John Keegan is England’s foremost military historian and, for many years, was the Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. His book — The Second World War — is arguably the best single volume book on World War II and his book The Face of Battle is essential reading for anyone seeking an understanding of the history of warfare. His newest book — The Iraq War — was published earlier this year, and here is a post from June on one of Mr. Keegan’s earlier op-ed’s on the Iraq War.
In this London Telegraph op-ed, Mr. Keegan weighs in on the current situation in Iraq, which has been the subject of these Victor Davis Hanson and James Fallows posts from over the past several days. Essentially, Mr. Keegan notes that mistakes have been made, but points out that the situation could be far worse than it is.
Inasmuch as England’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently bearing the same criticism over the Iraq War that President Bush is enduring from similar forces in the U.S., Mr. Keegan first addresses the motives behind such criticism:
It is difficult to understand the motives of those who are making life difficult for the Prime Minister. Some are legalists who continue to insist that the war was launched without justification in international law and wish to punish those responsible for their transgressions.
T hey belong to that tiresome but increasingly numerous tribe who seem to think that men are made for laws and not laws for men. In any case, their arguments are contested, since many (including the Attorney General) hold that UN Resolutions 678, 687 and 1441 do in fact provide justification for the taking of military action against Saddam.
Some of Tony Blair’s castigators are old-fashioned anti-militarists, usually with a strong anti-imperialist tinge, who deprecate the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy in almost any circumstances. They ignore the fact that Saddam was in breach of at least nine UN resolutions and flaunted his defiance. They also failed to explain why they in effect would support Saddam’s continuance in power and the maintenance of his cruel and dictatorial rule over the Iraqi people.
Some anti-Blairites are, of course, simply playing internal Labour Party politics. They dislike the Prime Minister’s unwritten contract with the middle classes, his refusal to institute progressive taxation and his disinclination to take back into public ownership any of the denationalised industries. They are usually anti-American as well, and take pleasure at the spectacle of President Bush’s failure to translate the victory of 2003 into a successful transition to stable government.
Mr. Keegan then goes on to point out one of the big mistakes that the American military made during the occupation of Iraq:
It was a serious mistake to dissolve the Iraqi police force and to disband the Iraqi army. The reasons for doing so seem to have been based on distant memories of the occupation of Nazi Germany in 1945. The Ba’ath party was identified as the Iraqi version of the Nazi party and the view taken that no supporters of the old regime should be allowed to exercise power under a new regime.
That policy may also have drawn on an idealistic but naive American belief in the existence of a potential democratic majority inside any repressed population, ready to elect an enlightened government if given the chance to vote. The effect in practice was to throw into unemployment hundreds of thousands of young Iraqi males, instantly discontented but skilled in the use of weapons. As almost every Iraqi male has access to weapons, the result was to make for disorder.
However, the disorder in Iraq is isolated to the Sunni Triangle, and Mr. Keegan notes that there is precedent in the Islamic world for this type of disorder:
The trouble that persists is centred on the so-called Sunni triangle, west of Baghdad, and is fomented by ex-Ba’athists who fear that properly conducted elections will exclude them from the position of dominance they were accustomed to enjoy in the Saddam years. Such elections are scheduled for January and that timetable is the spur to the current spate of bombings and shootings, which take as their principal targets those Iraqis who are brave enough to seek enlistment in the new police force and the new army.
Other dissidents are Shia militants, many followers of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who fear a revival of Sunni dominance through American-sponsored governmental means and who, in any case, regard Western forms of democratic government as un-Islamic. Their aims, if not their beliefs, are supported by the foreign infiltrators, particularly from Syria but also from Iran and the anti-royalist regions of Saudi Arabia, who want nothing less than the restoration of the seventh-century caliphate and a return to the rule of God on earth.
Britain has been here before. In the 1920s, at the beginning of its exercise of the League of Nations Mandate over Iraq, it had to pacify a disturbed ex-Turkish Ottoman territory in which, as the first British governor complained, every man had a rifle. Then, as now, Shia and Sunni were at loggerheads and the whole Muslim world was disturbed by the fall of the caliphate, brought about by Kemal Ataturk’s dissolution of Islamic rule in Turkey.
Nevertheless, Mr. Keegan notes that Iraq is a secular state and that its population is one of the best educated in the Middle East, and concludes by pointing out an essential truth regarding the calculated use of force:
When not silenced by the threat of violence from extremists and criminals, [most Iraqis] are also ready to say that they continue to regard the Western troops in their midst as liberators. Western so-called progressives who denounce the war of 2003 as a mistake are in fact illiberal and reactionary. They should be ashamed of themselves. Denunciation of war-making is much more fun than the recognition of the truth that the calculated use of force can achieve good. The United States and Britain must not be deterred.
Read the entire piece.
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