Will we learn from the Iraq invasion?

I said in an earlier post that arguing about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq amounts to little more than debating history; the important issue is what we should be doing now. We're where we are, and we can't turn the clock back.

But history is also important, not for political point scoring, but because we (hopefully) learn from it. And if mistakes were made in the way we decided to go to war we need to identify them. The current threat the (very unpleasant) government in Iran poses means there is a real risk that we will face a similar scenario; our actions at that point need to be informed by an acceptance of the tragic consequences of the Iraq war and a recognition of our moral culpability for them.

We do have a moral responsibility to do more than stand by in the face of evil; but our Iraq venture has been a disaster that we mustn't repeat.

Iraq: will we ever get out?

We might, if only because of the cowardly way our Government is keeping its head down and hoping that no-one really notices when we do. But our coalition partners have a bigger commitment, and face a bigger loss of prestige from admitting the failure of the enterprise. Then there's Afghanistan, for somewhat different reasons another disaster; we're almost certainly trapped there for the long term.

The purpose of this post is to draw attention to this article in the New York Review of Books which looks at the reasons things went so badly wrong, and the policies of the three main candidates seeking the US Presidency; it is well worth reading.

Ann Clwyd and Tony Blair

Ann Clwyd deserves respect, not least for her longstanding commitment to investigating and publicly denouncing the human rights abuses of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. She supported the invasion of Iraq because of those abuses, and there was no doubt whatever that her position was consistent throughout, and that there was immense moral strength to her argument.

If only one could have said the same of Tony Blair. In 1995 Ms Clwyd was the Opposition Spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, only to find herself sacked for taking a trip to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq 'without permission'. The atrocities she had already exposed there were on an appalling scale, but the briefings from the Leader of the Opposition's office were to say that she was 'mad', and 'obsessed with Iraq'.

If Tony Blair had been a man of principle, he would have recognised that the position he took in 1995 left him looking hypocritical in his subsequent support of the US invasion, called into question his motives for doing so, and required that he resign. As a Prime Minister who was so happy to apologise for the failings of any Government bar his own, it's no surprise that he lacked even the decency to offer Ms Clwyd a public apology.

Honour killings in Iraq

A depressing report from today's Independent. Not only have we failed to halt such barbarity in Afghanistan, but it has now obviously become common in Iraq too. On our watch, as it were.

These things matter because they are so at odds with all we believe about human rights. If moral obligation offers justification for the Iraq invasion it requires us to intervene here, certainly not to sit back and hand power to a government that condones such acts.

Here in the West we believe in the concept of democracy and that has left us between a rock and a hard place. It appears that many Islamic societies possess a significant majority prepared to support Sharia law, which embraces notions of morality we absolutely reject. Honour killings have no more moral justification in an approving democracy than in a despotic theocracy (and the latter may be the choice of the former anyway). To the extent that democracy lends legitimacy to the illegitimate, it is not the be-all-and-end-all of human rights that so many in the West imagine.

Norman Geras on Iraq

Over on the wonderful normblog, Norman Geras argues passionately and persuasively in support of the invasion of Iraq, an unusual viewpoint for someone on the left. You should definitely read him if you think your own views would be seriously challenged. I doubt that I do him any justice if I summarise his position as being this: that the overthrow of a murderous fascist dictator was justification enough, and that other possibly ulterior motives by those invading were of little import set against that. To those who point out that there are plenty of other murderous fascist dictators in the world and we're not in the business of overthrowing them, he says that our failure to do the right thing elsewhere doesn't alter the fact that we did so here.

I am less clear though whether he considers that we had a moral responsibility to undertake effective 'post invasion planning' (well that's the term politicians seem to favour), and whether our failure to do so weakened the morality of invading. If the end result of our invasion is that Iraq is left in a state of civil war until another murderous fascist dictator makes his way to the top of the heap, any moral satisfaction we derive from the overthrow of the last one will be pretty meaningless.

I think that Jim Holt's lrb article is pertinent here too; he argues that US interests lie in there being continuing instability in Iraq, as this provides them with their best opportunity to secure Iraq's oil supplies. If he's right, then Britain's failure to consider the US motive for invading was wrong, because it failed to determine the (immoral) outcome they sought and might already have achieved.

My own position is that we were wrong to invade, not because there was no justification whatever for the overthrow of Saddam but because we didn't begin to consider or prepare for the entirely foreseeable outcome, let alone accept responsibility for it. The lies about WMD matter too despite what Norman says. They matter because it was the claim that Iraq represented an immediate threat to us that was the justification for invading without due consideration of the consequence.

More importantly though, I think that arguing the rights and wrongs of invading is little more than debating history right now; we are where we are and Iraq is a mess. We need politicians who take on board our present responsibility and have a clear strategy; at this point there is none and no prospect of one either, unless it's the hope that sooner or later the problem will go away if we keep our heads down long enough. Politicians who have taken us into a war (however justified) using lies and evasions are unlikely to be the ones to bring us out of it with honour.

Iraq's Future and the race for the US Democratic Nomination

I write this from a left-wing political perspective and as one who is hoping, after the disaster of the George Bush years, that America chooses a Democrat as it's next President. But not as much as I might have done and this is all because of Iraq.

Iraq has become a nightmare, the nightmare nearly everyone could see and warned about ahead of the invasion. We should never have gone in, but now we are in and we can't get out again. And the politicians who were happy to support the invasion are now trying to bring the troops home as quickly as they can without losing face. But is this right?

It is slightly ironic really but it seems to be the US military that has made the difference in recent months. They seemed to grasp that their Commander-in-Chief was worse than clueless and taken the development of strategy into their own hands with surprising success. They have used the 'surge' to focus their efforts on protecting the Iraqi population and that this has produced a considerable fall in the level of day-to-day violence. Or maybe I've just been duped by US propaganda, yes I know. But the problem now is this: that George Bush has committed to bringing home the extra troops that made the recent difference in six months time, which will only return the situation to what it was six months ago. Iraq will once again head towards civil war and there will be a general wringing of hands in the west.

So what do the two leading Democratic candidates have to say on all this? Well, last March Hillary Clinton said 'This is an Iraqi problem; we cannot save the Iraqis from themselves'. Barack Obama wants to withdraw the troops, but send them back again as part of an international force if it becomes apparent that there is wholesale genocide. 'It is conceivable that there comes a point where things descend into the mayhem that shocks the conscience and we say to ourselves, 'This is not acceptable'' he said in November talking about his post-withdrawal strategy.

Given a choice between those two positions, I'm more comfortable with the latter, but I find it hard to see any other result from an initial withdrawal than that the situation would then demand we returned. And all this just reinforces the fact that the 'coalition' have no more strategy for post-invasion Iraq now than they did before we went in. Here in the UK the government is keeping it's head down, and bringing troops home as and when, just hoping the problem will go away. As for Afghanistan, it's even worse, as the situation is deteriorating and troops pulled out of Iraq will simply end up re-deployed there.

But it's the US who are the big player in all this. And, like here, the politicians find themselves dancing to the tune of a public opinion which shares the 'let's leave them to it' sensibility of Ms Clinton. It's sad that the need for coherent long-term strategy doesn't yet seem to have been grasped and developed to a point where it enjoys a broader consensus of support after even after all this time. Because then foreign policy would not be about to be determined by the short-term prejudices of an unpredictable US electorate.

I suspect that Clinton will be the candidate, and that Obama is the person who should have been.



It would be remiss of me to post about Iraq and not point you to an excellent article that appeared in the lrb - 'It's the Oil' by Jim Holt.