I knew what politics was before Iraq: it was why you had to buy the Big Issue but couldn’t have Kit Kats. But it was only 10 years ago this week – when I skipped out my afternoon classes to attend the protest in Trafalgar Square – that I understood what it really meant to be political. To be glued to Question Time. To have to read all the papers. To be fiercely, exhaustingly angry about something All. The. Time.
Ten years on from that first march, and the verdict is clear: the anti-war protestors are vindicated, the invaders disgraced. Those of us who stood there and chanted slogans and skipped school or took time off work or staged sit-ins: we were right.
The problem is: I’m not sure we were. The anti-war script is that Iraq is a bloodbath, a running disaster from which there is no escape. But even if you accept that script as true – and is there anything more distasteful than the paroxysms of delight that some commentators take in shrieking the names of the dead? – it ignores the small matter that that wasn’t why the United Kingdom intervened in Iraq. It was about the risk that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
It turns out, of course, that he wasn’t: that there were no WMD to find. But that wasn’t what the overwhelming majority of the intelligence-gathering community was saying. That was where all the evidence pointed. On the other hand, you had the anti-war movement, suggesting that he probably didn’t, or that, if he did, the west had sold them to him in any case. What if we had been wrong? It seems to be that you have two universes: one in which you potentially have a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, which, at best, presents you with the Syrian scenario: where the outside world watches a bloody massacre, or, at worst, presents you with an actively belligerent state that everyone is frightened of.
Then there is the Iraqi government’s alarming tendency towards authoritarianism: but, I can’t, in all conscience, support a line of argument that would suggest that the emergence of Hastings Banda or the setting up of a one-party state in Zambia invalidated the anti-colonial movement.
But all that only matters if you accept the script, and, the problem is, the Iraqi people don’t. Even when things were at their worst, in 2006, almost two-thirds of Iraqis surveyed said they thought the invasion had been worthwhile. During the American withdrawal in 2011, 55 per cent of people were optimistic about the direction the country was heading in. Which, when you compare it with the results of any Eurobarometer survey, isn’t too bad.
Increasingly I feel that, even if I was right all those years ago, I was right only by coincidence: I was right for the wrong reasons. So many of the arguments that we made and marched on simply dissolve upon contact with any serious criticism.
‘But America has nukes’. Yes, and also elections. Even during an administration as criminally incompetent – and incompetently criminal – as the second Bush administration, if you don’t realise that there is an obvious moral difference between the United States and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, then you weren’t paying attention.
‘The war was based on a lie’. No, it wasn’t. Any Iraq war conspiracy theory fails the cui bono test: that an American president, still riding the crest of a post-Afghanistan wave, on the verge of building a ‘permanent Republican majority’, and the most successful social democratic leader Britain has known, decided to risk it all on a foreign invasion, in search of a commodity that Saddam Hussein wanted to sell them anyway. This is the sort of plan that only makes sense in a low-budget Saturday morning children’s cartoon.
There is one argument that – if I was plunged into some kind of Freudian debate with my younger self – I wouldn’t be able to refute: that the Arab spring shows that it would have happened anyway. That we need not have sacrificed however many lives and broken the back of the Labour government. That there was an internal solution. But then: would Colonel Gaddafi have given up his weapons if Saddam had remained in place? Would he not have been free to go ‘house-to-house’ in Benghazi?
Perhaps I was right, after all, even if it was for the wrong reasons. Maybe the answer is the sentence I found hardest of all aged 13: I just don’t know for sure.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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WOW!!! You are confused. Why not check out Obama, the black guy across the pond? He says the war in Iraq was WRONG. Could be he might know a little about this?
He really doesn’t. Ask the Kurds and March Arabs,
We know Saddam had weapons of mass destruction because he had already used them at Halabja (they don’t have to be nukes to qualify for that description). And given he had used them once, would he have any scruples about using then again? Secondly there was even evidence he thought himself he had nuclear weapons – but his scientist were too damn scared to tell him they hadn’t cracked it yet..
We know Saddam had weapons of mass destruction because he had already used them at Halabja (they don’t have to be nukes to qualify for that description). And given he had used them once, would he have any scruples about using then again? Secondly there was even evidence he thought himself he had nuclear weapons – but his scientist were too damn scared to tell him they hadn’t cracked it yet..
There most certainly is a concerted effort by a section of the Left to completely control the narrative on Iraq, that insists those of us on the Left who believe the invasion to have been worthwhile and right, are some sort of monsters. I resent it hugely.
On your point on the Arab Spring; it was kicked off in Egypt, due almost entirely to the publication of files by Wikileaks. A website set up, because of the war in Iraq. I don’t think the Arab Spring would have happened, had it not been for Wikileaks, and I don’t think Wikileaks would have the attention it has, had it not been for the war in Iraq.
You say we went to war because of weapons of mass destruction? I think we actually went to war because the Americans wanted us to and, for strategic reasons, Blair couldn’t bring himself to break with Bush (Blair himself seemed if not enthusiastic, then certainly willing to go to war, for all sorts of reasons to do with his own personal convictions and the political positioning of the New Labour project). WMDs became the main pretext because, as Paul Wolfowitz said, it was the one thing everyone could agree on. I don’t think Blair and Bush lied about WMDs, I’m sure they both thought something you could term as WMDs would be found in Iraq, but I don’t think this was based on evidence. It was a widely-held assumption. Saddam was an evil bastard, he’d used them before, surely he had WMDs? Well, no, turned out he didn’t. You also say all the evidence from the intelligence agencies pointed to him having WMDs. Well actually that’s not really true either. No one had good intelligence from Iraq, what with it being a pariah state, closed off from the rest of the world. Information was patchy and confusing. Mostly we only had signals intelligence from the US and what the Iraqi opposition was telling us (and they had a vested interest in telling us what we wanted to hear). The intelligence conclusions all the spooks made were basically a combination of group-think and telling the politicians what they wanted to hear.
I think the US wanted to go to war because Iraq seemed like the next obvious thing to do after the quick ‘victory’ in Afghanistan. The US had a pre-existing grudge against Saddam and opening up the Iraqi oil fields would be a nice bonus (I don’t think oil was the primary reason for war, but I’m sure it was a consideration). Iraw was supposed to be an example to the Islamist terrorists, showing the extent of American power. It did exactly that, just not in the way America had imagined.
As to whether it was all worth it? I think it’s fantastically hard to say it was. But counter factual history is always a mug’s game, so who knows?