“Few events can be as debilitating as a great victory,” wrote the eminent liberal Israeli journalist Amos Elon in his 1971 book, The Israelis. Elon was referring to the Six-Day War of 1967, which gave Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza, and other territories. Israelis rejoiced, unaware that they had been given a poisoned chalice. America’s victory in the Cold War in 1989 followed a similar pattern: when Communist regimes in Eastern Europe suddenly collapsed one after another, followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, America and its policy elite basked in triumphalism, seeing democracy as the natural order of things to come. The war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the Nineties did not shatter the smug belief in a linear direction of historical Progress entertained by the powers-that-be; both events were horrific, but they were localized. Convinced that no geopolitical threats existed anymore, America sold its military interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo as a new kind of war, whose goal was purely humanitarian. Such was the misleading effect of the victory in the 44-year-long Cold War.

The realization that the end of the Cold War had given us not peace, but an even more dangerous and far more unstable world occurred in stages. And 9/11 was the first shock, magnified by the technology of television, which repeatedly showed the twin towers in lower Manhattan collapsing into a fiery pile of dust and rubble. The event hit Americans, lulled into the complacency of the Nineties, with the psychological force of Pearl Harbor, to which it was repeatedly compared. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 the world was already at war. The Nazis had already occupied France, and were at the gates of Moscow. The Japanese had already invaded China and committed the Rape of Nanjing. Thus, for Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war on the Axis Powers was not only the right thing to do, but also the natural thing.

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By Robert D. Kaplan

The direction of history after the attacks of 9/11 was not so clear. The world was otherwise at peace. The Chinese were still in the early phase of building a great navy, around which their military capability would be oriented. Moreover, China was still governed by the reformer Jiang Zemin, a leader friendly to the United States. Vladimir Putin had been in power less than two years and was still consolidating control. It was unclear in what direction he would take Russia. Great power conflict was the furthest thing from people’s minds.

And so, with China and Russia out of the mental picture, the public debate went from unreflectively assuming democracy was about to overtake the world to falling in line behind the Global War on Terrorism. In this way, 9/11 was incorporated into post-Cold War triumphalism. Indeed, as 9/11 had demonstrated, and as the conventional thinking went, the Arab world was politically sick, and the cure was to bring democracy to the greater Middle East.

The administration of President George W. Bush was actually slow to come to this conclusion. Caught off guard by the devastating attacks of 9/11, the Bush White House, burdened by guilt and thus determined that no chances could be taken in protecting American security, immediately conceived of a war to topple the Afghan regime of the Taliban, the hosts of the 9/11 killers. Two months after the attacks, the US military and its Afghan allies occupied the Afghan capital of Kabul. Victory had come easy, perhaps too easy, owing to an innovative, economy-of-force strategy emphasizing special operations forces and local Afghan fighters. But again, without much reflection, rebuilding Afghanistan was turned over to the big, conventional US Army bureaucracy, whose conception of Afghanistan — despite inventive interludes under certain commanders — would turn out to be analogous to that of the Soviet occupiers in the Eighties, who themselves withdrew in defeat.

Because Afghanistan was too easy (as it was then thought), and 9/11 still reverberated in a loud, deafening manner, a bigger response was conceived: the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime in Iraq. After all, from a human rights perspective there was no worse regime in the world except for North Korea’s. And Bosnia and Kosovo had set the pattern for humanitarian interventions. As I can attest from reporting on the ground in the Middle East, Iraq back then was actually far more repressive than Iran, which had an element of democracy built into its theocratic system under the reformist president Mohammed Khatami, and more repressive even than fellow-Baathist Syria. Though the proof of Saddam aiding al-Qaeda was very flimsy at best, he was certainly supporting many other Arab terrorist groups. Then there was the issue of Iraq seeking a nuclear bomb, which not only the American intelligence community but other Western intelligence agencies assumed to be the case. This is not a defense of invading Iraq — a war I initially supported — merely an argument of how it was not outright madness to consider such an action in sequence, considering that China and Russia were not yet on the radar screen as great power threats, and 9/11 still overwhelmed the public debate.

History is ironic. Had 9/11 not occurred; had Saddam not acted like a guilty man, trying to convince the world that he had a nuclear program even though he didn’t; had the Bush administration’s guilt over 9/11 not led it to a take-no-chances approach in the Middle East, there likely never would have been an invasion of Iraq in the first place.

History is also governed by odd contingencies. Had several Arab armies not threatened Israel in the spring of 1967 — specifically, had King Hussein of Jordan heeded the many warnings not to open a military front against Israel in the West Bank — Israel would not have come into possession of an Arab population totaling 1.25 million at the time. The Jewish settlers’ movement never would have been born, forever deforming Israeli politics in the process. Egypt would have stayed stuck with ruling Gaza. And later on, Iran’s clerical regime, despite its hatred of Israel and the Jews, would have had much less propaganda material to work with. The results of the 1967 War could well be interpreted as a tragedy for Israel; just as the effect of 9/11 could be interpreted as a tragedy for the United States even beyond the initial, massive loss of life, spawning as it did a long and misconceived occupation of Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous war in Iraq.

The problem is that extremism can be emotionally satisfying, especially after a great event or catastrophe. Moderation does not do well when people are literally dancing in the street in Jerusalem like after the 1967 War, or baying for blood like after 9/11, or likewise after 7 October 2023 in Israel. Calls for regime change in Iraq or flattening Gaza appeal to the emotions and not to the intellect. That is their strength. The nuanced, middle-of-the-road technocrats and area specialists are at their weakest in such moments. The last American president who after a great, foreign outrage pursued limited objectives was the moderate conservative George H. W. Bush. Following Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked aggression of Kuwait in 1990, Bush decided to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi rule but otherwise leave Saddam in power and not invade Iraq, where America would likely have been bogged down for years to come. By saving his successor, President Bill Clinton, from this fate, Bush allowed Clinton to inherit a largely pacified geopolitical climate that, in turn, allowed Clinton to focus on humanitarian wars-of-choice in the former Yugoslavia. In fact, the relatively benign geopolitical climate bequeathed by the elder Bush was largely responsible for the naïve hubris of much of the American policy elite in the Nineties.

Remember that after the Napoleonic Wars, it was enlightened conservatives such as the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, the British statesman Viscount Castlereagh, and the French statesman Talleyrand who, by not pursuing extreme and vindictive solutions, however emotionally satisfying they would have been at the time, bought Europe almost a century of peace. Ironically, it was the assumption that peace was the natural order of things that led several great European powers to stumble naively into the First World War.

Similarly, the success of limited interventions in Panama in 1989, in Bosnia in 1995, and in Kosovo in 1999 allowed significant sectors of the American elite to believe in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that the US military could do anything in a world ordered to American goals and interests. It was this delusion that allowed the United States to stumble into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beyond the gargantuan loss of life and treasure that the 9/11 wars cost the United States and the affected local populations, perhaps the greatest catastrophe was America’s grand strategic distraction while Russian and Chinese power grew exponentially. The decade of 9/11 wars was the decade when the Chinese military, especially its navy, unleashed its momentum of growth which continues to this day. Meanwhile, Putin consolidated his power in the Russian military and intelligence services, permitting him to rebuild the armed forces under virtual one-man rule for the first time since Stalin.

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The result of all this has not been pretty. Terrorism has certainly not been eliminated. As Joseph Conrad showed in The Secret Agent (1907), all it takes is an angry, politically motivated individual or two, burrowing in the heart of a city, anonymous to their neighbors, to perpetrate great atrocities. And great power conflict now exists alongside terrorism. Despite the attempts by middle-level powers to navigate between the United States and China and chart a course of their own, the very survival of the global system is now in jeopardy. This is the world that has followed what was believed to have been the triumphant end to the Cold War. And 9/11 was a crucial inflection point in this tragic process: distracting us when we should have been focused on Russia and China. It was indeed a great head fake.

Alas, there is no relief from history. The rise and fall of great powers is never-ending, and policymakers’ tragic mistakes are baked into the process. And while the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was avenged by the US victory over Japan in 1945, the United States is still searching for some sort of meaningful historical reply to 9/11 a quarter-century later. Indeed, our 9/11 wars, particularly in Iraq, only emboldened clerical Iran and enlarged its geopolitical footprint. The current war with Iran is part of the process that began with 9/11. The attacks brought us into a generational military struggle in the Middle East that shows no sign of abatement. And it isn’t only the Middle East’s inherent instability that is the problem, but our very obsession with it. Tragedy, as Shakespeare repeatedly shows, is borne of obsession.

Molan’s fate, and the Iranian missiles that continue to strike targets across northern Iraq, encapsulates the grave threat faced by Kurds and their political representatives. Rumored US support for a cross-border Kurdish assault on Iran has failed to materialize, leaving the Kurds exposed on the frontlines of a war they didn’t start. Three more Kurdish fighters were injured in a fresh strike just hours after Donald Trump announced the extension of a fragile ceasefire.

Yet beyond the Kurds and their unending fight for self-determination, Molan’s death also points to a broader crisis, one rapidly reaching boiling-point right across Iraq. Compared to Iran’s well-publicized ties to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, Tehran’s network of Iraqi Shia militias receive relatively little attention abroad. But amid missile strikes and the high-profile kidnapping of a US journalist, US-Iraqi relations are now at their lowest ebb since 2003. Just this week, Washington cut Iraq off from dollar shipments altogether, demanding its nominal partner sever ties with Tehran and arrest militia members accused of attacks on US bases. As Trump’s standoff with the Revolutionary Guards continues, his war on Iran looks set to spill over onto yet another country.

The semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), established following the Gulf War, has long been a loyal partner to the West. One street in the capital Erbil was recently renamed after John Major, honoring Britain’s own role in establishing the safe haven in Iraq’s mountainous north, today home to around six million Kurds. So when the American press started leaking news that the US and Israel were looking to “arm the Kurds” in the early days of the 2026 war, it seemed a repeat of that same partnership could be on the cards in neighboring Iran, itself home to some 10 million Kurds. The Islamic Republic has killed tens of thousands of its own Kurdish population over the years, including during 2022’s “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising and in response to massive protests this January.

But according to Hoshyar Siwaily, the head of foreign relations for the KRI’s governing Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), reports of an imminent US-backed cross-border operation were fake news. “Even when the KRI is facing continuous missile and drone attacks, from both Iran and our neighbors in Iraq, the West has not provided the KRI with the means to defend itself,” Siwaily tells UnHerd. “We’ve been asking the US and our European partners to provide us with air defense systems, which we think they would be willing to provide — but Baghdad’s position hinders that kind of direct assistance.”

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US forces stationed in Erbil operate their own air-defense system at the city’s airport. That means some protection for locals; busy shopping streets are peppered with falling shrapnel more than direct missile impacts. Still, it’s better than Kurdish regions outside the capital, which have no such shield. That includes the camps housing the various exiled Iranian Kurdish parties, sheltering under the wing of their more successful Iraqi brethren, and where most of the Kurdish casualties have been concentrated.

Hassan Sharifi is a senior representative of the KDP-I, the largest and oldest Iranian Kurdish opposition party. “We don’t have any role in starting this war between Iran and Israel and the USA, and we don’t have any role in it continuing or stopping,” he says, wearing a military-green version of the traditional Kurdish cummerbund as he speaks in his party’s Erbil headquarters. “And yet Iran continues to strike us, all day every day.”

Both domestically and abroad, scapegoating the Kurds has long been an attractive option for Iran, as it fights its asymmetrical war with the West. Washington’s careless hints at a partnership between the Kurds, the US and Israel have only poured oil on the fire. Adib Khaladyan, a political representative for another Iranian-Kurdish opposition group, counts members of his own small party among the dead. “We have refrained from any attacks on Iran since 2005, but they have never ceased attacking us,” he tells UnHerd in the lobby of an Erbil hotel included on an Iranian hit list for allegedly sheltering US and Israeli intelligence agents. Khaladyan, for his part, denies this charge. “There’s no concrete evidence Israel is supporting any Iranian Kurdish party,” he says, adding that the Islamic Republic nonetheless targets Iranian Kurdish parties and the houses of their members.

In any case, decades of political exile and internal repression by Tehran mean their scope for action within Iran itself is relatively limited, with the Iraqi-Kurdish authorities pragmatically keeping their Iranian guests on a tight leash. “We are not willing to let these [opposition] political parties use Kurdistan as a base to launch their attacks against Iran,” Siwaily says, pointing to a 2023 agreement between the KRI, Baghdad and Tehran aimed at disarming the Kurdish-Iranian opposition. But though the Kurds haven’t fired a single bullet against Iran throughout the two-month conflict, the war has reached their doorstep anyway. As well as contending with over 700 Iranian strikes since the war began, Iraqi Kurds have faced fire from their Arab compatriots.

As the leading force of the Shia Muslim world, Tehran has long sought influence in majority-Shia Iraq, home to both Shia Islam’s most sacred sites and the seminaries that honed the Islamic Republic’s religious leaders. While the US was busy backing Kurdish aspirations in the north during its wars with Saddam Hussein, Iran supported militias in the Shia south. Iran-backed insurgents went on to resist the post-2003 US occupation, before growing in strength and influence as they joined the fight against ISIS. Scores of militias, grouped under the banner of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), can today field hundreds of thousands of fighters. More than that, they regularly launch missile attacks at US bases and assets across the region — including, of course, the Kurds.

Tehran has a well-known policy financing and training regional proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis, enabling them to attack common foes in Israel and the US. But Iran’s Iraqi allies are arguably more valuable still, providing not just military cover, but billions of dollars in cash. These militias dominate Iraqi politics through the “Coordination Framework” of Shiite political parties, helping Iran achieve massive control over Iraq’s political, economic and legislative apparatus. To that extent, “militia” is a misnomer for a network that may still engage in checkpoint-level corruption at the grassroots, but which at the state level runs vast construction, agriculture, real estate and infrastructure enterprises. Especially as it struggles with sanctions and now a blockade, Iran is more reliant than ever on billions of dollars arriving from Iraq via shell companies and informal transfers, with the PMF for instance deploying a complex scheme to make $1.5 billion from Iraq’s black-market exchange rate.

While Washington and Tehran continue their will-they-won’t-they dance over a ceasefire, meanwhile, another set of highly significant negotiations is taking place in Iraq. The Baghdad political establishment is currently struggling to overcome a five-month deadlock and elect a new prime minister. A candidate elected with heavy Iranian backing has already been directly vetoed by President Trump under threat of US sanctions — but the pro-Iranian bloc is now trying to advance another pick, himself already sanctioned by Washington. US Special Envoy Tom Barrack this week stopped in Erbil before flying down to Baghdad, arriving in the capital to lobby for US interests to be respected. A senior member of the Revolutionary Guards was elsewhere in the city, making the opposite case for Iran. Hezbollah may be decimated, and Tehran in turmoil, but in Baghdad the US-Iranian struggle continues on an equal footing.

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Since the 7 October attack and Israel’s bloody reprisals across the Middle East, the Iraqi front has remained relatively quiet, as Iran’s proxies concentrated on consolidating and institutionalizing their power. The PMF’s penetration of Iraq was underscored this month when they plucked US journalist Shelly Kittleson from the streets of Baghdad and fired drones at a US diplomatic convoy from within the capital. All the same, US and Israeli strikes killing scores of PMF militiamen have not yet been met with an aggressive response.

Now, however, the hour of reckoning may finally have come. This week, the US has stopped all dollar shipments to Iraq’s central bank, and suspended all security coordination with the Iraqi government. Besides the Kurds, the US has its allies in Iraq’s formal security forces. Unfortunately for Washington, the PMF is larger and better-financed than Iraq’s actual army. If, in other words, the US and Israel ramp up their strikes, this political and economic struggle could yet devolve into outright civil conflict, pitting the PMF against Iraq’s beleaguered armed forces plus Sunni and tribal armed groups. Such chaos would, of course, create room for militant Islamists of all stripes — an especially concerning scenario given the US has just airlifted nearly 6,000 ISIS detainees from Syria and deposited them into Iraqi custody.

The shock-waves would certainly extend to Kurdistan, the USA’s last solid ally in Iraq, where political parties are struggling to plot a course through a sea of historic enemies. Even the pro-Western KDP has fostered a pragmatic alliance with the pro-Iranian presidential candidate in Baghdad. Iran, for its part, continues to exert deeper influence across Iraqi-Iranian borderlands controlled by the KDP’s historic rivals in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). It was here that Kurdish hospitals turned away the wounded Kurdish fighter, fearing Iranian reprisals.

“Although we are partners of the USA,” says the Kurdish politician Siwaily, “we would like to stay neutral, because this war is bigger than us.” But though Trump has now extended his ceasefire deadline, missiles continue to fly over Kurdistan, and the drums of war are sounding in Baghdad. Staying neutral might well be wishful thinking.

Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that the second oil crisis is already here.

On Oct. 17, 1973, the Arab members of OPEC announced a 5% monthly production cut after Washington airlifted weapons to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Next came a full embargo against the United States and the Netherlands(the latter boasted one of Europe’s most pro-Israel governments at the time and was used as a staging ground for US support to the Jewish state).

The price of crude surged to $11 a barrel, up from $3, in a matter of weeks. American gasoline prices jumped 40% by November. Lines formed at filling stations. The Western world was in crisis. The US economy tipped into stagflation and remained there for the rest of the decade. By the end of the 1970s, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a speech diagnosing a national “malaise” and a “crisis of confidence.” He also urged his countrymen to wear sweaters in lieu of burning fuel to warm themselves.

The embargo lasted five months. The damage lasted a decade. Japan, which imported almost all its oil, restructured its entire industrial base around electronics and fuel efficiency. That pivot made Japan’s economy more innovative, the envy of the world for the next 20 years. The crisis also created the International Energy Agency and the first serious strategic-petroleum-reserve frameworks that still exist today: after what the global economy went through that decade, countries wanted to deal with the issue collectively, coordinating in preparation of the next embargo.

But there is a crucial difference between then and now. In 1973, the disruption resulted from a political decision by producers to turn off the tap. Supply could theoretically have been restored the minute politics changed.

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What we confront now, as a consequence of Trump’s Iran war, is more complicated: chokepoint closure, damaged infrastructure, insurance markets in disarray, fields shutting in (temporarily closed). And the scale is simply not comparable. Around 20 million barrels a day move through the Strait of Hormuz, roughly 20% of global consumption and nearly a third of all seaborne oil trade. The 1973 embargo, damaging as it was, didn’t come close to these conditions. This is a supply disruption brought about by Iran in response to Tehran being attacked by two nuclear powers, and its ramifications won’t soon be contained, much less reversed.

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest. That makes room for two shipping lanes, each two miles across. Around 100 vessels a day transited the strait in normal times, 60% to 70% of them tankers or liquid-natural-gas carriers. Saudi Arabia moves 38% of the crude that transits the strait, Iraq another 22%, and the United Arab Emirates 13%. The top five exporters between them account for 93% of all the crude that goes through that passage.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have constructed pipelines for just this type of contingency. Together, they can route about 2.6 million barrels a day around the strait, approximately a third of Gulf export volumes. Iraq and Kuwait have no such option, however. And Qatar, which supplies roughly a fifth of the world’s LNG, has no alternative route to market, either. This is a structural problem that sheer capacity alone can’t overcome.

Since Feb. 28, commercial shipping through the strait has nearly ground to a halt. Tanker traffic dropped 70% in the first days and then fell to near zero as jacked-up insurance premiums rendered the economics impossible. Most of the vessels still moving are from the Iranian dark fleet. Washington has been reluctant to target them, wary of what Tehran would do to Gulf energy infrastructure in retaliation. Protection-and-indemnity war-risk coverage was suspended as of March 5. The Trump administration floated the idea of sovereign-level tanker insurance, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent quickly walked back the brainstorm. That would have put US taxpayers on the hook for damaged cargo, while the US Navy has made it clear that it lacks the ability to offer protective escorts in the near future.

In short, without insurance, ships don’t move.

Iraq’s three main southern oilfields have seen production collapse by 70%, falling to roughly 1.3 million barrels per day, down from 4.3 million. Onshore storage is filling because there is nowhere to send the crude. Fields that shut in don’t simply restart if and when a ceasefire is announced. Reservoir pressure, infrastructure condition, damaged terminals — all factor in, to the world economy’s detriment.

The timeline for restoration is weeks at best and months in the most realistic cases. Even today, the market is pricing a clean restart. Yet that assumption has very little basis in how the Middle East actually operates.

Brent, a key oil benchmark, is now trading north of $106 a barrel. That is the number that gets attention, but it is everything that this number triggers that needs to be examined.

Liquefied petroleum gas and naphtha (liquid hydrocarbon used in the petrochemicals industry) move through the Persian Gulf in enormous volumes, and almost nobody outside the energy sector thinks about them. Naphtha is what petrochemical plants, heavily concentrated in Northeast Asia, run on. Those plants make plastics, fertilizers, packaging, and the agricultural chemicals that go into growing the food we consume. When naphtha supply is disrupted, the effects don’t show up at the pump. They show up six to twelve weeks later in the price of a bag of flour, a bottle of cooking oil, a box of cereal.

We watched this in slow motion after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russian and Ukrainian wheat, corn, sunflower oil, and fertilizer were never formally sanctioned. But the disruption to trade finance, shipping insurance, and port logistics was enough to send food prices into a commodity super-cycle that hit Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Bangladesh harder than anywhere else. Governments already stretched by their Covid fiscal response had nothing left to absorb the extra shock. The Third Gulf War threatens a repeat — on a much wider scale.

Then there’s LNG. Qatar has declared force majeure on LNG exports, freeing itself from delivery obligations, after drone strikes hit its export infrastructure. Qatar accounts for roughly a fifth of global LNG supply. The IEA estimates a full Hormuz closure would pull more than 300 million cubic meters per day out of the global gas market, about twice what Nord Stream carried at its peak. There is no spare liquefaction capacity sitting idle somewhere that can cover that. Australia, the United States, and West Africa are all running near full capacity. Asia and Europe will end up competing for the same cargoes, bidding up prices that eventually land on ordinary consumers.

A ceasefire in the next 30 to 60 days, followed by a slow normalization of shipping, probably keeps Brent somewhere between $110 and $130 and takes at least half a point off global GDP.  That is the optimistic scenario, and it requires things to go well politically in a region where things have a habit of going, well, boom.

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Beyond 90 days, the picture darkens considerably. Shut-in fields, damaged port infrastructure, an insurance market that can’t simply switch back on, storage constraints that have permanently altered production profiles in some fields. Iran’s own military spokesperson has already warned publicly to get ready for oil at $200 a barrel. Analysts at Rystad Energy have Brent at $135 by June if the war runs for four months. Markets are not pricing that yet. They were not pricing a pandemic in February 2020, either.

The IEA, founded in the wake of the 1973 crisis, has now coordinated the largest emergency stockpile release in its 50-year history: 400 million barrels across more than 30 countries, with the United States contributing 172 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is an extraordinary intervention. It is also, as analysts at Bernstein noted, only about 15% of the daily supply lost due to the Hormuz closure. The barrels also take 60 to 90 days to meaningfully reach the market. It buys time but doesn’t fundamentally deal with the problems outlined above.

The United States isn’t insulated from these price shocks. The Trump administration has been fighting to tame inflation, and that fight gets considerably harder if oil stays above $100 a barrel for any length of time. Trumpian spokesmen gloat about domestic production, serenely unaware that oil and gas are fungible global commodities: a chokepoint several thousand miles away will drive up prices everywhere else — that is, unless Washington is prepared to contemplate an export ban.

The picture is still bleaker elsewhere. As consumers, China, India, Japan, and South Korea together account for around 75% of the crude that transits the Persian Gulf. China alone sources more than half of its 11-million-barrels-a-day import requirement from the Middle East. For those countries, this is literally the lifeblood of their economic development.

And as it was in 1973, the people who absorb the worst of it will not be the ones with the hedges and the trading desks. They will be in Cairo buying cooking oil, or in Karachi watching the price of flour move out of reach. They will be working-class Trump voters on low incomes who need to fill up their tanks to get to work. Half a century on from the first oil crisis, a narrow passage can still bring the global economy to its knees.

It’s not hard to see why. Military history teaches us that airpower alone is insufficient to achieve the kinds of aims the Trumpians have set for themselves. Unless the administration accomplishes what has historically proved impossible, it must either scale back its objectives or attempt a ground invasion of Iran. As a former US Army infantryman, who fought in what used to be called the War on Terror, I know one thing: the latter option shouldn’t even be on the table.

A ground war against the Islamic Republic, on Iran’s own terrain, will send American troops into hell on earth — or about as close as we mortals can get to it.

First, the sheer size of the ground force will be staggering. Any serious American invasion of Iran would likely rival or exceed the scale of Vietnam or the 1991 Gulf War, making it the largest US military undertaking since the Second World War. Iran’s land mass and population size alone would prove a daunting hurdle. The country is nearly four times the size of Iraq, and its population is more than three times larger.

Iran’s terrain is, in a word, punishing. Its topography is dominated by mountains, which by some figures constitute half of its territory. Unlike most nations, Iran’s urban centers are located inland, nestled amid mountains, and buffeted by uninhabitable deserts to the east and the south. This combination of Iran’s built and natural environments would mean that US forces would have to advance through numerous bottlenecks to even reach Iran’s military and population centers. And while Iran is in the middle of the pack in terms of population density, its capital, Tehran, teems with more than 15 million souls; a fight to capture the city against a determined enemy would amount to the largest urban battle in American military history.

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The idea of capturing and pacifying Tehran alone illustrates the near-impossibility of such an invasion. Using the troop density employed in the 2004 battle for Fallujah, Iraq, as a point of reference, suggests that it would require more than 600,000 soldiers — roughly the size of the US deployment during the Vietnam War. Hence, perhaps, Leavitt’s talk of reinstituting the draft. 

Looking to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a similar invasion of Iran, given its population size, would require as many 1.6 million troops. Those estimates appear more daunting still when compared with the actual force structure of the US military, which boasts about 2.1 million members in active service, reserves, and the National Guard. Of these, only about 20% are combat troops. Simply put, committing 1.6 million personnel would mean using roughly three-quarters of the entire US military, including combat forces America simply doesn’t have.

Such a war couldn’t be undertaken without a massive mobilization, and a fundamental reordering of American global commitments, requiring the diversion of forces from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. An invasion of Iran would therefore impel the United States to confront something it has long sought to avoid: hard choices about the limits of its global military footprint. Summing up the scale of the prospect, the columnist Max Boot, not exactly known for his pacifism, described an invasion of Iran as “the mother of all quagmires.”

Then comes the next obvious problem: fighting the war. While Iran’s military would likely lack air superiority and remains less technologically advanced than that of the United States, the Islamic Republic shouldn’t be taken lightly. Before the outbreak of the current war, the country’s regular armed forces were estimated at roughly 420,000 personnel. Iran’s more ideologically committed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps numbered around 190,000, backed by a militia force, known as the Basij, of more than 600,000.

How much of this force could ultimately resist an invasion is speculative: some may defect, and others removed from the battlefield before they can fight. But what is clear is that Iran would likely adhere to its long-standing doctrine of defense in depth. Drawing on lessons from the Iran-Iraq War, Iranian planners have adopted what they call a “mosaic strategy”: decentralized command structures combined with a willingness to trade territory to wear down an invading force through attrition.

Supporting this strategy would be Iran’s still-significant arsenal of rockets and drones. These have already surprised US military officials in recent engagements, and could prove even more dangerous on Iranian soil, where shorter flight times would give the Americans far less warning. Iranian militias in the region, too, are battle-hardened, versed in irregular warfare, and, in many cases, acquainted with American tactics.

US forces would likely find themselves fighting a determined asymmetric opponent armed with effective weapons and operating on difficult terrain. For a military that has not attempted a major invasion in more than two decades, and that remains only partially tested against modern drone warfare, such a fight would be far from easy. In short, Iranian commanders would aim to draw the United States into a long and bloody war of attrition, and they would have the terrain and urban density do it.

Some will argue that the past is not prologue — that the Iranian regime is unpopular and therefore unlikely to inspire serious resistance. It’s telling, however, that American bombing has yet to create fissures in the regime. Nor has the American air campaign inspired the Iranian people to revolt. On the contrary, all available evidence points to regime consolidation, and the closing of the gap between public sentiment and elite opinion.

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Then, too, critics underestimate the power of nationalism, particularly in the Iranian case. The “rally around the flag” effect — the well-documented tendency of citizens to unite behind their government in wartime — was most clearly demonstrated in Iran after Saddam Hussein invaded the country in 1980, a move that ultimately consolidated the very regime the Iraqi dictator had hoped to topple.

Even under the most ideal circumstances of state collapse — like those seen in the early days of George W. Bush’s Iraq War — a post-invasion insurgency in Iran would be all but certain. Between the most fervent supporters of the IRGC, and with the potential backing of Shiite militias across the region, it would not take many committed fighters to prolong the conflict. As Washington learned in both Iraq and Afghanistan, even a relatively small but determined insurgent force can sustain a war for years. That force could draw from an estimated “fit-to-service population” in Iran of 41 million, plus the larger Shiite sphere, including warriors from Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Pakistan, among others. Much like Iraq and Afghanistan, the defeat of the Iranian army would be a fleeting victory assuredly followed by a bloody and open-ended slog with an insurgency. 

Finally, an American escalation into a conventional ground invasion would deepen the already daunting regional crisis. Deploying ground troops in Iran would provide an ample opportunity for America’s great-power rivals, Russia and China, to drain Uncle Sam of blood and treasure. So far, the pair have yet to expand their assistance to Tehran beyond diplomatic and intelligence support. But the presence of American forces on Iranian soil would provide Moscow and Beijing with a tempting pressure point against a superpower that is already overextended, indebted, and domestically fractured. Iran, then, could become a bloody site of great-power competition. 

Given the totality of Iran’s geography, demographics, military capability, and geopolitical connections, the prospect of an American invasion of the country should be unthinkable. Yet Trump’s ill-considered decision to launch the war, coupled with his vague-but-ambitious goals, has made this impossible scenario a military possibility. Given the horrific costs such an invasion would entail, however, Trump should choose a different path: declare “victory” and de-escalate. Washington must stop throwing good American money after bad — and preserve the lives of the brave men and women who daily underwrite our national security with their blood.

Birthed in the heady aftermath of the Second World War, the Arab Socialist Baath Party went through three major stages, each closely related to the vexed political history of the region. The first stage was one of utopian dreams. The second involved military action, power grabs and coups. The third, and worst, was of ideals betrayed, of personal dictatorships and brutal death squads. Yet, if Baathism has finally entered history, with the Syrian party officially dissolved in February, its story is far from over.

On the contrary, the lessons of Baathism must now urgently be absorbed by a new generation of Arab leaders. From the way it pitted the region’s Arab majority against minorities, and in how it took the ideology’s mythical sense of destiny and placed it into the hands of strongmen, there’s plenty for men like Ahmed al-Sharaa to think about, even if they emerge from very different ideological backgrounds — especially if they hope not to end their premierships either exiled or hanging from a noose.

Founded in Damascus in April 1947, Baathism was the most enthusiastic iteration of Arab nationalism. Whereas Gamal Abdel Nasser understood the Arab world in hard-nosed strategic terms, as a place to exert his own influence, the Baathists had an almost mystical sense of the Arabs as a nation transcending historical forces. As one of its founders put it, this was a people with a “natural right to live in a single state”.

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Such high-minded ideas are unsurprising. After all, the ideology was founded by Syrians who had immersed themselves in European philosophy, from Marx to Nietzsche, while studying at the Sorbonne. Two of the three founders were members of minority communities, and it’s useful to think of Baathism as a way of constructing an alternative Arab identity to Islam. While Salah al-Din al-Bitar was a Sunni Muslim, Michel Aflaq was an Orthodox Christian. Zaki al-Arsuzi, for his part, was an Alawite who later embraced atheism.

What all three shared was an eagerness to blend Enlightenment modernism with Romantic nationalism. Arsuzi, for instance, believed Arabic, unlike other languages, to be “intuitive” and “natural”. Aflaq, for his part, turned the usual understanding of history on its head. He considered Islam to be a manifestation of “Arab genius” and deemed the ancient pre-Islamic civilizations of the Fertile Crescent to be Arab too. Never mind the fact that the Assyrians or the Phoenicians had never spoken Arabic.

Like other grand political narratives of the 20th Century, then, Baathism was an attempt to repurpose religious energies for secular ends. Even the word “Baath” means “resurrection”. Consider the party slogan, “umma arabiya wahida zat risala khalida” in Arabic. That means “one Arab nation bearing an eternal message” — which sounds strangely grandiose, even before you realize that “umma” is the word formerly used to describe the global Islamic community, and that “risala” is used for the divine message the Prophet Muhammad delivered to humanity.

If a secular form of messianic faith was one wing of Baathist ideology, you get a sense of the other from the party’s motto. Proclaiming “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”, it evoked a single, unified Arab state stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the Arabian Gulf in the east, and from Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. This Arab state, Baathists argued, must also be free of foreign control, and construct a socialist economic system. That makes sense: the region had long been exploited, both by the Ottomans and their European imperialist successors.

At first, Baathism was spread by rural doctors and itinerant intellectuals. In those early days, the leadership consisted disproportionately of schoolteachers, ruling over a membership of schoolboys. In 1953, however, the party merged with Akram Hawrani’s peasant-based Arab Socialist Party. This brought it a mass membership for the first time, and it came second in Syria’s 1954 election.

By then, though, democracy was becoming ever rarer. Since Colonel Husni al-Zaim’s March 1949 coup, the first in Syria and anywhere in the Arab world, politics was increasingly being determined by men in uniform. The most significant of these soldiers was Nasser, who seized power in Cairo in 1952, and promptly became a pan-Arab hero after successfully confronting Britain, France and Israel over the Suez Canal in 1956.

Nasser’s popularity fueled an already raging popular desire to eliminate colonial borders and, at the behest of Baathist officers in Damascus, Syria and Egypt merged into the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958. Yet Nasser’s conception of unity, one which the Baathists would emulate, was totalitarian. There should be only one leader, one party, one truth. Following Nasser’s orders, the Syrian Baath dissolved itself. It would never be a grassroots movement again.

In the meantime, Syrian officers seconded to Cairo formed a secret Baathist military committee. This marked the start of the Baath’s next stage, with the party now belonging firmly to military elites. Following the collapse of the UAR, in 1962, Baathists tasted power for the first time, seizing control of both Iraq and Syria. The Iraqi Baath had a different sectarian make-up to the Syrian. Its membership was mainly Sunni Arab, which was a minority locally but the majority across the wider Arab world. Iraq’s Shia Muslims, therefore, associated Baathism with Sunni identity and were more likely to join the communists, then Iraq’s largest party. This meant that the Iraqi Baath appealed to some — and may well have been sponsored by the CIA — as an anti-communist force. Its March 1963 coup was accompanied by a massacre of Leftists. In November, however, it was ousted by another coup.

The Syrian Baath retained power from 1963 onwards, but was riven by conflict, culminating in 1966 in an internal coup by Salah Jadid. Arsuzi was brought back from obscurity to play the role of ideological figurehead of the Syrian wing, but most of the party’s original leadership, including Aflaq, fled abroad. Bitar was assassinated in Paris in 1980.

The Baathists turned on each other, its Syrian and Iraqi wings becoming irreconcilable enemies. In Syria, an endless series of purges further sectarianized an already sectarian army. Competent officers were replaced by loyalists, overwhelmingly from the same Alawite community as Jadid and his ally Hafez al-Assad. The consequent weakening of the army may explain the catastrophic loss of the Golan Heights in 1967, when Assad, then defense minister, gave the order to retreat long before Israeli troops actually arrived.

Under Jadid’s “Leninist” leadership, the Syrian Baath practiced a top-down Leftism aimed at eliminating the old bourgeoisie. In 1970, however, the “pragmatist” Assad launched a new internal coup. Jadid was sent to prison, where he languished until his death. Assad eased off the class warfare, concentrating instead on building his own power base. The Iraqi Baath, meanwhile, had returned to power in 1968, and Saddam Hussein ascended within it until he became absolute leader in 1979.

This marks the third stage of the Baath, in which the party became a vehicle for one-man dictatorships. Cults of personality exalted Assad and Hussein with mass rallies and titles like “first pharmacist” or “hero of war and peace”. They were lionized as “eternal leader” and “symbol of the Arab revolution” — as if the hitherto deified nation had been reduced to a single figure.

Some sections of society benefited, for a while at least, from this system. Members of hitherto marginalized rural communities, including religious minorities, entered the army and security services. Some of the urban working class benefited from jobs in the rapidly expanding state sector. In Iraq, enormous oil wealth allowed rapid development of civilian infrastructure. Yet terrifying political repression and massive corruption caused a brain drain, scaring off investment from both Damascus and Baghdad.

Then Hussein’s regime squandered Iraq’s wealth on wars of choice. Despite bloody stalemate against Iran, and embarrassing defeat in Kuwait, Hussein hailed his victories. In this, he borrowed from the Baathist playbook: Assad had done something similar in 1973, after losing to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The gap between rhetoric and reality was vast and growing, perhaps inevitable given Baathism’s totalizing aspirations.

All the while, both Assad and Hussein built fearsome security states. Far from uniting the people, repression in both countries soon took on ethnic and sectarian overtones. Hussein killed tens of thousands of Kurds — the 1988 chemical atrocity at Halabja was especially infamous — before exterminating Shia Muslims when they rose against him in 1991. Hafez al-Assad responded to the challenge of the Muslim Brotherhood by killing up to 40,000 people in Hama in 1982. Then Assad’s son Bashar, who inherited the presidency in 2000, outdid his father, responding to the 2011 revolution by killing hundreds of thousands.

Hussein was deposed by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and soon met his end at the gallows. Many of his security officers later joined ISIS which — despite its religious rhetoric — is actually the Baath’s closest successor: both revel in mass surveillance, detention and torture.

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So what became of “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”? Instead of unity, the Baath brought divide and rule, splintering society by ethnicity, sect, class and region. Instead of freedom from foreign powers, Iraq and Syria ended up occupied. In both countries, socialism ended in sanctions, neoliberalism and graft.

In Greek drama, the tragic hero is brought down by a fatal flaw in their character. The Baath party’s flaw was its identification of the Arabs with state power, and then the reduction of the state to one-man rule. An Arab nation can be said to exist, and sometimes it even transcends state borders. The Arab Spring proved this, when Arabs from Tunis to Sana’a, influencing each other, all revolted simultaneously. But the Arab countries include non-Arab peoples, and the Arabs themselves are plural and diverse, far greater and more creative than a single man or a single mystic ideology could ever be.

That still leaves one more question: what lessons should present and future leaders learn from the failure of Baathism? First, that strong men are brittle and easily broken, whatever their ideology. Second, that the highly centralized, hyper-authoritarian states built by such men end in military defeat and economic collapse. These dictatorships weaken and impoverish society, and provide security to no one, not even to the strong men in the end.

There’s a foreign policy dimension here too. The Arabs have long been assaulted by a string of foreign states: Israel, the US, Russia and Iran. The need to win freedom from the nation’s enemies — or at least to deter their aggression — is more crucial than ever. But seizing control of the state by military force is not sufficient to shift the balance. There are no shortcuts. Lasting power can only be built by liberating the people rather than smothering them: and that means human and civil rights are essential tools in constructing national power. Once the peoples of the Arab and Muslim region are able to express themselves freely and determine their affairs democratically, then their various polities will be ready to coordinate their energies. And that, more than Baathism ever did, will truly change the world.

Until then, Biden’s legendary resilience seemed unbreakable. This was, after all, a quality he acquired at the price of intense suffering. By the time Biden appeared as a newly elected senator on the Washington scene in 1973, he had already suffered two life-altering tragedies. First, the rapid downfall of his businessman father from affluence to poverty when Biden was seven years old; and second, the more terrible blow of the accidental death of his wife and one-year-old daughter some 40 days after he was first elected.

Yet still Biden marched on, winning re-election to the Senate every six years until 2008, when he was concurrently elected Vice President with Barack Obama. It was, more than anything, proof of his mastery of “retail politics”, which allowed him to keep different clusters of voters happy. In Biden’s mini-state of Delaware — whose population in 1974 was just over 600,000 when New York State already had close to 20 million — it was not hard for him to win voters one by one, especially since he chose to live in Wilmington, commuting by train to Washington each day. When I first met Biden during his first senatorial term, the legendary political guru and speaker of the house Tip O’Neill was already saying that he would be a Washington personality for decades.

Many things about Biden’s life are well-known, but only future biographers will reveal what he himself rigorously kept secret from the world: that during his eight years as VP, Obama systematically ignored his excellent advice on foreign affairs. Captive to the latest policy clichés of the NGO world, he ignored Biden’s decades of experience as a very active member and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had heard from and interrogated hundreds of expert witnesses, many of them with valuable, first-hand experience in the world beyond Washington.

On Iraq and Afghanistan, by far the most important foreign-policy issues during his eight vice-presidential years, Biden radically disagreed with the strategy that Obama inherited and continued to pursue. Biden insisted that Iran would control Iraq unless its influence was drastically limited by US support for a Sunni regional government in addition to the Kurdish regional government, thereby confining Iran’s influence to a third, Shi’a, regional government.

But Obama preferred the advice of Dr Susan Rice, his national security advisor, Dr Samantha Powers, his ambassador to the UN, and Dr General Petraeus, whose stock of fashionable academic phrases about the world’s conflicts could never compete with the real-world knowledge that Biden had accumulated. As a result, Iran did what it wanted in Iraq. And it still does, largely because a central proponent of Obama’s deluded appeasement policy outlived his presidency: his personal friend Roger Malley, who was foisted on Biden and kept in the White House, until he was finally brought down by a security breach.

It was much the same in Afghanistan. Had Obama followed Biden’s advice, instead of listening to the telegenic PhD-general Petraeus, the US could have saved trillions of dollars and many American lives by abandoning the quixotic attempt to train and equip the Afghan army. From the start, Biden insisted that the military body was a total fraud — not just because Afghanistan’s so-called officers bought their promotions with bribes, but because the entire concept was rooted in a fantasy. Biden knew that Tajiks would only fight for other Tajiks, Uzbeks for Uzbeks, Hazaras for Hazaras, and so on — and that none of them would fight for the abstraction called Afghanistan.

Indeed, he needed tremendous self-discipline not to react when he saw his superficial boss being endlessly applauded at elite policy gatherings in Washington and Aspen, while he himself was ridiculed at Georgetown dinner parties. And it was a most bitter irony that it was Biden, as the newly installed president, who was universally blamed for America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan a few months after his inauguration, following the mass surrender of the Afghan army without a fight.

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Now, as he exits the stage, Biden has decided to offer another hostage to fortune, by nominating Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate ahead of the Chicago convention next month. That Harris is a remarkably strategic politician shouldn’t be overlooked: she started her pursuit of high office before she was 18 by choosing the modest education of Howard University over Stanford — where her father would teach — because of Howard’s politically powerful Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. But this cannot do more than mitigate her tremendous shortcomings as a candidate.

As VP, she was given one task: to stop the politically disastrous flood of millions of illegal immigrants walking across the border from Mexico. In June 2021, she made a very brief and futile visit to the border instead of staying in Washington to identify and activate effective border-control measures, which did exist and were only activated by Biden himself as the election approached. When given her only opportunity to display a capacity to govern, Harris failed.

For this and many other reasons, it seems improbable that Harris would fare well in a campaign against Trump, unless her running mate can do even more for her than the sharply intelligent Vance can do for Trump. But looking at the array of figures now trying to win her favour, one must be sceptical. As someone who was befriended by Biden decades ago, I do not derive any pleasure in anticipating that his anointed successor will be removed by the Democratic Convention — or else lead her party into a November debacle.

It would be unfair to suggest that the same was true of his journalism, but his stint as political editor of the Daily Mirror, starting in the late Eighties, was not distinguished. He was tribally loyal to Labour, and these were dark days for the party, which had lost three elections in a row and was shortly to lose a fourth, in 1992. His response was to fill the paper’s news pages with relentlessly partisan abuse. As a hack, his best-known contribution to political debate was starting a rumour that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants. (“I am only 90% sure of the accuracy of the claim,” he acknowledged.)

Perhaps some of the bitter triviality reflected his own thwarted hopes. In the run-up to the 1992 election, he was widely touted as the front-runner to become Neil Kinnock’s press officer should Labour win. But when Labour didn’t win, Campbell had to wait instead for the election of Tony Blair as leader in 1994 before getting the summons to become his press secretary. The job title didn’t reflect the role, Blair hastened to add; “it’s much more than that,” he said.

So it was to be. Campbell was generally referred to as a spin doctor, a relatively new term that had crossed the Atlantic in 1988 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary the following year. The job of the spin doctor, according to Peter Mandelson, the first British figure to be so described, was “to create the truth”. There were limits, though. “They can cajole and protest and manipulate and bully if they want,” Campbell explained. “They can explain their master’s thinking. But the master’s thinking and actions are what count.”

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That was the role occupied by Bernard Ingham when he was Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, but many felt that the master-servant image was no longer entirely accurate. “When you heard Bernard Ingham speaking, you heard Margaret Thatcher,” observed ex-Labour aide Joy Johnson. “When you heard Tony Blair, very often you heard Alastair Campbell.” It was a common perception, and Blair did little that might correct it; in his memoirs, he wrote of Campbell: “He was indispensable, irreplaceable, almost an alter ego.”

In any event, Campbell was — with Blair, Gordon Brown, and Mandelson — one of the Four Horsemen of New Labour. Following the election triumph of 1997, he accumulated still greater power. He ran an ever-expanding empire of press officers and political advisers at the expense of the civil service, he attended cabinet meetings in a way that his predecessors had not, and he took on the role of party discipline at Westminster: in a symbolic move, the press team moved into 12 Downing Street, traditionally the preserve of the Whips’ Office. Charges of control freakery were widely aired.

He was, everyone agreed, supremely good at his job. A large part of that job, however, seemed to include dragging politics down to the level of his commentary at the Daily Mirror. “Alastair tabloidery,” Blair called it, the tendency to pursue headlines rather than deliverable policies. “Political coverage in this country is a joke,” Campbell complained in 1999. “Most of the national media treat politics as a soap opera.” He made his contribution to that.

He contributed too to the growing distrust of politicians. Blair had been elected as the alternative to Tory sleaze, but by 1999 The Sun, which had backed Labour in the general election, was calling the prime minister “Tony Bliar”. Much of the criticism was aimed at Campbell’s media operation. Back in 1996, he’d appeared in a libel case and been castigated by the judge for being “less than completely open and frank”; he was “not a witness in whom I could feel 100% confidence”. By the turn of the century, there were many who agreed with that judgement.

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It came to a head, of course, in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. An intelligence dossier was released to justify the war, and when the BBC queried the degree of political interference in its preparation, Campbell decided that the best form of defence was attack. The ensuing battle cost the jobs of the BBC’s chairman and director general, and the life of the UN weapons inspector David Kelly, who killed himself after being identified as a source for the story. “If Alastair Campbell hadn’t started his war against the BBC, then Dr Kelly would still be alive today,” said Sky’s political editor, Adam Boulton, while the headline in Campbell’s old paper the Daily Mirror was: “Spun to death — Iraq expert driven to tragic ‘suicide’.”

Campbell resigned in 2003, but returned to run the 2005 election campaign, completing Blair’s remarkable hat trick of victories. After that, though, the magic seemed to have been lost. He helped with the unsuccessful elections of 2010 and 2015 and was an adviser to the equally unsuccessful People’s Vote campaign to get a second referendum on Brexit. Nonetheless, it was Brexit that gave him a new lease of media life: he became editor-at-large of The New European, and launched The Rest Is Politics podcast with fellow Europhile Rory Stewart.

Now comes a new book, But What Can I Do?, about the deplorable state of politics today. His analysis will come as no great revelation. He’s sympathetic to the idea of a written constitution; he thinks social media “has done much to harm thoughtful public debate”; he deplores “the culture war distractions of the radical Right”; he recycles lame gags about “Kamikwasi Trussonomics”.

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As a state-of-the-nation address, it comes with inbuilt obsolescence, with all the temporary nature of journalism, full of references to what happened “last autumn” or “last November”. Despite which, it seems stuck in 2018, so that former US president Donald Trump gets five times as many mentions as current British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. It feels like reading yesterday’s papers.

Much of it is a rambling, sometimes ranting, denunciation of “the Trumps, Johnsons, Netanyahus, Putins and Bolsonaros”, the populist leaders who have wrecked the democratic process. That’s a fairly disparate collection of individuals, but Campbell argues that there are common traits. Populists, he writes, are those who denounce “the elite”, and use the polarising language of “us” and “them”. And they’re not just to be found on the Right; there are also “populists of the Left”. There are those who divide the nation into “the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism”, while railing against “the cynics, the elites, the establishment”. Oh, hang on, that was Blair in a 1999 conference speech, which doesn’t get a look-in here.

These new populists are also barefaced liars. When did this casual attitude towards the truth start, one might ask? Certainly not on Campbell’s watch; he’s keen to point out that there were “several official and parliamentary inquiries” into Iraq, “none of which concluded that I lied”. In fact, not even his political enemies were deliberately deceitful in the old days. From Margaret Thatcher to Theresa May, he says of the prime ministers before Johnson, “none were in my view liars”. This wasn’t always his view. “Truth. Remember that,” he challenged in 1992. John Major and Norman Lamont “lie because it comes easy to them and because it is the only way they can survive”.

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He sometimes sounds like one of those academics who is triggered by the sight of a Union Jack and takes to Twitter to announce that we’re now living in a fascist regime. Mention referendums, for example, and we’re straight onto Vladimir Putin staging a rigged vote in the occupied parts of Ukraine. In 1975, Thatcher quoted Clement Attlee’s description of referendums as “a device of dictators and demagogues”; Campbell notes this approvingly, but forgets to mention that it was New Labour that made referendums part of normal politics in the first place.

Similarly over-wrought is Campbell’s claim that the British Right-wing press “would not look out of place in North Korea”. To be fair, though, it does take him until p. 34 to go for the inevitable comparison, segueing effortlessly from Nigel Farage to “Europe in the Thirties”. But once it’s out in the open, we get an entire chapter on “The Threat of Fascism”. This would all be more convincing if we hadn’t been here before. “Britain is being run by a dictatorship,” was Campbell’s implausible verdict on Major’s government in 1992.

One could go on. He’s shocked — shocked! — at the sight of Johnson’s government “attacking the BBC”. That’ll be the same BBC that he denounced as a “down-market, dumbed down, over staffed, over bureaucratic, ridiculous organisation”, even before the War of the Dodgy Dossier.

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But the point is not just that Campbell is wildly forgetful of his own time in politics and journalism. It’s more that, by airbrushing the past, he’s avoiding the issues. He leaves the big questions unasked, let alone answered. Why did Farage’s populist rhetoric about “the elite” resonate with so many? Might it be because of the extraordinary accumulation of wealth by the super-rich during New Labour’s time in office? Was disillusionment prompted by a government that the public thought was on their side proving instead to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”?

If you’re looking at disengagement from the political process, it’s worth considering the 2001 general election, when turnout was so low that the number of abstentions was greater than the number who voted for Labour.

In Campbell’s analysis, however, the rot only set in with the global financial crisis of 2008, an event so massive that it warrants an abbreviation: the GFC. His coverage is so brief, however, that those initials only get used once. Maybe he doesn’t like to dwell, lest he has to explain why Britain was so exposed to the banking meltdown that started in America. After the event, Gordon Brown complained that a “shadow banking system had proliferated without politicians being aware of it,” and it’s hard not to think that the man who’d been chancellor for a decade perhaps should have been aware of it.

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On a personal level, Campbell’s problem — the reason he worries about whether he’s “Dadsplaining” — is that he’s been overtaken by the world he helped to create. He would obviously disagree, but surely Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings are part of his legacy. So too, perhaps, is Brexit itself. Partly because even Campbell’s famed tabloid instincts failed to alert him to the impact of the huge rise in immigration. But even more for squandering the chance of moving closer to the European Union.

Because the biggest issue in Blair’s first term — even if it was ducked — was the single currency, and the imminent arrival of the euro. Should Britain join this venture or not? Blair was in favour. Gordon Brown was not. Nor was Rupert Murdoch, whose views carried some weight. And Campbell? Well, he wasn’t much fussed one way or another. “I was not that bothered about the euro,” he wrote in his diary. “It didn’t move me like a Labour v. Tory battle did.”

Maybe he should have cared a little more. Regardless of whether one thinks it would have been good for the country, being part of the single currency would have been transformative. It would have tied Britain so closely to Europe that it would have made a Leave vote very unlikely, indeed would have made a referendum unlikely.

Without Brexit, though, where would Campbell be now? His belated rallying to the European cause has been the re-making of his reputation, wiping away much of the stain of Iraq. As he was during his time at the Daily Mirror, he’s now fighting rearguard actions for the losing side, and it’s a role that suits him admirably. The player of the pipes might not call the tune, but he does get his voice heard.

It is not often you hear words like these, especially in Iraq. But Barzani is no ordinary Iraqi. As well as being the nephew to the former President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, he is also first cousin of the incumbent, Nechirvan Barzani, a general in the Kurdish Peshmerga army, and a Telecoms billionaire.

I first met him in October 2021, just after the last Iraqi elections, at his base, the Black Tiger camp (Black Tiger was his military call sign), on the disputed borders of the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Barzani is a hero to many in the region. He and his troops were the tip of the Kurdish spear against Isis in northern Iraq. They fought them hard and won, but they paid in blood — an old story for Barzani who spent the Nineties battling Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Kurdish mountains.

The results of that election were, as ever, reflective of the sectarianism that strafes Iraqi politics. The Sadrist Movement, led by Shi’ite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — an Iraqi nationalist and no friend of Iran — was the largest party with 73 seats, but was short of the majority needed to form a government; the Iran-backed Shi’ite Al-Fatah saw its vote drop from 48 to just 17. Sunni parties formed the second sectarian block. The Kurds came in third, with their major party, the Kurdistan Patriotic Union (KDP), taking 16 seats. The various blocs then haggled for more than a year to form a functioning government, until, in October 2022, Mohammed Shia’ Sabbar Al-Sudani was nominated to take office as Prime Minister. Iraqi democracy had finally kicked into gear again.

“Twenty years on, the situation is good, especially when compared to 2003,” Barzani told me last week. “We finally have democracy. It’s not perfect of course, and it may take 20 or 30 years for it to become mature, but it exists.” Democracy is an important word for Barzani — and for the Kurds of northern Iraq generally. During my trip to Black Tiger Camp just after the elections, I remember noticing how the tip of each soldier’s right index finger was covered in violet phosphorous-based ink, signifying that their vote had been cast. Barzani’s, I noted, seemed a little more faded than the rest. “It’s because he voted first,” an aide told me.

But if Barzani is now cautiously content with the state of Iraqi democracy, that is only half the story of post-2003 Iraq. The Kurds remain the world’s largest stateless population; their desire for a homeland stretches back centuries. I was in the region’s capital Erbil to cover the 2017 referendum when, against the implicit desires of Washington and the unambiguous orders of Baghdad, 92.73% of the Kurdistan region of Iraq voted to become an independent state.

As I watched Kurds celebrate in the streets, I remember thinking that the Iraqi government would make them pay for what they had done. And it did: as Iranian tanks massed on the border, Baghdad banned international flights to the region, slapped sanctions on the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), and sent troops into the city of Kirkuk and its oilfields. In total, the KRG lost around 40% of its territory. Iraq’s Supreme Federal Court decreed that to preserve the unity of Iraq, no province could be allowed to secede — a ruling the KRG ultimately said it would respect. And so, a unified Iraq remains, as do the sanctions on the Kurdistan region. Yet people here still say it was worth it. Centuries-old dreams of statehood die hard.

Erbil, though, continues to pay for its perceived intransigence. “What happened after the referendum was unfair,” says Barzani. “[To punish us] they cut our government budget and the Peshmerga budget, even after it was left to the Peshmerga to fight on behalf of civilisation against Isis. They sent no money, no equipment, no ammunition. When our leaders and people looked at al-Qaeda, the civil war, Isis and then the weak government which still sanctioned us for wanting independence after all we had done, they were not happy.”

These tensions are present throughout Kurdistan to this day. On the highway out of Erbil, the light turns a wan yellow as it hits the mounds of beige gravel and cement that line the arid land on either side. This part of Iraq may look sparse, but it is rich. Cement, oil, wheat and corn are all grown or produced here. I’m driving with Colonel Surd, head of intelligence of Peshmerga Sector Six (of eight). Six is the largest, stretching to almost 120 square kilometres and is responsible for protecting Erbil.

Six also has another job: to deal with the remnants of Isis who refuse to surrender — the most fanatical members of a former army of fanatics. They are holed up in caves and tunnels across the sector. On the day we meet, the Peshmerga have found more tunnels containing ammunition and grenades. “Daesh [Isis] is an ideology, and many of its people still adhere to it,” Surd says. “They are still active; their sleeper cells are very active. They recruit local people from the Qaraj and Zab and Hawija areas around us. From our thermal cameras we have counted around 60 fighters in no-man’s land. We don’t know if they are the same people or rotating, but based on our intel sources, there are more than 100 villagers who support them. Some because they believe, some for money and some from fear. Isis asks them for food and if they refuse to give it, they kill them.”

We arrive at a Peshmerga outpost: a small gravel-covered compound with a line of armoured vehicles along one side and several low, flat-roofed buildings on the other. In the largest, I meet Lieutenant Colonel Aziz, the commander of Battalion Two, Division 14. “We watch for them [Isis] 24/7,” he tells me. “The last major fight was during August 2021. They blew up a tower and then, by the checkpoint we just passed, took some civilians, eventually exchanging them for ransom.” In December 2021, they attacked again, killing three civilians. “We pursued them into the mountains, but they had laid an IED on the road, and 10 of our Peshmerga were martyred. After that, we changed our strategy. But I still ask myself: they are the enemy, they are outside the law — yet they have night-vision equipment, which we do not, and all the latest tech. How?”

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As if to prove his point, in Erbil later that day I am told that two coalition drones recently disappeared from the sky. Isis, my source explains, has anti-drone jamming equipment. The battle may be a low-level one, but it is fierce. In 2021, I accompanied Barzani to the front where Peshmerga would abseil down into caves housing Isis fighters and fire anti-tank rockets into darkness. It was, I was told, the most efficient way to deal with them.

Another soldier who declines to be named, but who has been itching to speak, interjects. “Isis tells you the situation Iraq is still unstable, even 20 years after the removal of Saddam. [With Isis], we have our feet on a landmine — it could go off at any time, and it will either take off a leg or kill you. This is Iraq in 2023. Before we had one Saddam, now we have militia leaders and corrupt politicians and foreign enemies.”

The soldier goes on to describe Iraq as “a failed marriage” between three groups — the Shia, Sunni and Kurds — who have been forced together. “A three-state confederation is the best choice for Iraq right now. While there is a Sunni governor in Mosul, Hashd [the Shia militias] control the city. A confederation of states for Sunnis, Shias and Kurds would fix this. Then, each group will have no choice but to go back to their part of the state, which will create less problems in every region.”

When I later raise the issue of a “three-state solution” with Barzani, he is more circumspect. “It’s strange,” he says. “Many of the people for whom a united Iraq seems an almost holy enterprise are also those who rail most against the Kafirs [infidels]. I always ask: if they hate Kafirs so much, why do they revere the work of the two Kafirs — Sykes and Picot — who created modern Iraq and started so much of this mess?”

Barzani sees double standards at work when it comes to Baghdad’s treatment of Kurdistan. “When it comes to the budget, we are not Iraqis. When it comes to money and equipment for the Peshmerga, we are not Iraqis. When it comes to the disputed territories, we are not Iraqis. But when they need us to fight Isis, we are Iraqis — the bravest Iraqis — and even then, they didn’t give us any money or weapons for the fight. We don’t need much: just the tech, intelligence, and drones to support us on the ground.”

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I ask him what he thinks might happen when the Coalition eventually leaves Iraq, in all forms, for good. He pauses, and then, in an even tone, answers. “Let me be plain: it will be catastrophic. When they withdrew from Afghanistan, we saw first-hand how that empowered Isis; it gave their fighters hope they would do the same here. And when the Americans withdrew the troops in 2011, we also saw what happened: al-Qaeda, the civil war and then Isis. If they withdraw their support, the same scenario will repeat itself — the state will fracture.”

In other words, the Kurdish fight against the Isis resistance is representative of something greater: of the chaos and failure of post-2003 Iraq. What was arguably the state’s greatest victory turns out to have been incomplete: violence in Iraq is never far below the surface and, once more, it is the Kurds who are facing the fallout of it all.

They remain a patient people. History has given them little choice. But everything has its limits. “I hope the present government can continue with its good work, but the three-state solution is always on the table,” Barzani concludes. “And if Iraq reverts to what it was in 2011 and implodes then, one day, it will become the only solution.”

Between 2018 and 2020, I spent three years living in Rojava, the region governed by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). There, I heard a different take on the revolution’s successes almost every day. US military commanders saw the region as a useful ally against Isis and a counter to Iranian influence. Kurds, women, and Christian and Yazidi villagers were pragmatically grateful to AANES for guaranteeing Syria’s highest standards of human rights and humanitarian provision in the face of ethnic cleansing by Turkey and Isis.

Yet some anarchist volunteers left despondent, their idealised view of the “Rojava revolution” foundering on the reality of mass poverty, limited political engagement and an increasingly prominent security apparatus. Many more remained, accepting ideological “contradictions” as part of the revolutionary process. Certainly, since 2013, it has become apparent that the revolution could never have survived without fulfilling a number of seemingly contradictory roles.

Rojava achieved autonomy after the 2011-12 Syrian uprising saw regime forces withdraw from the country’s Kurdish north. This enabled Kurdish fighters loyal to Abdullah Öcalan, their long-imprisoned leader, to descend to northern Syria from the mountain eyries where they had long been engaged in a bitter guerrilla war against Turkey. There, a committed cadre lived a necessarily communal and frugal life. Kurds who have spent time “in the mountains” speak nostalgically of the comradeship and holistic relation to nature they found there. But these political organisers now found themselves tasked not only with fending off Isis, Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Turkish Armed Forces, but also with establishing a society capable of sustaining millions.

These lifelong partisans of the Kurdish cause have experienced an almost rapturous vindication of their struggle. One middle-aged woman told me, with shining eyes, that 38 of 40 Kurds in her initial training group had lost their lives fighting Turkey, only for a liberated Kurdish homeland to suddenly emerge across the Syrian border. Privately, though, Kurdish militants will often admit frustration with a restive local population uninterested in their leader’s lofty ideals and rhetoric.

Ideas such as Öcalan’s have never before been implemented on such a mass scale. Following his 1999 capture by Turkey’s intelligence organisation (MIT), Öcalan — whose Kurdistan Workers’ Party had been fighting for an independent, socialist Kurdish state — encountered the work of US anarchist Murray Bookchin. Building from Bookchin’s “social ecology”, he developed a critique of state socialism also informed by feminist thought. The Kurdish leader came to advocate a “federation of federations” — a decentralised network of local communes feeding consensus decisions via city-level municipalities into a democratic polity, all based on a re-evaluated relationship with the natural world and a cooperative economy.

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There is a certain mysticism to Öcalan’s writings. His works were transmitted to the outside world from the prison island Imrali in lieu of defence submissions at court, and the subsequent lack of references makes its arguments hard to parse. His works are peppered with gnomic historical speculations, often prefaced with the disclaimer “Could it be…?” Rather, the jailed leader’s brilliance lies in distilling Bookchin’s complex analyses into maxims accessible to the Kurdish public. He deploys a Bookchinite account of history as the steady expansion of “hierarchy” from the patriarchal-gerontocratic tribe through the city-state to capitalist modernity. This teleology is then tied to the fate of the long-dispossessed Kurdish people in their Mesopotamian homeland, with Öcalan marshalling his people as the inheritors of the Fertile Crescent’s idyllic “natural society”.

The idea was for a network of self-governing communes to grow up alongside and ultimately supplant the authoritarian states which today occupy the Kurdish homelands. But, as Rosa Luxemburg observed after October 1917, revolutions do not grow up little by little: they are ejected into the world fully-grown and shrieking. In Rojava, Öcalan is respected as a symbol of Kurdish and women’s liberation, but little-read by civilians; Bookchin is known only to the Kurdish nomenklatura, and that indirectly. Reality, in the form of inter-ethnic warfare, bread shortages and depleted energy resources, immediately intruded on Öcalan’s somewhat utopian vision.

Most obviously, without its black-market petrol revenues, the impoverished Rojava administration could never have kept millions from starvation. Ambitions to build a greener economy by transitioning to more localised, cooperative agriculture and renewable energy sources have been frustrated by a number of factors: Turkish damming of the Euphrates and control of key water infrastructure; the diversion of power to areas controlled by Assad and Turkish-backed jihadist militias; war damage to dams and oil refineries; and an embargo preventing industrial imports. Hence the unlikely spectacle of a “green revolution” underwritten by oil wealth. (Could it be…?)

Economically, too, the AANES has been forced to proceed cautiously, expropriating Syrian regime holdings, but largely leaving private property and capital untouched. Oil revenues subsidise cheap diesel and bread, with these efforts reaching far more people than the scattering of co-ops. Sporadic attempts to develop agricultural autarky are limited in their effectiveness by the economic embargo and subsequent forced, continued reliance on smugglers who bring in the weapons the Kurds need to fend off Turkey, but also flood the markets with cheap Turkish chicken stock, flip-flops and cigarettes.

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Similarly, economic pressure, priorities of national defence and the challenges of managing conservative and sometimes openly pro-Isis local populations have hampered AANES’s efforts to promote genuine grassroots political participation. AANES has made truly impressive steps in challenging deeply-entrenched patriarchal norms by introducing women-led governance, restorative justice and social education programmes, even in former Isis heartlands — but the devolution of decision-making authority is partial and inconsistent. I’ve attended commune meetings in the Kurdish Jazira. Here, locals complain about road repairs, bread and price-gouging, but absent calls for greater investment in infrastructure, the Kurds broadly align behind the AANES. Directing an economy or a war requires centralised policy, and most locals are content to leave these issues to their leaders, visiting the commune only to collect the chits for their subsidised bread and oil.

Paradoxically, it is in those conservative Arab regions only recently liberated from Isis that the AANES has been repeatedly forced — through admirably open-minded public consultations, pressure from conservative tribal federations, and street protest — to rethink, revise or defend its positions on issues such as women’s education, conscription, the detention of Isis-linked individuals, and relations with Assad. Neither Öcalan nor Bookchin envisaged the scene I witnessed in Raqqa, in which tribal sheikhs quarrelled with Kurdish women’s activists over the primary-school curriculum. But these thorny controversies are the lifeblood of a unique democracy. These Arab-Kurdish tensions are the primary internal crisis facing Rojava today. But they also produce its most genuinely democratic and revolutionary moments. With typical far-sightedness, Bookchin recognised that “any self-managed community that tries to live in isolation and develop self-sufficiency risks the danger of becoming parochial, even racist”. Rather than Arab chauvinism merely being an obstacle for “the Kurds” to overcome, their fractious relation with these neighbouring communities creates genuine, if imperfect, federalism.

Thus the most interesting contributions to a new essay collection, Social Ecology and the Rojava Revolution, are not the sketches of Bookchin and Öcalan’s ideals, but the recent analyses from on the ground in Rojava. As Bookchin writes in his anthologised essay “What Is Social Ecology?” (1993), “new ecological attitudes will remain vaporous if they are not given substance through real and objective institutions”. The Trotskyist-turned-anarchist-turned-iconoclast would certainly be open-minded enough to consider the “Rojava revolution” on its own, distinct terms.

Bookchin repeatedly turns Marx’s maxim “the social revolution…cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future” against both Marxists themselves and eco-capitalists. But while he warns against “the glorification of history” and a desire to return to prelapsarian “primitive communism” and modes of social organisation, in practice Bookchin himself risks valorising an unobtainable historical ideal. As the Rojava experiment demonstrates, the approximated restoration of “natural society” through village communes and local co-operatives is noble in theory, but impractical and insufficient at scale. Bookchin’s self-described “utopianism” becomes reality not when applied in asocial, isolated Leftist enclaves kept pure by those he damned as “lifestyle anarchists”, and still less via the “mystified primitivism” of Trad-Right doomerism, but when material conditions make them a necessity for ordinary people.

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So, where one contributor to the essay collection cites the remarkable autonomous women’s village Jinwar as an example of Rojava’s social ecology in action, a more representative model of the region’s unique political identity might be the refugee camp I visited south of Tel Abyad, a town seized and ethnically cleansed by Turkish forces in 2019. Here, Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds — some displaced three times by war — must live side-by-side, solving grievances via the local reconciliation committee. It is here, and not in comparatively well-off Jazira, that the large and growing agricultural cooperative constitutes a genuine lifeline to destitute families.

As most international volunteers in Rojava are clear-eyed enough to recognise, any immediate efforts to implement similar ideals in the West cannot succeed at scale. Absent a decade’s armed struggle on the basis of a violently repressed national identity and even the very war against Isis, which served as the basis for building a trans-ethnic political consensus, Rojava could never have succeeded in mobilising a mass movement, still less in uniting peoples so recently at war. Rather, it is more likely to be through climate catastrophe and a retreat from globalism that we see new Rojavas emerge in the terra nullia left behind by shrinking states. The dialectic of history will lead some of us to anarchism — along, no doubt, with more authoritarian alternatives.

For his part, Bookchin somewhat reluctantly addresses “how to go from here to there” only in the final two pages of his magnum opus, The Ecology of Freedom, gesturing to a Marxist theory of historical crisis while admitting genuinely effective “libertarian forms of organisation” are yet to develop. Ten years on from the revolution, this is perhaps the most important lesson Rojava has to offer: it is only when the regional political consensus is fractured by extreme internal and external stresses that genuine opportunities to refashion it emerge.

We join a short queue and a guard looks vaguely in our direction. “Ok, prepare the cigarette. Oh, and take off your seatbelt. If you’re not smoking and you’re wearing a seatbelt, it means you’re UN, which is a problem because it means paperwork.” I do as instructed, and also take out a set of prayer beads I bought in Baghdad. “Nice touch,” says Mohammed with a grin as we pass through with ease.

Mosul suffered more than almost any other Iraqi city following the US invasion. The removal of Saddam brought the people a taste of democracy, but it also unleashed a sectarian war, mainly between Sunni and Shia. Of many things the carnage spawned, the Sunni terror group Isis was arguably the worst. 

In December 2013, after an attack on the city of Fallujah, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the leader of al-Qaeda’s pathologically anti-Shia offshoot the “Islamic State of Iraq”, announced he was forming the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. Six months later, it captured Mosul, Iraq’s second most important city. From the pulpit of the city’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, al-Baghdadi proclaimed the birth of a new worldwide Islamic Caliphate.

Isis then swept across the country. The Iraqi army simply couldn’t cope. At its peak, in autumn 2014, the caliphate spanned 41,000 miles across Iraq and Syria ― and ruled over eight million people, as well as its 40,000 foreign fighters who arrived from 120 countries. As we drive into the city, I ask Mohammed who joined Isis. “Various people,” he replies. “Those who supported Saddam; people who had family members killed by the Americans; and then many Sunnis who got sick of being treated like shit by Baghdad and the Iraqi security forces after Saddam fell.”

Saddam’s fall emancipated Iraq’s Shia majority, many of whom were looking for payback after feeling victimised under his Sunni rule. “There was so much anger here,” Mohammed tells me. “In Mosul, between 2011-2014, every neighbourhood had only one entrance and exit and if the soldier guarding it was in a bad mood, he’d just close everything. There were lines of cars waiting for hours.”

We weave slowly through traffic until we reach the Taqatu al Dawasa roundabout, one of the busiest in Mosul. “Over there used to be a tall building — the Orzdy,” Mohammed tells me breezily. “Isis used to throw gays off it.”

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Almost everything around me is either half-destroyed or being rebuilt. “This street used to be a line of trenches,” Mohammed says as he points out of the window to his left. “The two sides would just fire bombs and rockets at each other.” We pass a Mosul police patrol truck with a man in a balaclava standing on the back, holding a mounted PKC machine gun. SWAT is written across his back.

We enter Mosul’s old city. It’s a hive of winding narrow streets with construction works everywhere. I notice some graffiti and ask if it’s political. “Real Estate advert,” he replies. Mosul was once a battlefield; now it’s a building site. Billions have poured in to regenerate the city. “ When I was embedded with the military during the Battle of Mosul,” explains Mohammed, “this street was all rubble. Only Humvees could drive here. I’ve never seen so many people get killed. At least 50 every day — and that was just in our area. God only knows how many civilians got caught in crossfire.

We get out and walk. Mohammed points to a green door. “That’s a garden. During the fighting there were so many bodies there was no space in the cemeteries, so they’d bury them in their gardens.” We walk on. Once more Mohammed sweeps his arms outwards. “All this was a battlefield — between the Iraqi Golden Division and Isis.”

If the fight against Isis was brutal, their rule here was arguably worse. In a small shop in the old city, I meet Sarmad Al Moaymy, a realtor who lived under their rule. “In 2014, even several months before the city’s fall, it was obvious that Isis had taken over — and it was Nouri al Maliki [who became Prime Minister after Saddam’s fall] who gave them the “space” to do so,” he tells me as we drink tea. “The Government treated the people here really badly, arresting them randomly and forcing them to pay bribes to get out of jail, which they couldn’t afford. The people felt like they were being suffocated. Isis came and kicked out the Government and gave them freedom — they felt alive again; in the beginning at least.

“For a while the city was safe; every neighbourhood had the concrete blocks around their entrances removed; people could drive around again. Then Isis slowly started publishing laws and restrictions: no shorts or tight trousers; then people had to have beards. That’s when we started to realise what they were. Every day they would execute people on the roundabout in front of everyone. It was terrifying: today it was a stranger, tomorrow your neighbour, the next day it could be you. I refused to grow a beard so after six months I fled the city.”

In the nearby bazaar, I meet Fares Khalaf, a former sergeant in the fire department of the army and now a wheat farmer dressed in the traditional thawb. The market is a sensory assault: old electric fans recycle hot air; cuts of meat hang from hooks; sparks fly from welding tools. Rows of fake Prada and Hermes bags are lined up next to sacks of vegetables and nuts and fruit. “Life under Daesh [Isis] flipped upside down,” he tells me. “Before, we used to farm our barley and sell it to the government; under Isis there was no government — so we had to come to the bazaar to sell it. Wages for workers fell from 25,000 Dinars to 3,000. Many people tried to flee. But I stayed, where would I go? My family and my farm are here. And besides, you need money to flee.”

By this point, Isis’s violence had spread well beyond the city walls. “They killed nine from my village, one of whom was my son,” he says without changing his tone. “It was in 2014. My son and eight other men were driving in their cars and Isis shot them. They did an investigation afterwards and came to my house to say that they had killed him by accident and that they were sorry. I said: ‘What does your sorry get me? Does it get my son back?’”

It was this sort of barbaric behaviour that forced the Iraqi state to finally step in — even if it needed a lot of help to finish the job. On 13 June 2014, just days after Isis took Mosul, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, issued a call to all Iraqis to take up arms against the terror group. For the Shia it had the force of a Fatwa. Two days later, Al Maliki announced the formation of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), a group of (predominantly Shia) militias who would band together to fight Isis, and in so doing radically change the Iraqi state.

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Only Sistani had the moral authority to unite these rival groups. Few noted the irony of him bringing them together in a de facto alliance with Tehran. The Iranians had been arming and funding Shia groups in Iraq since the fall of Saddam — the PMF was their chance to scale up this influence. Meanwhile, someone with sufficient military skills was needed to run them effectively, and with the charisma and political nous to keep them united. There was perhaps only one man in the entire Middle East who could do that: the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani.

Not just an accomplished military commander, Soleimani was a master of a particularly Iranian art: political warfare. For years he had overseen the killings of US soldiers and subverted US policy in Iraq wherever he could. Now he dreamed of turning the PMF into a centralised force like the IRGC.

Soleimani soon made his presence felt. He was, by all accounts, “fearless” — famous for never wearing a flak jacket, even on the front lines. His fame spread. In December 2014, Newsweek put Soleimani on the cover, while the accompanying article claimed that the Shia militias were the only chance the world had of defeating Isis.

In truth, the militias were just one part of a combined effort that involved the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga and, flying overhead providing air cover in what was an inescapable irony for all concerned, the US-led coalition. For the next two years, this alliance drove Isis out of cities across Iraq. By the end of 2016, it controlled just 7% of Iraqi territory. Its final stronghold was Mosul and both the Iraqi security forces and the coalition were determined that the PMF — whose militias were often brutal to the Sunni inhabitants of the towns they liberated — would be kept out of the fight.

Rebin Rozhbayani, was then an officer in the 3rd battalion, 1st brigade of the Kurdish Peshmerga, was part of the first push to retake Mosul on 16 October 2016. The battalion’s job was to pierce the Isis lines that surrounded the city, open the gates, and allow the Iraqi army to enter the city.

The fight was tough. On the first day, as they reached the village of Fazilia near Mosul, a suicide bomber drove into their convoy, destroying two Humvees and killing three of his comrades. Canadian air support then announced they were pulling out to another sector where other forces were taking heavy casualties.

“We continued,” he tells me. “But then a second car hit our PAK unit. We lost two more Peshmerga. Once the Canadians had gone, we had to stop and put our American armoured vehicles into a 360-degree defensive circle. We spent the night like that, though no one slept as we were surrounded by Isis not knowing when they would attack. We were two brigades, 200 Peshmergas, facing about 200 of them.”

The second day was perhaps worse: “We killed about 20 Isis fighters who emerged from tunnels they had dug around the city to attack us with RPGs and SPG-9s. Getting captured was always a big fear. In the beginning, they wanted to capture rather than kill us. I used to listen to their radio and they always said: ‘Take them as prisoners, it’s so much more effective.’ A lot of their power came from their beheading videos. That’s partly how they captured Mosul so quickly. Their videos were so violent that the Iraqis forces became scared to fight them.”

After losing 31 Peshmerga, the brigade managed to enter the village of Bashiqa, where the fight was easier since Isis were withdrawing to Mosul for their final stand. It was the beginning of the end.

Rozhbayani accepts that Iran played a role in fighting Isis but, he stresses, it always had its own agenda — it didn’t matter what was good for Iraq. “The plan was to push Isis out of Iraq and back into Syria. But [Syrian leader] Bashar al-Assad is Iran’s client and the Iranians didn’t want them there, so they pushed them toward Kurdistan instead. And then at the end of it all, the PMF got 40 seats in the Iraqi parliament,” he concludes with a slight laugh. Once more, Soleimani’s political skills played a role. After Isis’s defeat, the Iranian-backed militias proclaimed themselves the country’s saviours, organising victory parades and celebrations.

Even today, in parts of the city, images of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Muhandis, the former deputy leader of the PMF, both killed in a US drone strike in 2020, are pinned to almost every lamppost. The checkpoint to the city is supposed to be manned by local police, but the guards are Shia militias dressed up in their uniforms. “Look at their beards,” Mohammed told me as we passed through. “No Iraqi policeman or soldier is allowed to have a beard like that.” They collect a tax of 10,000 dinars from every truck that comes through.

We later pass the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, its dome reduced to a torn and gaping turquoise shell swaddled in brown scaffolding. When Mosul was about to fall, Isis had a choice: either retreat from the site where the Caliphate had been announced or blow it up. It chose the latter.

Will Mosul recover? I ask Mohammed. “Life is back,” he replies. “Corruption is back. In fact, everything is worse — because so many people lost loved ones. There is a huge ditch in Khalsa in southwest Mosul, which contains the bodies of more than 14,000 civilians and police killed by Isis. And all this for what? WMDs? Oh please. The only WMD Iraq ever had was stupidity.”

“Today marks 20 years since the beginning of an invasion and occupation that has been estimated to have cost more than one million Iraqis lives, along with those of 179 British servicemen and women,” he told a TV camera afterwards. “Today, we remember how the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, warned that the war was not in accordance with the UN Charter and was illegal. Last month, we observed a minute’s silence for those killed in another illegal war, started by Russia in Ukraine. If there is a lesson for all of us to learn, it is that the UN Charter is there for a reason.”

Less than a mile away, at the Houses of Parliament, the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, also observed the minute’s silence. “I have previously stated that the Iraq war was not lawful because there was no UN resolution expressly authorising it,” he said in a statement afterwards. “The decision to commit British forces was taken by a former Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair. My Labour Party condemns all breaches of international law — both past and present.”

And then I woke up… to the dulcet tones of Tony Blair, sufficiently emboldened by yet another soft-soap BBC interview to pronounce, without a hint of irony, on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. When gently challenged over his own invasion of Iraq, he loftily declared that “each case must be judged on its own merits”. Blair, of course, has form with Putin, visiting the St Petersburg opera with him in 2000 as Chechnya was being pulverised. He later said that it is “important we support Russia in her action against terrorism”.

Twenty years ago, as an elected member of the Labour Party’s ruling National Executive Committee, I had a ring-side seat at the launch of the Iraq War. From the outset, I didn’t believe Blair’s claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. According to Robin Lustig, then a presenter on Radio 4’s The World Tonight, my clash with former US Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, was the first time anyone had publicly challenged the WMD claim. (So furious was Eagleburger, he started calling me “Buster”.)

From early 2002, it was already clear that America had a political imperative for Iraqi regime change. Tony Blair, far from dissuading President Bush, was actually helping him build an international “coalition of the willing”. On January 28, I sat next to the veteran Labour Left-winger Dennis Skinner at a meeting of Labour’s NEC as he jabbed his finger at Blair and said: “This will be the biggest mistake you will ever make!”

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Unbeknown to Blair, I was working closely with Jan Kavan, a former President of the UN General Assembly and Czech Foreign Minister, and Robin Cook, who would later resign from the Cabinet in protest at Britain’s support for the Iraq war. Together we drafted a series of resolutions to be tabled at meetings of the NEC, in the hope that this might encourage a wider revolt within the Parliamentary Labour Party. On three occasions, with only the support of three other members of the NEC, we challenged Blair directly, submitting resolutions demanding that the Labour Government ascertain from the UN Secretary-General and the President of the General Assembly the legality of any attack. The 30-strong committee voted us down twice and on a third occasion, as the countdown to war intensified, ruled a resolution “out of order”, which meant that it could not be voted on. This time, I walked out of the NEC meeting in protest. In another meeting, we were briefly handed a copy of the “dodgy dossier”, with its confected claim that WMDs could be launched against British military bases in Cyprus within 45 minutes. Then we had to hand it back.

When we took our opposition for a fourth time to the Labour Party Conference, despite party chairman Charles Clarke’s attempts to persuade us to withdraw our amendment, we were subsequently rounded on by tame, hand-picked speakers in the debate. I was accused of being an “appeaser” and “guilty of making orphans of the sons and daughters of servicemen in Cyprus”. Given that I was the son of a serviceman based in Cyprus who had been evacuated because there was a very real threat of a Turkish invasion at the time, it all seemed pretty hysterical. 

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On February 15, 2003, millions of people in more than 600 cities worldwide took to the streets to protest the impending invasion. In London, with more than a million people filling the streets and Hyde Park, I joined speakers including Reverend Jesse Jackson, Charles Kennedy, and Jeremy Corbyn. I had brought the nonagenarian Michael Foot from his home in Hampstead to give possibly one of his last great flights of oratory. In Europe, crowds were even larger. Anti-war organisers reported that the worldwide demonstrations collectively formed the largest peace protest since the Vietnam War.

What have we learned from the Iraq invasion? Precious little it would seem. Today, Gordon Brown, whom I had attempted to win over before the invasion, and who I knew in his heart didn’t really want to go along with it, is calling for a Nuremberg-style special court to try Putin for war crimes; the same was promised for Saddam Hussein and look how how that turned out. Meanwhile, arms control treaties have been ripped up and the UN Secretary-General is invisible enough for most not even to know his name.

In Britain, it is now very difficult to find anyone who was ever in favour of the invasion and dismemberment of Iraq. Yet Tony Blair has never apologised or been held to account; instead, he has become revoltingly rich, partly by advising the kind of regimes he once railed against. Meanwhile, his chief propagandist, Alastair Campbell, is treated reverentially by the media, holding forth with no hint of self-awareness on such vexed issues as “standards in public life”. However, perhaps Peter Mandelson is thriving the most: he is now back in control of a Labour Party that Starmer claims as his own. This is the legacy of Iraq for New Labour: the lies might seem a distant memory, but the liars are most certainly not.

Baghdad was strafed by violence, and then lavished with colossal, almost surreal, amounts of foreign cash. The Americans spent $2 trillion on the war — a good chunk of it on efforts to rebuild the country they had helped to destroy. It was, like many things the US does, almost uncontrollable. Billions in shrink-wrapped $100 bills flowed into the country, and back out again into foreign bank accounts. It was the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve. In the year after the 2003 invasion, almost 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad.

Is Iraq now the functioning democracy of Washington’s dreams, or a sectarian dystopia? Twenty years on, was it worth it?

“Long live Bush! Long live Bush!” My fixer Ammar is reminiscing about the first days of the invasion as we drive through the city centre. “That’s what we were chanting. The Americans were coming; the Baathists were running. I was on the roof of my house, and we saw Apaches flying around. Then the American soldiers entered the city. They were covered in mud; their faces all painted black. Then the armoured vehicles came. Those soldiers were spotless.”

Ammar is one of the many Shia Iraqis who initially viewed the war as a liberation from Saddam Hussein’s sadism. Saddam was Sunni, but also a Baathist, an avowedly secular political philosophy influenced by Arab nationalism and Marxism. He lived in perennial fear of Iraq’s Shia majority, not least the Dawa Party, a Shia Islamist group that emerged in 1960. Devoted to turning Iraq into an Islamist state, it tried to assassinate Saddam in 1982, his would-be killers emerging from the cover of a date palm orchard in the city of Dujail. Saddam had two of its early leaders, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and Muhammad-Sadiq al-Sadr killed. (Saddam allegedly hammered an iron nail into the head of the former.)

We pass one of Saddam’s palaces. Every remaining pillar for 50 metres has his initials engraved into it, Ammar tells me. “He made himself everywhere,” he adds, before pointing to another fortified wall. “David, look! That’s the Green Zone.” If Baghdad is a city of chaos, it’s also a city of walls. Once they encased a tyrant; now they protect the hordes of diplomats, journalists and NGO workers, who comprise the tip of today’s Western spear into this country.

There’s a mural by the side of the road. “Stop killing; we deserve life; where are you UN?” it reads with the image of a bullet flying through it. Ammar remembers the violence. “We got so used to the bombs that, after a while, we could clean up everything after an attack — including the bodies — in one hour.

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“At first, I was disappointed with Iraqis for fighting the Americans. I thought they were forgetting our debt: if the Americans hadn’t taken out Saddam, we would have lived under his dictatorship for 1,000 years. I thought the Americans just needed time to make huge changes in the country.” But then Ammar started working for the US Army as a translator. “Everyone was always coming to me with their problems, asking me about electricity, water, jobs — simple things — and I realised they didn’t have a plan. Even when violence against them was from just a few people, they took it out on everyone. They shot at me with water cannons just for approaching their car. They were savage.”

George W. Bush went into Iraq declaring he would take out a tyrant and replace him with a liberal democracy. Five weeks after the invasion, the president declared the mission accomplished. “In the battle for Iraq, the United States and her allies have prevailed,” he announced from the USS Abraham Lincoln. American forces captured Saddam later that year. Everything seemed rosy. But in truth, the problems were just beginning.

The road into Sadr City is lined with the posters of martyrs. They are all so young: young men who should have spent their youth playing video games, not dying in the street. Sadr City is a Baghdad suburb that was built to house the poor. Originally called Al-Thawr (Revolution City), it was renamed Saddam City in 1982 and then unofficially renamed Sadr City, after the martyred Sadiq al-Sadr. Today, it is the base of his son Muqtada al-Sadr, a thorn in the side of the Americans from the moment they arrived.

I am here for Friday prayers. All around are children playing in the streets. A few kick a dirty football around, their replica shirts bearing the names of famous Muslim players: Mo Salah and Karim Benzema are the most popular.

Friday prayers have a special place in the Muslim world — especially for the Shia of Iraq, who have traditionally used them to voice dissent. It was largely because of their sermons during Friday prayers that Sadeq and Baqir Sadr were killed. Today, more than a thousand people are praying in the street. Flags and banners stretch almost to the horizon. The images of the Shia Imams Huseyn and Ali are everywhere. “Muqtada!” demand the crowd. Muqtada, however, is not here today, but back home in the holy Shia city of Najaf. His replacement is giving a speech centred on the environment. “Iraq has become a desert under the rule of the former regime,” he intones. “It is time to plant more trees.”

Sadr City is key to the story of post-invasion Iraq. Just two months after the Americans overthrew Saddam in July, they set up a governing council to rule the country until proper elections — the first in the nation’s history — could be held the following year. Among the council’s leaders were members of Dawa. The party had been responsible for terror attacks against US targets in the Eighties, but after Saddam became public enemy number one following his 1991 invasion of Kuwait, Washington brought it in from the cold. But Dawa had no time for the US vision of a rainbow nation. Instead, it used the parliament to achieve its own vision of a Shia-dominated Iraq.

One person, though, was left out. On orders from the US, Muqtada was barred from the governing council. Washington viewed him as a loose cannon. But it didn’t count on his ambition. If Muqtada couldn’t rule through the ballot, he would do so through the bullet.

He got to work quickly. Sadrist forces already controlled most of Baghdad’s mosques and, just weeks after the invasion, they set about seizing the schools and hospitals, as well as opening local Sharia law courts and “punishment” committees. Muqtada wanted to expel the Americans from the start, and made his views known publicly. Then, after Washington responded by shutting down his newspaper, he founded the Mahdi Army. Its goal: to drive US forces out of Iraq. Once that was achieved, he would take his rightful seat at the new table of Iraq’s government. As Iraq imploded into bedlam, hatred of Washington became increasingly popular; his message found a growing audience.

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In a hotel in central Baghdad, I meet Abu Fatima, also known as Al Jariyah (the wounded), a former soldier in the Mahdi Army, a large man with a large belly and wounds across his face. He joined up soon after Muqtada sent out the call, and fought US forces in the August 2004 Battle of Najaf. Abu Fatima was wanted by the Americans and spent four years on the run in Syria and Iran.

“The Americans said they were liberators,” he tells me, “but we were sure they were occupiers. We started as peaceful protestors in 2004, and when Muqtada said the occupiers had to leave, we joined him in Najaf. Then they closed the newspaper, and they issued an arrest warrant against him. Then they tried to raid the holy shrine — and the conflict began. I was 18 at the time. We had Kalashnikovs and RPGs, while they were using planes and tanks. But still we managed to push them back.”

The story is taken up by Mortava Al-Musavi, the spokesman of the military wing of the Sadr organisation. Dressed in a black suit (the Shia’s favoured colour), he recalls his own time fighting. “We never had any support from anyone. We made IEDs and used them against Abrams tanks. Many of us went out to fight believing we would not return. We used to sleep inside the graves with the dead. I remember a comment from a US general, who said: ‘We are fighting ghosts.’”

I ask him what he thinks of Iraq today. “Twenty years on, we have proved that we will not accept any occupiers trampling on us. We believe that only Iraqis can rule themselves. And this is what Muqtada is putting into practice. If only Iraq stops implementing a foreign agenda, it will become a stable country. I don’t want to be pessimistic; I hope things will get better.”

“A foreign agenda.” It is impossible to spend any time in post-invasion Iraq without hearing these words. And they generally mean one thing: Iran. When the Americans removed Saddam, they empowered not only Iraq’s Shia, but its neighbour, the world’s most powerful Shia state. As soon as Saddam fell, Iranian money and influence, and indeed weapons, started pouring into Iraq. Not only did Iran help set up several militias in the country, but many of members of Dawa who fled Iraq under Saddam went into exile in Iran. Nouri Al Maliki, Prime Minister of Iraq from 2006-2014, and who many blame for a range of viciously anti-Sunni policies, was a Dawa member who spent eight years in Tehran.

Muqtada, though, has always — publicly at least — rejected Tehran and campaigned against Iranian influence in Iraq (though he spent 2007-2011 in Iran on the run from a US arrest warrant). It may have cost him. In the 2021 Iraqi elections, the Sadrist Movement gained the most seats in parliament, but couldn’t form a government: among other things, the Iran-backed Fatah coalition wouldn’t countenance a Sadr-led government and negotiations stalled for over a year.

Over tea that evening, Fattah Al-Sheikh, a former MP close to the Sadrist movement, explains what lies behind this stasis. “Too many politicians are pro-Iran or they are scared of it. They are subject to the Velayat-e faqih [Iran’s ruling theological-political doctrine] while having to deal with western countries. One day they must implement the agenda of a country that attacks the Green Zone and sends rockets into Erbil; the next they are trying to meet the US ambassador. They are lost.”

He continues: “You cannot claim to be democratic on one hand and hold a weapon in the other. You cannot be a democratic country when you are part of the government that is smuggling cash to another country. We have armed militia groups who put rifles to people’s heads when they go to vote.”

Twenty years on, Al-Sheikh is keen to be, as he calls it, “fair”. Without US intervention, he concedes, Iraqis would never have been liberated from the former regime, but the job is unfinished. “They need to be serious about building a proper democratic process here. They are responsible for keeping it safe while holding all groups, including the Iran-backed Shia militias, to account. We can kick them out of Baghdad and back to Iran if the international community helps us to establish a national project to serve Iraq… If they do that, we can finally say the US has succeeded in its project in Iraq.”

Success is a long way off. Throughout the city, there are posters and murals commemorating the Iranian Quds force commander Qasem Soleimani. In one market, you can buy a pendant of pro-Iran Shia militia leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was killed alongside Soleimani in a 2020 US drone strike.

Baghdad. The name still echoes in the imagination of both East and West. Shock and Awe. Old and New. The city is filled with scenes from ancient history and modern tragedy. Near the market, Ammar points out the site of a suicide bombing that killed hundreds. One day, we visit a coffee shop; near the entrance, a poster of the owner’s brother, martyred in another suicide bombing just outside, is pinned to a tree. Twenty years on from the 2003 invasion, the history of modern Iraq is still written into the cityscape of its capital.

As we drive out of central Baghdad, Ammar tells me: “This used to have so many bombs on it the Americans called it the Irish Road. Now it’s named after Muhandis.” I ask him about it all, after so many years. “We had so much hope in the beginning,” he replies. “Then the country turned to a path of blood, and then people started to want Saddam back to keep order. Even with all the misery he brought, you’d be taken quietly away. We didn’t see all this blood in the streets.”

Cheney’s involvement appeared to repeat a familiar story about the American military-industrial complex. Four decades earlier, a Halliburton subsidiary, Brown & Root, made large donations to President Lyndon Johnson before securing contracts on a naval construction programme in South Vietnam. Ironically, one of Brown & Root’s critics was a young Donald Rumsfeld, then a Republican Congressman, but in 2003 Bush’s defence secretary and a vocal cheerleader for the war.

Knowing that the oil charge coming from across the Atlantic made it harder for him to win the battle of public opinion in Britain, Tony Blair directly tried to defuse it in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman:

“Let me just deal with the oil thing because… the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It’s not the oil that is the issue — it is the weapons, which is why the UN resolutions have gone over 12 years in relation to the weapons and why we’ve actually allowed Iraq to export oil.”

Yet the Halliburton allegations were a distraction from the actual reasons why Iraq was an oil war — not that Bush and Blair dared present it as such. After post-invasion Iraq descended into civil war, Bush came close to spelling out those motivations when, in his 2006 State of the Union address, he said: “we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world”. In that moment, Bush might have been mistaken for Jimmy Carter. Indeed, since the origins of the oil problem that the Iraq War was conceived to address lie in the Seventies, he was necessarily Carter’s energy heir. Then, the United States became the world’s largest oil importer after decades of near self-sufficiency. Unfortunately from its perspective, it acquired a direct interest in supply from the Middle East just as British imperial power crumbled in the region and post-colonial energy nationalism took hold.

Iraq was always tangled up in Washington’s ensuing geopolitical problems. The Ba’athist government ­— on this issue directed by Saddam Hussein — had nationalised all the foreign oil companies. During the Seventies, Iraq was also an ally of Moscow. Wanting to guard against Soviet influence in the Persian Gulf, but not wanting militarily to replace Britain, the Nixon administration made Saudi Arabia and Iran the guarantors of American energy security in the region. But the Iranian revolution in February 1979, followed by first the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and then the Iran-Iraq War, overwhelmed this strategy while sending oil prices soaring until new output from Alaska and the North Sea appeared. In this maelstrom, Jimmy Carter made a major strategic change in American foreign policy that has never yet been reversed. Under the Carter Doctrine, the United States became publicly committed to using military force in response to “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf”.

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This did not mean that American presidents would necessarily embrace a military approach to American foreign oil dependency in the Middle East. To the contrary, they still much preferred sanctions against hostile regimes and the use of regional proxies, rendering Bush’s 2003 war a radical departure in method. In the Eighties, Iraq became one of those surrogates when the Reagan administration provided support to Saddam’s regime to defeat Iran. But after its territorial ambitions in Iran were vanquished, Iraq again became a problem, even as the Cold War with the Soviet Union ended. In responding to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with war, George Bush senior acted on the Carter doctrine. But in deciding to stop in January 1991 at pushing Iraq out of Kuwait, and relying on sanctions on Iraq’s oil exports — policed by the US air force patrolling the Gulf — to contain a Saddam-led Iraq, he bequeathed his successors a strategic contradiction around that doctrine.

Sanctions on Iraq — on top of those in place on Iran and Libya — constrained the supply of oil out of the Persian Gulf, the defence of which was the Carter Doctrine’s whole raison d’etre. While this tension caused few problems in the Nineties, when oil supply was abundant and prices low, in the early 21st century it became an altogether different proposition. Now, output from Alaska and the North Sea was declining, while fears about the rate of depletion at the world’s largest oil field, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia, were mounting. Meanwhile, China’s accelerating consumption, on the back of much higher growth after Beijing’s accession to the World Trade Organization, constituted a concurrent demand shock.

Undoubtedly, the George W. Bush administration was well versed in oil matters. In his second week in office, Bush set up an Energy Task Force headed by Cheney. The subsequent Cheney Report declared that the United States faced an “energy crisis” arising from the “fundamental imbalance” between the supply and demand for oil. The report concluded by recommending that the administration review the sanction regimes and make moves to reopen the Middle East to foreign energy investment.

Seen in these terms, the Iraq War did possess a strategic logic. Iraq had large, under-utilised oil reserves. Since all Iraq’s major fields are onshore, its production and capital costs are lower than anywhere other than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; while compared with Venezuela, another historical under-producer, Iraq’s crude is easy to refine. Releasing that potential supply meant both regime change and attracting the international oil majors back into the country. Contrary to Blair’s deflection, there was no prospect of Iraq becoming a top-tier oil producer without technologically modernising the Iraqi oil industry. In the entire period since nationalisation began, Iraq had only once managed a yearly average of more than 3 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude output, while the years of war and sanctions had left the sector’s infrastructure dilapidated. By contrast, Russia’s output in 2003 was 8.5 million bpd and Saudi Arabia’s 10 million.

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The oil rationale for the war appears to have been deemed publicly inadmissible, even as the Cheney Report implicitly had made it clear. In his memoirs, the former chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan wrote: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq War is largely about oil.” After facing criticism, he backtracked, claiming that it was a personal remark about why, as a central banker worried about oil prices, he had advocated for military action within decision-making circles. Absent was the brutal language about the gap between public discourse and energy manoeuvrings abroad that ends Sydney Pollack’s 1975 film Three Days of the Condor. There, the covert-operations CIA character explains to the idealistic Robert Redford character why he saw no reason to ask voters whether they supported a plot to seize Middle Eastern oil fields:

“Ask them when they’re running out. Ask them when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask them when their engines stop… You want to know something? They won’t want us to ask them. They’ll just want us to get it for them.”

In Beijing, there were few doubts that the war was oil-motivated. Almost immediately after Saddam fell, the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, signed an agreement with Putin to build China’s first oil pipeline with Russia. For the Chinese leadership, a world in which the United States was willing to wage war for an oil objective was one in which it needed to reassess Chinese oil security a decade after it became an oil importer. This fear crystallised in what Hu identified as the Malacca Dilemma: China’s vulnerability to an American naval blockade in the narrow Malacca Straits, through which all China’s oil imports from the Persian Gulf and Africa pass. If Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is a hedge against the Malacca Dilemma, its strategic intent lies in the conclusions an earlier Chinese leader drew about Washington’s response to its own post-self-sufficiency oil predicament.

Yet as an attempt to militarise Washington’s Middle-Eastern oil problem, the Iraq War was also largely a failure. Iraq’s oil production in 2005 was around 20% lower than in the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency. Indeed, it did not surpass that 2001 total until 2010. Although the Iraqi government then boasted that the sector could raise production to 12 million bpd within six to seven years, it has never yet been higher than 4.8 million bpd. As for the return of the Western majors, the Iraqi government took until 2007 to draft a hydrocarbon bill setting out a legal framework for foreign investment, and then could not get the Iraqi parliament to pass the legislation. When, in 2010, it did finally award contracts, it gave access to non-Western firms as well as the majors. Notably, on Iraq’s largest field, Rumaila, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation became an equal partner with BP.

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The country’s post-2003 political instability, at times fuelled by anger at the return of the international oil companies, has been nearly entirely un-conducive to those firms trying to transform Iraq’s oil industry. Forced by the Iraqi government to choose between its contracts with the Kurdistan regional government and its operations in southern Iraq, ExxonMobil was left to join forces with the publicly listed arm of China National Petroleum Corporation, PetroChina, on one of the two large West Qurna fields. After Isis seized control of part of Iraq in 2014, attacks on oil infrastructure became common. Even after the American military return to Iraq in 2014 allowed Baghdad to re-establish full territorial control by the end of 2017, Iran’s influence has grown.

In a near-perfect absurdity, considering the Iraq War’s purposes, most of the Western oil companies have, in recent years, either left or reduced their operations, while the Iranian Oil Ministry has set up an office in downtown Baghdad and Chinese firms are ascendant. Indeed, it was in part because PetroChina prevailed over ExxonMobil in their West Qurna partnership that the American major has sold its stake. Eventually, it fell to the American shale boom to make economic restitution for the Iraq War’s failure. Through the 2010s, the world economy relied not so much on oil from the international oil companies in southern Iraq, but that pumped by independent firms in Dakota and Texas: by 2019, US crude production was two-and-a-half times Iraq’s.

But the oil legacy of the Iraq debacle has not gone away. American shale output can no longer grow quickly enough to compensate for the stagnation in production elsewhere. When Joe Biden travelled to Riyadh last summer to meet Mohammed Bin Salman, he was in part asking the Saudi Crown Prince to allow Iraq to supply more oil in an attempt to bring prices down, even as, post-pandemic, Iraq has still not matched its output in August 2019 and the Iraqi government had said it wants oil to cost above $100 per barrel.

For now, Washington is offsetting the affordable supply problem by selling large volumes of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But it cannot do so indefinitely. When it stops, it will again have to address the world’s oil problem without the illusion that it can remake the Middle East by war.

Britain is now one of its many targets. The IRGC has sponsored terror, kidnap and seemingly endless sordid criminal acts since its founding. Its targets have always been global and since 2015, there has been a surge in IRGC activity in the UK and Europe. In 2022, MI5 acknowledged a real threat from Iran’s “aggressive intelligence services” to kidnap or kill UK-based people.

On Monday, the UK placed further sanctions on Iranian officials following the execution of dual British-Iranian national Alireza Akbari. On 12 January 2023, the House of Commons passed a motion calling on the UK government to finally proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. The vote passed unanimously in favour, though it’s not binding. It does, however, remain an indication of the growing tensions between the UK and Iran, which have intensified after the recent execution of dual British-Iranian national, former Iranian Deputy Minister of Defence Alireza Akbari, for alleged spying.

On one level, as Kasra Aarabi, Iran Programme Lead at the Tony Blair Institute, observes, the IRGC is a “violent, Islamist-extremist organisation that operates no differently to proscribed groups in the United Kingdom, including the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda and Hizbullah”. But the group is more than this. Key figures in the 1979 revolution — some of whom had trained with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Lebanon and even, further back, the Muslim Brotherhood — decided that, after the Islamic Revolution achieved victory by overthrowing the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an organisation would be needed not just to safeguard the revolution, but to bolster and strengthen it.

A tough gig, then. But what makes the IRGC so potent, beyond mere military prowess, is its ideological mission — which has only grown over the past few decades. If the group’s centrality emerged with the foundation of the state, its only increased in 1989 when Ali Khamenei succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader. Khamenei was determined to use the IRGC to further spearhead one of post-revolutionary Tehran’s key ideological tenets: exporting its Islamic revolution across the Muslim world. For this task, he set up a division known as the Quds (Jerusalem) Force, whose official objective is to “liberate” Jerusalem through the destruction of the state of Israel.

The Quds Force has become the engine of Iranian offensive operations across the Middle East — murdering its way across Syria, Yemen and Iraq, to name just a few countries. And in all the theatres in which it operates it does so not just as a military outfit, but a political one, too.

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The case of Iraq is instructive. It is Tehran, partly through skilfully deploying its Quds Force, that has been the clear winner of 2003’s cretinously planned and executed invasion of Iraq. From the beginning it exploited the void left by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, to expand its political, military and economic penetration of Baghdad. This is the bonus that comes with “extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world”. It tends to have considerable geopolitical benefits.

It’s no surprise that the Quds Force was led by Qasem Soleimani, who — until the US droned him in Baghdad in January 2020 — was a man of great charisma, striking looks and political acumen. Yes, Tehran was behind a lot of the violence in post-invasion Iraq, not least through its founding and sponsoring of several Shia militias to challenge and often supplant Baghdad’s authority. But it was the political talents of Soleimani, and his Iraqi sidekick Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis (who was killed in the same drone strike), that really drove the Iranian stake into the heart of Iraqi governance.

When, in 2014, several of the Iran-based Shia militias decided to band together in an umbrella organisation that came to be known as Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), it was Soleimani and Muhandis who kept their near-pathological infighting in line, and who were integral to formulating their political strategy. They were soldiers, but they were also what the Russians would call “political technologists”.

When they got whacked, it all started to fall apart. In the October 2021 Iraqi general elections, the political block of the Iran-backed Shia militias lost badly; and it lost because the various parties failed to understand the ramifications of electoral reforms, while their opponents used them to their own advantage. Since then, Baghdad has been unable to form a government while the Shia militias are squabbling among themselves and becoming even more unpopular among the Iraq people.

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As one regional expert told me last year: “The mess the Iran-backed Shia militias are in right now, can be traced directly to that drone strike in 2020. Without Soleimani they simply aren’t as politically effective.”

This speaks to an important, and inescapable, wider truth: All of the IRGC’s soft power activities are designed to aid its hard power activities. It has, over decades, cultivated demonstrably effective political, cultural, economic and intelligence divisions, the importance of which can never be underestimated. They ensure the group’s influence permeates into almost all aspects of national life, and across the Middle East — and now, critically, even in the United Kingdom.

In the UK, the IRGC can rely on a lattice of ostensibly religious and cultural institutions to further its ideological and criminal aims. Much of its propaganda, which is designed to nurture homegrown extremism, poses a threat to Britain’s national security and promotes the Guard’s ideology in mosques, charities and schools.

An analysis of the IRGC’s training manuals used to radicalise recruits reveals that the group’s ideology promotes both violence and a clear doctrine of extremism underpinned by a misreading of Islamic texts similar to terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. The materials make armed jihad against “enemies of Islam” — identified as non-Muslims and opponents of the regime (including Muslims) — an imperative for adherents, and explicitly calls for killings against Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians.

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As ever, ideology stands in the service of politics. The materials are at pains to stress that there is an equally strong imperative to torture Iranians who oppose the Islamic Republic prior to their execution on the basis they are “waging war against God” (moharebs).

As protests continue across Iran following the killing of Mahsa Amini in police custody on 16 September 2022, a succession crisis also looms. The 83-year-old Khamenei is seeking to ensure that his son Mojtaba, if he does not follow him as Supreme Leader, is at least the real power broker in Iran. In the background sit the IRGC, determined that whoever succeeds will be amenable to their interests.

Right now, Iran is in flux. The protests are unquestionably the most serious the regime has ever faced. The IRGC’s foot soldiers, the Basij, are out in the streets alongside the protestors doing what they do best — killing and maiming. Alongside mass unrest, the economy is tanking; summer will bring with it the now-familiar problem of drought. The threats facing Tehran are multiple and pretty much existential now.

The Mullahs and their sadistic enforcers are worried. In a state known for its near-pathological exercise of control, the future is unusually vague. One thing, though, is certain: whatever happens next, the IRGC will stand malevolently at the centre of it, and not just in Tehran but, unless the UK government finally acts, increasingly in London as well.

Cheney was referring to Saddam Hussein, but it is not difficult to imagine the current President saying something similar about his Russian counterpart. Just last week, Joe Biden stated that Vladimir Putin was “not joking” about the use of nuclear weapons, warning that “we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis”. Cheney’s hawkish worldview has been reinvigorated by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This time, however, those advocating restraint — the “realists” — are no longer just opponents, they are now enemies too.

In the past fortnight, the realists have been described as “intellectually bankrupt”, “pro-fascist” and “Putin apologists” — and that’s just in one article. It is a continuation of a trend that became prominent during the Covid era, in which it was no longer enough to question the argument, but to question the morality and the motives of the person making them too. Rather than being just wrong, proponents of realism — like the lockdown sceptics before them — are viewed as dangerous and morally flawed.

A diffuse network of intellectuals, think tanks, commentators, and politicians (on both the Left and Right), realists do not form any kind of cohesive bloc. All hew to a vague notion that America should act with restraint abroad, but have little else in common. There is neither a value system they wish to impart, nor a broad, all-encompassing ideology that holds them all together. This makes realism a modest doctrine; it doesn’t lend itself to extremism and Manichaean world-views.

Unlike idealists, who emphasise the importance of spreading democracy and human rights abroad, realists believe that countries are guided by self-interest, not abstract values. They eschew the Disneyfied view of the world of the kind recently expressed by President Biden, in which he characterised the escalating Ukrainian conflict as “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force”.

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Such enthusiastic support for Ukraine is a natural symptom of the moral absolutism he displayed during the pandemic. It forgoes rational debate in favour of a moral impulse to be seen to be doing something, even if the costs of those actions are not fully considered. However noble the intention may be, the results are often tragic, as Afghanistan (cost: $2.313 trillion), Iraq ($2.4 trillion), Syria ($1.2 trillion) and Libya ($567 billion) attest. Likewise, the cost of pandemic mitigation is still being calculated, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the economic and social consequences were seriously underestimated.

Yet for all their policy failures, America’s idealist wing appears to have suffered few professional setbacks. Joe Biden’s foreign policy team isn’t all that different from Obama’s; Thomas Friedman, who once boasted in 2003 that “we could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could”, still lunches with the President.

Compare this to the almost immediate backlash realists faced after the Ukraine invasion. Until 24 February 2022, John Mearsheimer was a relatively anonymous IR professor at the University of Chicago who gave scholarly lectures on the clash between liberalism and nationalism in America. As one of the country’s foremost realists, he had been interested in the Ukraine question for some time, arguing that Nato enlargement was to blame for Russia’s antagonistic relations with the West. In 2015, he gave a lecture on the subject, which subsequently went viral after the invasion.

Mearsheimer turned into an overnight pariah. Weeks after the lecture was dredged up, students at his university signed an open letter explaining that they were “deeply pained” to learn that Mearsheimer was “propagating Putinism” and asserting that his actions were “extremely detrimental for our country”. They even demanded to know if he was on the Russian payroll. Meanwhile, other prominent realists such as Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky were roundly condemned for suggesting that Ukraine may have to cede territory to Russia in order to prevent further bloodshed. In Chomsky’s framing, Ukraine had to make concessions because Russia was like an incoming hurricane. “You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, ‘I don’t like hurricanes’ or ‘I don’t recognise hurricanes’,” he said.

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Who will stop Putin from going nuclear?

By Philip Cunliffe

In response, Chomsky and “other like-minded intellectuals” were subjected to an open letter which accused them of “adding further fuel to the Russian war machine by spreading views very much akin to Russian propaganda”. Kissinger, who proposed the handover of Luhansk and Donetsk to Russia, was even admonished by Suella Braverman, who argued that the former diplomat was “appeasing” Russia. “People like Henry Kissinger believe that if we give the Russian dictator some of what he wants,” she wrote in June. “He’ll stop the war and we can return to normal.”

Such efforts to discredit the opinions of these academics bear a striking resemblance to the freighted criticisms thrown around during the Covid era. Following the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration, questions about the group’s funding were swiftly raised. In the same way that students believed that Mearsheimer was funded by Russia, the implication was that these scientists, Sunetra Gupta, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Battacharya, did not hold their views sincerely — they were merely a trojan horse for a wealthy libertarian think tank (Gupta even felt the need to profess her Left-wing credentials afterwards).

Implicit in all these charges was a conviction that these people were not just wrong, but on the wrong side of history too. Just as Conservative politicians who entertained lockdown scepticism were denounced for their “dangerous” beliefs, those who now outline a plan for peace in Ukraine — be it Elon Musk, the Pope, or Roger Waters — face a similar reaction. The lockdown sceptics were willing to sacrifice at-risk humans to save the economy; the realists were willing to let a country perish in service of great-power politics.

None of this is to suggest that realists have always been right. Predicting that Kyiv would fall in 72 hours, for instance, many underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian army and the incompetence of Russia’s. More recently, the claim by some realists that the US was behind the Nord Stream pipeline attack seems to have been disproved. And for every lockdown sceptic that slips into Covid denialism, there are realists who start off by asking legitimate questions about American military aid to Ukraine, and end by having to delete tweets that teeter on Holocaust revisionism.

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My 'free speech' college is silencing me

By Christopher Nadon

On the bigger questions, however, each passing day adds succour to the realist argument. The fear of an escalation continues to grow, with politicians such as John Bolton calling for Putin to go and Tobias Ellwood MP claiming that strategic ambiguity is “no longer a deterrent”. Add to that former US National Security Council official Fiona Hill’s assertion that we are already living through a Third World War, and it’s easy to see why realists are urging caution.

Putin and Covid are both malevolent forces, but how we respond to them is — and should be — a contested subject. In the same way that our response to Covid benefitted from having lockdown sceptics in the tent rather than out, the same must apply to realists. They are, after all, raising important questions about Ukraine’s interests versus our own, and the degree to which it is escalating beyond our control. Absent that, America is almost certain to repeat the same foreign-policy errors as before. And when a nuclear power is in play, that adds an entirely new — and potentially catastrophic — dimension.

To Labour’s Right wing, Blair remains the closest thing to a living saint. The former PM is their yogi, whose “rare interventions” — on Brexit, on Covid lockdowns, on higher education — are holy writ. But for normal people, who do not dream of May 1997 each night, Blair is a scoundrel.

To some extent this is to be expected. Blair governed for a decade. His mistakes were made in the public gaze — a gaze that tired of seeing his grin in the newspaper every day or his studied sandbagging on the evening news. Thus it is somewhat unfair to compare him to Alan Johnson, a Labour figure who is liked not because of any political accomplishments but because, to most, he is an affable TV raconteur. The same applies to Ed Balls and his ongoing rehabilitation via Strictly Come Dancing and Good Morning Britain.

The hatred Blair inspires is much more reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher, a similarly divisive yet successful politician who remade both party and country. Yet a decade after her death, she sits among the most popular of all Prime Ministers. She retained admirers, even as she was savaged by her enemies, and savaged them in turn. 

Blair was much more ameliorative than Thatcher, or at least he tried to be. Here was a mainstream leader who consciously aimed for the centre of public opinion. What Blair wanted, more than anything, was to be loved. So why is he so widely reviled?

The most common answer is Iraq. Without that war, moderates often argue, Blair would be remembered as a successful national leader. But even if we remove Iraq — the gravest British military blunder since the days of General Gordon — from an assessment of Blair’s legacy, he was a failure. One could argue he is even oddly fortunate that the scale of the debacle both there and in Afghanistan overshadows his domestic record.

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Cherie Blair's class war

By Joan Smith

Yes, there was Sure Start, and the introduction of a minimum wage (though that one belongs as much to John Smith as Blair). And yes, Blair funded the NHS properly for the first time in decades — though it belies the limits of his tenure that this was wiped out in a few years of Tory austerity.

Today, Blair’s most overwhelming legacy, and the one that affects millions of ordinary people in Britain every day, is housing. In 1997, as Labour won their largest ever parliamentary majority, the average income was £15,000 a year while the average property cost £65,000. By 2007, as Blair left office, average pay had risen to £20,000 — but house prices had surged to an extraordinary £190,000. In other words, relative to wages, and under a Prime Minister who spoke relentlessly of expanding opportunity, the cost of housing had doubled.

Given this, it is unsurprising that Gen X pundits, more socially liberal than boomers but whose cultural zeitgeist was defined by unprecedented property price rises, are the Blairite vanguard across much of the media. As any Marxist will tell you, conditions (often) determine consciousness. For Britain’s Gen X, the New Labour rise in property values — with its attendant sensation of prosperity — still feels like a successful project which merits defence. Yet the flip side to that phoney progress is today’s housing crisis, with home ownership falling from 70.9% in 2003 to 63.9% in 2018, and those between their mid-30s and mid-40s three times more likely to rent today than 20 years ago. The phrase “property-owning democracy”, on which the popular conservatism of the last century rested, is withering on the vine.

For now this remains primarily a problem for younger adults — although the ONS recently warned that the majority of older people will be living in rented accommodation in the future. Those same people burdened with thousands in student debt, another New Labour bequest, are increasingly likely to give up to half their post-tax earnings to a landlord. The Blairs, meanwhile, own a property portfolio worth approximately £35 million. Cherie Blair now oversees not one but two property management companies, including dozens of one-bedroom flats.

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Tony Blair's war on reality

By Mary Harrington

The surge in house prices after 1997 was no accident. Buy-to-let mortgages increased 30-fold under Blair while his government built fewer council homes than Margaret Thatcher. And while Blair certainly isn’t the prima causa of today’s housing crisis — the policy of right-to-buy in the Eighties was the catalyst, while supply issues are a major variable — it is remarkable that something as elementary as home ownership was permitted to become a luxury under a Labour government. 

Alongside this abysmal record on housing, New Labour oversaw a historic collapse in British industry. Between 1997 and 2007, output from all manufacturing, value adjusted for inflation, fell by 3% — while a million workers lost their jobs. Despite the post-industrial paeans of New Labour this was not inevitable: over broadly the same period, between 2000 and 2006, manufacturing output rose in the US, Germany and France. Most striking of all, manufacturing as a share of the overall economy fell more under Blair than Thatcher and Major combined.

All this was presented as a cause for celebration. For New Labour, deindustrialisation was a necessity. A small bump on the road to the “knowledge economy” that Britain must become. At the the turn of the century, Blair’s ambition was that Britain would become the best country in the world for “e-commerce”. The land of Newcomen, Watt and Bessemer, transmuted to a nation powered by lattes and online shopping.

Whether Blair had the faintest idea what he was talking about is unclear. This was a man, after all, who didn’t use a mobile phone until 2007 and whose first text message to his fixer Alastair Campbell read: “This is amazing, you can send words on a phone.” So Blair’s evangelism for the digital age wasn’t the result of any acquaintance with the possibilities of the internet. Rather he had found a compelling story to distract from the continued, and indeed intensifying, disintegration of national industry. Conveniently, this same story allowed Blair to present himself as modern and the blue-collar base of his party as backward.

A mixed domestic record is leavened by a series of foreign policy disasters. Blair is synonymous with Iraq and Afghanistan, and always will be. Britain spent £37 billion in Afghanistan, and lost more than 450 military personnel. For what? Two decades later, the Taliban have returned and the country is facing widespread starvation. In Iraq, the most secular country in the Arab world at the turn of the millennium became a hothouse for sectarian militias, then ISIS. Mission accomplished.

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New Labour was beyond parody

By Ian Martin

In the long-run the New Labour project, and Blair’s stewardship of it, can only be seen as a failure. The broader economic context of the Long Nineties — a goldilocks era of cheap energy, low inflation, and high growth — could not have been more kind to New Labour’s Nero. And yet, as Chinese consumer durables flooded the West, and cheap credit fell from the skies, Blair and Brown praised themselves for abolishing boom and bust. At the very least, New Labour might have built council homes, a national network of high speed rail, and prepared for climate change. They did none of it.

When asked about her greatest achievement Margaret Thatcher replied: “Tony Blair and New Labour.” The real legacy of Blair is that he not only cemented much of the Thatcherite settlement but, worse, made many believe that doing so was somehow progressive. Until that’s recognised for the mistake it was, Britain’s broken economic model, not to mention its housing crisis, will only get worse.

His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

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The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

Owen Jones gets into trouble because he insists on describing marginal groups as “the Left” and springing up to defend their honour. When the Labour leadership demanded that 11 MPs withdraw their signatures from a Stop the War statement, Jones decried it as “an excuse to purge the Left” — even though those 11 constituted about 5% of the PLP and one-third of the Socialist Campaign Group. Either the Left is a major political force with popular support for its policies, or it is a fringe of the fringe. Which is it?

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

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The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

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By Aris Roussinos

Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” —  fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

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Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

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By Will Lloyd

But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

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Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

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As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.

To succeed, sanctions must not only impose economic costs — they must also change the political behaviour of target governments. Neither is at all straightforward.

As the past week has shown, designing sanctions that will harm Russia but not other European economies is fiendishly difficult. So far, only modest measures have been imposed: primarily asset freezes and exclusion from the Swift payments system for some banks; asset seizures and travel bans for some elites and oligarchs; and limits on Aeroflot flights. None of these will cripple Russia’s economy, despite fanciful claims by Western leaders.

The proposed sanctions on Russia’s central bank may cut much deeper. Exactly how far these will go is not yet clear. But freezing Russia’s overseas currency reserves will make it harder for the central bank to defend the value of the rouble, and to supply foreign exchange for commercial banks. This is unlikely to collapse the economy, as some advocates suggest, but it could have significant and far-reaching consequences, including runs on Russian banks and impediments to foreign trade.

However, it’s precisely the threat to trade that will probably lead Western governments to avoid a total freeze — limiting Russia’s access to foreign exchange, but not severing it entirely. The reason is simple: Russia is not a minor economy. Western countries, firms and banks do a lot of business with Russia. Wide-ranging sanctions will naturally have blowback. This is why tougher measures will be difficult, if not impossible, to impose.

The real “nuclear” option would be to embargo Russia’s energy exports, which comprise over half of Russia’s total exports. This would inflict serious damage. But, given that Europe relies on Russia for about a quarter of its oil and over a third of its gas, it would also spur massive inflation and induce economic recession in the West. Prices have already spiked due to the conflict, which will further harm households reeling from record-high energy prices. It’s telling, for example, that Germany has “de-certified” the Nordstream-2 pipeline, but not the pipelines through which it receives existing supplies.

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Likewise, Western governments appear unable to agree on completely blocking Russia from Swift, because this would create difficulties for Russian and Western banks alike. Without Swift, how would Germany pay for Russian gas? And, if it cannot pay, would the gas keep flowing? How would the many other Western businesses working in or dealing with Russia make payments? For the same reason, although some sectors of the Russian economy, such as chemicals and automobiles, rely on imported hi-tech Western components, so far, export restrictions remain limited, for fear of damaging Western firms.

Despite their belligerent rhetoric, Western leaders are wary of creating more problems for economies already struggling to recover from the deep recessions caused by their Covid-19 lockdowns. They are quietly carving out even non-critical economic sectors, such as luxury goods and diamond exports, from the sanction regime. It is hard to avoid the impression that, having blundered into confrontation with Russia, Western governments are now realising they have very limited options, and remain reluctant to put their money where their mouths are.

However, even if the West can find ways to inflict serious economic damage on Russia, that still does not mean sanctions will “work”. To be truly effective, they must also change the Russian government’s behaviour. And this is where the logic of sanctions often breaks down. It is remarkably rare for Western policymakers to explain — or even consider — exactly how “economic pain” is supposed to translate into “political gain”. And the prospects in this particular case do not look promising.

The fundamental problem is that sanctions are based on a dubious understanding of human behaviour. They are a quintessentially liberal instrument, resting on the assumption that every man has his price: if I impose economic costs on you, you will revise the cost-benefit analysis of your course of action, and change your behaviour accordingly.

In the real world, however, many regimes and their supporters are willing to endure colossal economic costs to pursue their political and security goals. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party regime preferred to see Iraq’s economy and society destroyed rather than relinquish power. Fidel Castro’s regime withstood a punishing US embargo for decades. Iran has suffered serious economic harm under Western sanctions without relinquishing its nuclear programme.

What are Putin’s goals in Ukraine? The Russian government has made it clear since the early Noughties that it cannot tolerate the eastward expansion of Nato, considering it a serious threat to Russian security. Its invasion of Georgia in 2008, and its attacks on Ukraine in 2014, long ago demonstrated the Kremlin’s determination to prevent neighbouring countries falling into the Western orbit, even at the cost of international isolation and punitive sanctions. One does not need to sympathise with Putin at all to recognise that Russia’s bank balance is not his primary consideration.

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If Putin will not put economic costs ahead of his security goals, how else might sanctions work? Classically, comprehensive embargoes seemed to be guided by a “naïve theory” of sanctions, whereby economic suffering is expected to compel the population to rise up against their wicked leaders. But this rarely, if ever, happens. If anything, economic immiseration tends to fragment and weaken the population, who become absorbed by the struggle to subsist and more reliant on government help — as seen in Iraq.

Targeted sanctions work on an equally naïve basis, assuming that political leaders and their business cronies are completely autonomous from the people, such that manipulating their personal wealth will convince them to change course. In truth, political leaders always represent some broader set of forces in their regime and wider society. Their policies reflect that underlying coalition. If they change course, they will have to answer to their supporters.

Vladimir Putin is a powerful and quasi-authoritarian leader, but he is not autonomous from Russian society. His rise reflects a broadly-based nationalist backlash against the consequences of neoliberal “shock therapy” practised on Russia by the International Monetary Fund after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under the pro-Western President Yeltsin, the public wealth built up under communism was pillaged by oligarchs, while the Russian people suffered astonishing levels of deprivation. In the decade to 1998, GDP fell by 45%, mortality increased by 50%, government revenues had nearly halved, and crime had doubled.

Putin rose to power by promising to halt and reverse Russia’s national decline. In his first seven years in office, real wages doubled (albeit from a low base). Using soaring oil revenues, Putin stabilised the economy and paid off foreign debt, reasserting Russia’s sovereignty. He brought the oligarchs to heel, jailing or exiling anyone who would not recognise the state’s supremacy. And he restored stability and a measure of national pride to an exhausted and demoralised people. His regime, centred on a network of siloviki (security and military officials) and managers of state-owned enterprises, has proven politically robust and durable — a state within the state.

This is important not to praise or exonerate Putin, but to understand why his popularity has remained high, even under sanctions. Experimental research suggests that Russia’s economic decline since 2014 — mostly caused by declining oil prices, though compounded by sanctions — has cost Putin some support. But it has been more than compensated for by an upsurge in nationalist backing. Putin’s approval rating increased from 65% in January 2014 to 86% in April 2014, following the annexation of Crimea. It remained above 80% for the next two years before returning to the high 60s.

Today, a large majority of Russians blame the West for the crisis in Ukraine, while two-thirds have little or no concern about sanctions. Putin’s regime may have persecuted opposition figures, curbed dissent, and restricted electoral competition — but, despite such authoritarian measures, he retains widespread support. Western leaders could only dream of his approval ratings: support for Biden stands at 42%, for Macron, 40%, and, for Boris Johnson, just 25%.

Nor is there much sign of political fracture within the regime that sanctions could exploit. Putin’s ability to publicly humiliate his spy chief, who bodged his lines at the televised, stage-managed security council meeting prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggests he feels secure and confident. The overwhelming vote in the Duma of 400 to zero in favour of recognising the breakaway “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk suggests either broad elite consensus or an unwillingness to openly defy the Kremlin. Exactly how the (modest) economic pain caused by sanctions is meant to generate political gain is therefore hard to discern.

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All too often, sanctions are a comforting but dangerous illusion: they are alluring because they seem to provide an effective option between war and words. When diplomacy seems to fail, and states are unwilling to risk war, something else is needed — and that something is sanctions. But just because something must be done does not mean that this “something” is going to work. Moreover, it is all too easy to forget that embargoes are a weapon of war, often devastating target populations and escalating conflicts, rather than peacefully resolving them. In response to the latest sanctions, Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. It seems unlikely that he would deploy them in response to banking sanctions. But this is a reminder of that the stakes are incredibly high.

Ultimately, even if sanctions do bite, we need to ask: what is the endgame? Sanctions are at best a means to an end, and surely the desired end is lasting peace in Eastern Europe. And one does not need to have any sympathy whatsoever with the Putin regime to believe that this can only be achieved by reckoning with core Russian interests.

Like it or not, powerful states have the capacity to inflict serious harm on weaker ones — just ask the Serbs, Libyans, Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians on the receiving end of the Nato powers’ tender mercies. If Russia is dissatisfied, it clearly has the power to upset the existing order by force. The only way to prevent this is to compromise with Russia’s concerns, or deploy overwhelming force to deter it from using its military power. The West has done neither, dismissing Putin’s demands to establish a neutral buffer zone between Russia and Nato, while failing to deter him from using force to achieve his objectives.

The only way out of this disaster is a negotiated settlement, which will require Nato to reckon with Russian interests, and preserve Ukrainian democracy and sovereignty within a framework of international neutrality. For the brutal reality is this: sanctions are unlikely to force Russia out of Ukraine, and the West is unwilling to be drawn directly into battle with a nuclear-armed state. Unless a diplomatic solution can be found, sanctions are likely to be merely part of a grinding proxy war along the lines of the brutal and horrific conflict in Syria.

The people of Ukraine have already suffered too much. Sanctions won’t save them — they may only make their misery worse.

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

It is difficult to square this perception with the Army’s shambolic and wasteful recent record in procurement. And yet a sense lingers, whether true or not, that the armed forces remain a refuge area for a type of stoic effectiveness lost to the rest of the country, an ability to get the job done, without complaint, against intimidating odds.

This may say as much about Britain as a whole as it does of the armed forces itself. Consider the wave of affectionate sentimentality about the Army, perhaps a working-class analogue of middle-class sentimentality about the NHS, which swept the country in the late 2000s. The popular mood at the time, manifest in the Help for Heroes campaign (est. 2007) and the Sun’s Military Awards (est. 2008), was immediately inflamed by the sense that troops in the field were being put in harm’s way by the Government’s budget cuts, and by dissatisfaction with heckling and burning of poppies  by jihadist sympathisers as troops paraded home from Afghanistan. Then the Army was a potent symbol of a pure, betrayed institution around which the British people could explore its wider anxieties, a metaphor for growing unease with the direction of the British state itself.

Yet even the Army’s most devoted supporter would be forced to admit that the past two decades have not enhanced its reputation. Both the Labour government’s two wars of choice were painful strategic and tactical failures, entered into with little popular enthusiasm and abandoned with little fanfare. In both wars, units and individual soldiers fought bravely on a tactical level, in pursuit of misguided and ultimately fruitless strategic aims. 

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It is within this context that two recent books aim to dissect the Army’s failings in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sense of this lacklustre performance. In The Changing of the Guard, Simon Akam, a former gap-year officer, chronicles the Army like a disappointed lover, twisting the knife into the institution’s sorest wounds. In Blood, Metal and Dust, Brigadier Ben Barry, a former director of the British Army Staff, chooses a higher target. Yes, the successes of the small interventions of the Nineties had led military chiefs to rest on their laurels, so that “operational success had become the mother of complacency.” But for Barry, whose book draws from his still-classified official postmortem of the post-9/11 wars, the ultimate cause of failure can be placed at the hands of the Labour politicians managing the war. 

Both retell the bare, painful facts of the Army’s two most recent defeats. In Iraq, the initial capture and occupation of Basra, entered into with soft hats and the self-congratulatory confidence of an Army that believed it led the world in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, ended in a humiliating negotiated withdrawal of British forces to the edge of the city, where, pinned down by constant bombardment by the Shia militias who now ran the city, they lost all capacity to exert their influence. 

The Americans, distinctly unimpressed at the failure of the British officers, were forced to help Iraqi forces retake the city in 2008’s Charge of the Knights operation, a humiliation for Britain. “This damaged the reputation of British forces with the US and the Iraqis and inflicted major dents in British military self-confidence,” Barry notes. Akam is less stoic, describing it as ”an acute and lasting humiliation to the British Army”, which “will linger and follow the troops halfway around the world to Afghanistan”.

Indeed, to exorcise this ghost Britain’s political and military leaders recklessly volunteered for a campaign in a Helmand landscape of walled farms and thick vegetation which the Soviets had struggled to pacify, even while the Army struggled with Iraq. In Afghanistan, they believed, the Army would regain its reputation, leaving the difficulties of Iraq behind.

They were wrong. Thinly spread out in isolated rural compounds, or “platoon houses”, British troops were besieged by waves of Taliban fighters, and only avoided being overrun through devastating use of air power, which in turn alienated the civilians whose homes it destroyed. Along with a desperate need to avoid casualties, the reliance on short-ranged patrols, magnets for Taliban ambushes and bogged down by IEDs, meant that the Army could never retain tactical dominance in the countryside, let alone gain the strategic initiative.

As in Basra, force protection became the dominant goal and so initiative passed to the local enemy. Attempts to upend the balance of power, through bold but misconceived operations like Operation Panther’s Claw or through grandiose hearts-and-minds schemes like the transporting of a gigantic turbine through Taliban territory to the dam where it would remain unused for years, all failed. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the rich tribute of blood and treasure Britain poured into the dust was entirely in vain.

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Where does the blame lie? Barry lambasts Labour politicians such as Clare Short, whose intransigent refusal to provide the British troops who found themselves suddenly governing Basra, a city of 1.5 million people, with even basic DFID support due to her opposition to the war, did much to incite local anger in the first vital weeks and months of occupation. He takes aim at Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor forced through defence cuts that reduced the Army’s helicopter fleet, and then lied about it as Prime Minister when soldiers died in Helmand as a direct result. 

But he reserves his greatest ire for the architect of Britain’s entry into these needless wars: Tony Blair. Yet as Barry makes clear, military chiefs also failed to impress upon politicians the need to reassess their strategy in light of their failing mission. The plain-speaking and sober appreciation of hard facts for which the Army is renowned were here tragically absent.

For Akam, much of the blame can be laid at the Army itself. He draws an ethnographic portrait of an institution struggling to make sense of a changing world, whose cherished regimental ethos, the wellspring of individual pride and striving for excellence, also reduces it to “an awkwardly organised collection of warring tribes, inadequately co-ordinated and often fighting each other”. Fearful of future cuts, Generals volunteer the Army for the underestimated Helmand mission even as Iraq is failing: “It’s use them or lose them,” Akam quotes General Sir Richard Dannett on the ill-fated decision. Generals tell politicians what they want to hear, instead of the difficult truths that would blight promotion: “the British Army’s determination to ‘crack on’ got the army into a terrible mess.” 

For Akam, the absence of accountability for such failure is corrosive to the Army’s capability. Junior ranks are hauled before the courts for individual war crimes — rightly, he feels — while generals are rewarded for strategic failure with titles and sinecures. Unlike in Israel, where the failure of the 2006 Lebanon War led to a purge of failed senior officers, “no British general was fired or resigned over Iraq and Afghanistan”. The result, for Akam, is institutional rot: “that hypocrisy had trickled down into the institution below them and was souring it.” 

Moreover, Akam asserts, defence think tanks such as RUSI “can seem more like comfy clubs funded partly by arms manufacturers — friendly forces, in the forces’ jargon — than rigorous external overseers”, inhibiting them from guiding the Army through painful reform. 

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The American presence looms large over both books like a Victorian father, whose approval is yearned for, yet who emanates instead only cold disappointment. The tragic irony, as both Akam and Barry note, was that both the Basra and Helmand campaigns were entered into entirely to win Blair cachet in American eyes, yet the result of the Army’s disappointing performance was only American disdain. As Akam notes of his soldier informants on the eve of the Iraq invasion, “many appreciate that the real reason they are here is to maintain British military standing in American eyes”. 

Yet even during the invasion itself, before the humiliating retreat, the winnowing capacity of the British state had already lowered the Army’s reputation in American eyes. Basra, just over the border from Kuwait, was chosen as Britain’s target, in Akam’s telling, because the Army’s recent adoption of just-in-time logistics had left it with insufficient spare parts to travel any further. Lack of armoured vehicles, of body armour, helicopters, even ammunition left the Army scrounging what it could from unimpressed Americans and almost entirely equipping itself through emergency Treasury funds. 

Citing long-ago Malaya and more-recent Northern Ireland (as if that were an unqualified military success) in its favour, the Army deflected its sense of insecurity at its vastly reduced capacity compared to the US with an arrogant and ultimately mistaken belief that population-centric counterinsurgency was its unequalled métier. American officers quoted by Barry rolled their eyes at “‘more British tripe’” as events proved otherwise.

But even the Americans, whose resources were limitless in comparison, ultimately lost both wars. As Barry observes: “The US government’s decision to invade Iraq must stand as the worst military decision of the 21st century. It was a military strategic folly on a level equal to that of Napoleon’s 1812 attack on Russia and Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.” The failure, then, was ultimately a political one, of British politicians blindly following their American patrons into unwinnable wars: the Army’s essential sin was only one of trying to do the best of a bad job, a not ignoble character flaw. 

It is difficult to avoid the painful conclusion that the British Army functions for the Americans as the Gurkhas do for the British Army: a highly motivated, loyal auxiliary force, incapable of prosecuting a campaign on its own, whose colourful traditions still carry the romance of an earlier, more glorious era. 

Today, however, even this limited role is now in doubt: with the Government’s new focus on naval capacity and the much-vaunted Pacific Tilt forming the basis of Britain’s defence vision, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radikin, is allegedly poised to oversee a dramatic cut in the Army’s already-dangerously pared-down numbers, cutting infantry ranks by more than one third of its current numbers. 

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By Edward Luttwak

The “Best Little Army in the World” may be getting littler, but it is not for the better. As the defence analyst Francis Tusa warns, the result of its decades-long and self-inflicted procurement woes is that it is now more or less “combat incapable against high-end threats”. Two decades of fighting poorly-equipped insurgents has distracted the Army from its primary mission of defending the country against a competent and well-equipped adversary like Russia or China.

Perhaps this is less a disaster than it may at first seem. The danger is not so much the Army’s incapacity as our politicians’ inability to match their ambitions to its resources, or the moral courage of its generals to gently dissuade them. For all that we mock Germany its military weakness, it is not abundantly clear that Britain has gained much for the decade or so of warfare that the Germans managed to avoid. After Blair’s promiscuous use of the Army to assuage his lust for glory, perhaps a period of enforced abstinence might do the institution some good, if it is to re-equip itself for the graver, and unchosen challenges of the coming century. 

The Army’s focus on the new Ranger battalions, tasked with training and directing local partner forces, in place of line infantry hints at a world of conflict where the business of fighting is increasingly left to expendable proxies. Yet a shrunken, more tightly-focussed Army also presents a challenge for a denuded British state, which has increasingly come to rely on soldiers to make up for its own lost capacity.

Its willingness to take on tasks outside its core role may fend off cutbacks, for a time, but is not necessarily in its own or the state’s best interests; it distracts from its urgent task of modernisation and reorganisation, and gives British governments cover to further winnow away state capacity, confident that soldiers will always be there to pick up the slack. 

As the Chilcot Report on Iraq observed, “a ‘can do’ attitude is laudably ingrained in the UK armed forces, a determination to get on with the job, however difficult the circumstances — but this can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears.” Perhaps the Army’s capacity to win the next war, like the British state’s to weather the next crisis, would be better served by generals finding the courage, when necessary, to tell politicians that some things simply can’t, or shouldn’t be done.

Unremovable, the ink fades from the skin in around 48 hours or so. It’s become something of a status symbol; the Iraqi democratic process given corporeal form, quite literally imprinted onto the bodies of those who subscribe to it. 

A fortnight on from the elections and, with no clear winner, the horse-trading to form a new government is only just beginning. It will be a fraught process — for many of the reasons that the wider Middle East is fraught, too: sectarianism, corruption, civil strife and, of course, foreign meddling. These are bad enough. But the problems that strafed Iraq and the wider region throughout the 20^th century are now galvanised by one of the 21^st century’s most powerful forces: digitally powered disinformation.

Understand the Iraqi elections and understand, in miniature, at least some of the wider forces driving instability across the Middle East. The electoral process is theoretically simple: the people elect 329 members of Parliament, who in turn elect the President of Iraq and confirm the Prime Minister. Whichever party or bloc gets 165 seats forms a government. Given Iraq’s fractured polity, this never really happens — and this time was no exception.

The largest party, with 72 seats, is the Sadrist Movement, led by the scowling and barking Shi’ite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr comes from a famous clerical family and his name carries huge weight among Iraq’s Shia, whom he led against US forces following 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a rare animal in Iraqi politics: a Shi’ite leader independent — at least rhetorically — of Iran.

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The other major Shia forces are former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s State of Law party, which got 35 seats, and then the Al-Fatah Alliance, which saw its vote drop to just 15 seats (from 48 in the 2018 election). Officially, its leaders have close ties to Iran, but most Iraqi Sunnis — and indeed many Shia (plus most of the region) — consider them to be a straight-out Iranian proxy. Other Shia parties include the militia (and designated terror group) Kata’ib Hezbollah, which recently formed the Huqooq party, and which got one vote; and the Victory Alliance of Haider al-Abadi (another former PM), which got four seats. As ever post-2003, the Iraq Shia, so long oppressed by former leader Saddam Hussein, remain politically dominant.

The Sunni Taqaddum (Progress) came second with 37, while Iraq’s third major ethnic bloc, the Kurds, saw its major party the Kurdistan Patriotic Union (KDP) take 16 seats. A variety of smaller parties and independents made up the remainder.

It is this patchwork of ethnic, sectarian, and religious groupings that seeks to rule Iraq — and it is this which is, of course, the problem. If Iraqi society is divided, its politics are sundered. The 2021 elections were born of crisis after swathes of Iraqi youth took to the streets in 2019, sick of the corruption that dominates their lives, of those who rule them, and of the sectarianism that courses through the veins of the body politic. It was the largest civil unrest in Iraq since 2003 and it was bloody. The Government, backed by many of the Pro-Iranian Shia militias that support it, struck back, often firing live ammo; more than 1,000 people were killed. In the end, though, it was too much. The Government faced a simple choice: massacre everyone or back down. It backed down. Then Prime Minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, resigned to be replaced by the incumbent, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. New elections were promised: they have just been delivered.

Campaigning was merciless. Every party and group and sect seemed to toss accusations at the other: Sunni versus Shia; Shia versus Shia and Sunni; Shia versus Kurds. But certain narratives and tropes reoccur. These are clearly identifiable as false or misleading, designed to achieve behavioural change, and as such are what we might usefully describe as disinformation. They are also instructive, because not only do they spread across legacy and social media, allowing us a glimpse of what experts call the Iraqi Information environment (IE), but they are geared toward exploiting psychological vulnerabilities in Iraqis (as with all nationalities), which are formed by a specific set of cultural, historical, and geographical experiences.

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The Iraqi IE, especially its online spaces, is toxic at the best of times, but things began to get worse about a month before the election. And while all sides engage in disinformation, it’s clear that pro-Iranian Shia groups and their associates — perhaps reflecting their dominant position and foreign backing — do it more often and better than anyone else.

Given Iraq has had foreign troops on its soil for almost twenty years, not to mention a history of colonialism still very much alive in the national consciousness, then narratives that speak to foreign interference are popular there — as they are across the Middle East. About three weeks before the vote, Kata’ib Hezbollah-owned Aleitjah TV posted a report on Telegram claiming that international election observers form the UN and EU were seeking to manipulate the elections for the benefit of Western interests. The story even included a fabricated quote from the UN special representative to Iraq, who was quoted as remarking that “if things don’t go the way they’re supposed to, we will have another say in this”.

These kinds of narratives never fail to appeal and spread rapidly across social media — and none more so than those that mention the “Zionists”. Three weeks before the election, pro-Iran outlet Sabereen News got in early and attacked UN representative Hilary Stauffer on Telegram, claiming that she had worked in Israel before Iraq and was, inevitably, a Mossad operative, a lie that was, naturally, repeated on mainstream channels.

Much of the online content here has unsurprisingly been sectarian in nature. A Kata’ib Hezbollah-linked group claimed it had hacked a database containing a list of Sunni politicians frequenting the Saudi Embassy in Baghdad, which was supposedly buying votes for them. It was all nonsense, but clever nonsense nonetheless. It was clearly designed to exploit Shia fears of Sunni meddling in the elections, as well as to rhetorically bolster Iran’s broader geopolitical battle with Saudi Arabia for influence in the region.

Then came the day itself. Sabereen News began reporting — totally falsely — that “forces” had entered a polling station to mess with the count. Another group of pro-Iran outlets, again led by the now relentless Sabereen News, reported that voting at polling stations across several provinces, including Anbar and Baghdad, had been disrupted because voting servers, located in the UAE (a close Saudi ally) were, with the help of an Iraqi National Intelligence officer, being used to tamper with votes.

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Now that the results are in, it’s clear that one theme unites all these narratives: what we might call “the big lie”; that the voted was rigged, altered, or otherwise tampered with, and is therefore invalid. Once this is understood it’s obvious why most of the disinformation came from Pro-Iran outlets and parties. Al-Fatah lost over 30 seats. Iraqis have once more shown that they don’t want Iran in their country, but Iran cannot let this stand.

Indeed, as soon as the results started to become clear, Iran’s footsoldiers started getting their people out. On 12 October, two days after the vote, an Al-Fatah linked group announced that they had filed complaints with the electoral commission, threatening “alternative measures” if these weren’t addressed. A week later, another pro-Iran group released a statement also rejecting the elections and urging Iraqis to “demand their rights” and take to the streets.

Al-Fatah knows they will not force a recount, but they don’t really want one. After all, they’d only lose again, and they know it. But get their people out on the street and they can exercise influence on the incoming administration. The new Iraqi government can ignore 15 seats in the parliament. It can’t ignore 50,000 people on the streets.

All of this is likely to go on for several more months. The infighting will get worse, and the disinformation will grow. And all the while Iran will benefit from the chaos, as it always does — and the Iraqi people will suffer, as they always do.

Weinberger was a Right-wing Republican who worked for another, Ronald Reagan, and even in those days Right-wing Republicans were automatically written off as racists. But I never detected the slightest bit of discomfort in Powell’s demeanour, perhaps because neither Weinberger nor Reagan had any doubts about his ability: after leaving the Pentagon for a career-required Corps command once he was promoted to Lieutenant-General, Powell was summoned back to Washington by Reagan to serve as his National Security Advisor. That Powell was the first black man to run the “inter-agency” National Security Council was not much mentioned at the time, as far as I can recall, except perhaps in the vernacular press that I do not read.

More important was the impossible job at hand: in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan’s entire presidency was in question. To outsiders who did not know any better, senility seemed the most charitable explanation for the President’s active support for an insane caper that ended at Tehran’s airport — and which could have left a very senior US official in Iranian custody.

His predecessor Carlucci, under Chief of Staff  Howard Baker, ex Senate Majority Leader no less, stopped the shipwreck, but it was Powell who righted the ship along with Reagan himself, and to such good effect that the faithful Reaganauts who had been plotting a backdoor exit from the White House for their hero when the scandal exploded suddenly found themselves discussing the possibility of the first third-term President since Roosevelt: Reagan’s ascent in the public opinion polls was astounding.

The famous Powell doctrine enunciated in 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, weas that if the US goes to war, it must not play “controlled escalation” games as it did, disastrously, in Vietnam. If force had to be used, it was best used on the largest possible scale, to quickly end the war rather than start it.

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But there was also an undeclared Powell doctrine, not for the nation but for himself: prejudice exists; but if it can only be inferred because it is not visibly enacted, just ignore it. Do not sacrifice your own advancement to try to re-educate the malevolent and the ignorant; do not start a scandal that will only exacerbate the problem.

When his boss, Caspar Weinberger, complained in a Senate Hearing that the Senators were ignoring his own Secretarial advice and listening instead to the strategic lucubrations of a “PhD with a foreign accent” — he was referring to me, testifying about my book The Pentagon and the Art of War in a debate about the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act the book called for — Powell told me not to kvetch (he grew up with Yiddish speakers in the Bronx). Just be happy that the Senators are listening to you, he said, and that we will finally be able to re-organise the Pentagon.

But it was not until decades later, in a chance meeting aboard a transatlantic flight, that he told me why he was so little agitated by the subtle racial tensions of the Reagan years. As a battalion commander in Vietnam, he was recruited on a number of occasions by more senior officers to avert racial tensions among the troops, to avoid violence not with fists or even handguns but with fragmentation grenades or even M.16s.

For him, that was the end result of McNamara’s political science: a war not only endless but nonsensical, in which the same village might be flooded with economic aid, propagandised by a provincial team, bombed with napalm to destruction and then rebuilt. Hence his personal approval of Col. Warden’s “Instant Thunder” plan for the 1991 Iraq war: bomb every military target day after day to break up Iraq’s logistics, knock out bases and destroy as many armoured vehicles as possible. Then launch an all-out armoured offensive, force Saddam Hussein’s surrender and retreat from Kuwait — and bring the troops back home.

As a result of the 1987 Defense Reorganization Act, Powell was the first Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff who was in the actual chain of command. And although he was too tactful to order the Army and Marine field commanders about as the subordinates they were, when the Marines started nibbling at Kuwait before the two weeks of bombing was done, he made sure that it was no more than a photo-op. Ignoring the majority view in Washington that air power always disappoints (because it did in Vietnam) he understood that it was best to hollow out an enemy before moving the tanks forward. That was the Powell “first” that really matters: not that he was the first black US military chief, but the first and so far only US military chief since 1945 to win a war.

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The last thing that Powell thought would happen was the disastrous repudiation two decades later of all that was learned in Vietnam and all that was demonstrated in the 1991 war: that American military power can destroy high-contrast targets anywhere and can defeat enemies that assemble in conveniently targetable mass formations — but cannot defeat insurgents. As Powell well knew, the “counterinsurgency warfare” peddled by generals with PhDs was never more than military malpractice, as Afghanistan 2021 showed yet again.

Over the past week, every obituary of Powell has interrupted its praise to condemn his tenure as Secretary of State (another first for a black man that Powell himself hardly celebrated) because it was his approval that made the 2003 invasion of Iraq politically feasible.

As usual, the media criticises the intelligence malfeasance that trapped Powell — the failure to recognise that Saddam was only pretending to be developing nuclear weapons — as opposed to the inability of the over-staffed, over-funded intelligence community to recognise that if Saddam Hussein and his regime were removed, what would ensue was not “democracy” but a Hobbesian war of all against all as different factions killed each other. (When I testified accordingly before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just before the war, the pro-war witness call me a “racist” who denied that Iraqis could sustain a democracy, just as the Germans and Japanese did after 1945…)

Then there was the fact that an Iraq in civil war would not be able to resist Iran. So there were ultimately two choices: stay out of Iraq, or convert the US Army into a 700,000-strong Mesopotamian constabulary forever. When Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said exactly that in a Congressional Hearing, he received zero support from the Intelligence Community, so Rumsfeld & Co ridiculed him with impunity for something he emphatically did not say — that 700,000 American soldiers were necessary to defeat the Iraqi Army — and denied him the customary extra year.

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That was Colin Powell’s world on the eve of the 2003 war that would tarnish his reputation. As a Secretary of State, he could not apply the Powell doctrine to flood Iraq with troops. What he should have done — as he was the first to recognise in the aftermath — was to give a simple choice to Bush: Mr President, either give up the dream of a US-made democracy in Iraq or send in 700,000 troops, which cannot be done.

If the intelligence community had realised and transmitted what was happening in Iraq, Powell could have calmed the war fever with a phone call. Without that support, Powell couldn’t turn harshly against Bush, who was not only the President but also in effect a family friend, from the days of his father’s vice-presidency.

As it was, the second Iraqi war became an agony for him that never actually ended — very poor recompense for a life well-lived from the time that he packed boxes in a Bronx shop as a teenager. Characteristically, Powell kept in touch with the fatherly owner (who urged him to study on at all costs) and then with his sons, all through the years.

I only met Powell now and again over years, and it was only early on, and then in 2003, that those meetings were charged with much significance. But his death is still a real blow. I miss him already.

But with the Taliban now in control of Afghanistan — and signs of resistance dwindling — is he still convinced the West was right to invade?

He joined Freddie Sayers in our London studio to discuss his new book, The Will to See. An edited transcript is below.

The worldview you espouse and are famous for, what we might call liberal interventionism, seems more out of fashion than at any point in the past 30 years. Do you feel you now write in a spirit of defiance?
I never was concerned with being out of fashion or not out of fashion. I have my line, my conviction. It never moved since the beginning of my career. And I’m still the same. I believe that democracy deserves to be shared. I believe that there is no place in the world that is unfit for democracy. I believe in human rights. I believe in universality of values. And it is not because of the illiberal trend, or because of Mr Putin and Mr Erdogan being on the move, that I’m going to change my opinion.

But after all the disasters of the past 20 or 30 years, do you really think we should still be trying to export democracy around the world?
I never said that democracy has to be exported. What I say is that, where you have some democrats, if you have some democrats in a place or in another, we have the moral duty and sometimes the political duty to help, to encourage, to embrace, to reinforce, not to export. You have to have first the existence of a strong political force.

So in Afghanistan, for example?
There is a growing movement of women in particular, wishing equality, wishing to unveil their face, refusing the law of Taliban… The number grows from year to year. We had the moral duty of supporting them and when we denied it we betrayed this moral duty, and that it is a huge moral fault and political mistake.

So should we still be there?
In Afghanistan a few weeks ago, how many soldiers there were — two or three thousand? No more. They were not in war operations. They were in their barracks at the end of the day, but their symbolic presence, the fact that they were there, was like a shelter permitting the women to unveil, permitting the little girls to go to school, permitting your colleagues, journalists in Afghanistan, to do their job. My prescription was that America, and the UK and France have troops all over the world — in Korea, in Germany, in Europe. So what was the cost of leaving 2,500 or 3,000 troops on the non combat-mission? To leave them there just to show that we care, that we have a policy, that we are not withdrawing behind the walls of our fortress, that we don’t give space and abandon the field to Turks, Russians and Chinese.

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You write about the massacre of Christians of Nigeria. Do you think it’s reasonable for Christians in Western countries to care more about because of a solidarity of faith?
They should care about massacres in general. They should care about people embracing their values, our values. Why do the Christians in the West support so much the Christians of the Middle East, and of Mosul. I pleaded for that a lot! But nothing for the Christians of Nigeria. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because there is a blackout in the press. Maybe because Africa is considered as being remote.

Many people who, like you, are proud defenders of Western liberalism, feel that we would be better defended by moving on from the universalist delusions of the past decades — i.e. that every country will eventually look like our countries, and that we have no business being in faraway lands. What do you say to those people?
It’s a mistake. I believe it from the bottom of my heart. I know this way of thinking; it’s a big mistake. It’s a big mistake because the game is worldwide. And the people whom I confront in Mogadishu, in Nigeria, the Muslim Brotherhood, extremist Islamists — they have their equivalents in London and in Paris. What happens when their equivalents in Paris see that we let them act? That we leave them free to act in Nigeria or Mogadishu? They are emboldened, they are happy. They feel encouraged and every victory which they make in Nigeria or in Syria is an encouragement to fight more in London or in Paris. We cannot strengthen our model of liberal society at home, if we give the feeling that we quit the field and abandon the field in the rest of the world.

Realistically, though, there simply isn’t the political will in Western countries for these kind of ongoing foreign campaigns. If you’re a true democrat, surely what the majority of the citizens of those countries want is the point?
The majority is not the point. Majority is the point for a prime minister, for a president. But for a whistleblower, for an intellectual, the question is to say what one feels to be the truth. And if you are alone, to say it even louder. And you have to go against the majority. If the majority does not want to hear, you have to try your best to help them to see.

So your solution to populism, after all that has happened in the past few years, is still to try to “educate” the people out of their mistakes? It doesn’t seem to work very well.
It depends. In the fifties in France, for example, we had a populist movement. It was very strong, but they were defeated by the return to power of General de Gaulle. Then it was a high way for a long time. Now it’s a low, and the populists did gain some ground. This is the old story. It goes back and forth. We are in a moment where these sort of ideas which I defend are on low tide. I’m not discouraged by that. I don’t believe that it means that I’m wrong. I continue and I do hope that I will see a reversal of the tide.

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But surely there must be lessons to learn from the past 30 years. Look at China — part of the reason China was brought in to the global market was the idea that they would liberalise and become more democratic. But it didn’t work.
On China, what I said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, was that we had a duty to protect and defend the dissidents. For example, I was expelled from China in 1998, or 99, because I went there for in a movie festival and I dared to defend and to speak in favour of dissidents. And I think that we did not do that enough. So: defend the dissidents, not accept like stupid morons or beggars the Belt and Road which they are building now. Not accept their compact with Turkey and Russia in Africa to expel the West from this part of the world. I don’t believe that we have to exclude China, I believe that we have to intelligently confront them, not leave the ground; to have a real, proper diplomacy, not to be like, again, stupid morons swallowing all the propaganda of the Chinese when they say that they are creating prosperity and so on. We democrats should not be on the defence.

So you must be very unhappy with the isolationism of President Biden — seems it wasn’t only President Trump then?
I never said that it was only Donald Trump. I wrote a book before this one a few years ago, saying that the isolationism as a trend in America started with Barack Obama, and started on 29 August 2013, when Barack Obama decided not to respect his own red line in Syria… I even said that it was older than that, even years before. And Biden today embodies that… I am disappointed by the way in which he validated the choice of Trump. Trump dreamt the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden did it. The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a joint operation — conceived by Trump; executed by Biden.

But again – the reason that leaders of both Republicans and Democrats have pulled out of Afghanistan is that majorities of voters in both of their parties wanted it. So in a way, isn’t the withdrawal by President Biden from Afghanistan a success story for liberal democracy?
No, because liberal democracy is not only the rule of numbers; liberal democracy is also the rule of law. And even if the numbers disagree with the law, both are still valid — liberal democracy is a mix, an an encounter between number, law, institutions, a sort of civilisation and of practices… It is also a big trend in public opinion, which is an egoist trend, which is a trend, leading an increasing number of people to believe that their interest is a selfish interest reduced to the little home of their narcissism. And this is not a liberal democracy. This is something else, a new pattern of society, which you have, by the way, in some countries of Europe, like Hungary, for example. And which has not to be blessed. An intellectual is not here just to bless all that is happening in what is happening. Things have to be blessed, and things that have to be confronted. Liberal democracy is not amor fati — love of destiny — no!

Are you worried about that we are importing some illiberal trends within our Western Democracies?
Yes we are, we are, of course. The woke culture, the cancel culture, attacks on freedom of speech. I know it comes from the Left, but it does not deserve, in my eyes, more indulgence because it comes from the Left than if it came from the Right. For me, the new political dividing line crosses the Left and the Right. We have to adapt our mind, our behaviour, our way of acting, to these new dividing lines, and cancel culture, attacks to freedom of speech is really a huge problem on which we have to be very careful.

How does the pandemic feature in this? Lockdowns were a policy that came out of China and spread very rapidly around the Western world. Were you troubled by the curtailment of liberty and due process?
Of course, it reduced some liberties and it accelerated a process which was already going on, which consists in tracing all of us, collecting data on us and so on and so on. So I may understand that it was necessary for a while, but number one, it has to be just a while. Number two, citizens should be asking for guarantees that when it is over, these liberty measures will be destroyed. Number three, as for myself, I believe this isa terrible time. This is why I escaped to Syria, Iraq, Mogadishu and the Ukraine  during this time because for me, it was, I am impossible to lock down — I cannot be locked. And number four, this has not been a good period for the care of the others, has not been a good period for brotherhood, has not been a good period for internet journalism.

It’s thrown up its own miniature revolution, hasn’t it? We now see on the streets of Berlin, London and Paris regular protests against vaccine passports and steps towards mandatory vaccines. Do you think it’s important not to demonise those people?
I don’t like to demonise anyone. I am a man of words. I try to convince, I try to plead. Ideas are a battle, like an arm wrestling… These anti-vax people they are conspiracy theorists.

Some…
A lot of them. They have a stupid conception of health… So they have to be confronted.

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They might feel like they’re your people. They are missing and trying to defend the liberal world order that you’re talking about. They want their freedoms. They want due process. They want to make their own decisions.
No, no, no. Because I listen to them. I listen — I am ready of course to hear, I try to hear everything. They are not — they pretend to be in favour of liberal freedom. But when you ask them what they want, a majority of them or big lot of them what they want, what is the ideal regime for them? It is not a liberal one.

In France, Éric Zemmour is doing very well. How worried are you and how do you propose that people of your political persuasion confront his popularity?
You have to try to show that Zemmour is not a new way of being far-Right — he is pumping the votes of Marine le Pen and incorporating them to him, but it’s the same. I would like to say that he is falsely sophisticated and fond of history, I don’t think he is so much. It seems to me useful to say that his conception of France is a tiny, retracted conception of France — little France. Like in UK when you had the debate about Brexit, they wanted the UK great again, the result is that they made England more and more little.

It doesn’t so far feel like Brexit has turned out quite as badly as you feared though, does it? In 2016, you came to London and delivered a play imploring people not to vote for Brexit. We’ve just done a deal with Australia and the US which, although it upset Mr Macron, does not exactly imply a “little England” mentality. Were your fears about Brexit overblown?
I don’t feel that way, but I hope that they are unfounded. I love this country. As I often say, I would not be born without the sacrifice of British young boys on D-Day so I hope I was wrong. But alas, let’s wait to see what happens in in Ulster, in Northern Ireland. Let’s wait. Let’s wait to see what happens in Scotland. I arrived in London on a day when the newspapers were full of the shortage of fuel for the cars, of the shortage of people to work.

What about Boris Johnson. Do you view him as a liberal who just does some things you don’t like, or some kind of dangerous populist?
I think that nobody knows who is Boris Johnson, including himself. He doesn’t know himself if he’s still a liberal, or a really dangerous populist. From outside, it seems to me that it depends on the day. It depends on the hour. It depends on the mood. He’s a strange guy. I’m sure that if I had met him 20 years ago when he was journalist in Brussels, he would have seemed like a jolly and a sympathetic guy. Today, he seems more like Viktor Orbán. A populist — not authoritarian, but more of a populist than his buddy Macron, for example.

BHL, thank you.

I have had several chances to visit Iraq since ISIS took hold in 2014. My first three trips involved having to bypass ISIS-controlled Mosul to reach the land where the Yazidi genocide was committed. I was there to meet survivors, as well as the admirable female fighters taking on the Islamic State, for my movie Sisters in Arms.

On my most recent visit, we were accompanied by a fleet of helicopters and were able to land in the former capital of the caliphate — the now-liberated Mosul. Standing in front of the ruins of the al-Nori Mosque, President Macron delivered a message of hope. This was the very place where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had launched his murderous caliphate, only to blow it up in the face of defeat — a desperate attempt to hide behind a veneer of strength. Obscurantists destroy while democrats rebuild.

But unfortunately, the democrats sometimes leave a foundation so weak that they collapse in a few days. This is the disastrous spectacle that the world has witnessed in Afghanistan – hardly the outcome we might have hoped for twenty years after 9/11.

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The visuals are horrific: Taliban soldiers strutting around in GI uniforms, driving abandoned humvees, terrorising Afghan civilians, especially women, and ultimately crushing the final bulwark of freedom — the resistance in the Panjshir valley. Tragically, this was all accomplished with the help of weapons and equipment left behind by the United States.

Carefully coached by Qatar — the best PR firm for political Islam in the world — the Taliban claims to have evolved. It promises an “inclusive” government, but this includes only the old guard members of the Taliban and the worst incarnations of Salafism.

Afghanistan is now fated to become a sanctuary for jihadists — especially for a revitalised al-Qaeda. One Afghan chieftain who led Bin Laden’s “black guard” has already returned to the country in triumph, while Ayman al-Zawahiri, the brains behind 9/11, will likely now be protected by the Emirate of the Taliban.

Several failures explain this disastrous state of affairs. The most obvious was the failure to cut off the Taliban from the drug trafficking that funded them, as well as the failure to isolate them from their sponsors, the Pakistani Secret Service.

But the most important failing was not a military one. It was psychological: it was to fail to realise that you can only beat terrorism by attacking its ideological roots — religious fundamentalism. France and Europe realised this a long time ago — only to be labelled “Islamophobes” by parts of the American media whenever they dared to robustly defend secular values.

Some in the United States seem to believe that religious fundamentalists can embrace democracy overnight. They view Islamism through the prism of their own world, believing that everyone aims for the same thing — social justice. That blend of naivety and cynicism has even led some to suggest that the Taliban have changed. After all, that is what they promised, hand on heart, during the negotiations in Doha. Surely they were telling the truth?

A similar naivety has been displayed towards the Muslim Brotherhood, often presented as “democrats”, or even “largely secular”, in the American press. Even Hezbollah and Hamas have been described as “anti-imperialists”.

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Afghanistan always defeats the West

By William Dalrymple

Yet anyone who has closely studied Islamist movements knows that their acceptance of democracy is always tactical, viewed as a means to advancing theocracy and Islamic law. Any commitments given to the West are worthless; for the Taliban, Sharia law is the supreme goal.

Of all the extremist movements I have studied, from the ultra-religious Right to neo-Nazism, none has shown such talent at strategic subterfuge as Islamists. They know better than anyone how to instrumentalise democracy to promote anti-democratic views — or how to be victims of “islamophobia” while radicalising the muslim youth of Europe, convincing them that they would be happier in the shadow of a caliphate, rather than in secular democracies.

Of course, the American intervention in Iraq has not completely failed. Life for ordinary Iraqis in the Kurdish north is no longer the procession of massacres and executions that it was under Saddam Hussein.

But while they are freed from daily terror, Iraqi communities continue to eye each other with suspicion and bitterness. Some Sunnis continue to perceive ISIS as a form of protection against a government under the influence of Iran, which now arms Shia militias in the country’s many disputed areas.

The country continues to smoulder and the “Lebanonisation” of Iraq — its disintegration — remains a possibility, with the tiniest spark capable of enflaming the Sunni community once again to support a revived jihadist movement. Just like the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS is waiting patiently on the sideline for the Americans to depart. Such an outcome would prove to be the final failure of American policy in the Middle East.

So is the era of Western “interference” dead?

Here, a distinction can and should be made between a neoconservative vision of values being inflicted by force and our duty to care about what is happening in the rest of the world. It is, after all, possible to support democracy without wishing to impose it from above by military means. Indeed, during President Macron’s visit to Iraq late last month, he specifically made this distinction and called for a new approach which he called “neither interference, nor indifference”.

It is unacceptable to undermine a country which poses no immediate threat to the rest of the world, nor has genocidal plans for its own people. But it is “indifference” to allow tyrants to thrive — first in their own countries, then globally.

For as more democratic — and “indifferent” — countries retreat, the more influence they abandon to authoritarian regimes such as Russia, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran. These states have their own methods of interference, which have nothing to do with democracy or the desire to install democratic regimes. Quite the contrary; they are ruled by tyrants and dictators who see no problem with manipulating other countries with social media trolls and authoritarian state media outlets such as RT.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Now that Afghanistan has been abandoned, the honourable course for Europe and the United States is not just to become a place of safety for those fleeing dangerous regimes. Rather, they must also support and protect democracy in the Middle East where it still survives; to champion the autonomy of countries or regions which act as refuges or alternative systems of government; to create “safe spaces”, if you will, for the ideals of democracy and equality.

It should be our great honour, and our duty, to support the miracle which is Iraqi Kurdistan, defended valiantly by the Peshmerga, and which has provided a refuge to millions of international displaced peoples from the region. This is now a rare island of relative peace and stability in the war-stricken area.

Likewise we must support the miracle of Rojava, the Kurdish northeast region of Syria, which upholds courageously progressive, secular, egalitarian and environmental values — those which the West claims to defend as its own.

This is an opportunity to remind ourselves that the Kurds are on the frontline, defending our common values. They must no longer be abandoned to Turkish bombardments, which recently targeted a hospital in Sinjar without any reaction from NATO, Europe or the United States.

Similarly, it should also have been our duty to protect the Panjshir region of Afghanistan and its National Resistance Front. This mountainous area was the last region to resist the Taliban, acting as a haven for those fleeing their rule. Panjshir was reported to have fallen to the Taliban last week but guerrilla resistance is likely to continue — as it remains in the streets of Kabul, where brave women and men are demonstrating against the Taliban and the interference of Pakistan.

Across the country, pockets of democracy to survive, as symbols of resistance to tyranny and optimism for a better future. Democracy grows from such places — from the bottom, not the top.

In our own interest — in the interest of freeing Afghanistan — we must not let these seeds of hope perish.

As Biden observed, entirely correctly, “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan”. Instead, he asserted, “this decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Whatever the howls of outrage from America’s prestige opinion pages, the age of liberal imperialism is over: the time of nakedly realist great power competition has begun.

Yet Biden’s worldview, so outrageous for an American commentariat as recklessly jingoistic as John Bull magazine in its Edwardian prime, is supported by analysis from an unexpected quarter: that of the architect himself of both America’s War on Terror, and of the great slaughter in New York that precipitated it, Osama bin Laden.

Piecing together the themes of bin Laden’s various statements to the outside world in the years immediately before and after 9/11, a specific, concrete plan emerges, by which the “slave of God” — as the billionaire son of a Yemen-born construction magnate styled himself — would accelerate the collapse of the American empire through embroiling it in long, unwinnable and expensive ground wars in the Islamic world. This plan, bin Laden claimed, had formulated itself through his experience of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, whose ignominious withdrawal from the country had shortly preceded their imperial collapse, events in which he himself had played a relatively undistinguished part.

In an interview conducted a month and a half after 9/11, bin Laden observed that:

“the Soviet Empire has become — with God’s grace — a figment of the imagination. Today, there is no more Soviet Empire; it split into smaller states and only Russia is left… So we believe that the defeat of America is something achievable — with the permission of God — and it is easier for us — with the permission of God — than the defeat of the Soviet Empire previously.”

Why would it be easier, asked the journalist, al Jazeera’s then-star reporter Taysir Alluni incredulously? Because, bin Laden replied, “we have already fought them — like our brothers who have engaged in battle with the Americans, as in Somalia. We have not yet found a significant force of note. There is a great aura about America, which it uses to scare people before it engages in battle.”

But, he claimed, the brief and inglorious American episode in Somalia showed that American power could not stretch to imposing order on insurgent forces far from home: “America left, dragging behind it tails of humiliation, defeat, and loss, without looking back; it retreated unexpectedly, and it forgot all that great media enthusiasm about the New World Order, and how it was the master of that order, and could do whatever it pleased.”

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

This was not the first time bin Laden had used the example of Somalia to persuade sceptics of the logic underlying his plan. In his first interview with al-Jazeera three years earlier, after al-Qaeda’s twin bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which had killed more than 200 people, bin Laden noted that:

“We believe that America is much weaker than Russia, and we have learned from our brothers who fought in the jihad in Somalia of the incredible weakness and cowardice of the American soldier. Not even eighty of them had been killed and they fled in total darkness in the middle of the night, unable to see a thing.”

Even before then, in a 1997 interview with CNN journalist Peter Arnett, bin Laden noted that in Somalia, “after a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in God Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies.”

Indeed, he added, claiming dubiously that veterans of the Afghan jihad had fought against the Americans in Somalia, “We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low spiritual morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters. The Americans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter stayed.”

In choosing Afghanistan as the location for the war with the United States which would, he believed, bring about its decline, bin Laden embroiled the Afghan people in a conflict not of their choosing, doubling the length of their civil war by another twenty years and inflating its butchers’ bill by 46,000 civilian deaths alone. And yet, with the easy confidence of a billionaire, he told Afghans in a video message that their sacrifice was worth it — and that “whoever doubts this should learn from the Russians how the blessed jihad destroyed their myth.” Because, bin Laden claimed, “the struggle is both financial and physical” so that even as the Taliban reeled under American bombing, “it is possible to strike the economic base that is the foundation of the military base, so when their economy is depleted they will be too busy with each other to be able to enslave poor peoples.”

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

This emphasis on the War on Terror as a giant, entrapping money pit for the American empire runs throughout bin Laden’s messages. In his 2002 Letter to the American People, bin Laden taunted the inhabitants of “the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind” that “it was easy for us to provoke this administration and lure it into perdition. All we had to do was send two mujahidin to the Far East to raise up a rag on which “al-Qaeda” was written, and the generals came running. This inflicted human, financial, and political losses on America without them even achieving anything worth mentioning, apart from providing business for their private corporations.”

Indeed, in his critique of America’s conversion of the War on Terror into a vast and lucrative wealth-creation scheme for the military-industrial complex, bin Laden either echoes or prefigures the identical critiques of American anti-interventionists of both Left and Right, from Bernie Sanders to Trump’s previous, anti-interventionist incarnation.

As bin Laden boasted, the massive borrowing needed to finance the wars “truly shows that al-Qaeda has made gains, but on the other hand it also shows that the Bush administration has likewise profited. Anyone seeing the enormity of the contracts won by dubious large corporations, like Halliburton and others connected to Bush and his administration, can be certain of that. But the reality is that it is you, the American people and your economy, who are losing.” For “we are continuing to make America bleed to the point of bankruptcy, by God’s will,” he asserted.

Yet it was only the presence of America’s then-Republican government, surely a gift from God, which enabled this situation: “the White House leadership, which is so keen to open up war fronts for its various corporations, whether in the field of arms, oil, or construction, has also contributed to these remarkable results for al-Qaeda.” Indeed, he mocked, “to some analysts and diplomats, it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’s own goal, despite our different intentions.”

No wonder, then, that Biden has similarly invoked the vast cost of the wars — two trillion dollars in his estimate — in bringing about their end. But even this colossal sum may be an understatement. As Fortune noted recently, this figure does not include the interest payments on the loans taken out to prosecute the war, nor the benefits paid to the survivors of the more than 7,000 American dead. Nor does it include perhaps the greatest single expense: the medical bills for the war’s more than 50,000 wounded veterans, which may alone total $2.3 trillion by 2050.

All told, claims Fortune, citing Brown University’s Costs of War project, the real bill of the War on Terror, including the lesser engagements in Yemen and Syria, may end up closer to eight trillion dollars, the effect of which American taxpayers have not yet faced, as “almost the entire cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars has come from borrowed money, much of which has yet to be repaid”.

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A French lesson for Blair and Bush

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Among America’s creditors is, of course, China, which made use of the West’s overriding distraction with winning over mountain village chieftains in the wilds of Afghanistan, with trying and failing to install a functioning liberal democracy in Iraq and then with destroying the Islamic State caliphate the invasion spawned to accelerate its rise to global industrial dominance. It is surely no accident that only now that the War on Terror is winding down, competition with China has finally intruded into the American foreign policy consciousness, despite being mocked as eccentric or even racist when expressed by then-presidential candidate Trump as the empire’s overriding challenge.

Even in the new Cold War over infrastructure and state capacity, perhaps the battleground on which wavering nations will be competed for, the money wasted on the failed wars in Asia could, as the Institute of Policy Studies thinktank observes, “have solved multiple problems in the U.S., like erasing all student debt for $1.7 trillion [or] decarbonizing the entire electricity grid for $4.5 trillion.”

But we are where we are. The twenty failed years of war, debt and distraction may not yet have led to America’s collapse in the manner bin Laden eagerly anticipated, but it certainly set the then-sole superpower at a disadvantage in preparing for the coming competition over its right to global hegemony. As Biden noted in his speech announcing the withdrawal, abandoning the Afghan adventure was necessary because “we need to focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations that is really going to determine our future.” Returning to this theme in his speech justifying the chaotic scenes in Kabul, he reiterated that “the world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China… We have to shore up America’s competitiveness to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century,” and “as we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we’ve got to learn from our mistakes.”

But can America do so? Their foreign policy establishment certainly seems averse to learning any lessons from two decades of failure, even if ordinary voters overwhelmingly support Biden’s diminution of America’s historical mission. It is not obvious that a GOP establishment responsible for the manifold strategic disasters of the twenty-year war can legitimately criticise Biden’s decision to end it, especially not when its last president rode to power partly on the same platform.

Yet even bin Laden’s purported killer, a SEAL operative-turned conservative talkshow celebrity and anti-masking activist, maintains his brand by asserting that “It baffles me right now that we’re even considering negotiating with the Taliban … Why don’t we just go kill them?” — to the applause of American conservatives who applauded Trump’s anti-interventionism just as passionately when the random spinning wheel of America’s culture war was calibrated to reward different incentives.

For al-Qaeda itself, America’s endless internal political conflict, its deepest malaise, is nothing but a cause for crowing celebration. In a recent propaganda video, America Burns, an adaptation of a previous magazine article, al-Qaeda surveyed the American political scene, crowing at the internal divisions of a “decaying polity” on the “verge of collapse”. In al-Qaeda’s framing, America is teetering on the edge of civil war. Its vast security apparatus has increasingly been directed onto American voters themselves as the combination of crude populism and the reactive collusion between the security state and “the liberal press that controls the American media industry” raised the country’s tensions to boiling point. As a consequence, America’s “usury-based economy” is merely “an inflated balloon ready to implode”, serving only “the corporate robber barons” and “Communist China.” Indeed, they boast, “It was Allah’s wisdom that the fourth plane whose downing was ordered by Dick Cheney on the 11th of September did not reach its target, and Americans were left to destroy the edifice of their democracy with their own hands.”

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

So what can be said of America’s standing twenty years after 9/11? Strategically, the hegemon appears a strange oxymoron, a global military empire which cannot win wars. It can kill hundreds of thousands of people and cause untold destruction — generally with the very best and noblest of intentions — but is seemingly unable to deploy the overwhelming military force on which its global position depends in a way that advances its interests. Given its military caste was unable even to manage a bloodless withdrawal from an airfield it controlled under a timetable it itself set, who can bet confidently that they would emerge the victor from a struggle against a competent and prepared near-peer adversary like China?

Only a reckless gambler, or the British government, would be happy with such a high-stakes throw of the dice. Politically, America’s divisions are a cautionary tale rather than an example to the world it still claims to lead; if the US still retains its status as the global standard-bearer for liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is not as enticing a prospect as it once appeared.

Yet America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the withdrawal from Iraq — which, after a decent interval to avoid the appearance of being pushed out by the Iranian-backed militias the war empowered, seems certain to follow — does not herald the end of American power. It was the wars themselves that were the trap, as bin Laden made clear time and time again, and their ending is a necessary moment of rebalancing to focus on the far greater challenge ahead. In this, we can say Biden was the president the American empire needed, even if his supporters didn’t realise that was what they were getting: a cautious realist brought to power by a liberal-imperialist establishment, and a broadly competent manager of retrenchment, and objective decline.

It is therefore wrong to claim — as Tom Tugendhat and others have — that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is America’s Suez moment, not least because Suez was a military victory for Britain. It would be more apt to view it as America’s Singapore, a failure of planning and overconfidence which heralded the collapse of imperial power in vast swathes of Asia, yet a moral and psychological defeat more than a terminal strategic one. The Suez moment, if it comes, still lies over the horizon.

The lustre of the American empire has been tarnished, but the core underlying structure may hold good for decades yet; if America has lost its claims to global leadership, it has also lost its desire to press them. In abandoning America’s failing wars to focus on its decaying infrastructure and the great power competition that will now define its future, Biden has, perhaps, twenty years after the carnage of 9/11, finally exorcised bin Laden’s ghost.

“How could we not feel, as in the darkest times in our history, a deep solidarity with the people of the United States, to whom we are so close, and to whom we owe our freedom?” wrote Jean-Marie Colombani, possibly the then-most powerful opinion-maker in France, in that special grandiloquent style the French adopt to signal momentous thought. In the next paragraph, he warned the West not to fall for the “monstrous hypocrisy” of “finding excuses for the perpetrators of this murderous madness, crediting them with the ‘good intentions’… to avenge the wretched of the world against their supposed sole oppressor, America… They do not want a better, fairer world. They simply want to wipe ours off the map.”

Strong words after the shock of 9/11. The last paragraph of this 1250-word tirade did warn, accurately as it turned out, against escalation — “[the terrorists’] attitude is obviously suicidal. By going to the extremes, they want to force Muslim opinions to ‘choose sides’ against ‘the great Satan’ [and] to spread an unprecedented crisis throughout the Arab world. They want to attract the whirlwind. Our leaders must see the danger of causing the nations these warmongers covet to buy into this suicidal logic.”

Le Monde duly supported the French government’s October 2001 decision to join both the US-led military coalition for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, as well as the NATO international security task force. This, despite France not being bound by NATO’s charter (having been spectacularly pulled out of the Organisation by Charles de Gaulle in 1966), was met by popular support that never rose to jingoism. Both Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist president, and Lionel Jospin, the Socialist PM he’d been forced to take on when his party lost the surprise 1997 General Election, were for once in agreement. France sent 4,000 crack troops. By 2010, the French were the fourth largest contributor to the war in Afghanistan (after the US, UK and Italy).

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Benard-Henri Levy

Not only did France carry her weight during the War on Terror; her expertise on Arab and Islamic terrorism was invaluable, acknowledged by both the Americans and the British. French investigative magistrates draw on over half a century’s experience with every variety of bloody attacks: during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s-1960s; Left-wing Palestinian in the 1970s; Iranian in the 1980s; Algerian again in the 1990s as France became the hinterland of the 1992-2000 civil war in her former colony. When 9/11 came, only the scope of it was different from what the juges d’instruction had been working on for decades.

The French decision to leave Afghanistan in 2012, was met with relative public indifference, which is a more normal response The Constitution of the Fifth Republic, tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specific measurements, states (Art. 15) that the President of the Republic is “the head of the armed forces, decides on the use of military force and to this end has the responsibility and the power to engage nuclear forces if necessary”. Essentially, the otherwise-ornery French have left successive presidents to it. Even before Jacques Chirac put an end to conscription in 2002, there were next to no protests when the French military, including conscripts, were deployed in Lebanon, Chad, Kosovo or Bosnia.

The French see their military (and nuclear capacity) as part of a cherished mental dreamland: it’s the last acceptable refuge of the Grandeur invoked from Louis XIV to Le Général. This Grandeur sublimates France from mid-size power to major player, with a seat at the Security Council, an impressive armaments industry for a country of 67 million people, a capacity of foreign deployment roughly similar to the UK’s (currently 17,000 troops from the North Sea to the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, Syria and the Baltics), and the respect of her soldierly peers. From the 19th century, the French Army, whose officers signally refused to back populist leaders like Général Boulanger, has been known as La Grande Muette (The Great Mute): this held during the Algerian Independence war when two generals-led military coups ended in ignominious failure. It’s the civilians, not the military, who, from Danton to the Yellow vests, try to overturn the Republic.

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Marine Le Pen's daddy issues

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Predictably, perhaps, the post World Trade Center transatlantic love affair soured fast. Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s grand-standing Foreign Secretary (an obsessive collector of Napoleoniana, he has taken on some of the traits of his hero), came to speak to the UN General Assembly one year after the attacks, on 12 September 2002, and again on 14 February 2003, to urge jaw-jaw and not war. He brushed off any illusion that, after Afghanistan, France would also join the coalition to unseat Saddam Hussein from his quarter century iron rule over Iraq. The French sat out the Iraqi war, earning themselves a variety of soubriquets, the nicest of which, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, had been stolen from The Simpsons.

As it turned out, France was right, but for an unholy combination of cleverness and wrong-headedness. The French, who over the years had furnished Saddam with some $5.1 billion’s worth of weapons for his eight-year-war against Iran, not including the making of his fledgling nuclear capacity, also knew that Germany had built the plants that enabled Iraq to manufacture the Sarin and Tabun gas that killed 5,000 Kurds at Halabja. In other words, if anyone knew that Saddam Hussein was in the process of obtaining WMD, they sat in government offices in Paris — none more so than Jacques Chirac, who’d started cultivating the Baath ruler of Iraq since 1974. The French pushback against “Iraqi Freedom”, which would turn out to be an inspired decision, and keep us out of that mess, was more motivated by deep cynicism than by the romantic illusion that deposing a brutal Middle-Eastern dictator would start “a virtuous circle of democracy” in the area. (Prof. Bernard Lewis’s phrase.)

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How France fell for QAnon

By John Lichfield

Like every French president and Foreign secretary since de Gaulle, Chirac and Villepin prided themselves in understanding what they saw as the realities of the Middle East. The Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, has long pushed la politique arabe de la France. This is a mix of heady Gallic Orientalism, cold calculations (all those Mirage and Super-Étendard planes, Exocet missiles, helicopters, air-to-surface guided missiles, and more), power assessment, and entrenched underlying anti-Americanism (which often lumps the British in the Anglo-Saxon package).

It’s also arguable that the practice of French politics (the alliances, the reversals, the treasons, the conviction that idealism is for mugs) is much closer to Near East traditions than to the Jeffersonian (or Burkean) approach. It remains that French scepticism, in this instance, was inspired.

My mother could be fierce and she punished me frequently, but even then I knew that her threat was bluster. She might smack me, but she wasn’t going to take off any digits.

Empty threats are used as leverage to entice certain behaviour. But what if the threats are real? For the girls living under Taliban control in Afghanistan, threats are not theatre: they are promises. Even for transgressions as small as painting their fingernails, they face real consequences.

Saturday marks 20 years since the fall of the World Trade Center, a day that brought unimaginable devastation, heartbreak and loss to America. But if there was one glimmer of hope that came from that tragic moment, it was for the women and girls of Afghanistan. After 9/11, and the conflict that followed, a level of freedom unknown to previous generations came to their country.

I remember watching the planes crash on television. I was at work in the Netherlands at the time, and sat, horrified, with my colleagues. As we watched, we wondered how the world’s superpower would respond to such an evil attack on the American homeland. They certainly had the power, resources and reason to go and obliterate their newfound enemy. Sitting there, we could never have guessed that this tragedy would end up bringing more rights and freedoms to women in Afghanistan.

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How 9/11 created the surveillance state

By Jacob Siegel

The United States could have gone into Afghanistan, taken its revenge and left. President Biden’s continual defence over the past weeks has been that he was following the original plan. “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11^th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.”

But this is not where the legacy of 9/11 ends. It was not all necessary revenge and retaliation. Instead, we offered to help rebuild and provide hope to those who had not had it before. Together with our Afghan allies, we built a more inclusive society for women and girls, in the belief that precisely this kind of modernisation would reduce the danger of a Taliban restoration.

As Adam Tooze explains in his brilliant Substack, from 2003 to 2018, the number of women enrolled in university rose from 7,200 to 49,000. Female life expectancy increased by almost 10 years from 2001-2019. “Whereas in 2000,” Tooze explains, “Afghan men lived longer than women, now Afghanistan has the normal pattern of women outliving their menfolk.” Rates of literacy among females more than doubled between 2000-2018.

A generation of girls was raised without knowing life under Taliban control. And they soared. In 2017, an all-girls robotics team was founded, known as the Afghan Dreamers, who went on to win the Entrepreneurial Challenge at the Robotex festival in Estonia. In 2008, Afghanistan saw its first female mayor, Azra Jafari, in the town of Nili. And she was just the first of many females to hold political positions, including Salima Mazari, Zarifa Ghanfari, and Fawzia Koofi. Women made up 40% of the most recent class of graduates from the American University of Afghanistan. They have their own all-female orchestra. Female entrepreneurs invested $77 million over 18 years, resulting in 77,000 jobs. Their rights were promoted by the 2004 Afghanistan Constitution in Article 44, stating that “the state shall devise and implement effective programs to create and foster balanced education for women”.

Their successes were awe-inspiring. They were also a source of pride for Americans. They were, in part, America’s girls — girls raised to know a certain level of freedom, with their rights secure and protected, thanks to the U.S.-led intervention prompted by 9/11.

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme produced the Arab Human Development Report, aimed at providing a path for growth and opportunity in the Arab world. The report concluded that three factors contribute to the constraints of human development in the Arab world: “freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge”. Individuals needed to be educated beyond religious ideology, their human rights respected and women’s rights expanded. And for the last 20 years, the United States has supported women and these goals through the US Agency for International Development and State Department-funded programmes, as well as encouraging women’s participation in government and the private sector.

But now women’s rights are being ripped away. Biden’s betrayal reverberates sharply across the country. He offered a false dichotomy to the American people: either pull all troops out or go back to fighting an “endless war”. Pulling out the remaining US troops initiated the swift collapse of the Afghan government, will result in Afghanistan returning to a terrorist safe haven and removed the shield protecting women’s rights in the country. Surely this is not the legacy that Americans want to leave behind on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11?

The effects of Taliban control are already being felt by women. The Taliban have announced that women must cover their faces to attend university and genders must segregate, both in class and while entering and exiting the building. They are banned from sports, considered by the Taliban’s cultural commission as “neither appropriate nor necessary” for women. Women can no longer hold ministerial positions. There are no women included in the new administration. Some are being told not to go to work, allegedly a temporary change while the Taliban draw up new “women related procedures”. They face real violence if they disobey. Those speaking out against the Taliban are being deemed “agents of America” and accused of “not being true Muslims”. They are being erased from the public square. And the Taliban haven’t been in control for a full month yet.

What will happen to America’s Afghan girls? The ones born and raised since 2001. The girls inspired by the allure of freedom, liberalism, and chasing their own dreams. Those who have, until now, not known the crushing burdens and barriers of life under the Taliban. What will become of the defiant girls, who speak up for their rights? The ones who question the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban?

Many will suffer severe punishments. Violence will be unleashed against them in a magnitude that those in the West do not comprehend. Body parts will be chopped off. Sexual harassment, rapes, honour violence and murders will become the norm.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

But, unlike before, this time is different. The women of Afghanistan will fight back. They’ve already begun. Protests are erupting across the country. Women of all ages are standing firm against the Taliban. In Kabul, women attempted to march to the presidential palace, “demanding the right to work and to be included in government”. They were attacked for it, with videos and photos revealing the bloody violence they faced at the hands of the Taliban. At a subsequent protest in Kabul, one woman stated: “We don’t care if they beat us or even shoot us. We want to defend our rights. We will continue our protests even if we get killed.”

At another protest in Herat, calling for girls’ education, one of the organisers, Basira Taheri, explained: “The women of this land are informed and educated. We are not afraid, we are united.” Pashtana Durrani, the Executive Director of Learn Afghanistan, a bulwark for Afghan women’s rights, said; “We are going to make sure [girls] get to go to school, they get to go to work. If not on the terms that we want in public, we’re going to make it happen anyways.”

As the saying, often attributed to Thomas Carlyle, goes: “Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.” The Taliban cannot undo the last 20 years. These women and girls are refusing to submit to a new Dark Age. That glimmer of hope, sparked after 9/11, has not been extinguished. Even with the Taliban in control, America’s girls aren’t going to give up.

And now the world is watching. Before 9/11, the atrocities committed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan received very little coverage in the West. Now, everyone knows names like Malala and Bibi Aisha. And we will come to know more names, like Basira Taheri’s, as we cheer them on. Two decades on, these women may be the most enduring achievement of the American intervention that followed 9/11.

They are defiant. And, as a former defiant girl, I can say with conviction that they can’t beat or cut that defiance out of you.

Despite some bright moments, like the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 or the rescue of the Yazidis from Mount Sinjar in 2014, the overall story hews more towards farce and tragedy. In the grief and rage following the attacks on the Twin Towers, the US collectively took leave of its senses and embarked on a generational project of warfare that entailed creating two overseas protectorates, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now that inexplicable and indefensible project is over, stillborn and incomplete, as America retreats ignominiously from its obligations, reneging on its lofty promises. After hundreds of thousands of deaths, none of the instigators or cheerleaders for this disaster has suffered any career or reputational loss for their hubris or misjudgment, and almost no one has ever expressed regret.

It began with much more bravado in the early 20th century; wars were waged on two fronts with a casual arrogance that many seem to have forgotten. On 29 May, 2003, a few months after the US invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times declared on The Charlie Rose Show: “suck on this…We could have hit Saudi Arabia…We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth.”

Meanwhile David Frum, erstwhile speechwriter of George W. Bush, co-authored a belligerently pro-war book with the hyperbolic title An End to Evil in 2004. Before the invasion, Jeffrey Goldberg, now editor of The Atlantic, wrote an article titled “The Great Terror” for The New Yorker, making the case that Saddam Hussein’s regime was engaged in genocide against the Kurds, offering a compelling humanitarian rationale for the invasion of Iraq and Hussein’s overthrow.

Goldberg wasn’t alone at that august magazine, with storied foreign correspondent George Packer also being an invasion supporter. William Kristol, arguably the most prominent turn-of-the-century neoconservative, contributed The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission in early 2003, and predicted a two-month rather than eight-year conflict. At the highest levels of the American government, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney concurred with their advisors that the best way to win the “War on Terror” against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was to invade and conquer a secular nation-state, Iraq. Leading national security lights such as Condoleezza Rice and L. Paul Bremer encouraged Bush and Cheney and then attempted to execute their imperialist vision.

Somehow, all this seemed reasonable to 72% of Americans in 2003. America was the land of promise and possibilities. At the turn of the millennium, the US budget surplus was $230 billion. America was 30% of the world economy, and Russia and China were both considered geopolitical allies. The protracted dispute over the 2000 presidential election actually convinced many that the democratic system in the United States of America was robust even under stress. America at the turn of the century was in the afterglow of Cold War victory, a hyperpower in a world where it was the singular imperial colossus.

But the world has turned sideways in a single generation. By 2020, the US had a $3-trillion-dollar budget deficit, and our share of the global economy had decreased to 25%, in large part due to the rise of China. Nearly 7,000 Americans had died in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than double the number killed on 9/11. In the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden, and on 6 January this year the US Capitol was stormed by an enraged mob. To the broader world, the American colossus was looking a lot more like an American basket case.

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The results of American hubris have been mixed at best for Iraq and Afghanistan. A conservative estimate is that more than 200,000 Iraqis and 250,000 Afghans have died since 2001 as a result of the invasions. Iraq’s democracy is shaky, having undergone an existential fright with the rise of ISIS in the mid-2010s. Afghanistan is now under Taliban rule, just as it was in 2001. America came to liberate, but in the wake of imperial conquest, the natives suffered through corruption, factionalism and civil war. Due to our all-volunteer army and reflexive recourse to deficit spending, most Americans did not experience the wars in a visceral or indirect manner. All the while, viscera were being splattered across the streets of Baghdad and Kabul as young men blew themselves up, inspired by a religious fanaticism in turn aggravated by American occupation.

Notably, while the consequences for the Iraqis and Afghans have been tragic, our social, intellectual and political elite have suffered no professional repercussions for their incompetence. On 2 November, 2001 Friedman asked us to “give war a chance”. Twenty years later, he continues to opine for The New York Times, pulling down a salary of $350,000 per year at a time when journalism as a profession is collapsing.

Goldberg, whose New Yorker piece burnished the humanitarian need for the overthrow of Hussein, was appointed editor of The Atlantic in 2016. Packer wrote a book, Assassin’s Gate, where he chronicles his disillusionment with the war. This was sufficient to maintain a sinecure at The New Yorker until 2018, when he moved to The Atlantic to work under his former colleague Goldberg. Frum has had a more chequered career, but that had little to do with his position on the War on Terror, and everything to do with his scepticism of the Republican stance on healthcare reform in 2010, illustrating the true red-lines in American politics.

Frum is now more often speaking to a centre-left rather than a centre-right audience (though still identifying as a conservative), but he is still comfortably ensconced in the American establishment. Similarly, Kristol has converted into a “Never Trump” “Biden Republican,” and is a member of good standing of the “Resistance”. His publication, The Bulwark, receives funding from centre-left foundations. Even George W. Bush, who was once a hate-figure for the Left, is now being rehabilitated. The man who unleashed two disastrous wars and whose decisions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands is now celebrated for his paintings of immigrants.

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Bush’s one-time viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has also taken up painting and become a ski instructor in his leisured semi-retirement. Meanwhile, his hawkish lieutenant Dick Cheney is now well regarded for his support of gay marriage, while Cheney’s daughter, Liz, is garnering respect and accolades from Democrats for her anti-Trump views following the 2020 election. Condeleezza Rice, also an anti-Trump Republican, returned to academia, but has also become a pop culture phenomenon, and has now been tapped to make guest appearances on The View.

The soft-glow Cheney rehabilitation is emblematic of the primacy of domestic political concerns in today’s American cultural landscape. Just a decade ago, he was being pilloried for his frank defence of torture. Today his anti-Trump stance gets more weight when determining whether he’s one of the “good ones” or “bad ones”. Despite how much foreign policy dominated American politics in the early 2000’s, the rest of the world has faded from view over the past decade. The 2016 and 2020 Democrat presidential candidates were both supporters of the Iraq invasion and hailed from the party’s more hawkish wing, Hillary Clinton being a major proponent of American intervention in Libya.

Under Trump, many conventional narratives surrounding national security and foreign policy flipped. Liberals and the intelligentsia came to love the CIA and FBI, and cast a sceptical eye on foreign powers like Russia. Kristol, the architect of the neoconservative intellectual project in the 2000s, has now become an icon of the anti-Trump faction, even lauded by mainstream liberals. Establishment intellectuals even now see Bush as a bulwark of American democracy, a contrast to Trump’s strongman tendencies.

It turns out that 9/11 didn’t change everything. Despite a decade of international adventurism in the 2000s that extended at lower wattage into the 2010s, the US remained a nation apart, focused on its own concerns. The pundits and politicians whose blunders in the early 2000s had grave consequences for nations far away suffered few ill consequences for their disastrous prognostications, short-sighted decisions and uninformed arguments.

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Bush is now allowed to be the pro-immigrant painter ex-president, not the executive who authorised extraordinary rendition and whose decisions pulverised two nations for a generation. Kristol’s legacy may not be as organiser of Bush’s imperial braintrust, but as the rebel against the Trump regime. Friedman remains one of the best-paid journalists in the country, while Goldberg is now editor of one of the nation’s most venerable magazines. Frum and Cheney have not changed their fundamental politics, but are now embraced by the liberal establishment thanks to their strident anti-Trump position.

Never mind that Cheney’s objection to Trumpism is rooted in the latter’s deviation from the disastrous foreign policy of the 2000s. The period in the middle of that decade when foreign policy loomed large as a polarising issue in partisan politics was the exception and not the rule, and the collateral damage abroad of American adventurism is out of sight and out of mind. The current President supported the Iraq War, while Kristol is now a Biden-defender against even the gentlest conservative criticisms.

Twenty years down the line, the American elite is somewhat chagrined to be reminded of the arrogance and ignorance they showed in the wake of 9/11. But they are the same elite that they always were, because their sinecures are ultimately yoked to the whims of domestic politics, not the horrors that American enthusiasms unleashed abroad. Once obtained, a position in the pundit and political elite is rarely subject to the vicissitudes of meritocracy. America is ruled by a soft and complacent aristocracy of error in 2021, just as it was in 2001 on the eve of the 9/11 terror attack. In that sense, it was a day that changed nothing.

Right — and yet, in that appealingly strict dichotomy, a little bit wrong as well. And wrong in a way that matters now as we survey the scene 20 years on.

A personal memory to illustrate my point: why, in the summer of 2001, would you want to go to America to work as a BBC correspondent? America: devoid of news, its politics dull, its people porky and contented. Stay in Europe, my Brussels colleagues said, where everything is happening. The Euro is coming! The Commission has resigned and is being rebuilt! The Finns have the presidency and we’re all going to Lapland!

I hated Brussels — mainly for the weather (living on the inside of a milk bottle someone said) — but I couldn’t deny that the news was all there. From the day, in 1999, when the Austrian farm commissioner, Franz Fischler, presaged the commission’s demise with the immortal line: “I’ve resigned. I’m going for a drink,” we felt, those of us lucky to be in the Brussels press corps, at the very centre of the universe.

But, still, I hankered after the USA. The BBC view was that it was largely a features-led role — injuries caused by shark attacks were the biggest news — which required some considerable imagination to get stories that would make it onto programmes in London. A senior editor said he thought I could do better; he suggested Vietnam. But if I insisted, then my application for the vacant job of Washington Correspondent would be considered.

In my interview, I burbled about the sharks and a near-miss between a Chinese and US plane. I tried hard to hide the fact that my central concern was to see sunshine. When I got the job, I asked to delay until 2002 because I wanted to see my last real news: the introduction of Euro notes and coins at the beginning of that year. Nobody thought that a problem: a fill-in was sent to cover.

What I have just described seems now to have a faintly ludicrous, almost feckless feel to it. That’s because I think we characterise our recent history according to our current psychological state. Powered by Tony Judt’s abrupt division — before and after the twin towers — we have decided to remember the months, the years, before 9/11 as a waste of time and space, and the months and years afterwards as an angry violent period of endless wars and triumphalism and failed nation building.

From shark attacks to imperial hubris in the passing of a morning. It’s neat but it’s nonsense. My memory of Washington life – when I arrived, finally, in mid-2002 – suggests to me that the Judt picture needs revision. A period needs to be inserted between that September day and the mission of Donald Rumsfeld et al. It fuelled the mission far more than the fantasies of some neo-cons. It powered everything in my early months in Washington. It coloured all politics, all journalism, all of life.

It was fear.

We forget the fear.

I remember an early visit, after arriving in Washington DC to the hardware store to buy duct tape for the windows. We had been advised that this might be helpful in the event of a chemical or biological attack. That was what was people were expecting. Everyone thought another blow was coming and that it would be worse.

But this wasn’t what I had expected. I had come to Washington to live in a film set: I had in mind The West Wing or any number of movies in which the city shimmers as the backdrop for some eventually successful power play, a place of consequence, polished white monuments, polished black cars. Everyone and everything recognisable. Slick repartee leading to bold American decisions: “Let’s do this!”

Now we were halfway to The Road: dystopia beckoned. In the sky there was the roar of fighter jets, random but constant. On the ground there was duct tape and a glassy-eyed sense that the end times were upon us. At a dinner party to welcome us to Washington the host raised a glass for a toast: “Death to al-Qaeda!” I nearly choked but the other guests jutted out their chins and swallowed hard, as if thirsty, or just plain frightened.

This atmosphere did have consequences. As the international relations scholar, Robert Kagan has suggested, it fuelled the Bush administration’s desire to do something, not out of a sense of imperial hubris but because America was on edge;

“For better or for worse,” Kagan wrote recently in the Washington Post, “it was fear that drove the United States into Afghanistan… A collective failure today to recall what the world looked like to Americans after 9/11 has certainly clouded our understanding of the consequential decisions taken in those first years.”

The idea of a cheerful and gung-ho crowd setting off on an adventure they had always had up their sleeve, always wanted to have an excuse to use, doesn’t tally with what I experienced in Washington DC.

I saw a previously sure-footed place stumbling. At the hardware store and at the office, including the Oval Office.

And then came a new round of killing. Small in scale, but psychologically undermining, they re-opened the bigger wounds. One death, in October 2002, was close to my home in peaceful north west Washington: a woman called Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was filling her car with petrol when there was a sound described as “like a tyre blowing out”.

She was shot. At the age of 25. Married with a three-year old daughter. She was one of 17 victims of a duo who became known as the Washington snipers. They had a rifle with a long-distance sight and a car with a boot they had adapted to allow them to fire from. In a world of spiralling violence, a world in which fussing about shark attacks and the Euro notes and coins seemed so distant, the snipers added to the potent mix. I called my wife once from the corridor in the Pentagon outside the office of the deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to tell her there had been another shooting and maybe the kids should go home from the park. This was not normal and yet it was; it had become normal. Down the corridor there was a hole in the Pentagon where one of the 9/11 planes had hit. Who knew what normal was, or would be?

Even when the snipers were caught there was no sense of proper victory: their evil derangement (the older man had been damaged in the army, the younger was just angry) seemed to add to a sense of a world losing its moorings.

The British writer Jonathan Raban, writing in 2004 about his adopted nation, said: “It’s as if America, since September 11^th, has been reconstituted as a colonial New England village, walled in behind a stockade to keep out Indians.”

That was the mentality: I saw no hubris on the streets of Washington DC. Only unity and fear.