STUDIO DDT ONLINE:買い物

SEVENTEEN
The Fourth Assault: Islamicist Terrorism and its De Facto Allies
11 September 2001-15 December 2005
Al-Queda attacks the continental USA Tony Blair stands 'shoulder-to-shoulder with America - The motivation and background of Al-Queda operatives Anti-Americanism The limits of Intelligence-gathering The Coalition of the Willing Prestige and realpolitik The invasion of Afghanistan The oil-for-food scandal -No WMD are found Saddam's "useful idiots' General Franks' deception operations Saddam captured alive Al-Queda attacks Madrid Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay John Howard, George Bush and Tony Blair convincingly re-elected-Al-Queda attacks London US and UK military losses-Democratic elections in Iraq
'People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millennium is not created immediately."
Woodrow Wilson on board USS George Washington, December 1918
'By God's leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God's command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can.'
Osama bin Laden, 2001¹
"The present Iraqi regime has shown the power of tyranny to spread violence and discord in the Middle East. A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions. America's interests in security, and America's belief in liberty, both lead in the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq.'
President Bush's speech to the American Enterprise Institute,
26 February 2003
'We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action and not merely a frothing of words, and that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.'
Churchill speaking about the United Nations at Fulton, Missouri,
5 March 1946
'Surprise happens so often that it's surprising that we're still surprised by it.' Paul Wolfowitz, West Point Commencement Address, 2 June 2001
'If a suicide bomber targeted and killed civilians in Oxford Street he would be called a "terrorist"; at a bus stop in Tel Aviv, a "militant"; in Baghdad, an "insurgent". Where is Orwell?"
Letter to The Times, November 2004"
'We've never been a colonial power. Any nation that begins in a revolt against taxation without representation is going to be reluctant to embark on enter-prises that involve ruling without representation.'
Donald Rumsfeld, May 20043
"The Americans behave like a kind but strict uncle in a pith helmet."
Vladimir Putin, December 2004
'If only the French would cease to occupy themselves with politics, they would be the most attractive people in the world."
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A t 08.46 and then seventeen minutes later at 09.03 on Tuesday, 11 Sep-tember 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan were hit by hijacked aeroplanes; they collapsed at 09.59 and 10.29 respectively, killing 2,749 people. Meanwhile, a third hijacked plane hit the Pentagon in Washington DC, killing a further 180 people. The sublimely brave passengers of a fourth plane, led by Americans Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett and Mark Bingham, rushed its hijackers, and in the course of trying to overpower them the plane crashed in Pennsylvania killing all those on board, but saving either the Capitol or the White House from a fate similar to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Mr Beamer's call to his compatriots just before they stormed the cockpit 'Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!' - today ranks as one of the great rallying cries of the English-speaking peoples in combat.
Almost 3,000 people were killed by Al-Queda, Osama bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organisation, on 9/11, including sixty-seven Britons. It was by far the worst terrorist atrocity in modern history. Finally the English-speaking peoples woke up. Not since Pearl Harbor had there been a direct attack on such a scale on American territory, and not since the British burned the White House in 1814 had there been such an attack on continental USA.5
That terrible day the American people had painfully to re-learn the lesson that
President Roosevelt had taught them in his fourth Inaugural Address in 1945, that 'We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger. For over a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall, successive presidents and CIA directors had treated the threat of Islamo-fascist fundamentalist terrorism with too little appreciation of the true threat it posed.
The world did not change 11 September, but the English-speaking peoples' understanding of it did. As Donald Rumsfeld put it in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 9 July 2003, 'We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September the eleventh." For in fact Islamic terrorists had been waging a war against the United States for twenty years, a conflict in which the attacks on the US Marines in Beirut in 1982, against the Twin Towers in February 1993, against the US troops in Mogadishu in October 1993, against two US bases in Saudi Arabia in November 1995 and June 1996, against the American Embassies in East Africa in August 1998 and against the USS Cole in October 2000 were only the most high-profile manifestations. Those who accuse Messrs Bush and Blair of exacerbating Islamicist terrorism through their invasions of Afghanistan and especially Iraq fail to appreciate that murderous and pitiless war-making was already well under way long before 2003. If anything, the War against Terror was a very belated response. If those invasions had taken place far earlier than 2003, perhaps in 1999 under President Clin-ton's watch, once the evidence of Al-Queda's terrorist activities and Saddam Hussein's malicious disruption of the work of the UN inspectors was beyond doubt, the victories in Afghanistan and Iraq would have been far quicker and easier than was subsequently the case.
Before 9/11, successive Administrations of both political complexions had decided to treat these assaults as terrorist-criminal acts rather than acts of asymmetric warfare, despite Osama bin Laden's very specific periodic dec-larations of war against the United States. Only after 9/11 were the English-speaking peoples finally prepared to fight the struggle properly and employ every element of national power to form a coherent and strong response. 'We learned about an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal,' reported the 9/11 Commission, set up by President Bush to inquire into the events of that dreadful day. "The enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress of political grievances, but its hostility toward us and our values is limitless. Its purpose is to rid the world of religious and political pluralism, the plebiscite, and equal rights for women. It makes no distinction between military and civilian targets. "Collateral damage" is not in its lexicon."
The public statements of Osama bin Laden as transmitted to the world via the Arab television station Al-Jazeera soon made it clear that the demands of Al-Queda were so extravagant that no Western nation could ever accept them.
They included the re-creation of the caliphate across the Arab crescent from Pakistan to southern Spain and the universal implantation of Sharia law. This was fortunate, because were it possible to appease Al-Queda, history suggests that there would have been voices raised in the West - especially in Western Europe - in favour of doing just that. Even as it was, after a series of bombings and attempted bombings by two Al-Queda cells in London in July 2005, the attacks were blamed by some on Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq, despite the fact that Al-Queda's campaign against the liberal democracies had long pre-dated that. As earlier chapters have attempted to show, since 1900 there have always been those amongst the English-speaking peoples prepared to appease, apologise for and even on occasion to laud and aid their mortal enemies.
Tony Blair was working on his speech to the Trade Union Congress in the Fitzherbert suite of the Grand Hotel in Brighton at 1.48 p.m. on 11 September when an aide told him that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Assuming it to be a freak accident, he worked on. When the second plane hit, he watched on television the scenes in New York. The Prime Minister's reactions were those of most of the rest of Mankind: 'horror and disbelief. He was watching when the third plane hit the Pentagon at 2.43 p.m. (British time) and then put in a short appearance at the conference, where, visibly shaken, he told the delegates: 'There have been the most terrible, shocking events in the United States of America in the last hours. I am afraid we can only imagine the terror and carnage there and the many, many innocent people who have lost their lives. This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today Later he recalled, in an interview on Boston television, 'Sometimes things happen in politics, an event so cataclysmic that, in a curious way, all the doubt is removed. From the outset, I really felt very certain as to what had to be said and done. He stayed certain. In his conversations with Jacques Chirac of France, Gerhard Schröder of Germany and Vladimir Putin of Russia, he was delighted that all three leaders seemed to be 'totally on board, right from the outset'."
Verbal expressions of support and sympathy were one thing; swift and decisive Anglo-American action to avert panic-selling of dollars immediately after the attacks was another. The high and mutual regard between the Governor of the Bank of England, Professor Mervyn King, and the Federal Reserve Deputy Chairman, Roger Ferguson, ensured that one short con-versation on 9/11 was enough to open a $30 billion line of dollar credits, which kept the US currency in the United Kingdom stable and averted the danger of a global financial crisis following on from the national security one. It was a fine example of how Britain instinctively stood 'shoulder-to-shoulder' with America in her moment of peril. This reaction in turn gave Britain a say in -though of course not a veto over - what was decided in Washington. As Henry Kissinger has written, Anglo-American relations are 'so matter-of-factly intim-ate that it was psychologically impossible to ignore British views'.
President Bush's first conversation with a foreign leader - at 7.30 a.m. East Coast Time on Wednesday, 12 September was with Tony Blair, another indication of the enduring importance of the Special Relationship to the Americans. Blair found Bush 'very calm'. They discussed the United States' response. 'We are not interested in simply pounding sand for the sake of demonstrating we are going to do something, Bush said, adding that this would be a 'mission for a Presidency', thus proving that the lessons of the Clinton years had finally been learned. Blair then wrote out by hand a five-page memorandum, which was faxed to the White House and which concluded that, in the words of one report of it, 'the cancer was not confined to Afghanistan, or indeed Al-Qaeda, and they had to make plans to act against all who financed, supported or sponsored terrorism, wherever they existed in the world'. The Left's characterisation of Tony Blair as being Bush's poodle is thus no more accurate than that of Thatcher being Reagan's or of Macmillan being Kennedy's, or indeed of Churchill being Roosevelt's, although those accusations have each been made in their time.
On 20 September, Blair flew to New York to attend a memorial service for those who died. It was there that the British Ambassador read out a message from the Queen in which was contained the phrase that 'Grief is the price we pay for love.' The Prime Minister then flew on to Washington, where, standing by the window in the Blue Room of the White House, which looks out towards the Washington Monument, he was 'delighted' to be told by Bush that the President was going to announce to a joint session of Congress that evening: 'Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.'
Blair watched that speech, which was interrupted thirty-one times with ovations, from the Senate gallery. At one point Bush said, 'I'm so honoured the British prime minister has crossed the ocean to show his unity with America. Thank you for coming, friend. Although it is true that every post-war prime minister except Edward Heath and John Major has set a high value on the Special Relationship, only Churchill and Thatcher had brought it to such a fine pitch as did Blair. This was underlined soon afterwards in his powerful address to the Labour Party Conference, in which he said of the American people, 'We were with you at the first. We will stay with you till the last.' In this he was as good as his word.
If America's part in the Second World War started in 1941 with the counter-intuitive but nonetheless hard-headed analysis that it was necessary to fight Germany first, then her War against Terror began similarly. Although Saddam Hussein had not been implicated in the attacks of 9/11, Iraq was the world's leading state-sponsor of terrorism and an openly and oft-declared foe of the English-speaking peoples, who had led the coalition that had foiled his attempt to dominate the Middle East in 1990-1. Tony Blair, giving evidence in the House of Commons before 21 January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, categorically accepted: 'Whenever I am asked about the linkage between al-Qaeda and Iraq, the truth is that there is no information I have that directly links Iraq to September 11. I think that the justification for what we are doing in respect of Iraq has got to be made separately from any potential link with al-Qaeda. Saddam's support for non-Al-Queda terrorism was central to that.
Just as the Roosevelt Administration and Churchill Government had agreed to destroy Hitler first, even though Japan was the immediate enemy that had struck America, so the Bush Administration and Blair Government correctly identified the importance of removing the core problem in the Middle East -Saddam Hussein even though the immediate enemy that had struck the United States had been Al-Queda. Tony Blair's part in formulating the Allies' post-9/11 military strategy was powerfully reminiscent of Churchill's role in encouraging the concept of 'Germany First' in December 1941. What might seem illogical at the time can often look clear-sighted much later in light of the wider struggle. Although the successful attack on Afghanistan, which expelled Al-Queda and its Taliban protectors from all the country's key areas, was much more than a sideshow, it was never going to be the main event if the English-speaking peoples and their wide alliance were going to engage their major Middle Eastern tormentor.
Some Western commentators have argued that Al-Queda attacked the United States on 9/11 largely because of her support for Israel, and that this could have been averted if only successive American Administrations had tried harder to solve the Israel-Palestinian problem. This is utterly to misinterpret the true nature of Al-Queda. None of the nineteen hijackers was Palestinian, and Osama bin Laden's primary goal was to drive the Americans out of Saudi Arabia. The annihilation of Israel would only come later, once US power had been expelled from the Middle East. As Richard Beeston of The Times has succinctly put it, "The notion of 11 September being called off because of a fresh bout of US diplomacy in the Levant is ridiculous." American support for Israel has always been a noble response to, not a provocative cause of, fanatical Islamicist anti-Semitic terrorism.
An exhaustive study undertaken by Dr Marc Sageman of the University of Pennsylvania into the life histories of 400 Al-Queda members and their close allies shows that traditional motives ascribed to terrorists-poverty, desperation and ignorance also do not generally apply. Instead, 17.6% came from the upper class of their societies and 54.9% from the middle class. Of those whose
educational records were available, 28.8% had some college education, 33.3% had a college degree and 9% had a postgraduate degree. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the Briton who murdered the American journalist Daniel Pearl, attended the London School of Economics. Far from being brainwashed in madrassa religious schools, 90.6% had had a secular education. In their career paths, 42.5% were professionally employed as lawyers, teachers, doctors and so on, and only 24.6% had unskilled jobs. For those whose marital status was known, 73% were married and most of those had children. 13 Poverty, alienation and ignorance were thus emphatically not the primary motivations for Al-Queda activity. (The killing of Mr Pearl inaugurated a new and particularly vile method of Al-Queda murder: the videoing of a hostage's throat being slashed or head being chopped off.)
A useful tool in analysing the mentality of the 9/11 suicide pilots and the suicide bombers who have followed them is the 150-page 1951 bestseller The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. The author, an autodidact and former New York docks longshoreman, made a precise study of the similarities between the fanaticism of several mass movements including first-century AD Christianity, early sixteenth-century Protestantism, Jacobinism, Nazism, communism and Muslim fundamentalism, finding that, 'There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity and of self-sacrifice."4
Al-Queda have variously defined their aims as the recreation of the caliph-ate, the complete expulsion of Western influences from the land of Islam, and the conversion of the world to the Muslim faith and Sharia law, none of which have any chance of being fulfilled, especially not through the terrorist route chosen, yet, as Hoffer argued, that if anything strengthens rather than weakens its adherents' fanaticism. As the Israeli Ambassador to London, Zvi Heifetz, pointed out in October 2005,
The word jihad may be literally translated as "striving". It is an important clue because, in the distorted perspective of the global jihadists, waging war against the West is not a means to an end but the end in itself. Political objectives secured in the course of the struggle may be a welcome bonus but they are not the spiritual or intellectual point. 15
The unimaginative, bourgeois, earth-bound English-speaking peoples refuse to dream dreams, see visions and follow fanatics and demagogues, from whom they are protected by their liberal constitutions, free press, rationalist philosophy and representative institutions. They are temperamentally less inclined towards fanaticism, high-flown rhetoric and Bonapartism than many other peoples in History. They respect what is tangible and, in politics at least, suspect what is not. But as Hoffer recognised in fanatical movements long before Al-Queda, 'In all ages men have fought more desperately for beautiful cities yet to be built and gardens yet to be planted.... Dreams, visions and wild hopes are mighty weapons and realistic tools.'
Hoffer recognised how a conception of the past or at least a highly idealised view of it is an indispensable political weapon for a fanatical mass movement, since 'It develops a vivid awareness, often specious, of a distant glorious past... to show up the present as a mere interlude between past and future', both of which were glorious. To that end, Hitler lauded Arminius, who defeated the Romans in 9 AD, and the Jacobins harked back to the pre-historical era of the 'Noble Savage'. How much more powerful a motivation, then, when the past was not only glorious but relatively recent.
Yet Al-Queda needed no specious, idealised view of the House of Osman that ruled the Ottoman Empire for 470 years, comprising at different stages parts of Spain, the North African littoral, Egypt, Greece, the Arabian Pen-insula, Mesopotamia, Syria and Lebanon, Turkey and south-eastern Europe up to the gates of Vienna and, of course, Turkey. By any standards of History or Civilisation, the Empire that was ruled by thirty-six sultans of that House until 1922 was indeed impressive, and at times glorious. Bin Laden's reference in a videotape message after 9/11 to the abolition of the caliphate in March 1924-the action of a Muslim, Kemal Atatürk - shows how acutely Al-Queda regrets the decline of the secular power and influence of Islam.
As well as an unappeasable desire for revenge for everything that has befallen the Muslim world since it stood at the gates of Vienna in 1683, Al-Queda acts out of the same sense of envious rage that has always actuated peoples who view the world's hegemonic power, whatever that power is or has been and however benign it might be. (To appreciate quite how long ago it was since the Ottomans were in the ascendant and thus the length of the fundamentalists' legacy of resentment against the West - 1683 in Europe saw the Rye House Plot against King Charles 11 and in the New World it was the year that William Penn published A General Description of Pennsylvania.) There are good reasons why the United States should spend the billions it does relieving AIDS distress in Africa, tsunami victims in Asia, providing debt-relief throughout the Third World, and so on, but the hope of winning popularity should not be one of them.
Once again there had been a painful defeat in the opening engagement of a conflict. The sinking of the USS Maine (however it might have happened), the Boer invasion of Cape Colony, the retreat from Mons in 1914, the evacu-ation from Dunkirk, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the fall of Seoul, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the capture of Port Stanley, the invasion of Kuwait, then 9/11: all fit into a long-established pattern of reverses that have befallen the English-speaking peoples in the opening stages of almost every war they had fought over the previous century or beyond, if one also includes the nineteenth-century battles of the Alamo, Little Big Horn, Isandhlwana and Maiwand. Yet after every single one of those reverses and defeats, the English-speaking peoples were awoken as to what it would take to fight the war, and in all but Vietnam they went on to taste victory.
Furthermore, it is often small nations, rather than other Great Powers, which have tested the resolve of the English-speaking peoples. The Boers, Filipinos, North Koreans, Egyptians, North Vietnamese, Argentinians and Iraqis for all that some of them might have been backed by Great Powers were not particularly powerful in themselves, but they presented challenges no less important for the fact that they were not Wilhelm II's Germany or Hirohito's Japan. The end of Great Power status is often signalled by a successful challenge from a much lesser adversity, as Austria-Hungary found with Serbia, France at Dien-Bien-Phu in Indo-China, Britain at Suez and the USSR in Afghanistan. The United States could simply not afford to allow either the Taliban's Afghanistan or Saddam Hussain's Iraq to continue to mock her after 9/11. The worst bloodshed in history tends to arise when nations make an unwarranted bid for world-primacy; no potential successor could be left in any doubt that the United States was still a potent superpower more than capable of swatting a self-appointed irritant such as Saddam's Iraq.
The 9/11 attack brought out the virulence of anti-Americanism in all its ugliness. Palestinians danced in the streets of Gaza, many others in the Middle East celebrated less publicly, and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote of his own and his countrymen's 'prodigious jubilation in seeing this global superpower destroyed', saying of the terrorists responsible, 'Ultimately they were the ones who did it, but we were the ones who wanted it, and that 'everyone without exception had dreamt of such a cataclysm hitting America. Gallingly for anti-Americans as rabid as him, America was soon to prove that far from being 'destroyed' by 9/11, she was galvanised in the same way that she had been by the Lusitania sinking and the assault on Pearl Harbor.
In Britain, intellectuals such as the author William Boyd denounced the Special Relationship as 'this faltering, gimcrack, unequal relationship', arguing in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement: 'We have had to live with the Churchillian myth of a special relationship with the US ever since the Second World War and we continue to pay the price.' (Boyd's article was replete with factual errors, but that did not detract from the passion of his thesis.) Either denouncing the Relationship or denying that it even existed, many British commentators especially of the Left hoped to sever Britain's intimate and long-standing links with her closest ally.
Military Intelligence is necessarily an inexact science. To gain human intel-ligence on Saddam's Iraq involved having people who were willing to risk torture and execution not only on their own behalf, but also upon that of their families and colleagues as well. To expect, as so many armchair Intelligence experts since have, that all information on Iraqi capabilities could be supported by more than one source was simply to ask too much of any Intelligence service. Some defectors from Saddam's regime did speak to Western security services, telling them what everyone assumed was the case: that the dictator had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). (In 2001, for example, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer, said that he had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. He supported his claims with copies of Iraqi government contracts, complete with technical specifications.)" Saddam had used WMD in the past, had admitted to having them as recently as 1995, and had nothing in his previous behaviour that suggested that he might have destroyed them in the meantime. Indeed, why should a dictator whose power was entirely based on his ability to terrorise, voluntarily destroy weapons designed to achieve this? That central question still lies unanswered at the time of writing in January 2006.
'Iraq was the only country in the world that had recently used weapons of mass destruction,' Senator John McCain told me in November 2004. 'It had them in 1991, and every intelligence agency in the world believed that it still had them. We viewed Iraq as the greatest threat." The English-speaking peoples' experiences at Pearl Harbor in 1941, Dieppe in 1942, the Tet offensive in 1968, the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the Gulf War in 1991 all suggest that Intelligence is only part and often by no means the most important part of the story. Throughout the history of the English-speaking peoples since 1900, Military Intelligence has been patchy at best, with the almost sole (but vital) exception of the decryption of German codes during the First and Second World Wars. Yet that does not absolve Western leaders from the duty of taking decisions based on the best analysis available, which is what George W. Bush and Tony Blair had to do with regard to Iraq after 9/11. In the murky world of secret Intelligence, there is no counsel of perfection. As the CIA Director George Tenet told Georgetown University in February 2004, 'By definition, Intelligence deals with the unclear, the unknown, the deliberately hidden. What the enemies of the United States hope to deny, we work to reveal. In the Intelligence business, you are almost never completely right or completely wrong.' Over WMD, however, Tenet went badly wrong.
Appearing before the United Nations Security Council on 5 February 2003, the US Secretary of State Colin Powell held up a vial of white powder to represent Iraq's stocks of anthrax. 'My colleagues,' he said, 'every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.19 As a former four-star general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Security Advisor, Powell's words carried enormous weight. Although his estimation turned out to be wrong, there can be absolutely no doubt that this man of unimpeachable integrity believed them implicitly, because they were based on the very best Intelligence that the US and her allies could call upon at the time. That it was wrong was the fault of the Intelligence agencies, not the politicians who had to take decisions based upon it. (As well as the CIA and MI6, the Intelligence services of Russia, Israel, Germany, France and China all also took it for granted that Saddam had WMD.)
The first piece of recorded military intelligence in history is contained in a papyrus sent to Thebes 4,000 years ago, which reports: 'We have found the track of 32 men and three donkeys', evidence of a raiding party or the advance guard of an invasion force. Since then the espionage industry has become far more sophisticated technologically, but nothing has proved more valuable than human Intelligence ('humint'), which can only be gleaned from winning the trust of an opponent. Since the Al-Queda higher leadership largely coalesced over twenty years before 9/11 in the mujahadeen struggle against the USSR, that has proved impossible. Similarly, many of the people closest to Saddam had been with him since his 1968 coup. The leaders of the English-speaking peoples had to extrapolate what they could from what military Intelligence they had, as well as their knowledge of Saddam's track record. Their conclusions were the same that any reasonable, intelligent, objective person would have also come to at the time: that the War against Terror could not be won unless Saddam Hussein was overthrown, and that it was too much of a risk for the English-speaking peoples not to topple his regime.
Furthermore, it was not just the CIA and MI6 that provided Intelligence: in April 1995, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons experts reported to the UN Security Council that 'Iraq had concealed its biological weapons program and had failed to account for three tons of growth material for biological agents. After the defection that year of a senior official, Iraq herself admitted to making weapons from thousands of litres of anthrax, botulinim toxin and aflatoxin for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs and aircraft. By September 2002, UNSCOM had concluded that 'Iraq's declarations on biological agents vastly understated the extent of its program, and that Iraq actually produced two to four times the amount of most agents, including Anthrax and Botulinim toxin, than it had declared.'
UNSCOM also reported in September 2002 that 'Iraqi accounting and current production capabilities strongly suggest that Iraq maintains stockpiles of chemical agents, probably VX, Sarin, Cyclosarin and Mustard agent.' Furthermore, 'Iraq has not accounted for hundreds of tons of chemical precursors and tens of thousands of unfilled munitions, including Scud variant missile warheads', let alone 'at least fifteen thousand artillery rockets that in the past were its preferred vehicle for delivering nerve agents, nor has it accounted for about 550 artillery shells filled with mustard agent'. It would have been a gross dereliction of duty on behalf of the leaders of the English-speaking peoples to have overlooked what Saddam's behaviour seemed to suggest, even though we now believe that he was misleading them. The United Nations' own inspectors said, "There was a strong presumption that Saddam had ten thousand litres of anthrax, which could have been contained in a single petrol tanker, yet the CIA and MI6 have been demonised for merely agreeing with them.20
In a dossier released by the British Government on 24 September 2002, a great deal of accurate information was given about Saddam Hussein's regime, capabilities and likely intentions. However, there was also a claim that 'some of the WMD' - without specifying whether these would be a short- or long-range - could be ready 'within 45 minutes of an order to use them'. Elsewhere it was reported that Iraq was attempting to construct a ballistic missile capable of hitting Cyprus, where there were large British military bases. Although battlefield chemical weapons could indeed be used within forty-five minutes, Saddam had no ballistic missiles with which to hit Cyprus at that time, and neither the dossier nor the Prime Minister ever claimed he yet had. As the M16 source of the claim, Lieutenant-Colonel al-Dabbagh of Iraqi air defence, told Saddam's biographer, Con Coughlin of the Sunday Telegraph, We could have fired these within half an hour, yet, as he also pointed out, they were only for battlefields in Iraq and Kuwait.
The forty-five-minute claim represented only one sentence on page 17 of the dossier's main text, albeit repeated twice within its internal summaries and once in Tony Blair's foreword. The Prime Minister then mentioned it once on presenting the dossier to Parliament that day. It was picked up by The Sun newspaper with the headline, 'Brits 45 Mins From Doom', and by some other papers, but was otherwise largely ignored. Crucially the Government's public relations experts ('spin-doctors') did nothing to disabuse The Sun or anyone else of the lurid interpretation that the newspaper had placed on two separate pieces of information that had been conflated. (It is not the Government's duty, or within its capacity, to correct every inaccurate Press story.)
The forty-five-minute claim then lay buried, at least until after the war broke out six months later. Of some 45,000 questions that were asked in Parliament between the publication of the dossier and the outbreak of war, only two referred to it. Mr Blair did not refer to it in his speech preparing the country for war in March 2003, nor did anyone raise it with him. The subsequent claims made by the anti-war movement, therefore, that it played a central role in the Government's case for war, are quite untrue."
It was anyhow not enough that Iraq should not possess WMDs; UN resolutions made it incumbent on that country to prove that it did not, and Saddam's behaviour in expelling UN weapons inspectors in 1998 strongly suggested that he should not have been given the benefit of any doubt. The Al-Dawrah 'Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine Facility' was one of two known top-level bio-containment facilities in Iraq that had an extensive air-handling and filtering system. Iraq had already admitted that it had been a biological weapons facility in the past. In 2001, Iraq announced that she would begin renovating the plant without UN approval, ostensibly to produce vaccines that she could more easily and quickly import through the UN. Any rational person would conclude, knowing what was already known of the Ba'athist regime, that WMDs would soon be produced there.
Partly as a result of the culture of distrust of the Establishment that had been built up in the three decades since Watergate, many in the West have assumed that there was a conspiracy between politicians and the security services to take the English-speaking peoples to war full in the knowledge that Iraq had no WMDs. Despite two sober, hugely in-depth investigations in Britain, carried out by men of the highest personal and professional probity, namely the law lord Lord Hutton and the former Cabinet Secretary Lord Butler, the media saw fit to denounce both as 'whitewashes', which they were patently not. Both in-depth inquiries probed very hard into the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the Iraq War and both concluded that the Gov-ernment had acted in good faith, although other criticisms were made.
It says much about how far post-Watergate paranoia about the motivation and honesty of public servants had gone that very many people genuinely believed that an American Administration and a British Government delib-erately lied about the level of threat they believed Saddam posed in order to send US and British troops to fight and die in Iraq. Any such conspiracy would have had to have involved large numbers of utterly unprincipled people in the very highest reaches of government, the security services and armed forces. In fact it was a foul slur completely unsubstantiated by the facts. Although Bush and Blair have been widely denounced as liars by anti-war groups, by infantile political-comedians such as Michael Moore and Al Franken, and even on occasion by their Democratic and Conservative Party oppositions, to say what you devoutly believe to be the truth at the time - but which later turns out untrue is not a 'lie' under any generally accepted construction of the word.
'I apologise', said Tony Blair in October 2004, 'for any information given in good faith that turned out to be wrong.' This was the central issue - good faith and the electorates in Australia, America and Britain all had to decide between October 2004 and May 2005 whether the information truly was given in good faith. In all three countries they re-elected their leaders with very good majorities, suggesting that for all the conspiracy theorists and anti-war propagandists, most of the English-speaking peoples accepted that the incorrect information had nonetheless been given honestly.
Since Saddam had been the only leader to use biological weapons since Mussolini in Abyssinia, against the Iranians, the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds, there was a good deal of circumstantial evidence of his ruthlessness. Fur-thermore, the US Commander-in-Chief of the 'Coalition of the Willing' in Iraq, General Tommy Franks, was informed by both King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt that they had been told by Saddam that he would use WMD against the Americans.
In the same month as Blair's apology, Charles Duelfer, leader of the Iraq Survey Group, presented to Congress his Comprehensive Report on the issue of WMD. Though under-reported at the time, because it failed to fit in with the media's conspiracy theory preconceptions, this explained that Saddam's illegal military procurement budget ran at $500 million per annum between 1996 and 2003, with illicit oil contracts providing the funding. Duelfer further proved that Iraq had maintained weapons programmes that placed her in material breach of, amongst others, the key US Security Council Resolution 1441. He also surmised, as most other objective people would have, that Saddam intended to resume WMD production the moment that UN sanc-tions were lifted, while spending millions in bribes to individuals in China, France and Russia who were involved in the decision-making process. Duelfer also uncovered one Iraqi Intelligence report saying that French politicians had assured Saddam in writing that France would veto any second UN resolution, which it sure enough threatened to do in March 2003.
Since the terminal demise of the principles of the Washington Address, the American people have appreciated that their vital interests have lain far beyond her borders. The rest of the English-speaking peoples have known how far-flung their interests have been for far longer. It is therefore not enough to state, as various anti-war propagandists have, that simply because Saddam Hussein was not an immediate threat to US or British servicemen he should not have been overthrown. He threatened Western friends and allies in the region, harboured those who had murdered US servicemen and civilians, and occasionally Iraqi rockets were fired at RAF and USAF planes patrolling over the no-fly zones agreed in 1991. As Churchill said after the assassination of King Feisal and Prime Minister Nuri-es-Said of Iraq in 1958,
The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world. It has always been fought over, and peace has only reigned when a major power has established firm influence and shown that it would maintain its will. Your friends must be supported with every vigour and if necessary they must be avenged. Force, or perhaps force and bribery, are the only things that will be respected. It is very sad, but we had all better recognise it. At present our friendship is not valued and our enmity is not feared."
The Iraq War should not be seen as some kind of brand new military engagement in the Middle East, so much as the culmination of hitherto-unfinished business left over at the time of the Gulf War twelve years before. Quite apart from WMD, the British and American Governments also concentrated their case for war on other unanswerable humanitarian and terrorism-related factors that have survived the failure to discover WMD after the invasion. These also helped to justify the invasion of Iraq, but such was the influence of the anti-war movement and the media's concentration on the WMD issue that they were partly drowned out. Yet as Alex Van der Stoel, the UN special rapporteur on human rights for Iraq, had reported, the abuses there were 'so grave that it has few parallels in the years that have passed since the Second World War'. 23
Earlier chapters have established how important prestige has always been in the realpolitik that governs international relations. For the English-speaking peoples after 9/11 to have permitted Saddam to continue to mock their power; attempt to shoot down RAF and USAF planes over the no-fly zones; profit from the Oil-for-Food scandal while Iraqi children starved to death; pay $25,000 to the families of each Palestinian suicide-murderer; threaten his peaceful pro-Western Arab neighbours; ignore and jeer at sixteen UN resolutions passed over nine years; and summarily expel UN weapons inspectors, would have made a War against Terror that did not involve toppling Saddam not worth the name. In 1993, the Iraqi Intelligence Service attempted to assassinate President George Bush Snr and the Emir of Kuwait with a powerful car bomb. Iraq also sheltered the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq Organisation (which had killed US soldiers and civilians), the Palestine Liberation Front, Abu Abbas (who murdered the US citizen Leon Klinghoffer on the cruise ship Achille Lauro), the Abu Nidal organisation (responsible for the deaths or wounding of 900 people in twenty countries), Abdul Rahman Yassin (who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and such other notorious terrorists. There were therefore plenty of sound reasons for overthrowing Saddam quite separate either from WMDs or his monstrous domestic human rights record. Nor was time on the English-speaking peoples' side. Saddam had two vicious, sadistic sons, one of whom Uday was a rapist and mass murderer, who he was grooming to succeed him.
'Looking at the what-ifs seems to me to be extremely important,' said the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on 26 January 2004. 'If we'd walked away, Saddam would have been re-emboldened, a destabilising force in the whole of the Middle East. The authority of the UN and the security of the Middle East would have been further undermined.' Straw one of the best British Foreign Secretaries of the post-war era also pointed out that even after high penetration of the Provisional IRA over thirty years, the British Army still didn't know the whereabouts of their weapon stockpiles, and that Ulster was a fraction of the size of Iraq.
By 2002, Iraq was declared in breach of almost every single one of the obligations set out during nearly a decade of binding United Nations Security Council resolutions (UNSCRs), all designed to protect the rest of the Middle East from Saddam. Between 29 November 1990 and 17 December 1999, there were no fewer than sixteen of these, namely 678, 686, 687, 688, 707, 715, 949, 1051, 1060, 1115, 1134, 1137, 1154, 1194, 1205 and 1284. Under their terms, Saddam Hussein was required to, among other things: 'destroy all of his ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers; stop support for terrorism and prevent terrorist organisations from operating within Iraq; help account for missing Kuwaitis and other individuals; return stolen Kuwaiti property and bear financial liability for damage from the Gulf War; and... end his repression of the Iraqi people. He did none of these. Although Saddam probably had no more WMD by 1998, he certainly acted precisely as though he had.
On 8 November 2002, the Security Council voted unanimously in favour of Resolution 1441, which threatened that 'serious consequences' would follow further material breaches, yet those on the Left who had spent decades trum-peting the superior morality of the UN over the governments of the English-speaking peoples, preferred to see the Security Council's resolutions continued to be scorned rather than have the United States' case for war strengthened.
Saddam could have complied with Resolution 1441, albeit with huge loss of face, but he chose not to. Unfortunately the British Government - under extreme pressure from its Labour Party backbenchers made a fetish of attempting to secure a second UN resolution specifically authorising war, thereby wasting further precious months.
The English-speaking peoples and their allies had the perfect moral right to invade Iraq whether she had flouted numerous UNSCRs or not; their freedom of manoeuvre and that of NATO could not be allowed to be cir-cumscribed by the United Nations, an organisation whose interests are fun-damentally different from and occasionally opposed to theirs. One of the most serious ramifications of the Iraq War was that a significant proportion of the English-speaking peoples seem to have believed that military action could only be legitimate if specifically authorised by the United Nations.
Bruno Tertrais, until 2001 the special assistant to the Director of Strategic Affairs in the French Defence Ministry, and certainly no friend of the Bush Doctrine, was forced to admit in his recent book War Without End that, "The worldwide coalition against terrorism is in fact the widest in history: 134 countries offered their assistance to the United States after September 11, and ninety took part in one way or another in Operation Enduring Freedom (twenty-seven of them inside Afghanistan itself).25 No fewer than twenty-one nations - including Estonia, Poland and even Mongolia - also took part in the war against Saddam.
The countries that had 'boots on the ground' in Iraq in October 2003 were so many and varied that it made a mockery of the accusation that the United States was acting 'unilaterally' there. Taken alphabetically there were Albanians peace-keeping in northern Iraq; Azerbaijanis protecting religious and historic monuments; 7,400 Britons with more on the way; Bulgarians patrolling Karbala, south of Baghdad; Central American and Dominican Republic troops in south-central Iraq; Czech military police; Danish light infantry units; a battalion of Dutch Marines; Estonian mine-divers and cargo-handlers; Georgian sappers and medics; a Hungarian transportation contingent; 3,000 Italians; Moldovan de-mining experts; New Zealand and Norwegian army engineers; soldiers and police from the Philippines; no fewer than 2,400 Poles; Portuguese policemen; 800 Romanians; Slovakian military engineers; some South Koreans; 1,300 Spaniards; Thais assigned to humanitarian operations; over 1,600 Ukrainians from a mechanised unit; as well as troops from El Salvador, Honduras, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia and Nicar-agua. This was hardly the United States 'going it alone', as the domestic and foreign opponents of the war constantly alleged.
Tertrais went on to acknowledge what he correctly analysed as 'the unwaver-ing nature of the Bush-Blair partnership', adding,
The United Kingdom certainly had good reasons to get directly involved in the war: its past of colonial involvement in the area, its status as America's unfailing partner in all the operations against Iraq between 1991 and 2003, its experience in the struggle against terrorism, as well perhaps as its indirect responsibilities in the development of Islamism in Europe (the country having long been a haven of tolerance for extremism).**
The major difference between Woodrow Wilson's attempt to spread self-determination after the Great War and George W. Bush's attempt to spread democracy after 9/11 is that the vehicle Wilson chose to use, the League of Nations, was fundamentally flawed as soon as America failed to join, whereas 'the Coalition of the Willing' was driven principally by the military might of the English-speaking peoples. As well as the USA and Britain, Canada pro-vided troops for the liberation of Afghanistan and Australia provided them for Operation Enduring Freedom. 'In a world where the only alternative is the moral posturing of arthritic international organisations such as the EU or the UN' read an editorial in the largest-selling British broadsheet newspaper on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day, 'the transatlantic partnership is the only force that can still offer freedom to distant lands. "Then, as now, the Atlantic alliance in arms is an awesome thing."
Nor was it true that George W. Bush had somehow invented a doctrine of 'the pre-emptive strike', as has been alleged. If the threat to their interests was serious enough, the English-speaking peoples have long been willing to strike first. In 1807, George Canning did not wait for the Danish Navy to be used against Britain by Napoleon, but ordered Admiral Parker and his second-in-command Vice-Admiral Nelson to attack it at Copenhagen." The Germans did not directly attack the English-speaking peoples in either 1914 or 1939, but both times Britain declared war against them first. Churchill pre-emptively bombarded the Outer Dardanelles Forts in 1914 two days before Britain declared war against the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, France had been Britain's ally until her armistice in mid-June 1940 and was not an enemy belligerent after it, but in early July Churchill ordered the sinking of the French Fleet at Oran. He thought it safer to shoot first and answer Prime Minister's Questions later, and the House of Commons rose as one man to cheer him for pre-emptively keeping French capital ships like the Richelieu and the Jean Bart out of the hands of Admiral Raeder.
A political leader of the English-speaking peoples in the perilous twenty-first century has higher responsibilities than to outdated precepts based on obsolete concepts of strategy. Since the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, nation states have been the basic entities of the international system, but modern terrorism respects no borders. Today, it is better for the English-speaking peoples to be safe than to be ethically superior with regard to international law (although Article 51 of the UN Charter does anyhow allow the right of pre-emptive self-defence under certain circumstances, codifying the cus-tomary law that had been in being since the Canadian Caroline case of 1837).
If a pre-emptive attack on Al-Queda bases in Afghanistan under the Clinton Presidency would have prevented the 9/11 outrage, it would have been jus-tifiable under a precept that is greater than the whole panoply of international law the basic right to self-protection. As Enoch Powell pointed out during the Falklands crisis, that right was 'inherent in us' and it existed 'long before the United Nations was ever thought of. (Indeed, long before international law was ever thought of either, for that matter or the Treaty of Westphalia.)
Enemy powers have not been deterred from attacking Pearl Harbor, South Korea, the Falkland Islands or Kuwait because of international law; all that such rules have done is to hamstring the English-speaking peoples, but never their unscrupulous foes. As far back as 1996, Margaret Thatcher warned that America and her allies would have to deal with 'the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction... by pre-emptive means', and she was right. Although Saddam did not turn out to have WMD, the English-speaking peoples must at the very least be absolutely certain he could never acquire them. Just as generals tend always to be ready to fight the last war rather than the next one, so international law covers the exigencies of the Cold War, rather than the nihilistic, high-tech, stateless terrorism that characterises the present one.
The invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken full in the knowledge that the country's terrain made it legendarily difficult to govern. Foreigners had attempted it since the reign of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. 'Even Alexander's hold had been fleeting,' records the historian Ben McIntyre. 'Macedonian, Mogul, Persian, Russian, British and Soviet armies had all tried, and failed, to control the Afghan tribes. What made it any more likely that the English-speaking peoples' expeditionary force including contingents from America, Britain and Canada - would succeed where so many others had failed? 'Of the five royal descendants of Dost Mohammed Khan's tribe to rule Afghanistan in the twentieth century,' relates McIntyre, 'three were assassinated and two were forced into exile.' The last was Zahir Shah, who had become king aged eighteen after he had witnessed his father's assassination in 1933. (He ruled wisely and introduced freedom of speech and voting rights for women, before being ousted in 1973 when he was on holiday in Italy.)
As notorious as Afghanistan's political instability was the viciousness of her power struggles. When the Soviet Union had been forced by the US-backed mujahadeen to quit Afghanistan in 1990 after 50,000 Russians and one million Afghans had been killed their puppet ruler Mohammed Najibullah unwisely stayed on in Kabul to continue to fight. After taking sanctuary in the United Nations' compound as the enemy closed in on the capital in 1995, he was captured, castrated, and his body was dragged around the city behind a truck and then exhibited upside down in the Kabul bazaar.
The Stars and Stripes had flown over part of Afghanistan once before in history, in 1839 when the Chester County, Pennsylvania-born Josiah Harlan had unfurled it at the start of his short-lived personal rule there. 'Relying on an alloy of brass neck and steely self-confidence,' the Quaker-born adventurer braved bandits, quicksand and sixteen-foot crocodiles to carve out an impres-sive fiefdom there. He put his success down to his nationality. 'Over the principal tent, a few feet above the apex, Harlan recalled many years later, breeze. the American flag displayed its stars and stripes, flickering in the quietly drifting In the midst of that wild landscape, the flag of America seemed a dreamy illusion of the imagination, but it was the harbinger of enterprise which distance, space and time had not appalled, for the undaunted sons of Columbia are second to no people in the pursuit of adventure wherever the world is trodden by man.
The 2001 campaign in Afghanistan was successful; American, British and Australian special forces, aided by dominant American air-power and the enlistment of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of Afghans, quickly overthrew the Kabul Government and expelled Al-Queda from their terrorist bases and training camps in that country." It was an impressive victory by the English-speaking peoples and their allies in some of the toughest terrain in the world. However, Osama bin Laden managed to escape, most probably into Northern Pakistan. Nonetheless, the continued failure to capture him did at least concentrate Western minds on the fact that the War against Terror was far from over. In May 2006, the British soldier Lieutenant-General David Richards took command of the international force in Afghanistan, in charge of significant numbers of American troops, thereby exploding another myth about US insistence on exercising military control at all times.
The first Muslim Middle Eastern country in history to replace its government through a free election was Turkey in 1950. Unfortunately, it was also one of the last. Yet on Sunday, 18 September 2005, millions of Afghans braved Taliban threats in order to vote in the country's first parliamentary elections in over thirty years. The polling for provincial councils as well as the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) in Kabul was hailed by President Hamid Karzai, who said, 'We are proud of this day; we are proud of our people, even though the election strengthened the opposition parties.
Although twenty-two people were killed by the Taliban in the forty-eight hours prior to the elections, turn-out was high. As Ahmed Rashid, the author of the book Taliban, wrote the next day, 'Stories of electoral heroism are as moving as the sacrifices made by the Afghans while fighting the Soviet Union and the Taliban. Hundreds of women defied custom to stand and campaign in a predominantly male environment. No fewer than 5,800 women put themselves forward for the Wolesi Jirga, a quarter of the seats of which were reserved for them. The return of democracy to Afghanistan after three decades was a fine achievement of the English-speaking peoples, protecting that country from Al-Queda's re-infestation.
By late August 2002, there were enough US forces stationed on the Kuwaiti border with Iraq to effect a successful invasion once the order was given. Yet it took another seven months for that to happen, since the Bush Administration rashly decided to exhaust every possible avenue in order to give Saddam a chance to back down, and hopefully to leave Iraq. In order to help Tony Blair politically, placate international opposition to the coming war and perhaps also to avoid the conflict altogether, the US pursued a policy that in fact only had the effect of expanding the peace movement, emboldening French, German and Russian opposition to the war and allowing time for Saddam to put in place elaborate plans for insurgency operations once the initial stage of the campaign was lost. Money and arms were stockpiled during those months that were to prove invaluable later.
The United Nations was not merely ineffective, as the League of Nations had been before the Second World War, but downright obstructive and - like many other unaccountable bureaucracies in history - grossly corrupt. 'With the demeaning behaviour demanded of the United Nations to try to get the Iraq resolution through in early 2003 by trying to outbid the French to get the vote of Cameroon on the UN Security Council, concluded Professor Deepak Lal, 'no self-respecting power and certainly not one as powerful as the United States should, or is likely to, put up with this remnant of the old international order.'
An organisation that permitted totalitarian Libya to chair its Human Rights Commission and the UNSCOM-banning Iraq to chair its Disarmament Commission had clearly gone beyond parody and could not be permitted to circumscribe the foreign and defence policies of the English-speaking peoples. Nor could small undemocratic states such as Cameroon and Guinea, as well as other autocracies and kleptocracies on the Security Council, be allowed to prevent the extension of representative institutions to Iraq. The United Nations is based, as Lal points out, upon 'the anthropomorphic identification of states as persons, and the presumption of an essential harmony of interests between these equal world citizens', which is so at variance with the reality of international relations as to make the organisation almost redundant in crises, as was proved all too regularly in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo and latterly Darfur. 33 Indeed, it is possible that the United Nations actually makes such situations worse by giving the impression that something is being done when it often is not, thereby taking the pressure off the Great Powers to act. As Lord Salisbury once put it, a balcony that appears to be safe but is not is far more dangerous than having no balcony at all.
As well as giving Saddam much-needed time, the corruption of the United Nations' Oil-for-Food programme had provided him with equally essential Western currency. The Security Council handled around $64 billion from the programme's inception in 1996 until it was wound up after the 2003 war. Medicines and other supplies intended for the Iraqi people were routinely exported out of the country and sold on the international black market, while the genuine sufferings of the Iraqi people were blamed on the UN and US sanctions by the Ba'athist regime. Somehow during that time, the Iraqi regime managed to skim off over $1.8 billion in illegal revenues, just over half of it from smuggling outside the UN scheme. 34
In effect, through internal UN corruption, Saddam was able to use the United Nations as a giant money-laundering scheme. Long after the pro-gramme eame to an end, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the US Congress, estimated that Saddam made vast amounts on kickbacks from international companies working within the scheme, despite it being run by UN officials and monitored by a Security Council sub-committee. US officials discovered that Iraq charged an illegal 'surcharge' of between ten and thirty-five cents on every barrel of oil that it sold within the UN scheme. It also demanded a 10% 'after-sale service fee' from firms selling humanitarian goods to the country under the programme. 35
Furthermore, at least $1.1 billion was paid directly to people at the UN to cover the costs of administering the scheme, a 2.2% commission approved by the Security Council, for which no reliable audits were carried out nor accounts submitted. Claude Hankes-Drielsma, an advisor to the Iraqi governing council, testified to the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform in April 2004 that tracking that money had been 'key' to untangling the corruption scandal, and that the programme 'provided Saddam Hussein with a convenient vehicle through which he bought support internationally by bribing'. Files in the Oil Ministry in Baghdad contained 'memorandums of understanding' that suggested that Saddam could decide which UN officials operated within Iraq. The person who was in overall charge of organising the Iraqi end of the operation was his Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz.
In a separate abuse, Iraq's suppliers overvalued goods shipped into the country and then paid kickbacks to the Iraqi regime, providing it with hard currency. "Thousands of tons of food delivered under the UN programme were later revealed to be rotten, and many of the medicines particularly those imported from Russia were found to be out of date. '36 The man appointed to head the official investigation, Paul Volcker, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, had the Security Council's backing but no powers to compel witnesses to testify; he also had to rely on the co-operation of foreign governments, UN staff and former Saddam regime members, which was not always forthcoming. Nonetheless, his 623-page report was damning and found that of the 4,758 companies involved in the programme, kickbacks were paid in connection with humanitarian aid contracts of 2,265 of them and oil surcharges were paid in connection with the contracts of at least 148. This was larceny on a vast scale.
Vouchers were also given by the Saddam regime to prominent people outside Iraq entitling them to purchase quantities of Iraqi crude oil; these vouchers were themselves tradeable. Recipients included the French former Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua; the head of the Liberal Democrat Party in Russia, Vladimir Zhironovsky; several Middle Eastern politicians; Russian Communist Party officials; even a Swiss Catholic priest, who put the profits in his Vatican bank account. Roberto Formigoni, president of the Lombardy region of Italy, received oil rights over twenty-seven million barrels, recorded as 'special requests for Italy', the Volcker Report stated. French anti-war campaigners also received allocations. "The abuses were widespread,' reported the Sydney Morning Herald when the Report was published in October 2005. 'Kickbacks on humanitarian goods were traced to companies or individuals from sixty-six countries, while payments of surcharges were made by entities from forty countries. 37
It was true that in the 1980s the West did much to arm and aid Saddam's Iraq, when he was seen as a useful buffer against the ambitions of Iran. The laws of realpolitik, which have governed international relations since the Treaty of Westphalia, require countries to conform to the dictum that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'. Even the generally severely anti-communist Winston Churchill embraced the USSR the moment Hitler invaded her in 1941. The laws of Nature decree that all living entities alter, adapt, develop, mature, collapse and die over time, and relations between states are no different. 'Men are very apt to run into extremes; hatred to England may carry some into excessive confidence in France, George Washington wrote to Henry Laurens, President of the Continental Congress in November 1778. 'I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favourable sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable degree; but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it. These words of Washington's have continuing relevance because they covered unchanging principles, unlike his Farewell Address.
When Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran was the principal enemy in the Middle East, it made perfect sense to support her mortal enemy Iraq. When Saddam dropped his pro-Western stance for an aggressively anti-Western one, however, it made just as much sense to end that support. A similar case can be made for the decision of the Carter and Reagan Administrations to arm the mujahadeen guerrillas in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles after the Soviet invasion there. 'We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies,' Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons in March 1848. 'Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.' Just as Stalin was the West's ally in 1945 but its antagonist by 1948, so Saddam's Iraq stepped firmly into the enemy camp with his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It was, as so often with the English-speaking peoples' enemies in the past, entirely his choice. Yet for the Left to claim that because Iraq was once an ally, it was somehow illegitimate of the English-speaking peoples to invade her years later under totally different circumstances showed staggering naïveté.
Equally naïve was the argument that Saddam and the Taliban should not have been overthrown because the West was not also willing to go to war against other dictatorships, such as those of Burma, Zimbabwe and North Korea. That democracies cannot be installed across all the globe by force did not make it illegitimate to install two in the Middle East, especially once 9/11 had focused the American public's attention on the threat emanating from that region. As Tony Blair told the former editor of The Times Peter Stothard on 13 March 2003, 'What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot?... I don't because I can't, but when you can, you should. 39
Saddam could have taken comfort on 15 February 2003, when huge dem-onstrations against the forthcoming war were held in London and across Europe. The demonstration in Rome of three million people is believed by the Guinness Book of World Records to be the largest political gathering in history. By thus demonstrating to Saddam the deep divisions in the West over military action, these marches and speeches made it correspondingly less likely that he might back down at the eleventh hour. This great parade of European conscience therefore, incredibly self-indulgently, made war even more likely than it already was.
Just as the Korean and Vietnam Wars had seen Western apologists for the North Korean and North Vietnamese Governments, so in January 1994 the then Labour MP George Galloway had visited Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and told him, on Iraqi television, 'I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you' - adding, in Arabic - 'until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem.' He also told his 'Excel-lency' that there were Palestinian families 'who [named] their newborn sons Saddam'. As earlier chapters have shown in the cases of Beatrice Webb, Wilfred Burchett and Jane Fonda in earlier conflicts, the English-speaking peoples have always produced individuals willing to propagandise for totali-tarian dictatorships.
The moment that President Bush came to authorise the invasion of Iraq was conducted with the seemly behaviour expected of such a serious event. As Ronald Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz reminisced two years later,
I think someone once said that decision making is usually trying to choose the least crappy of the various alternatives. I really admire people like President Bush who are good at it. I was in the Oval Office the day he signed the executive order to invade Iraq and I know how painful that was. He actually went out in the Rose Garden to be alone for a little while. It's hard to imagine how hard that was."
In their cynicism and ideological opposition to America's wars, anti-Bush propagandists such as Michael Moore will simply not acknowledge that deci-sions such as Lyndon Johnson's to escalate the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon's to bomb Cambodia or Ronald Reagan's to invade Grenada do weigh heavily with presidents, and Bush's decision over Iraq was no different. Presi-dents who genuinely admire the military - and none did so more than Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Bush are the least likely to order soldiers into mortal combat. Similarly, the more God-fearing the president, the more conscious he is likely to be of eventual judgment before a far more august tribunal than simply the US Congress or even the bar of History.
"The duty of a politician', said the British nineteenth-century historian Bishop Mandell Creighton, 'is to educate the people, not to obey them.' In the debate on military action in the House of Commons on 18 March 2003, Tony Blair said that terrorism represented 'a fundamental assault on our way of life. He spent relatively little time justifying the forthcoming war on humanitarian grounds, concentrating instead on Saddam Hussein's repeated violations of the UN Security Council resolutions, and won the vote by 396 to 217 votes, a majority of 179 in a house of 659 seats, despite 139 members of his Labour Party voting for a rebel amendment. The large majority helped to remind many Americans that when the stakes are high and allies are needed for a major and dangerous operation, the United States cannot count on any friend more stalwart than the other nations of the English-speaking peoples, particularly Great Britain and Australia.
(Interestingly, formal war was not declared against Iraq in 2003, any more than it had been against Argentina in 1982, Egypt in 1956 [which was always designated a 'police action'] or North Korea in 1950. A state of war brings formal obligations on both sides, and the last time that Britain declared war was against Japan's ally, the Kingdom of Siam, in 1942.)
As in the Gulf conflict another non-'war' dire predictions were made about the disasters that were about to befall the coalition forces during the initial stages of the conflict. (There had also been incorrect estimations that hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians would die in the winter of 2001/2 as a result of being caught in between the coalition forces and Taliban guerrillas fighting to the last in the hills above Kabul.) The British journalist Robert Fisk compared the defences he witnessed being made in Baghdad to those of Stalingrad, whereas in fact, as The Times reporter Richard Beeston has put it, "The Iraqi capital fell in the short time that it took the first American armoured division column to drive into the city from the airport.' The Iraqi army in the field was routed in twenty-one days. Once again in the history of the English-speaking peoples, air power had been central to victory. Within days of the coalition attack not a single Iraqi aircraft was to be seen in the air.
The coalition commander was US General Tommy Franks. In his auto-biography, the use of strategic deception was revealed to have yet again been employed as a key element to victory. Rather like Operations Fortitude North and Fortitude South before D-Day, the intention was to persuade the enemy that the main thrust of the attack was due to take place hundreds of miles to the north, thereby forcing him to keep significant forces far from the place where it was really intended. It worked perfectly. Saddam was lulled by a double agent codenamed April Fool into believing that the coalition was 'planning to build up only a portion of its ground force in Kuwait, while preparing a major airborne assault into northern Iraq from above Tikrit to the oilfields above the city of Kirkuk. Helicopter-borne air-assault forces would then reinforce the paratroopers. Then, once several airstrips were secured, C-17 transports would deliver tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles to join them.' In the event, reconnaissance imagery showed how, 'Despite our sizeable build-up of forces in Kuwait to the south, Saddam's Republican Guard and regular army divisions had not moved significantly from their northerly position no doubt waiting for an assault that would never come.'43 Post-war interrogations of Iraqis confirmed that this was indeed the case.
The way in which the English-speaking fighting men respected their adver-saries, from 'the Fuzzy Wuzzy' in the Sudan, to 'Johnny Boer', to 'Fritz the Hun', to the Argentine pilots in the Falklands, was also echoed by General Franks, who described Osama bin Laden as not merely 'a deadly adversary' but also 'a worthy, bold commander of dedicated and capable forces'.
One of the major criticisms of the US administrator Paul Bremer's running of Iraq after the fall of Saddam was that he disbanded the Iraqi army, elements of which then sought re-employment as fedayeen militiamen in the insurgency. But as Jonathan Foreman, a New York Post journalist embedded with the 4th battalion of the 64th Armored Regiment of the US Army, pointed out,
Anyone who was there in April 2003 (and who wasn't doing their reporting from a hotel bar) could tell you, there was no Iraqi army for Bremer to disband. The Iraqi army had disbanded itself. It had ceased to exist.... Most of the Iraqis had simply doffed their uniforms and gone home between 21 March and 15 April. The truth is that when Bremer ordered the disbanding of the old Iraqi army on 23 May, he was merely formalising a state of affairs that already existed.4
Foreman went on to argue that co-opting the Iraqi army to police the liberated cities 'would have risked disaster on every level', since former Ba'athist officers made up much of the resistance. 'Any use by the Coalition of Saddam's armed forces the forces that put three hundred thousand Iraqi civilians into mass would instantly have alienated both the Shia and the Kurds. Indeed if you're going to employ Saddam's savage, brutal, coercive machinery to maintain order in Iraq, then why overthrow the regime at all? That same month, thousands of those bereaved by Saddam started to uncover the mass graves of their relatives murdered by his regime. graves These graves, containing the corpses of Saddam's victims over three decades, continued to be discovered at regular intervals, and are still being uncovered at the time of writing.
Although plenty of mass graves were discovered after Iraq's liberation, no Weapons of Mass Destruction were. When US Army historians had the opportunity to question Saddam's senior generals, Ba'ath party officials and
advisors about what had happened, a situation rich in irony was uncovered. As the Economist reported on 18 March 2006,
Some of the ruling circle never stopped believing, even after the war, that Iraq had WMD, even though Saddam himself knew otherwise. When he revealed the truth to members of his Revolutionary Command Council not long before the war, their morale slumped. But he refused a suggestion to make the truth clear to the wider world on the ground that his presumed possession of WMD was a form of deterrence.
Of course, far from being a form of deterrence, the Americans' genuine belief that Saddam possessed and might use WMD, and was busily creating more and yet deadlier ones, was one of the reasons they decided to overthrow him.
On Thursday, 2 May, President George W. Bush landed onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot's seat of a Navy S-3B Viking turbofan jet. The aircraft made a 'tailhook' landing at 150 mph, coming to a complete stop in less than 400 feet, emphasising yet again the undoubted superiority of US aero-technology. The President had taken a turn at the controls during the flight, which had to be made by plane since the carrier was too far from land for helicopters.
In declaring the end of the major combat operations phase of the war, Bush was filmed with a large sign featuring the Stars and Stripes and the words 'Mission Accomplished' behind him. "The banner was a Navy idea,' explained its spokesman Commander Conrad Chun. 'It signified the successful com-pletion of the ship's deployment.' (The Lincoln had been deployed for 290 days during the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, longer than any other nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in history.)
The President made it very clear that he did not believe the mission of 'the Coalition of the Willing' as opposed to that of the Lincoln had yet been accomplished, however, saying,
We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.
Brave words, and all the braver because it had already become clear that various anti-US and anti-democratic forces had coalesced to fight an insurgency war designed to confound his hopes for 'a free Iraq'.
On 13 December 2003, Saddam Hussein was captured alive, hauled out of a hole in the ground in which he had been hiding since the defeat of his armies. Those who had predicted that he would disappear in the same way that Osama bin Laden had were shown to be wrong. Although bin Laden himself has evaded capture - at least up until the time of writing - so too had Paul Kruger and Kaiser Wilhelm II in earlier wars, but neither made the eventual victories over them any less complete.
'If we were a true empire,' said US Vice-President Dick Cheney in January 2004, 'we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth's surface than we currently do. That's not the way we operate. In his State of the Union speech the same month, President Bush agreed: 'We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.' Instead, by that month the United States had spent over $100 billion rebuilding Iraq, a fantastically high figure and testament both to that country's generosity and her sense of international responsibility, but also to the fact that in the modern world only the English-speaking peoples have the necessary wealth - let alone the will -to rid countries of their tyrants. Vast sums were spent in the past on the Hoover Moratorium, Lend-Lease, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, re-supplying Israel during the Yom Kippur War and any number of other fantastically expensive US initiatives; bringing representative institutions to Iraq would now be no different.
The cost to the United States of fighting the Iraq War was approximately $48 billion, which seems like a significant amount, yet when one takes into account the $13 billion per annum it was already costing to confront Saddam, it represented only four years' containment costs. Furthermore, the money allocated by the Bush Administration to the occupation and reconstruction of both Afghanistan and Iraq represented a mere 0.8% of US GDP.45 The figure is so low partly because the GDP of the United States is so astonishingly high; in 2002, America accounted for no less than 31% of the entire global output. The American economy was two-and-a-half times the size of Japan's, eight-and-a-half times China's and thirty times larger than Russia's.
The Iraq War was also one of the cheapest engagements of its kind in the past century for the United Kingdom. By late September 2005, the entire conflict had only cost the British taxpayer £3.1 billion, less than 10% of British defence spending in the single year 2004, at a time when defence spending had fallen to 2.3% of GDP from a Cold War figure of 5%.46 With total government spending at over £200 billion per annum, intervention in Iraq cost only £910 million for 2004, less than half of 1% of the total. Rarely can the British taxpayer have received such excellent value for money in the public services.
Bombings carried out in Madrid by Al-Queda on 11 March 2004 killed 192 people, injured 1,500 and resulted, after an incompetent response by the Spanish Government which initially blamed the Basque terrorist group ETA, in a disastrous change of ministry at the elections. The incoming socialist government announced that it would withdraw Spain's troops from Iraq. The terrorists' response to this attempted appeasement was merely to plant a 22 lb bomb on the railway track between Madrid and Seville, which was fortunately discovered on 2 April when part of the 430-foot cable was spotted. The nihilism inherent in Al-Queda' s programme was evident from the statement it made at the time of the Madrid bombings: 'We choose death while you choose life.'
The publication of photographs of piles of naked prisoners simulating sex, hooded men with electrode clips attached to their arms, and grinning American servicemen and women at Abu Ghraib prison revealed serious abuses there, although nothing like the murder and torture common in any number of contemporaneous Middle Eastern political gaols. There followed no fewer than four official reports into what had taken place at Abu Ghraib, all of which concluded that the sadism demonstrated by the military policemen was not condoned by either any US Army doctrine or any orders from superiors; indeed, they went against everything that was in the interrogation rule-book. The incredibly extensive official documentation accompanying the reports was in itself, as the political commentator Alasdair Palmer has pointed out, 'astonishing testament to the legalistic nature of the American Government and its willingness to open itself to public scrutiny, and to that extent it is good evidence that the Bush Administration has not sunk into the kind of lawless dictatorship that some of its more hysterical opponents claim'.
One such might be the Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, who likened some US troops' misbehaviour at Abu Ghraib to the Nazis, the Soviet gulag and Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields. 47 Speaking on the record, a senior French minister called the American President a 'serial killer' and a German minister compared the American leader to Adolf Hitler. The Aus-tralian journalist John Pilger told the readers of Britain's Daily Mirror in January 2003 that, 'The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times', and elsewhere claimed that, 'The Americans view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as subhumans. Nelson Mandela meanwhile accused President Bush of 'wanting to plunge the world into a Holocaust'. Not to be outdone, the British actor Corin Redgrave has suggested that the President might even be worse than Hitler, as 'even the Nazis allowed the Red Cross to visit their prisoners'. 49 (In fact, the International Red Cross has full access to detainees at all times at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and even has an office there. By contrast, the United Nations refused an invitation to visit, yet nonetheless published a report claiming that torture took place there. It was the first time that force-feeding designed to save hunger-strikers' lives has been designated as 'torture'.)
The collapse of discipline at Abu Ghraib was a result of chronic manpower shortage due to the unexpectedly strong post-war Saddamite insurgency, and the fact that some of the military policemen involved were clearly little better than Appalachian mountain-cretins, but that does not justify comparing the scandal to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam of March 1968, as some anti-war commentators attempted to do. Neither did it justify attempting to blame Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney or even President Bush for what went on there, as the veteran American journalist Seymour M. Hersh also tried to do.
There has never been a war in history that has not had a seamy underside of abuse.
In January 2005, the ringleader of the Abu Ghraib abuses, Charles Grainer, was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, having failed to produce any evid-ence to suggest that he was acting under orders from above. Janis Karpinski, the US Army Reserve general whose military police unit was in charge of the prison during the scandal, was demoted on a broad charge of dereliction of duty and relieved of her command. Of course that was not enough for the conspiracy theorists, who attempted to connect the highest reaches of the Pentagon and White House to the scandal, but then nothing possibly ever could be.
The detention without trial at the US naval base of Guantanamo of sus-pected Taliban and Al-Queda fighters captured in Afghanistan and Iraq provided the Left with a brand new opportunity for spurious moral equiva-lence. The British left-wing weekly, the New Statesman, billed as 'Exclusive', for example, an article entitled 'America's Gulag: Bush's secret torture network of prisons and planes', featuring an American flag on a Soviet-style con-centration camp watch-tower and Bush wearing the lapels of a Soviet camp-guard's uniform. As seems obligatory in articles of this sort, the capital 'R' in America was reversed. 'Just like Solzhenitsyn's system, the American archipelago operates as a secret network that remains largely unseen by the world, the article stated. 'Guantanamo is the Gulag of our time,' agreed the general secretary of Amnesty International, Irene Khan, which if true proves how much better our time is than any earlier ones, since the Soviet gulag was responsible for six million deaths, whereas no-one was killed at Guantanamo.
Capturing and detaining enemy combatants has been the practice of the United States, Great Britain and their allies in every modern war. Under the law of war, there is no requirement that a detaining power charge enemy combatants with crimes or give them access to lawyers. The English-speaking peoples certainly did not do so in the First or Second World Wars. Under American law, the authority to detain enemy combatants exists independently of the judicial or criminal law system. It is rather a function of the President's role as Commander-in-Chief under the Constitution. Since Al-Queda is a terrorist organisation rather than a state, and therefore neither a signatory nor covered by the Geneva Conventions, their members are not entitled to POW status. And even if they were covered by the Conventions, they would still not be considered POWs, since they do not carry weapons openly, wear uniforms, follow responsible command or comply with the laws of war, as required under Article 4.
Detainees at Guantanamo Bay are provided with shelter, clothing, the means to send and receive mail, reading materials, three meals a day that meet cultural dietary requirements, medical care, prayer beads and rugs and copies of the Koran. Over twenty senators, 110 representatives, 150 congressional staffers and more than 1,000 American and international journalists have visited the prison, which was certainly not allowed in previous wars. Furthermore, 180 detainees have been released in the period to February 2006, at least twelve of whom returned to the fight against 'the Great Satan' America. Around 300 remain there, including self-confessed enemy combatants, terrorist trainers, recruiters, bomb-makers, would-be suicide bombers and terrorist financiers. America is right to keep them there.
Earlier presidents have resorted to extra-constitutional means when the Republic was under attack. Abraham Lincoln's policy of arresting secessionists in Maryland without trial in April 1861 forced the Supreme Court's Chief Justice, Roger B. Taney, to remind the chief executive of his presidential oath to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed' and warned that his actions in denial of habeas corpus would mean that 'the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws'. Lincoln simply ignored Taney and kept secessionists such as John Merryman, the lieutenant of a pro-Confederate drill company, locked up in Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour." History has forgiven Lincoln for his actions. Similarly, on 19 February 1942 the liberals' hero Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage, a policy administered by Earl Warren, later Chief Justice of the United States. By contrast, President Bush has not needed to resort to unlawful means to prosecute the War against Terror, despite the greatest of provocations.
It is quite untrue that the American neo-conservatives who initiated the Iraq War refused to accept that any mistakes were made. On 15 September 2004, Patil Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Defense Secretary, told the author Mark Bowden that in his view an Iraqi provisional government should have been established in Baghdad 'the day we got there', instead of having the US labelled as being 'an occupation authority'. As a result Al-Jazeera was able to draw (entirely spurious) parallels with Israel's post-1967 occupation of Palestinian territories. It had been the State Department that had opposed the recommendations of the Pentagon to recognise a provisional government.
Wolfowitz was straightforward in admitting with regard to the Saddamite insurgency that, 'I think most people underestimated how tough these bastards are.... The heart of the problem is that 35 years of raping and murdering and torturing created a hard core that is incredibly brutal and a population that it incredibly scared: one relatively easy to intimidate. Although during the pre-war build-up, 'We also had report after report of Iraqi brigade division commanders who were promising to bring their units over to our side, I don't think there was a single such event that actually took place.
With Saddam still describing himself as president of Iraq, and 'his cronies' having access to millions of dollars in Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian bank accounts, Wolfowitz drew a telling comparison with 1945, sayings, 'It's as though the Nazis, after their defeat, still controlled Nuremberg and had bank accounts and sanctuary in Switzerland and co-operation from some other country like Iran.' When asked whether he had believed that Saddam had WMD stockpiles, he answered:
What really bothered me was biological weapons and we know they made them.
They were given a chance to come clean under 1441. We caught them lying on the declarations on not insignificant things mostly on the missiles they were working on and the UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]. And there was lots of evidence of obstructing inspectors and hiding things. You had a very dangerous character who played with terrorists, who had regularly declared hostile intentions towards us and toward our allies in the Persian Gulf, who definitely had a capacity to make these weapons and was extremely dangerous, and much more dangerous in the light of September II than before. And that's where September 11 changed the calculation. I think it would have been irresponsible to leave him alone. 52
On 28 October 2004, Wolfowitz also showed how the now-standard accusation that the United States ought to have flooded Iraq with troops is also not one that stands up to much analysis. As Wolfowitz pointed out, it was 'actionable intelligence' that was the problem, not numbers of coalition troops. The supposed lack of available troops was the criticism that was made during the Boer War, Gallipoli and Vietnam, even though in fact each place was awash with troops for much of those conflicts and the real problems were quite different. Moreover, as Wolfowitz admitted, 'If you have more troops, that creates a new set of problems. You have a heavier American footprint, which means alienating more people. No war in history has been fought perfectly, and the counter-insurgency operation in Iraq has been fought no worse than many. Certainly, great courage has been shown by troops on the ground.
The Australian election results of October 2004 saw a landslide for John Howard's Liberal-National Party coalition, defeating Mark Latham's Labor Party and winning eighty-six seats in the House against Labor's sixty. Although the Government's strong record on the economy was the most important domestic issue, Iraq also played an important role. Whereas Howard - very ably assisted by his Foreign Minister Alexander Downer had spoken in defence of President Bush and the war, Latham had promised to withdraw Australian troops by Christmas 2004 if elected. It was thus a timely help to President Bush, who three weeks before his own election would have been badly damaged if an English-speaking country had announced that it was pulling out of the coalition. As the British journalist Charles Moore wrote of the subsequent treble victories of Bush, Howard and Blair, 'Anglo-Saxon political culture still has enough self-confidence not to fear leadership in war, but to see it as a necessary attribute of a robust democracy. Which is a good thing.
The re-election of President Bush in November 2004 was unsurprising in the light of the fact that no sitting president had ever been defeated in an election during a major war. To cashier a commander-in-chief mid-struggle would give succour to the enemy, which is something the American people had a patriotic reluctance to do. Given the widespread domestic opposition to the Iraq War, the scale of Bush's victory was remarkable. For the first time in US history, all the Southern states voted Republican. Bush was re-elected with 62.04 million votes against the Democrat contender John Kerry's 59.03 million, more than the entire 59.9 million population of France. Bush became the first US president since 1988 to win over 50% of the popular vote, on a turn-out of 60.3% of those eligible to vote - the highest since 1968.
On Thursday, 5 May 2005, the Labour Government in Britain was re-elected in an unprecedented third landslide victory. The two pro-war parties, Labour and the Conservatives, polled nearly 70% of the total votes cast between them.
Two months later, on Thursday, 7 July 2005, four suicide-murderers exploded devices at underground stations around London and on a No. 30 bus in Tavistock Square that killed fifty-two innocents as well as the bombers them-selves. 'I can tell you now that you will fail in your long-term objectives to destroy our free society, were the defiant words of Ken Livingstone, the left-wing Mayor of London and no ally of Tony Blair in the War against Terror. 'In the days that follow, look at our airports and seaports, and even after your cowardly attacks, you will still see people from around the world coming here to achieve their dreams. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail. There was no mass panic. The terrorists responsible for the attacks, who called themselves the Secret Group of Al-Queda's Jihad in Europe, boasted that, 'Here is Britain now burning with fear and terror.' Anyone who was present in the capital at the time knows that to be utterly untrue. The city that survived the Blitz and the V-weapons campaign showed disgusted resignation and mourned its dead, but did not consider bowing, any more than it had in earlier conflicts.
By late January 2006, the United States had lost 2,237 soldiers killed in Iraq, less than 4% of those who died in either Korea or Vietnam. 53 Great Britain had lost 100 dead, of whom more than a quarter had died in traffic accidents or training. "The number [of British soldiers] killed in combat over the past year has been twelve,' reported the Spectator in February 2006, 'far lower than even the quietest years in Northern Ireland.' Meanwhile, fewer US troops had died in Afghanistan in the twelve months to February 2006 than in motorbike crashes in the continental USA. Seen in their historical perspective, therefore, the casualty figures were astonishingly low. Single engagements like the battle of Belleau Wood in the Great War or taking Tarawa Island in the Second World War had cost the US more fatalities than the entire Iraq War to date.
Furthermore, as a proportion of the total number of Americans, only 0.008% died bringing democracy to important parts of the Middle East in 2003-5. So, for all the sadness and tragedy of each American and British life lost, in the wider context Iraq ought to be seen as another very significant victory of the English-speaking peoples over yet another variety of fascism. Similarly, the number of Iraqis killed, variously estimated at around 25,000 to 30,000, needs to be seen in the context of the report of the Iraq Human Rights Centre in Kadhimiya, which calculated in 2004 that 'more than seventy thousand people would have died in the last year if Saddam had still been in charge'. United Nations figures show how wars in the second half of the twentieth century averaged 30,000 deaths globally. The death toll in Iraq was therefore below average up to January 2006, however much the media might have done its best to imply otherwise.
Al-Queda was wrong to assume from the experiences of Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993 that Americans would refuse to tolerate substantial levels of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Michael Barone, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, has pointed out, 'Americans will tolerate very high levels of military casualties if they believe that their leaders are on the road to victory. They tolerated them in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, and ceased to do so only when their leaders seemed no longer to be seeking to win. Polls show that some of Eugene McCarthy's voters in New Hampshire wanted the war waged more vigorously, not less. The two years that saw the highest numbers of casualties in American history - 1864 and 1944-also witnessed the incumbent commanders-in-chief re-elected. As Barone extrapolated, 'After Sherman marched from Atlanta and the GIs landed in Normandy, voters saw that American forces were headed for victory.'
In the Iraqi elections of December 2005, full democracy - rather than merely representative institutions - finally arrived in Iraq. Ten million Iraqis braved threats from the undiminished insurgency to record a 70% turn-out. The English-speaking peoples had written the latest chapter in their long history of bringing liberty to places which had previously known fascism of one form or another, but hopefully not the last. As Tony Blair had told a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party in February 2003, 'People say you are doing this because the Americans are telling you to do it. I keep telling them that it's worse than that. I believe in it.'54

Conclusion
'We might have been a free and great people together.'
Thomas Jefferson, 1776'
'I am here to tell you that, whatever form your system of world security may take, however the nations are grouped and ranged, whatever derogations are made from national sovereignty for the sake of the larger synthesis, nothing will work soundly or for long without the united effort of the British and American peoples. If we are together nothing is impossible. If we are divided all will fail. I therefore preach continually the doctrine of fraternal association of our two peoples... for the sake of service to Mankind and for the honour that comes to those who faithfully serve great causes."
Winston Churchill, Harvard University, 6 September 1943
'In today's wars, there are no morals, and it is clear that Mankind has descended to the lowest degrees of decadence and oppression.'
Osama bin Laden, May 1998
"The descendants of the 17th-century commonwealth, the mostly Protestant diaspora of English-speaking peoples, will always see the world through par-ticular eyes.
Sir Simon Jenkins, The Times, March 2004
"September the eleventh was for me a wake-up call. Do you know what I think the problem is? That a lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep.'
Tony Blair, July 2005
T The Italians are rightly proud of the Cæsars and preserve the memory and relics of the Roman Empire with diligence and love. The Greeks venerate Periclean Athens as much as the Macedonians do the achievements of Alexander the Great. France's moment of la Gloire under Napoleon is today burnished even by French republicans, just as the greatness of King Philip 11 is admired by Spaniards. The palaces of Peter the Great and Catherine the
Great are kept pristine by Russians. Egyptians still feel proud of the New Kingdom's Pharaohs of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. Recollection of the reign of Gustavus Adolphus is uplifting for Swedes, and the highest decoration in Uzbekistan is the Order of Temur, named after the conqueror known to Westerners as Tamerlaine. The Portuguese esteem Prince Henry the Navigator and the Austrians their great Hapsburg Emperor, Charles v. A toast to 'The Great Khan' (Genghis) will still - despite decades of official disapproval have Mongolians leaping to their feet. Indeed, there is no country, race or linguistic grouping that is expected - indeed required -to feel shame about the golden moment when they occupied the limelight of World History. Except, of course, the English-speaking peoples.
The fact that first the British and then the American hegemonies have held global sway since the Industrial Revolution is perceived as the source of pro-found, self-evident and permanent guilt. Ever since the 1960s, academics, the Left-liberal intelligentsias, and the social and political establishments of both countries have been united in the belief that English-speaking imperialism was evil. This is bad enough for Britain, whose time in the sun has been over for half a century, but the politics of the pre-emptive cringe is even worse for modern America, which is still enjoying her moment of world primacy, yet is being enjoined on all sides to apologise for it already, long before it is even over.
It was the Athenian historian Thucydides who first thought of uniting the four distinct but successive and related conflicts between Athens and Sparta from 431 BC to 404 BC into one great Peloponnesian War, the subject of his classic narrative composition. Similarly, the four distinct but successive attacks on the security of the English-speaking peoples, by Wilhelmine Germany, the Axis powers, Soviet communism and now Islamic fundamentalism ought to be seen as one overall century-long struggle between the English-speaking peoples' democratic pluralism and fascist intolerance of different varieties.
Historians will long continue to debate precisely when the baton of world leadership passed from one great branch of the English-speaking peoples, the British Empire and Commonwealth, to the other, the American Republic, but it certainly took place some time between the launch of Operation Torch in November 1942 and D-Day in June 1944. It wasn't handed over in any formal or official sense, of course, but the leadership of the Free World that lay in Churchill's hands before Pearl Harbor was certainly held by Roosevelt three years later. The baton was not passed easily, as in a relay race, but neither was it forcibly snatched, as on most other occasions in history when one nation supplants another in the sun.
The way that the Suez crisis of 1956 italicised a power-shift that had already taken place raised an ire in Britain that has still not fully abated, yet it is naïve to hope that a world power will act against its own perceived best interests out of linguistic solidarity or a feeling of auld lang syne for a shared wartime past.
The fact that in retrospect it was clearly in America's long-term interests to permit Britain and France to swat the nascent Arab nationalism personified by Colonel Nasser is ironic, but immaterial. The fact nonetheless remains that of all the peoples of the world who could have supplanted her, the British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, West Indian and Irish peoples were immensely fortunate that it was the Americans who did. The surprising phenomenon is not that the United States acted in her own perceived national interest immediately after the Second World War and at the time of Suez any Great Power would have done the same thing but how often over the century the genuine national interests of the English-speaking peoples have coincided; and never more so than today.
'Collaboration of the English-speaking peoples threatens no one,' wrote Churchill in 1938. 'It might safeguard all. He was quite wrong, of course, both then and now. The collaboration of the English-speaking peoples threat-ened plenty of people, and still does. Just as it threatened the Axis' ambitions and subsequently the Soviets', today in very different ways Middle Eastern tyrants, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, rogue states, world-government uni-globers, Chinese hegemonists and European federalists have every right to feel threatened by what that collaboration might still achieve in the future.
The English-speaking peoples did not invent the ideas that nonetheless made them great: the Romans invented the concept of Law, the Greeks one-freeman-one-vote democracy, the Dutch modern capitalism, the Germans Protestantism, and the French can lay some claim to the Enlightenment (albeit alongside the Scots). Added to those invaluable ideas, however, the English-speaking peoples have produced the fine practical theories behind constitutional monarchy, the Church-State divide, free speech and the separation of powers. They have managed to harness foreign modes of thought for the enormous benefit of their societies, whilst keeping their native genius for scientific, technological, labour-saving and especially military inventions.
It is emphatically not that the English-speaking peoples are inherently better or superior people that accounts for their success, therefore, but that they have perfected better systems of government, ones that have tended to increase representation and accountability while minimising jobbery, nepotism and corruption. These in turn have allowed them to achieve their full potential, while some other peoples on the planet have remained mired in authori-tarianism, totalitarianism and institutionalised larceny. The English-speaking peoples are unromantic and literal-minded, and do not dream of future utopias like French or Russian revolutionaries; instead, they root their hopes in what is tangible and tested. 'I confess myself to be a great admirer of tradition,'
Churchill told the House of Commons in March 1944. "The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.
Many indeed most of the English-speaking peoples' theories of gov-ernment, such as the First Amendment of the US Constitution that guarantees freedom of speech and thus the ability of the media to expose corruption, or the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms that ended institutionalised corruption in the British Civil Service, were in place before 1900. Part of their genius has been rigidly to abide by the general principles of 1776 in the United States and of the 1688 Glorious Revolution in the case of most of the rest of the English-speaking peoples. That is ultimately why today their economies account for more than one-third of global GDP, despite their combined population of 335.7 million making up only 7.5% of the world's population.3
In the two political (though not military) defeats of the English-speaking peoples since 1900 - Britain's at Suez and America's in Vietnam - the oper-ational side of events went relatively well from the start. Otherwise their wars tend to begin very badly indeed. In both cases the initial provocations came from abroad, with the sudden nationalisation of the Suez Canal in July 1956 and the North Vietnamese attack on USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin on 2 August 1964. Taken together with the Spanish declaration of war against America in 1898, the Boers' declaration of war on Britain in 1899, Germany's attack on France through Belgium in 1914, the threat to America contained in the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917, Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong in 1941, the Berlin blockade of 1948, North Korea's assault on South Korea in 1950, Argentina's grabbing of the Falkland Islands in 1982, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and latterly the Al-Queda attacks of 9/11, an identifiable pattern emerges: that of the essentially pacific English-speaking peoples and their allies coming under sudden, unprovoked and usually lethal attack from an aggressive foe whose assaults must be militarily avenged if honour and prestige are to be secured.
The reason that prestige is so important in international affairs is not because of pride or self-importance, but because it is a tangible currency in the realpolitik that governs relations between states. Because the most costly wars in modern history have arisen whenever there is confusion about which is the world's pre-eminent power, anything that emphasises the true situation is good for security and stability. Today, fortunately for themselves but also for most of the rest of the world, the English-speaking peoples occupy that hegemonic place.
As the devoutly Anglican British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, pointed out, international affairs cannot be conducted according to the Lord's Prayer or the Sermon on the Mount. The harsh truth of realpolitik is that if you turn the other cheek or forgive those who trespass against you, disaster often strikes.
The world is at its most peaceful when Great Powers are under no illusions as to where they stand in the global pecking order. By taking such an aggressive stance over the War against Terror since 9/11-and especially by overthrowing the Taliban and Ba'athist regimes in 2002 and 2003 the English-speaking peoples unmistakably demonstrated to the rest of the world that they still enjoy global hegemony. They have thus made less likely the type of clash that historically has cost the most lives in the period since 1900: a struggle between the Great Powers.
For all the evident unpopularity of the Iraq War in some circles, it has reminded the world that although the English-speaking peoples put up with a good deal of insolence and defiance from Saddam over twelve years, they would not be mocked indefinitely. The speed and ease with which Saddam Hussein's army of well over half-a-million men was defeated in a matter of three weeks by the smaller forces of the coalition in March 2003 was an object lesson in courage, professionalism and superior technology.
The coalition's willingness to stay in Iraq and fight against the post-Saddam insurgency there while re-electing the American, Australian and British leaders in the process - was further proof to the world that it was serious about allowing Iraqis to decide their own government for the first time in over thirty years. When over ten million Iraqis voted in their general election of December 2005 at 70% a far higher turn-out than in most Western countries, despite the threats it was shown that democracy is as popular a concept in the Middle East as it is rare. Far from being an aberration, the foreign policy pursued by the USA, Great Britain, Australia and other countries of the English-speaking peoples since 9/11 derives from the mainstream of their historical tradition.
The English-speaking peoples are constantly berated by the Left and by churches over the levels of debt they are owed by Third World countries. One reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement has described such debt as 'the newest version of empire - the novel American method of maintaining world dominance by keeping the old colonies massively, permanently and irre-deemably in debt, and demanding payment in strong dollars. As an exercise in raw power, this makes even the Spanish looting of Latin America seem sophisticated. In fact, of course, the amount America receives in debt-service payments from the Third World is a minute proportion of her GDP; all loans were voluntary and therefore not a form of imperialisn. The fact that the borrowers have often wasted their money on corruption and white-elephant prestige projects can hardly be blamed on America; it is commercial banks rather than the USA herself which do the lending in most cases, but Wash-ington does provide huge amounts of debt relief each year through the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, which it does not have to. Finally, if a country borrows in dollars which hasn't always been strong and certainly isn't at the time of writing in 2006 it must expect to repay in either that or another currency acceptable to the lender. As so often, this critique of the USA, for all its sarcasm and aggression, fails to stand up to close examination.
Both absolute poverty and the gap between rich and poor in the United States is also often held against the country by anti-Americans, but the fact remains that the poor there are a good deal better off than the poor almost anywhere else in the world. Over 46% of America's poor as defined by the US Government's Census Bureau - own their own homes, 72% have washing machines, 60% own microwave ovens, 92% have colour TV sets, 76% have air-conditioning and 66% own one or more cars. Two-thirds of poor house-holds have an average of two rooms per person, and the average poor American has more living space than the average individual in Paris, London, Vienna or Athens. Obesity, rather than hunger or malnutrition, is the danger for the children of America's poor, who nonetheless are growing up to be an average of one inch taller and ten pounds heavier than the Gls who stormed the Normandy beaches in the Second World War. According to The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook, the editor of the New Republic magazine, if one strips out immigration, for the nine out of ten Americans who are native-born inequality is declining, due in part to the rising affluence of African-Americans.
The hackneyed line that 'When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold' also has its obverse side, that when virtuous phenomena take place in America, the rest of the world benefits. When American doctors find the cure for various diseases - as they do more than any other nation - all can celebrate. The fact that America has won far more Nobel Prizes - 270 between 1907 and 2004-than any other country is a reflection of the English-speaking peoples' thirst for new knowledge. In 1900, only 382 PhDs were conferred in the entire United States, yet between 1900 and 1950 the number of PhDs awarded in the fields of science, medicine and technology increased 16.2 times faster than the population."
The success of the Anglo-Saxon model in higher education is mirrored by its success as the best of the many forms of capitalism. The incredible regenerative power of American capitalism was underlined in January 2006 when the Dow Jones hit 11,000 for the first time since 9/11. Even a global War against Terror had not doused American optimism for long. The Promethean power of free markets to provide material benefits has enriched the world. The extension of representative institutions since the early 1940s first to Western Europe and Japan, then to the Indian sub-continent, then Palestine, then to parts of Asia, then to Latin America, then to Eastern Europe and Russia, then to much of Africa, and recently to Afghanistan and Iraq, is also in great part down to America's willingness when not under direct threat herself to extend her birthright across the globe.
When the threat from Marxism-Leninism was mortal during parts of the Cold War, the democratisation process that is America's default position had to take second place to stability and anti-communist tyrants unfortunately had to be tolerated. As with Stalin in 1941, or with Saddam in the Seventies when Iran was the greater threat, realpolitik dictated that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'. It is perfectly true, therefore, that there were monstrous human rights abuses committed by US allies such as in Guatemala during the Cold War, but it takes a particular kind of anti-American to blame these on the United States rather than on the Guatemalans themselves. To have undermined pro-American regimes over their human rights abuses during a period when the most likely alternative was an anti-American Marxist-Leninist regime, would have been the height of irresponsibility. Quite apart from the geo-strategic implications, it would not have led to an improved human rights situation either, as the 94.4 million people killed by communism since 1917 bear witness.
It is not out of sentimentality or naïve utopianism that the English-speaking peoples actively support the extension of representative institutions throughout the world, but out of hard-headed self-interest. The so-called 'neo-conservative' drive to export liberal democracy actuated British statesmen such as George Canning and Lord Palmerston in the nineteenth century, just as the concept of pre-emptive warfare was practised by the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars and since, including against the Vichy Fleet at Oran in 1940. George W. Bush has not invented a new doctrine therefore; he has simply adapted an old one to new and equally terrifying circumstances. In that sense, the fact that 9/11 was not a chemical, biological or nuclear attack was a god-send, in that it finally woke the English-speaking peoples up to the fact that war was being waged against them, but in a way that did not leave hundreds of acres of downtown Manhattan as a sea of radio-active, cancer-inducing rubble.
When freed from the isolationist impulse, the desire to liberate from tyranny runs deep in the English-speaking peoples' psyche; it was they who first came up with the then-unusual notion of first impeding and then abolishing Slavery by force of arms. In many ways they are still carrying out the task, as the women of Afghanistan and the majority of Iraqis can attest. Yet in countries too feudal, theocratic, tribal or obscurantist for an experiment in representative institutions to result in genuine pluralism, democracy must sadly wait, espe-cially if the likely result would be governments elected that were violently opposed to the West. The stable Cold War conditions are already being seen by some as a golden age, which they were certainly not. Old hatreds have produced new terrors in new guises. In the wars of the future, germs will be more dangerous than Germans. Nor are the wars getting shorter; indeed, they seem to be elongating exponentially: the Great War took four years, the Second World War six, Vietnam eleven and the Cold War forty-three. No-one can tell how long the war between Western democratic pluralism and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism might take, but it will certainly not be of short duration. It is already correctly being dubbed 'The Long War' in the Pentagon.
In trying to understand why the English-speaking peoples have been successful in exporting their political culture in the period since 1900, the fact that they have not suffered the trauma, humiliation, expense and fear involved in being invaded, unlike all their major geopolitical rivals - principally France, Russia, Germany, Japan and China played a major part. In many ways, the 'broad sunlit uplands' that Churchill promised future generations in the darkest days of 1940 are where the English-speaking peoples abide today. For when last has there been a period of six decades with no major war between any of the European Great Powers? When has every continent (except Africa) advanced materially every decade for over half a century? When have scientific and technological innovation, and the free market that delivers their fruits, been so vibrant?
As Churchill said in his 1943 Harvard speech (the Ur-text of this book),
Law, language, literature these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all a love of personal freedom... these are the common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples.
They connect the peoples of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Aus-tralia, New Zealand, the British West Indies and more often than not - Eire. Instead of distancing themselves from the heritage of the rest of the English-speaking peoples, as some siren voices in each of those places suggest, all of them should take pride in it. National identity is all the stronger for it.
There have been a number of sins and errors committed by the English-speaking peoples since 1900, as was inevitable in the course of human affairs. Amongst their crimes, follies and misdemeanours have been: underestimating the capabilities of the Turks at Gallipoli and the Japanese before Pearl Harbor; the failure to dismember Germany in 1919; not doing more to try to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle in 1918-20; Woodrow Wilson's mismanagement of the Senate in 1919 and the subsequent refusal of the United States to join the League of Nations in 1920; Britain treating France rather than Germany as the more likely enemy in the 1920s; not opposing Hitler's re-militarisation of the Rhineland in 1936; allowing too few visas to Jews wanting to escape Nazi Germany; doing too little to publicise the Holocaust once the true facts were known for certain; transporting non-Soviet citizens to Stalin after Yalta; botching the 1947 transfer of power in India; the fervent support of the State Department for closer European integration after the Second World War; allowing Nasser to nationalise the Suez Canal; encouraging the Hungarians to rise in 1956; misleading the Commonwealth about the true implications of Britain joining the EEC; waiting for a century after Lincoln's Emancipation Address genuinely to emancipate Black Americans; fighting only for stalemate in Vietnam; the Carter Administration pursuing Détente long after its initial purposes were exhausted; appeasing the Serbs for so long after the collapse of Yugoslavia; failing to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War; encouraging the Kurds and Shias to rise against him while allowing Iraq the use of helicopter gun-ships; trusting the United Nations to operate the Oil-for-Food programme honestly; relying too much on Intelligence-led WMD arguments to justify the Iraq War; waiting so long for a second UN resolution before attacking Iraq, and subsequently not turning the administration of the country over to a provisional Iraqi government immediately upon Saddam's fall. It is a long and at times shameful catalogue of myopic and failed states-manship, but most other Powers would have done worse, and a century is a very long time in politics. Most of these oversights and errors were made out of good intentions.
Plenty of doom-sayers have predicted disaster for America's imperium in the twenty-first century. Many factors have been adduced for why this is inevitable, in a genre known as 'declinist literature'. A useful check-list was provided by the distinguished historian Walter Lacquer in February 2003 in a Times Literary Supplement review of a profoundly pessimistic book entitled The End of the American Era, by Charles A. Kupchan, Professor of Inter-national Relations at Georgetown University:
Unilateralism on one hand; arrogance and lack of patience to cooperate with allies, as well as isolationism, on the other; adding up to an unwillingness to pay the price for empire. The American economy will simply not be strong enough to sustain the country's role as the globe's strategic guardian. Among other sources of weakness, the author sees the false promises of globalization, American dependence on foreign capital, the weakness and vulnerability of American industry, the destructive consequences of the digital revolution, economic and social inequality among nations and within societies. Kupchan disapproves of the fact that younger Americans watch too much television and sport, and SUVs [sports utility vehicles] are clogging American highways and city streets even though the owners only get thirteen miles to the gallon. He complains about the lagging performance of American institutions of governance and the penetration of politics by corporate money."
It was quite a list - except the one about SUVs, which sounds like a personal gripe - but in order for the American Era to end, another nation must take its place. There was plenty of 'lagging performance of institutions of governance' in Ancient Rome, let alone 'economic and social inequalities', but until Attila the Hun arrived, Rome was the dominant power for over six centuries.
Furthermore, we have been here before; the 1980s also saw a spate of declinist books, such as Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which predicted in 1988 that America's imperial overreach would produce bankruptcy as a result of its irresponsible arms race with the Soviet Union. As Lacquer wrote of Lupchan, who predicts that the European Union would replace America as hegemonic superpower, "The temptation to draw far-reaching political conclusions concerning the future from present economic trends is always there and should always be resisted. Most truly important issues in the life of nations cannot be quantified, and are not found in the Statistical Abstract of the United States and similar works of reference." Trees never grow to the sky. Even though China replaced Britain as the world's fourth-largest power in terms of GDP in 2006, and is set to overtake Germany in 2008, she nonetheless has severe political, social and environmental prob-lems to overcome before she can threaten the United States (at least economically).
The American economy despite the War against Terror is still the power-house of the world, as it has been for over three-quarters of a century. In 2003, America's industries and workers produced almost $500 billion more goods and services than in 2002. That means that America added to the size of her economy an amount equal to a Brazil, or an India, or over one-and-a-half Russias. Of the world's ten largest businesses, measured by market capitalisation, eight were in the US (and the other two BP and HSBC Holdings were British). Americans bought over sixteen million cars and light trucks and some two million cars that year. What Henry A. Wallace in 1942 described as 'the century of the common man' and others have dubbed 'the American Century' has in fact been the English-speaking peoples' century, and it is far from over.
'Sometimes it takes a foreigner to open your eyes,' recalled a recent British contributor to the Spectator. 'A Norwegian diplomat told me long ago that he was taught at school, as British kids aren't, that Britain gave the world industrialisation, democracy and football its economic system, its political system and its fun." There are plenty of causes for hope amongst the English-speaking peoples: Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, until recently had more Nobel Prize-winners than France; the most recognised word on the planet is not the name of a dictator or political theorist but of a refreshing fizzy drink, 'Coca-Cola'; on Christmas Day 2004, more than one million phone calls were made between Britain and America; more people - 750 million speak English as a second language than as a first one; Canada has taken part in more United Nations peacekeeping operations fifty-five by 2004 than any other country in the world except Fiji (a country with the Union Jack in its flag). Best of all, most Americans post-9/11 now view George Washington's isolationist Farewell Address in its proper historical context as an obsolete policy stance that has been comprehensively overtaken by events, rather like the Founding Fathers' compromise over slavery.
Yet the phrase 'Anglo-centric' is still a term of disapprobation, at least among the English-speaking peoples themselves. A recent work has even criticised Dr Samuel Johnson's dictionary, complaining that it transmitted 'an image of English and Englishness which is not just predominantly middle-class, but also backward-looking, Anglocentric, and male'." Considering that the (male) Dr Johnson was compiling a book entitled A Dictionary of the English Language on necessarily backward-looking historical principles, using citations from authors who in those days were overwhelmingly male, one wonders how the great work could have been anything much different? Many citizens of the English-speaking peoples resemble the Jacobin in George Canning's rhyme, who was, 'A steady patriot of the world alone, / The friend of every country but his own."
When a British pro-American left-winger, Jonathan Freedland, published a book in 1998 on the Fourth of July, no less which was subtitled How Britain Can Live the American Dream, he recalled how,
The Leftie response was unsurprising. How could anyone admire a country that gorged itself on junk food, still executed criminals and wouldn't treat the sick till they produced a credit card? What was there to emulate in a land of Bible-bashing, gun-wielding simpletons, trapped in a sclerotic political system warped by cash and painfully ignorant of the rest of the world?"
His spirited reply, that America was in fact 'a vigorous democracy and an engaged civil society, still captivated by the dream of self-government - a dream made manifest by a degree of volunteerism, philanthropy and local autonomy that put Britain to shame,' was commendable, but what was more interesting was the sheer fury of the left-wing reaction, and at a time when Bill Clinton was President. 'Anti-Americanism is now written into the European psyche, believes the writer Leo McKinstry, 'the last acceptable prejudice in a culture that makes a fetish of racial equality. 12
Instead of creating an outpouring of thanks and affection for the United States, the demise of communism, ironically enough, made Europe safe for anti-Americanism once again. As one writer has put it, 'The threat from a common enemy during the Cold War helped to put anti-American attitudes on hold. The common disdain for American civilisation its vulgar materialism, its rootless cosmopolitanism, its shallow optimism, its lack of the tragic sense - emerged once again when the common enemy disappeared."3
As George Kennan observed in his famous Foreign Affairs article in 1947, anti-Americanism is sometimes simply unappeasable because, like those Irish republicans who cannot accept that Roger Casement was a promiscuous homosexual, for some people these things become 'essentially theological, in the end a matter of faith rather than reason'. As Jonathan Swift said, it is useless to try to reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into. Some of the rants of anti-Americans especially since the Iraq War - more closely resemble attacks of Tourette's Syndrome than rational criticism.
One of the most common criticisms of the United States is that her citizens do not travel abroad; only about 18% of adult Americans hold passports. Yet the astonishing geographical variety to be found in the United States makes it far less necessary for Americans to leave their continent than Europeans. Living on a land mass that comprises San Francisco, the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountains, the Shenandoah Valley, Philadelphia, the Grand Canyon, Chicago, Californian wineries, New England villages, the Niagara Falls, the Appalachian Mountains, the Capitol, Colorado ski resorts, the Nevada Desert, New York City, Hawaiian beaches, the Mid-Western prairies, Southern swamps, everglades and bayous, the Yosemite National Park, wonders of the natural world and almost every conceivable type of flora and fauna, as well as extremes of temperature and climate, all girt by the globe's greatest two oceans, Americans have less reason to own passports than any other people on earth.
The Mississippi River is over 4,000 miles long and pours a billion cubic feet of water into the Gulf of Mexico every week. Yellowstone Park is half the size of England's largest county, Yorkshire; another American National Park can boast sixty glaciers. If the entire British Isles were dropped into the Great Lakes, there would be room for a further 9,000 square miles. 'Vast is America,' wrote H.L. Gee in 1943, 'a modern world in itself. The very best of Western civilisation's painting, music, sculpture and culture can be enjoyed in the great American museums, art galleries and concert halls. With European countries such as Luxembourg and Liechtenstein so small that, in Woody Allen's gag, 'they could carpet them', cross-border travel is an absolute necessity for many Europeans in a way it simply is not in the continental United States. The relatively small number of Americans who own passports should not be such a cause for European derision.
The contradictions inherent in anti-Americanism were pinpointed by a senior broadcaster named Henri Astier recently, who wrote of how,
We are happy to view American society as both utterly materialistic and insuffer-ably religious; it is predominantly racist and absurdly politically correct; Ameri-cans are both boring conformists and reckless individualists; US corporations can do whatever they want and are stifled by asinine liability laws. Furthermore, in the same breath the United States is accused of 'unilateralism' but also of shirking its international responsibilities. America is blamed for intervening every-where, and expected to save Mexico from default, protect Taiwan from China, mediate between India and Pakistan get the two Koreas talking, etc. 14
The explanation for all this double-speak given by the French philosopher Jean-François Revel is the correct one: anti-Americanism 'can only be explained in psychological terms. Anti-American recriminations stroke a soci-ety's collective ego by drawing attention away from its own failures.' Thus the highly censored Arab media alleges that the War against Terror has muzzled freedom of speech in America; the Organisation of African States calls for 'a Marshall Plan for Africa' despite having enjoyed the equivalent of four such cash injections in four decades; Europeans 'find a reassuring explanation for the Continent's catastrophic loss of status' by blaming American hegemony, rather than attributing it to their own two continental suicide attempts within thirty years during the twentieth century."s
Only the English-speaking peoples need not indulge in this kind of self-indulgence, because through our Special Relationship - whose relevance has never been more powerfully tangible in the entire post-war period than since 9/11 we are part of the hegemonic power that the Arabs, Africans and Europeans so self-referentially loathe. For all that the English-speaking peoples might hold different views over carbon emissions or steel tariffs, in the great world-historical struggle, as Tony Blair put it so perfectly, our shared interests dictate that we stand 'shoulder-to-shoulder' with our cousins, allies and co-linguists.
Churchill was right in his Harvard speech when he declared, 'If we are together, nothing is impossible. In the last century, the Union Jack has flown on Everest and the Stars and Stripes on the Moon, and together the English-speaking peoples have brought down tyrannies across four continents, cured disease after disease, delivered unheard-of prosperity to hundreds of millions, made their tongue the global lingua franca, won by far more Nobel Prizes than anyone else in both absolute and per capita terms, and smoothly passed the baton of global leadership from one of their constituent parts to another, right in the middle of a debilitating war. Their only possible limiting factor seems to have been a recurring, inexplicable, undeserved form of anguished intro-spection that makes them doubt their own abilities and moral worth.
Back in 1900, any number of rivals might have snatched hegemony from the English-speaking peoples. The British Empire was overstretched and had no army to speak of, at least not one that could have engaged a Great Power on equal terms; the United States had neither a significant army nor navy and was only beginning to discover a global ambition. By contrast, the economically formidable Imperial Germany was flexing her weltpolitik from China to Venezuela to Samoa and building a world-class High Seas Fleet' France had a huge global empire and a thirst for revanche against Britain over her humiliation at Fashoda only three years previously; Russia was industrialising successfully, heavily armed and carefully eyeing British India; the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Japan looked relatively weak but could certainly not be written off entirely, especially the last.
A little over a century later the landscape could not be more different. Not one but two lunatic attempts to force geopolitical matters through military rather than commercial means have left Germany a pacifist husk and wrecked French power as much as her own; Russia suddenly capitulated in her long struggle to impose communism on the rest of the world and is now the weakest she has been since the 1905 Revolution. All of those countries, as well as Austria-Hungary, Italy and Japan, have been invaded and occupied at least once, most of them twice, with all the dislocation and demoralisation that that entails.
The English-speaking peoples, by total contrast, today know no rival in might, wealth or prestige. The most likely future challenger on the far horizon is China not a contender in 1900 which still has very far to go before she can threaten to supplant them. A few fanatical malcontents from the former Ottoman Empire have proven their ability to strike a painful blow to the heart of the greatest city of the English-speaking peoples, it is true, but their fury is a mark of their enemies' primacy rather than a serious threat to it. Even were terrorists to strike a further, perhaps chemical, biological or nuclear blow against one of the English-speaking peoples' principal cities, it would not destroy that primacy. As George Will has observed, 'Al-Queda has no rival model about how to run a modern society. Al-Queda has a howl of rage against the idea of modernity.16
At the closing stage of the battle of Waterloo, once the Emperor Napoleon's Imperial Guard had been defeated in its final great assault on the Anglo-Allied lines, the Duke of Wellington raised his peaked hat and gave the order: 'Go forward and complete your victory' With Soviet communism now lying in the dust, and with representative institutions, free enterprise, the English language, military superiority and the rule of law their talismans as of old, it is clear that the English-speaking peoples have done just that.
On 26 January each year, the Roman Empire celebrated the festival of Feria Latina, commemorating the origins of the Latin-speaking peoples, held at Alba Longa, once their principal city. (As Pontifex Maximus, Julius Cæsar officiated at it seven weeks before his assassination.) The English-speaking peoples are far too self-deprecating to copy such a celebration of themselves, but perhaps they should, because today they are the last, best hope for Mankind. It is in the nature of human affairs that, in the words of the hymn, 'Earth's proud empires pass away', and so too one day will the long hegemony of the English-speaking peoples. When they finally come to render up the report of their global stewardship to History, there will be much of which to boast. Only when another power - such as China - holds global sway, will the human race come to mourn the passing of this most decent, honest, generous, fair-minded and self-sacrificing imperium.
 

ここまで

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Gartner

GartnerGroup's Dataquest Says Nokia Became No. 1 Mobile Phone Vendor in 1998

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GartnerGroup's Dataquest Says CDMA Was Best-Selling Mobile Handset Technology in the U.S. During First Quarter 1999

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GartnerGroup's Dataquest Says U.S. Mobile Handset Sales Exceeded 10 Million Units in Second Quarter 1999

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3Q99

 

GartnerGroup's Dataquest Says Mobile Phone Sales Increased 65 Percent in 1999

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1Q00

 

Gartner's Dataquest Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Reached 98 Million Units in Second Quarter 2000

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3Q00

 

Gartner Dataquest Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Increased 46 Percent in 2000

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Gartner Dataquest Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Exceeded 96 Million Units in First Quarter 2001

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2Q01

 

Gartner Dataquest Reports Worldwide Mobile Phone Shipments Declined 9 Percent in the Third Quarter of 2001

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Gartner Dataquest Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales in 2001 Declined for First Time in Industry's History

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Gartner Dataquest Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Declined 4 Percent in the First Quarter of 2002

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Gartner Dataquest Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Showed Signs of Rebounding in Second Quarter of 2002

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Gartner Dataquest Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Exceed Expectations in Third Quarter of 2002

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Gartner Dataquest Says Fourth Quarter Sales Lead Mobile Phone Market to 6 Percent Growth in 2002

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Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Industry Experienced an 18 Percent Increase in Unit Sales in First Quarter of 2003

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Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Terminal Market Increased 12 Percent in Second Quarter of 2003

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Gartner Says Mobile Terminal Sales Grew 22 Percent in Third Quarter of 2003 — Market Could Reach Half a Billion Units in 2003

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Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Increased 21 Percent in 2003

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Gartner Sees Global Mobile Phone Sales Rise 34 Percent in Strong First Quarter

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Gartner Reports Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 35 Percent in the Second Quarter of 2004

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Gartner Reports Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 26 Percent in the Third Quarter of 2004

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Gartner Says Strong Fourth Quarter Sales Led Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales to 30 Percent Growth in 2004

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Gartner Says Mobile Phone Sales Rose 17 Percent in the First Quarter of 2005

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Gartner Says Mobile Phone Sales Rose 21 Percent in the Second Quarter of 2005

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Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Increased 22 Percent in the Third Quarter of 2005

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Gartner Says Top Six Vendors Drive Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales to 21 Percent Growth in 2005

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Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales in First Quarter are Indicative of Another Strong Year in 2006

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Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 18 percent in the Second Quarter of 2006

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Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 21.5 percent in the Third Quarter of 2006

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Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 21 Percent in 2006

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Gartner Says Strong Results in Asia/Pacific and Japan Drove Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales to 14 Percent Growth in the First Quarter of 2007

https://web.archive.org/web/20101010131119/http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=506573

Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 17 Per Cent in Second Quarter of 2007

https://web.archive.org/web/20110908035849/http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=514407

Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 15 Per Cent in Third Quarter of 2007

https://web.archive.org/web/20101010124325/http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=552507

Gartner Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Increased 16 Per Cent in 2007

https://web.archive.org/web/20090627153559/http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=612207

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IDC

2011

Worldwide Mobile Phone Market Maintains Its Growth Trajectory in the Fourth Quarter Despite Soft Demand for Feature Phones, According to IDC

https://web.archive.org/web/20120202212120/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23297412

2012

Android- and iOS-Powered Smartphones Expand Their Share of the Market in the First Quarter, According to IDC

https://web.archive.org/web/20120524203759/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23503312

Android and iOS Surge to New Smartphone OS Record in Second Quarter, According to IDC

http://web.archive.org/web/20140102192003/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23638712

Android Marks Fourth Anniversary Since Launch with 75.0% Market Share in Third Quarter, According to IDC

https://web.archive.org/web/20121103041944/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23771812

Android and iOS Combine for 91.1% of the Worldwide Smartphone OS Market in 4Q12 and 87.6% for the Year, According to IDC

http://web.archive.org/web/20140705080335/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23946013

2013

Android and iOS Combine for 92.3% of All Smartphone Operating System Shipments in the First Quarter While Windows Phone Leapfrogs BlackBerry, According to IDC

https://web.archive.org/web/20140904043934/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24108913

Apple Cedes Market Share in Smartphone Operating System Market as Android Surges and Windows Phone Gains, According to IDC

http://web.archive.org/web/20150204235051/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24257413

Android Pushes Past 80% Market Share While Windows Phone Shipments Leap 156.0% Year Over Year in the Third Quarter, According to IDC

http://web.archive.org/web/20150329201734/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24442013

Android and iOS Continue to Dominate the Worldwide Smartphone Market with Android Shipments Just Shy of 800 Million in 2013, According to IDC

http://web.archive.org/web/20150712064907/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24676414

2014

Worldwide Smartphone Shipments Edge Past 300 Million Units in the Second Quarter; Android and iOS Devices Account for 96% of the Global Market, According to IDC

https://web.archive.org/web/20140817073307/http://www.idc.com:80/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25037214

Android and iOS Squeeze the Competition, Swelling to 96.3% of the Smartphone Operating System Market for Both 4Q14 and CY14, According to IDC

https://web.archive.org/web/20151127130139/http://www.idc.com:80/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25450615

2015

Worldwide Smartphone Market Posts 11.6% Year-Over-Year Growth in Q2 2015, the Second Highest Shipment Total for a Single Quarter, According to IDC

https://archive.li/Oz5CL

Smartphone Shipments Reach Second Highest Level for a Single Quarter as Worldwide Volumes Reach 355.2 Million in the Third Quarter, According to IDC

https://archive.li/VJnHo

Apple, Huawei, and Xiaomi Finish 2015 with Above Average Year-Over-Year Growth, as Worldwide Smartphone Shipments Surpass 1.4 Billion for the Year, According to IDC

https://archive.li/LBTBy

2016

Worldwide Smartphone Growth Goes Flat in the First Quarter as Chinese Vendors Churn the Top 5 Vendor List, According to IDC

https://archive.li/d2KrM

Worldwide Smartphone Shipments Up 1.0% Year over Year in Third Quarter Despite Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Recall, According to IDC

https://web.archive.org/web/20161029114612/http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41882816

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Canalys

64 million smart phones shipped worldwide in 2006

https://web.archive.org/web/20110823002128/https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/64-million-smart-phones-shipped-worldwide-2006

2007

Smart mobile device shipments hit 118 million in 2007, up 53% on 2006

https://web.archive.org/web/20110823002123/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/smart-mobile-device-shipments-hit-118-million-2007-53-2006

2008

Global smart phone shipments rise 28%

https://web.archive.org/web/20110822235200/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-smart-phone-shipments-rise-28

2009

Smart phones defy slowdown

https://web.archive.org/web/20110820171703/http://canalys.com/newsroom/smart-phones-defy-slowdown

Smart phone market shows modest growth in Q3

https://web.archive.org/web/20110818051734/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/smart-phone-market-shows-modest-growth-q3

Majority of smart phones now have touch screens

https://web.archive.org/web/20110818053525/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/majority-smart-phones-now-have-touch-screens

2010

Global smart phone market growth rises to 67%

https://web.archive.org/web/20110822030841/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-smart-phone-market-growth-rises-67

Android smart phone shipments grow 886% year-on-year in Q2 2010

https://web.archive.org/web/20110808044531/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/android-smart-phone-shipments-grow-886-year-year-q2-2010

Apple takes the lead in the US smart phone market with a 26% share

https://web.archive.org/web/20110818051632/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/apple-takes-lead-us-smart-phone-market-26-share

Google’s Android becomes the world’s leading smart phone platform

https://web.archive.org/web/20110818053611/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/google%E2%80%99s-android-becomes-world%E2%80%99s-leading-smart-phone-platform

2011

Android increases smart phone market leadership with 35% share

https://web.archive.org/web/20110818050255/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/android-increases-smart-phone-market-leadership-35-share

Android takes almost 50% share of worldwide smart phone market

https://web.archive.org/web/20110809131432/http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/android-takes-almost-50-share-worldwide-smart-phone-market

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