Who Remembers the War?

The twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War has come round with neither George W Bush nor Tony Blair appearing in the dock of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. There's no statute of limitations on war crimes, a point that has been forcefully made to Vladimir Putin recently, but I think it's safe to say that "Dubya" and Tony aren't going to face charges this side of the grave. That the ICC's issue of an arrest warrant against the Russian President should occur within a week of the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq might appear like ironic timing, or just bad taste, but I think what it really emphasises is how that famous briefing attributed to Karl Rove still applies: "'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out." Or to put it in simpler terms, We'll do what we want and whatever we do is by definition legal. Judiciously ignoring Rove's point, the media has been full of lessons learned and advice on what the US and its allies should do to avoid similar misadventures in future, as if this were some corporate plus-delta exercise.

Stephen Wertheim, who has made a name for himself as an advocate of progressive realism, reckons that "the United States should disentangle itself from the Middle East, shift defense burdens to European allies, and seek competitive coexistence with China." But it won't do so because "Washington is still in thrall to primacy", a failing that he traces to the search for a new posture after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Writing of the authors of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, he says: "The key, they reasoned, was to think and act preventively. Lacking challengers to balance against, the United States should keep new ones from emerging. It must work to dissuade “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” To this end, the United States would maintain a massive military, sized to dwarf all others and capable of fighting two large wars at once. It would retain alliances and garrison troops in every region of the world that Washington considered to be strategically significant. It would, in short, replace balances of power with an American preponderance of power." 

The problem with this picture is that the network of garrison troops and the preponderance of military might had long been established. It wasn't a pivot towards a new post-Cold War strategy but a doubling-down on the global policing role formally pursued since 1945. Wertheim himself traces this strategy to 1940 in his book, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (you can read his original dissertation here), though even this shows the recurrent desire to identify a rupture in American foreign policy brought about by external factors, rather than the inexorable development of the logic of hegemony arising from the USA's geographical advantages and the rapid expansion of industrialisation after the Civil War. When viewed from the perspective of the economy and global finance, as in Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin's The Making of Global Capitalism, it becomes clearer that the hegemonic strategy in foreign policy goes back much further than World War II to the first era of globalisation which coincided with the USA's early experiments in imperialism during the Spanish-American War.

Wertheim noted in the Guardian recently that when President Biden spoke in support of Ukraine in Warsaw earlier this year, he declared: "The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened." As Wertheim inquired, "Did the Iraq war even happen?" This is a knowing reference to Jean Baudrillard's now famous provocation "The Gulf War Didn't Happen", in which the French philosophe noted that the one-sided reporting of that conflict and the reliance on the simulacra of modern media meant that we could have no meaningful understanding of the reality (a rapid massacre of Iraqi troops). According to Wertheim, "While Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers. The flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations: this happened. The attempt to legitimize “pre-emption” (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone): this mattered, including by handing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a pretext he has used." Yet what the rest of the world remembers is not some exceptional abuse of authority by the US, that "flagrant illegality", but simply the normal exercise of power by the hegemon. After all, that was at the root of the contemporary scepticism.

Biden wasn't alone in mentally erasing Iraq. In calling for Vladimir Putin to be arraigned for war crimes Gordon Brown conveniently forgets his own role in voting for an illegal war (the very definition of a war crime). But outrage at this hypocrisy is as misplaced as questioning Churchill's endorsement of the RAF's nightime bomber raids over Germany in the Second World War, which had limited military utility but spread terror among the civilian population, or Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which probably spared US casualties from an invasion of the mainland but at the cost of the mass murder of Japanese civilians. This is what great powers do. Among the US foreign policy commentariat, for whom Thucydides is a touchstone, you can always find a parallel in the Greek's history of the Peloponnesian War, whether the "reckless audacity" of the Iraq invasion or the "trap" of  rising US-China competition, but the most useful quote remains his imagined retort in the Melian Dialogue: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".

I'm of the view that the reason why political leaders in the West have been so forgetful of the Iraq War is not because of any sense of shame or regret but because the episode went according to plan, and that plan was to turn the area centred on the Tigris and Euphrates into a de facto no-man's land between Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Iraq had proved an unreliable buffer against the first of these regional powers and its invasion of Kuwait had threatened the second. Likewise, the descent of Syria into civil war following the Arab Spring wasn't because that state was less resilient in the face of popular demands than Egypt and Bahrain but because of foreign interference, notably by those three regional powers (Lebanon obviously faces the same problem). The collapse of Iraq into a fragmented state subject to competing militias wasn't some novel strategy. This was pretty much the playbook of foreign powers across much of Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth, in the case of China). Iraq and Syria themselves were the remnants of the collapse of the Ottoman state in the region, split up between Britain and France by the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Why didn't the US and its allies plant the evidence of WMD after they arrived in 2003? It surely wasn't because of any ethical scruples: they had invaded on a lie, after all. The simplest explanation is that they didn't feel they needed to. They'd got away with the invasion - no one was ever going to stop them - and while they would be criticised for the mess they made of the country, they weren't going to face any consequences internationally or personally. George W Bush and Tony Blair are both lauded as elder statesmen today. In the UK, the establishment attitude towards the Iraq misadventure can best be characterised as a shrug (much as the reaction to the Chilcot report was an ironic "whatever"). While the usual suspects among the commentariat wring their hands over the betrayal of liberal values, or try and spread the blame as widely as possible while regretting that this episode has undermined the popularity of military intervention, some are more concerned that the memory of opposition to the war might provide the left with renewed credibility and thus delay its conclusive political burial. Somewhere between 300 and 600,000 dead Iraqi civilians pales into comparison with the risk to Wes Streeting's career.

So, what does this mean for Ukraine? You might think the parallel with Iraq is strained, not least because Russia, the Iran in this equation, did the invading and the West clearly has no intention of putting boots on the ground, but if you think the mess of post-invasion Iraq was actually the objective then similarities start to obtrude. Russia is now bogged-down in a military and economic morass, its great power aspirations shown to be laughable. For all the claims that the Iraq War and Syrian Civil War emboldened and strengthened Iran, the reality is the country remains regionally weak, its expanded influence limited to literal bombsites in Lebanon and Yemen. The sanctions regime against Russia hasn't proved effective in stopping the war, but sanctions should be seen as a form of permanent discipline rather than a lever of diplomacy, something that Iran is only too familiar with. Meanwhile, the civilian population of Ukraine can expect to continue to suffer as their government pursues a maximalist line that precludes negotiations while Western arms and materiel guarantee that the war will grind on.