The Iraq Disaster

Exactly 20 years ago, on 18 March 2003, the UK House of Commons voted in favour of Tony Blair’s motion for war against Iraq - although 139 Labour MPs, along with every Liberal Democrat and a few Tories, voted for the contrary amendment, which said that “the case for war against Iraq has not yet been established”, words now hard to argue with. Robin Cook - who had been Foreign Secretary for four years and was now Leader of the House - had just resigned in protest and made what most regarded as the most powerful resignation speech in half a century (the link gives the speech in full). Alastair Campbell was, at the time, Blair's notoriously belligerent press secretary and at the heart of the small policy group around Blair until 2003 (the character of Malcolm Turner played by Peter Capaldi In The Thick of it in the TV series is based on Campbell).

Campbell has now transformed himself into a serious commentator and, for the past year, has run a highly successful podcast with an eccentric centrist Conservative politician Rory Stewart who had taken two years off from Foreign Office duties to walk across central Asia in 2002-4 and then resumed duties – as a Governor in one of the Iraqi Provinces and duly produced a book about that experience "Occupational Hazards – my time governing Iraq" (2006). This week the two came together for an amazing double episode of the podcast to explore their very different perspectives on the war – Campbell from the control centre and Stewart from an increasingly disillusioned periphery. As you can imagine, it's one of the best bits of broadcasting I've ever heard!

Updates; 

Chris Hedges has been a Pulitzer prizewinner and war correspondent for almost two decades which has made him one of the US's strongest critics of their military aggressivness. In his latest article, he recalls the death threats he and the few other sane journalists receiived on the outbreak of the Iraq war.  

3 hour BBC radio podcast – starting with https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001k0cg

This week's "New Statesman" (which had what we might call a "good" war) marks the 20^th anniversary of the war with a special feature (behind a paywall) but let me offer some excerpts -

How did it happen? Twenty years on it’s obvious that the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a catastrophic failure. It was the most damaging adventure by any British government since 1945, far worse than the Suez fiasco in 1956. In fact, the Iraq War now seems for us what the American grand strategist George Kennan called the world war of 1914: “the great seminal catastrophe of this century” from which all subsequent calamities have flowed.

Not only were the consequences of the Iraq War wretched, the reasons given for the invasion proved to be false. There cannot be many, even among Blair’s dwindling band of admirers, who still pretend that those claims for war were made in good faith. In the summer of 2002, when George W Bush told Blair that Britain didn’t need to participate, the Labour leader insisted: “I will be with you, whatever.”

Far more than with Suez, British action in Iraq was in defiance of popular opinion. On 15 February 2003 more than 1.5 million people protested against the war in London, and opposition was expressed in the opinion polls in the weeks before troops were deployed.

So how did it happen? Despite public sentiment and the weakness of his case, Blair was counting on the corrupt servility of his cabinet and Labour MPs, as well as the supine credulity of the media. His estimation of both proved correct. British participation in the Iraq War was a dismal failure of British politics and journalism, which have barely recovered…….The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee was ecstatic. Writing under the revealing headline, “He promised to take on the world. And I believed him”, she said the speech “will stand as a moment British politics became vigorously, unashamedly social democratic. The day it became missionary and almost Swedish in pursuit of universal justice.”

A group of American neoconservative ideologues, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, along with the right-wing militarists Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, regarded Saddam Hussein as the greatest enemy of the US and of Israel and had wanted to overthrow him since the Gulf War of 1990-91. In 2000, those men came to power when Bush won the presidential election. As soon as he was inaugurated, the White House began planning the destruction of Saddam, and less than nine months later the 11 September attacks in New York City gave Bush and his cabal an excuse for enacting those plans.

In August 2002 the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who was then chair of the Culture Media and Sport Committee, wrote an essay in the Spectator entitled “Why I oppose an attack on Iraq”. He lucidly explained why such a war would be unjustified and likely calamitous. But at the end Kaufman declared that, if it came to a vote in parliament, “my loyalty to Blair would lead me to vote with him”. In March, like Mandelson, Kaufman voted in favour for what he knew to be an unjustified war – out of loyalty. Kaufman was just obeying instructions. Is it any wonder politicians have fallen into such disrepute among the public?

The media’s record over Iraq was just as dismal. Rupert Murdoch warmly supported the war, not least because he said that the best result of invading the oil-rich country would be“$20 a barrel for oil”. All of Murdoch’s London papers supported military action. Individual columnists such as Simon Jenkins and Matthew Parris were allowed to voice their opposition in the Times, but Murdoch has never minded dissenting voices as long as they don’t affect the main tendency of his titles. Murdoch always saw th  Sun as his most important paper, and it was gung-ho for war: “He’s got ’em, let’s get him”, it declared on its front page on 25 September 2002. At one time the Daily Telegraph might have expressed reservations about the war, and seemed that the Iraq adventure was worse than Suez, when Britain and France colluded with Israel to attack Egypt and remove another dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, before the US stopped them. More than 40 years later, the British now conspired with the Americans, against French and German opposition.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia

Let me start with a short quotation from a short piece "Nostalgia makes us all tick"

"Whether we are inclined, personally, to be nostalgic or we are somehow bound up in the external and contextual nostalgic webs, nostalgia dictates our lives. Beyond the intimate bittersweet immersions of nostalgia, conjured by aging, remembrance, death, time, childhood, loss, recovery, and melancholia, we are influenced by such things as retro shops, local produce, concepts of national states, xenophobia, communities, technology advancement, migration, and the climate crisis”.

Some three years ago. I wrote about “Nervous States – democracy and the Decline of Reason” (2018) - a highly original analysis of how feelings seem in recent years to have overwhelmed western societies. Its author, William Davies, is very good on how 17^th century trade led to the development of the system of trust which allowed bills to be issued and exchanged; and subsequently to the wider system of trust of middlemen and experts.

A veteran scholar of neoliberalism, Davies has drawn on a wide set of genres 
— history, philosophy, political science, medicine — to explain the “decline of 
reason” subtitle of his book.
In the seventeenth century, a twin set of abstracted languages were born: the
 abstract system of signs set up by modern commerce and science and the 
system of “abstract” representative government. Each of these moments has 
its own protagonists in Davies’s book. Not just Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes
 and Francis Bacon but, arguably, the first technocrat William Petty’s “political
 arithmetic” - as inventors of the modern state, commerce and modern science.
Then there is the anti-rationalist camp, in which we find Friedrich Hayek,
 Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, Napoléon, and Donald Trump, who together
 initiate the much-lamented “decline of reason.”
Modernity’s twin system of representation (modern science and the
 representative state) has seen a dramatic loss of legitimacy in the last
 thirty years.
- Science has lost its glow and has retreated into a citadel of expertise.
- Party-politics and parliaments, in turn, have lost their attraction, with
 decreasing memberships and increasing popularity for referendums from 
populists.

The result is a two-pronged “crisis of representation,” both on scientific and political
 fronts. But today I turn my attention to Nostalgia - 

Social scientists interested in studying emotions – which became a particularly thriving and promising research concern from the 1980s and onwards – have to a large degree neglected nostalgia and focused more intensely on emotions such as fear, love, trust, shame, guilt, anger, envy and so on. At least this was the case until quite recently, when nostalgia gradually stated to attract the attention of scholars working within the social sciences and humanities. Sociology, psychology, anthropology, historical science, political science, literary studies, business studies and so on have now discovered nostalgia as a potent and inexhaustible source of knowledge about individual behaviour as well as about ongoing cultural changes.

According to Zygmunt Bauman (2017), we now live in the ‘age of nostalgia’. In fact, it seems as if in recent years we may have witnessed nothing less than a ‘revival of nostalgia’ in many quarters of the academic world with numerous new books published on the topic and an increasing number of journal articles testifying to the fact that nostalgia is indeed still with us and alive and kicking

Nostalgia has become very fashionable in the past decade. Perhaps first noticed by Gary Cross in Consumed Nostalgia – memory in the age of fast capitalism (2015) although Post-communist Nostalgia by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille had also drawn attention to the phenomenon in 2010 but mainly for a central european audience.

Both books passed me by – and I have been able to download them only because a friend passed me yesterday "Nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe – from Literature and Film to Media" by Alexandru Condrache (2022)

Alexandru Condrache’s book scans nostalgy’s landscapes with gusto aplenty and no little faith. He knows what he’s talking about even if some of us don’t care, while others might try to not remember the scars that once were wounds, some deep. As a devoted interdisciplinarian, he chronicles the kinds and binds of (mostly Eastern European) nostalgies stalking literature and film, journalism and ads, ideologies left and right, and our less or more fictitious selves. Ostalgie, Yugonostalgia, and especially Romanian post-communist aches are taken to task, sifted through fine meshed analytic strainers, found wanting or desirous, and placed in inviting synthetic containers where nostalgias cohabitate, whether personal or collective, painful or just playful, ridiculous, dramatic, or passées. “Nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe: From Literature and Film to Media” sets up and charts off one of the most inclusive networks of nostalgias to date. At that, it is to be reckoned with as a lucid study in interdisciplinary communications

Further Reading

"Nostalgia Now – cross-disciplinary perspectives on the past" MH Jacobsen 2020 The full book

"Media, Communications and Nostalgia" 2016 useful overview 113pp

How Realistic is it to expect Good Government?

 “Notes on Good governance” was the subtitle of a book I wrote in 1999 called “In Transit” - but the concept is one of which I’ve been not only sharply critical but downright dismissive. But surely we all support such things as transparency, rule of law, accountability and effective public bodies – the notions that lie at the heart of “good governance”?? My problem was that, in the 1990s, these became largely Western ideas (some of them very recent) which we were imposing on non-Western nations and expecting them to imitate when we ourselves have proved incapable of living up to these high standards.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Ralf Dahrendorf had warned that it would take at least a generation for the Rule of Law to become properly embedded and enforced in ex-communist societies. Thirty years later that’s looking a shade optimistic!

In the new millennium a Harvard Professor, Merilee Grindle, suggested in an article entitled Good Enough Governance that we tone down our expectations and gave us what is probably the definitive paper for this discussion - Good Governance Revisited (2005) – particularly with its tables and diagram detailing the variety of issues and stages at stake….

My reservation stems from the fact that Grindle’s paper focuses on what we used to call the “developing” nations and fails to recognise that the Eastern bloc of new EU member states still lack the basic standards of “good governance” – she is, after all, more of a specialist in Latin American systems. The paper offers a five-fold typology of government – “collapsed”, “personal rule”, “minimally institutionalised”, “institutionalised, non-competitive states” and “institutionalised, competitive states” but seems a bit crude to me and to need nuancing. Countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania perhaps need a category of their own.

For the moment, I offer some generalised comments on the difficulties all countries face in seeking to achieve better government. This, of course, begs the question of how many countries are genuinely seeking to improve their systems

Why progress toward Better Government is difficult

Key Principles	What it should mean	Reality
Accountability	Elections allow the electorate to get rid of governments pursuing unpopular policies Ministers take responsibility for departmental performance Government propose and oppositions dispute	Globalisation and neoliberalism have homogenised policies – “they’re all the same” Noone resigns nowadays opposition increasingly cast as disloyal
Transparency	Those in power accept responsibility for their actions Mass media take their responsibilities for exposing misdeeds seriously	Public Relations cover up mistakes Media focuses now on spectacle Whistle-blowers prosecuted
Rule of Law	Noone is above the law Justice is neutral and judges fair-minded Money can’t buy favours People respect the law	Various legal scandals have demonstrated judicial incompetence - and that justice commands a price. Judges have been socialised into the elite and find it difficult to challenge their own – and in ex-communist countries belong to networks The US system is based on massive transfer of corporate money to politicians even the basic issue of political succession is now open to doubt; and Republican states bar blacks from voting
Effective public institutions	Public bodies adequately funded Their performance measured and open to challenge Politicians propose and civil servants advise	Austerity programmes have weakened the efficacy of state bodies The traditional notion of civil service independence now questioned increased politicisation

We have, of course, become much more cynical since 1989. Our trust in both public and private organisations has crashed spectacularly. On Thinking Institutionally was a rare book by Hugh Heclo which explored this issue in 2008. Pages 18-20 give a timeline exposing the development of political distrust in the USA

Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.
But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize trust.

In his final Presidential address in 1960, Eisenhower left us with this warning

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

The best writing on the subject
 “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020). A study of the worrying trends which have been seen in the UK in the past decade

Fighting Systemic Corruption – the indirect strategy Bo Rothstein 2018 
His Quality of Government Unit contains the most important analysts of government systems

Making development work – the quality of government approach Bo Rothstein 2015 An important report It’s more than 100 pages long so this shorter powerpoint presentation may be more helpful 

”How Corrupt is Britain?” Ed by D Whyte (2015) a collection of essays about most key institutions of the country ie policing, government and the corporate sector

Bringing politics back in ; Brian Levy (2013) Brian Levy is another economist – who wrote “Against the Grain”

Good Governance - Inflation of an Idea Merilee Grindle (2010) a useful article in which the author updates her idea of “good enough Governance”

British system of government still has signs of life

It’s good to know that “accountability” and “openness” are still in evidence in British government. I had feared that 7 years of corruption and madness had killed such values off. But yesterday the House of Commons’ Committee on Privileges issued a short report entitled simply “Issues to be raised by Parliamentary Ctte on Privileges with Mr Johnson” which threatens to blow Boris Johnson apart. This represents the line of questioning the committee will pursue when interviewing BJ about the apparent lies he told the House of Commons on numerous occasions about what has become known as the “Partygate Affair” when both he, the present Prime Minister and others were fined by the police for breaching the strict laws then in place throughout the land. Lying to Parliament has been one of the most heinous crimes any member is capable of!!

And, to add fuel to the fire, the newspapers have been having a field day this week with the treasure trove of messages the previous Minister of Health, Matt Hancock, is revealed to have sent when he was photographed in a clinch with his aide. They demonstrate a culture of utter contempt by senior Conservatives for the law of the land which was preventing the rest of society from attending funerals and weddings. In the meantime, a Committee of Inquiry into Covid 19 was finally announced in December 2021 with the appointment of a Chairperson - although the terms of reference were not complete until June 2022. The inquiry is structured into phases or “modules”

Also in today’s newspapers a stinging attack by the UK’ “Food Tsar” (I never knew there was one) on the government – and supermarkets for failing to take seriously a significant 290 page report he sent to them in 2021 – the National Food Strategy. With three Prime Ministers in office during 2022, the government did perhaps have other things on its mind – but food and energy have certainly been up there on the minds of the great unwashed public. But all credit to Michael Gove, the Minister for Levelling-up, for commissioning the report – even if he and his Prime Minister may now be regretting the transparency and criticisms it has brought.

And all credit too to the Institute for Government – one of the better (and genuinely independent) Thinktanks which recently set up a feature called Ministers Reflect which, so far, has allowed people in previous positions of power to reflect honestly on their experience of government. I’ve chosen one Conservative and one Labour Minister interviews. What comes across is their total unpreparedness for office. The Institute does frequent podcasts – for example this most recent – although I did feel that a zoom discussion in which I took part on the Centre of Government was overly complacent and London-based.

I know that we have all become so cynical about politicians but it is good to know that some of the newer values of transparency, accountability and openness are apparently alive and kicking in some parts of the system