The US Begins the End in Iraq

President Obama is due today to announce the beginning of the end of US troop involvement in Iraq with just 50,000 troops due to remain until the end of next year. In view of this drawdown it is perhaps time to reflect on the nature of the US and UK involvement in Iraq for the past seven years.


The invasion that took place in 2003 was controversial at the time and the consequences of it have been far-reaching. The effect on Iraq itself has been considerable. The toppling of Saddam Hussein, a seriously brutal dictator whose excesses against his own population are today largely forgotten, was something that was a direct product of the invasion, as it was intended to be. The arguments concerning the justification of the war against Hussein have been gone through endlessly with particular focus on the failure of the "weapons of mass destruction" to be found and the repeated charge of the "illegality" of the invasion. The charge of "illegality" had two prime sources. The first was in a highly charged normative theory of international law. This theory, perhaps elaborated most extensively by Jurgen Habermas, tended to collapse the aspiration for a world order in which normative considerations are paramount from the reality of the world order we are faced with. The second, less contentious, focused on narrower issues, to do with the alleged status of UN resolutions and with the "ban" on aggressive intent in war. The status of UN resolutions and, indeed, the status of the UN itself, are less settled than opponents of the Second Iraq War contended. The more important point was the settled consensus that there is no basis for aggressive war and, indeed, it was due to the understanding and acceptance of this view even within official circles in the US and the UK, that it was suggested that Iraq possessed the potential and the desire to attack the West or, at least, unsettle Western possessions or allies. That was the reason the discussion of the alleged weapons mattered.


Despite the failure to find any weapons it is worth remembering that there was little dispute in 2002-03 that Iraq possessed dangerous weapons. There was a general acceptance that this was very likely including in governments that led opposition to the war such as those of Russia, China, and France. This tends to be forgotten by those who would wish to re-write history. It also tends to be forgotten that there was a serious split within Europe concerning the invasion with the governments of Spain, Italy and Poland prominent amongst those willing to support the invasion, even leaving aside the complicated case of Britain.


The effects of the invasion, apart from the removal of the brutal dictatorship of Hussein, have been, to put it mildly, mixed. What became clear after the dictatorship's removal was the basis of its existence. This basis was that the dictatorship had been able, by use of its methods, to keep Iraq as a nation united and removal of the dictatorship opened the way for all the forces that could pull Iraq apart. The insurgency against the invasion was mainly based in the Sunni population who had been net beneficiaries of the rule of the dictator though Shiite factions also arose that were to dispute the rule of a central government. Further, the US/UK reliance on ill-informed outsiders was exposed early. The general failure to understand or plan for the aftermath of the invasion was surely criminally irresponsible and is the single biggest mark both against the invasion itself and the principal movers behind it, especially the second President Bush. 


The regional effects of the invasion remain, somewhat surprisingly, unclear. There were initial encouraging effects when Libya, for example, hurried to become part of the fold of "accepted" nations. The failure to contain Syrian ambitions has revealed, however, how limited the regional effects of the invasion has been. The continuing conflict in Afghanistan, from which resources were drained by the invasion of Iraq, perhaps poses the more significant long-term questions.


US politics became drawn into long and bitter arguments that prompted, for a time, the most serious hostility to a sitting president in living memory. The continuing polarisation of US politics can be seen in the peculiar "Tea Party" phenomena. The Democratic Party was neither united in opposition to the war or capable of throwing up a leadership that could outline alternative views of America's place in the world as Obama's presidency continues to reveal.


In the UK the Iraq war eroded and eventually destroyed the premiership of Tony Blair, a consequence whose effects continued to be seen in the last election here this year. The corrosive consequences of this have been the return of traditional Tory isolationism combined with a general aversion for discussion of normative questions in international relations. These consequences are seriously regrettable and show that the long-term effects of the conflict reach far and wide.


The invasion may well have produced an international climate that is less favourable to serious normative consideration of international affairs generally despite the appeal to such considerations on the part of the war's critics. Alliance of such critics with governments of dubious standing and with those willing to make Islam a political movement also stained the credibility of such critics. There is little long-term to celebrate either concerning the war or its adversaries.

War Crimes and Moral Relativism

Last night I made the mistake of listening to BBC Radio 4's programme The Moral Maze. This was a mistake for a number of reasons. One of the key ones is that despite its apparent status as a programme that discusses "moral principles" it invariably is dominated by journalists, commentators and politicians who have the vaguest notion of what such things as moral principles are. The most striking example of this lack of sense of moral principle is certainly the Director of the Institute of Ideas Claire Fox. On last night's programme she advanced a view of international law and the notion of war crimes that amounted to the clearly relativist conception that it was intrinsically impossible to have agreement on what constituted "war crimes" so there was no point in trying.

Fox's concern with the issue of war crimes dates back to her previous role, highlighted on her personal description on the Institute of Idea's website with the magazine Living Marxism (later called LM). In her capacity of involvement with this magazine Fox was part of a campaign by this magazine in support of Republika Srpska's view of the internment camp at Trnopolje, principally by publishing in the February 1997 issue an article by Thomas Deichmann. Deichmann was a chief witness in the defence of Dusko Tadic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague. Tadic was charged with a series of crimes against humanity in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from northern Bosnia and was convicted and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. Despite the fact that Deichmann's testimony was in defence of a man subsequently convicted of war crimes he was presented by LM primarily as an "expert witness" at a series of trials the jurisdiction of which they were in the process of contesting.

The article LM magazine published by Deichmann alleged that ITN journalists had substantially fabricated a report concerning the Serb camp at Trnopolje and led to a libel suit against the magazine filed by ITN. The magazine lost this case against ITN, had a substantial award made against it and subsequently folded as a result. At no point during Fox's presentation of an essentially relativist argument about war crimes during the Moral Maze programme were any of her background in being part of a magazine that engaged so directly in defence of Republika Srpska mentioned. Due to this her argument could have appeared no more than a wooly attack on the idea that there could be such a thing as "international law" or any notion of standards of international justice. Such a position is problematic enough in itself but, when aligned with a past as a revisionist concerning the substance of the issue of the programme itself she emerges as someone with little credit in terms of addressing substantial moral issues.

The defence that LM magazine made of its original article in the libel trial was seriously intellectually confused since, during the course of the trial, it was admitted by both the editor of the magazine, Mick Hume (who now runs Spiked On-Line) and Deichmann himself that the camp in question was indeed a brutal place at which rape, beatings and murders (aka "war crimes") were, indeed, taking place. The primary argument they apparently made in response to ITN was that the Serb camps should not be compared to Nazi-style concentration camps with the implied suggestion that only these could be classed as being legitimately ones to which the term "war crimes" could be attached (a rendition further of Fox's relativist argument as given in the Moral Maze). As Fox put this point on last night's show, any mention of war crimes in connection with the Bosnian conflict suggests a connection with the Holocaust, a connection that she takes to "belittle" the Holocaust itself. This elevation of the Holocaust to an absolute status underpins the generally relativist view of "war crimes" otherwise adopted by Fox, Hume and Deichmann.

The general problem with the arguments of Fox et al and their presentation on a show apparently concerned with "moral principles" is connected to a parallel failure to investigate what is meant by "war crimes" when such are alleged to have been carried out by President Bush and ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Iraq War. On the one hand, there are those who articulate a position of "war crime" or "illegal war" on the absurd ground that a war has not been ratified by the UN and on the other hand there are those who deny that the term "war crime" has any meaning other than political except in a specially sanctified "absolute" case that renders all other judgments merely relativist in comparison. Both such positions merit resistance and indicate a substantial need for concern with the vocabulary of "war crime" including a return to investigation of its meaning prior to articulating its use. For a more extended comment on the background, history and nature of the case LM fought and lost with ITN and the reasons for viewing it as particularly important in this area see two articles by David Campbell here.