Losing the peace

Even as evidence of dissimulation by the U.S.-U.K. war lobby mounts and the demand for public investigations into the claims made as justification for the war strengthens, war-ravaged Iraq slips further into chaos.

IT could have been a case of miscued timing. Or perhaps the pressure of public interrogation had become just a little too intense, even for a formidably thick-skinned public personality.

Late May, just as United States President George Bush was preparing for a visit to Europe and meetings with several world leaders who had opposed the war on Iraq, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld unburdened himself of an astonishing comment. After Vice-President Dick Cheney - who was constrained from putting in too many public appearances because reasons of state demanded that he remain under camouflage for much of the period after the 9/11 attacks - Rumsfeld was the one individual who boasted absolute certitude that Iraq was in possession of lethal weaponry that could threaten U.S. security and imperil world peace. But here he was telling a foreign affairs conclave in New York that Iraq's stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) probably would never be found. Without retreating from his insistence that such an Iraqi arsenal existed, Rumsfeld said that all incriminating evidence could well have been destroyed just prior to the U.S.-led war.

It was, of course, a curious assertion that could perhaps enter the annals of military history as the "Rumsfeld doctrine", that a country threatened with "shock and awe" bombardment - which would, in Rumsfeld's own words, be an assault of a "scale and magnitude never seen before" - should choose to destroy its means of counterattack just on the verge of the outbreak of war. But this was by no means the only outlandish statement or suggestion to emerge from the U.S. administration as the celebration of the victory in Iraq gave way to fatigue and despair.

At roughly the same time that Rumsfeld authored the theory that Iraq would rather suffer immolation by U.S. bombs than be discovered in breach of U.S.-mandated law, a rival interpretation was put out on the elusive WMD. Iraq, it was definitively stated by intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom, maintained its entire stocks of WMD in the immediate precursor stage, ready for assembly and deployment at short notice. This, unfortunately, did not quite mesh with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair's assertion in September 2002, that Iraq could launch its lethal weapons against targets over a fairly expansive range at 45 minutes' notice. Neither did it relieve the U.S. and U.K. of the onus of finding the facilities that could have been used to manufacture and store the WMD precursors.

On May 28, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) decided to take the bull by the horns. With its analysis ostensibly complete, the CIA posted a report on its website, saying that two mobile trailer units discovered in Iraq by U.S. forces constituted the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare programme".

The CIA findings, it was immediately apparent, were timed to afford the maximum political spin. In an interview timed to be the curtain-raiser to his visit to Poland, Bush told a television channel from that country on May 30, that the sceptics had simply not been "paying attention". Bush said: "You remember when (Secretary of State) Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, `Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons'. They're illegal. They are against the United Nations' resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we will find more as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

Weapons experts who got the opportunity to review the CIA analysis soon pronounced it altogether too infirm to stand scrutiny. Neither of the trailers had revealed any traces of biological pathogens. That apart, both were lacking in vital pieces of equipment that are required for culturing lethal germs - like steam sterilisation equipment and vacuum pumps. And as this barrage of sceptical comment intensified, the theory that the trailers were mobile weapons laboratories held the field, increasingly tenuously, only because no credible alternative hypotheses were available.

Early in June, the British media reported on the basis of intelligence findings that the trailers were basically used to fill hydrogen balloons to assist in gathering target information for Iraqi artillery. There was nothing proscribed about this activity and, most embarrassingly, the equipment was modelled closely on a system that had been sold by the U.K. in the 1980s.

Evidence of dissimulation by the war lobby was mounting, but world opinion had drawn its inferences much before. As Bush flew into Europe, he was greeted by a torrent of outraged comment over the war of deception. The Daily Express in the U.K. chose a most graphic headline for its report: "Just Complete and Utter Lies." The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany wrote that the "charge of deception is inescapable". U.S. credibility is "as rare as a WMD in May", said Le Monde in France. And the veteran chronicler of wars, Max Hastings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph in the U.K., that the week preceding Bush's visit to Europe had been remarkable for the kind of "diplomatic folly" that even exceeded the usual standards of his administration. Hastings said: "The struggle against terrorism and the management of the world look harder today than they did a week ago, thanks to Washington's frightening surge of unforced errors."

Meanwhile, The Guardian in the U.K. obtained what it claimed was the transcript of a meeting between Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in a New York hotel in February. Just before Powell went before the U.N. Security Council to make the case for war, he is revealed as expressing the worry that the facts when they emerged would perhaps "explode" in his face. Straw responds with equal scepticism about the evidence that he had been given on Iraq's WMD programmes. The U.S. media reported an angry outburst by Powell at an intelligence briefing, when he allegedly flung aside a paper prepared with generous inputs from the office of Cheney and vowed never to read out its tenuous and tendentious findings in public.

Loyal soldiers both, Straw and Powell soon issued the expected denials. The alleged meeting in New York had not taken place, they said. And neither of them had ever entertained the slightest doubt about the quality of the intelligence they were supplied.

Yet the pressure of public interrogation would just not abate. Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector overseeing the disarmament of Iraq, told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that his teams had diligently followed up intelligence inputs received from the U.S. and the U.K. but found most of it worthless. He said: "I thought - My God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?"

With a political storm brewing, the U.S. Senate announced that its foreign relations and intelligence committees would begin a joint inquiry into the Bush administration's case for war. Blair faced a strong demand from the British Parliament for a judicial inquiry into the case for war that he had so ardently made. Clare Short, a senior Cabinet Minister who quit in disgust at Blair's dog-like devotion to the U.S. diktat, charged that he had been misleading the British Cabinet for several months after arriving at a secret understanding with Bush that war in Iraq would be launched no later than March.

Blair successfully managed to ward off the demand for a judicial inquiry and, in a grand gesture of accountability, conceded an inquiry by the security and intelligence committee of Parliament. The British Prime Minister normally retains some discretionary powers over the deliberations of this committee and could conceivably withhold its report. But Blair has already been forced by public pressure to waive this privilege at least partly.

THIS is not quite the way it was to work out. The invading forces in Iraq were to be welcomed as liberators. And the fabric of daily life in the country - ruptured in the war of 1991, tattered through 12 years of a malevolent peace, and finally destroyed in 2003 - was supposed to mend under the invaders' ministrations, by the miracle of U.S. technological prowess. Iraq was then supposed to move rapidly towards democracy, sucking along all Arab societies in its slipstream of progress.

If matters had really worked out in accordance with the most hopeful scenarios written in Washington, the questions that followed would have been relatively subdued. But the furious interrogation now under way for the very reasons for the war is an index of how the deluded prognosis of the U.S. has been found out by the rest of the world, and how the aggressor countries in Iraq are going to be held accountable for their crimes.

The collapse of civil order in Iraq and the evident inability of the invading forces to deal meaningfully with the task they have on hand are only the surface symptoms. Winning sides get to write the histories of war, at least in the early phases. Yet there can be few precedents for the current situation, of the winning side fighting desperately to justify a war that has long since been declared won.

The mood of public questioning has not spared the war-time leaders who should, in the normal course, have been basking in the glow of victory. On May 30, the actor Sean Penn took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, explaining why he was and continued to be a principled dissenter on the war. Disregarding opinion polls, Penn ridiculed the nation's commander-in-chief for his simulation of military machismo in taking a co-pilot's seat in a naval jet and landing in a blaze on the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln on May 2. Evidently, Bush liked the trappings of military service much better now, wrote Penn, than in the early-1970s, when he was a volunteer in the Texas Air National Guard and "simply failed to show up for duty for over a year in wartime". Penn said: "I certainly wouldn't want to remind him that were he AWOL in a time of war, it would amount to treasonous desertion."

In the month following Bush's ringing "mission accomplished" declaration from the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln, U.S. troops were dying in Iraq at the rate of one every day. Early June brought more attacks on U.S. military personnel in the towns of Fallujah and Tikrit.

After a sequence of such incidents, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, Lt-General David McKiernan, announced that the occupying forces intended moving from peace-keeping to combat mode. The attacks against U.S. forces, he claimed, were more accurately described as "combat" rather than "crime". They were no longer amenable to police action but needed appropriate military counter-measures.

Thomas White, a former Brigadier-General in the U.S. Army who served until recently as Army Secretary in the Defence Department, could not have chosen a more appropriate time to speak out. Since retiring from service, White served a longish tenure as a top executive at the scandal-tainted corporation, Enron. This alone might have necessitated his early removal from positions of authority in government. But his dismissal, when it came, was the outcome of a bitter doctrinal battle within the Defence Department, pitting the top uniformed personnel in the U.S. Army against Rumsfeld.

White paid the price for endorsing the estimate made by General Eric Shinseki, the U.S. Army's chief of staff, that troops numbering "several hundred thousands" would be needed in Iraq to maintain the peace even if initial war aims were quickly achieved. With Rumsfeld insisting - as part of his project to sell the war - that the task could be achieved with minimal commitments of U.S. personnel, the professional military assessment was a serious inconvenience. Speaking out a month after his unceremonious ouster from the Defence Department, White accused Rumsfeld and his close advisers of being "unwilling to come to grips" with the magnitude of post-war obligations in Iraq. The war planners, he charged, showed little inclination to reckon with the "notion that we will be there a long time and may have to set up a rotation (of armed personnel) and sustain it for the long term".

The U.S. would like to relieve itself of a part of the burden by inviting armed contingents from friendly countries - including India - into the political minefield that it has sown in Iraq. Few countries have shown the slightest inclination to take on the responsibilities that the U.S. is trying to foist on them.

The reasons are not far to seek. The U.S. walked into Iraq on a trail of falsehood and deception, deluded into the belief that winning the peace would be the simpler part. It is now mired in political confusion and the putative leaders it had designated for post-war Iraq have proven every bit as incompetent as the more objective experts had predicted. The post-war viceregal team that had been nominated even prior to the war was disbanded after a month of growing chaos and anarchy in Iraq. The new team, led by former diplomat Paul Bremer, has made little headway in restoring basic services in the country. Apart from issuing sweeping edicts disbanding the armed forces and barring all members of the former ruling party from positions of authority, Bremer has been clueless about the political processes and institutions he would like to foster in Iraq.

Ahmed Chalabi, the shadowy financier and right-wing ideologue who was favoured by the U.S. Defence Department as the future leader of Iraq, has now decisively fallen out of favour. And the U.S. has abandoned plans to put in place a transitional government, preferring rather to exercise direct rule for the indefinite future, though with the fig-leaf of an "advisory council" made up of Iraqi nationals.

Even if vassal governments were to step in to fill the vacuum in administration that its invasion has created, the U.S.-U.K. axis is going to face a long and hard slog in Iraq, lasting well into the future.