'Groupthink' has led to unfolding Iraq disaster

Worldview: 'We are in the nastiest rat's nest without a nation-building plan, without significant international support and without an exit plan." So wrote Lieut Col Karey Kwiatkowski, a former head of air force intelligence in the Pentagon, in a devastating analysis of US policy in Iraq, penned after her recent resignation.

Her target was the neo-conservative group which set the agenda for the Iraq war, particularly its manipulation of intelligence reports to justify its case, which she describes as "groupthink".

The unfolding disaster in Iraq has fully confirmed her analysis.

The 146,000 US troops there are not enough to provide security and are quite unprepared for nation-building and peace-keeping, functions dismissed as unnecessary by the neo-conservative war party.

Even the minority of Iraqis who regarded the US military victory over the Saddam Hussein regime as "liberation" are more and more frustrated about the collapse of elementary infrastructure. Their nationalism has been restoked, as have their demands that Iraqi sovereignty be restored.

President Bush this week approved an initiative for another United Nations resolution to mandate more troops - a major change of direction from an administration that previously scorned or sidelined the international organisation. Initial indications are that it will not be easy to convince the Security Council to rubber-stamp a resolution which would give the US more international troops but retain their military and political dominance. France and Germany say the plan on offer is "not dynamic enough, not sufficient".

The French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, calls for a logic of Iraqi sovereignty to replace the logic of occupation, hinting that US control of reconstruction projects and access to Iraqi oil must also be reopened if significant international support for the US is to be restored.

His British counterpart, Jack Straw, gave a grim warning that the US and Britain risk "strategic failure" unless they send more troops to improve security in Iraq and speed up moves towards self-government.

His confidential assessment was leaked to the Daily Telegraph. Without the despatch of more troops, he says, drawing comparisons with Northern Ireland, if British troops face "another spectacular (e.g., against a British barracks) we and the US could otherwise find ourselves entirely alone". Iraqis' high expectation for reconstruction are being frustrated, with "electricity generation still around 25 per cent below pre-war levels, and transmission undermined by looting and sabotage".

"Strategic failure" would be tantamount to military and political defeat, hardly an exit plan either the US or Britain could accept. Tony Blair said at his press conference on Thursday that "Iraq is important for the stability of the Middle East and the wider world," and so it is.

But both states are militarily overstretched by the current commitment. Boosting it would involve calling up more reservists in the US, aggravating a developing public scepticism about the wisdom of the entire venture.

Clearly it will figure prominently in the forthcoming election campaign.

Those who expected a spreading wave of democratisation in the Middle East flowing from the liberation of Iraq are being sorely disappointed - not least by the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire provoked by Israeli attacks on Hamas leaders after the latest bombing atrocity in Jerusalem.

It still looks as if Ariel Sharon has more influence in Washington than Tony Blair - although this will presumably change if the Security Council drives a hard bargain on a new resolution, swinging the balance of US policy back towards a selective multilateralism and away from the ideological Zionism espoused by discredited neo-conservatives.

Or will it? Timothy Garton Ash, a close student of the Blair-Bush relationship as it has unfolded since 2000, argued in Thursday's Guardian that as a result of the war "Blair has ended up with terrific ties to America and frayed ones to Europe."

He guesses that Blair and his team probably spent only 20 per cent of their time trying to convince France and Germany to come along with their strategy this time last year and convincing the Bush administration this was necessary, compared to 80 per cent of it devoted to lobbying in Washington and preparing the intelligence dossier under investigation at the Hutton inquiry.

"What use is a bridge attached to only one bank?" he asks, noting that another casualty of the war has probably been any attempt by a weakened Blair to have a referendum on joining the euro before the next British election.

The war's effects on transatlantic opinion are revealed in the annual poll of attitudes in the United States, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands and Poland published this week by the German Marshall Fund (it was taken in June).

There is a feeling of cumulative dismay on the European side with Bush policies and a general disillusionment with the United States, especially in Germany, where support for a stronger EU role grew sharply. Seventy-one per cent of Europeans believe "Europe should become a superpower" compared to 65 per cent last year, while a majority - 49 to 45 per cent - believe it is undesirable that the US exert strong leadership in world affairs, compared to 31 and 45 per cent last year. There is much less support in Europe for using war to achieve justice, and big majorities on both sides say Americans and European have different values.

In the US only 15 per cent support an isolationist stance, while 77 per cent support an active overseas foreign policy. But 80 per cent there believe it is desirable that Europe should exert strong leadership in world affairs, compared to 79 per cent last year, with 43 per cent saying this is "very desirable" compared to 31 per cent in 2002.

Commenting on these findings Garton Ash said "that's fascinating after all the huge row over Iraq and the talk of European treason, and of France no longer being an ally. It demonstrates first that the news from Iraq shows you every day you cannot run the world on your own, and secondly that there is a transatlantic community."

The shifting public opinion in the US is revealed in another poll finding in late August that 63 per cent of American voters agreed that "getting the UN and our allies to contribute more of the troops and money for the reconstruction in Iraq" was preferable to retaining US control over the Iraq occupation. So one must beware stereotyping overall US attitudes by reference only to Bush's rat's nest.

pgillespie@irish-times.ie