[lbo-talk] "I was silly to trust America" Max Hastings

[Chris Burford]

But the damage may already have been done. Read this article by this decent 
British pillar of British conservatism and imperialism, in yesterday's 
Sunday Telegraph.

This is more threatening for Blair and the alliance with Bush than any 
number of embarrassed left wing Labour MP's. It probably indicates that the 
Conservatives would support Robin Cook's call for an enquiry. It may be 
very difficult to Tony Blair to resist this.

Chris Burford

______

I was silly to trust America
By Max Hastings
(Filed: 01/06/2003)

Even by the standards of the Bush Administration, last week was a 
remarkable one for diplomatic folly. Paul Wolfowitz, the Assistant Defence 
Secretary, disclosed that the US wilfully exaggerated the threat of weapons 
of mass destruction, to rally support for an Iraq war. Likewise, 
Wolfowitz's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, declared that he has little expectation 
of finding any WMDs. He then launched a new round of sabre-rattling against 
Iran. So much for the gleeful banner under which President Bush greeted a 
homebound American aircraft-carrier crew: "Mission accomplished".

The leading lights of the US Defence Department always made it plain that 
disarming Saddam was a pretext for regime change in Iraq. Yet that pretext 
was the basis of a massive American diplomatic offensive. Tony Blair 
explicitly told the British people that disarming Saddam justified taking 
Britain to war. That argument was fraudulent.

Some of us, who accepted public and private Whitehall assurances about 
WMDs, today feel rather silly. Robin Cook is crowing, and well he may. He 
said that WMDs did not exist. He appears to have been right. It is 
irrelevant that the Allies won the war. The Prime Minister committed 
British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and 
it stinks.

Meanwhile inside Iraq, it has become irrelevant to criticise the Americans 
for past failure to anticipate the problems of making the country work. The 
question is whether they intend to commit resources on a scale commensurate 
with the task, now that the requirement is plain. The example of 
Afghanistan, where Washington seems untroubled by post-war anarchy, is not 
encouraging. The Americans shrug that today's warlordism offers Afghans 
better lives than yesterday's Taliban, and that outcome should suffice.
The Administration has always asserted that the Iraqi people were not 
enemies, but hapless pawns of a tyrant. In 1945, the Germans and Japanese 
begged for cigarettes and scratched in the ruins of their cities without 
much audible protest, because they knew they were the vanquished. The 
Iraqis, by contrast, behave as if they had just voted the Americans into 
office. They are petulantly impatient to see their new government fulfil 
its election pledges. The world is happy to cheer them on.

George Bush seems likely to fight a khaki presidential election in 2004, on 
a platform of tough action abroad in the cause of homeland defence. Critics 
observe that he can scarcely do anything else, since his management of the 
US economy frightens the life out of everyone who thinks beyond polling day.

It is hard to overstate the seriousness of the damage to British trust 
which is inflicted almost daily by Washington's insouciance. What was the 
point of reluctantly joining the Iraqi adventure, people ask, if the 
British Government cannot curb the excesses of American policy, and if the 
British Army's reward for participation is a half-baked war crimes charge 
against one of its officers by a disgruntled American major?

American hawks would dismiss most of the above as a reflection of familiar 
British liberal pusillanimity, our unflagging belief that we ran the world 
more intelligently in our centuries than they do in theirs. Yet there are 
good grounds for mistrusting American judgment.
I was among those who thought the war mistaken, but reluctantly accepted 
the arguments for British participation, to preserve the Atlantic alliance 
and to maintain some marginal influence upon American policy. Today, given 
the behaviour of the US Administration, that case is in tatters.

Thus, some people declare that this is the moment for Britain to jump ship, 
plainly to assert that we will go no further alongside an ally so reckless 
in its diplomacy, so careless in its actions. Yet the US remains the only 
superpower we have got. It cannot be exchanged for a new model. Britain is 
now committed in Iraq, for better or worse.

It remains vital to engage with Washington. Even in the face of great 
difficulties, the diplomatic effort must continue, to restrain American 
unilateralism. But a heavy blow has been struck against our faith in 
American rhetoric and judgment. The struggle against terrorism, and the 
management of the world look harder today than they did a week ago, thanks 
to Washington's frightening surge of unforced errors.

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