Imagine for a moment that you’ve woken up to the election results from North Korea. Or Syria. Or even China. The turnout is above 62 per cent, and millions of votes have been cast throughout the country for an exhaustingly wide range of candidates from all sorts of political parties and groups. No group will have a majority, so soon negotiations about forming a government will begin.
You’d think it was a bloody miracle. And so it is, and it happened in Iraq at the weekend. The campaign was clamorous, with posters everywhere. There was, as far as we know, no widespread fraud, nor was there violence between supporters of the various candidates. One political alliance is reported to have done well in Baghdad, Najaf and Basra, another in Nineveh and Diyala. Followers of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr — whose uprising was beginning when I went to Iraq in 2004 — went to the polls, as did supporters of a new Kurdish party, Goran, which is challenging the dominance of the two existing Kurdish parties on the ground that wealth should be better distributed. “The new democracy seems to be taking root,” said the man from The New York Times.
We’re seven years after Saddam. Seven years in which, in this country at least, nothing seems to have shifted a millimetre. At the weekend, as Iraqis were about to vote, I found myself caught up in yet another Chilcot discussion. Seven years, I said, seven goddamned years of this stuff! Oh, said a woman writer whom I like and whom I want to like me back, but the Iraq war is the kind of thing that we should discuss for seven years.
What, so that we can hear the same stock phrases, the same conventional wisdoms that now pass from brain to lip without encountering thought along the way? The war was illegal, immoral, the greatest foreign policy blunder since Suez or since Pharaoh spurred his chariot into the Red Sea, Blair lied or dissimulated, was Bush’s poodle, was driven crazy by his own messianism, didn’t tell the Cabinet anything, didn’t listen to the country’s clear opposition — all the sentiments that led to the bizarre spectacle of Clare Short being applauded at the end of her woeful evidence at the inquiry.
Seven years in which (I say it not because it’s important, but because it illustrates something) those who supported military action to remove Saddam have had this support treated as if it were the only thing they did.
I think of Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, and among the most original and brilliant people in the country, who was told that one of his own members was “compelled to question [his] democratic credentials and commitment to the values of the RSA on that basis [of his views on Iraq]. There seems to be a fundamental conflict of principles.”
We rightly make much of our violent shortcomings, as with the death of Baha Musa in 2003 at the hands of our troops. As The Times reported yesterday, his family may have received up to £3 million in compensation. It is true, but difficult to say, that had Musa been a victim of Saddam Hussein, not only would there have been no inquiries, no money, no apologies, but that anyone even whispering such things would have quickly ended up murdered. And yes, that difference matters greatly.
It is (I am told) “understandable” that many sensitive Britons feel “wounded” by the circumstances of the war. Well, it certainly was understandable, but it isn’t any longer. Seven years on, it’s gone well beyond the original wound, and we’re at the stage where many folk twist the knife in their own scar to keep it bleeding. They want to stay wounded — they enjoy their wounds. And I’m not even talking about that corrupted part of our body politic that took sides with the murderous insurgents and described them as liberators.
But the biggest reason for lamenting seven years of obsessive Shortism is not that it’s been horrid, but that there has been an intellectual and strategic cost to it. In the first place it has made it almost impossible to discuss the Iraqis themselves, to consult them or listen to them. They have become ghosts, invoked as (implausible) casualty figures, or seen on TV briefly lamenting a death or maiming. The Hurt Locker, however worthy of an Oscar it might be, is not a film about Iraq. It is a film about Americans. There has been no popular film yet made about Iraq.
In the second, it means that we have had no discussions about what has been avoided in Iraq — the continuation of sanctions or their breakdown, the continuation of Saddam or his handing over to Uday and/or Qusay, what might have happened had there been a coup or an uprising. It means that our discussions have lacked realism.
In the third, it has obliterated our ability to think about the future. At enormous cost we have exchanged one of the most exemplary tyrants — an emblem of the triumph of political violence — for what now may be a functioning (if idiosyncratic) democracy. This could make a huge difference to other countries in the region, and we have to discuss how we might help.
My specific concern is that there is huge pressure from the re-wounders, the knife-twisters, for Chilcot and his committee not to learn the long-term lessons of Iraq but to emerge with a conclusion that would effectively hobble future governments in taking action abroad. I note the pressure that Shortists of both Left and Right have put on the historians, Lawrence Freedman and Martin Gilbert, because they haven’t grandstanded, cross-examined like barristers or got all arsey and sarcastic with Messrs Brown, Blair and Miliband.
We know what the Shortists want. They want Chilcot to say, in effect, that it shouldn’t have happened and mustn’t happen again. Some explicitly want Britain to turn away from the troublous world and its bleeding peoples, and to isolate ourselves, leaving tyrants alone and hoping the resulting refugees can be stopped at Calais.
Even years on they won’t want Chilcot, or anyone else, to look at Iraq now and say that there is definitely an important new democracy in the Middle East, and that its existence is one of the most hopeful changes in recent times. And yet, miracle that it is (Iraqi miracle that it is), it’s true.
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David Aaronovitch is a writer, broadcaster and commentator on international politics and the media. He writes for The Times Comment page on Tuesdays. He has previously written for The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent, winning numerous accolades, including Columnist of the Year 2003 and the 2001 Orwell prize for journalism. He has appeared on the satirical TV current affairs programme Have I Got News For You and made radio broadcasts on historical topics
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