War jaw

Bob Woodward’s take on the Iraq war is pompous and Washington-obsessed while Patrick Cockburn offers an incisive analysis

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
Verso, £15.00

Bush at War: State of Denial
Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, £18.99

No two books could be more different. Bob Woodward’s third book on the Bush presidency handling of overseas military intervention since 11 September 2001 – a longer period than the second world war – is in the American tradition of all that matters happens in a square mile around the White House. There is no sense of anything or anyone that counts unless it is said and done in English, preferably over dinner in Woodward’s Georgetown mansion.

No foreign source is cited, no book published overseas quoted, there is no selection of material, and at times as minor characters wander in and through Woodward’s chapters, it reads like a transcript of a Waraholics Anonymous session with everyone beating their breast about how wrong they got things.

The one exception is Donald Rumsfeld who enters history as a latter-day Varus, the Roman senator who, 2000 years ago, promised Augustus an easy victory with a few Roman centurions over the savage German tribes and disappeared into the bogs of disaster and defeat and humiliation for Rome. In the first two books on the Bush wars, Woodward built up Rumsfeld as a hero. Since the US defense secretary cooperated fully with the writer, he has only himself to blame at the picture in the new book in which the General Patton of the first tomes morphs into the Colonel Custer of this volume.

Woodward never leaves the Beltway. Instead he pours into his book almost everything dictated to him by his interviewees. Junior officers who wrote haikus like:

We knew how to fight
Not so; building a NATION
We may lose the PEACE

get space but Woodward does not appear ever to have been in the Middle East or Europe or talked to any of the politicians who were faced with the terrible decision of how to deal with Saddam Hussein.

Woodward has moved into the comfort zone of today’s opponents of toppling tyrants by agreeing that there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq. That was not how it appeared to Robin Cook who regaled the Commons when he was foreign secretary with horrific tales of Saddam’s hidden caches of lethal weapons. That was not how it appeared to every European leader in 2002 and into 2003 who said repeatedly that Saddam and WMD were a real problem.

Those who opposed intervention like Gerhard Schröder, who offered Jacques Chirac a secret deal on maintaining the common agricultural policy regime in exchange for French support for Schröder’s neo-neutralist politics, did not deny the existence of WMD. They argued that a full-scale invasion would make matters worse; but the big lie in 2006 is that there was a big lie in 2002 on WMD. As Europe minister I patrolled Europe’s capitals and even as concern and criticism mounted over the Bush approach, no one questioned Saddam’s WMD ambitions. It was, after all, only the presence of 250,000 US and British troops camped on Iraq’s borders that allowed Hans Blix and his team into Iraq late in 2002. And even he could not tell the world that Iraq was WMD-free.

Hence the Bush-Blair dilemma. Should they keep a Normandy-style invasion force permanently on stand-by in the region? Or come home and leave Saddam crowing with victory and continuing to mock and defy all the UN resolutions asking him to comply with international law? Russia, followed by France made clear that a veto would apply to any UN authorisation of force against Saddam. Robin Cook had supported the bombing of a European city, Belgrade, and the invasion of a sovereign state, Serbia-Montenegro, without UN authority, and it is interesting to speculate on what his position would have been if he not been evicted from his post as Foreign Secretary and humiliatingly demoted to a minor cabinet post.

Patrick Cockburn’s book on Iraq is a joy to read after plodding through Woodward. Less than half the length of Woodward, it distils a quarter of a century’s worth of Cockburn’s profound knowledge of Iraq and the movements, the duplicities, and the passions of the country and the region. Unlike his more famous confrère, Robert Fisk, who opined with all his customary detachment in a recent column ‘could anyone have told more lies to the British people – to obscure, dissemble, distort and cover up than Blair?’ Cockburn does not go in for such rants, nor does he blame everything on the efforts of the Jewish people to survive in their tiny state of Israel.

Instead, he reports accurately that ‘For years people I knew well enough in Baghdad …were desperate for a normal life free of Saddam and sanctions.’ Cockburn further writes that late in 2002 the majority of Iraqis ‘wanted an end to the regime even if this involved an American-led attack.’ He quotes a young architect in Baghdad. ‘We are even ready to live under international tutelage. We have nothing to lose, and it cannot be worse than our present condition.’ This is deeply honest reporting from a writer who does not seek wisdom after the event. His book is the most excoriating exposé of the almost unbelievable catalogue of errors the Americans made in the running of Iraq after the fall of Saddam but all the more powerful because he acknowledges that the fall of Saddam was a liberation for the Iraqis.

Somewhere over the last 2,500 years from the time of the first blunders by Athenian politicians in handling the territories they conquered, there must be a giant handbook on what not to do after invading and occupying a foreign land. The Pentagon and Rumsfeld, who demanded full control over Iraq, made every mistake it was possible to make and added a new list of what-not-to-do calamities. If war is too important a matter to be left to the generals, than occupation should never be contracted to a defence ministry. Cockburn travelled all over Iraq in this period. Coolly with a precise, accurate, unsentimental reporter’s eye he describes the developing tragedy. He avoids the smug, gloating condemnations of the ‘I told you so’ columnists of London and Washington. But his indictment is all the more damning thanks to the precision and brevity of his prose which has in each chapter more wisdom and good judgement than all three of Woodward’s bloated Washington-obsessed books.

Cockburn has done writing about international politics a big service by demonstrating that big is not best. His short book is a model of how to tell a complex story with elegance and yet make powerful points. Woodward will be the best-seller. But if Washington wants to do better, it should read Cockburn.

Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former minister for Europe

Comments

Posted by Captain Spaulding on 14 November 2006, 9:59:43 AM
It was predictable that the Republican reverse in the mid-terms followed by Rumsfeld’s defenestration would cause consternation among the British neo-cons and bang on cue, along comes Denis MacShane. Bob Woodward’s latest book “State of Denial”; gives him an excuse for a counter-blast. The award-winning American journalist’s book is as usual very well sourced, but this time let down by a rambling style and too much reliance on verbatim accounts. It is nowhere near as good as his previous “Plan of Attack”;. Nevertheless a “state of denial”; accurately describes how the pro-war camp have reacted since things started to go wrong in Iraq, and it appears to describe Denis’ state of mind. For example, as regards to the famously non-existent “weapons of mass destruction”;, what is one to make of the following bizarre statement? “Woodward has moved into the comfort zone of today’s opponents of toppling tyrants by agreeing that there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq.”; That’s to say, one mustn’t, even now admit to the non-existence of these weapons. To do so, apparently, means that you support tyrants. And he says, criticising Bob Woodward for being “Washington obsessed”; that, “Woodward does not appear ever to have been in the Middle East or Europe or talked to any of the politicians who were faced with the terrible decision of how to deal with Saddam Hussein.”; Politicians in the plural? An important message that comes out of “Plan of Attack”; is that when George W and his small group of associates planned the war they had little interest in what the Brits or other Europeans had to say. A key section of Woodward’s account describes the activities of the proconsul-type figure Paul Bremer. Bremer made the disastrous decision to purge the Baath party down to the lowest levels (including for example all the teachers, who had been forced to join) and to disband the army. In this way, the invaders alienated those with arms, the administrators and the executive class, many of whom had previously been grateful to them for toppling Saddam, and helped to strengthen the growing insurgency. As Denis MacShane himself says, quoting Patrick Cockburn, the Americans made an “unbelievable catalogue of errors”; in the running of Iraq after the fall of Saddam, making “every mistake it was possible to make”;. But it’s not good enough for Denis airily to say that there must be a handbook for politicians to avoid in handling the territories they conquer and hey, this stuff has been going on for 2500 years anyway. It need not need have happened this way and it was only because the White House was in the grip of ideologues like Rumsfeld that it did. Woodward in one of the more telling passage in his book contrasts the American preparations for conquered Europe after World War 2, which took about three years, and the preparations for post invasion Iraq, which were perfunctory and were rushed through in weeks. Denis will surely agree that much of the success of post-war Germany rests on the effort put into the new constitutional arrangements, the federal structure, massive economic assistance and so on. One could also contrast the Nuremberg trials, which were prepared with infinite care and which have, ever since, been an exemplar for how to handle defeated war criminals, with the chaotically handled trial of Saddam Hussein, which will go down in history as a farce and a missed opportunity. Finally, some words of comfort for Denis – he speculates bitterly that Woodward’s book will be a best seller, but I bought it this weekend on the high street at half price, so obviously it won’t. At its reduced price of £9.50, it’s worth a read.