, to let go of the arguments.
The war has remained roughly as important as they wanted it to as the relentless questioning of the motives and methods of the political leaders who started it has, in Britain at least, been a dominant thread of recent politics.
The Hutton inquiry, the campaigns to see the attorney general's full legal advice and the decline in Tony Blair's personal popularity - which has a lot to do with whether or not he lied over WMD - all go back to the war.
What was not seized on so strongly - or at least became overshadowed by other events - was the leak of a 2002 Downing Street memo to the Sunday Times in the week before the May 5 general election.
In it, Whitehall officials noted that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".
It was, the Guardian reported, evidence that Mr Blair was "privately preparing to commit Britain to war and topple Saddam" almost a year before the invasion.
The latest issue of the New York Village Voice has a good primer. Why now, you may wonder. Well, it is because - as the Village Voice puts it - after several weeks in which the editorial pages of some of the US's biggest newspapers, including USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, all ignored it, smaller outlets and groups such as Democracy Now have pushed it to a higher profile. Daily Kos launched a campaign to "lift the virtual news blackout" on the story.
In the most recent development, senior Democrats in the US congress yesterday convened a public meeting to call for a full investigation into the Downing Street memo. As this CBS news story explains, George Bush has always maintained that the use of force was a last resort, but the memo "could be the first documentary proof that [he] deceived the American people".
That could be a problem for the president. Campaigners such as After Downing Street want an inquiry to determine whether Mr Bush misled congress. If he did, it could be an impeachable offence.
Mr Bush's spokesman accused the congressmen of "simply trying to rehash old debates", and the White House refused to respond to requests for an inquiry. A piece in Salon (very readable) asks whether it is "just hearsay, or the new Watergate tapes".
Whichever it may be, what is all too obvious is that the Iraq war and its aftermath are not going to go away quietly any time soon. Historians will certainly be writing about it.
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