Published in Maclean's Magazine, March 3 (edition date: March 10) LONDON To George W. Bush and Tony Blair it must have seemed like a promising rhetorical device. So this past week they shifted gears, claiming their thirst for speed in securing a military solution in Iraq is morally correct, since it would deliver the Iraqi people from their tyrannical dictator. War, they both implied, was really in the best interests of freedom-loving Iraqis. Critics pounced. Far from Churchillian, Bush's and Blair's logic falls flat, they claim, tripped up by truth, by the historical record. "The argument is simply nonsensical," says Iqbal Sacranie, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain. "The sanctions maintained by our governments are responsible for much of the Iraqi peoples' current suffering, and this war is going to bring about more death and destruction. Where's the morality in that ?" Sacranie's group is Britain's largest Muslim organization and one of its most moderate. It supports the disarmament of Saddam Hussein's regime, but by peaceful means: U.N. weapons inspectors, says Sacranie, must be given more time. In a sharply-worded letter to Downing Street last month, Sacranie cautioned Blair that war in Iraq would cause "bitterness and conflict for generations to come" and "lasting damage" to relations between Muslim world and the West. Indeed attitudes within Britain itself have already hardened against the western cause. Muslim commentators complain the Bush-Blair strategy is really about re-drawing the political map of the Middle East. And seven out of ten British Muslims, according to a recent ICM poll, believe the Bush administration's war against terror is in fact a war on Islam. An historic vote in the House of Commons hammered home to the Blair government that these anxieties cross all lines of culture, religion -- and political allegiance. Not since William Gladstone's Liberals rebelled against a home rule bill in 1885 have so many members of a governing party broken ranks with their Prime Minister. The Labour rebels' message was twofold: that the case for war on Iraq has not yet been made, and that British policy must not be dictated by the Bush administration's timetable. While the American president may not have felt the earth move, no-one on this side of the Atlantic could miss noticing that the vote has opened a chasm between the two leading proponents of military action. While Washington might prefer a second U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force, London now definitely, crucially needs one. And not just to protect Tony Blair's grasp on power (which has been thrown into question for the first time since Labour swept Westminster in 1997) but for British troops in the Gulf. Retired Major General Patrick Cordingley, who in the 1991 Gulf War commanded Britain's 7th Armoured Brigade, the descendants of Montgomery's fabled "Desert Rats", told Maclean's: "I think there is a genuine British problem if we went alone with the Americans now, and the lads out there on the ground knew that the British public was not behind them." Cordingley has made headlines in Britain for making the soldier's case against rash and gratuitous use of force in such a sensitive part of the world. "I actually think that containment has worked," he says. "If you can contain the Soviet Union for fifty years, then for heaven's sake you can contain Iraq for a hundred years without too much of a problem. "Purely from a soldier's point of view, is the use of power to resolve this sort of a problem, when you're almost certain to kill a lot of people because of the way we operate, is that actually the best way to proceed ? You're not defending your nation -- this is a bigger argument about gaining stability in the Middle East. But the way you may have to get that stability is to use overwhelming force. You may have to ask your armed forces to kill a lot of people." Like all responsible commanders, Cordingley is mindful of encountering the unexpected. However effective the Pentagon's war plan might appear now, things can go terribly wrong when the shooting starts. "If there's a prolonged air campaign against Iraq, if it's not just a quick initial bombardment," he says, "firstly, you run out of targets, as happened in Desert Fox in 1998 (the last large-scale U.S.-led bombing of Iraq). Then if the bombing continues, we can be reasonably certain that a lot of babies will be killed, a lot of women will be killed, because Saddam Hussein will make certain that they are. Then you have a major issue with the international community." The consequences of a bloodbath prey on the minds not just of veterans like Cordingley, but of commanders taking the field right now. Especially American commanders, however brash and reckless the language from political masters like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might seem. Men like Colin Powell know that huge life-and-death mistakes can be made -- because he's made them, in the Gulf. Prior to launching the ground war phase of Desert Storm in February, 1991, Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said of Saddam's Republican Guard: "Our strategy to go after this army is very, very simple. First we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it." Yet the C.I.A. later estimated that 70 percent of Saddam's Republican Guard troops and half their tanks and other armour escaped Kuwait, enabling the Iraqi dictator to crush, with extreme cruelty, internal rebellions against his rule. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were slaughtered, mainly southern Shias and Kurds in the north, who had heeded George Bush Sr.'s call to unseat Saddam. What went wrong ? Three things, military analysts agree: President Bush Sr.'s decision to call a cease-fire after just 100 hours of combat, General Norman Schwarzkopf's failure to seal the Iraqi's escape routes out of northern Kuwait, and good old fashioned confusion in the chain of U.S. command and control. Put simply, the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force had not been matched by disciplined, decisive political leadership. The U.S. had fumbled the football on the goal line. "When Norm Schwarzkopf went to meet with those generals from the other side he had very little direction from anybody, whether from the president's advisors or the state department as to what he was supposed to say or do." So states General Calvin Waller, Schwarzkopf's deputy during the 1991 conflict. In an interview telecast last month by The History Channel in the U.S., both Waller and Lt. General Buster Glosson, who planned the air campaign in Desert Storm, revealed the extent -- and consequences -- of the miscommunication that plagued the cease-fire process. "The decision to permit the helicopters to fly was a mistake," said Glosson of Schwarzkopf's consent to a request made by defeated Iraqi generals at the Safwan truce conference. As a result, Saddam's gunships and transports were free to fly in post-war Iraq. Glosson continued: "Everybody says well, that's 20/20 hindsight. Well permitting the helicopters is not 20/20 hindsight to an airman. Had I been sitting at Safwan, I would never have agreed to that." On a larger scale, history has judged the aftermath of Desert Storm in even harsher terms. U.S. politicians and generals, in their rush to exit the region after securing Kuwait for the al Sabah family, stumbled into their -- and our -- worst nightmare: leaving Iraq a smoldering, bloody, open-ended conflict. Could it happen again ? Could a U.S. commander in chief and his armies storm in, claim victory, then foul up ? A look at Afghanistan, one year after General Tommy Franks' routing of the Taliban, offers grim testament to the current Bush administration's lack of staying power. Only this week President Hamid Karzai, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, warned that Afghanistan could once again become a haven for terrorists should the U.S. abandon the cause of improving security. Echoing him was the U.N.'s undersecretary-general for peacekeeping, who called for immediate assistance to the crippled southwest Asian nation. John-Marie Guehenno told the Security Council that "The national army needs to be built, factional armies need to be dissolved, and assistance needs to be provided to help ex-combatants re-integrate into civilian life." Care International is one of many respected aid agencies that have called for the ISAF peacekeeping force to expand its operations beyond Kabul. The International Narcotics Control Board, too, says that real peace cannot be achieved unless the resurgent crisis of illegal drugs is addressed (Afghanistan regained, last year, its ranking as the world's top opium producer). The INCB, Care, Karzai and the U.N. -- they constitute a united front, but a disappointed one, too. The Bush administration shows no sign of responding to Afghanistan's cries for help, whether to stem the rampant lawlessness plaguing the countryside, or to decisively counter the regrouping of fugitive al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Consequently, reconstruction has stalled and much of the landscape is wracked by human misery. The World Health Organization notes that maternal mortality remains one of the highest in the world: in some provinces, up to seven percent of mothers die in childbirth. Fourteen of every 100 children born are likely to die before the age of five. On this front, like his inability to confront and disarm unruly regional warlords, Hamid Karzai is virtually powerless to improve the situation: 70% of what little health care is available in the country is provided by foreign aid agencies, not by his own administration. Death by U.S. munitions continues to stalk the civilian population. The U.S. agency Human Rights Watch has quantified the threat from unexploded cluster munitions. The group says that U.S. warplanes dropped 1,228 cluster bombs, containing a total of a quarter-million submunitions or bomblets. Roughly five percent, 1,200 bomblets, failed to explode on impact, but in subsequent accidental detonations at least 127 people -- 69% of them children -- have been killed or wounded by the devices. War in Iraq would almost certainly see this carnage immensely magnified: at least 60 times as many cluster bombs and rockets were fired by U.S. forces in the 1991 Gulf War as in the Afghan campaign. Projections of the probable civilian death toll from other misplaced bombs and rockets are even more horrifying. While estimates of civilian deaths during the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan remain hotly debated, the most sombre estimate comes from Prof. Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire. His study indicates that some 3,620 innocent Afghan men, women and children have died since Oct. 1, 2001. In off-the-record briefings, officials at the Pentagon have told journalists that any war in Iraq will be a great deal larger and more intense than the Afghan campaign, particularly in the initial air phase. Would 50 times the bombardment produce 50 times the civilian dead in Afghanistan ? No-one knows. But the decision by the White House, this past week, to go public with its plans for humanitarian assistance to Iraq was clearly a response to worldwide fears of the human costs of a desert blitzkrieg. Strangely -- and shamefully, in the view of one seasoned aid specialist -- the White House is talking in tens, not hundreds of millions of dollars for post-war reconstruction in Iraq. "Seventy or eighty million dollars will be a drop in the desert sand," says a veteran of U.N. and non-governmental aid in Afghanistan and Africa. "That money would be burned up just rebuilding bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates. "What the White House isn't telling anyone is how much it'll cost to feed and heal 24 million Iraqi civilians after the country's infrastructure goes up in smoke. It'll be the Marshall Plan, Take Two. Billions and billions of tax dollars. And we'll be at it for years, not months." Hardly surprising that some old soldiers, too, see the trail of destruction of a U.S.-led juggernaut as something best avoided. Former Desert Rats commander Cordingley, however, is resigned both to the war and its ominous aftermath. "Having lived there (the Middle East) for five years," he says, "I can tell you the Americans are hated in the region, and the Brits are not far behind. This war can only aggravate the problem. "Still, talking to my Arab friends, they say that since it's inevitable -- the Americans have made their mind up and nothing's going to stop them -- it's probably better to get on with it than draw the whole thing out and make it more and more complicated for everybody. I just, like them, wish that it wasn't inevitable." Not so fast, says Iqbal Sacranie -- and at least one quarter of Tony Blair's parliamentary Labour party. "What the international community decided is that independent inspectors should go in and search Iraq," says Sacranie. "They (the inspectors) have made it very clear they need more time. Let the will of the international community prevail. "What is all the rush all about ? If giving more time, even a year, will result in a peaceful disarmament of the regime, this is what we should do." All of that and a fistful of Iraqi dinar will buy you a cup of coffee in Washington D.C. Much sooner than a year from now there'll be only one fit topic for debate in the U.S. capital: the 2004 election. The engineers driving George W. Bush's campaign machine won't want to compete with the noise of jet exhaust, tank treads and bombs going off on TV. The time for war, they counsel, is now. The time for containment is gone. Pity peace, and everything too unwieldy for the U.S. political process. |