A Journey (68 page)

It is instructive to read the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 passed by President Clinton. It was then that US policy became regime change, but it did so – as the Act makes clear – because of the WMD issue and Saddam’s breach of UN resolutions. It wasn’t to do with the moral case against Saddam; it was precisely to do with the WMD threat, and arose out of his defiance of the will of the international community.

Therefore, as the impact of September 11 reverberated around the world, and I as a leader contemplated the future potential for risk, the possibility of terrorists acquiring WMD was at the forefront of my mind.

It was true that, in certain respects, you could say that groups like al-Qaeda and regimes like that of Saddam were on opposite sides. Al-Qaeda was aiming at governments, and often those in the Arab world. Governments – and especially dictatorships – inherently dislike and distrust those who operate outside their influence. Fanaticism disturbs those who rule through order imposed with an iron fist. All of this was true, and remains true.

But I thought I could see something deeper, that at a certain level down beneath the surface there was an alliance taking shape between rogue states and terrorist groups. There was a common enemy: the West and its allies in the Arab and Muslim world. They shared a fear of Western culture, attitudes and thought. Rightly, as the adoption of such thought was a material threat to them. There was a reason why Saddam of all the Arab leaders was so vociferous in opposition to the Saudi peace initiative, launched with much courage by the then Crown Prince Abdullah in 2002. Peace between Israel and Palestine was a threat to all those of an extremist hue, as it is today. It would mean coexistence. To groups like al-Qaeda, this was anathema. To regimes like Saddam’s, it was a threat. A calm region, on a path to change, would not be an easy region for the likes of him or his sons.

This sharing of a common enemy was buttressed by a common set of attitudes: indifference to human life; the justification of mass killing to achieve ends abhorrent to most people; and a willingness to involve religion and the history of Islam in pursuit of such ends.

Would someone like Saddam want al-Qaeda to be powerful inside Iraq? Absolutely not. Would he be prepared to use them outside Iraq? Very possibly. Was there a real risk of proliferation, not only from Iraq but elsewhere, leaching into terrorist groups which would not be averse to using WMD? I certainly thought so.

Actually, I still think so. How many times did I hear, in respect of the Iranian government, people tell me that they, as Shia, would never forge an alliance with Sunni groups in the Middle East? But where they conceive it serves a tactical purpose, they do – because they share with those groups an interest in instability and a passionate aversion to ‘Western’ values, which they rightly see as a long-term threat to their grip on power.

I also felt that the Middle East should be viewed as a region whose problems were ultimately interlinked and whose basic challenge was very simple: it was urgently in need of modernisation. It was an alarming melange of toxic ingredients: a wrong-headed view of the future; a narrative about Islam that was at best inadequate and at worst dangerous; and governed by regimes that could be allies of the West but be otherwise under immense internal strain. The leaders were often well intentioned, but presiding over systems that were inherently and deeply unsustainable. So the leaders would be open to the West, but their societies would not be. The discourse between leaders in that world and in ours could agree on the need to root out extremism, but the discourse on their streets would frequently represent that extremism.

This was exemplified by the attitude to Israel. At leadership level, though highly critical, and sometimes with good cause, of Israeli governments, the leaders basically wanted peace. What had been used as a rallying cry was now an irritant, and moreover a source of internal disaffection. Whereas at one time they wanted to use the issue, now they just wanted it solved, out of the way, off the agenda. And though back then Iran was perceived as less of a threat (a point they would make against the Iraq War, of which more later), there was even at that time a growing anxiety about Iranian influence and intention. They might dislike Israel, but they never feared it. Iran was a different order of worry altogether.

But, as even a cursory reading of local Arab press would indicate, at street level and among the educated commentariat, Israel was hated. It became a means of siphoning off the demand for change inside, by focusing political energy and commitment to an external cause, an injustice not just to Palestinians but to Muslims everywhere, a vital and persistent proof that the West was inimical to Islamic interests and to Islam itself.

As I have argued before, the most combustible combination politics knows is a people faced with a choice between an undemocratic government with the right idea, and a popular movement with the wrong one. That choice was there in abundance in the region and beyond. In the case of Saddam, this was almost inverted, which meant that his influence within the region was both poisonous and regressive to those who, like many of the Gulf states, wanted desperately to take their people on a journey to the future.

I looked at the region and felt the chances of a steady evolution were not good, and undoubtedly worse if Saddam remained in power. I never quite understood what the term ‘neocon’ really meant. To my bemusement, people would say: It means the imposition of democracy and freedom, which I thought odd as a characterisation of ‘conservative’. But what it actually was, on analysis, was a view that evolution was impossible, that the region needed a fundamental reordering.

George Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2002 was famous for its ‘axis of evil’ remark, linking Iran, Iraq, Syria and North Korea. It indicated that America was set on changing the world, not just leading it; and, as Afghanistan had shown, if necessary by force.

From my perspective, there were two drawbacks with the way the thesis was expressed by its supporters. The first was that (and this is less a criticism of George, who was always wary of the term) by wrapping it in partisan language – ‘neocon’ – it caused obvious problems for those from the progressive wing of politics, like me. Second, as I said in my September 2001 conference speech (and like a broken record thereafter), I believed that resolution of the Palestinian issue was of essential strategic importance to resolving this wider struggle. It hadn’t caused the extremism, but resolving it would enormously transform the battle lines in defeating it.

However, leaving those problems aside, I had reached the same conclusion from a progressive standpoint as George had from a conservative one. The region needed a fundamental change. And this change was to be of a different character. In the 1980s we had armed Saddam as we had the mujahideen in Afghanistan, so as to thwart Iran in the one case and the Soviet Union in the other. It was a tactical move but a strategic mistake. This time, we would bring democracy and freedom. We would hand power to the people. We would help them build a better future. We would bring not a different set of masters, but the chance to be the masters, as our people are of us.

And hadn’t we shown that such idealism was indeed achievable? In Afghanistan they were preparing for their first election, and the Taliban at that time were seemingly banished. In my first term, we had toppled Milosevic and changed the face of the Balkans. In Sierra Leone, we had saved and then secured democracy after the ravages of the diamond wars. We had the military might of America, not to say that of Britain and others. There was no way Saddam could resist: he would lose, or he would go voluntarily, in the knowledge that the alternative was involuntary removal.

So if there was a message to be sent about defiance of the international community, it should be sent to Iraq. If there was a regime whose detestable nature and penchant for conflict was clear, it was Saddam’s. If there was a people in need of liberation, it was surely the Iraqi people.

It didn’t turn out like that. Precisely because the roots of this wider struggle were deep, precisely because it was a visceral life-or-death battle between modernisers and reactionaries, precisely because what was – and is – at stake was no less than the whole future of Islam – the nature of its faith, its narrative about itself, and its sense of its place in the twenty-first century – precisely because of all this, there was no way the forces opposed to modernisation, and therefore to us, were going to relinquish their territory easily. They were going to fight as if their survival depended on it, because it did and it does. Let the values of democracy put down their own roots; let Western-funded development help the people prosper; get people right in the heart of the Arab world to see the benefits of a modern approach to work, leisure and life, and the narrative about the West as enemies, as infidels, would collapse and be seen as the self-serving nonsense that it is.

And they were going to fight using the one weapon almost impossible for any government, even one in a strong tradition of government, to handle: terrorism. The truth is that the insurgency among Sunni groups, albeit with some high-visibility terror attacks thrown in, was disruptive but manageable. What precipitated the deluge and very nearly broke the country apart were the al-Qaeda-led attacks of indiscriminate terror in markets, shopping malls and even mosques, killing large numbers of ordinary civilians and spreading fear and panic; complete with highly discriminate attacks focused specifically on Shia places of worship and holy sites and on the Shia population itself that were designed to fan – and did fan – the flames of sectarianism.

On its own, even that could have been defeated. But what lent it devastating force was that terror in combination with the steady build-up of Iranian influence among extremist Shia groups, and then finally with al-Qaeda, whose use of terror and then improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against UK, US and other forces, led to the draining of support for the whole venture. We may have begun fighting Saddam; we ended fighting the same forces of reaction we are fighting everywhere in the region, beyond it and even on our own streets.

In other words, left to itself, the country could have just about managed. What made the task all the harder, occasionally verging on the impossible, were the activities of the outside influences, hell-bent on chaos and destruction. Both al-Qaeda and Iran knew what was at stake in Iraq. Neither was going to let the nation stabilise without a fight, and as our will weakened, theirs grew. It was then only through Prime Minister Nouri Maliki showing (frankly unanticipated) leadership qualities – and the Bush decision to surge – that the balance of will to win was shifted back towards the forces of democracy and modernisation.

It had been hard, harder than anyone foresaw. The problem, however, with the line that the aftermath ‘proves’ that the removal of Saddam was wrong is that it involves an acceptance of something that, on reflection, we should find unacceptable. We remove Saddam. The people are given the chance of a UN-sponsored democratic process and a large sum of cash to rebuild their country. They want to take it and show that desire in an election. However, the removal of Saddam provides the opportunity for terrorist and anti-democratic forces to disrupt the country. This causes a bloody war. Therefore, the argument goes, leave Saddam in place. Thus the Iraqis, a bit like the Afghans, are presented with a choice: the brutal dictator they have, or being overrun by terrorists who will impose their own dictatorship. So they can have a secular tyranny or a religious one.

As one Iraqi put it to me on my visit to Baghdad shortly before leaving office: ‘So you’re saying [meaning the Western critics]: We can have Saddam or rule by terrorist; but we can’t have what you have? Surely we had to defeat Saddam; now we must defeat terror. But there must be a better choice for our future.’

The trouble is that the enemy we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have discovered one very important facet of the modern Western psyche: we want our battles short and successful. If they turn out to be bloody, protracted and uncertain, our will weakens. In particular, the loss of our soldiers demoralises and depresses us. Instead of provoking feelings of anger, determination or even revenge, it arouses a sense of the pain not being worth it, of a battle that is too much, too heavy, too laden with grief. And of course in the media age of today, it is played out in real time, in real life – and in real life, war has never, not from first to last, been anything other than horrible. Ironically, the last to lose heart are the warriors themselves, the soldiers who joined the army as volunteers and who want an army prepared to fight. But the public tires long before, emotionally exhausted and psychologically unnerved. The result in Iraq was that as time wore on, there was a fatal sagging of the will that was really only restored by the surge and the Iraqis’ determination to avoid the abyss.

The fact is, in Iraq, there were two conflicts: a relatively short one to remove Saddam, and a prolonged one to rid the aftermath of the destabilising plague of terror. It was in that second conflict that horrendous numbers of casualties were suffered, both of innocent Muslim Iraqi civilians and of US, UK and other Allied soldiers. But to have conceded to such often externally inspired and guided terror would have been a disastrous setback for the wider struggle.

So the argument raged fiercely back then and rages fiercely today. History, as ever, will be the final judge. At this point, I don’t seek agreement. I seek merely an understanding that the arguments for and against were and remain more balanced than conventional wisdom suggests.

This was not Suez, where in 1956 Britain and France, against America’s wishes, sought to topple Nasser and failed. It was not Vietnam, which was a battle fought against a genuine insurgency (though one clearly not universally supported in the country) and where the insurgents won.