NO WAY TO RUN A WAR
The 'pro-war' coalition of Britain, America and Spain meeting today in the Azores must be reflecting on how spectacularly they have failed to make their case. From the offset the campaign against Iraq was fudged. Senior military figures in the US, along with substantial parts of the intelligence services aired their doubts in public. So-called 'hawks' in the administration were tempted to demonstrate their resolve precisely because of the doubts that kept creeping into the deliberations. That Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair succeeded in persuading the president to take the argument to the United Nations' Security Council only indicated the underlying uncertainty that gripped his administration. These anxieties were always apparent beneath the buster of belligerence coming from the US, and they let the Weapons Inspectorate under Hans Blix take the initiative, acting as final judge on the validity - or otherwise - of American and British allegations against Iraq.
In the Security Council itself US anxieties assumed an external expression in the initially cautious, then increasingly bold opposition of France, Germany, Russia and China to military action to disarm Iraq. The French and German leaders did not set out to sabotage the war, only to contain US action within the United Nations' framework. To their surprise, momentarily casting themselves as the anti-war coalition lifted these rather moth-eaten politicians to dizzying popularity. Piqued by the rhetoric of unilateralism coming from the Bush administration, Chirac and Schroeder felt little restraint and solidified their anti-US alliance.
US huffing and puffing against France does not disguise the fact that the problems in the alliance stemmed from their own nervous inability to act sooner. Now they face the prospect that the war itself will be prosecuted under the harsh gaze of a cynical press and sceptical public. Already the weaknesses the pro-war alliance have been revealed in crass errors, like the plagiarism of an outdated college thesis for an intelligence briefing, or the crude forgery of evidence of Iraq's having procured nuclear weapons - dismissed by the Atomic Energy Agency's Mohammed El Baradei. Even before the shooting starts the US administration is making impossible and contradictory promises of both a painless war and an overwhelming victory. While they cannot lose to the Iraqi army, they can inflict more damage on their own standing than Saddam ever could.
BROAD CHURCH
The growing confidence of the anti-war movement is in direct proportion to the self-doubts of the pro-war campaign. From a handful of the 'usual suspects' the anti-war coalition has been transformed into the official view of most of Western Europe, backed by everybody from the Pope to Martin Sheen. Even where the official cabinet view is pro-war, as in the United Kingdom, lower down the administrative ladder, the anti-war case is overwhelmingly endorsed. Widespread scepticism at the Foreign Office is all-too evident in the unofficial leaks, and the official briefings from intelligence sources like the Royal United Service Institute. The second-best selling newspaper in the country, the Daily Mirror, irritated by the government's support for its rival, the Sun, has unequivocally opposed the war - a situation that previous administrations would never have allowed to happen. By the time you get down to school level it becomes apparent that head-teachers all over Britain collaborated in the recent protests.
The very breadth of the anti-war movement indicates that it cannot be wholly a radical movement. On the contrary, a variety of different motivations are at play. For the 'anti-war' European governments, opposition to a second resolution in no way indicates opposition to military domination of the developing world - of which the opposing nations, as the supporting, are past masters. Rather their ambition is to restrain US imperialism within the Western club. For the growing band of middle class critics of the war that pushed the protest into a different league, the fear of instability is the overriding emotion. Their pacifism is at root a conservative instinct to ward off unwelcome change - the popular equivalent of the European leaders' instincts, in fact. No doubt there is a genuine desire to save Iraqi lives on the part of the protestors, but that rarely extends to an endorsement of the rights of the Iraqi people to determine their own future. On the contrary, the anti-war coalition has embraced the alternative case for disarming and governing the Iraqi people through the institutions of the United Nations.
Distaste for the war leaders outside of the United States is close to achieving the critical mass that will make their position impossible. But for the most part the ill-feeling towards them is motivated by a greater conservatism than they themselves embody.
-- James Heartfield
http://www.heartfield.demon.co.uk/james1.htm