US AND THEM: US, UN & Iraq, version 8.0

07/11/05 - Daily Mail

Blair 'could have delayed Iraq war'

Tony Blair repeatedly failed to use his influence with President George Bush to halt the rush to war with Iraq, Britain's former ambassador to Washington said.

Sir Christopher Meyer said that Mr Blair could have been in a position to secure a delay to the conflict and help plan for post-war Iraq, avoiding much of the violence now besetting the country.

But in his book, DC Confidential - serialised in The Guardian and the Daily Mail - he said that the Prime Minister and his entourage had been "seduced" by the "glamour" of US power and refused to take tough negotiating positions.

Sir Christopher - who actually supported the war - nevertheless concluded that the verdict of history was likely to be that it was "terminally flawed both in conception and execution".

He said that although Mr Blair had been told that as far as the Bush administration was concerned, Britain was "the only ally that mattered", he was unwilling to use the leverage that gave him.

"London was not fertile ground for the notion of leverage or the tough negotiating position that must sometimes be taken even with the closest allies - as Churchill did with Roosevelt and Thatcher did with Reagan," he wrote.

He said that he doubted that Mr Blair had ever had a "plain-speaking conversation" with Mr Bush, in which he made clear that he would only support war if British wishes were met.

"We may have have been the junior partner in the enterprise but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone. Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise," he wrote.

However, Sir Christopher said that Mr Blair appeared to have no appetite for the hard bargaining that was necessary. "Tony Blair chose to take his stand against Saddam and alongside President Bush from the highest of high moral ground. It is the definitive riposte to Blair the Poodle, seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power," Sir Christopher wrote.

"But the high moral ground, and the pure white flame of unconditional support to an ally in service of an idea, have their disadvantages. They place your destiny in the hands of an ally. They fly above the tangled history of Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Turkomen and Assyrian. They discourage descent into the dull detail of tough and necessary bargaining: meat and drink to Thatcher but, so it seemed, uncongenial to Tony Blair."

The Wrap: A worm's eye view

Monday November 7, 2005


Andrew Brown wonders whether the fourth world war is already underway


I know exactly the moment when I decided that the Iraq war would be a disaster. I was travelling down to a demonstration against it in September 2002, very troubled in mind. It's in the nature of wars that they pitch you together with allies you would rather not have and I couldn't sign up to either of the main strands of piety that motivated my fellow demonstrators - the leftist and pacifist one that said wars are always wrong and solve nothing; and the Muslim one which held that wars against Muslims are always wrong (but was enthusiastic about fighting Israel and possibly America).

But on the train down to the demo I read a long essay from Commentary by the neocon intellectual Norman Podhoretz, which concluded with an optimism so demented that I realised the project must end in disaster: "By every measure we possess, very large numbers of people in the Muslim world sympathise with Osama bin Laden and would vote for radical Islamic candidates of his stripe if they were given the chance.

"To dismiss this possibility would be the height of naivete. Nevertheless, there is a policy that can head it off, provided that the United States has the will to fight World War IV - the war against militant Islam - to a successful conclusion, and provided, too, that we then have the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties. This is what we did directly and unapologetically in Germany and Japan after winning World War II; it is what we have indirectly striven with some success to help achieve in the former Communist countries since winning World War III; and it is George W Bush's ultimate aim in World War IV."

This was essentially a call for the armed occupation of every Muslim country whose government was repugnant to New York intellectuals - Iran, Syria, Saudi, Egypt and Libya were all mentioned as candidates for treatment after Iraq had been triumphantly occupied and converted to a democracy. Given this was an impossibly hubristic end, it was clear that we shouldn't set off in that direction.

The term "World War IV" seemed integral to this hubristic world view, so it was rather a surprise to find it used in all seriousness last week by a formidable opponent of the hubris of the Iraq war, Andrew Bacevich.

Professor Bacevich is a former army colonel and lecturer at West Point, a Vietnam veteran and an old-fashioned conservative. He calls the war in Iraq "preposterous". His most recent book, "The New American Militarism", is a first-rate piece of history which sets out to explain how a powerful and well-respected army came to seem the solution to almost all America's problems after the Vietnam war. This conviction grew in different groups for different reasons. No overarching conspiracy was required or existed. But the army itself, the evangelical Christians, the neocons, and the Republican party all had their own reasons for supposing that military power would restore America, and none of them really foresaw where it would all end.

This is a sane and powerful analysis, even if his belief that the country can return to its founding principles - as he understands them - and renew itself without militarism looks optimistic from here. Historically, the countries that have renounced a belief in their own military prowess have not done so out of the goodness of their hearts, and Bacevich believes in the goodness of the American heart.

Yet this sane and optimistic person believes that his country is already fighting World War IV, and what's really interesting is that he thinks Jimmy Carter started it, right back in 1979. Carter never planned to do this, of course. He was forced into it when the American electorate recoiled from what he wanted to do, which was to respond to turbulence in the Middle East by saving oil. "There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice", he said. He urged his people to "lower thermostats, observe the speed limit, use carpools, and park their cars one extra day a week."

With hindsight, this illuminates Carer's priggish goodness as a man and his failure as a politician to gauge the mood of the nation. His speech gave Reagan an opening, the Reagan who, Bacevich says, "Assured Americans not only that compromising their lifestyle was unnecessary but that the prospects for economic expansion were limitless and could be had without moral complications or great cost. This, rather than nagging about shallow materialism, was what Americans wanted to hear."

When Carter made his appeal, America was importing about 43% of the oil it needed. Now the figure is 56%. The distinction between armchair and professional warriors surely lies in the fact that armchair warriors believe that there are wars that can be fought without sacrifice. But that figure of 56% doesn't represent a sacrifice avoided, only a sacrifice postponed. If World War IV is under way, the prognosis for our side is not very good.

* Andrew Brown maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog.


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Wasn't it the Brits who first came up with the Niger yellowcake stuff? Who was misleading who when you get right down to it? Or is it possible that both were working from the best information available?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Iraqi politician most associated with the discredited prewar intelligence that has the Bush presidency in turmoil visits Washington this week as he maneuvers for advantage before Iraq's December 15 elections.

I'd thaught, the United Kingdom invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq as well.
But thanks for clarifying that, ican.

The USA invaded Iraq March 2003 when the then Iraq government ignored USA government requests and would not stop harboring (i.e., allowing) al Qaeda training camps in Iraq because that harboring is a threat to our way of life.

US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah