Last Friday the 28th February, my wife and I had David Carr down to dinner. Of everyone I personally know who thinks war with Iraq would not be against the British national interest, David is the most brilliant and persuasive. He accepts he may be wrong, but honestly believes that British interests at the moment require some support of the Americans. On his last visit, our conversation ended dramatically, as we smoked by his car while, beyond the cold November sky over the sea, the Moon moved steadily into eclipse. This time, he was to stay the night, and we simply sat around the dinner table till three in the morning, drinking a gallon of coffee between us and discussing the sad state of public affairs. We avoided arguing over the external aspects of the war, as our positions are now set, and there is little reason to enter into them until the facts available should decisively change again. Instead, we discussed the domestic consequences of war. This started a train of thought that is continuing. While it leads me to conclusions different from those with which David might agree, they do come wholly from the fact of his company.
In writing about this war, I have thought so far almost entirely in terms of the British external interest, taking internal matters as separate. But it should be obvious that the two are closely joined. Tony Blair has wagered his reputation on the outcome. If he loses in any plain sense, he is finished as Prime Minister. This being so, let us consider the internal consequences of the various likely outcomes. These are success, failure, or no active military involvement by this country.
It always helps to define terms. Bearing in mind the scale and nature of public opposition, I think success now must mean a short and victorious war. David and I agree that victory requires a ten day campaign with not more than a hundred British casualties, and reasonably small numbers of Iraqi civilians dead. It also requires a speedy and honourable British withdrawal from the region—whatever cost and danger may be left behind for the Americans to face.
Give him this, and Mr Blair will be saved and more than saved. His public standing will return to what it was in 1997. He will be the man who stood by his principles, facing down opposition in the country and in his own party. He will be rock on which British world prestige stands. He can rid himself of Gordon Brown and all the other enemies in his cabinet. He will rejoice in the praise of his Conservative opponents and the respect and gratitude of his allies. That he is now opposed by a majority of the electors and at least half the Establishment will then count for nothing. Success in politics is everything. Success in doing what is wrong is worth more than mediocrity in doing right.
Now, if British interests required a victory in war with Iraq, this might be a price worth paying. But the benefits of victory would need to be immense. For Mr Blair is easily the worst peacetime Prime Minister of the past hundred years. He inherited the bones of a police state from the Thatcher and Major Governments, and has spent the past six years putting pound after pound of flesh on that skeleton. He has increased the range of state power and centralised and corrupted its exercise. He has completed our civilian disarmament, and loaded us with hate crime laws, and further relaxed the bonds of due process. He has turned every institution of state into part of a vast patronage machine, in which advancement—and perhaps even employment—go on the basis of ideological conformity. He has further subjected us to the unaccountable rule of the European Union. He has taken us repeatedly into other wars beside this one. All that has restrained him—for the Conservatives have not counted as an opposition in any of this time—is the rivalry of Gordon Brown and his satellites, and more recently the growing contempt and loathing of the British public.
I know that his various enemies on the right are presently reconsidering their opinion of his character. At least he has courage, they are saying, and we must respect that. I disagree. By looking at his known character and his now permanently desperate appearance, I believe he joined with the Americans last autumn largely out of vanity. He wants the adoration of his people and to make a great noise in the history books, and is not worried about his means. He recalled how his Serbian war had been opposed at home - though not by any majority or any organised body of opinion—but how it had turned out after all not too expensive in terms of British lives, and that people had soon grown tired of arguing over its merits. That had allowed him to sweep any number of uncomfortable truths out of sight—about the lack of evidence for Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kossovo, and about the behaviour during and after the war of our Albanian "allies" there. And it had given him a reputation for military resolve among those who value such things. And though it did him little good with public opinion at large, it did him no observable harm. Much the same happened with Afghanistan. I think he believed the same would happen with Iraq. He never thought there would be mass opposition, and that his serial justifications of war would be so thoroughly examined and so contemptuously rejected. What people now take for resolution is no more than the repeated cry of "double or quits" of a broken gambler.
So far, he has seen his European strategy collapse, together with his moral authority within the Parliamentary Labour Party, and his relationship with the media and his general status within the country. His multicultural dream is also crumbing, as the Asianised cities of the north prepare for wild rioting against his war policy, and his own Ministers in response use language that legitimises the electoral appeal of the British National Party. Unless he wants to leave Downing Street some time between now and Christmas, and be remembered as a sordid failure, Mr Blair has no choice but to continue talking firmness in public while privately hoping things will not end in disaster. Perhaps, as people keep telling me, he does know something we do not about Saddam Hussein, and is careless of self and all he has so far achieved in his present service to the public good. But I see no reason to believe this. He is a gambler on an unexpected losing streak.
Give this man victory in war, and there is no limit to what he could then do. If he wanted, he could take us into the Euro. If not, it would only be because the Americans told him not to, or the Europeans told him to go away. He could replace the House of Lords with a body of his own nominees. He could strip the Queen of her ability to get in his way. He could complete the abolition of trial by jury. Wrapped in the Union Flag, he could continue the New Labour project of dismantling all that remains of our free and ancient institutions and the transformation of this country into a New World Order satrapy. And he would get us into further wars. However much justification there might be for this present war—and I still cannot see any—the man has at least an indifference to human suffering. I go further. He has a taste for blood. He raised the cup in Serbia, and will not put it down in Iraq. Give him success in Iraq, and he will gladly follow the Americans wherever they please to go next.
Therefore—always granting a danger from Iraq that he has chosen not to share with us—I cannot imagine a worse outcome for this country than victory under Mr Blair.
But I do not think victory in the sense defined above is possible. Of course, a simple military defeat is hard to imagine. The balance of forces is wholly against Iraq. Intelligent and ruthless use of force must bring victory to the Americans. But are they sufficiently intelligent and ruthless? The Iraqis ought to have realised from their last military defeat that a conventional defence of their country against the Americans would be a waste of time. Whatever positions they take in the open can be seen, and their weapons are as old and useless as the cavalry charges with which the Polish Army tried to stop the Germans in 1939. An effective defence can only be in the cities, where modern surveillance and weaponry must give way to individual courage or desperation and a willingness to massacre civilians. I am not sure the Americans can excel in these qualities. I do not trust the spirit of their soldiers for vicious street combat, or their nerve to fire into the women and children the Republican Guard would certainly drive into battle before them—or the willingness of the American public to watch all of this played out live on television. The battle for Baghdad might turn into another Stalingrad, with the world media playing the part of the encircling Soviet armies.
And then what? I am told by those who think they have access to private information that the Americans really want Iraq as a base from which to control the Middle East, much as we used to control it from Egypt and India. This will give them control over the largest reserves of oil in the world, and with it the ability throughout the present century to coerce every other power in the world that relies on imported oil. It makes better sense than any other explanation I have yet heard, and it sounds feasible in military terms. But, again, possession of military force is not the only relevant calculation. There must be the will to use it. Whatever their money and whatever they can buy with it, have the Americans the will as an occupying power to face down a continual war of terrorist attrition? There are large numbers of Iraqis who can be expected to be less grateful for the destruction of a tyrant than resentful of an infidel occupation. Iraq has open borders with other countries where the authorities will give at least passive support to the terrorists. Moslem clerics all over the world are already crying jihad against the Americans and British. Give us a war, and there will be more than enough of the faithful willing not merely to listen but also obey. And we know now that terrorist retaliations can be carried right into the territory of any occupying power. Looking at their record in Lebanon and Somalia, I really have as little confidence in their will to occupy as in their will to conquer.
It is unlikely that the British forces sent out to war will see much of the fighting. But they will probably be expected to share in the occupation. To look at the human costs of this, look at Ulster and multiply by a hundred.
But long before its human costs could be finally reckoned, such a war would have destroyed its American and British projectors. Considering its public justifications so far given, this war cannot involve serious casualties on any side. Never mind the uproar in Washington, Tony Blair would be finished in London.
But what then? Would the Government collapse? If so, what would replace it? I imagine the most likely replacement would be a reconstructed and much diminished Labour Government headed by Gordon Brown. Whatever he privately thinks of it, he would be able in the event of failure to claim he had always been against the war. He could then clear the Blairites out of government and settle down to making the best of things. The Americans and Europeans would have no time for him. He would have to deal with a serious recession; and he would probably face a revived Conservative opposition. Since Mr Brown has long specialised in keeping all his political options open, I cannot predict more.
How about the Conservatives? I know they have for the past ten years been a joke without a punch line. And they are presently solid in their support of the war. But the near chance of power can breathe life into even the most dispirited opposition. And it is worth recalling that, while leaving it destroyed what remained of Conservative unity and morale, membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism had been fully supported by Labour, which was able, even so, to profit from the crisis of September 1992. Perhaps the Conservatives would benefit in the same way from a disastrous war.
This being so, the resulting Conservative Government would be in a fine position to do as it pleased. Out of government—and especially in such circumstances—Labour would be too split and demoralised to oppose anything. The Conservatives would have a clear run at reforming the public sector in the ways they are beginning to discuss. They could reverse many of the police state measures they are beginning to denounce. Given the collapse to trust between London and the Paris-Berlin axis, they could simply walk away from the European Union. If they then gave the country to America, it might well be a more cautious America—ruled by an Establishment that had finally discovered the meaning of nemesis.
It sounds rather good. The only problem is the cataract of blood required to bring this about. Here, I should be honest. Though I accept it as a legitimate use of state power, and though I am no liberal idealist where foreign policy is concerned, I do hate war. If I write about foreign policy in very cold terms, it is because I do believe that cold measurements of interest and power, and an indifference to considerations of honour and friendship between nations, are best suited to the prevention or minimisation of war. When the actions of states are as predictable as planetary orbits, collisions become less common, or at worst are made predictable. The cruellest wars are generally those entered into with indefinite aims, or presented in moralistic terms so to inflame national hatred. And I do hate war. Though no pacifist, I do hate war.
I was a boy in Chatham in the 1960s. I played in the bomb sites that still dotted the town. Every day in the streets, I could see old men from the Great War and often still young men from the next - blinded, without arms and legs, with faces horribly scarred. I lived for my first six years with one of my grandmothers. Many of her neighbours were widows from the Great War. She herself had lost her husband when HMS Avenger went down at the Casablanca landings. Because he had been reported missing at Dunkirk, but had stepped ashore in England from one of the last fishing boats out, she only gave up hope in the late 1940s. But from that time, nearly all joy went out of her life. I hardly saw her really happy. I know that she cried to herself on the usual anniversaries. Most of my great uncles on both sides were either killed by the Germans or taken prisoner by the Japanese.
I suppose I spring from a race of heroes. But any glow of heroism that may have attached to my ancestors had faded long before I knew of them. What I most remember is the long, tired regret of those left behind for all they had lost. I remember the Armistice Day parades in the rain, the military bands playing Gustav Holst, looking up and down the endless lists of the fallen. War is not exciting. It is not glorious. It is not about solving the problems of the world in one easy step. It is about young men and civilians blown apart, and mutilated survivors, and grieving widows, and fatherless children. It is one of the greatest artificial evils of this world. It may be sometimes a necessary evil. But it is not something to be casually loosed on the world—certainly not when the only benefit I am able to conceive is the propelling into office of a gang of political cowards and nothings who could have got there by their own efforts two years ago had they only not been what they are, and who might in any event soon throw away all the advantages gained and break all the promises made if they were propelled there. I cannot think it worth inflicting on a larger scale in Iraq the quiet horrors with which I grew up in Chatham.
And so we are left with the third option—of nothing much at all. Perhaps Mr Blair will tell the Americans that his supporters have melted away and that he cannot credibly take us to war. Perhaps the Americans themselves are having second thoughts, bearing in mind the settled opposition of the French, the Russians, and now of the Pope. We are not in a repeat here of the July crisis of 1914. Then it was impossible for any one of the continental powers to cancel its mobilisation orders once given, for fear that the other side would continue with its own, and thereby benefit from the administrative shambles of cancellation. The Americans have moved large numbers of men and weapons to the Middle East. These can be moved back without military danger. All that is needed is the right face saving excuse.
Perhaps some means will be found of saving face. Perhaps the Iraqis will hand over their last and probably feeble weapons for destruction. Perhaps some ambitious minister or general in Iraq will murder Saddam Hussein, and then talk loudly enough about human rights to let Messrs Blair and Bush announce a bloodless victory and pull out.
If this, political life will go on here with a few changes—few but still welcome changes. Mr Blair will be more weakened than otherwise. His European policy will stay in ruins, all chance now gone of our being taken into the Euro. Gordon Brown will remain a powerful disruptive force within the Government, the decline of his own reputation counterbalanced by that of Mr Blair. The Conservatives can, depending on further circumstances, continue their slow recovery or their drift to oblivion. And the rest of us can go back to moaning about the higher taxes we are paying for fewer and worse public services, about the mishandling of macro-economic policy, and about the further erosion of liberties and birthright. It once looked so depressing. It now deserves nostalgia.
On the whole, I doubt if prayers are listened to. But uttering them does no harm. Let us then pray for a return to boring normality, and for an eventual régime change closer than in Baghdad.