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Home - world - middle east - article

Logic? What logic?

7 April 2003


We hear a good deal about the logic of war, but before making a decision it helps to work out what problem you are trying to solve. When decision-makers act instinctively, for a jumble of reasons, it may be possible to work backwards from the decision to uncover the true objective. Might this process shed light on the war in Iraq?

The official (and more or less legitimate) reason for the war in Iraq is the forcible disarmament of that country. This can be articulated as two problems:

  1. The danger of terrorist proliferation of Iraqi chemical, bacteriological or nuclear weapons
  2. The damage to the credibility of the international community if Iraq was not disarmed of its prohibited weapons.

On the face of it, neither problem indicates a precipitate decision to go to war. There were many factors against such a decision.

Since the official reasons for the war do not fit with the precipitate decision to launch it, it makes sense to look around for other reasons. These are not hard to find: here are two possibilities:

  1. The wish to remove the Iraqi regime irrespective of whether it could be disarmed another way
  2. The recognition that the Anglo-U.S. army could not wait around in the Gulf for ever.

    3. Finally, From a British perspective, another tacit reason:

  3. The preservation of the Anglo-U.S. alliance by going along with U.S. plans.

Item 4 is important. There are persuasive arguments for saying that World War One started because troop movements took place in a febrile atmosphere in which it became impossible to withdraw them. The presence of a quarter of a million or more men placed in the Persian Gulf for the express purpose of invading Iraq had to make war more likely than not. It remains unclear whether the season was a deciding factor or whether the invasion could as easily have taken place in May or August.

Whatever the answer to that, item 4 is not sufficient reason for the invasion. One would have to ask why the troops were there at all, in such numbers, if backing up the U.N. inspectors was the only objective. The commitment so early of such large numbers gives credence to item 3. Removal of the government ("regime change" as we know it) has no basis in international law but was often stated as an aspect of U.S. policy. War was always likely to be necessary to achieve this.

Precisely what interest the U.S. has or had in Iraqi regime change remains unclear. U.S. policy still has too many disparate and tangled threads for it to be possible - yet - to work out what the U. S. thinks it is doing. The sources of British involvement, however, appear easier to isolate. Policy on this matter emanates from the political and, indeed, personal convictions of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. What he thinks he is doing is, more or less, what the British government thinks it is doing. This ought to be easier to tell.

If his words are anything to go by the British Prime Minister's chief interest is humanitarian. He wishes to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people at the hands of the government of Saddam Hussein. It is true that he only gave prominence to this rather late in the debate. It must have been frustrating to him that this moral agenda had no legal standing, so not much was made of it until suddenly wheeled out when the issues of disarmament failed to make headway in the public domain. It often happens that the real reason for a decision is the last to be aired.

As an objective, however, it fits with the Prime Minister's mission statement for foreign policy as spelled out in various speeches, notably to the Labour Party Conference of October 2001. He wants to make the world a better place; people like Saddam Hussein stand in the way of that project. Irrespective of the U.S. government's reasons for wanting regime change, the Prime Minister was able to harness U.S. power to his own policy objective while incidentally basking in the strength of the Anglo-U.S. alliance (and keeping his humanitarian cabinet colleague, Clare Short, on board).

If regime change (for moral or other reasons) was the objective, this would favour early war over continued inspections. Regime change needed war. Successful disarmament by U.N. inspectors would have prevented this and the policy objective would have been thwarted. So the British government did not just go along with U.S. impatience but had its own interest in concluding that the U.N. inspections had failed.




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