Neo-Conned. How Blair Took New Labour for a Ride.

The Independent, 27 June 2007

An edited excerpt from Black Mass.

Neo-conservatism is not the most recent variety of conservatism. It is a new type of politics that can emerge at any point on the political spectrum. In Britain, neo-conservatism's political vehicle was not the Conservative Party but the new party that Blair created when he seized the Labour leadership.

The single most important fact in Blair's rise to power was Thatcher's new settlement. Both in economic and political terms it was an established fact, but while this was an index of Thatcher's achievement it was also a source of weakness for the Conservatives.

Thatcher often declared that she aimed to destroy socialism in Britain. She never paused to consider what would be the effect on her party if she succeeded. For much of the 20th century the Conservatives acted as a brake on collectivism. The Conservative Party existed to oppose not just socialism but also - and more relevantly - any further advance towards social democracy. By dismantling the Labour settlement, Thatcher removed the chief reason for the existence of the Conservative Party. Without a clearly defined enemy it lacked an identity. Labour had never been a doctrinaire socialist party - as Harold Wilson remarked, it had always owed more to Methodism than to Marx - but by identifying New Labour with the market, Blair was able to deprive the Conservatives of the threat that had defined them for generations. As a result they were mired in confusion for nearly a decade.

While Blair's embrace of neo-liberal economic policies was a strategic decision, it soon acquired an ideological rationale. More conventional in his thinking about domestic issues than most politicians, and having an even shorter historical memory, Blair embraced without question the neo-liberal belief that only one economic system can deliver prosperity in a late modern context. Modernisation became the Blairite mantra, and for Blair it meant something precise: the reorganisation of society around the imperatives of the free market.

When he was still in opposition, Blair curried support from disillusioned Conservatives by representing himself as a One Nation Tory - a progressive conservative who accepted the central role of the market but also understood the importance of social cohesion. Once in power it was clear Blair came not to bury Thatcher but to continue her work.

Blair's One Nation Toryism was like his fabled Third Way, a political marketing tool. The Third Way originated in Bill Clinton's practice of "triangulation" - a tactic invented in the mid-1990s by Clinton's adviser Dick Morris, which involved Clinton setting himself up as a more pragmatic alternative to both parties in Congress. Adopting the same tactic, Blair attacked his own party as much as the Conservatives. His successful campaign to remove Clause Four (which mandated common ownership of the means of production) from the Labour constitution in 1995 was a symbolic act rather than a policy shift. At the same time it was a marker for larger challenges to Labour's social-democratic inheritance. Blair carried on the agenda of privatisation that had developed from Thatcher's original programme into core areas of the state such as sections of the justice system and prison service, and inserted market mechanisms into the NHS and the schooling system.

In these respects Blair did no more than consolidate Thatcherism, but he did not change British society in the way Thatcher did. His chief impact has been on his own party. New Labour was constructed to bury the past and in this, if in nothing else, it succeeded. It began as a coup masterminded by a handful of people - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and others - who aimed to rebuild the party as an instrument for securing power.

New Labour was a purpose-built construction with few links to the political tradition that preceded it. If it displayed any continuity with the past it was with the Social Democratic Party that had split from Labour in the Eighties, but unlike the Social Democrats, New Labour grasped that issues of strategy and organisation are more important than questions of policy. New Labour's first priority was to restructure the party as a centralised institution. Power had to be concentrated before anything else could be done. New Labour always had a Leninist aspect, but it was a Leninism that focused on reshaping the image of the party. If New Labour was "modern" in its acceptance of the free market, it was "postmodern" in its conviction that power is exercised by changing the way society is perceived.

Blair's most prominent talents were his skill in using the techniques of public relations and his sensitivity to the public mood. These traits have led some observers to the view that he is an opportunist with no underlying convictions. It is true that there has never been anything like a Blairite ideology, but that does not mean Blair has no beliefs.

His career in politics is testimony to the power of neo-conservative ideas, which guided his most fateful decisions. Blair was a neo-liberal by default, but a neo-conservative by conviction. Neo-conservatism diverges from neo-liberalism at crucial points, and it is specifically neo-conservative beliefs that shaped Blair's view of the world. Unlike neo-liberals, neo-conservatives do not aim to return to an imaginary era of minimum government. They perceive that the social effects of free markets are not all benign and look to government to promote the virtues the free market neglects.

Blair has always been a strong advocate of "law and order", and made this a theme when he served as shadow Home Secretary under Labour leader John Smith. In part this was a strategic move to wrest the territory from the Conservatives, but it also matched his instincts.
Neo-conservatives may not always be admirers of Victorian values - some (including Blair) have seen themselves as having liberal views on personal morality - but they reject the view that the state can be morally neutral. Government must act to promote the good life, which involves accepting the need for discipline and punishment. It also means promoting religion. Unlike neo-liberals, who are usually secular in outlook, neo-conservatives view religion as a vital source of social cohesion - a view expressed in Blair's support for faith schools.

Above all, neo-conservatives are unwilling to rely on social evolution. Commonly more intelligent than neo-liberals, they understand that while capitalism is a revolutionary force that overturns established social structures and topples regimes, this does not happen by itself - state power and sometimes military force are needed to expedite the process. In its enthusiasm for revolutionary change, neo-conservatism has more in common with Jacobinism and Leninism than with neo-liberalism or traditional conservatism. The common view of Blair as a crypto-Tory could not be more mistaken. There is no trace in him of the scepticism about progress voiced by Tories such as Disraeli. Nor is he simply another neo-liberal prophet of the free market. He is an American neo-conservative and has been throughout most of his political life.

It is in international relations that neo-conservatism shaped Blair most deeply. Whatever he may have wished his inheritance to be - British entry into the single European currency, perhaps - he will be remembered for taking the UK into a ruinous war. His part in the Iraq War destroyed him as a politician, and he cannot have wanted this result. It would be a mistake to imagine that he was as committed at the beginning of this ill-conceived venture as he later came to be; he made errors of judgement at every stage. At the same time, his support for the war expressed his most basic beliefs.

From one point of view it was a misjudged exercise in realpolitik. Like other British prime ministers, Blair feared the consequence of opposing US policies and was prey to the conceit that by being America's unswerving ally Britain could help shape its behaviour in the international system. Anthony Eden's attempt to topple the Egyptian president Nasser and reassert British control of the Suez Canal in 1956 destroyed his political career and underlined the risks of any British leader opposing American power. Later prime ministers successfully distanced themselves from American policies - most notably Harold Wilson, who wisely declined to send troops to support the Americans in Vietnam - but Blair was insistent that Britain must give the US full support. He feared the impact on the international system if the US acted alone and saw an opportunity for Britain to "punch above its weight" by acting as the bridge between America and Europe.

In fact, the war left the transatlantic divide wider than at any time since the Second World War, with British opinion alienated from the US, and Britain at the same time more at odds with Europe even than in Thatcher's time. But it was not only a misguided attempt at higher strategy, and there can be no doubt that Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam chimed with Blair's convictions. Saddam was a tyrant who represented a stage in human history whose time had passed. A new international order was under construction with America in the lead, and Blair wanted to be at the forefront of this project. As John Kampfner has written, "Blair was not dragged into war with Iraq. He was at ease with himself and his own beliefs."

What were those beliefs? In a span of six years, Blair took Britain into war five times. He sanctioned air strikes against Saddam Hussein in 1998, the Kosovo war in 1999, British military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000, the war in Afghanistan in 2002, and Iraq in 2003. He dispatched further contingents of British troops to Afghanistan in 2006 when US forces were run down in the country. There is a strong strand of continuity in these decisions. Blair believes in the power of force to ensure the triumph of the good. From this point of view, the attack on Iraq was a continuation of policies in the Balkans and Afghanistan. In each case war was justified as a form of humanitarian intervention. This may have had some force in the Balkans and Sierra Leone. It was dubious in Afghanistan and duplicitous in Iraq.

Blair justified these military involvements in terms of a "doctrine of international community", which he presented in a speech at the Economic Club in Chicago in 1999. Blair's new doctrine rested on the belief that state sovereignty could no longer survive in an interdependent world: "We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community. By this I mean the explicit recognition that today more than ever before we are mutually dependent, that national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration and that we need a clear and coherent debate as to the direction the doctrine takes us in each field of international endeavour. Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community - the belief that partnership and co-operation are essential to advance self-interest - is coming into its own; so it needs to find its own international echo."

Blair's speech reflects the unreal intellectual climate of the time. In the Nineties, it was fashionable to maintain that the world had moved into a "post-Westphalian" era - so called after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which is often seen as marking the point at which the modern state was recognised in law. This system had ended in the post-Cold War period, it was believed: state sovereignty was no longer at the centre of the international system, which was governed by global institutions. In fact the sovereign state was as strong as it had ever been, and its seeming decline was a by-product of the interval after the end of the Cold War in which the US seemed able to act without restraint from other powers. The interval was destined to be brief.
China and India were emerging as great powers whose interests diverge at important points but which are at one in rejecting any system based on American hegemony. In the Nineties, as in the past, several great powers were interacting in a mix of rivalry and co-operation. In many ways this was a re-run of the late 19th century with different players.

The idea that the sovereign state is on the way out was nonsense, but it served Blair well. In the first place, it matched his view of the world in which human development is seen as a series of stages, each better than the last. This is a Whiggish variant of the belief in providence to which Blair subscribed as part of his Christian worldview.

It would be unwise to take too seriously Blair's claim to have been inspired by the Quaker philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976) - a Christian communitarian thinker who developed from the British Idealist tradition and argued for a positive understanding of freedom as a part of the common good. To a greater extent than for most politicians, Blair's view of the world was formed by the conventional beliefs of the day. He never doubted that globalisation was creating a worldwide market economy that must eventually be complemented by global democracy. When he talked of the necessity for continuing "economic reform" - as he often did - he took for granted that this meant further privatisation and the injection of market mechanisms into public services. The incessant "modernisation" he demanded was, in effect, an ossified version of the ideas of the late Eighties. Like Thatcher - with whom he has very little else in common - Blair lacked scepticism. For him, the clichés of the hour have always been eternal verities.

As with George W Bush, however, there is no reason to doubt the reality of Blair's faith. Like Bush, Blair thinks of international relations in terms derived from theology. To be sure, this is not the theology of Augustine or Aquinas. It failed to persuade Pope John Paul II when Blair had an audience with him in late February 2003.

Medieval Christian thinkers developed a rigorous theory of the conditions that must be satisfied before a war can be considered just, and the pontiff rightly believed they had not been met. The audience must have pained Blair, but it failed to shake his sense of rectitude. It was enough that he felt he was right. The scrupulous casuistry of medieval thinkers regarding the consequences of human action was of no interest.

Good intentions are what matter and they are bound in the end to prevail. And yet these same "good intentions" were promoted through ill-conceived and ideologically motivated policies, whose distance from any prudent assessment of facts he seemed unable to perceive.
The idea that the international system was moving towards global governance expanded the traditional purposes of war. The "international community" could take military action whenever it was morally right to do so. Not only "rogue states" that threatened the international system by developing weapons of mass destruction, but also states that violated the human rights of their citizens should be the target of armed force. The aim was not just to neutralise threats - even pre-emptively. It was to improve the human condition. War was no longer a last resort against the worst evils but an instrument of human progress. In his speech in Chicago, Blair acknowledged that military action should be taken only when diplomacy had failed, and then only if it had a reasonable prospect of achieving its goals.

Nevertheless, he dismissed the views of those - many of them in the professional military in the UK and the US - who demanded that an exit strategy be identified before military intervention could be seriously contemplated. For Blair, their caution smacked of defeatism. "Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider," he declared.

Later speeches show Blair accepting that military force alone cannot bring about the radical transformation in the international system to which he is committed. Addressing the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles in August 2006, Blair declared that the struggle against terrorism "is one about values". He was reticent in specifying what these values might be; but whatever they were, he had no doubt they spearheaded human advance: "Our values are worth struggling for. They represent humanity's progress throughout the ages and at each point we have had to fight for them and defend them. As a new age beckons, it is time to fight for them again."
Blair returned to the subject in January 2007, when he opined: "Terrorism destroys progress. Terrorism can't be defeated by military means alone. But it can't be defeated without it."
Lying behind Blair's view of international relations is a view of America. Along with his fellow neo-conservatives in Washington, Blair regards America as the paradigm of a modern society. Propelled by the momentum of history, it is invincible. In giving his backing to the Bush administration in Iraq, Blair was able to believe that he was aiding the cause of human progress while having the consoling sense of being on the side of the big battalions. Blair's faith in American invincibility was misguided. America's defeat by the Iraqi insurgency was in no way unexpected. The French were driven from Algeria despite prosecuting the war with extreme ruthlessness and being backed by over a million French settlers. In conditions more like those the American forces faced in Iraq, the Soviets had also been driven from Afghanistan. The lesson of asymmetric warfare - where the militarily weak use unorthodox tactics against the seemingly overwhelmingly strong - is that the weak have the winning hand.

If Blair failed to heed these lessons, the reason was partly ignorance. A politician who has unusual intuitive gifts in divining the British public mood, he lacked the knowledge necessary to make well-founded judgements in international contexts. His record of success in domestic politics was based on banishing the past. He was led into the Iraq débâcle by the belief that history was on his side. Actually, he knew very little history, and what he did know he refused to accept when it undercut his hopes. History was significant only as a record of human advance. To turn to it to chasten current ambitions was unthinkable, even immoral. Like Bush, Blair viewed history as the unfolding of a providential design, and a feature of their view is that the design is visible to the faithful. Others may be blind to the unfolding pattern, and in that case they may have to be guided. In Augustinian terms this is unacceptable, for only God can know the design of history. Here Blair has been the modern man he claims to be: for him, a sense of subjective certainty is all that is needed for an action to be right. If deception is needed to realise the providential design, it cannot be truly deceitful.

Deception has been integral at every stage of the Iraq War. [Let us] consider some of the key episodes of disinformation that enabled British involvement in the war. In the run-up to the invasion, Blair always insisted publicly that its goal was not regime change - which he knew to be legally unacceptable as a ground for attacking the country - but the threat posed by Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. A document was circulated titled "Iraq's Programme of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government" (published on 24 September 2002 under the title "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government"). The document - which came to be known as the "dodgy dossier" - claimed to be an authoritative statement based on intelligence concerning Iraq's capabilities and intentions regarding WMD; but it contradicted earlier intelligence assessments. In March 2002, a report to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which brings together information from all of the UK's intelligence services, concluded that there was "no evidence that Saddam Hussein posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991 after the Gulf War". Moreover, while the dossier claimed to be based on intelligence sources, 90 per cent of it was copied from three published articles. In the case of one of them, the meaning was changed to imply that Iraq was supporting Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida - a claim for which there was no basis, and which evidence of enmity and suspicion between the two rendered highly implausible.

Like Bush, Blair has focused on intelligence failures as being among the chief reasons for the difficulty of prosecuting the war. In fact, a recurrent feature of the conflict has been that intelligence findings that ran counter to claims made in support of the decision to go to war have been ignored or suppressed. In February 2003, a leaked document from the UK Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) acknowledged that there had been contact between al-Qa'ida and the Iraqi regime in the past but noted that any relationship between them foundered on mistrust. "[Bin Laden's] aims are in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq," the report concluded. The report contradicted the claim that Saddam cultivated contacts with the group that organised the 9/11 attacks - a claim central to Blair's defence of the attack on Iraq as part of the "war against terror".

An earlier report, the "Iraq Options" paper produced by the Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office on 8 March 2002, surveyed the evidence and concluded unambiguously: "In the judgement of the JIC, there is no recent evidence of Iraq[i] complicity with international terrorism. There is therefore no justification for action against Iraq based on self-defence to combat imminent threats of terrorism as in Afghanistan." This report and others show that Britain's intelligence agencies were repeatedly tasked to find evidence for links between Saddam and al-Qa'ida. Unable to find any such evidence and unwilling to invent it, they reported that none existed. The only effect their reports had was that Blair shifted the case for war to arguments about WMD, where intelligence could be more easily manipulated.

In this instance, as in others, the problem was not defective intelligence. It was that intelligence was disregarded when it did not support the case for war. Blair had no use for intelligence based on facts. He was only interested in "faith-based intelligence" - as a former arms-control expert who used to work for the American State Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, described the way intelligence is viewed in the Bush administration. One of its key proponents headed the Office of Special Plans - an ad hoc organisation set up to screen out inconvenient intelligence.

Secret planning for the invasion seems to have started in America months or weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks late in 2001, and it was clear to Blair that Bush meant to go to war in Iraq from the time he visited Bush at Camp David in April 2002. A memorandum from the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, which was sent to Blair on 25 March 2002 in preparation for the visit, noted that while it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind, the case for war was thin - Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. Despite this advice, Blair gave his full backing to Bush when the two met at Camp David. At a meeting held at 10 Downing Street at 9am on 23 July 2002, whose details were subsequently leaked in the "Downing Street Memo", Blair was told by "C" - the head of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, who had recently had talks in Washington with the head of the CIA, George Tenet - that military action against Saddam was "seen as inevitable" and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". Partly in order to placate opinion in the Labour Party, Blair persuaded Bush to go to the UN to seek a second resolution authorising military action. Yet at a meeting in the White House on 31 January 2003, Bush made it clear to Blair that he meant to go to war regardless of the UN's decision, and Blair again promised Bush his full support. He also rejected an offer from Bush that could have spared Britain from full involvement in the war. In March 2003, fearful that Blair's government might fall, Bush gave him the option of British forces not participating in the invasion. Blair dismissed the option and insisted he was fully committed. However, in the House of Commons Blair maintained the pretence that war could still be avoided right up to the crucial vote on 18 March (two days before the war).

Blair's complicity in deception in the run-up to war has led to him being seen as mendacious. This is a misreading. It is not so much that he is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it. For him, truth is whatever serves the cause, and when he engages in what is commonly judged to be deception he is only anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about. His silences serve the same higher purpose. Blair has remained silent regarding the abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib, and he has dismissed well-sourced reports that American planes have used British airports to implement the policy of "special rendition", in which terrorist suspects are kidnapped and transported to countries where they can be tortured. Blair's stance on these issues must by ordinary standards be judged to be thoroughly dishonest, but it is clear he believes ordinary standards do not apply to him. Deception is justified if it advances human progress - and then it is not deception. Blair's untruths are not true lies. They are prophetic glimpses of the future course of history, and they carry the hazards of all such revelations.

During Blair's decade in office, British government changed in character. All administrations aim to present a positive image of themselves, and some have departed from truth in the process. Where Blair was unique was in viewing the shaping of public opinion as government's overriding purpose. The result was that, whereas in the past lies were an intermittent feature of government, under his leadership they became integral to its functioning. Writing about the role of lying in Soviet politics, the French political thinker Raymond Aron observed: "In the exact, strict sense of the word, he who consciously says the opposite of the truth is lying: Lenin's companions were lying when they confessed to crimes they had not committed, and Soviet propaganda was lying when it sang of the happiness of the people during the days of collectivisation... On the other hand, when the Bolsheviks, the Communists, call the Soviet Union socialist, must we say that they are lying? ... if they recognise the difference between what socialism is today and what it will be when it conforms to its essence, then they are not, in the strictest sense, lying, but rather substituting for reality (something that can be described as) 'pseudo reality': the meaning that they give something in terms of a future they imagine as conforming to the ideology. Despite everything, Sovietism becomes a step along the road to socialism, and hence a step toward the salvation of mankind." If there is an historical precedent for Blair's methodical disregard for truth it is in the Soviet era, when a generation of Western communists represented the USSR as a stage on the way to universal democracy. Believing they were serving an invincible cause, these fellow-travellers were ready to "lie for the truth" by portraying the Soviet system not as it was in fact but as it would inevitably - so they believed - become.

It was absurd to describe the Soviet Union as a democracy. It is no less absurd to suggest that Iraq is an emerging liberal democracy and to refer to the country as the place in which the war against global terrorism is being won. In factual terms Iraq is a failed state, and insofar as there is anything like democracy it is working to produce Iranian-style theocracy. In the same way, facts tell us that the US-led invasion has turned the country into a training ground for terrorists.
Blair did more than conceal these facts. He constructed a pseudoreality that aimed to shape the way we think. As in the Soviet case, the pseudoreality failed to withstand the test of history. The hideous facts of life in Iraq refute the postmodern dogma that truth is a construction of power. If they have yet to penetrate into Blair's awareness, they have entered that of American voters, and as a result he is condemned to live out his days as the redundant servant of a failed administration. Out of power, he faces decades on the lecture circuit dispensing uplifting platitudes to listless audiences drawn from the second division of American business.

The political environments in which Blair and Bush came to power could hardly be more different. Blair could not mobilise popular religious belief behind him as Bush did, and a neo-conservative intellectual movement supporting his messianic foreign policy began to develop in Britain only towards the end of his period in power. Yet there was a kinship between Bush and Blair. The combination of a shallow but intense religiosity with a militant faith in human progress that defines Bush's world-view also shaped Blair's. Blair and Bush interpreted the history of the past two decades - the only history they knew - as showing that humanity had entered a wholly new era. Like Thatcher at the end of the 1980s, they interpreted the collapse of Communism not as a setback for Western universalism - which it was - but as a sign of the triumph of "the West". Lacking any longer historical perspective, they understood the challenges of the early 20th century in terms of the triumphal illusions of the post-Cold War era.

Blair and Bush came at the end of a period of ascending utopianism in Western politics. For them, human progress was axiomatic; but it was never understood only in the terms of secular thought. Both practised a missionary style of politics, whose goal was nothing less than the salvation of mankind.

The Death of this Crackpot Creed is Nothing to Mourn

The Guardian, July 31 2007.

The era of liberal interventionism in international affairs is over. Invading Iraq was always in part an oil grab. A strategic objective of the Bush administration was control of Iraqi oil, which forms a key portion of the Gulf reserves that are the lifeblood of global capitalism. Yet success in this exercise in geopolitics depended on stability after Saddam was gone, and here American thinking was befogged by illusions. Both the neoconservatives who launched the war and the many liberals who endorsed it in the US and Britain took it for granted that Iraq would remain intact.

As could be foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, things have not turned out that way. The dissolution of Iraq is an unalterable fact, all too clear to those who have to cope on the ground, that is denied only in the White House and the fantasy world of the Green Zone. American-led regime change has created a failed state that no one has the power to rebuild. Yesterday's Oxfam report revealed that nearly one in three Iraqis is in need of emergency aid, and yet the anarchy that prevails prevents any such assistance.

Iraq now belongs in the history books, and Mesopotamia - the ancient region between the Tigris and Euphrates that includes parts of Turkey, Iran and Syria as well as the country that has been destroyed - is the site of an intensifying resource war. The Baghdad government is a battleground of sectarian forces while the Kurdish zone is independent in all but name. Utopian schemes for a federal state have been overtaken by an internal resource war fought out along sectarian lines.

Anarchy of this kind is a hideous condition in which to live, but its destructive impact reaches beyond the millions of Iraqis whose lives are already ruined. The surrounding states are being irresistibly drawn into the country's conflicts. Both Iran and Turkey have an interest in Iraq's oil wealth - Iran by virtue of having expanded its power and influence over the Shia majority, Turkey from fear that control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk will pass into the hands of the Kurds. Such states can hardly avoid intervening and will not be deterred from acting to safeguard what they see as their vital national interests by threats from the Bush administration. Iraq is at risk of becoming the centre of a wider war, which the US can do very little to prevent - which shows up the lack of proportion in comparing the present conflict with Vietnam.

America was able to walk away from Vietnam because that country was peripheral in the world economy and the knock-on effects of US withdrawal were comparatively slight; Iraq, by contrast, is a key factor in global oil supplies, and if the US pulls out its ability to protect its allies in the region will be called into question. Another crucial difference is that Vietnam had an effective government in the north that could take over when the US exited. No such entity exists in Iraq. The feared domino effect in south-east Asia did not occur, but Iraq could be the scene of a domino effect in reverse in which the country's warring neighbours fall into the void left by the Americans' departure. By any standard, defeat in Iraq would be a more devastating blow to US power than Vietnam.

The most important - as well as most often neglected - feature of the conflict shaping up around Iraq is that the US no longer has the ability to mould events. Whatever it does, there will be decades of bloodshed in the region. Another large blunder - such as bombing Iran, as Dick Cheney seems to want, or launching military operations against Pakistan, as some in Washington appear to propose - would make matters even worse.

The chaos that has engulfed Iraq is only the start of a longer and larger upheaval, but it would be useful if we learned a few lessons from it. There is a stupefying cliche which says regime change went wrong because there was not enough thought about what to do after the invasion. The truth is that if there had been sufficient forethought the invasion would not have been launched. After the overthrow of Saddam - a secular despot in a European tradition that includes Lenin and Stalin - there was never any prospect of imposing a western type of government. Grotesque errors were made such as the disbanding of the Iraqi army, but they only accelerated a process of fragmentation that would have happened anyway. Forcible democratisation undid not only the regime but also the state.

Liberal interventionists who supported regime change as part of a global crusade for human rights overlooked the fact that the result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing. Equally they failed to perceive the rapidly dwindling leverage on events of the western powers that led the crusade. If anyone stands to gain long term it is Russia and China, which have stood patiently aside and now watch the upheaval with quiet satisfaction. Neoconservatives spurned stability in international relations and preached the virtues of creative destruction. Liberal internationalists declared history had entered a new stage in which pre-emptive war would be used to construct a new world order where democracy and peace thrived. The result of these delusions is what we see today: a world of rising authoritarian regimes and collapsed states no one knows how to govern.

Many will caution against throwing out the baby of humanitarian military intervention together with the neocon bathwater. No doubt the idea that western states can project their values by force of arms gives a sense of importance to those who believe it. It tells them they are still the chief actors on the world stage, the vanguard of human progress that embodies the meaning of history. But this liberal creed is a dangerous conceit if applied to today's intractable conflicts, where resource wars are entwined with wars of religion and western power is in retreat.
The liberal interventionism that took root in the aftermath of the cold war was never much more than a combination of post-imperial nostalgia with crackpot geopolitics. It was an absurd and repugnant mixture, and one whose passing there is no reason to regret. What the world needs from western governments is not another nonsensical crusade. It is a dose of realism and a little humility.

Power and Vainglory: Iraq Isn't Another Vietnam - It's Much Worse

The Independent, May 19, 2004

The images of abused prisoners demonstrate not just American depravity, but the folly of waging war as a moral crusade

Misguided from the start, the war in Iraq is spiraling out of control. Any legitimacy the occupying forces may ever have possessed has been destroyed, and there are signs that Iraqi insurgents are coming together to mount a movement of resistance that could render the country ungovernable. With even more damning images likely to find their way into the public realm in the near future, the United States is facing an historic defeat in Iraq - a blow to American power more damaging than it suffered in Vietnam, and far larger in its global implications.

The inescapable implication of currently available evidence is that the use of torture by US forces was not an aberration, but a practice sanctioned at the highest levels. Undoubtedly there were serious breaches of discipline, and the blank failure to understand that they had done anything wrong displayed by some of the abusers does not speak well for the levels of training of sections of the US military.

Abuse on the scale suggested by the Red Cross report cannot be accounted for by any mere lapse in discipline or the trailer-park mentality of some American recruits. It was inherent in the American approach to the war. American military intervention in Iraq was based on neo-conservative fantasies about US forces being greeted as liberators. In fact, as could be foreseen at the time, it has embroiled these forces in a brutal and hopeless war against the Iraqi people. From being regarded as passive recipients of American goodwill, they are now viewed as virtually subhuman. If, as seems clear, British forces are innocent of anything resembling the systemic abuse that appears to have been practiced by the Americans, one reason is that they do not share these attitudes.

The resistance mounted by the Iraqi insurgents can be compared to the anti-colonial liberation struggles of the 1950s, but the closest parallels with the intractable conflict now under way are found in Chechnya, which remains a zone of anarchy and terror despite the ruthless deployment of Russian firepower and the systematic use of torture for more than a decade. It was the prospect of an intractable guerrilla conflict that led many soldiers in the Pentagon to express deep reservations regarding the war. When the civilian leadership launched the invasion of Iraq, US forces were plunged into a type of conflict for which they are supremely ill equipped.
In the wake of Vietnam and Somalia, American military doctrine has been based on "force protection" and "shock and awe".

In practice, these strategies mean killing anyone who appears to pose any threat to US forces and overcoming the enemy through the use of overwhelming firepower. Effective in the early stages of the war when the enemy was Saddam and his regime, they are deeply counter-productive when, as in Iraq today, the enemy comprises much of the population. As Douglas Hurd has observed, filling the hospitals and mortuaries is not the best way to win hearts and minds. The effect has been to make the conflict more savage. It is in circumstances such as these that torture becomes routine. In Iraq over the past year, as in Chechnya, and before that in Algeria where the French fought a similar dirty war, anyone could end up a victim of torture.
In subjecting randomly selected Iraqis to abuse, American forces are following a well-trodden path, but the type of torture that has been practiced has some distinctive features. Unlike the Russians or the French, who inflicted extremes of physical pain as well, US forces in Iraq appear to be relying mainly on techniques that focus on the application of intense psychological pressure. In order to soften up detainees they have swept up from the streets, they have used disorientation, sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation. These are all forms of abuse that would damage any human being, but leading naked Iraqi males around on dog leads and covering their heads with women's underwear look like techniques designed specifically in order to attack the prisoners' identity and values. The result is that an indelible image of American depravity has been imprinted on the entire Islamic world.

It remains unclear how these techniques came to be used in Abu Ghraib prison. What is evident is that from the start of the war on terror the Bush administration has flouted or circumvented international law on the treatment of detainees. It unilaterally declared members of terrorist organizations to be illegal combatants who are not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. The detainees held at Guantanamo Bay fall into this category, and so apparently did the Taliban and al-Qa'ida suspects who were captured in Afghanistan. Being beyond the reach of international law, they were liable to torture.

In Iraq, the Bush administration evaded international law by a different route. They outsourced security duties at Abu Ghraib and other American detention facilities to private contractors not covered by military law and not regulated by the Geneva Convention. In effect, the Bush administration deliberately created a lawless environment in which abuse could be practiced with impunity.

Some of the lawmakers who watched video stills of the sexual abuse of Iraqi women by US personnel in a closed session on Capitol Hill in Washington last week have described the behavior they witnessed as un-American. Maybe so, but it was made possible by policies emanating from the highest levels of American leadership. The torture of Iraqis by US personnel is an application of the Bush administration's strategy in the war on terror.

Tossing aside international law and the norms of civilized behavior in this way is self-defeating. Not so long ago, the clash of civilizations was just a crass and erroneous theory, but after the recent revelations it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. In toppling Saddam, the Americans destroyed an essentially Western regime, not unlike the Stalinist Soviet Union in its militant secularism. In doing so, they empowered radical Islam as the single most important political force in the country.

The immediate beneficiary of the torture revelations is likely to be Iran - a fact that seems to have been grasped by Ahmed Chalabi (the Iraqi émigré that the neo-conservatives believed would take the country to American-style democracy), who appears to be forging links with the Iranian regime. At a global level, the principal beneficiary is al-Qa'ida, which is now a more serious threat than it has ever been.

The Bush administration's self-defeating approach to terrorism is symptomatic of a dangerous unrealism running right through its thinking. For Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defense Secretary, and other neo-conservatives, the solution to terrorism was to "modernize" the Middle East. For them, that meant overthrowing many, if not most, of the area's regimes and replacing them with secular liberal democracies. They appear not to have noticed that the region's secular regimes were authoritarian states such as Syria and Iraq. In the Middle East today, as in Algeria in the past, democracy means Islamist rule.

In part, the attack on Iraq was simply another exercise in the type of neo-Wilsonian fantasy that is a recurring feature of US foreign policy, but it was also an exercise in realpolitik - and a resource war. A key part of the rationale for the invasion was to enable the US to withdraw from Saudi Arabia, which had come to be seen as complicit with terror and inherently unstable.
If it was to pull out from Saudi Arabia, the US needed another source of oil. Only Iraq has it in sufficient quantities - hence the drive for regime change. In this Dr Strangelove-like vision, once Saddam had been removed and Iraq remodeled as a Western-style democracy, the oil would start flowing. The war would be self-financing, and the world economy would move smoothly into the sunlit uplands.

Things have not turned out quite like that. Oil prices have risen, not fallen, and they could easily rise further. Partly this is a result of the increasingly desperate security situation in Iraq. The Americans did more than overthrow Saddam's despotic regime; they also destroyed the Iraqi state, with the result that the country is now in a condition of semi-anarchy.

Given the ill-judged attack by US forces on the Shia holy city of Najaf and the likelihood that the beheading of Nicholas Berg by Islamist militants will be followed by more such atrocities, the level of violence in the country will almost certainly escalate. In that case, Iraq will be the scene of a mass exodus. International organizations and Western oil companies will leave and any prospect of rebuilding the country will be lost. Where will that leave Iraq - and its oil?
The exodus will not be confined to Iraq. Western companies are already leaving Saudi Arabia, the producer of last resort in the global oil market. Emboldened by the worsening situation in Iraq, forces linked to al-Qa'ida have intensified their attacks on Saudi targets. Economists may say that the world need not fear another oil shock, but they have forgotten the geo-political realities. Saudi oil is still hugely important, and any sign of increased instability in the country is immediately reflected in the oil price. The impact of a major upheaval in the kingdom would be incalculable.

The US cannot afford an ongoing war in Iraq, but the price of a quick exit will be high. Even so, it looks clear that that is exactly what is about to happen. After the torture revelations, "staying the course" is no longer feasible. This is not because the American public has reacted with massive revulsion to evidence of the systematic abuse of Iraqis - as has been the case in Britain and other European countries. Rather, Iraq and its people are now viewed with a mix of bafflement and hatred, and a mood of despair about the war has set in. Most Americans want out - and soon. Locked in internal dispute, the Democrats have not so far been able to grasp the nettle. The pressure on President Bush to announce that America has completed its mission with the handover of sovereignty may well prove overwhelming.

If he decides to cut and run, Bush may yet survive the débâcle in Iraq. No such prospect beckons for Tony Blair. It was his brand of messianic liberalism that dragged Britain into the war. For the Prime Minister, going to war in Iraq offered an intoxicating feeling of rectitude combined with the reassuring sense of being on the side of the big battalions. But American invincibility was a neo-conservative myth, and the notion that Blair can survive the hideous fiasco that is unfolding in Iraq is as delusional as the thinking that led to the war in the first place. It cannot be long before he is irresistibly prompted to seek new avenues for his messianic ambitions.

In the US, American withdrawal will be represented as a reward for a job well done. The rest of the world will recognize it as a humiliating defeat, and it is here that the analogy of Vietnam is inadequate. The Iraq war has been lost far more quickly than that in South-east Asia, and the impact on the world is potentially much greater. Whereas Vietnam had little economic significance, Iraq is pivotal in the world economy. No dominoes fell with the fall of Saigon, but some pretty weighty ones could be shaken as the American tanks rumble out of Baghdad.
The full implications of such a blow to American power cannot be foreseen. One consequence is clear enough, however. The world has seen the last of liberal imperialism. It died on the killing fields of Iraq. It is no consolation to the people of that country, but at least their sufferings have demonstrated the cruel folly of waging war in order to fight a liberal crusade.