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Thursday, Sep 09, 2004

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International

Is war on terror being lost?

By Richard Norton-Taylor

LONDON, SEPT. 8. Forget all the arguments about Iraq, we are told. In the U.K., we have had two separate enquiries (Hutton and Butler), Tony Blair won't apologise for misleading the public and Parliament, and it is time to move on. But how can we possibly move on? The invasion of Iraq has cost the lives of more than 1,000 U.S. and more than 60 British soldiers. Put on one side the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction and the fact that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed less of a threat to its neighbours — let alone the west — last year than when western Governments were supplying his regime with WMD precursors right up to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Lofty aims

For Mr. Blair, as well as the U.S. President, George W. Bush and his neo-cons, an invasion of Iraq would topple a vicious dictator, help the "war on terror" by preventing nasty weapons getting into the hands of Al-Qaeda sympathisers and promote democracy in West Asia and neighbouring Central Asia.

We have just witnessed the latest manifestation of the so-called war on terror in the Caucasus. Further east, across the oil-rich Caspian, lies Uzbekistan, where the U.S. turns a blind eye to serious human rights abuses in return for military bases for the same war on terror. They were initially used to attack the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, where elections are due next month — an event the U.S. has done little to prepare for, wary of upsetting warlords, while leaving responsibility for security to its European NATO allies, which they are unwilling or unable to provide.

In Iraq — described without irony by the Bush administration as the new "front line" in the war on terror — the U.S. has installed a Government of placemen. As the respected Iraq expert, Toby Dodge, observes in Survival, the International Institute for Strategic Studies journal, it has "a high proportion of formerly exiled politicians in the Cabinet and a Prime Minister closely associated with the intelligence arms of both the British and American Governments."

The insurgency, he writes, is a homegrown phenomenon, springing from the political and security failures of the occupation. Foreign troops, he suggests, will be needed "for many years to come if anarchy is to be avoided." Dodge adds pointedly: ``In the 20s and 30s, the hegemonic power seeking to recreate Iraq was Britain. The 1920 revolt made the occupation extremely unpopular with the British people and led to a change in government in London. The result was that state-building in Iraq was sacrificed at the altar of British domestic politics.''

Mr. Blair insists his Government will not walk away from countries it has helped occupy. The bigger question is how he will achieve his stated objectives of promoting democracy and human rights in West Asia, fighting poverty, and giving a much-needed boost to a U.N.-focused internationalism. All this would help, much more than military occupation, in the fight against terrorism.

Obstacles

It is hard not to conclude that one of the greatest obstacles to the kind of better world Mr. Blair says he wants — one with less cause for terrorism, even if terrorists will always be around — is the Bush administration, and notably the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They have consistently dismissed British interests and embarrassed a Prime Minister who has attached himself so closely to Mr. Bush with such little reward.

What did Blair think when delegates at last week's Republican convention booed speakers who mentioned the U.N.? How much longer can Blair, or his Ministers, accept to be led by a U.S. administration that denigrates everything they say they stand for?—

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