Authors: John Keegan
It was anomalous that Saddam’s apparent avengers should have invoked the Caliphate, since his secularist régime was anathema to Islamic fundamentalists. Their appeal to the Caliphate also partook of myth rather than reality. The last Caliphate, which had its seat in the Ottoman capital at Istanbul, had no connection, either by endorsement of the
Umma
, the Muslim community, or by blood, with the family of the prophet, to justify its status. Endorsement by the
Umma
was the Sunni orthodoxy, blood descent the Shi’a orthodoxy. The Ottoman Turks had simply assumed the Caliphate, by right of conquest, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Caliphate, moreover, had been abolished by a secular Muslim, Mustapha Kemal, in 1925; no Westerner had been involved. Not even by the most tortuous theological logic could the infidel West be held responsible for the Caliphate’s termination.
It was most unlikely, in any case, that a dominant constituency for the re-establishment of the Caliphate could have been assembled in post-Saddam Iraq. The surviving Ba’athists were secularist, so were many of the Sunni population. The Shi’a,
though a majority in Iraq, were a minority in the Muslim world. Whatever views they advanced about the Caliphate would have been rejected by most of their co-religionists in the wider Muslim lands. Indeed, even among the Shi’a, the beliefs and the methods of the terrorists were an abhorrence. The Western conquerors, uninvolved as they were on one religious side or the other, were therefore pursuing an objectively uncontroversial policy in their efforts to establish an efficient, modernizing post-Saddam regime.
Unfortunately, the American efforts got off to a bad start. The British in the south, with their long imperial experience, took the pragmatic view that the priority was to establish law and order, working with whoever appeared co-operative, and to restore essential services. By September electricity supplies in Basra had been returned to normal and most other facilities, such as schools and hospitals, were operating efficiently. Crime was under control, the streets were safe and terrorism had been quashed. The Americans adopted an ideological approach. They sought an immediate transformation of Iraq from a tyranny to a functioning democracy, believing that liberation from Saddam would motivate a sufficient number of pro-democratic Iraqis to assume effective governmental functions within a few months. To oversee the democratization of Iraq, the US Department of Defense, the Pentagon, which had assumed the lead function, appointed a retired general, Jay Garner, to lead a team of Pentagon-vetted officials with authority to institute governmental functions. General Garner’s organization, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), was answerable to the expeditionary commander, General Tommy Franks. The State Department had, before the war, drawn up an elaborate collection of policy documents, the ‘Future of Iraq Project’, suggesting guidelines for reconstruction and transitional governmental procedures. On the Pentagon’s assumption of responsibility for Iraqi postwar affairs, however, they were set aside. The future of Iraq was to be decided, paradoxically, by the dictates of a military organization committed to idealistic democratic goals. Its brief was to hand over the administration of the country to a group of unpolitical Iraqi leaders within ninety days.
It became quickly apparent that the Garner transitional régime was inadequate to its task. Its personnel were naïve and under-trained, it lacked a rational plan of procedure. On 12 May Garner was replaced as presidential envoy by Paul Bremer, a former counter-terrorism expert at the State Department. He also had close Pentagon connections. Bremer established better relations with Central Command, which had fallen into quarrels with Garner’s team. He also made it a priority to tackle the problem of terrorism. ORHA became the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), with largely new personnel.
Bremer began at once to create a new Iraqi police force, with an initial strength of 40,000. Training academies were set up and Western police leaders brought to Iraq to instruct the trainers in Western policing methods. The trainers proved both enthusiastic and brave; bravery was needed, since the terrorists instantly targeted the men in new uniform. Recruitment remained a difficulty. The CPA had set its face against enlisting former servants of the Saddam régime but ex-policemen provided the most obvious enlistees. It was Bremer who also decided ill-advisedly on the complete disbandment of the army. A future Iraq would need a properly trained army and there was no better time to establish one than when large numbers of Western troops, models of what post-Saddam soldiers should be, were present on the territory. Bremer, however, was determined to make a clean sweep. As a result, several hundred thousand ex-soldiers were demobilized and turned onto the employment market which could not absorb them. Discontented and unpaid, they easily yielded recruits to the terrorist campaign.
Bremer also decided to exclude members of the Ba’ath party from new government employment. He thereby deprived the CPA of the services of most of the country’s most experienced experts and officials. His dilemma repeated that of the Allied Military Government of Germany in 1945. It had originally adopted, for moral and ideological reasons, a policy of de-Nazification, treating all former members of the Nazi party as disqualified to resume the positions they had held under Hitler.
Since almost everyone in a position of responsibility had been obliged to join the party, or had found it difficult not to do so, post-1945 Germany was deprived in the crisis of surrender and occupation of the services of those people most urgently needed for the country’s reconstruction. As a result there was a compromise: de-Nazification was accelerated, sometimes dispensed with altogether. Principal beneficiaries of the policy of turning a blind eye were the German secret weapons scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who was transformed from a Nazi favourite to an American citizen at headlong speed. Ironically it was his principal invention, the V-2 rocket, which, in its Iraqi version, formed a principal target of UNSCOM’s and UNMOVIC’s inspections.
The CPA was eventually obliged to adopt the attitude of the postwar occupiers of Germany, interviewing Ba’ath party members on a pragmatic, person-by-person basis and exempting from penalty almost all those judged necessary to the reconstruction programme.
De-Ba’athification did not apply in the selection of members of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), established in July 2003. Its twenty-five members represented all Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurds, Christians, Assyrians, Turkoman and others; three were women, an unprecedented departure from normalities even in Saddam’s secularist society, where women’s nominal equality had not accorded them political representation. None had been Ba’athists. Their consequent unfamiliarity with the exercise of power at first hampered their ability to launch and direct reconstruction programmes. Shortage of funds, however, was not one of their problems. On 10 June 2003, Paul Bremer announced that $100 million was to be made available for reconstruction, all the money to be spent through Iraqi companies, so as to provide employment and credit to domestic businesses. In the longer term, finance for reconstruction would be supplied by Iraqi oil revenues. The initial funds were a transfer from the American treasury.
The status of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and of the Iraqi Governing Council, was regularized on 22 May 2003 by
the adoption at the UN of Resolution 1483, which declared an end to the régime of sanctions against Iraq, in force since 1990, and gave legal authority to the occupation of Iraq by the coalition forces. The export of oil, destined to pay for the reconstruction, was authorized, the proceeds to be vested in the CPA. On 16 October the Security Council extended its approval of postwar arrangements in Iraq by adopting Resolution 1551, which recognized the legitimacy of the Coalition Provisional Authority and urged the establishment of a constitutional conference to assist the Iraqi Governing Council in settling the future government of Iraq.
The governments which had most stridently opposed the war, France and Germany foremost, continued to express their hostility to the coalition’s actions. Russia, at first an opponent, relented; in October it decided to back the Americans. The French and Germans remained intransigent. Though they both demanded ‘rights’ in the determination of Iraq’s future form of government, basing their claims on ill-defined appeals to ‘international democracy’, they declined to offer money to Iraq’s reconstruction programme. Both declined to provide troops to the international force, which by 2004 included contingents from thirty-five countries, such as Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Romania, the Czech Republic, Norway, Portugal and South Korea.
Despite the enlargement of the international occupation force, and the creation of a new inspection team, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), in succession to UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, the one front in which the coalition failed to make progress was in the location and identification of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The ISG, which was led by David Kay, the American former UN weapons inspector, published its interim report in October 2003. Its content, and his subsequent testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in the last week of January 2004, lent comfort to the opponents of President Bush in the United States and to the many critics of the war in Britain. Both were taken to substantiate the view that there was no reliable intelligence support for Anglo-American allegations of Saddam’s continuing possession
and development of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery. Dr Kay in fact said no such thing. While admitting that he doubted if large stocks of WMD would be found, an embarrassment to both the American and British governments which had advertised before the invasion their certainty of such discoveries, he qualified his doubts about the WMD threat by stating his belief in the existence of smaller stocks of WMD still hidden on Iraqi territory, Saddam’s sponsorship ‘right up to the end’ of such programmes as the refinement of the deadly poison ricin, his maintenance of a ballistic missile development programme, assisted by the import of foreign technology, and the resumption of nuclear weapons development. He also revealed to
The Sunday Telegraph
that he had evidence of the transfer by Saddam of WMD to Syrian territory.
It was, however, the headline elements in Dr Kay’s testimony, rather than his careful qualifications in detail, that were seized upon by the anti-war constituency. Its spokesmen were compromised in the United States because of their association with the campaigns of Democratic candidates running against George W. Bush in the current presidential election campaign; their message was also offset by the expert evidence of a few stalwarts in the media, such as Judith Miller of
The New York Times
, a veteran of weapons inspection on the ground, who continued to demand that attention be paid to the evidence for WMD. On the whole, the anti-war party, though strident, failed to capture control of opinion among the American people who remained in the majority supportive of their President and armed forces. That was not the case in Europe, where the French and Germans, governments and peoples alike, remained hostile. It was equally not the case in Britain. There the moderate majority continued to support Prime Minister Blair’s Iraqi policy, but many professional politicians and much of the media took a different view. Their suspicions, essentially that Britain had gone to war for unsubstantiated reasons, found endorsement in a broadcast by Andrew Gilligan, a BBC reporter specializing in defence affairs, on 29 May 2003. At 6.07 a.m., on the
Today
programme, the BBC’s
flagship morning radio news channel, Gilligan revealed that ‘a British official who was involved in the preparation of the dossier’ – the dossier being an intelligence assessment of the threat presented by Iraq’s WMD, prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee and submitted in September 2002 to the Prime Minister – had claimed it was ‘transformed in the week before it was published to make it sexier’. As an example he cited the statement that ‘weapons of mass destruction were ready for use in forty-five minutes’. The ‘official’ said, according to Gilligan, that the ‘forty-five minute’ statement was not in the original draft of the dossier, was included ‘against the wishes’ of some involved in the dossier’s preparation and came only from one source, instead of the usual two or more.
The broadcast attracted widespread interest, which grew. Its truth was denied by the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, Alastair Campbell, after he and Gilligan had both given evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) on 19 June and 25 June respectively. During late June the interest of the media, that of the BBC in particular, and of the government focused on identifying Gilligan’s ‘official’. The mystery was partially dissolved on 1 July when a letter, written the previous day, was received at the Ministry of Defence. It came from Dr David Kelly, a scientific civil servant with great experience in the arms control field in general and Iraqi WMD in particular, and revealed that he was the ‘official’ Gilligan had cited. He carefully defined what had been discussed in the Charing Cross Hotel, over a glass of apple juice. He emphasized that he had in no way said anything to undermine government policy, revealed that he supported the war, because he regarded Saddam as a threat to regional peace, and admitted only that he had conceded that the ‘forty-five minute’ claim might have been added to the dossier ‘for impact’. There were no witnesses to their conversation and no evidence of its content, except for Gilligan’s skimpy and barely decipherable notes.
Two consequences followed from the receipt of Dr Kelly’s letter at the Ministry of Defence. One was that he was required
to give evidence before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, in public and on television, on 15 July, and before the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) on 16 July; the other was that, over the course of the next days, Dr Kelly was revealed by the government, in a convoluted and less than frank way, to be Andrew Gilligan’s ‘official’ (it was a complication of the story, wholly unfair to Dr Kelly, that he had somehow been characterized, and would so be described by much of the media, as an ‘intelligence officer’, which he was not). Dr Kelly was roughly handled by several members of the FAC, particularly a Labour member, Andrew Mackinlay, a backbencher who went out of his way to scorn Dr Kelly, a highly distinguished scientist and devoted government servant, as ‘chaff’ and ‘a fall guy’. Many viewers were stunned by Mackinlay’s performance, which many felt was unworthy of a Member of Parliament.