POWER VACUUM
The assassination of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, following last week's killing of the United Nations envoy, exposed the dangerous power vacuum in that country. As is widely understood, the coalition was prepared for war, but not for reconstruction. More pointedly, the regime that they destroyed was, for all its terrible faults, the only viable order in Iraq. Until an alternative power had been built up alongside it, overthrowing Saddam meant tipping the country into disorder.
Uprooting Saddam necessarily meant that Iran - as the strongest power in the region - would enhance its influence in its stricken neighbour. The Ayatollah, as a Shi'ite leader returning from Iranian exile with a brother taking a seat on the US-sponsored Iraqi council, therefore represented something like stability - but now that influence has been disrupted.
The United Nations represented an important source of authority for the West in Iraq, if for depressing reasons. The UN policed the economic sanctions against Iraq, and the aid for oil programme, which gave it political links in the country. Unfortunately for the USA, the UN Security Council failed to support the war, so that US power necessarily undermined UN authority.
The US and British military are left in direct contact with a population that is incoherent and unpredictable, without any interlocutors to mediate between them. As long as these political circumstances persist even the remnants of the demolished Ba'athist dictatorship or a handful of Islamist cranks will be able to cause the occupying superpower serious security problems.
CREDIBILITY GAP
The resignation of British prime minister Tony Blair's director of communications Alastair Campbell in the middle of Lord Hutton's inquiry into the death of David Kelly suggests some serious wobbling in Downing Street. This week Blair admitted that he had been aware of the No 10 press office's strategy of naming Kelly as the source of damaging revelations; a strategy that appears to have led to his suicide. Though Campbell, in his evidence to Hutton, had distanced himself from the direct pressure on Kelly, he is widely believed to be responsible.
This is not the first time that the affable, smiling Prime Minister has had to jettison a less attractive collaborator. Blair's long-time ally Peter Mandelson became known as the 'Prince of Darkness' for his reputed abilities to manage the media, just as Campbell is now dubbed 'the spinmeister'. But both these figures are more like lightning rods for bad publicity than the actual target.
Blair's own character has become the field on which the different demands of government clash. Affecting to rise above mere politics, Blair appeals that he is an ordinary guy trying to do the right thing. But often that means unpopular decisions. His habit of hanging out with uglies is a way of making himself look good.
With the war against Iraq, the Blair team - conscious of the judgement of history - talked themselves into thinking that this was 'the test' that would reveal who was a real man. But all they revealed was that they were incapable of garnering popular support for the policy. All of the subsequent difficulties stem from that failure: the need to manage the press, the need to hide behind the Joint Intelligence Committee's 'dossier', the need to stamp on dissent, the need to manufacture an 'impartial' inquiry…and finally the need to jettison the spinmeister.
DAVID KELLY: AGENT OF IMPERIALISM
'Kelly was no critic of the western domination of Iraq' (the WEEK ending 20 July 2003). Today the Observer posthumously publishes chief weapons' inspector David Kelly's article arguing that military action in support of regime change is the only way to 'disarm' Iraq. But just as Kelly's dogmatic belief in Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is revealed, other champions of military action are asking the question: how could we get it so wrong about WMDs? Former US assistant secretary of state James Rubin had been a champion of intervention. But on British television he admitted that the intelligence community had got it wrong, there were no WMDs. Amongst those who 'got it wrong' was David Kelly, who helped to invent the threat from Iraq to maintain western domination of the country and his own status as overseer.
SHORTFALL
The US commerce department credited increased military spending alongside strong consumer demand with boosting GDP growth from 2.6 to 3.1 per cent. The Keynesian effect of military spending on the economy has a downside. The leader of the occupation authority Paul Bremer estimates that the cost of rebuilding Iraq will run into tens of billions of dollars. That, and the cost in the lives of American servicemen, puts greater pressure on the USA to get support from the international community.
European leaders look forward to a more amenable relationship with the Americans in which their support is valued once again. But they underestimate the difficulties that a return to multilateralism involves for the President. Though in practice George Bush was always seeking to work with allies, his ideological appeal to his supporters has been on the basis of roughing-up the Europeans. The right-wing cliques that wrote the US foreign policy are not socially important - but they are important to the coherence of the Bush administration. They will not find it easy to go cap in hand to the UN.
-- James Heartfield