By Anatole Kaletsky (THE TIMES, 20/04/06):
AS THE THIRD anniversary of the Iraq war passes, as President Bush plumbs depths of unpopularity untouched even by Richard Nixon during Watergate, and Tony Blair, a lame duck leader, waddles off to the anti-climax of a career that will be blighted forever by his backing of the war, let me confess: I supported the invasion of Iraq.
Although many intelligent and well-intentioned people in America and Britain backed the Bush-Blair campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein, very few are now willing to admit it — and with good reason. For a generation of politicians, commentators and concerned citizens, the war in Iraq has become a litmus test of judgment, intelligence and personal integrity, like Suez in the 1950s or appeasement in the 1930s.
Iraq is sliding towards civil war and its nascent democracy looks more like a stillborn foetus, with a parliament that cannot even agree on a prime minister, never mind any policy that might give the country renewed hope. Yet to me it is still far from obvious that deposing Saddam was wrong. It was not the brief war itself, but the catastrophic mismanagement of postwar reconstruction that caused the disasters we see today.
This statement may seem like self-exculpating hypocrisy, but I believe that failure to debate it properly poses a threat to democracy in America and Britain and to stability around the world. Stability because the post-Iraq belief that military intervention can never be justified and is anyway doomed to failure has offered a free pass to outlaw states such as Iran. Democracy because accountability is the bedrock principle of democratic government, and the first step in creating accountability is to establish what errors were made and by whom.
For those who believe that invading a sovereign country is wrong in principle and under all conditions, accountability for the Iraq debacle is easy to establish: the blame lies with Mr Bush and Mr Blair and they should be made to pay the price. But voters in America and Britain rejected such an absolutist view of the Iraq invasion. Clear majorities in both countries believed at the time of the invasion that it was justified. All efforts to defeat, impeach or even seriously embarrass Mr Bush and Mr Blair were doomed to failure because most voters recall that this decision seemed to be justifiable at the time, in both moral and pragmatic terms.
The real crime committed by Mr Bush and Mr Blair lay not in starting the war, but in failing to plan for and manage the consequences — failing to provide enough soldiers to restore order, failing to protect electricity and water supplies, failing to rebuild schools and hospitals, failing to discipline the occupation forces, failing to understand the rivalries and cultural sensitivities of the different ethnic groups and failing to spend the mindboggling sums of money devoted to Iraq in ways that clearly benefited the people.
The question that Britain and America should be debating therefore is not whether the invasion was wrong, but whether the occupation was recklessly, even criminally, mismanaged and who was responsible for these mistakes. If there were any doubts on this score, they have been dispelled in the past few months by the publication of numerous books and articles by the US officials who spent the past three years doing the dirty work in Iraq — ranging from Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator, to General Anthony Zinni, the Marine Corps commander, and six other generals who spoke out on this issue last week. What these accounts confirm is that Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, and his entourage were responsible for all the key errors and misjudgments.
The logical conclusion is that Mr Rumsfeld should have taken responsibility for these mistakes long ago. He should have been dismissed back in 2004 as an act of contrition for the abuses of Abu Ghraib prison. When Mr Bush refused to dismiss Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Blair should have forced his hand. The Prime Minister could easily have succeeded then, because the President was in danger of losing his bid for re-election and would have done anything to keep the loyalty of America’s main ally in the Iraq war. But Mr Blair was too timid to exploit this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to force a change of leadership and policy on the Pentagon. When the history of the Iraq adventure is written, this failure to energise the efforts at reconstruction may well be remembered as one of the biggest mistakes of the Prime Minister’s career.
Instead of being dismissed after the scandal of Abu Ghraib Mr Rumsfeld had his authority enhanced, and his power in Washington has grown with every new disaster in Iraq. This week, for example, Mr Bush reaffirmed his unqualified support for his Defence Secretary while reshuffling the rest of his Cabinet, replacing several top White House officials and leaking disparaging comments to the effect that John Snow, his Treasury Secretary, could be dismissed any day. Considering that the US has been the world’s best-performing leading economy during Mr Snow’s tenure, while the Pentagon has staggered from one disaster to another under Mr Rumsfeld, this inequality of treatment is morally outrageous. The President clearly feels that he can never sack Mr Rumsfeld because this would be seen as an admission that invading Iraq was wrong.
That America’s real error was not the invasion of Iraq, but the failure to plan and manage its reconstruction seems never to have occurred either to Mr Bush or to his opponents. Yet the many Iraqis who initially welcomed the Americans as liberators from the tyranny of Saddam must surely have reached this conclusion: what destroyed Iraq was not the American invasion, but the arrogance and incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld.