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April 4, 2004
REVIEWS: Appointment in Samarra
There is something sad about this book. William Shawcross made his name with one of the greatest pieces of journalism, Sideshow, about the destruction of Cambodia by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. He has written some of the most committed writing on the revolutions that toppled communism in Eastern Europe. One does not have to follow Shawcross’ trajectory from the Left to the neoconservative Right to admire his moral tenacity.
I wish Shawcross could have passed through Samarra, where I’m reading his book, before submitting his manuscript. Samarra is but one piece in Iraq’s mosaic, close to the spider hole in which Saddam was captured. The twist is that, in the text I am reading, the resistance fighters for whom the Americans search are either ‘revanchists’ loyal to Saddam, or else international Islamic terrorists. Not so: those I met this morning feared, despised and despise Saddam; they are secular Muslims from the city, and that is why they are fighting.
Allies: The US, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq is a cuttings job, albeit an elegant one. It charts the ascent to power of the neoconservative conviction that “this is a time for a grand strategy to assert Pax Americana... that America must manage a unipolar world”.
William Shawcross notes the centrality of Israel in neoconservative strategy, and how officials now senior in the Bush Administration were contracted in 1996 by the now ruling Likud Party to write a blueprint for ripping up the Oslo peace accord and an Israeli border extending to the river Jordan, as though the Palestinians did not exist. “They believe that Israel will achieve peace,” writes Shawcross, “through a grand reordering of its environment, through overwhelming force. They want to see the entire Middle East transformed by democratization.”
Shawcross’ appraisal of Bush and Blair is uncomplicated. The author’s venom is reserved for the French, especially for Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who, unlike Bush and Blair, “plays to the gallery of the world”. A visit to Baghdad by Jacques Chirac in 1974, during which he met “Vice-President Saddam Hussein”, is described, but Donald Rumsfeld’s trip to help furnish President Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons is not. There is a cursory acknowledgment that the United States refused to topple Saddam after the 1991 war, but Shawcross shies away from the cynicism with which Kurdish and, especially, Shiite uprisings were betrayed. I wish he could have seen the Shiite mass graves excavated during the course of this year.
Shawcross points out that “it is important to remember that in November 2002, there was a widespread conviction that Saddam had WMD”. But not everybody has been surprised that the search for such weapons has been fruitless. I wish I could have taken Shawcross to many places. I wish he could have accompanied me on a month-long inquiry into how many civilians were killed by the war’s “brilliant success”. I wish Shawcross could have been with us in Fallujah, to talk to some of those who had demonstrated outside a school, demanding that the Americans vacate it for studies to begin. The Americans opened fire, killing 18.
To wish for Shawcross’ company on such occasions is to expose oneself to some charge of sympathy with Saddam Hussein. However, I am pretty sure I loathe Saddam more than Shawcross does, having had the accursed honour of seeing so much of his butchery at first hand. But this is how Shawcross’ book becomes useful, and challenging.
Along with his neocon politics, Shawcross’ eagerness for invasion is also rooted in the most compelling section of the book, where he discusses betrayal of the persecuted in Bosnia and Rwanda by international design, Europe’s didactic negligence, and what Shawcross calls the “complicity” of the UN. This is the moment after which Blair led the Americans into Kosovo, calling it “the first progressive war”. I think it is incumbent on those of us who agree with Shawcross on Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo, but who dissent on Iraq, to concede that we have a case to answer.
The argument will develop as America’s intentions in Iraq play out. But it has to rest on foundations. One is simple: that the world is far more dangerous after America’s invasion. Argument two is that interventions into Bosnia and Rwanda would have been into the eye of a hurricane. The racist genocide was ongoing; intervention on a Monday would only have spared slaughter on a Tuesday.
It is brutal but true to say that the very worst of what was happening in Iraq was over. That had happened while Iraq was America’s ally, and after America refused to go to Baghdad in 1991, for reasons of “realpolitik”. Yes, the regime of terror remained, but the genocide had abated, and the regime was set to totter, with Iraq remaining part of Arabia.
This is the hub of the wheel — do we really mean to ‘free’ Iraq? Shawcross does find the selection of Halliburton and Bechtel for the initial bonanza of reconstruction contracts to be “neither proper nor wise”. But he stays clear of the lucrative advantages to America’s enterprise as a central motive for invasion. But it does matter that this is a US administration in a relationship of perpetual motion with the energy industry.
All empires entwine commercial with geopolitical interests. The crucial argument is the simple fact of a strategic foothold at the core of a region pivotal to this ‘Pax Americana’ in a ‘unipolar world’. As Shawcross writes, this is a regional, not a local, enterprise, and one that is global indeed.
Some who routinely attack everything America does may dig and delve to find such strategic US interests in the Balkans or Rwanda, but they do not really convince. These could and should have been interventions of principle, and that is almost certainly why they did not happen.
Bosnia bore more relation to Spain in the 1930s than to Iraq. Sarajevo was, I believe, the Madrid of our generation. Guernica and Srebrenica even rhyme on paper. And if there is one group of people less worthy of intervention on principle than Muslims without oil, it would be a tribe faced with obliteration in the heart of post-colonial francophone Africa.
So why not Baghdad? Do we ‘Europeans’, and other targets of Shawcross’ scorn, really wish Saddam were still there? It would be perverse to say so.
But Iraq is something other than “humanitarian intervention”, let alone “progressive war”. Iraq is an act of arrogance and of empire, as Shawcross’ friends in Washington readily proclaim. For all the joy and relief at liberation among many Iraqis, there is so little, if anything, that is honest about America’s invasion. — Dawn/Observer News Service
Allies: The US, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq
By William Shawcross
Atlantic Books. Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026
Email:
libooks@cyber.net.pk
Website:
www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 1-84354-257-9
261pp. Rs1,185
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