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April 9, 2003
The
Anglo-American Way of War
Winners
& Losers
It's
a good thing that this war is coming to an end soon as otherwise
I don't think the TV companies could have afforded to continue covering
it. Already several of the US networks have shipped home some of
their more expensive human resources, and just think where we would
be if this ratings-killer kept squatting on the airwaves for another
month. The flatulence
of most of the broadcast media was best caught by that absurd
fuss over what the Anglo-American military brass expected would
happen. Or rather, what they hoped would happen. Of the war,
British and American generals obviously hoped that Iraq would fold
even quicker than it in fact did, with still less loss of life on
both sides, and preferably shunted in this direction by immediate,
popular uprisings. Things didn't pan out like that, but what so
much of the press weren't capable of coping with was that essential
distinction between what the Western military ideally hoped would
happen, and what they realistically were prepared
to cope with. In very large part – and this, of course, will
never be faced up to – the media lashed out at the military for
'their' [sic] faulty predictions because, in truth, they were shamed-faced
at their own predictive failings. Never mind the vatic utterances
of a Richard Perle, it was British and American TV that truly expected
a 'cakewalk', and gosh was there some displacement when they
didn't get one.
Now that we're on the way to our glorious
victory over a third world country, we'll just have to smile
and keep quiet about how bogus our claimed justification for this
war was: that Iraq somehow composed a clear and present danger to
the national interest of both Britain and America. If the progress
of the war proves nothing else, it demonstrates beyond contradiction
that the only thing Saddam's regime threatened was the people of
Iraq. So we went to war for them then? Well, there's one crude way
to go about proving that retrospective claim, and it's this: we
should count up how many of them we've killed. It shouldn't be too
difficult an exercise, now that we're running the place. No agreed
guestimate ever came out of the last Gulf War, or out of the assorted
NATO interventions on the Balkans, or out of the Anglo-American
demarche against the fearsome Afghani horde. We could, to the nearest
thousand, compute, over the next however many months it takes, the
number of military and civilian causalities incurred by Iraq during
its, ahem, liberation. I've no doubt that we've done our Christian
best to keep this as low as possible, but it would be interesting,
for informed, democratic debate, when next our electorates have
to sanction war, to have these numbers in the public square. Yet
you and I both know it's not going to happen.
It's unneeded knowledge because our governments both correctly appreciate
how much world-policing their publics are willing to bear, the calculus
being very simple – there are only so many heathens without the
law we're willing to kill. Keep the figure down and we'll fight,
wade us out too deep in gore and we won't. It's a measure of the
demerits of democracy that this question – 'just how many did we
kill in order to win?' – will assuredly go on being unasked. But
then that's hardly a novel development: democracies can't superintend
foreign policy the way they nominally mandate domestic policy because
the ship of state needs micro-management of the sort that not even
opinion polls, still less elections, can give. That said, when you
consider the guff being spouted by the clever, clever people running
the biggest boat of all, you do have to worry. And as ever, we're
back with the lies, inanities and delusions the rhetoricians of
the American right parade as the basis of a sane foreign policy.
But Before We Get to Them
If
you follow this war outside the United States you'll have found
the matter of Basra, Iraq's second city, million plus population,
blah, blah, to have been of at least passing interest. The British
claimed in the first few days of the war that it was about to fall
and it didn't which led to the inevitable orgy of media moaning.
The failing of the military this time being that, oh, they'd been
'over-optimistic', or, worse still, 'dishonest', when, naturally,
what they'd been doing, and what any fool even only marginally less
pompous than a Western hack could have seen they were doing, was
attempting to make a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, if
they claimed that Basra was about to rise against Saddam,
then it might very well do that. It, understandably, didn't. So
the British employed classic counter-insurgency techniques to slowly
envelop the city, and were mightily bummed by our own press for
doing so. When, inevitably, what we were doing was practising the
techniques of restraint and indirection any force of limited attacking
power has to do out of second-best necessity. Still, we did it very
well, and just in the nick of time, Basra fell. The urgency? Very
simply that the nightmare scenario for the British high command
was that the Americans might take Baghdad whilst Basra remained
in the regime's hands, and if one outcome couldn't be allowed to
happen, that was it.
As I say, that was all news in the unAmerican world. Our ever-helpful
friend Google News reminds us that it didn't make much of an impact
inside the US, but there you go. This, for what it's worth, never
tells me anything much about the American people, save to
remind one that to watch or listen or read it is to know that the
United States has the most inadequate, shallow press of any functioning
democracy. Call me a sap, but I really don't believe that the people
anywhere get the media they deserve. Seriously I'm not much of an
humanitarian, but the whole dead brown babies, etc, etc stuff always
seems marginally more morally pressing to me than journalistic near-misses,
or attacks on the Palestine hotel, but again, why at this point
expect any better from the press than self-obsession?
Why do I mention this disparity between what the two principal aggressors
have been seen to be up to? Well, always having subscribed to the
argument that 'I was only following orders' is a defence of sorts,
Britain was. She didn't start this fire. She didn't try to fight
it, but patsy not puppet-master is our status in this whole affair.
There is, though, the additional fact that Britain simply hasn't
been allowed to get up to all that much badness. Never mind the
fact that we've been cut out of the reconstruction work thus far
(it is American money, albeit soon, no doubt, to be subsidised by
the forthcoming government of 'Free Iraq'), there's the more traditional
stuff. You'll note that we've been dealing with Basra. We were left
that because we plain old weren't allowed to join in the race to
Baghdad. The institutional needs for prestige of the US army and
marine corps overrode even a modicum of basic alliance diplomacy,
and any British participation in this cherry. That was the most
galling insult we took like the obedient prison bitch we are, but
almost as bad was our eschewal of any role in running the place
we helped conquer. Jay
Garner's gang isn't slated to include any Britons at all. You'd
have to wonder other than an invisible glow quite what glittering
prizes we're going to get out of the killing and the shooting and
the fussing and the cursing.
Not only Britain not have any particular interest in taking part
in a war that self-evidently hasn't needed to happen, but now that
we have, we're not going to get anything out of above and beyond
what all those couch-potato nations are going to end up with anyway.
It's wearisome beyond belief to keep reiterating what an unnecessary
war this was from Britain's point of view, but the thing, the people
who mattered where it matters to matter, the teenage girlie pundits
screaming at mop-topped Dick and Rick and Paul and Jay couldn't
keep their line for killing straight if they tried. As Gerry
Templer said to Dickie
Mountbatten, seemingly every sincere fan-in-advance of the war
is also, 'so crooked that if you swallowed a nail you'd shit a corkscrew'.
This, as we can plainly see is every time demonstrated by the lies
they tell about the past to justify their coming mistakes.
Appeasement Was Right
You'll be familiar with
appeasement, which was the second most wicked thing ever.
It's poster boy Neville Chamberlain will naturally be to you the
figure of hate and contempt all eternity will surely know him as.
He's the villain so bad that even our beloved friend, fellow democrat
and all round good guy in the war against terror, 'General' Sharon
was adjudged to have gone too far when he briefly compared Neville
to Dubya last year. This, to be precise, is the orthodoxy if you've
wanted us to get into this war. Scoot off to National Review
or The Weekly Standard, or read that troupe of historians
who reach their risible low-point with Victor David Hanson and you'll
see why the appeasement of the 1930s is living history – in other
words, it's the very thing that teaches us why we have to act as
we've acted these last few weeks. Appeasement is wrong, it must
never happen. Bad, bad things will happen if you appease, or seem
to appease, or lay yourself open to the charge of appeasing.
Most of the criticism of Neville Chamberlain is painfully illiterate:
with especial scorn I remember a Chamberlain adduced by Rich
Lowry to buttress some sophomoric argument about current foreign
policy. This fantastical figure had apparently been convinced by
all sorts of contemporary progressives and radicals that utopian
peace was possible only by appeasement, and he had put all questions
of realism in the conduct of statecraft far behind him. Actually
Chamberlain
was close to being the most hard-headed politician on the go before
World War II, and more than any other, he was a sceptic about
what use the United States would be when it came to dealing with
fascist revanche. This truth cuts at the core of the Hansonite bluster
that stresses unique American virtue, justifying her present diplomatic
executions. For far from the United States having earned pre-emptive
rights from her World War II role, as if such a status could be
earned, the story is exactly the opposite to what the historians
of wars to come insist on preaching.
With every insult to the dead in France, whether by the French,
or by those in France who hate her and everything she stands for,
the Hansonites add their grisly, uncouth chorus. They damn French
failure to wage and win war because they ignore that unlike the
United States, the French had fought and died in their millions
long before the United States took to the field. With the fall of
France in 1940, her corpses dwarfed those the United States brought
with her from the Great War. And by May 1940 none had been added
because the United States, far from rushing to fight fascism, was
busy preparing to re-elect her president on the basis that he wouldn't.
The estimable Tom Fleming details all this perfectly clearly inside
The
New Dealer's War: FDR and the War Within World War II. In
January 1941 74% of Americans were against war with Germany; weeks
later, after the Placentia Bay summit and the Atlantic charter,
the figure was still 74%. Contrary to every insulting, ahistorical,
dumb French lie of the last year from cretinous sections of the
modern American 'right', the American people didn't want to 'do
their bit for freedom', and indeed their government promised them
that it wouldn't make them.
The United States didn't go to war for any of the nonsensical, teleological
grounds claimed for it by the third rate hacks National Review
wheels round behind the bugle today. The only reason why the United
States ended up involved in the Second World War was because she
was dragged there kicking and screaming by the Japanese.
And how do you know that when you're the grown-up world power
having to deal with global responsibilities (rather than blub about
them, and complain how unpopular you are, as would appear to be
the neocon motif)? Just this: you appease too. America stands now
where Britain stood before the Second World War, and just like Neville
Chamberlain, George
Bush wisely cuts his cloth. As purely one hugely pertinent example
think on China. Sure the US flew a spyplane within 200 miles of
the PRC's coast (a zone which if another country attempted to do
the same by the US, she'd shoot the plane out of the sky) and mewled
that this was an entirely legitimate thing to do. And absolutely
this aircraft rammed a buzzing Chinese fighter out of the sky, killing
its pilot, then landed, damaged, on of all things a Chinese military
airfield. And indeed, certain American right wing pundits became
outraged that the Chinese became just a touch miffed by all of this.
But what did the practical men and women who make up the US government
do? They ever so humbly kow-towed, they truckled out an apology,
and they didn't push their luck. That's not to say that the long
term policy of the United States toward China (to somehow deny her
even regional pre-eminence) isn't essentially lunatic – what it
is, unquestionably, is unavoidably appeasing in the short and medium
term. States appease when they have to, and they're right so to
do.
There is no special moral claim to right that enables the US to
wage war as Washington Times editorialists see fit. Much,
much more importantly, even after the aberration of 9/11, there
is no credible state of international relations that exists which
will allow any sensible American government to start fighting countries
that could fight back. Despite everything, the grim lesson of the
screeching people off-stage is this: America could be much worse
led than she is.
–
Christopher Montgomery
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