Ever since I started writing this blog in 2009 I have known that at some point I would have to write about the Iraq war. That was partly because it was bound to crop up as a news item - now is pretty much the 10th anniversary of the invasion - but also partly because it was something I got very exercised about at the time.
Let me explain. I supported the invasion.
Feel free to stop reading now. But if you do, reflect on how closed your mind is.
To be clear, at the end of 2002 when the possibility of invasion was first mooted, I was fervently against it too. In fact I wrote a tongue in cheek letter to the Guardian pointing out that if the Blair government was looking for a country to invade which had treated some of its citizens disgracefully, which undoubtedly had weapons of mass destruction and which was in breach of UN resolutions, it need look no further than Israel.
I suppose I started to change my mind when the poverty of this position became apparent. Our government might well have been inconsistent in its choice of foes, but as so often in life it was not enough merely to accuse them of hypocrisy for targeting Iraq but ignoring other countries' transgressions: I also had to decide which position to support - to invade or not to invade.
Sometime after the war I read Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. Like most of McEwan's work it is a book flawed by glaring plot implausibilities, but in its description of the day of the anti-Iraq war demonstration as seen through the eyes of the surgeon Henry Perowne it has the priceless merit of ambiguity. On its least interesting level it is a story of a psycopath stalking Perowne's family, but it is a book which examines other aspects of Perowne's life with a kind of hyper-lucidity.
The scene which struck me at the time was the argument Perowne has with his daughter. She has just returned from the anti-war March filled with righteousness, to find Perowne not only dismissive of the protestors' case but contemptuous of her unawareness of the consequences of not going to war. "If the price of getting rid of Saddam is war", he says, "then the price of no-war is Saddam". Of course a massive row ensues, analagous to the similar ones I had had with my wife and friends, every single one of whom - bien-pensant Lefties like me - opposed the war.
The really striking thing was that the anti-war faction had not grasped the nature of the choice being presented. The choice was not as the protestors apparently believed between one thing self-evidently good (no-war) and another self-evidently bad (war). The choice was between two bad things. We were being asked to decide which bad thing we preferred.
But it wasn't just that the antis had misjudged the kind of dilemma the invasion presented; it was also that they felt so pleased with themselves. They really did think they occupied the moral high ground under a cloudless sky. On the other hand I felt that the decision to oppose invasion should have been an absolutely agonising one. Their smugness was, I felt, symptomatic of a failure to look at the issue squarely. And this in turn was a consequence of fear. This was the fear that George Bush and Tony Blair might be right.
It seems to me now a decade later that three issues should dominate discussion of the invasion. The first is whether it did enough good to justify the undoubted harm it did. The second is what it tells us about our domestic politics. The third concerns international law.
As far as the first is concerned you might start by measuring how many people were killed during the invasion and its aftermath. Estimates have run into millions at the more hysterical end. Handily, there is a website dedicated to counting every single named individual known to have died - iraqbodycount.org. Today it stands at about 120,000 deaths. To be clear, the bulk of the deaths occurred in about 2006/7, three years after the invasion. Now 120,000 is an awful lot of people, even spread over ten years. But it's not enough to say how terrible this is - to criticise the invasion persuasively you also have to demonstrate the alternative would have been better.
But here the alternative would have been to leave Saddam in place. What would that have been like? Well, probably quite like it was in the years up to 2003. You can start trying to find out about this by going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq, a page on which the eye scrolls down past atrocity after well-documented atrocity to an extract from the New York Times which sums it up nicely. "(Saddam) murdered as many as a million of his own people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. . . Other estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million, including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,0000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion. Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000."
And yet this was the regime that those against the war felt it better to leave in place. I find that very hard to explain.
What would have happened to Iraq in the Arab spring? Well perhaps there would have been an uprising. If so, an awful lot of people would have been killed - look at Syria today. Perhaps more likely Saddam would have kept control. And after him, one of his psycopathic sons; and after that some other Ba'ath party strongman. To paraphrase Orwell, "If you want a vision of Iraq's future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
What about our domestic politics? The most common charge against the Blair government is that it exaggerated the claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and deluded the electorate into supporting the war. I found this baffling even at the time.
Why? Well firstly, everyone believed Saddam had such weapons anyway - the circumstantial evidence, from the massacre at Halabja to the dodging of the UN weapons inspectors, was overwhelming.
Secondly, paradoxically, no-one believed the dodgy dossier. I spoke to many people who opposed the war. Not one was taken in by the dossier. I never met anyone who believed it. People pretend now that it made a difference, but it made none whatsoever. They believed in the WMD anyway because of the circumstantial evidence.
Quite often people say to me, "Well the war might have done some good, but it wasn't sold to us on that basis. It was sold on the basis of weapons of mass destruction". But that isn't true either. Of course the focus was on WMD, but Blair also sold it on the basis of regime change. I saw him on Newsnight on 6th February, taking questions from a hostile studio audience. "But the one thing I hope we can all agree on", he said, "is that Saddam Hussein is in a different category from virtually any other regime in the world in terms of his use of appalling repression against his own people, external aggression against other people and the fact is, he is the one power in this world that has actually used chemical weapons against his own people. . . the people that have suffered most from Saddam are the Iraqi people themselves . . . I mean I spoke to ten Iraqi exiles the other day, who were women, who described to me, not just the deaths of members of their family, but the appalling human rights abuses, torture, the fact that they were still, some of them, under threat of death - living abroad - from this guy. I mean, you know, this, this is not a humane regime . . . "
But let's assume the antis are right, that we were lied to, and the lies made a difference. Undoubtedly this would have been A Bad Thing. But if there is a special place in hell for politicians who have lied, it will be a very crowded place. For me, the opprobrium reserved for Blair verges on the hysterical.
His opponents seem to think his deceit, real or imaginary, is a kind of get-out-of-jail card which saves them from thinking about the wider issue of whether the war did any good. But that only works if you think considerations of domestic politics trump removing a vile dictator and his retinue of thugs and torturers. It doesn't do it for me.
What about international law? Didn't Blair and Bush flout the UN Charter by the invasion? It was surprising how many people thought so. A lot of people who had never been nearer a legal textbook than a visit to their conveyancing solicitor became experts overnight. "This illegal war", they used to say. How did they know?, I wondered.
Now I am not an international lawyer, but I have practised law and at the time I did a bit of research about this. The first thing to say is that the discipline of international law predates the UN Charter by the best part of a century. No-one knows whether the Charter replaces it or runs alongside it. In fact if you can say anything certain about international law, it is that there is not much certain about it, for the very good reason that there is not much jurisprudence. The law concerning theft, for example, is long-established and litigated every day: it's rare that an issue of law comes up to puzzle the judges. But areas of certainty in international law are much fewer and further between.
If someone tells you he knows the invasion of Iraq is illegal you can be pretty certain that he is a bullshitter. Even if he is an international lawyer. Some of them think it was; some don't.
A family friend of ours is a leading human rights lawyer, a kind of latter day Mark D'Arcy. At the time of the invasion he wrote an article in the Guardian setting out the case against the invasion. It was detailed and sounded authoratative. Of UN Resolution 678 he wrote that it only authorised such force "as was necessary to restore Kuwait's sovereignty". Interested, I Googled the resolution. It said no such thing. It actually authorised "all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area". Recognising that for a lawyer this was a loophole big enough to drive a tank through,I emailed our friend wondering why he had not referred to it. He didn't reply. I have never pressed the point. I wouldn't want to embarrass him.
Two things arise from this. One, the war may have been illegal; but it may not have been. We'll probably never know. The second one refers to the UN Charter itself. After the invasion Kofi Annan gave a speech in which he acknowledged that the Charter itself might be defective. It was set up after the war, in circumstances where two of its signatories, the USSR and China, wanted very much to minimise the possibility of sanction on the basis of things governments did to their own populations. That's why the Charter focuses instead on prescribing actions governments take against other countries. It's arguable that an invasion of Nazi Germany in 1938 to protect its Jewish population might have been illegal under the Charter, for example. Annan said the Charter might have to change. It hasn't.
I have often wondered why those against the war were so ready to ignore the bleedin' obvious, most egregiously the wicked nature of Saddam's regime. I have commented elsewhere on this blog that the film In The Loop, devoted as it is to the Dodgy Dossier scenario, never once mentions him. My own tentative theory is that whereas Saddam was a comedy dictator in a far away country of which they knew very little, George Bush was a pantomime Texan villain who had stolen an election and, being a right-winger, stood for everything they hated. Similarly, Tony Blair was a man in whom they - we - had all placed our political faith, a man who had led Labour back from the wilderness. How dare he betray us in this way?
For me, the Iraq war opened up political cracks that have since widened a good deal. If the Left could think so limply and so dishonestly about Saddam, what did it say about their thinking elsewhere? From 2003 onwards I was freed from the tribalism which had allied me to Labour all my adult life. For this I have been berated by friends and family as a conservative; but actually I have changed my mind, whereas many of them doggedly retain the political views they had at 19, when the world was a very different place and their understanding of what was going on it was nothing like as well-informed or experienced. I don't see myself as conservative.
I see the antis as people in something like the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. We have had anger, we are having denial. In the end I think we will get acceptance. Here is Martin Kettle, the Graun's chief leader writer, in its op-ed pages last week: "it needs saying that . . . there is a fair amount of good news coming out of Iraq these days, as well as the bad stuff". Another No Really moment there. I expect I will live to see Kettle recant, if he dares: almost alone amongst Guardian journalists, Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch came out in guarded support of the war. Aaronovitch, evidently marginalised, left shortly afterwards. Cohen is still writing for the Observer, and today has written as pertinently as ever on the foreign policy consequences of liberal interventionism and post-Iraq refuseniks like President Obama.
If it was naive of Bush and Blair to imagine a democracy could be created in Iraq without bloodshed, it is naive of their opponents to judge post-Saddam Iraq by the very same standard. Democracies are not created without pain. As the American writer Alan Wolfe wrote, "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard".
Finally, in his Observer piece, Cohen too quotes from Ian McEwan's Saturday. "Why is it amongst those two million idealists today I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam", Henry Perowne asks his daughter. "He's loathsome, it's a given", she replies. "No, it's not", says Perowne. "It's a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?"
