Protected By Their Successors

Peter McKay writes:

As we mourned the dead of two world wars and more recent conflicts, our Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir David Richards said the ‘war on terror’ can never be won. The best we can do is keep our Al Qaeda enemies at bay. We’ll be in Afghanistan (invaded in 2001) for the next five years, at least. As for Iraq (invaded in 2003), that’s likely to remain a bloody mess into the foreseeable future. Not to mention, of course, the everyday threat of terrorism in aviation, our transport systems and our cities. A brilliant prospect, isn’t it? A ‘war on terror’ that will soon have lasted longer than our two world wars combined.

Did anyone realise that an open-ended ‘war on terror’ would be the result of invading Iraq and Afghanistan? Yes, it was said so at the time. We knew Iraq’s warring tribes would set about each other once Saddam was removed, and we’d seen the mighty Soviet military machine chased out of Afghanistan. Was there any alternative after the 9/11 attacks on America? Yes, those responsible could have been pursued relentlessly without the distraction of invading two countries, which put the then little-known Al Qaeda group on the map.

Given this background, you’d expect the military genius who declared the war on terror - former U.S. President George W. Bush - would, at the very least, be under house arrest. Not at all! He’s on the up and up - the subject of toadying interviews. One of them, by the Right-wing historian Andrew Roberts, says of ‘American aristocrat’ Bush: ‘I’ve never met a man more totally at ease with himself and his legacy.’ Bush’s reputation is said to be on the rise, while that of his successor, Barack Obama, sinks in the polls. Why so? Partly because Obama has done too little, too late to follow through on his main campaign pledge to end Bush’s wars honourably and bring home the troops.

How can Bush and his disciple, Tony Blair, smugly conclude they were right, pushing out self-serving memoirs suggesting that history will be kind to them when they are responsible for so much death and destruction? Because they are protected by their successor governments from the consequences of what they have done. Both the U.S. and Britain are keen on jailing or hanging foreigners for war crimes, yet we consider our own leaders immune from prosecution.

There’s another complication, too: the Tories were Blair’s allies over Iraq. Hence their disinclination to pursue Labour over its so-called dossier on Saddam’s non-existent WMDs. Only the Liberal Democrats opposed Blair’s wars. Now they’re silenced by coalition for the next five years. As a senator, Barack Obama voted against war in Iraq. That helped him to win the presidency in 2008. Why, after becoming President, didn’t he bring Bush and Co to book over their lies and evasions? By failing to do so, Obama encouraged Bush and his cronies on the Right to re-organise themselves against his presidency.

David Bromwich, who teaches literature and political thought at Yale, says Obama’s ‘legal indulgence’ of Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney was ‘a magnanimous deed, as well as a signal of non-aggression to tamp down the savagery of the Cheney circle’. But it had the opposite effect. ‘It made sure that none of the people from whom Obama had most to fear would ever fear him …’ By preventing the disclosure of evidence of torture and extraordinary rendition — and citing the need to keep state secrets — Obama played into Bush and Cheney’s hands. They’d claimed their actions were dictated by necessities of state. Writing in the London Review of Books, Bromwich says Obama ‘had foregone the only assurance the law affords against the repetition of such acts’. So Bush is on the ascendancy again, along with the folks who put him in power. Our own, ongoing Iraq inquiry is forgotten.

Remembering our war dead is an honourable ritual. We dignify ourselves by doing it. But we must also remember how we got into wars.