Matthew Parris
Somebody’s boring me, Dylan Thomas once remarked as he quit a dinner party in the middle of the soup course, “and I think it's me”. I, along with too many of my fellow commentators, could say the same these days about our own commentary.
All of us on both sides of this argument about the war have been moralising since Christmas, and look set to continue moralising until the crack of doom. We have moralised about personalities, moralised about policies, moralised about plans, moralised as if there were no tomorrow. Newspapers have become a nest of pulpits, television screens a forest of wagging fingers, the airwaves a cacophony of cluck-clucks and bravos.
You say George W. Bush is brave; The Daily Telegraph says his father was a wimp; we all say Rumsfeld is a brute. The Sun says Jacques Chirac is a worm; the Daily Mirror says Charles Kennedy is chicken; George Galloway says British troops are wolves. Half Europe thinks that America is a bully; half America praises Britain’s guts; the whole world thinks the Baathists are monsters. You say Robin Cook is vain; I say Tony Blair is mad; The Times commends his lonely valour. Clare Short, we shrill, has sold out; Hans Blix has copped out; Richard Perle has snuck away. “Mad”, “bad”, “brave”, “chicken”, “hero”, “wimp”, “bully”, “traitor” . . . the good, the bad and the ugly: around the media playground we dance, chanting short words with easy meanings.
And almost every term collapses upon examination into a verbalised salute or sneer aimed at the head of a politician — or the heads of a whole nation. This is such an easy way to write. No research tools are needed beyond a short conversation with our own conscience — always a genial exchange. Pink with fury or adoration, we laud or impugn the honour of a country, a world religion or a big name on a short cast-list of famous people. Each of us has our chosen candidates for Heaven, Hell or Purgatory, but on one thing it suits us to agree: this story is all about right and wrong. With columns to fill and indignation to vent, we reach for the moral thesaurus like an addict for his needle. A stab of sanctimony, a rush of blood, a warm feeling . . . and nothing gained.
It is time for a bonfire of the pieties. International diplomacy is not about good or bad intentions, it is about good or bad guesses.
Unfortunately for the writers of punchy sound bites, tabloid headlines or snappy book titles, history’s word-of-choice for 2002-03 will lack the zap of time-efficient monosyllables such as “sin”. Spoilsport historians will start from the premise that we are all sinners. The subject they will want to discuss will contain five syllables and 14 letters, use up two seconds of airtime to pronounce, totally fail to fit across the top of a tabloid newspaper, and require serious research to assess. The word is M-I-S-C-A-L-C-U-L-A-T-I-O-N. For this is the story of something worse than a crime: it is the story of a mistake.
When the war is over and we come to perform the autopsy, I predict that all the spume about who is to be loved or admired which today slops around the media, obscuring vision, will have dried to a yellowing fleck. History’s autopsy will be clinical, cutting through. Motives will in most cases emerge as unsurprising and matter of fact. The personal virtue of the main actors will be of only passing interest. Among the leaderships of the “old” Europe and the “new”, the sum totals of nobility and ignominy will be found to be more or less the same. The hopes and visions of the various European and American statesmen will not be assessed as differing greatly: all of them, we shall easily conclude, wanted world peace, international order, a good measure of national advantage and the best security money could buy.
Such assessments will not be the conclusion but the starting point of the really interesting investigation. We shall quickly allow that nobody was particularly cowardly; nobody was particularly brave; nobody but Saddam was evil, or desired anything but the best. There will be little on this score to detain us for many pages in our book before its authors turn to the one seriously baffling question, the one dismaying mystery, they will wish to pursue. How did such intelligent and well-meaning people in the governments of such sophisticated countries miscalculate to such an extent on so many fronts and cause such deep and terrible damage to so many institutions in so short a time?
Such a question throws up questions of its own. These, I fear, must start from the basis that the Governments of America, Britain, Germany, Russia and France would not have got themselves into the various positions they find themselves in today if they had known the likely outcome of their actions. For within the space of but a few months Nato is perhaps fatally wounded; the EU is bleeding internally; the British Government’s hopes of a referendum on a single currency have been pole-axed; bilateral relations between Britain and France, and between France and the United States, have been badly damaged; Germany’s transatlantic relationships have been knocked off balance; a trade war threatens; the chances of a world economic recession have increased; the UN Security Council has been horribly weakened; the commitment of the United States to the very idea of the United Nations has been called into question; Islamists and Islamophobes have both been inflamed; relations between the Arab world and the West have been torn; and decades of patient confidence building of many kinds have been pulled apart.
Forget even the question of whether a war was wise: it is surely clear that for Washington to have embarked on it unilaterally would have been preferable to the failed attempt at co-ordination. Among the questions which therefore arise — none of them with the slightest bearing on the moral estimability of any living politician — are these:
Is it true that the US Administration had settled on an invasion of Iraq long before Resolution 1441? If true, did the American political machine generate the grave internal debate warranted by such an idea? If not, why not?
Did the governments of the European allies know of any such debate, or any such long-standing US intention? If they did not, how did their intelligence networks fail to pick it up? If they did suspect it, why did they not co-ordinate a response and give Washington fair (and private) warning of what that response was likely to be?
Why had the British Government such seemingly scant intelligence of German, Russian and French thinking when our Prime Minister made it his mission to arrange the UN resolution which came to be known as 1441? Or, if it did have such intelligence, why did he lead the US Administration into a belief that differences within Europe and on the Security Council could be reconciled?
Once 1441 had been agreed, why did our Government not deduce from the difficulty of agreeing it that it would be unwise to encourage talk of a “second” resolution? Having encouraged such talk, why did the Prime Minister continue to sound so confident that such a resolution could eventually be agreed? What private assurance did he have from the French that they were bluffing about a veto, or, if he had none, who advised him that they were probably bluffing? Had Paris no means of privately warning our Prime Minister of French intentions? Was a warning given, and if not, why not?
How could the American State Department have been so crass as to insult a new and fragile government in Turkey by seeming to take for granted Ankara’s acquiescence in a plan to buy their military co-operation when the flattery of high-level visits and respectful presentation would have been simple to arrange? Who led our Government to believe that expert military advice was confident that invasion would bring a swift victory? (We can guess they were confident, or the Budget would not have been postponed for just a few weeks.)
There will be many such questions. From them emerges the impression of a colossal failure of international diplomacy. This, I repeat, has nothing to do with anybody’s virtue or courage. Nor does it arise from the clash of objectives. It arises from a failure on the principal actors’ part to give each other sufficient warning of their objectives.
Only Saddam has been wicked. Everybody else has screwed up. Now there is a term we might, after all, get into a tabloid — or even a national — newspaper
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-634785,00.html
Somebody’s boring me, Dylan Thomas once remarked as he quit a dinner party in the middle of the soup course, “and I think it's me”. I, along with too many of my fellow commentators, could say the same these days about our own commentary.
All of us on both sides of this argument about the war have been moralising since Christmas, and look set to continue moralising until the crack of doom. We have moralised about personalities, moralised about policies, moralised about plans, moralised as if there were no tomorrow. Newspapers have become a nest of pulpits, television screens a forest of wagging fingers, the airwaves a cacophony of cluck-clucks and bravos.
You say George W. Bush is brave; The Daily Telegraph says his father was a wimp; we all say Rumsfeld is a brute. The Sun says Jacques Chirac is a worm; the Daily Mirror says Charles Kennedy is chicken; George Galloway says British troops are wolves. Half Europe thinks that America is a bully; half America praises Britain’s guts; the whole world thinks the Baathists are monsters. You say Robin Cook is vain; I say Tony Blair is mad; The Times commends his lonely valour. Clare Short, we shrill, has sold out; Hans Blix has copped out; Richard Perle has snuck away. “Mad”, “bad”, “brave”, “chicken”, “hero”, “wimp”, “bully”, “traitor” . . . the good, the bad and the ugly: around the media playground we dance, chanting short words with easy meanings.
And almost every term collapses upon examination into a verbalised salute or sneer aimed at the head of a politician — or the heads of a whole nation. This is such an easy way to write. No research tools are needed beyond a short conversation with our own conscience — always a genial exchange. Pink with fury or adoration, we laud or impugn the honour of a country, a world religion or a big name on a short cast-list of famous people. Each of us has our chosen candidates for Heaven, Hell or Purgatory, but on one thing it suits us to agree: this story is all about right and wrong. With columns to fill and indignation to vent, we reach for the moral thesaurus like an addict for his needle. A stab of sanctimony, a rush of blood, a warm feeling . . . and nothing gained.
It is time for a bonfire of the pieties. International diplomacy is not about good or bad intentions, it is about good or bad guesses.
Unfortunately for the writers of punchy sound bites, tabloid headlines or snappy book titles, history’s word-of-choice for 2002-03 will lack the zap of time-efficient monosyllables such as “sin”. Spoilsport historians will start from the premise that we are all sinners. The subject they will want to discuss will contain five syllables and 14 letters, use up two seconds of airtime to pronounce, totally fail to fit across the top of a tabloid newspaper, and require serious research to assess. The word is M-I-S-C-A-L-C-U-L-A-T-I-O-N. For this is the story of something worse than a crime: it is the story of a mistake.
When the war is over and we come to perform the autopsy, I predict that all the spume about who is to be loved or admired which today slops around the media, obscuring vision, will have dried to a yellowing fleck. History’s autopsy will be clinical, cutting through. Motives will in most cases emerge as unsurprising and matter of fact. The personal virtue of the main actors will be of only passing interest. Among the leaderships of the “old” Europe and the “new”, the sum totals of nobility and ignominy will be found to be more or less the same. The hopes and visions of the various European and American statesmen will not be assessed as differing greatly: all of them, we shall easily conclude, wanted world peace, international order, a good measure of national advantage and the best security money could buy.
Such assessments will not be the conclusion but the starting point of the really interesting investigation. We shall quickly allow that nobody was particularly cowardly; nobody was particularly brave; nobody but Saddam was evil, or desired anything but the best. There will be little on this score to detain us for many pages in our book before its authors turn to the one seriously baffling question, the one dismaying mystery, they will wish to pursue. How did such intelligent and well-meaning people in the governments of such sophisticated countries miscalculate to such an extent on so many fronts and cause such deep and terrible damage to so many institutions in so short a time?
Such a question throws up questions of its own. These, I fear, must start from the basis that the Governments of America, Britain, Germany, Russia and France would not have got themselves into the various positions they find themselves in today if they had known the likely outcome of their actions. For within the space of but a few months Nato is perhaps fatally wounded; the EU is bleeding internally; the British Government’s hopes of a referendum on a single currency have been pole-axed; bilateral relations between Britain and France, and between France and the United States, have been badly damaged; Germany’s transatlantic relationships have been knocked off balance; a trade war threatens; the chances of a world economic recession have increased; the UN Security Council has been horribly weakened; the commitment of the United States to the very idea of the United Nations has been called into question; Islamists and Islamophobes have both been inflamed; relations between the Arab world and the West have been torn; and decades of patient confidence building of many kinds have been pulled apart.
Forget even the question of whether a war was wise: it is surely clear that for Washington to have embarked on it unilaterally would have been preferable to the failed attempt at co-ordination. Among the questions which therefore arise — none of them with the slightest bearing on the moral estimability of any living politician — are these:
Is it true that the US Administration had settled on an invasion of Iraq long before Resolution 1441? If true, did the American political machine generate the grave internal debate warranted by such an idea? If not, why not?
Did the governments of the European allies know of any such debate, or any such long-standing US intention? If they did not, how did their intelligence networks fail to pick it up? If they did suspect it, why did they not co-ordinate a response and give Washington fair (and private) warning of what that response was likely to be?
Why had the British Government such seemingly scant intelligence of German, Russian and French thinking when our Prime Minister made it his mission to arrange the UN resolution which came to be known as 1441? Or, if it did have such intelligence, why did he lead the US Administration into a belief that differences within Europe and on the Security Council could be reconciled?
Once 1441 had been agreed, why did our Government not deduce from the difficulty of agreeing it that it would be unwise to encourage talk of a “second” resolution? Having encouraged such talk, why did the Prime Minister continue to sound so confident that such a resolution could eventually be agreed? What private assurance did he have from the French that they were bluffing about a veto, or, if he had none, who advised him that they were probably bluffing? Had Paris no means of privately warning our Prime Minister of French intentions? Was a warning given, and if not, why not?
How could the American State Department have been so crass as to insult a new and fragile government in Turkey by seeming to take for granted Ankara’s acquiescence in a plan to buy their military co-operation when the flattery of high-level visits and respectful presentation would have been simple to arrange? Who led our Government to believe that expert military advice was confident that invasion would bring a swift victory? (We can guess they were confident, or the Budget would not have been postponed for just a few weeks.)
There will be many such questions. From them emerges the impression of a colossal failure of international diplomacy. This, I repeat, has nothing to do with anybody’s virtue or courage. Nor does it arise from the clash of objectives. It arises from a failure on the principal actors’ part to give each other sufficient warning of their objectives.
Only Saddam has been wicked. Everybody else has screwed up. Now there is a term we might, after all, get into a tabloid — or even a national — newspaper
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-634785,00.html
