The Revenge of History. Seumas Milne
Baghdad in March 1984 to offer US support to Saddam, on the same day Iraq launched a chemical weapons attack on Iranian troops – rages on about a ‘decapitation strategy’ for his former allies, Blair has been busy promoting Britain’s dossier of assertion, conjecture and intelligence speculation to soften up public opinion for war.
There is nothing whatever in the dossier, as the former Tory foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind said this week, to suggest that Iraq is any more of a threat than it was in the days when the US and Britain were arming it – in fact the opposite, as would be expected after twelve years of sanctions and seven years’ weapons inspections.
But more importantly, the Iraqi government’s announcement that it intends to allow UN inspectors free and unfettered access has already stolen the dossier’s rather modest thunder. After all, it should soon be possible to put its claims seriously to the test. That is presumably why Bush immediately threatened to veto the inspectors’ return without a new, more aggressive UN resolution and why Condoleezza Rice has been trying to revive discredited claims of links between Iraq and al-Qaida.
In spite of Russia’s insistence yesterday that inspectors can go back without a new UN resolution, Blair at least is convinced that support can be won for a more hawkish form of words. Given the threats and bribes that are routinely used to corral crucial votes – and the carve-up of Iraq’s oil that the US has been dangling in front of Russia and France – that seems possible.
What is highly unlikely, though, is that any resolution will be passed explicitly authorising invasion, regime change and occupation – in violation of the UN charter – which is what is actually intended. Expect, instead, some implied threat of force, which could then be used to create provocations, trigger an attack and be claimed as UN-authorised. But it would be nothing of the sort. Nor would it reflect the genuine will of the international community, but only further serve to discredit the UN as a cipher for American power, to be used or discarded as and when convenient.
That process was accelerated this week when the only Middle Eastern state with an advanced programme of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear-armed Israel – refused to comply with a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate end to its destruction of Palestinian compounds in Ramallah because it said it was ‘one-sided’. No action is expected. But then Israel is a serial flouter of UN Security Council resolutions – and some resolutions are treated more seriously than others.
The planned US invasion of Iraq will increase the threat of war throughout the world. By legitimising pre-emptive attacks, it will lower the threshold for the use of force and make aggression by powerful states more likely. It will encourage nuclear proliferation, as states rush to get hold of some protective deterrent. It will damage the fabric of international law and multilateral treaties. It will encourage terrorism by pouring oil on the flames of anti-Western rage.
It also risks creating a humanitarian disaster in Iraq – on top of the terrible human toll exacted by sanctions. Nor is it easy to believe that a US-orchestrated regime change in Iraq will deliver a genuine democracy, or that the US would be likely to accept the kind of government free elections might produce. The last time Britain and the US called the shots in Baghdad, in 1958, there were 10,000 political prisoners, parties were banned, the press was censored and torture was commonplace.
For the US, this war is not mainly about Iraq at all, but about the implementation of its new doctrine and the reconstruction of the entire region. For Tony Blair, it is about his ‘article of faith’ in the centrality of the American relationship and the need to pay a ‘blood price’ to maintain it. For the British people, across the political spectrum, it should highlight the moral and democratic necessity of starting to loosen what has become a profoundly dangerous alliance.
(27/9/02)
Not fighting terror, but fuelling it
This time last year, supporters of George Bush’s war on terror were in euphoric mood. As one Taliban stronghold after another fell to the US-backed Northern Alliance, they hailed the advance as a decisive blow to the authors of the September 11 atrocities. The critics and doom-mongers had been confounded, cheerleaders crowed. Kites were flying again, music was playing and women were throwing off their burkas with joyful abandon.
As the US president demanded Osama bin Laden ‘dead or alive’, government officials on both sides of the Atlantic whispered that they were less than forty-eight hours from laying hands on the al-Qaida leader. By destroying the terrorist network’s Afghan bases and its Taliban sponsors, supporters of the war argued, the Americans and their friends had ripped the heart out of the beast. Washington would now begin to address Muslim and Arab grievances by fast-tracking the establishment of a Palestinian state. Downing Street even published a roll-call of shame of journalists they claimed had been proved wrong by a hundred days of triumph. And in parliament, Jack Straw ridiculed Labour MPs for suggesting that the US and Britain might still be fighting in Afghanistan twelve months down the line.
One year on, the crowing has long since faded away; reality has sunk in. After six months of multiplying jihadist attacks on US, Australian and European targets, civilian and military – in Tunisia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Russia, Jordan, Yemen, the US and Indonesia – Western politicians are having to face the fact that they are losing their war on terror. In Britain, the prime minister has taken to warning of the ‘painful price’ that the country will have to pay to defeat those who are ‘inimical to all we stand for’, while leaks about the risk of chemical or biological attacks have become ever more lurid. After a year of US military operations in Afghanistan and around the world, the CIA director George Tenet had to concede that the threat from al-Qaida and associated jihadist groups was as serious as before September 11. ‘They’ve reconstituted. They are coming after us,’ he said.
In other words, the global US onslaught had been a complete failure – at least as far as dealing with non-state terrorism was concerned. Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, was even more brutal. Summing up a litany of unmet objectives in the US confrontation with militant Islamism, he asked: ‘By what measure can we say this has been successful?’ But most galling of all has been the authentication of the latest taped message from bin Laden himself, promising bloody revenge for the deaths of the innocent in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the man whose capture or killing was, after all, the first objective of Bush’s war. And yet, along with the Taliban leader and one-eyed motorbiker Mullah Omar, the mastermind of America’s humiliation remains free.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan itself, the record is just as dismal. By using the Northern Alliance opium mafia to overthrow the Taliban regime and pursue al-Qaida remnants ever since, the US has handed over most of the country to the same war criminals who devastated Afghanistan in the early 1990s. In Kabul, the US puppet president Hamid Karzai can rely on foreign troops to prop up his fragile authority. There, and in a few other urban centres, some girls’ schools have re-opened and the most extreme manifestations of the Taliban’s oppression of women have gone.
But in much of what is once again the opium capital of the world, the return of the warlords has meant harsh political repression, lawlessness, mass rape and widespread torture, and the bombing or closure of schools, as well as Taliban-style policing of women’s dress and behaviour. The systematic use by Ismail Khan, who runs much of western Afghanistan with US support, of electric shock torture, arbitrary arrests and whippings to crush dissent is set out in a new Human Rights Watch report. Khan was nevertheless described by Donald Rumsfeld recently as a ‘thoughtful’ and ‘appealing’ person. His counterpart in the north, General Dostum, has in turn just been accused by the UN of torturing witnesses to his troops’ murder of thousands of Taliban prisoners late last year, when he was working closely with US special forces.
The death toll exacted by this ‘liberation’ can only be estimated. But a consensus is growing that around 3,500 Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing (which included the large-scale use of depleted uranium weapons), with up to 10,000 combatants killed and many more deaths from cold and hunger as a result of the military action. Now, long after the war was supposed to be over, the US 82nd Airborne Division is reported to be alienating the population in the south and east with relentless but largely fruitless raids and detentions, while mortar and rocket attacks on