The strange condition of postwar Iraq makes the visitor wonder what America’s remarkable military victory was for. On the lawless roads, in dangerous, power-starved Baghdad, among the newly opened mass graves of Saddam Hussein’s victims or outside the great mosques of Najaf and Karbala, there is no sign of a bold new order. Here is no nascent Arab democracy giving light to a dark region, nor even a province in a new American empire. Here is just a mess, growing messier by the day. The liberal and the conservative can agree, if they have eyes to see, that thought did not play much part in this venture.

John Newhouse makes a brave attempt to explain and understand how this happened, how an American president devoid of curiosity about the world, allied with some leathery old pseudo-conservatives in search of an enemy whose evil would emphasize their virtue, attacked and invaded a country that was no threat to the United States and that nobody now knows how to manage. This useful book is packed with compelling little details showing just how many wise and experienced people warned others at one time or another that Iraqi regime change was needless at best, dangerous at worst. Perhaps the most persuasive warning of all came from Dick Cheney, before he became vice president, who in February 1992 wondered: “You’re faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq. Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Shia government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to have to leave there to keep it propped up, how many casualties are you going to take through the course of the operation?”

Newhouse details the urgent tasks that faced President Bush after September 2001 — in the Middle East, North Korea and Iran, not to mention Pakistan and India — and explains how the preoccupation with Saddam Hussein got in the way of tackling them, which it undoubtedly did. Newhouse is persuasive and thorough here, though some would challenge his optimism about Iran’s unconvincing reformers, and many would be more pessimistic about Tehran’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, especially in the light of recent revelations. His conventional belief that Israel rather than the PLO is the obstacle to a compromise in the Middle East can also be wearing. Most important of all, he does not quite grasp — as I suspect only conservatives can — the real nature of the neo-conservative or pseudo-conservative impulse. He almost does. “‘Conservative’ is the term normally applied to members of the Republican Party’s hard right. ‘Radical’ would be far more appropriate,” he says.

Regrettably, he does not follow this through, rapidly switching to standard default mode and speaking of the president as belonging to the “hard right.” Had he followed his instincts, he might have seen that the ideological drive for the Iraq war was something entirely new among the supposed right.

Many conservative Americans have accepted without question the support of Britain’s Labor government for the Iraq war, and have likewise welcomed the unexpected endorsement that regime change has won from a number of the more intelligent radical leftists in the United States. It is as if a group of well-known arsonists had joined the Fire Department, and everyone was too polite to comment on it. Newhouse frequently and rightly puzzles over what precisely drove Blair to behave as he did. If he is mystified by what the British prime minister hoped to gain, he can see the disadvantages of his position easily enough. He characterizes Blair’s loyalty to the war plan as an “overcommitment to the role of Washington’s junior partner.” He also believes that “Blair ran a serious risk of sacrificing himself to Bush’s war and becoming a tragic figure.”

He may well prove right about the tragedy, given the damaging aftereffects of the apparent suicide of the British weapons expert David Kelly. But what drove Blair was probably as ideological as the forces behind neo- or pseudo-conservatism. Blair’s government is a domestic failure in every field in which it pledged to be a reforming success. It is, by the way, a conservative’s nightmare, taxing and spending at unprecedented levels, politically correct, weak on crime and soft on terror when it is close to home. It has neglected the armed forces. Blair is frighteningly keen to dissolve British national sovereignty in the European Union, a passion that has survived the recent disagreements with France and Germany. During the Kosovo affair, he made a speech in Chicago in which he pledged himself to a sort of global liberal imperialism at Washington’s side. That the president then was Bill Clinton, and the president now is George W. Bush, has not altered that commitment at all.

What Blair has in common with the pseudo-conservative White House is a need for an ethical justification for their existence, and a contempt for the national sovereignty of countries other than the United States. American pseudo-conservatives, having lost or preferred not to fight the great cultural and moral battles over marriage, education and morality, and robbed of a genuinely evil empire by Mikhail Gorbachev, scan the globe for replacement Kremlins to confront and overthrow. In this they are egged on by ex-Marxist secular globalists who despise national sovereignty and conceal a loathing for all faiths in a scorn for Islam, and by liberal imperialists such as Blair, who view the non-European, non-American world as a kind of park where they can exercise their atrophied consciences.

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(Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday. He recently visited Iraq.)

— Arab News Features 25 September 2003