London: Is it going to happen again? Will the next 12 months really see Western armies return to Iraq? Last year was meant to signal an end to wars of intervention that dominated the world stage at the turn of the 21st century, attacks by powerful Western states against Muslim ones. It was assumed that Washington and London would draw a curtain over the most shambolic foreign policy adventures of modern times. The West would stop trying to reconfigure political Islam. Troops would return to base.
Yet the old tic, the twitch to intervene, has not gone away. Last October, despite his Commons rebuff, Mr Cameron told his party conference that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was “a danger to Europe” which he could not ignore. “There is no walk-on-by option,” he said, though he did then walk on by. Like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, he sees terrorism as an ideology rather than a form of coercion.
Following his election victory, Mr Cameron let it be known that he wanted Parliament to reverse its vote on Syria. It was then revealed that British pilots had been secretly involved in bombing Syria all along. Britain’s leaders are at least consistent in their military adventurism. America is whimsical. It is hard now to recall Mr Bush’s 2000 election rhetoric against what he and his aide Condoleezza Rice dismissed as wimpish “humanitarianism” and “nation-building”. Mr Blair was ridiculed for his interventionism. The world was not America’s business.
9/11 reversed all that. Mr Bush initiated an era of shock and awe which, by 2014, had engulfed the Muslim world from Pakistan to Sahara. By the time Mr Bush left office, the Iraq and Afghanistan expeditions were discredited. The end was signalled by Mr Obama’s 2008 election and his promise to bring troops home. Even the growth of Sunni militancy under the ISIS did not see an interventionist revival. 2014 opinion polls showed a solid 55 per cent of Americans against “boots on the ground”.
In the past year that has totally changed. The lame-duck Mr Obama has had to send forces to support the helpless armies of Baghdad and Kabul. He wages a token air war against ISIS-held territory that he is in no position to occupy or govern. Trapped by his military-industrial lobbyists into launching drone attacks across the region, he seems oblivious of the aid they offer ISIS recruitment. Iraq has now secured pride of place in the forthcoming American election.
The past year’s bombing of the ISIS has reinforced its claim as champion of Islam’s defiance of the West, clouding its role in the Sunni war against the Shia. The longer the ISIS holds power across Sunni Iraq and Syria, the more its neighbours will move towards accommodation. The question now is how long can London and Washington tolerate ISIS atrocity videos. The Western media lacks any self-restraint in publicising them, such that the ISIS is said to regard them as a far more potent way of drawing attention to itself than the occasional act of terrorism. The clear objective is to goad the West into sending armies back to the desert.
American election candidates are responding as if on cue. Every one wants to take on the ISIS.
The ISIS cannot pose any serious threat to any Western state, yet the media is happy to accept politicians who pretend it does. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” should today be renamed the military-industrial-media one. For all the condemnation of Mr Blair over Iraq, it should be remembered that every daily paper (except the Mirror) supported his call for force, including initially the Guardian.
There is little appetite in Britain for a return to Iraq. In the Commons last month, defence secretary Michael Fallon asserted, “Britain will not send ground forces into Iraq or Syria because it will be used by the ISIS as anti-Western propaganda.” He failed to explain why this did not apply to British pilots. But every British deployment began with similar denials. In none of the wars of intervention was there any plausible casus belli, beyond the presence on television of “bad guys”. Kosovo was said to be humanitarian, but was effectively a war of partition.
Afghanistan was punitive, but mutated into “rebuilding” a nation — Britain’s Clare Short was even flown out to eradicate the opium crop. Iraq was claimed as a matter of “Britain’s national security”, but in reality was a simple decapitation of a dictator. Libya was “to avert a Srebrenica in Benghazi”, but soon changed into taking side in a civil war.
I can find no truth to the left-wing claim that the wars were about securing oil. Even the most evil oil regime has to sell oil, and we have to buy it. Nor were the victim states significant harbours of terrorism. Most countries are that in some shape or form. In Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq it was only boots on the ground that altered the outcome, for good or ill. But the longer the boots stayed, the more likely was defeat.
The conservative American Cato institute ran a regular analysis of the wars and their outcomes. It reached a clear conclusion. They were all wars of choice.
Yet war still has the best tunes. During Libya, Mr Cameron yearned for a chance to play Henry V, with the help of his interventionist foreign policy aide, Ed Llewellyn. He still dives for his Cobra bunker at the slightest whiff of cordite and emerges speaking cod Winston Churchill. Those who have no experience of war seem to crave it. But Iraq, again? It is hardly to be believed. Must we join Rudyard Kipling and watch as “the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”?
The writer is a columnist and editor
By arrangement with the Spectator
