The Great War for Civilisation (188 page)

In Egypt, Nasser ruled to ever greater acclaim, even surviving his appalling defeat at Israel's hands in the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, suppressing all domestic opposition with executions and torture. Suez distracted the world's attention as Russian troops stormed into Budapest on 30 October 1956 and crushed its revolution. Some never forgave the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell for his November broadcast in which he labelled British troops as aggressors—unlike in 2003, there was at least a serious political opposition to the government in the House of Commons—while
The Observer
lost readers it never recovered for opposing the war.

“It was all a gamble,” ex-Major Murad was to say thirty years later. “Nasser was very lucky that the Americans intervened and asked the British to cease fire and evacuate—the Americans wanted to replace the Europeans as the big power in the Middle East. But it was luck. If I had been in Nasser's place, I would not have done this because there was no agreement with Russia. The war was not an equal match—it was not even a war. It was an action taken against the nationalisation of the canal to destroy Nasser's power. We realised this at the time.”

But the last word should go to Eden just after the British landed at Suez. “If we had allowed things to drift,” he said, “everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Muslim Mussolini, and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and North Africa would have been brought under his control.” We would hear all this again in 2002 and 2003, even if Eden's hatred for Nasser had some limits. “I have never thought Nasser a Hitler,” Eden was to write. “. . . But the parallel with Mussolini is close.” Guy Mollet, the French premier, referred to Nasser as an “apprentice dictator.” He and Eden were both possessed by what Mollet himself called “the anti-Munich complex.”

IN BRITAIN IN 2003, newspapers screamed their arguments for war. In America they argued with books, heaps of them, coffee-table books recalling the attacks of 11 September 2001, paperbacks pleading for peace in Iraq, great tomes weighed down with footnotes extolling the virtues of “regime change” in the Middle East. In New York, the publishers as well as the media went to war. You only had to read the titles of the 9/11 books—many of them massive photo-memorial volumes—on America's news-stands:
Above Hallowed Ground, So Others Might Live, Strong of
Heart, What We Saw, The Final Frontier, A Fury for God, The Shadow of
Swords
. . . No wonder American television networks could take the next war for granted. “Showdown in Iraq,” CNN announced. “Prepared for War.” No one questioned its certainty. I protested during a live radio show in the United States in January that the participants—including an Israeli academic, a former Irish UN officer, a Vietnam veteran, Tony Benn and others—were asked to debate not whether there should be a war in Iraq, but what the consequences of that war would be. The inevitability of conflict had been written into the script.

The most recent and most meretricious contribution to this utterly fraudulent “debate” in the United States had been
The Threatening Storm: The Case for
Invading Iraq,
by Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA spook and an ex-director for “Gulf affairs” at the National Security Council. It was the book that all America was supposed to be talking about and its title—
The Threatening Storm
was, of course, a copy-cat version of
The Gathering Storm,
the first volume of Winston Churchill's Second World War history—told you all you needed to know about the contents. Just as in 2002 George W. Bush tried to dress himself up as Churchill fighting appeasement, so Pollack twice pretended that the world was confronting the same dilemma that faced Britain and France in 1938. The Allies could have won in a year, he claimed, if they had gone to war against Hitler then. The fact that Britain and France, though numerically stronger in troops, were weaker in modern armaments—whereas the United States could now crush Saddam's forces in less than a month—was not allowed to interfere with this specious argument. Pollack accepted that Saddam was not Hitler, but once more Saddam was dressed in Hitler's clothes—just as Nasser was the Mussolini of the Nile during the Suez crisis of 1956—and anyone who opposed war was, by quiet extension, a Nazi sympathiser.

Before and immediately after the start of the Second World War—the real Second World War, that is—British publishers deployed their authors to support the conflict. Victor Gollancz was a tireless defender of British freedoms. By 1941, we were publishing the bestselling Last Train from Berlin by Howard K. Smith, the brilliant American foreign correspondent's desperate account of life in Nazi Germany before the United States entered the conflict. But these were often works of literature as well as ideology. What happened in the United States in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq was something quite different: a mawkish, cheapskate attempt to push Americans into war on the back of the hushed, reverent, unimpeachable sacrifice of September 11th.

Removing Saddam “would sever the ‘linkage' between the Iraq issue and the Arab–Israeli conflict,” Pollack wrote. In the long term, “it would remove an important source of anti-Americanism” and produce a positive outcome “if the United States were to build a strong, prosperous, and inclusive new Iraqi state . . . a model of what a modern Arab state could be.” Pollack's argument for war was breathtakingly amoral. War would be the right decision, it seemed, not because it was morally necessary but because we would win. War was now a viable and potentially successful policy option. It would free up Washington's “foreign policy agenda,” presumably allowing it to invade another country or two where American vital interests could be discovered. And that all-important “linkage” between Iraq and the Palestinian–Israeli war would be over. This theme recurs several times in Pollack's text, and the narrative—in essence an Israeli one—is quite simple: deprived of the support of one of the Arab world's most powerful nations, the Palestinians would be further weakened in their struggle against Israeli occupation. Pollack referred to the Palestinians' “vicious terrorist campaign” without the slightest criticism of Israel. He talked about “weekly terrorist attacks followed by Israeli responses,” the standard Israeli version of the conflict. The author regarded America's bias in favour of Israel as nothing more than an Arab “belief.” Needless to say, there was no mention of former UN weapons inspector and ex-Marine Major Scott Ritter, whose own tiny volume opposing the war—
War on Iraq: What
Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know—
was a mere ninety-six-page flea-bite on the back of the pro-war literature churned out in Washington.

As this material came off the presses, the latest fantasies were seeping out of Washington and London. Stories of further attacks—on the Lincoln Tunnel and the Golden Gate bridge in the States—were mixed with all the scare stories Britons had been fed over previous weeks: smallpox, dirty bombs, attacks on hotels and shopping malls, a chemical attack on the Tube, the poisoning of water supplies, “postcard target” attacks on Big Ben and Canary Wharf, the procurement of 5,000 body bags, 120,000 decontamination suits, survival classes for seven-year-old schoolchildren, new laws to quarantine Britons in the event of a biological attack. There seemed no end to this government terrorism. Did they want Osama bin Laden to win? Or was this merely part of the countdown to war on Iraq, the essential drug of fear that we all needed to support Messrs. Bush and Blair?

For these stories provided a vital underpinning to pro-war literature. In the United States, the intellectuals' support for war in fact went far further than Kenneth Pollack's insipid book. In
Foreign A fairs
magazine, for example, Johns Hopkins University Professor Fouad Ajami, constantly disparaging the Arab world for its backwardness, its lack of democracy, its supposed use of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict “as an alibi for yet more self-pity and rage,” announced, “with sobering caution . . . that a war will have to be waged.” And—here was the line for fantasy-lovers to remember—“any fallout of war is certain to be dwarfed by the terrible consequences of America's walking right up to the edge of war and then stepping back, letting the Iraqi dictator work out the terms of another reprieve.”

The logic of this was truly awesome. America had to go to war because it had threatened to do so. Its own threat was now to become the cause of war; peace would therefore be more terrible than war. As New York St. Lawrence University Professor Laura Rediehs remarked in a perceptive essay in
Collateral Language
, one of the best books on the linguistics of this conflict, in a Cosmic Battle between Good and Evil of the kind Bush imagined, the taking of innocent lives by us would be justified because we were good. But when the other side killed innocents, it was unjustified because the other side was evil. “What makes the deaths of innocent people bad, then, is not their actual deaths, but the attitudes and feelings of those who killed them.” By far the most moving contribution towards the anti-war campaign in the same book was that of Amber Amundson, whose husband Craig of the U.S. Army was killed in the attack on the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. “Will the invasion of Iraq really bring us to a more peaceful global community?” she asked her nation's leaders. “. . . If you choose to respond to this incomprehensible brutality [of September 11] by perpetuating violence against other human beings, you may not do so in the name of justice for my husband.”

Obsessed with their own demonisation of Saddam Hussein, both Bush and Blair now constantly reminded us of the price of appeasement. Bush thought he was the Churchill of America, refusing the appeasement of Saddam. It seemed as if the Second World War would be for ever the excuse, the warning, the justification, the utterly dishonest paradigm for every folly, for every bloodbath we initiated. The Second World War was an obscenity. It ended in 1945. Yet you might have thought, in early 2003, that Hitler was alive in his Berlin bunker. The Luftwaffe, if you listened to Bush and Blair, was still taking off from Cap Gris Nez, ready to bombard London after years of appeasement of Nazi Germany. Yet it was our air forces that were about to strike from Iraq's “Cap Gris Nez”—Kuwait and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Turkey and assorted aircraft carriers—to pulverise not London but Baghdad. What was it about our Lilliputian leaders that they dared to trivialise the massive sacrifice of the Second World War for their squalid conflict against Iraq, elevating Saddam's tinpot dictatorship into the epic historical tragedy of the 1939–45 war?
¹⁹⁸

How could a sane human being react to this pitiful stuff? One of the principal nations that “did nothing about Hitler” was the United States, which enjoyed a profitable period of neutrality in 1939 and 1940 and most of 1941 until it was attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. And when the Churchill–Roosevelt alliance decided that it would only accept Germany's unconditional surrender— a demand that shocked even Churchill when Roosevelt suddenly announced the terms at Casablanca—Hitler was doomed.

Not so Saddam, it seemed. For Donald Rumsfeld offered the Hitler of Baghdad a way out: exile, with a suitcase full of cash and an armful of family members, if that is what he wished. I couldn't recall Churchill or Roosevelt ever suggesting that the Führer should receive a golden handshake. Saddam is Hitler—but then suddenly he's not. He is—said
The New York Times
—to be put before a war crimes tribunal. But then he's not. He could scoot off to Saudi Arabia or Latin America, if he took Rumsfeld at his word. In other words, he wasn't Hitler after all.

What, I kept asking, happens after the invasion? On 26 January I asked our
Independent on Sunday
readers what we planned to do when Iraqis demanded our withdrawal from their country. “For we will be in occupation of a foreign land. We will be in occupation of Iraq as surely as Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And with Saddam gone, the way is open for Osama bin Laden to demand the liberation of Iraq as another of his objectives. How easily he will be able to slot Iraq into the fabric of American occupation across the Gulf. Are we then ready to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan and countless other countries? It seems that the peoples of the Middle East—and the West—realise these dangers, but that their leaders do not, or do not want to.”

Travelling to the United States more than once a month, visiting Britain on the penultimate weekend of January 2003, moving around the Middle East, I had never been so struck by the absolute, unwavering determination of so many Arabs and Europeans and Americans to oppose a war. Did Tony Blair really need that gloriously pertinacious student at the British Labour party meeting on 24 January to prove to him what so many Britons felt: that this proposed Iraqi war was a lie, that the reasons for this conflict had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, that Blair had no business following Bush into the war? Never before had I received so many readers' letters expressing exactly the same sentiment: that somehow—because of Labour's huge majority, because of the Tory party's effective disappearance as an opposition, because of parliamentary cynicism—British democracy was not permitting British people to stop a war for which most of them had nothing but contempt. From Washington's pathetic attempt to link Saddam to al-Qaeda, to Blair's childish “dossier” on weapons of mass destruction, to the whole tragic farce of UN inspections, people were no longer fooled. The denials that this war had anything to do with oil were as unconvincing as Colin Powell's claim in January 2003 that Iraq's oil would be held in “trusteeship” for the Iraqi people. “Trusteeship” was exactly what the League of Nations offered the Levant when it allowed Britain and France to adopt mandates in Palestine and Transjordan and Syria and Lebanon after the First World War. Who will run the oil wells and explore Iraqi oil reserves during this generous period of “trusteeship”? I asked in my paper. American companies, perhaps?