Most politics is a matter of trial and error. You try something; if it works you carry on, if it fails you try something else. Usually the trial is based on some theory. Intelligent policymakers will test the theory against reality in a small way before making a big bet on it.
Foreign policy is more difficult. It consists of a series of one-off problems, and you do not get a choice about whether they are big or small. Even after the event it may not be clear whether you did right or wrong. One school of thought argues that Britain should have stayed out of the second world war and instead preserved the empire. Most of us would guess that both were impossible, but we cannot prove it. Others believe that but for Pitt's hatred of Napoleon, peace might have been possible in the Europe of his time. Trial and error may lead to a sound way of managing interest rates or hospitals—neither simple tasks—but in foreign policy everything is new.
The victors of the second world war were more successful in avoiding some of the mistakes of Versailles though, as it turned out, the peace of 1945 with division, annexation and occupation was in many ways a harder peace than Versailles. Churchill's sense of history equipped him for his and Britain's finest hour, but it also prevented him from seeing that empire was doomed. Britain's second great historical achievement of the 20th century, the peaceful dismantling of empire, came from the different historical vision of Attlee and Macmillan. Stand and fight or cut the losses and compromise—these two approaches represent the basic choice in foreign affairs. History is only a partial guide to the right answers.
The problem of the new in foreign policy seems worse than ever today. New weapons, new states, a new world where domestic and foreign policy connect in ways they never have done before. Which of the following is the greatest threat: the spread of nuclear weapons, the rise of China, global warming, catastrophic terrorism or the failure of the state system in Africa and the middle east? Most of us would probably settle for global warming because it seems the most certain and the most relevant to our lives. Europe is not under obvious threat from any of the others. (Americans, though no less secure, seem likely to give a different answer.) But that could change. If terrorists were to start regular attacks across Europe using biological weapons, our lives would alter dramatically. If nuclear weapons became common across the middle east, incalculable risks would follow. Perhaps we will look back on the present moment as the calm before the storm. We cannot know.
These risks are difficult to calculate, because they are new, they concern threats that are beyond calculation, and they are less visible than armies massing on frontiers. It was to deal with these new threats, distant but potentially catastrophic, that the idea of pre-emptive/preventive action was put forward by the Bush administration. The idea of attacking a potential enemy before it grows too strong is not new, but the lessons of history are, as usual, ambiguous. Sometimes, looking back, we may conclude that pre-emptive action was right. Napoleon would surely have attacked Britain one day with or without Pitt (indeed he tried via Ireland). Hitler would have done the same. On the other hand, the German idea in 1914 that it would be better to fight Russia before it grew unmanageably strong seems, in retrospect, fatal. And those who argued in the 1950s for a pre-emptive attack on the Soviet Union to prevent it acquiring thermonuclear weapons or, like Curtis LeMay in the 1960s, for an attack on the Chinese nuclear programme, do not today look like wise counsellors. In both cases, doing nothing turned out to be a good policy. Is there any conclusion to draw from these examples, other than that history is written by the victors? It seems as if, on each occasion, we were wise either in our action or in our inaction, and they were wrong.
What should we do against risks we have not faced before and can hardly calculate? Here, even the unreliable guidance of history is not available. And yet there does sometimes seem to be a logic in events. One of my personal regrets is that I did not see when East Germans had been let out to the west via Hungary that the wall would fall. Another is my failure to predict a Kurdish rebellion after the defeat of Saddam Hussein in 1991. It seems that at a certain point events become as good as inevitable. For example, if nuclear weapons spread, the risk of their being used increases. If education, frustration and technology spread, it is logical to expect a further growth in terrorism.
Precautionary measures against bird flu or the millennium bug are easy enough, since the costs of the measures are not dramatic and the risk is. In the same way, it was easy enough for British leaders 100 years ago to follow the rule that any single power dominating the European continent spelled trouble, and thus to take pre-emptive action—with widespread support at home. But what do you do when the risks are remote but enormous, and the costs of counter-action are high—as is the case with military action?
In his widely praised book, The Politics of Good Intentions, David Runciman pays much attention to risk and what he sees as its manipulation by politicians, notably Tony Blair. He does not give a full answer to the question of how new, incalculable risks should be handled. Doing nothing is a possibility, but everyone should understand that there is a risk in that too. It may be right that, as he implies, some of these risks are exaggerated. But how can we be sure?
In the case of Iraq the risks were exaggerated. The war was started on the false assumption that Saddam Hussein had large-scale WMD programmes; it turned out he had none. In Britain, at least, the existence of WMD was a central premise of the campaign. It was not particularly well supported by intelligence but many believed it. After all, in 1991 the intelligence community had been shocked to find how far the Iraqi nuclear programme had advanced—far beyond the estimates of the day. In 1998, Saddam Hussein stopped co-operating with the UN inspectors and they left Iraq: what were we to suppose? What everyone guessed—those who were against the war as well as those who supported it—was that he was at it again. Other arguments were also made for war, notably Saddam Hussein's appalling record and the desirability of bringing democracy to the middle east. Personally I am sceptical about foreign armies as a means of establishing democracy—though the defeat of an authoritarian regime is not a bad starting point, as Italy in 1943 or Argentina in 1982 suggest—but in the British government's case the central argument was about WMD, not democracy.
Suppose that nuclear proliferation is one of the main risks of the age we are entering. What should we do? Turn the clock back four years. If we decide to do nothing in the case of Iraq—where there is a forest of UN resolutions, most of them flouted, where sanctions have been tried over years without producing any obvious result except for starving children, where a particularly nasty dictator remains by all accounts intent on acquiring nuclear weapons—then will there ever be a case where the international community will have the stomach to enforce its own rules? If the answer to this question is no, then we may as well kiss goodbye to the idea of limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. If we take these problems seriously and have some thought for future generations and the world they may have to live in, is it not better to act? If you are a British prime minister, you do not have the capacity to act on your own in such cases, but do you not have a responsibility to support a US president who has the means and the courage to take the risks?
That is one way of putting the case for the war. You do not hear it much today because the major premise is discredited. It would make those concerned look foolish to keep reminding people of the key errors for which they were to some degree responsible. But it is a reasonable case nonetheless. It does not prove that war was right, or that the risk of action was better than that of inaction: that is inherently unprovable. The weakness of those who argued against the war was that they offered no alternative way of preserving the non-proliferation system or of dealing with the risks of its gradual demise.
Perhaps it is the natural inclination to think the worst of politicians that makes writers such as Runciman neglect more subtle criticisms. If big risks and big uncertainties are involved, it must make sense to try to reduce the unknowns by seeking more evidence. A more powerful criticism of the Iraq war is not that it was cynical or frivolous but that it was precipitate. If there was uncertainty about the WMD, why not let the UN inspectors' mission run its course to see if the case could be proved or at least better supported? Why the hurry? The weather in the region might have meant a delay of some months but matters of war and peace should not be settled by the weather. The development of WMD in the middle east would have incalculable consequences—but so does military action. These are big decisions that need time and debate.
The problem for a British prime minister is that he is not fully in control. He is in alliance with the US. This also is not unreasonable. The world we live in is ordered by American power. Supporting the US is a natural and honourable policy for those who benefit from its protection. But once you have committed yourself to working with America, it will make most of the decisions. It has most of the military assets and it is taking most of the risks; any ally that fails to understand this will quickly lose its attention, not that it necessarily got much in the first place. Cobra II by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, an 800-page history of the Iraq war and the planning process leading up to it, mentions Tony Blair four times, Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon once each.
Where does democratic debate fit into this decision-making process? Is representative democracy adequate to deal with the problems of risk, intelligence, war and peace? Runciman's answer is that it is. Probably this is not wrong, though for one who wears his radicalism on his sleeve it is a strangely conservative conclusion. In its support he provides an interesting little essay on the Abbé Sieyès, who argued the case for representative democracy during the French revolution, as Madison did after the American revolution. Perhaps this idea was not as revolutionary as all that, since representative assemblies of one sort or another existed already; indeed, the delegates to the Third Estate were elected on the basis of a fairly broad male suffrage. Nevertheless, until that moment the assumption had always been that democracy was possible only in a city-state, and that in a large country it would lead to chaos. Representative democracy was the solution to this problem. Since the revolutions of the 18th century, the idea of democracy through representative assembly has become the norm—and as our societies have changed, the scope of representation has undergone successive enlargements to take in the middle classes, the poor, non-whites, women and youth. We have not yet dealt with the question of foreigners, but we will one day.
It is too early to write off representative democracy, but we should still recognise that the world has changed since the days of Madison and Sieyès, and that this strains the system. One change is external: the state is no longer self-contained—we need decisions in a wider framework than that of the nation. The notion that the WTO or the G8 or the EU are "undemocratic" belongs to this dilemma. In fact, in the case of the EU, decisions are made by some combination of elected governments and elected European parliamentarians (though not many voters bother to vote for them). But the architecture is different from our familiar national institutions, and is not well accepted. National parliaments can intervene, but it is difficult for them to do so decisively since the final decisions are going to be made by compromise in Brussels. For the most part, these decisions concern dreary regulatory subjects that do not excite much domestic interest—except for the odd "straight bananas banned" newspaper story.
At the end of the 18th century, the nation and the idea of national decision-making were new and modern. It was this fresh concept and identity that made representative dem-ocracy possible. The idea worked so well that politics and identity remain national today. However, economics and, increasingly, security too have become global and need global and regional management. With economics it is possible to manage many of the technical decisions through an international technocratic process. In contrast, decisions on war and peace need national debate, but alliances are international and belong outside the national framework of politics and democratic discussions. This applies to Nato, to the EU and also to the special relationship. Politics is local; economics is global; security is American. Here is the democratic dilemma: our most important political institutions are national, but some of our most important decisions are made in Washington not in Westminster.
Internally, our societies have changed since the 18th century. The revolutions of that century were partly the long-term consequence of Gutenberg and Caxton. Print made books cheap and learning accessible. People were able to read the Bible for themselves and make up their own minds about it. The church's authority declined, as did authority in general as a source of wisdom and legitimacy. Print created national languages and with them national consciousness. As the church became less significant, the state, and in particular the nation state, grew up to fill the space left vacant. Thinkers and governments of the time could see that something dangerous was going on. As early as 1651, Hobbes had warned against letting people read the Bible for themselves.
We do not know what changes text messaging, the internet and blogs will bring, but there will surely be an impact on our identity and on our political systems. Print brought national identity; the net offers anonymity or multiple identity. The consequences of print technology worked themselves out over a period of 500 years. The coming revolution will be faster, but has only just begun. Representative democracy seems to me, as to Runciman, the best system we are likely to find for the moment. But does it continue to fill the place in people's lives that it once did? Participation in traditional politics is in decline everywhere. The NGO, the radio phone-in, the blog all seem to offer better opportunities for political expression, but do not offer much in the way of control on the executive.
One sign of decline in representative democracy is the need that leaders feel to appeal to the people. The House of Commons has the power of decision but it is the polls that politicians watch. Debates on television seem more important than debates in parliament. The tendency to court popularity by proposing referendums grows—though they are the modern equivalent of the chaotic Athenian democracy that Madison and others rejected. And as the appeal to the people becomes louder so does the need to present policy choices in moral terms. The reason for attacking Iraq may have been an old fashioned piece of realpolitik but it is difficult to sell such policies to a wide audience, so policy tends to be cloaked in moral sentiments. Double standards have always existed in foreign policy and—as Runciman says—I am not the first to speak up for them. Public and personal morality are not the same: morality belongs in the world of law; realpolitik in the world of power. Machiavelli explained this long ago.
Realpolitik is both necessary in a world of power and unworkable in a world of democracy. The liberal imperative to remake the world in our democratic image is one solution to this dilemma. The neoconservative urge to do this by force of arms is the bit that doesn't work. But whatever happens, we cannot go back to secret decision-making, nor even to leaving everything to parliament. The need for hard choices will remain, sometimes for choices between alternatives both of which are morally indefensible (do you allow killing to continue or do you invade Sudan?). Sustaining an intelligent foreign policy in these conditions requires more, not less, debate.
One of the things that is alarming about the Iraq war is that there was so little debate in the US before the decisions were made. Right or wrong, the decision to invade should not have been an easy one and it needed discussion: democracy is about debate as well as decision. As Runciman says, a wide debate should lead to better decision-making. But it is no use having democratic debate in Europe if that has no influence in Washington where the decisions are made. Since its European allies have little leverage on it individually, the way to a more democratic foreign policy must lie in a stronger collective European input into US policy. Only by making the EU work can Europeans achieve a voice that will be listened to in Washington. The EU, like the WTO, is not a classical representative democracy. Nations are represented by governments and decisions are reached by negotiation. But at least the process is open and is governed by rules—both characteristic of democratic systems. Bilateral deals with the US are, in the nature of things, secret and made from a position of weakness. It is hard to see anything better on the horizon than representative democracy, but we need at the least to explain to ourselves how it should function and fulfil its purposes under today's circumstances.
All of us are in the middle. British prime ministers are caught between the need to win votes and the need to safeguard our future. In foreign policy they are torn between the slog of building a European consensus and the glamour of American power. Runciman is torn between journalistic polemic and political philosophy. When his book highlights the philosophical issues underlying the political questions of the day it is interesting, though he rarely answers the questions. It is a book of ups and downs. The downs include a comparison of Iraq with the Weimar republic—would that it were so orderly—and a chapter on Robert Kagan devoted to showing that Hobbes was not a Hobbesian. The ups are in the witty writing and pointed questions. There is interesting work in progress here. With a little more work there is a serious book trying to get out.
The Politics of Good Intentions is about Iraq, but it is a book of ideas and opinions. Cobra II is a book of facts. It will become the benchmark work on the Iraq campaign up to the summer of 2003. Michael Gordon seems to have had unparalleled access to decision-makers and documents—including two striking telegrams from the British representative in Baghdad—itself a demonstration of how much our societies have changed. The result is a gripping read. Though there is a lot of military detail, this makes more vivid the picture of what happens when plans collide with reality. One of the things that happens is that people die. Cobra II's perspective is American—Gordon was an embedded reporter; one day perhaps someone can piece together how it feels to be on the receiving end of American power.
Here and there Gordon and Trainor throw light on some of the issues that preoccupy Runciman. They note, for example, that the overwhelmingly positive congressional vote on Iraq in 2002 came just before the mid-term elections, giving it something of the character of a plebiscite. Before the first Gulf war, the vote had taken place just after the elections so that congressmen were able to function more in the fashion that Burke conceived representative democracy. The vote in 1991 was of course very close, especially in the Senate. They also draw attention to the difficulties of interpreting intelligence. Just before the UN inspectors arrived in Iraq, satellite intelligence showed greatly increased activity at suspected WMD sites. Almost every intelligence agency guessed that concealment or dispersal was under way. In fact, it was the opposite: Saddam Hussein was trying to clean up the sites and destroy any leftover chemical weaponry so that he could show the UN that he was free of WMD.
Cobra II is almost two books: one on the planning, one on the operation. But it is good that they are combined. As Clausewitz says, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. We might add today that no plan for civilian reconstruction survives contact with the civilians. This is especially true if the plan hardly exists. Post-second world war planning began in 1942; even so it was often a mess. In the case of Iraq, reconstruction planning started a few weeks before the invasion. Civilian planning is more difficult than military planning. Within limits, all armies are similar. Societies are much more complicated and difficult to understand; and without a political structure it is very difficult to communicate with the people as a body.
Gordon and Trainor give their views on the lessons to be learned from Iraq—so far—at the end of their book, but the facts speak equally eloquently for themselves, and the reader will have already drawn his own conclusions. Their conclusions are damning: the seemingly successful military campaign paved the way for the postwar chaos and the insurgency, a mixture of "hubris and heroism, of high technology wizardry and cultural ignorance." But we should remember that mistakes are inevitable in any massive centrally planned operation like a military campaign or a reconstruction programme. The attraction of democratic and market systems is that they allow for small mistakes and find ways of correcting them along the way. This is not possible for dictatorships or for centrally planned economies, and military operations have some of the features of both. Even so, in the case of Iraq some of the mistakes seem gratuitous.
We should beware, however, of the conclusion that everything would have been all right if only the planning had been more thorough. Or that we can do better next time. Once you invade someone else's country, you cease to be in control. They may be at your mercy, but you are also at theirs. The problems inherent in a post-conflict situation are mostly political and they cannot be solved by force of arms.
As for Iraq, we do not yet know how it will turn out. Roughly 26m Iraqis want democracy to succeed, but democracy requires a culture of compromise and of loyalty to a constitution. These may not yet exist. Our prime minister will be judged in the end by history; by the random results, that is, of a hundred thousand events he can neither know nor control.
