The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  What baffles Westerners is why Muslim militants hate Western civilization as bitterly as they do. There is, perhaps, no logical explanation; most modern Westerners would fail to supply a persuasive explanation of the hatred felt between their Protestant and Catholic ancestors in the century of the Reformation. The hatred felt by Muslim extremists is, however, real and it has historic roots. In the years after the Muslim triumph of the seventh and eighth centuries, when Muslim armies conquered the old Christian provinces of the Middle East and North Africa, seized Spain and established a foothold in the Balkans, culminating in the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the ancestors of modern Muslims became, in a sense, the Americans of their age. The system of government they established under the universal Caliphate was an enlightened one which guaranteed freedom of belief to all who acknowledged the Caliph’s supremacy, and his scholars were in the forefront of contemporary learning. They rescued Western classical thought from obscurity, they advanced the study of modern mathematics and the practice of medicine and they instituted the systematic study of political sociology.

  Until the fourteenth century Islam was the most progressive intellectual force in the world west of China. Then, in a regrettable step, the religious leaders of orthodox – Sunni – Islam decided that its interpretative development, taking account of discoveries in non-theological thought, should come to an end. This ‘closing of the gates’ spelled an end to Muslim openness. Thereafter, right down to our own day, mainstream Islam found itself confined within intellectual boundaries set by scholars several hundred years dead. Not only was the practice of religious life to be defined by their decisions; so too was public, political and legal life. The law of Sharia – ‘the path to the waterhole’ – thenceforth dictated how pious Muslims should relate to each other, to their business associates, to non-Muslims and to the state. Not that, in orthodox Muslim thought, the state had any existence independent of the religious world that defined it. Until the extinction of the universal Caliphate in 1925 at the behest of the secularist Mustapha Kemal of Turkey, where it had had its seat since the sixteenth century, orthodox Islam made no distinction between worldly and religious authority. One was the other and vice versa.

  The interpenetration of the spiritual and the material was, in practical terms, a disaster for Islam. It prevented the separation of theological and pragmatic paths of thought which the Christian West had achieved, if not without a struggle, even before the Protestant Reformation. While, from the Renaissance onwards, Italy, France, Germany, Holland and Britain soared off into the heady altitudes of intellectual freedom that would usher in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Islam remained stuck on the path to the waterhole. Its intellectual life decayed, its political institutions, the universal Caliphate foremost, fossilized. In its heyday, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the Caliphate had conquered wherever it turned its steps. By the nineteenth century Turkey, meaning the Caliphate, which still ruled North Africa in name, the Arab lands and the Balkans as colonies, was the Sick Man of Europe. France and Britain fought Russia to prop Turkey up on its deathbed, for fear of the consequences of its final collapse.

  Its collapse, when it came at the end of the First World War, gave France and Britain control of what remained of its empire, the Arab lands of which they had not already taken possession. The Arabs proved, however, turbulent subjects, even though promised eventual independence under the terms of the League of Nations mandate which authorized Britain and France to exercise authority over them. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and in particular Palestine, whose future Britain complicated by offering it as the location of a National Home for the Jews, chafed at the mandate terms. Their populations wanted immediate, not delayed independence.

  Independence came. In the meantime, however, developments had occurred that made formal political arrangements a secondary issue. The onetime outposts of the Caliphate’s power that had been made French colonies, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, achieved independence by secession or armed struggle. Their British equivalents, Egypt and Libya, went the same way, as Iraq and Jordan had already done. Part of Palestine became a Jewish state. Syria and Lebanon achieved separation from France. Inside the Arab world which was comprehended by these states, however, there raged an intellectual ferment which threatened to transcend the idea of mere independence from European rule. In one direction it took the form of an Arab political renaissance, imitating but stressing its separation from European political models; its instrument was the Ba’ath party in Syria and Iraq. In another and later development it reverted to the earliest message of Islam: that the preaching of the Prophet has universal force, that it is his destiny to triumph and that those who oppose the extension of his power over the world are excluded from the promise of compassion that lies at the heart of the Islamic religion.

  This perversion of the Prophet’s teaching, and that it is a perversion is admitted by the majority of Muslim teachers, was launched on the Islamic world by an Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, during the period of Nasser’s Presidency. Imprisoned by Nasser for membership of the Muslim self-help organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, he moved by stages to an extremist interpretation of Muslim theology. Nasser’s essentially secularist version of Islam – though he was an overtly devout believer, his policies emphasized material at the expense of spiritual development in a Muslim society – led Qutb to denounce the Egyptian President as jahili, spiritually ignorant. His refusal to moderate his views led to his execution, after a long period of imprisonment, in 1966. Before his death, Qutb had elaborated his new interpretation of Islam to argue – convincingly to many young, frustrated Muslims – that, while the Prophet had undoubtedly preached compassion towards nonbelievers, he had also stressed the primacy of submission to his teachings, which were those of God, and that, until such submission was widely achieved, Muslims were absolved from the duty of showing compassion to those who rejected the preaching of the Prophet’s word.

  In short, violence against nonbelievers was not sinful. Indeed, and here Qutb harked back to the teaching of Abul Ala Mawdudi, struggle – jihad – against the encroachment of the West on the Islamic world was an obligation. Mawdudi, Pakistani by nationality, had called for a universal jihad to fight the jahiliyyah (ignorance) of the West, just as the Prophet had fought against jahiliyyah in pre-Islamic Arabia. He argued that the call to jihad was the central doctrine of Islam, exceeding in importance the duty to pray and to give alms. Qutb went farther still. He called on Muslims to model themselves upon Muhammad in their personal lives, then to separate themselves from society and then to wage jihad in a violent fashion; an important distinction, since jihad can, and indeed should, take the form of a struggle against self. Only when the jihad against ignorance – which Qutb identified as the secular modern world – had been won should Muslims revert to the practice of compassion, within what would be a new universal Caliphate.

  Qutb’s elaboration of Mawdudi’s teachings proved enormously influential. It inflamed, rather than inspired, a new generation of Muslims, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to train for war, to learn the methods of terrorism and to reintroduce into public life the ancient Islamic punishments of stoning and mutilation. It underlay the rise of the Taleban (‘students’), products of religious schools where his teaching was passed on. It motivated the assassination of secularist Muslim leaders, notably President Sadat of Egypt. It justified, if it did not directly motivate, the doctrines of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11, whose methods are those of universal jihad and whose ambitions, the conversion of all to Islam and the establishment of a universal Caliphate, mirror those of Qutb.

  The emergence of a new world order according to Qutb was the least expected outcome of the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is most improbable that it could have been foreseen. True, the dissolving of the superpower blocs, what foreign policy experts called the ‘bipolar’ world, would be likely to result in a measure of instability. Terrifying though the bipolar world had been, with its oppos
ed ranks of nuclear weapons, its nature assured that most states had to belong to one bloc or the other – the ‘unaligned’ states had no strategic significance – and that the bloc leaders kept their followers in order. Inevitably the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that some of its client states would cease to toe the line determined by the Kremlin, but the presumption was that, at worst, they would resume old quarrels with neighbours. So at first it proved; the Balkan disorders had origins that long predated the Cold War and Saddam’s annexation of Kuwait was motivated by a dispute over frontiers that went back to a British disagreement with the Ottoman empire. The international system seemed adapted to coping with such problems. Then 9/11 demonstrated that there were malcontents in the post–Cold War world for whose wrongdoing the international system made no provision at all. The system, whether its roots are traced to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 or to the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War, is political in substance. It assumes the existence of states and that they will relate to one another in terms of self-interest. The Salafists who launched 9/11 – Salafism is an Islamic umbrella doctrine embracing all Muslims who reject the concept of the state and seek only a universal kingdom of believers – deny the right of mortals to make policy or frame laws, insisting that all they need to know of public life can be found in the Koran.

  This Salafist new world order – little known in the West and even less understood – nevertheless indirectly provoked a Western response. In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, which left Saddam in power, a group of Washington foreign-policy makers began to argue that acquiescing in his survival spelled danger to the West. Unaware that there were more dangerous figures active in the Muslim world, they advocated what would become known as the doctrine of pre-emption – striking first to avert a later danger. They included Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defense to Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, also a Pentagon official at the time, and Richard Perle, a defence intellectual omnipresent in post–Cold War Washington. They and many of their associates had begun their political lives on the left of politics. As they moved towards the right, ‘rightness’ being associated with strategic realism, they acquired the description of ‘neo-conservatives’. In 1992, as the first Bush Presidency drew to its close, Wolfowitz wrote a defence policy paper which outlined his view of how a strategy of pre-emption should work. He argued that, in the face of calls for a ‘peace dividend’ following the end of Cold War hostilities, the United States should spend to maintain its military dominance in Europe and Asia, preserve its strike forces and be ready to launch pre-emptive attacks against states which, on escaping the constriction of the superpower system, were setting up as possessors of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear foremost but also biological and chemical. Those he suspected were either historically unaligned or pro-Soviet – Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya and, of course, Iraq. His paper, though diluted by bureaucratic process, was eventually published under then Secretary Cheney’s imprimatur as an official document, Defense Strategy for the 1990s.

  The succession of President Clinton deprived the neo-conservatives of direct influence on government. Clinton, though prepared to intervene abroad, as he eventually did in the Balkans, preferred to do so in concert with other states and through international organizations, and to proceed with caution. He did not share the neo-conservatives’ beliefs in the necessity of pre-emption nor in the desirability of régime change in countries overtly hostile to the United States and able to harm its interests or citizens. Although out of government, the neo-conservatives remained able to propagate their views, through such publications as the Weekly Standard and Commentary, a major organ of Jewish thought. Many of the neo-conservatives were Jewish; almost all were Zionist and pro-Israeli. That was to prove unfortunate for it entangled their policies for the Middle East, which were generally rational and enlightened if not always realistic, with their ambitions for the future of the Jewish state, which were contentious and nationalistic. The neo-conservatives believed, in a highly traditional American cast of mind, that the solution to the world’s problems lay in transforming absolutist, monarchical and autocratic régimes into free-enterprise democracies. They believed democracy to be transportable and to have a transforming effect; through its implementation, in societies previously tribal or theocratic or otherwise afflicted by divisive and unrepresentative systems, they believed populations could be led to become politically enlightened and economically prosperous. They also believed in a ‘domino’ effect: that the transformation of one society in a region would lead to the same effect in others. They were particularly insistent that ‘régime change’ in Iraq, the focus of their antipathies, would foster change for the better in its neighbours, including Syria and Iran. Paradoxically, however, several of the neo-conservatives supported extremist politicians in Israel, who rejected compromise with the Palestinians; they wanted a larger and stronger Israeli state, empowered to deal with the Palestinians only on the basis of recognition of its right to exist and to command defensible frontiers. The confusion of policy, for confusion it was and remains – democracy for Middle Eastern Muslims but a particular version of state rights for Israel – weakened and continues to weaken the neo-conservatives’ message. To European liberals and leftists in particular, the neo-conservatives appear hypocritical. They interpret the contradictions of neo-conservative policy as an attempt to establish native versions of American democracy in the unreformed Arab states while supporting a selfishly Zionist regime in Israel. Needless to say, that view is widely shared in the Arab world and bedevils American efforts to win friends in the region.

  The neo-conservatives farther alienated liberal and leftist opinion in Europe by their devotion to the idea of American ‘particularism’ – an idea, almost as old as the United States itself, that the country stands for certain superior principles of public and inter-state behaviour – justifying in their view, again a long-established American position, its right to act unilaterally in foreign affairs. From the earliest days of the republic American ideologues have sought to define America as not only detached from but better than the Old World of religious prejudice and political egotism. To the idea of American particularism – Ronald Reagan’s vision of ‘the city on the hill’ – the neo-conservatives conjoined that of ‘the American moment’. With the collapse of the Communist system, the neo-conservatives argued, the United States inherited an opportunity, unlikely to be long-lived or to recur, to change by forthright action the world for the better. There had been such a moment once before, in 1918, when the idealistic President Woodrow Wilson had imposed on an exhausted world his plan for a League of Nations that would rid mankind of war. The chance to capitalize on his vision had been missed when his physical collapse allowed less enlightened politicians, some American, to dilute his plans.

  With the return of an American moment, the neo-conservatives glimpsed a new opportunity and determined to profit by it. It would not be taken through the medium of the United Nations. An improvement on the Wilsonian conception though it was, with its powers to authorize the use of military force against transgressors of international order, the UN still lacked the capacity for peremptory action. Too many interests had to be placated; too many nationalities were allowed a voice. The neo-conservatives wanted the power to strike, without consultation and without warning. They believed in particular that enemies like Saddam could be disposed of only by unilateral action, with the assistance of such allies as would not quibble and could match American standards of military efficiency. That meant in effect Britain and any British associates, like Australia, that deployed equivalent forces.

  Capturing a fleeting American moment required the return to power of a conservative American President. George W. Bush, elected in 2001, was such a figure. At his inauguration he did not seem a neo-conservative choice, though he appointed to office several highly conservative politicians, including Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney, his Vice-President, was also a neo-conse
rvative favourite. The horror of 9/11 set the new President, however, on a neo-conservative path. He was quickly persuaded that the ‘war on terror’ which he immediately proclaimed was best prosecuted at the outset by attacking al-Qaeda, the perpetrator of 9/11, in its terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Having acquired American bases for the campaign in the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, he launched the counter-terrorist attack. By a combination of the commitment of special forces (American, British and Australian), the enlistment of the anti-Taleban forces of the Northern Alliance and the deployment of heavy American airpower, the al-Qaeda units in Afghanistan and their Taleban supporters were quickly overcome. At the culmination of the campaign it was believed that Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind, had been cornered and killed. Later evidence, supplied by video and broadcast tape, dashed such hopes. Nevertheless, he thereafter became a fugitive figure, having scarcely substantial existence, while the material success of the campaign in Afghanistan was undoubted. The country was given a new, plausibly representative administration and the Islamicist régime of the Taleban was dissolved.

  With the defeat of the Taleban, which destroyed al-Qaeda’s principal platform of support, the Bush Presidency could turn to engage the other main targets of the war on terrorism. Al-Qaeda was reported by American intelligence to have centres of support in as many as fifty countries but the main danger was identified as emanating from Iraq. Saddam, Iraq’s President, was indubitably a threat to peace in the Middle East and beyond. During his thirty years in power he had attempted to acquire the capacity to build nuclear weapons – a threat checked only by the Israelis’ destruction of the French-supplied Osirak reactor in 1981 – and used chemical weapons both in his war against Iran in 1980–88 and against his own Kurdish citizens. Saddam had also authorized an assassination attempt against the new American President’s father, George Bush Senior, who had organized the coalition war against him in 1990–91. Saddam was a wicked man, an aggressor, an oppressor of the Iraqi people and a menace to order in his own régime and the wider world. Whether he was a sponsor of al-Qaeda was more problematic. He had undoubtedly given succour to Abu Nidal, an earlier father of anti-Western terror, and he was generally well-disposed to anti-Western terrorists. His association with al-Qaeda escaped proof. Osama bin Laden was a Salafist, a believer in a Muslim world without political institutions. Saddam was an Arab secularist, a type particularly repugnant to Islamic fundamentalists. Had Osama bin Laden attempted to propagate his beliefs in Saddam’s Iraq, he would undoubtedly have met the fate of all Saddam’s enemies.