A balanced piece by Charles Moore in the Telegraph puts the situation in Iraq into some much needed perspective. He does not deny the difficulties, nor the many mistakes that have been made on the ground, and the despondency and even despair these have caused. In particular, he identifies the core difference of approach between the Americans and the British:

'The British, who feel, with some justice, that their troops are better at dealing with local human beings than the "too kinetic" American forces, believe that Washington has imposed organised naïveté upon a complicated country. The Americans don't know how to deal with tribal chiefs, they say, and they have depended too much on returning exiles who are resented by those who stayed at home. The American insistence on "de-Ba'athification", they argue, meant that anyone who knew how to do anything in the country was excluded and is therefore resentful. A similar problem, say the British, arose with the Iraqi army. I was given the example of the Sikh regiments that fought us in the 1840s. Once we beat them, we simply turned them round, en masse, and got them to fight for the East India Company and then the Raj. After independence, they served their new masters equally happily, as they do in the Indian army to this day: that is what should have happened with the Iraqi army and the police. The British want the Americans to talk less about democracy, and more about stability.

'The Americans, on the other hand, are more likely to believe that the project for Iraqi democracy is being hampered by timidity and vested interests. They didn't commit so much just to shuffle the pack of moustachioed villains and cut a deal with whoever came out on top. It's not true, they say, that the Ba'athists are the only people who can run anything: their top 40,000 members created the infrastructrual mess that we have to clear up, as well as the terror. Regime change is supposed to mean just that. If you cosy up to Ba'athists you will, among other things, systematically exclude Shias, who mostly steered clear of what was essentially a Sunni movement. The lack of a Shia majority revolt so far is what keeps the situation manageable...

'The Americans think the British – and those in their own State Department and the CIA who think like them – don't get the point that the old way of dealing with the Muslim world has failed. It drives them wild to see Jack Straw sucking up to an Iranian government that still sponsors terror. They believe that the modern elements in Iraq – the surprisingly strong urban, educated, politically secular middle class – need the chance to build a civil society there. They will never get that chance if the coalition temporises with the old order, and sits still as rejectionists flood in from neighbouring countries. Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, they point out, all want the experiment in Iraq to fail, and can use their porous borders to help bring failure about.'

Moore thinks there is truth on both sides. I think there's more truth on the British side, paticularly since it is the secular midddle class that the US appears to have alienated by its disastrous decision to disband the army and police forces and thus fail in its first duty to establish order and security.

But as Moore also points out, the bottom line remains not only that the nay-sayers on Iraq have never come up with any alternative for dealing with the threat that faces the west, but also that much in Iraq is moving -- however erratically and imperfectly -- in the right direction:

'What do you do with failed states, religiously motivated terrorism and organised instability across the Islamic world? Having seen what Yasser Arafat has done for 40 years, how can anyone believe that what Israel/Palestine needs is just one more heave of some peace process? When you see what happened with the oil-for-food programme, how can you argue that the future of trouble-spots such as these can rest with bodies such as the United Nations? What is the racial theory that insists that Arabs must always be unfit for democracy?

'The interventions of the European Union and of what one expert calls the "Dad's Army Intifada" of the 52 British ex-diplomats make some valid criticisms, but offer no solutions or even, forgive the phrase, road-maps for one. When a great power injects a new idea into the political world – that we must not appease dictators, that an Iron Curtain is descending across Europe, that we face a "war against terrorism" - it is bound at first to be imperfectly thought out, but it is the opponents of these new ideas, not their authors, who look shabby in the light of history.

'Anyway, we are where we are, and where we are, according to all my varied collection of experts, is far from hopeless. A tyrant who ruined his country and defied the free world is in prison. Iraq is becoming more prosperous and the infrastructure is recovering, though too slowly. From July 1, it will have the inklings of self-rule. Although the country is an artificial construction of the colonial mind, it has acquired reality over time: most of its inhabitants see themselves as Iraqis rather than solely as Kurds, Sunnis or Shias. They want an Islamic nation, but a modern one, not a theocracy. Even the main theocrats (the "moderate" Shia leaders) prefer stability to al-Sadr's Mahdi Army or Iranian intrigue. No, Iraq is not about to become Sweden on the Tigris, but it could become the fairly open, prosperous and educated society which, once upon a time, it was. If it did, it would set an example that changed the shape of the region. And the coalition attacks on Afghanistan, and then on Iraq, not to mention missions in the Philippines, and gentler tactics in Libya and Pakistan, have made a difference. If you are Yemen, Syria, Iran, you have been given pause for thought. All these warnings against "setting the Muslim world ablaze" ignore the fact that the fire was burning fiercely before anyone thought of the war against terrorism (and that there have actually been fewer terrorist attacks since September 11 than in the preceding years).'

All true -- but disaster still looms unless the Americans now learn from their mistakes, and start listening to the voices of British military experience and pragmatism.

Posted by melanie at May 11, 2004