Now that the bulk of the fighting has ended, Britain and American politicians have settled down to their more pleasant task: gloating at the anti-war movement. How could the protesters have been so wrong? We predicted a bloody conflict, a war of occupation. Didn't the TV pictures prove that we were mistaken on both counts? Jack Straw has declared that France and Germany will have to reconcile themselves to the "new reality" in Iraq. A Guardian poll revealed that British public opinion, strongly anti-war in mid-February, has swung round completely at the end of the conflict. So are supporters of the war right to feel triumphant? It seems to me that their case depends on two false statements, and a third claim, which although concealed is actually more "true". We can address each point in turn.
The first false claim is that this war was won without significant civilian casualties, making it a uniquely bloodless affair. The highest figure claimed by any Iraqi minister was that sixteen hundred civilians had been killed. The American military spokesmen argues that even this number was inflated. They were almost certainly wrong. Even the figure of sixteen hundred dead was constructed simply by counting up the casualties of major "atrocities" which took place in areas where journalists were thick on the ground. Thus sixty two dead were counted following the market bombing, seven for the carload of refugees that was gunned down, and so on.
Yet almost certainly the largest numbers of civilians were killed in areas where there was no media coverage, and where Iraqi civilian rule had already collapsed, hence the under-reporting: on the outskirts of Baghdad, along the route of the Euphrates, and in the centre of such towns as Basra, where homes were destroyed by tank and artillery fire -- but journalists did not dare to approach. We may for once trust the evidence of the various US generals. At least one of them seemed to boast of between one and five hundred killings, in either Nasiriya or another Euphrates town, daily throughout the war. What ratio of civilians to combatants were killed in that fighting? Elsewhere, the ratio has risen through the century's conflicts, until the average has been estimated at standing at nine civilian deaths to every one combatant. Urban warfare, conducted by artillery and tanks, is the crudest form of military action. The documented figure may eventually stand at around ten thousand civilian deaths. The war was far from the peaceful combat that has been presented to us.
The second false claim is that the invasion was welcomed by the large majority of the Iraqi people. This popular support is said to demonstrates approval after the fact. As evidence, war supporters point to the pictures of crowds tearing down Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad. Others are more sceptical. It did not help that the pictures were accompanied by still photographs, shown, for example, on the front page of the London Evening Standard, in which a crowd of around five hundred people seemed to welcome the American advance on Northern Iraq. The problem, here, was that the photo was faked -- a crowd image repeated using Photoshop so that the same faces and banners could be counted four or five times in one image.
The live TV images were truer, and more significant. Yet even here, the crowd did not seem to be made up of more than two to three hundred people. To call this the true face of Iraqi sentiment would mean ignoring other perspectives -- the images for example of crowds demonstrating in Nasiriya against Saddam Hussein, and also against the Americans. The numbers on these marches have been anything up to twenty thousand people, sixty or one hundred times more than the numbers that ran around in the Baghdad square. The evidence of hostile voices, of an aggressive and malign looting, of American soldiers firing on demonstrations or just on cars in "liberated" territory -- all suggest to me that the majority sentiment includes a strong feeling of anger at the occupation, which is only likely to grow in the next few weeks.
All these arguments, though, are beside the point. It does not even matter that the Americans have failed to find any biological or chemical weapons -- the claimed legal premise for the invasion. For what our politicians understand better than many in the anti-war movement is that might always makes right. This is the third and most important -- if often unspoken -- justification for war. Even the anti-war side was dragged in. Through the first weeks of war, when a period of US stagnation seemed possible, we scanned the papers for news of Iraqi resistance. Glimmers of hope were exaggerated. Hani Shukrallah reported demonstrators in Cairo rejoicing in every US reverse. The Americans sounded like Arabs, he reported, the Arabs like Americans. Emotionally, we took sides in a conflict where one combatant out-gunned the other -- in munitions equivalence -- by a factor of at least a thousand to one. By the end of the war, majority sentiment was persuaded that a battle, which the Americans and British won, must, by definition, have been a good war. The fact that "the coalition" won proves that "we" deserved to. This, of course, is the logic of fascism, and it is also the morality of our age.
What can now be done? Some anti-war campaigners suggest that we should continue to demonstrate against the war -- or other wars -- as if everything remained the same. America has the taste for blood, and further conflicts should be expected soon, against Syria, perhaps, Iran or North Korea. It seems to me that such a strategy would be mistaken. The American government, traditionally disinterested in peacekeeping, and now trapped in Iraq, could easily prevaricate -- and isn't that Bush's style? -- thus placing the anti-war left in the false situation of warning against a further set of imminent conflicts, which might actually be long delayed.
The opposite suggestion is that we should give up all talk of war, returning instead to the struggle pre-September 11, and the strong language of the anti-capitalist consensus. That option seems equally false to me. Millions were involved in the anti-war movement. They understood -- if vaguely -- that economics and politics are connected. The war camp is gloating. The people in the middle deserve a better explanation of the present situation. Intellectually, we cannot just run away.
A final option beckons: continue to follow events in Iraq, but treat them differently. We can now begin to expose -- following Arundhati Roy -- the deceit behind a strategy of exporting "democracy". What sort of equality will be allowed in the US puppet state, busy auctioning the nation's wealth? Which Iraqis will get to vote on a strategy of donating the nation's wealth to companies like Halliburton? Even while the mainstream journalists lose interest, the people of the anti-war movement must continue to watch events in Iraq. Remember everything. Learn how to demonstrate that imperialism and globalisation are linked. Patiently explain.
