The new Iraq received a heart-warming welcome at the Olympic games opening ceremony. But the invasion and its aftermath continue to reverberate through both British and American politics, revealing the confusing moral landscape of today's international relations. The British left grumbles about an invitation to the new Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, to address this year's Labour party conference as if American and British troops had just overthrown Salvador Allende, not Saddam Hussein. And David Marquand, writing in the last issue, spoke for many opponents of the war on left and right when he declared: "Europeans cannot afford to treat the middle east as an adventure playground for moralising exporters of democracy… For heartland Europe, a stable Iraq - even under a dictator - was better than the instability that the Americans brought with them."
As Michael Petek points out on the letters page, it now seems to be Europe, and even parts of the left, which stands for the realpolitik that the US was once chastised for in Latin America. This is not to say that US motives for war in Iraq were pure. Wars can be fought for good and bad reasons at the same time, and can also have good and bad outcomes at the same time. It seems that there is something about the horror of large-scale violence which encourages people to think in moral absolutes. But what is wrong with saying that the Iraq war was, on balance, unjustified - at least on the grounds on which it was argued for - but that its outcome has been, on balance, beneficial (although it will be hard to establish any clear, human cost-benefit analysis for another two or three years)? This, minus the final caveat, is roughly the position that John Kerry is arguing in the US election. Kerry's presentational problem is how to be both reassuringly strong and intelligently nuanced on Iraq at the same time.
Erik Tarloff listens in on the Democratic bigwigs as they worry about whether Kerry is too nuanced and about whether anyone is listening in on them. Andrew Adonis, Roy Jenkins's biographer, continues the theme of eavesdropping on power by recalling his days acting as a conduit between Tony Blair and Jenkins.
And who would feel more at home in this world of moral complexity and eavesdropping than Graham Greene, whose centenary is celebrated by Julian Evans inside? To add spice to his reflections, we have an early view of the 1980s correspondence between Greene and his shadiest mentor - Kim Philby.
