[Mr. Keegan's newest book is entitled "The Iraq War" and it is up to his usual lofty standards. Keegan has written a number of outstanding books on WWI and WWII...I recommend hunting them down.]
Fresh hostilities don't alter the justice of deposing Saddam (Filed: 21/09/2004)
The Daily Telegraph
The Prime Minister admitted on Sunday that British forces in Iraq are involved in a new war. Last week Gen Sir Mike Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, described current military operations in the country as a counter-insurgency. Yesterday Iyad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, identified the enemies of law and order as former supporters of the Saddam regime, Islamic infiltrators from outside the country and common criminals seizing their opportunity.
It is not only the British who are involved in the fighting. So, too, are the Americans, and more intensively, as they have been almost since the conventional campaign of occupation ended apparently so successfully in April last year.
Documents leaked last week to The Telegraph from inside the Foreign Office compound the Prime Minister's Iraqi problem. They suggest that Downing Street was warned of post-war turmoil, perhaps persisting for a long time, and that the Foreign Secretary expressed his concern at Western unreadiness to impose a settlement.
The Prime Minister's opponents, particularly within his own and the Liberal Democrat parties, are already exploiting the embarrassment caused to undermine his Iraqi policy and denounce his continuing support for President Bush's determination to see the Iraqi interventions through to a satisfactory conclusion.
It is difficult to understand the motives of those who are making life difficult for the Prime Minister. Some are legalists who continue to insist that the war was launched without justification in international law and wish to punish those responsible for their transgressions.
T hey belong to that tiresome but increasingly numerous tribe who seem to think that men are made for laws and not laws for men. In any case, their arguments are contested, since many (including the Attorney General) hold that UN Resolutions 678, 687 and 1441 do in fact provide justification for the taking of military action against Saddam.
Some of Tony Blair's castigators are old-fashioned anti-militarists, usually with a strong anti-imperialist tinge, who deprecate the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy in almost any circumstances. They ignore the fact that Saddam was in breach of at least nine UN resolutions and flaunted his defiance. They also failed to explain why they in effect would support Saddam's continuance in power and the maintenance of his cruel and dictatorial rule over the Iraqi people.
Some anti-Blairites are, of course, simply playing internal Labour Party politics. They dislike the Prime Minister's unwritten contract with the middle classes, his refusal to institute progressive taxation and his disinclination to take back into public ownership any of the denationalised industries. They are usually anti-American as well, and take pleasure at the spectacle of President Bush's failure to translate the victory of 2003 into a successful transition to stable government.
No doubt the Americans made mistakes. It was a serious mistake to dissolve the Iraqi police force and to disband the Iraqi army. The reasons for doing so seem to have been based on distant memories of the occupation of Nazi Germany in 1945. The Ba'ath party was identified as the Iraqi version of the Nazi party and the view taken that no supporters of the old regime should be allowed to exercise power under a new regime.
That policy may also have drawn on an idealistic but naive American belief in the existence of a potential democratic majority inside any repressed population, ready to elect an enlightened government if given the chance to vote. The effect in practice was to throw into unemployment hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi males, instantly discontented but skilled in the use of weapons. As almost every Iraqi male has access to weapons, the result was to make for disorder.
There is now plenty of disorder in Iraq and disorder makes for headlines. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that much of Iraq is not in a state of disorder. The Kurdish north has made a successful transition to peaceful self-government. In the British-garrisoned south, three of the four provinces are at peace, and in one of them successful local elections have recently been held, which returned secularists to office.
The trouble that persists is centred on the so-called Sunni triangle, west of Baghdad, and is fomented by ex-Ba'athists who fear that properly conducted elections will exclude them from the position of dominance they were accustomed to enjoy in the Saddam years. Such elections are scheduled for January and that timetable is the spur to the current spate of bombings and shootings, which take as their principal targets those Iraqis who are brave enough to seek enlistment in the new police force and the new army.
Other dissidents are Shia militants, many followers of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who fear a revival of Sunni dominance through American-sponsored governmental means and who, in any case, regard Western forms of democratic government as un-Islamic. Their aims, if not their beliefs, are supported by the foreign infiltrators, particularly from Syria but also from Iran and the anti-royalist regions of Saudi Arabia, who want nothing less than the restoration of the seventh-century caliphate and a return to the rule of God on earth.
Britain has been here before. In the 1920s, at the beginning of its exercise of the League of Nations Mandate over Iraq, it had to pacify a disturbed ex-Turkish Ottoman territory in which, as the first British governor complained, every man had a rifle. Then, as now, Shia and Sunni were at loggerheads and the whole Muslim world was disturbed by the fall of the caliphate, brought about by Kemal Ataturk's dissolution of Islamic rule in Turkey.
Things could be a lot worse than they are. For all his crimes, Saddam must be credited with turning Iraq into a secular state and making its population one of the best-educated in the Middle East. As objective observers report, the majority of Iraqis have embraced both secularism and Western education; they welcome the fall of Saddam's dictatorship.
When not silenced by the threat of violence from extremists and criminals, they are also ready to say that they continue to regard the Western troops in their midst as liberators. Western so-called progressives who denounce the war of 2003 as a mistake are in fact illiberal and reactionary. They should be ashamed of themselves. Denunciation of war-making is much more fun than the recognition of the truth that the calculated use of force can achieve good. The United States and Britain must not be deterred.
Next story: It's dangerous to get rid of men in tights
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