Washington digs in for war it believes to be inevitable
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
news.scotsman.com
COMING to the hyperpower capital from peace-torn Europe, I find three things. Washington is at war. Washington is probably going to war. And Washington is starting to think about a peace to end both wars — the war on terrorism and the likely war with Iraq. People in Europe, and the world beyond, need to wake up to all three realities.
There is some confusion here between the two wars. Sometimes when Washingtonians say "war" they mean the war against terrorism, which they are still living intensely in everyday life. Sometimes they mean war with Iraq, which now seems more likely than ever.
Saddam Hussein’s stubborn claim that he has no more weapons of mass destruction is a blow to those who had hoped for a peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis and a gift to those who think toppling him by force is the only path to effective disarmament. My own impression from talking to people inside and close to the Bush administration is that the Iraq war is now a matter of when and how rather than whether.
With his 12,000-page report to the United Nations, Saddam has written perhaps the longest suicide note in history. Of course, the Bush administration wants multilateral and United Nations support for a military operation, so it will let the United Nations inspectors run around trying to verify Saddam’s claims. But the administration’s own intelligence sources are apparently saying that he’s lying again. If need be, the administration may share some of that intelligence to get support from the Security Council and the public in the United States and Europe. Then it will take action.
As for rationale, I’ve heard Americans voice all the same theories about President Bush’s motivation expressed by supposedly anti-American Europeans: that he’s doing it to distract attention from economic problems at home. (Senator John Kerry recently raised this charge.) That the reason is oil. That he’s completing unfinished business from the first Bush administration’s Persian Gulf war. That it’s a grudge match to topple the man who tried to kill Bush’s father. That he’s going after Saddam because he can’t find Osama bin Laden. That it’s about winning the next presidential election.
At the same time, I’ve also heard the case for war from liberals who have supported humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere. They say Saddam is guilty of using weapons of mass destruction against his neighbours and his own people, and the only sure way to disarm him is to depose him.
What strikes me most, however, is how much people in Washington really do regard the likely war with Iraq as part of an ongoing war against terrorism.
When I say Washington is at war, I’m not just using Washington as diplomatic shorthand for the United States. I mean Washington, this freezing, handsome, driven, one-topic city on the Potomac, and specifically, its Republican elites.
Last weekend, in the American heartland of Kansas and Missouri, I asked farmers, students and Friday night casino-goers whether they felt they were at war. Answers ranged from a hesitant "Not really" to "Well, sort of". Here in Washington, the answer given by people close to the administration is a resounding yes.
Around the dinner table, people still relive their September 11 experiences: chaotic office evacuations, the smoke from the Pentagon, the wild rumours. The more affluent stockpiled antidotes to anthrax, gas masks, emergency food supplies in the cellar, even pills that are supposed to alleviate the effects of a dirty bomb. Though the expected follow-up to last year’s attacks has not yet come, people feel it’s only a matter of time until it does.
When I lived here for a year in the 1980s, Washington seemed an unreal city. All the world’s problems - war, famine, disease, revolution - were discussed over breakfast, yet none directly affected daily life in plush offices and pleasant suburbs. That has changed. Public and private have merged traumatically. The closer you are to the heart of power, it seems, the more alarmed you are by the myriad plausible scenarios for terrorist attacks. "It’s really scary when you start looking at it in detail," one senior official told me. So whatever the actual facts, and however remote this experience is from the reality of war in places like Bosnia, Washington feels itself to be at war. That is a municipal fact of world importance.
But Washington is not just sitting around feeling scared. It’s not just preparing to prosecute the Iraq war. Amply conscious of being the imperial capital of the most powerful country in the history of the world, it is also beginning to think big about the path to a peace that is supposed to end both wars. An administration that came into office ideologically opposed to American involvement in nation-building in foreign countries is now plainly committed to the long haul of nation-building in postwar Iraq.
And that’s for starters. A new, democratic and prosperous Iraq is to be a model for its neighbours, as West Germany was for its unfree neighbours during the Cold War. Some in Washington now talk of encouraging a velvet revolution to democratise Iran. Then there’s the United States’ rich and friendly but oppressive ally, Saudi Arabia, with its Wahhabi hate wells beside those oil wells. No one in the administration yet says this publicly, but there is a logic that leads from the democratisation of Iraq to that of Saudi Arabia.
And so people are talking quietly about a Wilsonian project for reshaping the whole Middle East, a plan comparable in its ambition to those for Europe in 1919 and 1949. World-weary Europeans, and people in the Middle East, may doubt the feasibility of this idea and the United States’ capacity to sustain it. We Europeans would better spend our time thinking how to complement and improve it.
Of course the "Washington" I write about is, in some measure, a term of art. Here, as everywhere, there are widely diverging views. But the sense of war and the great changes that must flow from it are palpable here as nowhere else.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH IS AUTHOR OF HISTORY OF THE PRESENT: ESSAYS, SKETCHES AND DISPATCHES FROM EUROPE IN THE 1990S
This article:
news.scotsman.com
More War with Iraq?:
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Websites:
Dossiers on Iraqi WMD & human rights abuses
fco.gov.uk
FCO - Policy towards Iraq
fco.gov.uk
FCO site - Britain, UNSCOM & Iraq
special.fco.gov.uk
UN - Office of the Iraq Programme
un.org
US Dept of State - Iraq Update
usinfo.state.gov
Iraqi Presidency
uruklink.net
Iraq Watch
iraqwatch.org
John Pilger on Iraq
pilger.carlton.com |
