LONDON, 23 December 2003 — The year began with a world bracing for a conflict that, for all the maneuvering at the United Nations, we knew was all but inevitable. The year’s symbolic, if not calendar, conclusion came on Dec. 13, when Saddam Hussein, the man against whom this most personal of wars was fought, was hauled, disoriented and disheveled, from a “spider’s hole” at a remote farm near his home town of Tikrit. Future historians may remember 2003 as a hinge year, the point of transition from one era to another.
The war with Iraq confirmed much that we already knew: The overwhelming, irresistible military power of the United States, the enduring instability of the Middle East — and the fact that the war against terrorism and downfall of Saddam, contrary to the insistence of the Bush administration, are rather different things.
It also seemed to bear out many things we half suspected. Europe, as personified by the “Old Europe” derided by Donald Rumsfeld, may be at a parting of the ways with the US. The opposition of the French and German governments to the war not only reflected public doubts across the continent, it underlined how, without the glue of a common Soviet foe and the Cold War to bind them, Europe and the US now see the world in different ways. The debate over a new constitution for an expanded European Union only underscored Europe’s inward-looking mood.
Simultaneously, America’s eyes were turning westward. The trans-Atlantic relationship, once the pivot of US foreign policy, is being replaced by a new focus on the Pacific. The year 2003 was when China emerged incontrovertibly as the world’s new manufacturing powerhouse.
Both the US and Europe saw jobs and industries move to Asia; America’s prime argument with a China no longer Communist except in name is not over Taiwan, Tibet, or its military threat to the region — but over the exchange rate of its currency. This year may have marked the moment when the “partnership” between the US and China unmistakably became the world’s most important bilateral relationship, presaging the emergence of China as a fully-fledged superpower.
For the moment however, as Iraq demonstrated, the US remains supreme. The campaign to topple Saddam proved shorter and even easier than predicted. Despite the huge build-up of forces on the borders of Iraq the coalition still managed to produce and exploit an element of surprise, thanks to the speed of its actions.
A bare three weeks elapsed between the initial bombing of Operation Shock and Awe to destruction of the statue of Saddam, pulled down by a rope attached to a US armored vehicle in Firdousi Square, central Baghdad, on April 9. The aftermath has been messier. The Pentagon’s planning for the postwar was as abysmal as its battlefield strategy had been brilliant. The hard-edged neoconservatives who had conceived the war proved to be dewy-eyed optimists over its aftermath. Reconstruction would glide smoothly forward, they had argued, propelled by Iraq’s oil revenues and its people’s delirious welcome for the liberators. What they got was a low-level guerrilla war, countered in turn by hardball military tactics that have alienated the ordinary Iraqis they were meant to reassure. Thanks in good measure to the Pentagon’s determination to retain control itself, the US occupiers found themselves woefully short of genuine Iraq specialists and Arab linguists.
At the end of 2003 Iraq represents a race; between pacification, “Iraqification” and reconstruction, and a guerrilla insurgency that draws increasing support from popular resentment at a foreign invader fast outstaying his welcome. The current — precarious — plan calls for sovereignty to be transferred by June 30 next year to an elected transitional assembly and government, which will draw up a constitution. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority will then be dissolved. Whether Saddam’s capture will make this easier is an open question. But even assuming the smoothest of handovers, US troops are likely to remain in Iraq for at least two years.
But a war won by US military power has been followed by a state of neither war nor peace which has exposed the limits of that power. But if Iraq proves that even America’s writ runs only so far, it has been an even more wretched showcase for the world’s most important multilateral entities. It was somehow fitting that on the very day US forces captured Saddam, the European Union had again demonstrated its disunity by failing to agree upon a new constitution. The deal foundered on the arcanities of vote weighting in future European decision-making. But Iraq had already exposed another, even deeper cleavage — between Old Europe and the governments of “new Europe” so recently liberated from the Soviet Union, and instinctively more aligned with the power that did most to liberate them.
In the middle was the UK, tugged as usual between Europeanism and Atlanticism. Usually British governments have managed to have it both ways, but this time Tony Blair was forced to choose. To no one’s great surprise, Iraq proved that in the crunch, Britain invariably sides with the US, not with its partners across the Channel. Thus the Iraq crisis showed how Washington can keep Europe in its place by a policy, witting or unwitting, of “divide and rule”.
Whichever way you look at it, 2003 was also a disastrous year for the United Nations. Yes, the US was as determined not to allow the UN to stop a war with Iraq, as France was to prevent the world body from formally authorizing one. Rarely though has a breach been so bitter. Rarely has a diplomatic debacle been so complete.
Iraq has demonstrated the harsh truth that, for all its embodiment of international legitimacy, the UN is no more than the sum of its powerful member nations; if they can’t work together, the UN can’t function properly either. In the major crises of today, the organization is hardly a player. August’s suicide bombing at its Baghdad headquarters drove it from Iraq. As a member of the “Quartet” working for a settlement between Israel and Palestinians, the UN has had little impact. If the present lull in the violence does turn into a cease-fire that leads to real progress, it will be thanks to Israelis and Palestinians themselves, with the US and the Arab world playing a lesser role.
As it is, however, the Middle East remains desperately unstable. Having embarrassingly failed to unearth a single chemical shell of Iraq’s alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration now presents the invasion as stage one of a master plan to bring democracy and prosperity to the Middle East, with the new Iraq serving as model. But for all the fine phrases of the White House speechwriters, and Bush’s bluster against Syria and Iran, his administration has shown no sign it is prepared to exert serious pressure on its Middle Eastern allies to reform.
Herein lies the other great crisis of the Middle East, that festered as Iraq blazed: A crisis of populations denied political outlet by regimes which know only how to cling to power, sheltered by the US. Stir in frustration and anger at America’s perceived bias for Israel and you have the perfect recipe for radical Islam and the terrorism that springs from it.
In 2003, terrorism became a fact of life. For 27 months, Bush has protected his country from another major attack. Indeed, a repeat of Sept. 11, using aircraft as missiles, is inconceivable. But if old Al-Qaeda has suffered some heavy blows, the mother cobra has spawned a nestful of children. These deadly newcomers are perfectly capable of hitting “soft targets” — as the bombings in Riyadh, Casablanca and most recently Istanbul prove. Will a Minnesota shopping mall or a packed baseball stadium be next? Terrorism has moreover expanded out of its old strongholds in the Middle East proper to East Africa, South Asia and the sprawling nation-archipelagoes of Indonesia and the Philippines. At year’s end the most dangerous country in the world was not Afghanistan (where the Taleban is showing signs of regrouping). It was not Iran or candidate-members of the “Axis of Evil” such as Syria or Libya. Nor was it North Korea and its known nuclear ambitions. There is a rationality in the seeming irrationality of Kim Jung Il. Throughout 2003, hawks and doves in Washington waged an unresolved struggle over how to deal with President Kim. But the US and China have a common interest in a peaceful settlement on the Korean Peninsula. No one expects the dictator to be pushed over the brink into open war with the US — nor that the US will gratuitously start a conflict that would instantly engulf South Korea as well.
No, the distinction of most dangerous country belongs to an American ally — Pakistan. There, the brew is 100 percent proof: A despotic ruler, hugely powerful and semi-autonomous intelligence services, a porous border with regions of Afghanistan infested by the Taleban and Al-Qaeda renegades, a long-running conflict with India — and nuclear weapons to boot.
This month, only a radio jamming device may have saved the life of President Musharraf as a bomb exploded a few seconds too late on a bridge over which his motorcade was passing. Technically, Pakistan is an ally of the US in the war on terror. Had the ambush succeeded, Bush might today be facing a real Islamic bomb. As it is, he faces a global anti-Americanism unprecedented in recent history. November provided the remarkable spectacle of a US president unable to show his face in public during a visit to Britain, his country’s staunchest ally. But British froideur pales beside the dislike in other parts of the world — not just in Muslim countries where the negative rating of the US can reach over 80 percent, but among traditional friends like Mexico.
In Europe the animosity is personal, directed at the highhanded behavior of Messrs Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. In the Muslim world however, the resentment is at policies which long predate this president — at US support for Israel, and the grip it maintains on the region, seen as reflecting not a desire to spread Jeffersonian democracy but to secure strategic oil supplies. More than a new face in the Oval Office is required, if this state of affairs is to change.
And might not America be barking up the wrong tree? No sane person would disagree with George Bush and Tony Blair, that the greatest danger facing the world is weapons of mass destruction (above all nuclear weapons) coming into the possession of terrorist groups. But Saddam, as was evident even before the uranium-from-Niger fiasco, was never going to be that supplier. Far more ominous were the intermittent, albeit fragmentary, reports from Russia, about “loose nukes” and vanished nuclear materials. But the US policy apparatus has never been able to focus on more than one foreign crisis. In 2003 that was Iraq.
And there is another, more subtle threat to US hegemony — not military, but economic. China’s emergence as a global industrial colossus is the flip side of a fascinating question: How long can the world’s biggest debtor nation continue as its unchallenged master? The Cold War ended a dozen years ago. The three competing powers of that period — the US, Russia in its Soviet guise and its Communist rival China — are now partners, drawn together by the common enemy of terrorism. But this will not always be. As 2003 ends, the dollar is in free-fall. For the moment, that decline reflects America’s rebounding economy. But if the foreigners who finance the immense US external deficit suddenly decide they’ve had enough, they will lay bare a vulnerability that all the Pentagon’s prowess on the battlefield and all the swagger of this White House can no longer conceal. For the British government the struggle to reconcile global politics and war with growing dissent at home came together in the tragic figure of David Kelly. On a Thursday afternoon in July, the government scientist left his Oxfordshire home, walked to a nearby wood, lay on the ground, and killed himself. This lonely tragedy escalated almost at once into a crisis which even now threatens Tony Blair’s grip on power.
While it can never be possible to know the full truth of what would drive a tough and talented man to suicide, the immediate trigger in Dr. Kelly’s case is well established. He was, in effect, a casualty of the Iraq war. Two days before his death, he was hauled in front of the Foreign Affairs committee of the House of Commons, which had been conducting a long investigation into the case which the government presented to Parliament before involving British troops in the war.
A long line of witnesses had been before the committee, starting with the two Cabinet ministers, Robin Cook and Clare Short — who resigned because they opposed the war — and Tony Blair’s combative director of communications, Alastair Campbell. He had told them in blunt language they should be investigating the standard of journalism at the BBC.
Campbell was furious with Andrew Gilligan, defense correspondent for the Today program, for alleging on air that an intelligence services dossier on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction had been “sexed up” by Downing Street before being presented to Parliament. In an article for The Mail on Sunday, he named Campbell as the culprit. He also disclosed that this information was given to him over lunch in a London hotel, with someone high up in the intelligence services. The dossier had been presented to the Commons by Tony Blair in September 2002 — so the implication was that he or his staff had consciously misled Parliament to bolster the case for taking the UK to war, about as serious an allegation as the BBC could make. Dr. Kelly told his MoD line manager that he had lunched with Gilligan, although he disclaimed responsibility for comments which were attributed to him.
For as long as Dr. Kelly was alive, the BBC refused to say whether he was Gilligan’s main source. The government insisted he was, and intended to extract all the mileage it could out of the disparity between Dr. Kelly’s version of the conversation and Gilligan’s. Campbell saw this as a chance to “.... Gilligan”. The Foreign Affairs committee intended to treat him sympathetically and in fact concluded, erroneously, that he was not Gilligan’s source. What they overlooked was that he was not used to this sort of public cross examination. He evidently took it as a form of public disgrace.
The terms of the argument were transformed by Dr. Kelly’s death. Tony Blair immediately ordered a public inquiry. Lord Hutton, a veteran high court judge, was put in charge. The long-running Hutton inquiry shed fascinating light on the way government decisions are reached. The main actors nervously await his report, due in mid-January. As to why Tony Blair seemed so sure that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, that is not for Lord Hutton to answer.
