I was watching Official Secrets with my daughter last night and I ended up thinking about the Second Iraq War for the first time in a long time. She was very young when it was happening so had only the dimmest memories and it wasn't something we'd ever discussed at length, so she was struck by how upset I remained at it. For some of us thinking is more akin to marination than cogitation and what I discovered when talking to her was that if anything I now think that war was even more of a disaster than it first appeared to be and is a crucial moment that set us up for many of our current difficulties. The us in those sentences are those of us who live in the US and Europe, but particularly in the UK. Of course the real disaster is for the Iraqi people, but I have no competence to write on that, so all I can do is acknowledge it.
If we go back to that moment in early 2003, the geopolitical world was very different. The US enjoyed a kind of cultural, economic, and political dominance that has already disappeared. Looked at in long-term view, the pivot of the US after Vietnam to effectively ally with China against the USSR had worked. Kissenger's move had set up victory in the Cold War, and laid the foundations for the development of the international order after it. To a particular geopolitical turn of mind 9/11 was a reminder that the Middle East was the remaining crucial area of instability in the international order, and a call to do something about it. It is important to remember that the people driving US foreign policy at this point were the members of Nixon's team (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Armitage, Wolfovitz, the people Paul Mann called the Vulcans) who had been entirely sceptical of Kissenger style diplomacy and believed in frank assertion of American power. Imagine how the world looks to thinkers who see Kissenger as too liberal; Joe Nye style notions of a norm-grounded international order don't even occur to them. So the US had enormous room for manoeuvre, and could have done pretty much anything, but it chose to invade Iraq as an opening move in a reorganisation of the international order, and was choosing from a constrained body of choices because of the outcome of the 2000 election. What they found out, as we all know, is that they were completely wrong about how power and the international order work.
What seems clear to me now is that for the people pushing for war the geostrategic reason for intervention was so clear that the premise was almost beside the point. When you see the unconvincing revelation of shaky intelligence the people delivering it look like they are going through the motions. From their point of view they were going to do the right thing "free the Iraqi people" and the formalities were just that, formalities. And so we start getting in to the long-term consequences. Iraq was hardly the first time a state has lied to its population to go to war (just in case there was any doubt Poland did not attack Germany in 1939, and that whole Tonkin Gulf thing was cooked up) but the investment in alternative facts was unprecedented. The mobilisation we will need to combat climate change is of the order of war and the US and the UK undermined the very principle of rational public debate right at the point we most need it. That was the point at which the rules-based international order started to crumble, and that tendency intensified as the rights regime came under stress (torture memos). From the outside it also looks as if US foreign policy has become locked into a strategy of dominance rather than hegemony through leadership. At the end of this dynamic stands the question of whether the existing international legal and political order can be recovered or do we need to start looking for other arrangements.
Closer to home Tony Blair, and the Blairite support for the war, broke the Labour Party. For those of us of a natural Labour turn of mind Blair and his team were never the easiest option, but if that was where the centre-left of the UK was found, well then so be it. However that warrant did not extend to wars of choice, no matter how well-intentioned or honestly supported (and the egotism of turning these issues on personality clearly foreshadowed what was to come). The Labour Wars of the last decade and a half all turn on where people were on Iraq. It must be hard to be on the Corbyn side of the party and remain civil with the supporters of the Iraq war, and the hard core of anti-Corbyn was driven by the Iraq Yeomanry.
The most vivid example of the effect of Iraq on the Labour coalition is in Scotland. In the Scottish elections of 2003, held in May, Labour lost only six seats, to the Scottish Socialists, and the SNP lost more, eight, mostly to the Greens. That did not crack the mould of Scottish politics since it was hardly news that Labour faced a challenge from the left, and the effect of Iraq had not yet been to reconfigure the political spectrum. Labour had every reason to expect the Green and Scottish Socialist vote to return to them in the long run. The SNP opposition to the war, a position that aligned them with the Liberal Democrats, allowed them to break out of the nationalist constituency and to appeal to Labour voters who could not stomach the war, and they added twenty seats to their tally in 2007, which then set them up to become the dominant force in Scottish politics that now defines the local agendas. The middle class turned against Labour in 2007 and the working class did the same in 2011.
And Iraq had huge consequence for the UK's position on Europe as well. When Blair supported the war, and so broke with the European consensus that this was, as the cliche has it, "worse than a crime, a blunder", he also reinforced the dynamics of UK nationalism that eventually drove Brexit. The CANZUK/US fantasy as an alternative to the EU, has its proximate roots in the Iraq alliance. The consequences of even trying to put the Empire back together in this form really are terrifying. As the UK aligns with the US, and tries to bring the old white settler colonies in its train, in the view that military superiority generates some kind of international legitimacy, they both drive everyone else, who rejects that view, to co-operate against them. This whole strategy for the UK looks doomed to failure, and makes the work of international co-operation against climate change unnecessarily harder. It also makes an EU-China alignment in accord with the equatorial nations most vulnerable to the early effects of climate change more likely.
The US did not have to make this mistake, and the UK made it worse by supporting them.
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