Helmintholog

On the real tragedy, but the retreat of the warhards is now like the retreat of the Iraqi army from Basra in the first gulf war, when tens of thousands were killed by Allied aircraft. This morning’s papers are full of commentators running full-pelt from the enemy. At the head of them is the Daily Telegraph — yes — that Daily Telegraph, which under Conrad Black was the most completely neoconned and -conning paper in the business.

Students of military history will know that this is the most dangerous moment of all for the retreating army. Better, surely, to mount a despairing bayonet charge towards the enemy, hoping to frighten them back to their lines. And so we must read Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail today.

Washington is buzzing with rumours that the US is considering inviting Iran and Syria to help restore order in Iraq and that the President is desperately looking at all suggestions for an early exit strategy. Almost every day brings out of the woodwork yet another Republican or military or intelligence type to intone the funeral rites over Iraq.
Well I’m going to stick my neck out and defy the received wisdom to say that all this is so much hooey. The biggest danger that we face — and it is fast being realised — is of talking ourselves into defeat.
… For sure, plenty of mistakes have been made and need to be corrected. But that does not mean the strategy of remaining in Iraq until the insurgency is defeated should change. The security of the region and the world depends on it.
Those of us who have always supported this war must concede that Iraq has indeed become a central hub of jihadi terrorism. But the idea that we would all have been safer had Saddam remained in power is wrong.

Saddam was a godfather of terror. If he had not been deposed, we might now be facing a major threat to our security from his nuclear programme — just like North Korea, whose own nuclear ambitions Saddam helped realise.

… for all the violence, Iraq represents an achievement of the first magnitude. Who would ever have imagined that its previously murderous rival factions of Shia, Sunni and Kurds would now be co-operating in running the country after being democratically elected?
The insurgency is actually failing in the first and most important of its objectives — to destroy this political settlement. For all the appalling carnage, Iraq’s government continues to function. Far from civil war, it has passed a new plan for peace and reconciliation backed by all factions pledging to act together.
In short, Iraq is holding up heroically. But the insurgency is well on the way to achieving its second objective — a collapse of nerve in the US and UK.

I would like to believe that she is the only person who believes that the way out of the present difficulties is to widen the war “One of the reasons for the continuing violence in Iraq, after all, is America’s spineless failure to hold Iran and Syria to account for their sponsorship of terror in Iraq and elsewhere.” But this is the logic of the neocon position and there may be others like her in Washington who think that they must rescue their position with a bombing campaign.

Next to her, by the way, is a British nationalist leader saying that the war is a disaster, and the British implicated in this catastrophe.

I quote Melanie Phillips at length because I don’t think she is just completely mad — though, of course, on the war, she is. The things that frighten her frighten me, too. But if her remedies are the only ones, then we really are all doomed.

This has been the week when half of our problem became obvious: the war is lost. What hasn’t yet sunk in is the other half of this catastrophe: we can’t afford to lose it.

I like Germans; I like Americans. I’m even quite fond of the English. But when I look at the reactions to the Lancet study on Iraqi deaths. I am reminded of a photograph reproduced in Tony Judt’s Postwar. A small boy, in a knitted sweater and shorts that come down to his knees, walks down a sandy heathland road. In the background are birch trees and a couple of pines. The boy has a pained, determined expression, and is looking away from the verge, where perhaps a hundred corpses have been laid down in rows. They are former inmates of Belsen, just up the road.

Judt’s caption says "Like most adult Germans in post-war years, he averts his gaze."

One of the surprises of this really excellent history has been just how little the Germans came to terms with Nazism. When I lived there, as a teenager, between 1969 and 1971, approx, all the Germans I knew at all well were of my own generation; and the man from whom we hired our house had survived captivity after Stalingrad, and so might be considered to have expiated his crimes and then some. But Judt is full of acid little notes about the extent to which the Germans were not, as we would now say, good. "In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the Agriculture ministry were former Nazis … Of the newly constituted West German diplomatic service, 43 percent were former SS men, and another 17 percent had served in the SD or the Gestapo."

At about the same time, a poll found that 37% of Germans thought it would be better for Germany to have no Jews on its territory, and 25% of them had a good opinion of Hitler.

This doesn’t prove the unique depravity of Germans, only their depravity. It is very hard for countries, as for individuals, to admit wrongdoing sincerely; perhaps it is harder for countries: if a language is just a dialect with an army, a nation is a dialect with defence mechanisms. We may be fairly certain that the little boy in Judt’s picture didn’t himself kill any of the corpses by the roadside, any more than you or I killed anyone in Iraq.

But it does suggest that the reaction to the Lancet’s study will be, overwhelmingly, that of George W. Bush. We won’t find it credible, because to do so would make us accomplices in something entirely ghastly. For all the people saying they predicted this horror (and I have just gone back and looked at my own predictions) I don’t think many of us thought 600,000 excess deaths were a remotely credible result of the invasion. To give an idea of what 600,000 people means, suppose that half of the people who went on the last big anti-war demo in London had died since then, as a result … that feels entirely different, even to 600,000 foreigners (of course, proportionate to Britain’s population the number should be much higher. Suppose everyone who went on the anti-war marches had died since then. That would be about the death rate proportionately.)

I doubt that even convinced opponents of the war want to believe something that terrible has happened as a result of our actions, or inactions. I don’t know whether it is worse to think now that we could have done more to stop the war, or to reflect that we could do no more than we actually did. But if we opponents must look away as they pass the rows of corpses, why should we expect that supporters of the war should face the facts when they have so much more at stake.