The no-win war

There is only one story, to be honest. Fire and brimstone and monstrous indignities. There are many casualties, not the least of which is the truth. It’s a war, after all. But this being the 21st century, and army chiefs having learned many a lesson from past conflicts, journalists are embedded with army units, and cameras are everywhere. Angles are chosen, firefights highlighted. The tekkies drool over the hardware. The armchair pundits settle in. It’s showtime.

And many people die. Just because it’s packaged and flossed for telly, in order to manipulate and fool the masses out there, to bring them onside, doesn’t mean it’s any less violent, any less barbarous. It isn’t.

This war throws up a range of fascinating confrontations. There is, for example, the question of morality. On one hand there are those opponents of war who question the morality of going to war in the first place, of expending vast amounts of weaponry and money on an issue that could have been resolved by peaceful means. And then there’s those proponents who point to the absolute immorality of Saddam’s regime.

You can call it any way you want, but for me there’s two undemocratically elected leaders going toe to toe. George owes it all to dubious (that’s Dubya’s) counts and electoral practices in his brother’s State of Florida. Saddam owes it all to violence, to his own murderous will and the fear he has engendered in the Iraqi people. You might sneer that at least he gets elected by a majority, but that would be to diminish his appalling record. He’s a bastard.

On any meaningful scale, Saddam is infinitely more horrible and despicable than George Bush who, for example, hasn’t been responsible for gassing tens of thousands of his own, or other people.

But is that it? Is that what it all comes down to?

The US and British coalition leaders and campaign managers would have you believe so, that it’s a straight fight between the decent and the diabolic, the humane and the beastly. Personalising the conflict, putting Saddam at the centre of the conflict and focusing on him rather than on Iraq, is smart PR. It drives a wedge between the different elements of Iraqi society, and between those who oppose the war.

I mean, who on earth would want to be seen as a Saddam partisan, as a henchperson of a war criminal and mass murderer? Not me.

But neither can I be a fellow traveller for a new empire, for the establishment of a pax Americana, for a world order in which every interaction is evaluated on whether or not it threatens America’s interests. And in which, if it does threaten those interests, it is considered legitimate to spend more on bombing and blasting it than would pay off the entire third world debt, and provide AIDS vaccines for all as well.

Because America is so closely identified with personal and corporate greed and avarice, with globalisation, with privatisation and with environmental degradation, this war is seen by many as between vast state-sanctioned multinational greed and local, tribal avarice, between the global corruption of Bush’s America and the individual corruption of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

In these scenarios, people who loath the Iraqi dictator find secret sympathies with his doughty fighters. And this is Bush’s greatest bungle, to have so mismanaged matters that throughout the world, and not just in the Islamic world at that, there are people who will secretly root for the Iraqis, because they cannot bear to think of what will follow if Bush has an easy victory.

They want to believe that might is not always right and that small forces fighting for their own hills and villages and swamps can challenge overwhelming force fighting for an unelected world order. Call it a Star Wars thing.

What’s unfolding before our eyes is what the French and the Germans and many others knew might happen. Now we have the risk of Turkish forces entering northern Iraq, sparking a war within a war. We have the prospect of a lengthy period of attrition, with armies slowed and stopped, besieging cities but unwilling to enter for fear of what they might suffer. We have the prospect of Stalingrad.

We will have more death and destruction, as though the unfortunate citizens of what was once the most liberal and secular state in the Middle East hadn't suffered enough over the last 25 years. One can only utter the forlorn hope that it will not be so, that death and injury and dislocation will be avoided, that peace will have a chance.

Nothing will be the same again. Sadly, having taken their batons to the world, the US and the UK are now stuck with what follows.

The Hog