Colossus (32 page)

The question nevertheless remains: What was in it for Britain? It is easy to see why President Bush went so far to meet Blair’s requests for a United Nations mandate for war. Having Britain on board lent credibility to the American claim to be leading a coalition against Saddam and ensured that U.S. troops would be reinforced by a substantial British contingent, which, though rather less numerous and much less well equipped than their American counterparts, proved to be rather better at the constabulary duties that swiftly fell to the victorious invaders. But why exactly did the British prime minister risk his political life for a plan of action against Iraq that was designed in Washington with American needs primarily in mind? From a narrowly British vantage point, the costs of backing the United States were immediately obvious: Britain incurred a share of the costs of the war and the subsequent occupation, while at the same time becoming the Islamist zealots’ third-favorite target after Israel and the United States. But if the spoils went, as they traditionally do, to the victor, what share would the victor’s spear-carrier get? It seemed highly unlikely, to give just one example, that British oil companies would secure a significant role in the postwar reconstruction of the Iraqi oil fields. And the next time President Bush should feel the need to raise an import tariff for domestic political reasons, British exporters certainly would not be exempted, since all of Britain’s trade negotiations must be conducted through the European
Union. In war and peace there may be “old” and “new” Europe. In trade there is only Brussels. The benefits to Britain of the special relationship seemed strangely intangible in 2003.
⁷⁸

Of course, nearly all British prime ministers since the war have been seduced by the idea of a special relationship with the United States, a relationship personified in its strange mixture of affection and mutual disappointment by Winston Churchill. At the time of the coup in Iraq that ended British rule there, the eighty-three-year old statesman, now retired, was tempted to make a speech on the subject of the Anglo-American role in the Middle East. His notes survive and seem quite prescient forty-six years later:

America & Britain
must work together,
     reach
Unity
of purpose.
The complications which the problem presents
     can be cured if & only
if
,
          they are dealt with by united forces
& common principles
     not merely increase of strength.
When we divide we lose.
⁷⁹

Churchill’s point, which he decided in the end not to make, was that in precipitating the first American expedition to Lebanon, the 1958 coup in Baghdad might be an intimation of some future American Suez crisis. “It wd. be too easy to mock USA,” Churchill toyed with saying. “This is not time for our trying to balance a long account. The accounts are balancing themselves.”
⁸⁰
But
do
the accounts of the special relationship balance?

Not all prime ministers have automatically assumed that they do. Harold Wilson wisely resisted all pressure from the Americans to send even a token force to Vietnam. “Be British,” pleaded one American official when the foreign secretary George Brown went to Washington in January 1968. “How can you betray us?”
⁸¹
Dean Rusk would have settled for “just one battalion of the Black Watch.” “When the Russians invade Sussex,” he grumbled when this too was denied, “don’t expect us to come and help you.”
⁸²
Yet even Wilson was not wholly immune to American blandishments. “The ceremonies of welcome went far beyond anything I have had before,” he told Barbara Castle, one of his cabinet ministers, after a visit to Washington in 1975.
⁸³
That may give us a clue to why so many premiers
have clung to the special relationship, even when its fruits have been so hard to pick. In the end it is simply more pleasant to visit the White House (or even Crawford, Texas) than the Élysée Palace, much less the German Federal Chancellery. Given the choice between Brussels and the Beltway, most British prime ministers opt for the latter. The only authentic exception to this rule was Edward Heath, who relished telling Richard Nixon that from now on he would have to deal with all nine members of the European Economic Community as one.
⁸⁴
Even Tony Blair, who once appeared instinctively to prefer Tuscany to Texas, proved unable to resist the allure of the special relationship.

So who won? One answer is that Clausewitz did. The United States once again pursued its political goals through war, one that its colossal economic and military superiority ensured was swift and cost few American lives: just ninety-one combat-related fatalities between the start of the war on March 20 and President Bush’s declaration of victory on the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln
six weeks later. This was a different war from those fought in the 1990s. After much talk of “shock and awe,” the preliminary air bombardment was short and selective, and much more of the fighting was left to highly mobile ground forces, which swept toward the main cities, encountering only desultory resistance. Saddam was toppled. After a nine-month manhunt he was found skulking in a “spider hole.” As it turned out, he had been bluffing: initial searches found little, if any, trace of weapons of mass destruction or even facilities to make them. But more fool Saddam. Had he simply told the truth to the inspectors instead of duping the CIA, he might have survived to a ripe old age amid the gaudy comforts of his numerous repulsive palaces. Even his conventional weapons proved virtually useless, for most of the men armed with them simply fled rather than fight.

The war against Iraq therefore ended up being much more a war of humanitarian intent than anyone had anticipated. In the absence of conspicuous piles of WMD, attention turned to the second stated aim of the coalition, the liberation of the Iraqi people from tyranny. Here it became apparent within a very short time that not only Clausewitz but the United States had won. They might have reservations about President Bush, but
when asked in June 2003 about the consequences of the war in Iraq, fully three-quarters of French, Italian and German respondents to the Pew Global Attitudes survey agreed that the Iraqi people were better off without Saddam Hussein.
⁸⁵
Even more striking, ordinary Iraqis seemed to share the same view. The first rigorously conducted poll of Baghdad, published in September last year, revealed that 62 percent of Baghdad residents believed “the ousting of Saddam Hussein was worth any hardships they might have personally suffered since the … invasion.” Moreover, two-thirds (67 percent) believed that Iraq would be somewhat (35 percent) or much (32 percent) better off five years from now than it was before the American action. Support for the regime change was especially strong in poor areas of the city.
⁸⁶
The only consolation for the opponents of the war was that the most popular Western politician in Iraq was none other than Jacques Chirac.
⁸⁷

There is no gratitude in international affairs; as the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. In 2003 the United States went to war against a regime that had repeatedly broken international law, repeatedly defied the United Nations Security Council and—according to the organization Human Rights Watch—repeatedly murdered its own citizens, perhaps as many as three hundred thousand of whom Saddam caused to be executed and interred in mass graves. Most European governments supported the American decision to overthrow Saddam. Most rational people in Europe and in Iraq itself welcomed the fact that he was gone. Yet a great many of the same people complained that the United States had acted “unilaterally”; that it, rather than Iraq, was the “rogue nation.” This was nonsense. Already before 9/11 it was obvious that the United Nations was too weak an institution to deal effectively with renegade states engaged in military aggression and/or genocide. Bosnia and Kosovo had shown that American military leadership was the only effective solution to such challenges. Afghanistan had shown that the United States could achieve
military
success more or less single-handedly. But there was never any intention to act in complete isolation, there or in Iraq. There was a role for the UN—and indeed for NATO and all the other components of the international community—after the tyranny had been overthrown. That role was to assist in the very different task that turned out to be the inevitable concomitant of regime change: precisely that nation building of which President Bush and his closest advisers were so suspicious.

Asked at a press conference during the Afghan War what the United States would do after the Taliban were overthrown, Secretary Rumsfeld gave a revealing answer. “I don’t think [it] leaves us with a responsibility to try to figure out what kind of government that country ought to have,” he declared. “I don’t know people who are smart enough from other countries to tell other countries the kind of arrangements they ought to have to govern themselves.”
⁸⁸
This was also the president’s view. “I oppose using the military for nation-building,” he told a meeting of his National Security Council three days after Rumsfeld’s statement, “Once the job is done, our forces are not peacekeepers. We ought to put in place a U.N. protection and leave….” He was notably sympathetic to his secretary of state Colin Powell’s notion of a “UN mandate plus third country forces ruling Kabul.”
⁸⁹
Like the dichotomy between unilateralism and multilateralism, however, this distinction between U.S. regime change and UN nation building was a chimera. In practice, the United States simply could not walk away from Afghanistan or from Iraq the moment the obnoxious regime it was fighting was no more.

Even before the invasion of Iraq, what Michael Ignatieff has called “a distinctive new form of imperial tutelage called nation building”—“Empire Lite” in his witty coinage—was already under way in at least three countries.
⁹⁰
In each case it was American military intervention, though at no stage positively requested by the United Nations, that made nation building (to be precise, state building) by the UN possible. In each case it was the United Nations that gave the American presence international legitimacy and thereby reinforcements. The goals of both parties had certainly changed over time. In the Balkans the objective had been humanitarian: to halt genocide and an exodus of refugees. Ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan had obvious humanitarian benefits, but these were, as economists say, “externalities.” The main object had been to “root out” terrorists and their sponsors. The fundamental tendency, however, was imperialism in the name of internationalism. Whether they liked it or not, and whether the enemy was genocide or terrorism, the United States and the United Nations were now operating together as a kind “semi-empire.”
⁹¹
This was also bound to be true in Iraq, despite the UN’s skepticism about the American rationale for regime change. Regime change and nation building were not after all distinct activities, as President Bush had hoped.
The one shaded inevitably into the other, and while the United States might be capable of unilateral (or at least UN-less) regime change, it was not capable of nation building on its own. Nor, unfortunately for Bush and Rumsfeld, was the United Nations. By the end of 2003 it was an ineluctable reality that to reconstruct Iraq the United States and United Nations must put aside differences and unite.

PART II

FALL?

Chapter 5

The Case for Liberal Empire

Imperialists don’t realize what they can do, what they can create! They’ve robbed this continent [Africa] of billions, and all because they are too shortsighted to understand that their billions were pennies, compared to the possibilities! Possibilities that must include a better life for the people who inhabit this land.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, 1943
¹

It would be ignorant, dangerous nonsense to talk about grants of full self-government to many of the dependent territories for some time to come. In those instances it would be like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account, and a shot-gun.

HERBERT MORRISON, 1943
²

NO TO EMPIRE?

Nation-states are a novelty compared with empires, for there have been empires since the beginning of written records. Colonization—the establishment of new settlements by large and organized groups of migrants— is of course a process that predates recorded history. Civilization—the emergence of complex social structures with urban centers—can be traced back to the fourth millennium before Christ. Empire, however, denotes something more sophisticated still: the extension of one’s civilization, usually by military force, to rule over other peoples. It is one of history’s truisms that empires rise and fall. One less commonly understood implication is that there are periods in history in which there is no dominant empire,
indeed sometimes no empire at all. In the 1990s the world faced this possibility. To put it starkly, the choice after the collapse of the Soviet Empire was between a world of independent nation-states, some but not all of them democracies, and an American
imperium
. Those opponents of the Bush administration whose slogan in 2003 was “No to Empire” took it for granted that the former was and remains a viable world order. Ironically, this was also the view of President Bush himself and indeed of most of his most senior advisers. As we have seen, though willing to use American military power to effect changes of government in rogue regimes and failed states, they had little appetite for “nation building,” a euphemism for a new kind of “multilateral empire” in which the United States and United Nations together took over and ran countries in the aftermath of regime changes. In theory, this imperialism of internationalism could last indefinitely in countries palpably incapable of stable self-rule. But as far as Bush was concerned, the American presence in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq was no more than a temporary expedient; this was not nation building in the Clintonian sense but merely an interim, provisional form of administration, paving the way back to self-government for the countries in question.