The Baker report on US involvement in Iraq signals the end of Bush-era unilateralism . . . and potentially a safer world for us all, argues Tony Kinsella
Aesop tells us that the plodding tortoise eventually outpaces the sprinting hare. The Iraq Study Group (ISG) co-chaired by James Baker submitted its report to the US Congress yesterday. President George Bush called it a "tough assessment" of the situation in Iraq, following a one-hour briefing with the entire group.
The report suggests the US drastically cut its forces in Iraq by 2008, and engage with Iran, Syria and other neighbouring countries in the search for a solution.
Robert M Gates, the incoming US secretary of defence, told Senator Carl Levin last Tuesday that the US was not winning in Iraq. The Baker group has now gone further, diplomatically stating the US, acting alone or with a few tame allies, cannot win in Iraq.
The greatest military power the world has ever known is losing a war. It has now become a political necessity in the US to criticise Bush's military madness. The penny is loudly dropping that singing the praises of the United States of America may involve criticising the Bush Administration.
Although most of the strike capacity of the US army (as distinct from its navy and air force) is deployed in Iraq, there were never enough troops to impose any form of political order. Paul Bremer, the US pro-consul, warned Condoleezza Rice in 2003 that the US had "about half the number of soldiers we need". The US dispatched virtually its entire land combat forces, some 150,000 troops, to a conflict that needed closer to 400,000.
There were only three sources for those missing 250,000 troops - raising a larger US army, building a global coalition or massively involving Iraqis.
This was to be a quick war of "shock and awe", based on lies the White House had warped out of the ruins of the twin towers. Those lies could never have sustained a domestic political consensus to draft, train and equip a sufficiently large US force. There was never any chance of building a real international coalition to support a US war of aggression - and maintenance of a significant Iraqi force would mean a White-House-excluded degree of compromise with Baghdad.
In August 2002, Dick Cheney set out the three goals for regime change in Iraq: "Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced." The failure to achieve any of these goals is a damning testimony to the limitations of aggressive military force.
The unilateral military hare is not only limping badly, it is being overtaken by the plodding multilateral military tortoise. The second-largest expeditionary force on our planet today is composed of 93,000 personnel from 110 countries deployed in 34 UN peacekeeping operations across five continents.
As the US cuts-and-limps in Iraq and the joint UN-African Union mission deploys in Darfur, our species will, for the first time in its history, devote more resources to collective security than to unilateral aggression. We still stint on resources for this historical success. The 45,000-strong NYPD has an annual budget of $4 billion (€3.01 billion), the US has squandered $300 billion on its Iraqi debacle, while the current UN peacekeeping budget is a mere $4.75 billion.
Nations, like tortoises, are not sprinters. Micheál MacLiammóir once remarked that "nations are like people in slow motion". Our collective tortoise has, however, been in motion for 50 years, long enough for us to measure its progress.
In 1956, France and the UK, in secret collaboration with Israel, attacked Egypt. London wanted to reassert its presence in the Middle East, while Paris believed it would nip the Algerian insurrection in the bud if it toppled Nasser's government. Faced with Egyptian resistance, global condemnation, Soviet threats and US disapproval, the Anglo-French imperial adventure quickly turned to fiasco. The then Canadian foreign minister, Lester Pearson, organised the first major UN peacekeeping force (UNEF) of 6,000 troops from 10 countries to manage the end of empire and police the Israeli-Egyptian ceasefire.
At the same moment, a more modern imperial fiasco was playing out on the streets of Europe. President Eisenhower and vice-president Nixon had come to power in 1952 on a pledge to "roll back communism". Their belligerent propaganda encouraged the Hungarian government to break with Moscow, but with the world focused on Suez, and Washington furiously back-pedalling, the Red Army brutally crushed the Hungarian uprising.
On a soggy West Berlin street, an unknown 43-year-old former revolutionary found himself using a police microphone to dissuade angry mobs from storming into East Berlin in support of their counterparts in Budapest. Willy Brandt later told me it was at this precise moment he fully understood that, however bellicose the superpowers' rhetoric, neither would go to war to alter the European balance of forces.
Force having been excluded, Europe's difficulties had to be politically addressed. Ostpolitik, detente, the Helsinki process, German reunification and the collapse of the USSR, would all flow from Brandt's comprehension of realpolitik that November 1956 evening.
Lester Pearson became the 1957 Nobel Peace laureate. In his Nobel lecture, he observed "we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies".
Willy Brandt followed in his footsteps in 1971. He closed his prizewinner's lecture with a fervent plea: "May all those who possess the power to wage war have the mastery of reason to maintain peace."
The "power to wage war" has failed in Iraq. We are now offered a historic opportunity to apply Brandt's "mastery of reason" - for Aesop's tortoise, the finish line is in sight. It's high time for us "retarded pygmies" to become "precocious giants".
• Tony Kinsellais an Irish author and commentator. In the 1980s, he worked on security and disarmament questions in the Socialist International group under the presidency of Willy Brandt, former chancellor of West Germany