John Roughan: Pre-emption doctrine the flaw in Iraq mess

COMMENT

The peace movement is going to an early screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 this afternoon. I probably could have gone along. For a while now I have been receiving unsolicited invitations to all their rallies against the Iraq war and other American crimes, such as capitalism.

But much as I am looking forward to the Michael Moore movie on the Bush presidency I don't want to see it with an uncritical chorus. The trouble with the peace movement - and all critics of the Iraq disaster so far - is that they don't seem to realise why the war was wrong.

I don't expect Moore will be different. There was a scene in Bowling for Columbine when he confronted a spokesman for a missile assembly plant that employed the fathers of the two boys who committed the school massacre. Moore put it to him that the reason the boys shot up the school might have had something to do with the fact that their fathers went to work every day for a company that made weapons of mass destruction.

The flack replied, with remarkable forbearance I thought, that he could see no connection. The missiles they were making, he said, were for the defence of the country and it was not a country that went out and attacked people just because it felt like or because it didn't like them.

Right there Moore had the indictment of the war George W. Bush was at that time fomenting. But then, with his usual heavy-handed irony, Moore went over the top. He cut to footage of the first Gulf War, Kosovo, Nicaragua, Panama, Vietnam - every US military engagement he could muster from a film archive, as though they were all equally unwarranted, equally offensive.

There was all the difference in the world between the first Gulf War and the second. The first was a response to Saddam Hussein's invasion and annexation of Kuwait. Kosovo was an intervention against ethnic cleansing that should have happened sooner. Most other items in Moore's catalogue, including Vietnam, were conflicts the US joined for geopolitical purposes during the Cold War.

There is an important difference between intervening in a conflict and picking a fight in cold blood. The national interest might be the same but the justification is not. And justification matters, not only to soldiers who regard war as a last resort but also to the national morale. When the justification is dubious a democracy cannot sustain the fight.

Pacifists, who hold all war to be wrong and avoidable, and leftists who oppose all war waged by the US, are no help when it comes to drawing useful lessons from the mess in Iraq.

But nor have been the official inquiries in the US and Britain that confirm that the case for war was based on dubious intelligence, wildly exaggerated by the elected leaders of those countries.

THOSE inquiries have been valuable in their own way, removing surely for all time the mystique of the CIA and MI6. They are not, and probably never were, the all-powerful, all-penetrating organisations of popular fiction and political conspiracy theories. They are Government departments really, in which mostly desk-bound officials study a country of interest and file snippets of information that mostly they cannot verify.

Very little if any of it comes from actually infiltrating enemy organisations. The congressional inquiry has found that none of the US intelligence bureaux had agents in Iraq after 1998 when the United Nations weapons inspectors were expelled. Before then the agencies had relied heavily on information supplied by the UN team (which Saddam Hussein accused of spying).

But the bulk of US intelligence on Saddam's regime came from exiles with an axe to grind. The principal source, Ahmed Chalabi, who hoped to be Prime Minister once Saddam was toppled, had not been inside Iraq for decades. The emigre whom the US has now installed as Iraq's Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, admits to being the source of Tony Blair's famous claim that Saddam would need just 45 minutes to deploy the WMD.

But while opponents of the war can derive vindication from non-existent weapons and the like, those are not the reasons the war was wrong. In fact, by dwelling so much on the spectral weapons, opponents of the war are in danger of implying that if the material had been found, the invasion would have been justified.

That is not very far from the fall-back position of Bush and Blair. They now argue it was right to invade Iraq even if their suspicions were wrong.

No country can invade another simply because it suspects the other is capable of doing harm, any more than a civilised country can execute or imprison people on suspicion of criminal potential. The US would not accept that principle as a general rule of international conduct and ought not to reserve that right to itself.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what the Bush Administration has done with a doctrine of "pre-emption" which it has tested in Iraq. The resulting mess has much to do with the faults of the doctrine, which not only saps the commitment of American soldiers and citizens when they realise they're unwelcome but also provides sustenance to the resistance.

Not very long ago, after the collapse of European communism, it was being widely noted that democracies did not start wars. The theory was that government that depended on the popular will could not put citizens' lives at risk unless attacked.

Insiders have testified that Bush came to the White House much more interested in Saddam than Osama bin Laden and in the days following September 11 the White House was intent on finding Saddam's hand in the destruction of the Twin Towers.

The obsession produced an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a country the President and his military advisers barely understood. Now that Americans are waking up to the man they rather lightly elected four years ago, it is vital that they and we work out why his war was wrong.

An international code of civilised power is still to be restored.

Herald Feature: Iraq