Posted on 03/23/2004 9:06:13 PM PST by chauvelin01
Yes, I believe it
TONIGHT, exactly a year ago, was the night that people all over the world went to bed, but couldn't get to sleep. The politicians had voted. The UN inspectors had left. The invasion force, or at least the American part of it, was ready.
As the sands ran out on the final deadline of the final US ultimatum, I was lying on my "executive mattress" at the Palestine Hotel, Baghdad, biting my nails and wondering if I was going to die. I wasn't the only one. Even at 3am, the lights in the flats opposite were on, with people moving around, getting themselves cups of coffee, coming to their windows to stare up at the sky. In London, we had the Prime Minister's word for it that he, too, slept badly, and I think that, on this occasion, we can believe him.
One year on, however, the most important fact is that nobody's worst fears on that wakeful night have come true. The vast majority of us, Iraqis, journalists and Tony Blair alike, survived. Fedayeen guerrillas struck the coalition in small numbers, but there was virtually no real fighting with Saddam's regular forces. The bombing of Baghdad looked scary on TV, but it didn't even begin to approach the average daily tonnage dropped on, say, Hanoi during Vietnam, London or any German city during the Second World War.
"Shock and awe" lasted an hour and a half, rather than the promised three days.
And with only a few ghastly exceptions, the targeting, in the capital at least, was very precise. Colleagues who arrived after the war was over kept asking us where all the destroyed buildings were.
There never was a military stalemate, a refugee crisis, a hundred thousand civilian dead. Most of the great news events of the war - the "uprising" in Basra, the "fall" of Umm Qasr, the "defection" of the Iraqi 51st Division, the "execution" of British prisoners, the "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch - turned out to have been made up. That old doom-monger's favourite, the revolt of the "Arab street" across the Middle East, has remained as much of a mirage as any weapon of mass destruction.
FOR the Iraqis and Westerners who died, and their families, the war was a catastrophe. But compared to what could have happened, casualties were relatively few. In purely military terms, measured by the standards of past conflicts, the Iraq war was mercifully unapocalyptic.
Nor is the occupation, as the new Spanish prime minister seems to think, a disaster, just a mess. Comparisons with Vietnam are sometimes made. But there is no comparison. The Viet Cong had the backing of two superpowers, the Soviet Union and China, and shelter from three neighbouring countries. The Iraqi insurgents do not.
The vast majority of Iraq is not insurgent, though it is lawless. It is still true - as I got into trouble for saying just after the war - that life in Baghdad is more dangerous than it was in the final years of Ba'ath Party rule. By 2003, Saddam, though still a monster and a murderer, was killing far fewer people than he ever had in his Western-sponsored heyday. In 2004, the homicide and sexual assault rates in Iraq have reached truly spectacular peaks.
But that sort of actuarial calculation is now a little beside the point.
What Iraqis have been given, what they never had before, is something statistics cannot measure: hope for the future. If you are an Iraqi of talent and education, your life is probably better already. You're no longer trapped in a stagnating pariah state. You can make money and travel. If you're more of an Iraqi Joe Bloggs, you might half-miss the old days of stability and certainty, rather as some in the old Soviet Union still do. But even you are unlikely to want the tyrant back.
There must be a fear that Iraq will fracture on ethnic or religious lines.
There are already tensions in the city of Kirkuk. But so far, in keeping with their stoical tradition, the Shia majority have resisted attempts to inflame them against their Sunni brethren. It is true, though, that the main tests are still to come.
Among the many polls in this anniversary week, the most relevant is surely the one taken among the people most directly affected by the war and occupation, the Iraqi people. Fifty-six per cent of Iraqis think their lives have got better since the war, compared with only 19 per cent who think things have got worse.
Hardly anyone, seven per cent, expects things to deteriorate over the next year.
Despite the imprecisions of sampling, and Iraqis' understandable tendency to give people asking political questions the answers they want to hear, these are impressive numbers. Perhaps Tony Blair could arrange to swap electorates.
Even for the British voter, the answer to the key question about the conflict is only just on the debit side of neutral. It is clearly impossible to claim that the war has made this country safer from terrorism. Yet has it actually put us in much more danger? It may have slightly increased the risk, made a few British Muslims more willing to shelter a bomber. But the wider picture is that war or no war, al Qaeda and its allies have always been utterly determined, and highly likely, to attack us. The "serious and specific threat" this week received by France shows that Islamic terror makes few distinctions between countries which supported the war and those which opposed it. To the nihilists of al Qaeda, we are all Westerners, all targets.
Given all that, the question now must be as follows. If the war and occupation were not militarily disastrous, why have they been so politically disastrous? Why does the Prime Minister often look so grey and ill? Why does Alastair Campbell need to strut the country, protesting his innocence to every hospital radio station that will have him? Anniversaries normally mark the return of an event to the front
pages after a long absence. This one doesn't. The war may have been over for nearly a year, but for barely any of that time has it gone away.
I supported the war (nobody ever believes this, but I did). Well before it started, I was on record as saying that it would probably be easy and quick.
The reason why it has been a political disaster is not because the war was wrong, it is because the politics were wrong. Right war, wrong reasons, wrong timing.
The Government could have made far more persuasive and urgent humanitarian arguments than it did for resolving the issue of Iraq once and for all.
Few people now remember quite how monstrous the sanctions between 1990 and 2003 were. The best available study, from Columbia University, estimates that between August 1990 and March 1998, some 150,000 Iraqis died prematurely because of sanctions.
Saddam and his cronies, of course, not only never suffered - they prospered. A war was probably better than another 13 years of that. But it was not an argument I ever heard from London or Washington.
MORE than anything else, what discredited the war was the rush to conflict, the need to claim Iraq as a pressing danger. From this need stemmed all the Government's most famous tabloid half-truths and non-truths. No one I know ever doubted that Saddam had WMD, or could rebuild them quickly. It was a perfectly fair inference to draw from his behaviour, even if it now seems to have been wrong. But no expert, spook or politician I ever met, apart from a few New Labour androids, believed Iraq's WMD were a threat "current and serious" enough to require military action in March 2003.
If Britain and America had given the UN another few months, one of two things would have happened.
Either the inspections would have worked, Iraq would have been verifiably disarmed, sanctions lifted, and the country and its citizens readmittedto the world. Or, more likely, continued Iraqi intransigence would have left far fewer people doubting the need for regime change. A second UN resolution would have been secured, and most of the Prime Minister's political and legal troubles would have been avoided.
It is difficult to see that the US's decision to start massing troops in winter 2002, which led inevitably to war a few months later, was due to anything other than a wish to finish things before the presidential election.
Tony Blair was probably the only person in the world who might have at least slowed the momentum.
Mr Blair's support was important to the Americans. It helped the President to enlist bipartisan support in Congress for his policy, and it probably did give Britain some real influence at the time. But the Prime Minister ended up, maybe not entirely consciously, going with the US timetable.
Much has been made of Mr Blair's bravery over Iraq. But I really don't think he ever anticipated having to be anything like so brave. Until almost the end, he thought that the French and the Russians would come round, that he would get a second resolution in March, and that public opinion would shift to his side. He thought the war would be quick, the occupying troops would be welcomed, and something in the general WMD line would be found that could plausibly be presented as dangerous. With one exception, all these have turned out to be the greatest miscalculations of Tony Blair's life.
Has the Government learned its lesson? Well, its conduct over the claims it made on Iraq has not exactly been a model of humility. And the week before last, the Prime Minister was on the rhetoric again. In describing al Qaeda as an "existential threat", and comparing it to Nazi Germany, he is once more spoiling a good case by exaggeration. Nazism was a genuinely existential threat, in that it could have destroyed civilised existence in Europe. Al Qaeda might want to destroy Europe, but it is simply not capable of doing so.
In practice, it can mount no more than a handful of attacks, however ruthless and dramatic, each year. A good way to reduce the terror caused by terrorists is to avoid taking their wilder statements at face value. A bad way to fight terror is to make statements that undermine your own credibility.
Twelve months on, it is clear that the Government has survived Iraq. It has seen off its critics. It has won. But it has paid an unexpectedly heavy price, and probably lost many more nights of its collective sleep.
The line that I can't get out of my mind as I watch the ministers wriggling on the TV studio sofas is the lament of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, after he won the battle of Asculum: "One more such victory and we are lost."
What Iraqis have been given, what they never had before, is something statistics cannot measure: hope for the future
No expert, spook or politician I ever met, apart from a few New Labour androids, believed Iraq's WMD were a threat "current and serious"
Much has been made of Mr Blair's bravery over Iraq. But I really don't think he anticipated having to be anything like so brave END
I didn't need that before bed.
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