The Guardian: Unhappy endings

The Downing Street dream factory paints a hopeful postwar future. But everyone else sees potential disaster

Polly Toynbee

Friday April 4, 2003
The Guardian

The world is upside down. The three left-of-centre dailies - the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror - are all the most hostile to the Labour government's war, while the rightwing press largely urges it on. This is a wretched state of affairs for those who wish this government well, watching it plunge headlong into what looks like a serious error. Europe is fractured, other alliances and friendships lost, leaving Britain marooned with George Bush. Colin Powell's sweep through Old Europe yesterday delivered a direct snub to any serious role for the UN rebuilding Iraq. The background roars from the president's stomach-churning speech in North Carolina were a display of patriotic histrionics to appal the world.

Yet what if it does end well and Tony Blair proves right after all? Those who oppose the war can only hope to eat their words: nothing wrong with humble pie. So let us examine the government's scenario for everything going right. At the moment, it goes as follows.

Republican Guard battalions have melted away under catastrophic bombardment. Stout resistance remains and Baghdad may not fall in a day but it will not be Stalingrad. There is no great hurry - Basra is the patient way to take towns, gradually. The regime will fall with fewer British and US losses than in any conflict in history: civilian deaths will be proportionate. Rolling news deceives with its hungry demands for a new Band of Brothers episode every hour, but war doesn't work like that. All in all, the government sounds calmly certain that all will be well. Since we know nothing, let's assume all will be tolerably well.

It was always the aftermath that was in doubt - in Iraq and in the world. How believable is Blair's version? He promises to persuade the US that it cannot rule Iraq alone. The US needs the UN not just for humanitarian aid, but for reconstruction. The US needs the UN for money, for legitimacy and to avoid inflaming the Arab world. "Iraq for the Iraqis," Blair promises. As for the French and Germans, they will see the error of their ways and hasten to rebuild good relations with the US: it will start with a meeting like the UN-sponsored Bonn conference that determined Afghanistan's postwar settlement. Britain will prove it is again a strong bridge between the US and EU. Then Bush will head off down the roadmap to peace in Palestine, while Iraq holds free elections, the Arab world sees a beacon of democracy in their midst and the world is a safer place.

All that would be excellent. The only trouble with the Blair vision is that it is exceedingly difficult to find anyone anywhere who believes it will happen - certainly not the White House. That is not their vision at all, as Powell made brutally clear yesterday. They have done the fighting, so why hand the peace over to the French and Russians on the security council?

The UN can do humanitarian, but not a single US soldier will wear a blue hat. Instead General Jay Garner and his battery of 24 Pentagon-approved Americans will run every ministry, with a tame Iraqi exile each. Contracts will not be awarded by a UN fair procurement process: why give the French or Russians anything? A new Iraqi government will be US and Israel-friendly: what happens when the Iraqis don't vote that way is just blanked out of their minds.

It gets worse. John Bolton, assistant secretary of state, visiting the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs in London, was already musing publicly on a coming pre-emptive strike on Iran. Russia is building Iran a nuclear capability that could give it weapons within months, he said. Better to knock it out first - a necessity as soon as it is spoken. For Iran faced with Iraq as a US satellite on one side with Israel's nuclear power on the other will respond to this pincer threat. The director of the Royal Institute listened to Bolton aghast. US conviction that a free Iraq will spread light and freedom all about it is not shared by those who know the region.

Nor does most of Europe believe in Blair's happy ending. Indeed, Powell killed it in Brussels yesterday. Since it has taken until now for the Germans and French finally to say in public that they hope Saddam will lose the war, there is hardly a close rapprochement on either side. Here the Blair-bridge vision halts.

The postwar landscape looks bleaker by the day, international law fractured, the UN bust. The only optimism comes from triumphalist White House hawks or from the Downing Street dream factory - though their visions are quite different. Elsewhere it is hard to find observers who feel anything but alarm at what is yet to come. Look back at Afghanistan, controlled by warlords still, severely underfunded and under-policed, all reconstruction money still spent on basic feeding, a place forgotten as the world moves on. Will Iraq fare much better?

There is one streak of hope on the grey horizon, though Blair may not see it that way. There is a chance now that the shock of schism may shake Europe into a new unity. All Europe, Britain included, is agreed that Iraqi reconstruction must be done under UN auspices - and that means what it says. This unity of purpose offers Britain's best chance to get back inside a newly purposeful Europe, with its own progressive mission as upholders of multinationalism and international law.

Powell offered only a dim UN role: an appointee would act as "the UN's eyes and ears" on a US-run interim Iraq administration. No amount of diplomatic verbiage can obscure the difference between a genuine UN operation and a nominal one. Chirac having taken the high moral ground on the war, to enormous approval in the polls, will not endorse a fix. Nor will the Russians or Germans - nor can Blair now. Unless the White House has a remarkable conversion, this gap looks unbridegable and the prime minister will soon be confronted again with that choice he never means to make - the choice between the Atlantic and the Channel. It is crucial that this time he jumps back with Europe to support the UN.

Right across Europe there is a new sense of purpose, as people wake up to their new responsibilities now they have let go of the American umbrella they have idled under lazily since the war. When Joschka Fischer, a Green minister in an instinctively pacifist nation, can announce that Germany must at last help build a European defence strategy, then a stronger Europe may be in sight. The French and Germans are not calling it a "counterweight" to the US, but less aggressively, simply "a weight".

Wars are political milestones: the EU trauma over Iraq could now forge a stronger Europe, better connected to its peoples, who have stood almost unanimously against the war. But it depends on Blair choosing Europe. In the grim uncertainty this war will leave in its wake, the world will need the EU as a strong and independent voice as never before. Those on the left who have hesitated over Europe should see now that the game has changed.

p.toynbee@guardian.co.uk

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