This War Is Not Yet Over
By Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
12 February, 2004
It's the Alan Clark manoeuvre. When the old Tory reptile found himself assailed by a tricky argument, he would fire back with his most lethal weapon. "This is boring," he would say airily. "You are being the most frightful bore." Clark used the word often, keenly aware of its peculiarly English power to devastate.
Now the government is deploying the Clark manoeuvre. Those who still insist on banging on about Iraq and its missing weapons of mass destruction are anoraks, they say, trainspotters on the fast track to Dullsville. Ministers declare that the rest of the country lost interest in this media fixation long ago. Only journalists, with their stained coats and plastic carrier bags, still care.
It is beginning to work. Plenty of those whose blood was up in the immediate aftermath of the Hutton report - the backlash against the whitewash - suspect they ought to drop it now. Better to change the subject than be a bore.
They should think again. For this is more than another political story de jour, one that looms enormous at the time but is soon forgotten. This is not the fuel protest or the Hinduja affair. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the Iraq war is about as serious a question as you could imagine; its answer could determine the way our world is ordered in the 21st century. And this is not abstract, chin-stroking stuff for the seminar room. It has direct political consequences; it could even break the governments of both Britain and the United States.
The gravity should hardly need to be proved. Yesterday's suicide attack on a police station 25 miles from Baghdad, killing dozens, was a reminder of how Iraq remains a matter of life and death. The rising number of British and US casualties drives the point home just as intensely. What more serious question could there be than whether all these deaths are the result of a grievous mistake? If the war was not an error but built on a lie, then those dead are the victims of a terrible crime.
Take the most recent dispute: whether Tony Blair should have known that the legendary 45-minute claim applied only to Iraq's battlefield weapons. Ministers insist this is an "obscure" question, of interest only to the nerd class of defence specialists. But surely it relates directly to whether Blair was right to brand Iraq a "serious and current threat" in 2002. If Saddam did appear to have long-range, strategic weapons of mass destruction deployable in under an hour, then the threat would indeed have seemed serious and current. But if it was just battlefield shells, then the danger was rather less pressing. Hardly an obscure difference. (Imagine what extra ordure Lord Hutton would have piled on Andrew Gilligan if he had broadcast a report on Iraq's arsenal, only later to confess that he never bothered to find out what kind of weapons he was discussing.)
Still, the specific cost in human lives of the Iraq war is not the sole reason why this will remain the central question of current politics. There are wider reverberations. For this war was unique, the first truly pre-emptive attack lacking even the pretence of provocation. At least earlier, hotly controversial military adventures, whether over Suez or in Vietnam, had an initial, immediate prompt to action. But in 2002 there was no nationalisation of the canal, no threat by the north to topple the south. There was merely an ongoing stand-off with the United Nations, one that had been running for years and that, admittedly under the threat of military action, was beginning to unblock. Hans Blix and his men were making progress; they were not threatened or harassed. There was no provocation.
The Bush administration makes no secret that it sees the Iraq war as the prototype for future conflicts; indeed, it has enshrined the idea in its official national security strategy document. Pre-emption remains the Bush doctrine. Witness Donald Rumsfeld's revealing remarks in Munich last week. Asked whether America is bound by any international system, legal framework or code of conduct, the US defence secretary replied: "I honestly believe that every country ought to do what it wants to do ... It either is proud of itself afterwards, or it is less proud of itself." Translation: the US can do what it likes - including making war on countries that have made no attack on it.
Such pre-emptive wars are only possible with intelligence. Without some knowledge of the perceived threat that is to be removed, no case for preventative action can be made. Which makes the reliability of intelligence a centralissue of our time -and ensures that the use politicians make of such intelligence is not some fleeting, one-off issue that will die with the Iraq episode. Its legitimacy or otherwise will determine how wars are fought in future. If the lesson of the WMD debacle is that intelligence cannot be relied upon, for it will always risk what Blix calls "dramatisation" in the hands of politicians, then Iraq might be the last pre-emptive war. If Blair and Bush succeed in leading public opinion towards the reverse conclusion, we will soon live in a different world.
Such consequences can almost seem too large to grasp. But there are some concrete ones to contemplate, too. A majority of Britons now believes that Tony Blair lied over the Iraq war and that he should resign, according to an NOP poll last weekend. When the prime minister's trust ratings took a hit in the past, the working assumption was that things would soon right themselves. Sure enough, formula one and the Mandelson home loan affair brought embarrassments, but the Blair numbers soon recovered. This is of a wholly different order. The PM said Iraq had WMD when it did not, and the public trust has been irreparably broken. It is as harsh and as simple as that. Whether it is at the next election or later, one cannot help but believe that somehow the Iraq adventure will destroy the Blair premiership if not the Labour government.
In the US, that process might already be under way. Few would dare bet against the president just yet, but Iraq could be the undoing of Bush. His presumptive opponent, John Kerry, is running hard on the issue, even lashing out at the bogus 45-minute claim at the weekend. Al Gore, recast as an elder statesman, is making fierce speeches comparing Bush with Richard Nixon, who won re-election only to be brought down two years later. The president himself is looking defensive and shaky, most visibly in a feeble TV performance on Sunday.
Blair and Bush must suspect that Iraq could be the breaking of them, even if they do not know how it will happen. Governments toppled in London and Washington, and the world order reshaped. Boring? I don't think so.