One week in, there is a lot of confusion about the US-UK war in Iraq, a sense of things not going to plan.
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The Iraqi regime does not appear particularly shocked or awestruck so far, and there has been little sign yet of the promised flower-throwing welcome from the Iraqi people. Military experts complain that coalition forces are getting overextended and bogged down, while media pundits wonder how such a widely despised dictator as Saddam Hussein could have won the early exchanges of the propaganda war against the combined might of the Washington-Whitehall spin machines.
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What's going on? The short answer is that this is what happens when our risk-averse Western societies try to go to war in the twenty-first century.
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The war against Iraq was not motivated by traditional concerns about pursuing the national interest, gaining a geo-political advantage, or securing economic assets. Indeed, by conventional standards, the Iraqi war is likely to be destructive of US-UK interests, leaving America more isolated and with less authority on the world stage, while Britain tries desperately to straddle the widening gap between the USA and the EU.
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President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair have been propelled into this 'pre-emptive' attack on Iraq primarily by the contemporary Western obsession with precaution and risk aversion. If, as Clausewitz suggested, war is the continuation of politics by other means, then this war is the projection of our fearful domestic political culture on to the world stage.
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Go back to Bush's national address of 19 March 2003, when he told Americans and the world that the war had begun. What reason did he give?
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'Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly - yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.'
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Mighty America and its allies were supposedly so terrified of finding themselves 'at the mercy' of Saddam's ruined, disintegrating state of Iraq, that they had to launch an all-out war in order to prevent the Iraqi bogeyman coming over and murdering us all in our beds. That was a depressingly clear statement of the Western elite's culture of fear.
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 | | We can expect the writs to start flying as soon as the bullets stop |
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The notion of a pre-emptive war of this kind applies to international affairs what conservative scientists would call the precautionary principle, or what your grandmother might call the doctrine of 'better safe than sorry'. As we pointed out on spiked months ago, the Bush-Blair campaign against Iraq appears to have been modelled on the government's precautionary response to the British foot-and-mouth debacle: 'Better to slaughter all of the beasts, just in case some of them have something nasty.'
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So began the world's first big risk-averse war. The trouble is, the risk-averse outlook driving them to war also inevitably distorts their military strategy. The same anxieties propelling them into the conflict tend to hold them back from seeing it through decisively. In his speech, Bush promised 'to apply decisive force…. [T]his will not be a campaign of half measures'. After the first week of the campaign, some exasperated military observers might well advise the president to go tell it to the Marines.
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What is now being called the Rumsfeld Strategy (after its architect, the alleged uber-hawk US defence secretary Donald H Rumsfeld) seems to have been designed to achieve victory with the minimum risk. Drop some awesome bombs on Baghdad from a safe height, send in a relatively light, fast column of ground forces from the south, hope that the Iraqi regime will collapse from shock and the people will come out to cheer their liberators.
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It sounds like wishful thinking, a fearful child's idea that if you cross your fingers, jump out from under the bedclothes and switch the light on quickly enough the demons will all disappear. But wishes don't win wars. Now there are high-level complaints that the coalition forces inside Iraq are too lightweight, over-extended, and reluctant to engage the enemy. Attempting a safe war seems to be a highly risky business (see The road to Basra, by Brendan O'Neill).
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Of course, the coalition forces should still win a military victory. (The comparative defence budgets are USA, $364 billion, Iraq $1.5 billion.) The problems and casualties encountered to date are on a very small scale, judged by any historical perspective. But when you signal your intention to pull off some sort of 'safe', low-risk conflict, small setbacks can easily be perceived as big problems.
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By the same token, the coalition's defensive emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties means that, when some do occur, what would once have been seen as an inevitable consequence of war can now cause an international outcry. And the past week has shown that Anglo-American attempts to play the victim, accusing the Iraqis of war crimes, leaves them open to the same allegations from the likes of Amnesty International (see Prey to their own propaganda, by Josie Appleton).
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So the US-UK military planners sit with official lawyers at their shoulders, warning them against bombing targets that, though strategic, could lay them open to the risk of future prosecutions for crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, the discussion already begins about possible legal cases in Britain after the war, in which soldiers and their families could sue the government for risking their lives, or perhaps seek compensation for the manufacturers of dodgy boots and rifles. We can expect the writs to start flying as soon as the bullets stop.
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Who is likely to benefit from such a bizarre war, a military offensive prosecuted as an exercise in risk-avoidance? The Iraqi people have been dragged into an unnecessary conflict and an uncertain future, in order to calm the nightmares of the Western elite. Yet the consequences of all this in the West will only be to intensify further the paralysing sense of anxiety. At home and abroad, the culture of fear is most corrosive and destructive of precisely those civilised standards that Bush and Blair claim to be defending. Risk-averse warfare turns out to be a mortal danger to us all.
Mick Hume is editor of spiked.
Read on:
spiked-conference: Panic attack
spiked-issue: War on Iraq
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