Financial Times Sees “No Good Options” For Iraq on Fifth Anniversary of Invasion

By Lucy Jones

A Shi’i Iraqi fighter wearing a U.S.-issue ammunition belt runs past a burning Iraqi army armored vehicle after Shi’i fighters attacked army positions around the state-run television news station in the southern city of Basra, March 30, 2008 (AFP photo/Essam Al-Sudani).

“IRAQ WAS SUPPOSED to be over long before now,” wrote BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds on March 16, three days before the five-year anniversary of the invasion.

“It was not supposed to provoke a conflict between Sunni and Shi’i or stir up an al-Qaeda hornet’s nest. Nor was it supposed to alienate much of the rest of the world from U.S. foreign policy, which post-9/11 was on the crest of a wave of sympathy,” Reynolds wrote of the war.

“Ironically it is Iran, with which the U.S. shares a mutual hostility, that has emerged with greater strength, to the concern of the Gulf Arab states,” he warned. “The fallout continues.”

“The Iraq war has shown how high is the pain threshold of the West,” wrote columnist Max Hastings in the UK’s Guardian the following day. “The media class on both sides of the Atlantic is deeply engaged, indeed impassioned. The war is much discussed in the U.S. presidential election campaign. But most Americans and Europeans display vastly less interest in the Middle East than in troubles closer to home—the global banking crisis foremost among them,” he wrote.

“They have grown used to Iraq in the way they do to a chronic personal ailment. It is there. It is nasty. They wish that it would go away,” he continued. “But it does not inflict the sort of agonizing pain that causes democracies to force urgent action upon their governments.”

Noting that “the U.S. faces a total bill of $3 trillion, and still counting” and that “about 4,000 American soldiers, 171 British and anything between 200,000 and 600,000 Iraqis have died,” Hastings added that although “It would be madness to describe these numbers as acceptable…they have not proved so unacceptable that the U.S. or British government, or even the Iraqi administration in Baghdad, has found it necessary to adopt any radical shift of policy.

“The Iraq experience has laid bare the limits of raw military power,” he concluded. “It would be naive to suggest that an abrupt American departure would now promise the country a happy future. But there seems no purpose in a continued U.S. military presence, save within the context of new regional policies vastly different from those that prevail today.”

“If Iraq is better, it’s because of John McCain,” wrote the UK Daily Telegraph’s foreign affairs editor, Con Coughlin, on March 21. “The fact that Iraq, as it marks the fifth anniversary of Saddam’s overthrow, is showing signs of improvement after the bloodshed of the past few years is due in no small measure to Mr. McCain’s campaign in Washington to persuade Mr. Bush to commit more forces to the country,” he argued. “Mr. Bush may claim all the credit for the success of last year’s military surge, but Mr. McCain, an influential figure in the U.S. Senate’s Armed Services Committee, was the real architect,” Coughlin noted.

“Similarly, it is unlikely, had Mr. McCain occupied the White House before the invasion, that he would have tolerated the inept handling of pre-war diplomacy in Washington that led to the greatest rift in the transatlantic alliance since the 1956 Suez crisis, with France and Germany all but cutting off meaningful diplomatic relations with America,” he continued.

“Mr. McCain’s robust attitude toward those who would threaten the security of America might have caused some friction among Washington’s European allies,” he acknowledged, “but nothing approaching the scale achieved by Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.”

According to journalist Patrick Cockburn, however, writing in the UK’s Independent on March 19, the anniversary of the invasion: “It has been a war of lies from the start. All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.

“The outcome has been an official picture of Iraq akin to fantasy and an inability to learn from mistakes because of a refusal to admit that any occurred,” he added.

“The most notorious lie of all was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction,” Cockburn wrote. “But critics of the war may have focused too much on WMD and not enough on later distortions.

“The event which has done most to shape the present Iraqi political landscape was the savage civil war between Sunni and Shi’i in Baghdad and central Iraq in 2006-07 when 3,000 civilians a month were being butchered and which was won by the Shi’i,” he elaborated.

“The White House and Downing Street blithely denied a civil war was happening—and forced Iraqi politicians who said so to recant—to pretend the crisis was less serious than it was,” he charged.

“Five years after it was invaded, Iraq has been broken as a country,” the Financial Times editorialized the same day. “There are, it should be clear, no good options left.

“Iraq could become a shell state, like post-Soviet Afghanistan, prey to warlords and militias and an incubator of jihadi totalitarianism. One side—the majority Shi’i—could win and impose its writ,” according to the newspaper.

“Or—the least bad outcome—Iraq could emerge exhausted into a loose confederation, with a weak central government with agreed tasks such as allocating oil revenue. To achieve that, the U.S. needs to stay long enough to avert a bloodbath, but leave soon enough to make Iraq’s high-wire faction leaders—their safety net removed—reach some sort of modus vivendi,” the newspaper said.

“This outcome would be eased by a broader rapprochement in the region between Shi’i Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia (which is possible) and if Washington buried the past and sought a diplomatic grand bargain with Tehran—which might be made possible by a new U.S. leader,” it concluded.

German Intelligence Still Protects “Curveball,” Charges Der Spiegel

According to the March 22 issue of Der Spiegel, five years after the invasion of Iraq, Germany has failed to share responsibility for some of the misinformation surrounding Iraq’s alleged biological weapons. “The information came from a source developed by German intelligence—and it turned out to be disastrously wrong. But to this day, Germany denies any responsibility,” the publication said.

“The source, who is the subject of an upcoming Hollywood motion picture, went by the codename ‘Curveball,’” Der Spiegel reported. “He was the man who provided vital ‘evidence’ that ultimately contributed to the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies. But that role has since turned into his greatest problem: Everything he claimed to know about Iraq’s weapons program, all the proof he presented, was fabricated,” the publication’s authors wrote. “His lifeline, though, has yet to be cut: Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), remains loyal to their source. They keep him under cover and protect him from uncomfortable questions—in southern Germany.”

Palestinians Urged to Consider Power of Mass Nonviolence

Nonviolent encounters with Israeli authority may be the best hope Palestinians have of winning the sympathy of outsiders, wrote Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland on Feb. 20. “Palestinians could compare their struggle to the Martin Luther King movement for civil rights, walking and marching for their freedom,” Freedland said. There would be problems with this approach, he admitted: for example, Palestinians cannot threaten to withdraw their labor because few work in the Israeli economy. “Yet, the power of mass nonviolence would be undeniable,” he argued. “My own hunch is that even Israelis themselves, given enough of a respite from rocket assaults and suicide bombings, and forced to confront the realities of Palestinian life, would waver in front of such a movement.”

Al Fayed Version of Diana’s Death Judged “Unworthy”

“Why does Mohamed Al Fayed get such stick?” asked the UK Independent columnist Mary Dejevsky on Feb. 21, as the Egyptian owner of the British flagship department store Harrods at an inquest blamed the royal family for the deaths of Princess Diana and his son, Dodi, in a 1997 Paris car crash. “How the great and good of the British establishment must be rejoicing,” wrote Dejevsky. “They finally granted Mohamed Al Fayed his yearned-for day in court, and now the whole Diana conspiracy has evaporated in the steam of his own over-heated rhetoric,” she continued. “Short of failing to turn up or answering in curt monosyllables, there was nothing Fayed could do to escape the trap…You almost wonder why, if it was going to be so easy to damn his credibility with his own words, he wasn’t invited to the witness box a decade earlier,” she added. “Those of us who still suspect that more lies behind Diana’s death than an irresponsible French driver were dismissed as fantasists, who now had to believe what the establishment told them. Because Al Fayed was emotional and hyperbolic, every aspect of his story was judged unworthy of consideration,” she noted. “It is a classic case of allowing the messenger to obscure the message. I wonder in whose interests that might be,” she concluded.

Turkey’s PKK Bashing Said not the Best Way to Get Kurdish Support

“Turkey’s latest assault on Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq is understandable but unwise,” opined Britain’s Economist Feb. 28. The U.S. has “leaned back further than usual in a friendly manner toward the Turks, apparently helping them in their latest attempt to squash the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK),” it editorialized. “Sooner or later they may have to wobble back the other way—if they want to avoid ditching the right sort of Kurds along with the bad ones.

“There are Kurds and Kurds,” the magazine pointed out. “The PKK is generally a bad lot, though it may have dropped some of its nastier habits and beliefs over the years…By contrast, the two Kurdish parties which jointly run an autonomous region in northern Iraq have been pretty good of late. Theirs is the most peaceful part of Iraq.”

According to the British publication, Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan “has done rather well with the Kurds, persuading a lot of them to vote for him and steadily widening their rights. Plainly, bashing the PKK is not the best way to get the Kurds on side,” it noted.

“In the longer run, the Turks’ biggest change of heart must be toward the Kurds of Iraq, who have been consolidating their autonomy for some 15 years and who, amid hiccups, have been strengthening economic ties with their Turkish neighbors. By the same token,” the editorial added, “Iraq’s Kurds must reassure the Turks that they have no intention of expanding a quasi-independent Kurdistan into Turkey or of encouraging the PKK.

“The Americans, while they are still [in Iraq], must continue to hold the ring as best they can,” it concluded.

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist based in London.