The WMD justification for war has been unravelling for some time now. The carefully worded, meticulously researched article by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Washington Post has destroyed whatever credibility that the US government?s original case for war had.
It is beginning to dawn on me that politics as it is practiced in the Western world is not very different from the way politics is practiced back home in India. The sleaze touches almost everyone. The politicos in US run a way more sophisticated operation, though if you dig deep as you make your way down south, you are bound to feel queasy.
I was not especially bothered about the disintegrating case for war on this side of the Atlantic. I don?t think truthfulness is this US government?s strong point. I also felt (and still feel) that the overthrow of Saddam was a good thing anyway. But what followed seems to be worse. I also had a soft corner for Blair. I believed that his support for war was based on his conviction and that the sleaze did not reach 10, Downing Street. It was of course my political naivet?.
The Hutton enquiry is giving tantalizing glimpses of the British government?s decision-making process (A more accessible Guardian coverage here). You see the footprints of Blair?s staff all over the place. That is what is so fucking sad. It is unquestionable that Gillian did a sloppy job of reporting the events. His credibility may never recover. BBC did not exactly cover itself in glory. It is now becoming evident that Alastair Campbell did not force anyone to insert the 45 minute claim into the dossier. But the crux of the BBC story was essentially correct; that the British government let questionable intelligence take center stage in their dossiers in order to sex up the case for war. The whole war of words by the British government against BBC over the semantics of their reportage distracted from that. Many people now suspect that Campbell may have feigned the outrage in order to distract attention from the story. (Whatever may be the case, you have to be impressed by Campbell as an operator!)
But if the case for WMD was completely manufactured and the relationship between iraq and Al Quaida never existed, we are bound to wonder why did the US and British governments decide to invade Iraq. At a simplistic level the answer is easy. If done right, it gives US a powerful military presence in the Middle East, a US friendly government in a country which has the second largest oil reserve in the world and allows them to alter the balance of power in the middle east. It also allowed the neoconservatives to play the fantasy game of bringing democracy to the middle east (I used to be a believer in that fiction, but looking at the chaos that the last few months of US occupation has created in Iraq, I see Beirut, not Japan.). I do think democratization of Iraq could have worked and it was possible to create in Iraq a role model for the entire Middle East. But Bush?s foreign policy team has neither the depth or maturity nor the cultural sensitivity to accomplish that. It was a right war, but wrong warriors. It was also a wrong call on my part.
At a deeper level, many people suspect that US did this in order to walk away from Saudi Arabia. There was a very persuasive story in FT a few days back. (I would try to look it up and quote from there). Commentators in Guardian also speculated about that.
The American people in the heartland, the people that this administration care about, don?t seem to care much about the innuendos and misrepresentations made in the case for war. And this government doesn?t care about international public opinion. But people obviously care about the deaths. They do care about the cost of waging this war. And the elections are coming.
Bush has a smart team of political advisers who would not let the daily trickle of deaths compromise his prospects for elections So whatever may had been the underlying reason for war, I now fear that in order to show a rosy picture back home and extricate itself before the 2004 election the US is going to continue to penny-pinch in Iraq and hand over the running of reconstruction and war to the private contractors of the kind that used run wars in West Africa. However, if the western world now washes its hands off Iraq, it would lead to its Beirutization, an exponential increase in religious fundamentalism, and a disaster that the future generations will pay for.