The naming of cats is a difficult matter, according to TS Eliot in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The naming of wars is just as tricky. Only rarely do we pause to note the political will and imagination that have gone into imposing a title on this or that episode of state-sponsored violence. Yet the war name matters, because it provides the heading to what we now call the "narrative," the purpose of which is to explain the reasons for going to war and to justify, even ennoble, the bloodshed and sacrifice. Every war needs, as Old Possum says a cat does,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Sometimes this means that the two sides to a conflict adopt different names for it. The southern states of America preferred to remember the civil war as "the war between the states," because to call it a civil war was to accept the north's opinion that it was a war within one nation from which a group of slave-owning states had no legal or moral right to break away. Stalin preferred to call the second world war "the great patriotic war," in order to highlight the heroic defence of the motherland and relegate to the shadows the Nazi-Soviet pact.
How was the west to wage this new sort of war? The political elite quickly devised a modus operandi that in its essentials was adhered to for nearly 50 years. The general technique and the analysis on which that technique was based were spelled out with icy clarity in the famous 1946 "long telegram" of George Kennan, then a junior diplomat in Moscow, which was published under the pseudonym of "Mr X" in Foreign Affairs the following year. Its terms are now so familiar to us that we can scarcely conceive of any alternative: "It is clear that the main element of any US policy towards the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." Bluster and histrionics were to be avoided. American demands must not involve Soviet humiliation, and so on.
Kennan does not depict the Soviet leaders as headstrong know-nothings. On the contrary: "The Kremlin is under no ideological compulsion to accomplish its purposes in a hurry… The teachings of Lenin himself require great caution and flexibility in the pursuit of communist purposes. These precepts are fortified by the lessons of Russian history: of centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast unfortified plain."
While paying full heed to the implications of Marxist-Leninism for Soviet policy, Kennan is reminding us of the older Russian tradition that lies behind it. What the west is confronting is not simply a new ideology bent on world domination but an updated version of Russian despotism. From our side, therefore, behind the cold war, behind the anti-communist struggle, lay the conflict's secret name: what might be called, in terms that Marx would have recognised, "the war to contain Asiatic despotism."
This cold war narrative was remarkably successful. For 45 years, both the political elites and the vast mass of voters in what came to call itself "the west" subscribed to both the heading and the text. We were prepared to see it through, devoting a large proportion of our GDP to the struggle, and contributing munitions and men, often on a huge scale.
Yet there are oddities about both the narrative and the name, and even about when the cold war started and stopped. And can the series of bloody engagements, some of them lasting decades, around the edges of Asia over the period really be encompassed by the bland phrase "cold war"? Millions died in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, in wars, pogroms and other atrocities, with the encouragement or active participation of the superpowers, who contributed troops or arms or dollars in vast quantities. These conflicts were among the most murderous in history, dwarfed in scale only by the slaughter of the two world wars. In terms of casualties, it would be fair to say that the third world war has already taken place.
Not only did these wars prove costly to the local inhabitants; their immediate results were mostly unsatisfactory to the western powers and often to the USSR too. In how many of these peripheral wars did the west both prevail and leave behind a well-functioning democracy? In Malaysia, and half of Korea (but look at the other half). Elsewhere the results of western intervention ranged from messy to disastrous. Are the results of these "peripheral" wars really of so little significance for the main contest?
Nor does the conventional cold war narrative often pause to reflect on the reasons for these terrible costs and messy outcomes. No doubt there were local reasons for each failure, but they mostly boil down to one big reason. Time and again the western powers were startled by the degree of national feeling provoked by their intervention. However tepid people's adherence to the prevailing local ideology, they will fight to keep out invaders. Nobody at the outset of the Vietnam war dreamed that by its end so many thousands of Americans would have lost their lives, let alone that the Vietnamese dead would ruin into millions. This might be called "the patriotic surprise." A national will to resist, scarcely guessed at by the natives themselves, is forged by the invasion and is strengthened by the grief and rage generated by the death and destruction. Yet we have continued to plunge into proxy wars at regular intervals, as forgetful of the agony of the last one as women are said to be forgetful of the pains of childbirth.
Throughout the cold war, all of this was possible because western leaders did have a genuine moral purpose and were able legitimately to put a high moral sheen on their projects and excuse their actions which were often brutal or devious. So long as the struggle to contain despotism coincided with the struggle to defeat communism and demonstrate the superiority of liberal democracy, they could persuade their public that it was worth the sacrifice, especially as the hardest costs were being borne by the peoples of the periphery. The terrible bloodshed and destruction could be justified on the grounds that only by standing up to communism in its forward posts could the expansionist ambition of an ideology-driven superpower be contained. What changed in 1989 was that the anti-communist rationale melted away and western leaders have since failed to construct an alternative narrative for their actions that would bear the heat of public scrutiny.
There have certainly been efforts to do so: for example, the first President Bush's vision of a new world order, and George W Bush's acknowledgement, in a 2003 speech in London, that America had been wrong in the past to back dictators. Also knocking around the debate over the past few years have been the concepts of "rogue states" and "failing states," whose existence is alleged to be a threat both to their own citizens' human rights and to their region, if not the world. Another element in the rhetoric is the assertion that nuclear weapons must be restricted to those who already possess them and that to prevent the proliferation of such weapons is an essential part of the struggle for world order and peace. These two lines of thought were combined in the doctrine that the UN might legitimately take steps to stop a rogue state from possessing "weapons of mass destruction." This doctrine turned out to be a spectacular flop when Saddam Hussein's bluff provoked the western allies into offering what looked in retrospect like a trumped-up casus belli, if not an unforgivable lie.
These narratives may have intrinsic merit and public appeal. But they have never been co-ordinated or enunciated in a sustained fashion. The line has not been agreed on or stuck to. Nowhere is this truer than in Iraq, where we have slithered from one narrative to the next and back again. Did we go to war to enforce the will of the UN, or to liberate the people of Iraq, or to pursue the war on terror?
As a result, it is hardly surprising that the war, like Old Possum's cats, has three names. What Eliot called "the sensible everyday name" is the Iraq war. This name appeals especially to opponents of the war because it detaches the conflict from previous hostilities in the region and inside Iraq itself, and makes it easier to present the US decision to invade as reckless folly, unconnected to any genuine provocation. Only rarely is it referred to, more precisely, as "the second Iraq war," although those implicated in the project—ministers, generals and diplomats—do talk about "the second Gulf war," for them a more dignified name, linking it to the first Gulf war which had a copper-bottomed justification under the UN charter, namely Saddam's unprovoked invasion of Kuwait. Indeed, some of the war's defenders argue that the first Gulf war never ended. Perhaps they ought to call it "the long Gulf war"; the economic sanctions, the no-fly zones and the bombing sorties to enforce those zones do add up to a sustained pattern of warlike actions.
At least calling it "the second Gulf war" does correspond to the facts. The same cannot be said of the third name that is attached to it, the one that George Bush hoped would catch on: "the war on terror." It is now clear that the alleged links between Saddam and those responsible for the atrocities of 9/11 were either phoney or trivial. Yes, Saddam was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths within and beyond his border, and with or without WMD he remained a threat to the lives of his citizens and the peace of his region, but as a sponsor of international terrorism he never amounted to much.
Yet if the second Saddam war cannot be counted as an indispensable part of a war on terror, in what terms is it to be justified? Saddam's disregard of UN resolutions did constitute some kind of provocation, and it is just about possible to squeeze from the UN charter some justification for intervening to protect the human rights of those living under a despot, although the central thrust of the charter is to protect the despot from outside intervention so long as he stays within his borders. But something stronger is required to feed the hearts and minds of the public.
Even supporters of the war are painfully aware that there is at present no public narrative that will carry the weight of the second Saddam war. It is a war without a legitimising name. And into this vacuum have poured a host of fierce critiques that are pretty persuasive. It is said that the war was unnecessary because Saddam was already being contained by a combination of bombing raids and UN inspections. Then it is said that the war was appallingly managed because there was little preparation for its aftermath. Bush and Rumsfeld, brash and cocksure from the start, refused to commit enough troops, refused to accept that this was bound to turn into a nation-building mission, and then made the mistake of disbanding Saddam's army and police force, creating a huge, hungry and resentful recruiting base for the insurgency. For Blair to join this misbegotten adventure was Britain's greatest foreign policy blunder since Suez. These arguments in themselves are powerful, and there is plenty of evidence to back them up. There is certainly no doubting the damage done to western legitimacy and to the reputation of the US in the eyes of the world.
But there is about these accusations a curious sense of stopping short. Most people who advocate some version of this thesis do not go on to spell out the assumption behind what they are saying: namely, that if the war had not been fought at all, the problem of Saddam would have gone away, and/or that even if it had been fought, it might have been possible to win it and leave behind a reasonably functioning state with far less bloodshed. In other words, the alternatives to the policy that was adopted would have been relatively benign. The leading tormentor of the neocons, Matthew Parris of the Times, says that when asked for his alternative to invading Iraq, he replies candidly: do nothing. Yet he also says that "the coiled spring driving the clockwork of both the civil and the military parts of the Baathist administration was terror and brutality from top to bottom. At its apex was one monstrous dictator." That dictator was already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not to mention a million or two deaths in the Iran-Iraq war. Was a regime like Saddam's, or one led by his sons, likely to go quiet if we left him alone?
For what it's worth, I was a reluctant hawk before the war and I can see the attractions of becoming a retrospective dove. Yet I cannot help feeling that there is something too light and easy about the claim that most of this unpleasantness could have been avoided. That same alluring tone is to be found also in the claim that if only we had stopped Hitler going into the Rhineland, the second world war could have been averted. Or in AJP Taylor's claim that the first world war was a cock-up precipitated by the railway timetables of the German general staff. It has taken a generation of historians to show how utterly mistaken both of these propositions are.
It is good that there is now a more honest admission, especially after the US midterm elections, of the many mistakes in Iraq. Condoleezza Rice is again talking about "soft power" as a means of furthering America's interests. Everyone in the Pentagon is apparently reading a thesis by Colonel John Nagl, a Pentagon adviser and former Rhodes scholar. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a title borrowed from TE Lawrence) sets out an American version of counter-insurgency techniques learned from Lawrence, Robert Thompson and other masters of the art. There is at last a revival of American interest in the sort of hearts and minds campaign which goes all the way down, rather than representing little more than a cynical gloss on the rougher stuff.
Now there is everything to be said for recognising that the west is operating in a more fragile political and moral climate than during the heyday of the cold war. But the fashion for soft power has its dangers too. A focus on soft power tempts us to construct an alternative, more comfortable version of recent history, in which all the victories are won by low-cost peaceful competition, and the defeats are caused by irrational outbreaks of bellicosity or misguided intervention in other people's civil wars.
If in retrospect we sanitise the cold war like this, we mislead ourselves. The readiness of America and, often, Britain to wage difficult and costly wars in faraway areas of the world where their own interests were not immediately threatened is not just an embarrassing fact of postwar history. It is perhaps the central fact. And if we are to regard the cold war as a victory, then it would be odd to conclude that this readiness had nothing to do with that victory. This downplaying of the periphery wars springs, at least partly, from an inclination to make history seem less sad and difficult than it is. For if you write all these wars of containment back into the record, you have to confront a bleak possibility: that the discouragement and defeat of monsters may depend, in part, on a continuing readiness to fight even those wars, like Iraq, which turn out to have bloody consequences. There is something in GK Chesterton's maxim that "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
It is also worth imagining how a new George Kennan might frame a new set of instructions for today's post-cold war policymakers in the rebuilding of legitimacy. Any such instructions, I am sure he would insist, must knit together both the strategies they are to pursue and the narratives they are to broadcast to their own publics and to the world. No strategy can be viable unless it reconstructs western legitimacy in the eyes of both the public who are to bear its domestic costs and of the wider world which is to be on the receiving end of it. Here are a few suggestions for a latter-day Mr X:
1. It is crucial to make plain both our principles and our intentions. We must leave no uncertainty as to what we will and won't tolerate. From the Falklands to the first Gulf war, the costs of not making ourselves clear are painfully obvious.
2. The rise of the human rights agenda means that human rights can no longer be pursued or defended as a sideline. If moral credibility with the public is to be sustained, it must be at the heart of everything we do. But the human rights imperative cuts both ways. On the one hand, it means that in pursuit of their goals, however desirable, America and its allies can no longer ride roughshod over the human rights of foreigners. On the other hand, it offers a fresh justification for interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations in order to protect the rights of their citizens. The quicker the UN charter is amended to reflect this, the easier it will be to maintain public support for desirable projects.
3. If, as Bush and Blair proclaim, the encouragement of democracy is to be the new imperialism, then we need to think out much more sophisticated and sustained strategies for encouraging opposition parties, dissidents and other opponents of despotic regimes. So far, whether in Iraq or Zimbabwe, we seem to leave them in the lurch more often than we stick by them. In this mission we have a new ally. The communications revolution offers far greater opportunities to reach and assist citizens who live under despotic regimes. Even in the days of the cold war, democratic and free market ideas permeated the iron curtain with surprising ease. Now it is hard to see how much longer, for example, the Chinese authorities can control their citizens' access to the internet.
4. In all our actions, especially military action, the greatest possible care must be taken to minimise damage to the ecology and heritage of the target area. Looted historic monuments shock opinion at home and provoke new patriotic surprises on site.
5. Torture. Avoid—for the same reasons as 4. No gains in intelligence could possibly outweigh the damage done by Abu Ghraib.
6. Economic sanctions have been shown to be counterproductive as an instrument for the containment of tyrannies. Either they are wholly ineffective and merely boost the prestige of the tyrant, or they do heart-rending damage to the poorest families, thus enabling the tyrant to whip up further hatred of the west. Sanctions once seemed like a humane alternative to the threat or use of force. They are not.
7. Nuclear non-proliferation is an extremely awkward cause to make headlines out of, since it seems inherently unfair to the non-possessors. It is best pursued quietly through the UN, not by grandiose threats from the great powers.
8. In our eagerness to adopt the more appealing methods of persuasion, we must not neglect the possibility, unpleasant though it is, that certain tyrannies can be contained or unhorsed only by the credible threat and, if necessary, effective use of military force. We must not underestimate the discouragement that such force spreads to our potential opponents and the encouragement that it offers to our potential friends. The demonstration effect may seldom be as clear-cut as it was in the case of the Falklands war, where recapture of the islands brought democracy to Argentina. But imagine what the demonstration effect in the other direction would have been if communism had been allowed to spread across southeast Asia without serious opposition? Would the wall have come down when it did? Without hard power behind it, would soft power be enough? It would be surprising if the same demonstration effects did not apply to the rise and fall of tyrants in the Islamic world. The removal of Saddam, his capture from a hole in the ground and the destruction of his apparatus are humiliations of a spectacular order. We may be dismayed, but we should not be surprised that the immediate consequences are chaos and civil strife. This is not the first time that these have been the immediate consequences of western intervention.
The above principles would not necessarily betoken a retreat from the threat or use of force. The pursuit and defence of human rights may well legitimise more frequent interventions, often on quite a small scale, especially in Africa. As for Iraq, if we had steadily pursued a policy like this over the past 15 years, we might still find ourselves encamped there as we are now and having to cope with the brutal consequences that were always likely to follow the transfer of power from the minority Sunni to the majority Shia. But such an intervention would have arisen out of a policy which was clearly set out and consistently applied and which had as its unwavering aim the liberation of the people of Iraq from one of the nastiest regimes on record. The irreconcilable opponents of western intervention anywhere, any time, would still have opposed it. But many of those who opposed the war could have been brought back to something like the grudging acceptance they accorded to the first Gulf war—and, indeed, to the western cause throughout the cold war. We should be under no illusion, though. The reconstruction of legitimacy will be a long haul. And as Kennan taught us, we shall need to be patient and steady.
