“A weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervour”

The Guardian has posted the first of three excerpts from a new book, Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq, by Johnathan Steele, about Tony Blair and the run-up to the Iraq war.

In November 2002, six academics with backgrounds in Iraqi history and international security met with Blair and tried to convince him that invading Iraq would be disastrous.

“We all pretty much said the same thing,” [George] Joffe [an Arabist from Cambridge University] recalls. “Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don’t imagine you’ll be welcomed.” He remembers how Blair reacted. “He looked at me and said, ‘But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?’ I was a bit nonplussed. It didn’t seem to be very relevant.” Recovering, Joffe went on to argue that Saddam was constrained by various factors, to which Blair merely repeated his first point: “He can make choices, can’t he?” As Joffe puts it, “He meant he can choose to be good or evil, I suppose.”

— snip —

The experts didn’t seem to make much of an impression. Blair “wasn’t focused”, [Charles] Tripp [Iraqi history expert] recalls. “I felt he wanted us to reinforce his gut instinct that Saddam was a monster. It was a weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervour.”

More below . . .

Later, in 2004, a group of retired British diplomats published an “extraordinary” open letter to Blair, decrying the invasion and his inability to foresee the entirely predictable, and predicted, breakdown of Iraqi society along sectarian lines and general resistance to the occupation.

Steele, the author of the excerpted book, goes on to note that everyone at the time assumed that if these retired diplomats were speaking so forcefully, it must mean that non-retired, active officials had voiced similar concerns, at similar volumes, to Blair in the run-up to the war.  This was not the case.

While some senior officials in Britain’s intelligence agencies expressed their doubts that Saddam was genuinely stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, no serious qualms were raised by the government’s foreign policy experts about the equally important problem of whether occupying Iraq could work. Analysing the likely consequences of invading one of the major Arab states should have been a crucial element in judging whether it was in Britain’s interest, let alone that of ordinary Iraqis, to go to war. Yet such analysis was simply absent. Ministers never asked for it; officials never offered it.

Steele goes on to relay his fear that if inquiries are ever conducted into the (as I’ll call it) “failure of intelligence services to predict the failure of the occupation” that such investigations will very conveniently miss the point.

If the government ever answers calls for a full-scale inquiry into the policy discussions that led to the invasion of Iraq, there is a danger that it will focus on WMDs, or blunders such as the failure to control mass looting or the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army. But what about the serious lapses in political analysis? It is often argued that the occupation stumbled because of a lack of prewar planning, but the real problem was a failure to comprehend that western armies cannot successfully take over Arab countries and force them to run along western lines.  The occupation was doomed from the start. No matter how efficient, sensitive, generous and intelligent the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had been, it could not have succeeded. Occupations are inherently humiliating. People prefer to run their own affairs; they resent foreigners taking over their country.

I want to point out, though, that the points made in the above block quote are not new.  Here is Machiavelli, from chapter III of The Prince, writing in 1513:

But when states are acquired in a country differing in language, customs, or laws, there are difficulties, and good fortune and great energy are needed to hold them, and one of the greatest and most real helps would be that he who has acquired them should go and reside there. This would make his position more secure and durable, as it has made that of the Turk in Greece, who, notwithstanding all the other measures taken by him for holding that state, if he had not settled there, would not have been able to keep it. Because, if one is on the spot, disorders are seen as they spring up, and one can quickly remedy them; but if one is not at hand, they heard of only when they are one can no longer remedy them. Besides this, the country is not pillaged by your officials; the subjects are satisfied by prompt recourse to the prince; thus, wishing to be good, they have more cause to love him, and wishing to be otherwise, to fear him. He who would attack that state from the outside must have the utmost caution; as long as the prince resides there it can only be wrested from him with the greatest difficulty.

— snip —

But in maintaining armed men there in place of colonies one spends much more, having to consume on the garrison all income from the state, so that the acquisition turns into a loss, and many more are exasperated, because the whole state is injured; through the shifting of the garrison up and down all become acquainted with hardship, and all become hostile, and they are enemies who, whilst beaten on their own ground, are yet able to do hurt. For every reason, therefore, such guards are as useless as a colony is useful.

I have no large point here, other than to point out that the obvious insights are obvious, and have been made for centuries.  It’s not that no one knows these things, or that they require special expertise or insight.  It requires, in fact, “a weird mixture of total cynicism and moral fervour,” to ignore them.

Either that, or a conviction produced by greed that the world and its inhabitants don’t exist as entities seperate from one’s ambitions.