Duplicity and the Invasion ofIraq

From Planet 173

by Bruce Clunies Ross

The public talk from the Pentagon and the White House when contrasted with what was really going on, amounted to strategic deception. The target of all the duplicity and double-talk was not, of course, Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, but the American press corps and the American people.
(Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command)

Enough testimony has emerged to confirm suspicions that George W. Bush and his intimate advisors decided to exploit the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in order to implement and justify a neo-conservative international strategy and ensure the re-election of a President some believe to be divinely appointed. To achieve this, however, they had to resort to deception. The second part of their plan — the re-election of Bush — was brilliantly successful. With support from the fundamentalist Christian right, Bush was finally elected to the office the second time he stood for President. The first part, however, failed. The dangerous impracticality and utopianism of neo-conservative ideas on American foreign policy was exposed, and terrorism far from being contained began to spread.

Despite the daily accumulation of inconvenient facts — which keep before us the question of what his allegedly preventative war is preventing — Bush, along with Blair and those still left in the “coalition of the willing”, remain sanguine, at least in their public utterances. (The unbelievable statements by Blair, after the London bombings, that they had nothing to do with Britain’s participation in the Iraq war, despite the publication, on the same day, of a Chatham House report showing that the war had encouraged recruits to terrorism and had made Britain more vulnerable, is a case in point. Blair’s hollow arguments were later repeated by the Danish Prime Minister.) Until recently, the Bush regime has been less an exercise in government than a triumph of public relations; an impressive achievement considering it has to work with such intractable material as Donald Rumsfeld. Credit for this must be given to Bush’s spin doctor, Karl Rove, a specialist in spreading malicious rumours, currently under suspicion for deliberately blowing the cover of a CIA agent, the wife of an American diplomat, just to punish her husband for opposing the war and for discrediting one of the lies used to justify it.

Bush’s response to the attacks on 11 September, 2001 was questionable from the beginning. He played into the terrorists’ hands with his nonsensical declaration of “war on terrorism”. As many commentators pointed out, terrorism is a tactic, not a state, a political system, or set of wicked ideas, and it cannot logically be the object of war. Though it is generally and rightly regarded as a despicable tactic, it has been used extensively in warfare by many belligerents, including the United States, whose government, in recent memory, also condoned its use by allies in Latin America. Terrorism comes into its own, though, as a major tactic of the weak in conflict with the strong. The United States is currently stronger than any other nation in the history of the world and the position it claims as “the world’s only superpower” is founded on its huge armed forces and superior weapons technology. Because it is militarily unassailable, terrorism is the tactic by which it is most likely to be attacked. Indeed, its military might is its Achilles heel, for the more aggressively it is used, the more hostility it provokes, and the more it exposes itself to terrorist retaliation. A dangerous cycle is being generated, in which unilateral bullying and military aggression are creating the conditions which are invoked to justify that aggression. Bush’s neo-conservative foreign policies and the war in Iraq perfectly illustrate this.

Terrorism can only be combated by breaking the cycle. Neo-conservatives seem to believe that this can be done by spreading free-market democracy, American-style, around the world, but in Iraq any chance of this has been spoilt by the violence used to impose it, while the neglect of Afghanistan has led to the revival of the warlords and the Taliban, as well as a resurging market in opium on an unprecedented scale. Democracy is only likely to spread in the absence of bullying and aggression, so the neo-conservative theory will not work unless it is put into practice with precisely the opposite means to those used by Bush.

From the beginning, Bush has had a losing strategy, as terrorism cannot be defeated by the confrontational war on which he has embarked and while it is possible to negotiate with terrorists, it is not possible to negotiate a surrender, or any conclusion of hostilities, with terrorism. When Iraqi resistance on the battlefield seemed to evaporate before the rapid American advance to Baghdad, Bush made a theatrical show of declaring the end of hostilities, but it was at this point that his armies were drawn into the guerilla conflict which has checked them. It was only after this that terrorism of the kind the war was supposed to prevent broke out in Iraq. The invasion created the conditions which turned Iraq into “what Afghanistan once was: the privileged theatre of jihad against the West, forcing the United States to maintain some 138,000 military personnel there,” as Bruno Tertrais explains in his book War Without End. Saddam Hussein, it should not be forgotten, threatened the Americans with precisely this kind of opposition. It is difficult to see how Bush can get out of the mess his duplicitous strategy has created. Branding it as the “global war on terror” (trade mark supplied by the advertising consultant who branded “Head and Shoulders” shampoo) has so far been his best political card, but as casualties accumulate and the army remains tied down, the illusion will fade.