by Kevin Carey

G21 Alumnus

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Kevin Carey

Sussex, United Kingdom - KEVIN CAREY says that many unpleasant consequences may flow from the war in Iraq but the Coalition did the right thing for the wrong reason; and the opposition to war and intemperate media coverage have weakened future opposition to wars.

Even if I have made this point before, notably just after 9/11, it needs to be made again in the light of the coverage of the war in Iraq. Free will makes causality in human affairs much more complex than in the chemistry laboratory. So, just as some perceived flaw in United States policy towards the Middle East did not "cause" 9/11, the American occupation of Baghdad did not "cause" the indiscriminate looting of Iraqi cities. It created conditions in which looting took place but it was not inevitable as is the reaction between sodium and water. Iraqis could have chosen not to loot at all; or they could have chosen to loot commercial and government premises but not hospitals; or they could have chosen to loot buildings but not dig up and carry off water supply pipes; they could have left the museum alone.

I make these simple points here because I have not seen them written nor heard them said anywhere else. There has also been precious little discussion of why this looting was so indiscriminate. Might it not be that people robbed of moral choice for so long has lost its moral bearings; that exploitation breeds exploitation; that violence breeds violence? Such notions are almost unquestioned in the analysis of individual and family behaviour, so how far do they hold for polities? And if freedom is greeted with such indiscriminate communal self abuse, what does that tell us about the extremity of the regime from which they were freed?

Let us, then, look at tactics. How many of us, planning a military occupation of a major city would prioritise the guarding of public hospitals against looting? When I was in the middle of the attempted coup in Nairobi in 1982 I recall with a shudder that wounded rebels were murdered in their hospital beds by members of the General Services Unit (GSU) but throughout a day of chaos and looting no hospital facility was touched. I was caught in the cross fire at the Grenada airport during Maurice Bishop's successful coup in 1979 and not even the duty free shop was touched. I think if I had been a coalition strategist I would have anticipated that commercial property, government Ministries and Saddam's palaces were certain targets for looting; I certainly would not have thought of hospitals.

But, then, I don't have the forecasting powers of your average news hound! I hope I would have rated saving life higher than saving property. The rejoinder to that, of course, is that the lives of American soldiers in Baghdad would not have been in danger had it not been for the invasion, a facile argument if it is based on the raw actuarial principle that an event should be judged in terms of the lives it saves or costs. Whatever the final number of casualties on both sides, military and civilian, I very much doubt that it will come close to Saddam's annual quota of torture and murder.

Even if we have no reasonable expectations that journalists will apply the tools of moral philosophy, one surely has the right to expect a little consistency. I saw reporters alternately accusing the coalition of being too heavy handed and imperialist and being too relaxed in the face of looting. Again, it is a matter of priority. I remember two days after the attempted coup in Nairobi had been put down, turning a corner in the middle of town to be greeted by a hail of sniper bullets. To save me that fear I would have given up the Hilton.

This risk illiteracy is linked to another odd phenomenon of war coverage; minor skirmishes were blown up into battles but pockets of urban resistance were trivialised. Part of the problem was, of course, embedded journalists who could not construct a general picture but part of the problem, too, is the syndrome of journalist as hero, as hero parallel with if not superior to soldiers. I admit at once that brave journalists lost their lives in this war as they have in many others but too often the journalist became the story instead of reporting it. I was frequently left with the impression that journalists thought themselves above telling me what had happened or was happening and were much more concentrated on what they thought it meant or what might happen. If Nietzsche thought that we were the victims of history that is nothing to what we now suffer as victims of the possible. The probable, that vital, farinacious staple of democratic analysis, has been abandoned in favour of the meringue of the possible, the sweet begetter of rot and of irrational fear and dictatorship. The danger with the possible is that it is terribly susceptible to prejudice; this or that group might overwhelm us. It also leads, through conflation, to incoherent risk assessment.

Those opposed to war on principle and journalists who have a vested interest in frightening people were equally wrong about the overall risk of the war. There has been no Vietnam-style war of attrition, the Republican Guard hardly resisted; there was no protracted hand-to-hand street-by-street fighting; the level of global terrorism has fallen since the invasion began; the streets of the Middle East are not full of shrill protesters on the brink of overthrowing their dictators; the bombs were much more accurate than last time. Yet, until the last days when he was caricatured as 'Comical Ali', Iraq's Minister for Information was quoted as solemnly and much less sceptically than President Bush or Prime Minister Blair.

Let us, then, go back to the origins of this war. It was illegal in terms of international law; its justification was spurious and shifting; but its outcome was predictable. Those who opposed it rarely 'came out' as pacifists but, rather, hid behind the United Nations. They were right to back the UN as the best thing we have got but ruined their own case through the exaggeration of its virtues. They were right, too, in identifying the spurious and shifting nature of the justification. In principle, in theory, the US and the UK could have kept their troops on the Iraqi border for years while Saddam played cat and mouse with Mr. Blix and his team but that, ultimately, would have made a monkey of the very UN the opponents of war so sanctified and, not to put too fine a point on it, there is nothing easier than spending somebody else's blood and money. I would have been interested in the reaction of the 'Coalition of the unwilling' if the price of giving Blix more time had been the contribution of troops or money. It was, then, a matter of realpolitik, of how long the coalition was prepared to finance the pressure for disarmament.

But, either through ignorance or arrogance, both sides of the argument failed to understand Saddam. If you look for the briefest of moments at the history of the Government of Iraq, particularly since 1991, you will see a meticulously regimented bureaucracy operating in defensive mode, a warren of competing intelligence and spy networks, caught between the paralysis of hierarchy and the threat of torture and murder. It may turn out that there were no weapons of mass destruction after the 1998 withdrawal of the UN Inspectors but nobody inside Iraq knew whether there were or no. They could not admit to their existence nor to their destruction. It is a certainty that if they were destroyed, a regime - like many other dictatorships - obsessed with documentation would have kept a record; but nobody had the confidence to say anything one way or the other. Even Tariq Aziz could not save his country by saying that there was nothing worth worrying about and that he had the evidence to prove it. The core of the foreign policy he had to carry out under the threat of death was that Saddam was safe as long as nobody knew; if he had the weapons he was finished and if he did not have the weapons he was finished.

This, I think, brings us to the heart of the matter. Granted, the war was illegal, granted, the cause was spurious and shifting, granted, the analysis of what was going on in the period between the withdrawal and the reintroduction of UN weapons inspectors was crude, but we should not, at any cost, trivialise the brutality and ruthlessness, the mendacity and manipulation, of Saddam's regime. Journalists frequently held up the bodies of children maimed and killed by the war but much less often mentioned those yet to die in Saddam's 'peace'. Ultimately, a regime that operated on the basis of suspicion, mistrust and violence was overthrown by the violence of those who suspected and mistrusted it.

There may be many unpleasant consequences of this successful campaign, such as the further debilitation of the UN at the expense of the American Imperium with its self confidence to go to war at will, the springing up of a new generation of terrorists, what you will; but if the world is as uncertain as some people say, then those people cannot then go on to argue that we must not do this or that because of certain consequences which are bound to occur.

In terms of this war, I am pleased that those against it and those who have a vested interest in prophesying doom were wrong on almost every count but am sorry in more general terms because it weakens them next time a similar occasion arises. They may point to UN opposition and to the spurious and shifting grounds on which a war is proposed but we will hardly trust them in forecasting. After all, every time a forecast crashed to the ground the opponents of war shifted their grounds, too. If anything, the proponents were more cautious than the opponents. In addition - and this bears out an observation about the Afghanistan War that the journalists told more lies than the politicians - it was a close call but on this occasion it was easier to believe the military spokesmen than reporters.

Yesterday I went to see Shakespeare's Macbeth. It portrays a man who was not the devil incarnate but who, through a variety of circumstances, including his own acts of will, ended up in a situation where it was easier for him to command the death of innocent children than to repent, resign or run away. A point was reached, after the murder of Macduff's children, when the balance tipped from acceptance to rebellion, from pacifism to war. The US, the UK and their allies might have gone to war for the wrong reason but they did the right thing.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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