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The toll of coalition fatalities was nevertheless surprisingly light, 122 American, 33 British. Of the British dead, six had been killed in action, the others in accidents or by ‘friendly fire’. A higher proportion of Americans were killed in combat but, again, most were victims of accident and some of attack by their own aircraft. Almost all were young, under thirty, some very young. War is a young man’s – now also a young woman’s – business; one American who died was Army PFC Lori Ann Piestewa, aged twenty-three. Almost all the British dead bore identifiably traditional British names, Stratford, Allbut, McCue, Evans, Ballard, Tweedie. One, however, was a citizen of the Irish Republic, Ian Malone, serving in the Irish Guards, another a black Zimbabwean, Christopher Muzvuru, an Irish Guards piper. A high proportion were senior NCOs or junior officers, evidence of the dangers always attaching to leadership in combat.
Among the American dead, too, many were NCOs or junior officers, marine gunnery sergeants, army warrant officers, captains, second lieutenants. The names testify to the kaleidoscopic origins of the American nation. Many were Hispanic or Slav, from recent immigrations, others Teutonic or Scandinavian from the great North European influx of the nineteenth century. A considerable number were as British as those of the 1st (UK) Armoured Division’s dead, Tristan Aitken, Nicolas Hodson, George Mitchell, Wilfred Bellard, names that might have been found among the emigrants on the Mayflower. The American armed forces are truly representative of the American people, who so devotedly support their soldiers, sailors and airmen.
The number of Iraqi dead has not yet been counted. Since there were no great battles in the war, it is unlikely that casualties in the Iraqi armed forces were high. Most of the conscripts of the regular army drifted away before the fighting began. Casualties may have been higher among the Republican Guard but it, too, avoided heavy combat. Such serious fighting as was done was by ‘fighters’ – not uniformed soldiers but Saddam’s political militiamen, devotees of the Ba’ath party and foreigners, Islamicist volunteers from Syria, Algeria and other Muslim countries seeking the opportunity to give their lives for the faith. The total of their dead will probably never be known but must have amounted to several thousand. The number of civilian dead was much lower, thanks to the careful precision of coalition air attack on populated areas.
Prisoners there were none. In the heat of combat such small groups as offered their surrender were made captive but they were not long detained. One of the first acts of the occupiers was to decree the disbandment of the Iraqi army and the battlefield detainees were released to their homes, whither most of their comrades-in-arms had already made their own way. The only Iraqis the victors sought to apprehend were leaders of the régime and identifiable violators of human rights.
In retrospect the disbandment of the army was a serious mistake, one of several made by the American interim administration in the immediate aftermath of the Saddam régime’s collapse. It released several hundred thousand young men onto the unemployment market, leaving them unpaid and discontented, at precisely the moment when the need became apparent to re-build Iraq’s security forces. The mistake was repeated when the national police force was not kept in being. The occupiers had defensible grounds for both acts, since they feared that retention of the army might perpetuate the power of a major Ba’athist institution, while the police force was tainted by violations of human rights. The occupiers argued, persuasively, that the police force would have to be recreated, from freshly recruited entrants trained by Westerners.
The disappearance of the police – which could probably not have been averted in the immediate aftermath – had regrettable effects in the days following Saddam’s downfall. Looters appeared in thousands and began to pillage. At first their targets were the office buildings of the régime in the government quarter of Baghdad; seventeen out of twenty-three ministries were ransacked. American troops managed to protect the Ministry for Oil, the resumption of oil production being judged essential to the country’s reconstruction, but there were too few troops to save the others. Then the looters turned to nongovernmental facilities, including hospitals and schools. The looters, some ex-prisoners released from the city gaols, others simply the poor of the back streets, stole anything portable. Computers were a favourite piece of booty, and air-conditioning units, but eventually completely worthless items were carried or wheeled away. In the process enormous quantities of documents, essential to reorganization and reconstruction, were destroyed or irretrievably dispersed. Looting spread wider. The looters began systematically to strip copper wire out of the telephone networks and electrical distribution systems, making communication and power, interrupted by the war and the damage war had caused, impossible to restore without elaborate and expensive repair. There was also cultural damage. Iraq, home to the world’s oldest civilizations, was a treasure trove of antiquities, originally collected by European scholars, later piously preserved by dedicated Iraqi scholars and conservationists. For some weeks it was believed that the Iraqi National Museum had been emptied of its treasures, a story that led to wild denunciation of the invasion in the Western press. Later, fortunately, it was discovered that the museum staffs had been able to hide almost all the exhibits in the vaults.
Looting was destructive but merely anarchic. After a few chaotic weeks there was little left to steal, householders in the richer quarters were defending their properties and the American troops had established rough-and-ready order in the streets. Looting, however, merged into and was succeeded by organized attacks by intransigents on the occupying forces. Anarchy, in the Sunni central region, gave way to insurgency, organized and vicious. The attackers were the same people as the ‘fighters’ who had raised most of the resistance to the invasion in March and April. They were ex–Saddam militiamen, fedayeen, Ba’ath party members and foreign fighters, whose numbers were reinforced by an influx of Islamic extremists from other Arab countries, filtering across the unguarded borders. Their methods, familiar to the Israeli troops fighting the Intifada but also to the British with experience in Northern Ireland, were those of terrorism – attacks on patrols by gunmen who disappeared into side streets, roadside car bombs – intensified by the self-sacrifice of suicide bombers. The British in the Shi’a south were spared the worst; an appalling incident, when six military policemen training Iraqi police recruits were massacred, proved to be an isolated event, apparently provoked by a local dispute over possession of weapons. It was the Americans in and around Baghdad, in the ‘Sunni triangle’, who were consistently attacked, leading to a steady drip of deaths. In August the ‘fighters’ extended their reach. On 14 August a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian embassy, killing seventeen. On 19 August a suicide truck bomber drove into the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing the Special Representative, Sergio Viera de Mello, and twenty others. On 28 August a leading Shi’a cleric, who advocated co-operation with the Americans, was killed by a car bomb in Najaf, one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest cities. A few days later Akila al-Hashemi, one of the women members of the American-sponsored Iraqi Governing Council, was assassinated outside her house. American military deaths continued almost day by day, to reach 500 by the end of the year.
The fighters persisted despite the evident approval most Iraqis showed for the overthrow of Saddam. Polls demonstrated that 80 per cent of Iraqis welcomed the dictator’s fall. Support was absolute in the Kurdish north, which had effectively reverted to self-rule, and almost universal in the Shi’a south where, after a brief period of instability, the British had succeeded in restoring order and winning the co-operation of the inhabitants, much assisted by the early restoration of essential services. The Sunni recalcitrants were either Saddam loyalists, whom defeat had deprived of privileges and employment, or foreigners who had entered Iraq to carry on the war against the Great Satan of America. A leading terrorist group was Ansar al-Islam, allied to al-Qaeda, which had briefly occupied a ‘liberated zone’ in the Kurdish north, during the period when Kurdistan had escaped from Saddam’s control. Its members fled after the American occupation to Iran, then infiltrated back again. The spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam, the mullah Mustapha Kriekar, in exile in Norway, compared the activities of Ansar al-Islam in Iraq to al-Qaeda and the Taleban in Afghanistan. ‘The resistance’, he told an Arabic language television channel, ‘is not only a reaction to the American invasion, it is part of the continuous Islamic struggle since the collapse of the Caliphate. All Islamic struggles since then are part of one organized effort to bring back the Caliphate.’
It was anomalous that Saddam’s apparent avengers should have invoked the Caliphate, since his secularist régime was anathema to Islamic fundamentalists. Their appeal to the Caliphate also partook of myth rather than reality. The last Caliphate, which had its seat in the Ottoman capital at Istanbul, had no connection, either by endorsement of the Umma, the Muslim community, or by blood, with the family of the prophet, to justify its status. Endorsement by the Umma was the Sunni orthodoxy, blood descent the Shi’a orthodoxy. The Ottoman Turks had simply assumed the Caliphate, by right of conquest, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Caliphate, moreover, had been abolished by a secular Muslim, Mustapha Kemal, in 1925; no Westerner had been involved. Not even by the most tortuous theological logic could the infidel West be held responsible for the Caliphate’s termination.
It was most unlikely, in any case, that a dominant constituency for the re-establishment of the Caliphate could have been assembled in post-Saddam Iraq. The surviving Ba’athists were secularist, so were many of the Sunni population. The Shi’a, though a majority in Iraq, were a minority in the Muslim world. Whatever views they advanced about the Caliphate would have been rejected by most of their co-religionists in the wider Muslim lands. Indeed, even among the Shi’a, the beliefs and the methods of the terrorists were an abhorrence. The Western conquerors, uninvolved as they were on one religious side or the other, were therefore pursuing an objectively uncontroversial policy in their efforts to establish an efficient, modernizing post-Saddam regime.
Unfortunately, the American efforts got off to a bad start. The British in the south, with their long imperial experience, took the pragmatic view that the priority was to establish law and order, working with whoever appeared co-operative, and to restore essential services. By September electricity supplies in Basra had been returned to normal and most other facilities, such as schools and hospitals, were operating efficiently. Crime was under control, the streets were safe and terrorism had been quashed. The Americans adopted an ideological approach. They sought an immediate transformation of Iraq from a tyranny to a functioning democracy, believing that liberation from Saddam would motivate a sufficient number of pro-democratic Iraqis to assume effective governmental functions within a few months. To oversee the democratization of Iraq, the US Department of Defense, the Pentagon, which had assumed the lead function, appointed a retired general, Jay Garner, to lead a team of Pentagon-vetted officials with authority to institute governmental functions. General Garner’s organization, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was answerable to the expeditionary commander, General Tommy Franks. The State Department had, before the war, drawn up an elaborate collection of policy documents, the ‘Future of Iraq Project’, suggesting guidelines for reconstruction and transitional governmental procedures. On the Pentagon’s assumption of responsibility for Iraqi postwar affairs, however, they were set aside. The future of Iraq was to be decided, paradoxically, by the dictates of a military organization committed to idealistic democratic goals. Its brief was to hand over the administration of the country to a group of unpolitical Iraqi leaders within ninety days.
It became quickly apparent that the Garner transitional régime was inadequate to its task. Its personnel were naïve and undertrained, it lacked a rational plan of procedure. On 12 May Garner was replaced as presidential envoy by Paul Bremer, a former counter-terrorism expert at the State Department. He also had close Pentagon connections. Bremer established better relations with Central Command, which had fallen into quarrels with Garner’s team. He also made it a priority to tackle the problem of terrorism. ORHA became the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), with largely new personnel.
Bremer began at once to create a new Iraqi police force, with an initial strength of 40,000. Training academies were set up and Western police leaders brought to Iraq to instruct the trainers in Western policing methods. The trainers proved both enthusiastic and brave; bravery was needed, since the terrorists instantly targeted the men in new uniform. Recruitment remained a difficulty. The CPA had set its face against enlisting former servants of the Saddam régime but ex-policemen provided the most obvious enlistees. It was Bremer who also decided ill-advisedly on the complete disbandment of the army. A future Iraq would need a properly trained army and there was no better time to establish one than when large numbers of Western troops, models of what post-Saddam soldiers should be, were present on the territory. Bremer, however, was determined to make a clean sweep. As a result, several hundred thousand ex-soldiers were demobilized and turned onto the employment market which could not absorb them. Discontented and unpaid, they easily yielded recruits to the terrorist campaign.
Bremer also decided to exclude members of the Ba’ath party from new government employment. He thereby deprived the CPA of the services of most of the country’s most experienced experts and officials. His dilemma repeated that of the Allied Military Government of Germany in 1945. It had originally adopted, for moral and ideological reasons, a policy of de-Nazification, treating all former members of the Nazi party as disqualified to resume the positions they had held under Hitler. Since almost everyone in a position of responsibility had been obliged to join the party, or had found it difficult not to do so, post-1945 Germany was deprived in the crisis of surrender and occupation of the services of those people most urgently needed for the country’s reconstruction. As a result there was a compromise: de-Nazification was accelerated, sometimes dispensed with altogether. Principal beneficiaries of the policy of turning a blind eye were the German secret weapons scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who was transformed from a Nazi favourite to an American citizen at headlong speed. Ironically it was his principal invention, the V-2 rocket, which, in its Iraqi version, formed a principal target of UNSCOM’s and UNMOVIC’s inspections.
The CPA was eventually obliged to adopt the attitude of the postwar occupiers of Germany, interviewing Ba’ath party members on a pragmatic, person-by-person basis and exempting from penalty almost all those judged necessary to the reconstruction programme.
De-Ba’athification did not apply in the selection of members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), established in July 2003. Its twenty-five members represented all Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurds, Christians, Assyrians, Turkoman and others; three were women, an unprecedented departure from normalities even in Saddam’s secularist society, where women’s nominal equality had not accorded them political representation. None had been Ba’athists. Their consequent unfamiliarity with the exercise of power at first hampered their ability to launch and direct reconstruction programmes. Shortage of funds, however, was not one of their problems. On 10 June 2003, Paul Bremer announced that $100 million was to be made available for reconstruction, all the money to be spent through Iraqi companies, so as to provide employment and credit to domestic businesses. In the longer term, finance for reconstruction would be supplied by Iraqi oil revenues. The initial funds were a transfer from the American treasury.
The status of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and of the Iraqi Governing Council, was regularized on 22 May 2003 by the adoption at the UN of Resolution 1483, which declared an end to the régime of sanctions against Iraq, in force since 1990, and gave legal authority to the occupation of Iraq by the coalition forces. The export of oil, destined to pay for the reconstruction, was authorized, the proceeds to be vested in the CPA. On 16 October the Security Council extended its approval of postwar arrangements in Iraq by adopting Resolution 1551, which recognized the legitimacy of the Coalition Provisional Authority and urged the establishment of a constitutional conference to assist the Iraqi Governing Council in settling the future government of Iraq.
The governments which had most stridently opposed the war, France and Germany foremost, continued to express their hostility to the coalition’s actions. Russia, at first an opponent, relented; in October it decided to back the Americans. The French and Germans remained intransigent. Though they both demanded ‘rights’ in the determination of Iraq’s future form of government, basing their claims on ill-defined appeals to ‘international democracy’, they declined to offer money to Iraq’s reconstruction programme. Both declined to provide troops to the international force, which by 2004 included contingents from thirty-five countries, such as Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Romania, the Czech Republic, Norway, Portugal and South Korea.
Despite the enlargement of the international occupation force, and the creation of a new inspection team, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), in succession to UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, the one front in which the coalition failed to make progress was in the location and identification of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The ISG, which was led by David Kay, the American former UN weapons inspector, published its interim report in October 2003. Its content, and his subsequent testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in the last week of January 2004, lent comfort to the opponents of President Bush in the United States and to the many critics of the war in Britain. Both were taken to substantiate the view that there was no reliable intelligence support for Anglo-American allegations of Saddam’s continuing possession and development of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. Dr Kay in fact said no such thing. While admitting that he doubted if large stocks of WMD would be found, an embarrassment to both the American and British governments which had advertised before the invasion their certainty of such discoveries, he qualified his doubts about the WMD threat by stating his belief in the existence of smaller stocks of WMD still hidden on Iraqi territory, Saddam’s sponsorship ‘right up to the end’ of such programmes as the refinement of the deadly poison ricin, his maintenance of a ballistic missile development programme, assisted by the import of foreign technology, and the resumption of nuclear weapons development. He also revealed to The Sunday Telegraph that he had evidence of the transfer by Saddam of WMD to Syrian territory.
It was, however, the headline elements in Dr Kay’s testimony, rather than his careful qualifications in detail, that were seized upon by the anti-war constituency. Its spokesmen were compromised in the United States because of their association with the campaigns of Democratic candidates running against George W. Bush in the current presidential election campaign; their message was also offset by the expert evidence of a few stalwarts in the media, such as Judith Miller of The New York Times, a veteran of weapons inspection on the ground, who continued to demand that attention be paid to the evidence for WMD. On the whole, the anti-war party, though strident, failed to capture control of opinion among the American people who remained in the majority supportive of their President and armed forces. That was not the case in Europe, where the French and Germans, governments and peoples alike, remained hostile. It was equally not the case in Britain. There the moderate majority continued to support Prime Minister Blair’s Iraqi policy, but many professional politicians and much of the media took a different view. Their suspicions, essentially that Britain had gone to war for unsubstantiated reasons, found endorsement in a broadcast by Andrew Gilligan, a BBC reporter specializing in defence affairs, on 29 May 2003. At 6.07 a.m., on the Today programme, the BBC’s flagship morning radio news channel, Gilligan revealed that ‘a British official who was involved in the preparation of the dossier’ – the dossier being an intelligence assessment of the threat presented by Iraq’s WMD, prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee and submitted in September 2002 to the Prime Minister – had claimed it was ‘transformed in the week before it was published to make it sexier’. As an example he cited the statement that ‘weapons of mass destruction were ready for use in forty-five minutes’. The ‘official’ said, according to Gilligan, that the ‘forty-five minute’ statement was not in the original draft of the dossier, was included ‘against the wishes’ of some involved in the dossier’s preparation and came only from one source, instead of the usual two or more.
The broadcast attracted widespread interest, which grew. Its truth was denied by the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, Alastair Campbell, after he and Gilligan had both given evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) on 19 June and 25 June respectively. During late June the interest of the media, that of the BBC in particular, and of the government focused on identifying Gilligan’s ‘official’. The mystery was partially dissolved on 1 July when a letter, written the previous day, was received at the Ministry of Defence. It came from Dr David Kelly, a scientific civil servant with great experience in the arms control field in general and Iraqi WMD in particular, and revealed that he was the ‘official’ Gilligan had cited. He carefully defined what had been discussed in the Charing Cross Hotel, over a glass of apple juice. He emphasized that he had in no way said anything to undermine government policy, revealed that he supported the war, because he regarded Saddam as a threat to regional peace, and admitted only that he had conceded that the ‘forty-five minute’ claim might have been added to the dossier ‘for impact’. There were no witnesses to their conversation and no evidence of its content, except for Gilligan’s skimpy and barely decipherable notes.
Two consequences followed from the receipt of Dr Kelly’s letter at the Ministry of Defence. One was that he was required to give evidence before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, in public and on television, on 15 July, and before the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) on 16 July; the other was that, over the course of the next days, Dr Kelly was revealed by the government, in a convoluted and less than frank way, to be Andrew Gilligan’s ‘official’ (it was a complication of the story, wholly unfair to Dr Kelly, that he had somehow been characterized, and would so be described by much of the media, as an ‘intelligence officer’, which he was not). Dr Kelly was roughly handled by several members of the FAC, particularly a Labour member, Andrew Mackinlay, a backbencher who went out of his way to scorn Dr Kelly, a highly distinguished scientist and devoted government servant, as ‘chaff’ and ‘a fall guy’. Many viewers were stunned by Mackinlay’s performance, which many felt was unworthy of a Member of Parliament.
By the time of Dr Kelly’s appearance before the FAC, confirmation of his name as Gilligan’s ‘official’ had been made public, through a curious guessing game devised by the Ministry of Defence, which declined to publish his name but agreed to confirm it if it was put to the Ministry by a newspaper or broadcasting agency. The Financial Times was the first organization to make the correct guess.
As soon as publicly identified, Dr Kelly left his house in Oxfordshire with his wife for the west of England, to take refuge from press attention. He later returned to his daughter’s house in Oxford and it was from her home that he travelled to London on 15 and 16 July to attend the meetings of the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence and Security Committees. He then returned to his own house where he joined his wife. They spent the morning of 17 July together though for most of the time he was working in his study. Colleagues at the Ministry of Defence sent him a number of e-mails about the progress of the inquiry and he sent e-mails himself and made and received telephone calls. He and his wife then had lunch together. She found his state distressed. He was sunk in silence. After lunch he said he would go for a walk and, after returning briefly to his study, he set out. He did not return. As the evening drew out his family became concerned and his daughters searched for him. After midnight they called the police. Early next morning, after the organization of a police search, his body was found in remote woodland. Its state suggested he had committed suicide, by cutting his wrist and taking an overdose of painkillers. The official inquiry later conducted by Lord Hutton into the circumstances of his death confirmed that to be the case.
The death of Dr Kelly provoked a full-blooded political crisis in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister immediately announced, the day following Dr Kelly’s death, that an inquiry would be held into the circumstances, to be conducted by Lord Hutton, a senior Law Lord. It first met on 11 August and concluded its work on 25 September. It exercised wide powers. Among the witnesses called were the Prime Minister himself, the Secretary of State for Defence, the Chairman of the Governors of the BBC and its Director-General.
Lord Hutton’s report, published on 28 January 2004, caused consternation. Opponents of the war had expected that the judge would find, in his analysis of the documents brought in evidence, grounds for criticizing the government’s decision to go to war; the report included, among much other material, the ‘September dossier’ which Andrew Gilligan, in his broadcast of 29 May, alleged had been ‘sexed up’ to improve the government’s case. Against the expectations of much of the media, the Conservative opposition in Parliament and many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, Lord Hutton decided, by contrast, to reserve almost all his criticism for the BBC. He found that Gilligan’s allegation, that the government’s warning of Iraq’s ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction within ‘forty-five minutes’ of receiving the order to do so was based on information it knew to be false, was ‘unfounded’, and that it was inserted at a late stage into the dossier not because its veracity was doubted by intelligence officers but because of its late reception. He also dismissed the allegation that the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee had yielded to pressure applied by Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications, to insert material that supported the government’s case for war which was not supported by intelligence evidence. He recognized that the JIC Chairman, John Scarlett, had been willing to assist the government but only in so far as the facts did so as well.
Turning to the BBC, he was almost unsparing in his strictures. He found Gilligan’s allegations about the ‘forty-five minute’ claim and the circumstances of its insertion to be unfounded. He found the BBC’s system of exercising editorial control to be ‘defective’, as was its procedure for investigating complaints. He criticized the Governors of the BBC for failing properly to investigate the complaint against the Gilligan broadcast and so for persisting in a failure to apologize for which a proper investigation would have shown the necessity.
The government did not altogether escape Lord Hutton’s criticisms. Those focused on the pathetic circumstances of Dr David Kelly’s death. David Kelly was a distinguished scientist who had spent a life of duty in the scientific civil service. Scientific civil servants occupy an ill-defined and anomalous position, superior to that of middle-rank penpushers but inferior, and made to feel inferior, to the Whitehall grandees who mingle on terms of equality with ministers, despite the fact that they can be of an intellectual eminence not found elsewhere in government service. Like all government servants they are forbidden to speak in any undirected way to the media. Some, however, and David Kelly was one, are given a loose and undefined permission to brief the media on matters of public interest. They are thus put in an indefensible position, apparently allowed to speak to journalists but liable to disciplinary action if what they say causes embarrassment. Poor David Kelly fell headfirst into that trap.
Lord Hutton conceded that Dr Kelly, when the trouble broke, was given support by a few of his immediate civil service superiors. The hierarchy effectively disowned him. Sir Kevin Tebbits, the most senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, described Dr Kelly in a letter to the Secretary of State as ‘a relatively junior official’ and ‘not the Government’s principal adviser on the subject [of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction], nor even a senior one’. Yet Dr Kelly knew more about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction than anyone in Britain. It is testimony to how little real experts are valued within the government hierarchy that he could be discussed so dismissively. Lord Hutton was moved by compassion. At the end of his report he adopted as his conclusion on the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s death the opinion of the Professor of Psychiatry at Oxford University who had examined the evidence. He judged that Dr Kelly had killed himself out of a ‘profound sense of hopelessness’, of his life’s work having been ‘not wasted but … totally undermined’; these feelings were compounded by fear that the civil service intended to take disciplinary action against him, perhaps end his work in Iraq or even dismiss him from government employment.
David Kelly was not the only victim of the ‘September dossier’ affair. The Chairman of the Governors of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, resigned on the day of the Hutton report’s publication. Greg Dyke, the Director-General, resigned a day later. No such indignities had ever before been visited upon an institution which continued to regard itself, with some justification, as ‘the greatest news-gathering institution in the world’. A little later, in the first week of February 2004, the British government announced that it would undertake an inquiry into the workings of the intelligence services over the Iraq crisis. Its announcement followed one similar by the United States government.
Thus the certainties that had inaugurated the brief and brilliant campaign to overthrow the tyranny of Saddam Hussein petered out in recrimination. Objectively the world was undoubtedly a safer place as the result of his downfall, besides being morally purged of one of the most wicked dictators of modern times. Subjectively it was even more divided than it had been when the ‘war on terror’ was undertaken after the atrocity of 11 September 2001. The Muslim world in general, the Arab world in particular was confirmed in its grievances, particularly that the West was prepared to use its overwhelming military superiority to keep Muslims subordinate. ‘Europe’, the Europe of the Franco-German plan to create a federal union strong enough to stand on terms of equality with the United States as a world power, had been humiliated by the failure of its efforts to avert the war. Liberal opinion, dominant throughout the European media and academia, strong also in their American equivalents, was outraged by the spectacle of raw military force supplanting reason and legality as the means by which relations between states are ordered.
Reality is an uncomfortable companion, particularly to people of good will. George H. W. Bush’s proclamation of a new world order had persuaded too many in the West that the world’s future could be managed within a legal framework, by discussion and conciliation. The warnings uttered by his son that the United States was determined to bring other enemies of nuclear and regional stability to book – Iran, North Korea – was found by his political opponents profoundly unsettling. The reality of the Iraq campaign of March–April 2003 is, however, a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.