Allies:
The United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq
By William Shawcross
Public Affairs, 261 pages, $30
In the first issue of the new year of the London Review of Books -- an important organ of Britain's intelligentsia -- English writer Alan Bennett published excerpts from his diary for 2003. Bennett, who had included in the excerpts several passages expressing his distaste for the invasion of Iraq, ended with this passage: " 15 December. As I'm correcting the proofs of this diary, the news breaks of the arrest of Saddam Hussein. It ought to matter, and maybe does in Iraq; it certainly matters in America. But here? Whatever is said does not affect the issue. We should not have gone to war.
"It has been a shameful year."
This seems to me to stand as some kind of litmus test, and one applicable beyond Britain. The test is: Did you, whatever your views about the invasion of Iraq, rejoice in the capture of Saddam Hussein? Or did you take the Bennett view, and regard it, with infinite world-weariness, as a matter of no account? Or even -- a further possible position, though not Bennett's -- think that it was a pity he had been caught?
I think that on the first of these positions, there is the possibility of rational debate among the liberal-minded. I mean liberal with a European small rather than a Canadian large "L," to include conservatives and social democrats as well as Liberals. The others tend to lie outside of the scope of what should be termed "liberal," suppressing or denying the real human horror that was the Baath regime in Iraq, preferring to confine the debate to the alleged horror of U.S. military hegemony. The latter debate is an important, indeed a critical one, for us all -- for the United States' northern neighbour as crucially as any -- but it can only properly take place if we first recognize that Saddam Hussein was a monster, and an exceptionally dangerous one. What to do about him -- placate, contain or confront -- is a real argument, not one that takes place on the grounds of U.S.A.-phobia, where all other actors are mere bit-players being jerked about by Uncle Sam's strings, and not even the arrest of a genocidal fascist "affects the issue."
Saddam Hussein was a tyrant on a scale at once epic and intimate: that is, his deliberate actions caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own and other peoples, and he took a sadistic delight, which he amply bequeathed to his two late sons, Uday and Qusay, in watching his enemies die. In this short, angry and principled book, William Shawcross reminds us of both these characteristics, writing: "Iraq was a wonderland for this gangster family. Max van der Stoel, the former UN special rapporteur for human rights in Iraq, had good reason to say that the brutality of the regime was 'so grave that it has few parallels in the years that passed since the Second World War.' "
The regime, Shawcross records, "gouged out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents. It fed people into huge shredders, feet first to prolong the agony, or into vats of acid. It forced prisoners to watch their wives, daughters and sisters being repeatedly raped by guards or having white hot rods jammed into them." He quotes the former New York police chief Bernard Kerik, brought in to train the Iraqi police force, as writing that there is a tape of Saddam "sitting and watching one of his military generals being eaten alive by Dobermans because the general's loyalty was in question."
Once we accept that the end of a rule of this kind is an advance for humanity -- an idea that meets a surprising amount of resistance among otherwise apparently good-hearted people -- we can get down to debate the pesky business of U.S. power. British writer and broadcaster Shawcross, who three decades ago wrote Sideshow, an indictment of the United States' largely covert war in Cambodia, now has little doubt about U.S. power. "American commitment and American sacrifice are essential to the world. As in the 20th century so in the 21st, only America has the power and the optimism to defend the international community against what really are the forces of darkness."
He goes further still: His book embraces much of the foreign-affairs position of the group known as neoconservatives -- a group which, as he reminds us, has been most distinguished for seeking "moral clarity" in foreign affairs. Shawcross writes that "hard questions have to be asked of the region [the Middle East]in which most of the current governments fear a successful democratic experiment in their back yard. It may not be comfortable diplomatically or economically, given the West's (and Asia's) dependence on Middle East oil, but the practical and moral question that demands an answer is this: Can we afford to do business with these obsolescent polities that rule through repression?"
Is that not precisely one of the largest of the questions that now face us, as we seek some sort of international order? Realpolitik, that school represented most prominently for more than three decades by Henry Kissinger, would give an almost contemptuous answer: We must do business with these polities; if they honour the contracts, the rest is their business.
Yet even in its own terms, that is no longer enough. The obsolescence of a number of states -- by which is meant, above all, the suppression of all independent political activity and much social change, especially in the status of women -- breeds terror. Terror has been put at the service of an extreme Islamism -- Shawcross describes it as "a minority nothing can assuage" -- that posits the Islamization of all societies through destabilization; it's a religious equivalent of fascism, or communism in its Soviet form. Doing business with such states means underpinning their regimes and thus, even implicitly, conniving at further suppression.
For the moment, in most countries of the West but particularly in the United States and Britain, the main partners in the Iraqi invasion, the political debate revolves around the existence (or not) of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It may be that his WMD stocks were largely destroyed before the war (though no major secret service seems to have thought so), and it seems that some of the claims made by the British and U.S, governments to support their joint invasion rest on slim bases. On this, the apparatus of criticism largely rests, and insofar as the case is proved, or partly proved, the legions of the indignant are likely to conclude that they are right.
But Shawcross again puts the case well: "Intelligence was wrong -- Saddam's WMD ambitions were an inevitable threat rather than an immediate one." Yet inevitable threats must be dealt with, too: When they have materialized, as it seems North Korea's nuclear-weapons capability has, the crisis caused is much more dangerous than the crisis looming. We can face up to such threats; we can debate them reasonably. But we cannot wish them away or take refuge in cynicism. The governments of the United States and Britain did not do so, and it makes at least this reviewer -- with Shawcross -- glad to be a citizen of the latter.
John Lloyd, a former editor of the New Statesman, is editor of the FT Magazine.