America invades Iraq - 21 March 2003

On a balmy weekend in April nineteen sixty one, the most novel item of new that I might have talked about, was the fact that in the twenty seven year old national golf tournament called "The Masters" held in brilliant hot weather, amid the towering pines and the azalea bushes of Augusta, Georgia. For the first time a foreigner a South African was on his way to winning the tournament.

In what professional golfers tend to call "the outside world" which you and I know as "the world" nothing very remarkable was happening, nothing anyway calamitous or politically significant that need prevent me from doing a light, odd, I hope entertaining Letter from America.

I forget now what it was about but within a day or two I learned what it ought to have been about. A well known radio critic in England was ready to take a deep breath and deliver a raspberry in my direction.

It's at once a blessing and a curse of radio that the listener (however sophisticated) believes (unless he is directly reminded otherwise) that the speaker is talking to him now. Well it happened that as usual my talk had been recorded just before the weekend for its usual transmission on a Sunday. Unfortunately for me it also happened that late on the Saturday evening our time, one Yuri Gagarin the first soviet astronaut (they called a cosmonaut) had mad the first orbit of the earth. On the Sunday morning papers the name of Gagarin blazed from the headlines from Glasgow to Tokyo. This good English critic chose that Sunday to hear what I had to say about it, and was appalled to hear whatever "fluff" or "fun and games" I was going on about and he wrote his piece.

Need I say that forty two years later his words still retain a touch of their original irritation? Like a hair in the mouth. I haven't seen his magazine since he wrote the damning sentence but I can quote it "When the last hydrogen bomb has fallen on the American mainland, you may be sure the good old Cooke will be waffling away in New York as usual".

I tell you this deplorable story in order to stress a point. The point I want to make for critics, listeners young and old in Hong Kong or John o' Groats is that this talk is being recorded at nine thirty in "our" morning on Friday the twenty first of March.

By the time you hear it whether on Friday evening or Sunday, or Tuesday evening in New Zealand, anything might have happened. Iraqi bodyguards may have surrendered in droves, or not. Hundreds of scud missile might have whizzed toward Kuwait or Tel Aviv? Saddam himself (pray the Lord) might have suddenly "flown the coop" and gone into safe exile on the Riviera, Paris perhaps? In an interview last Sunday President Chirac admitted (with an indulgent smile) the yes indeed he had called Saddam "a friend".

So these must be mere passing thoughts after about thirty six hours of the war. First, in the week before the war was declared the most striking and to me the most unexpected development was a movement in American popular opinion. Three weeks ago before we heard from the fifteen nations on the security council, the number of Americans approving the war was fifty five percent, if it happened with the sanction of the security council. Then came the last of the interminable debates conducted in the glum atmosphere of impending vetoes from France and Russia, and at best an abstention from China. Secretary Jack Straw's proposed second resolution was practically a rewrite of the first and second council resolutions way back in the early nineties. He made it very clear what was true at the start, but has been increasingly fudged down the years that the burden of proof was wholly and always on Saddam's part. The United Nations inspectors were never required to go out on a treasure hunt.

There was a time when one or two top advisors of the President (the President was then Mr Clinton) had the idea that it was time for the United States (and any available allies) to plan an early invasion of Iraq without the UN'S permission. Now remember that all through the cold war for two or three decades, there had been scores of wars never even brought up before the United Nations, the Security Council stayed politely on the sidelines.

Mr Bush's decision last autumn to bring up Iraq, only served to advertise the "going it alone" initiative which had been routine since the end of the second world war. Which today lead some statesmen with very scant knowledge of recent history to start bellowing "the United States is defying the council!" Well this passing thought of the Clinton administration was passed over almost in the moment of its conception. For whatever moral authority President Clinton had built up during his six, seven years in office was in shreds. The famous old American Novelist Norman Mailer has just celebrated his eightieth birthday by airing the theory that our present woes in Iraq can be traced to Monica Lewinski, the White House intern with whom President Clinton had a squalid sexual encounter.

I doubt that anyone apart from Mr Mailer embraces this theory but I must admit it has a tasty grain of truth. But I was trying to discover what caused a dramatic rise in the percentage of the American people's support for the war. The council debate were watch, listen to by an astonishing eighty million adult Americans. There has been (that I know of) no pole or study to see what caused the change, I have to guess that three men were the main persuaders, secretary of state Powell first of all, who had been the more reluctant warrior all through the last fall, but now grit his teeth and put forward what he had known for years, the precise amount of Saddam's arsenals of anthrax, vx and two other deadly gases which had been reported in the late nineties, but throughout all the recent inspections never exposed. At one critical point in the debate secretary Powell said in effect "just take the key, unlock the door and say "look we forgot these or look we have destroyed them"". Even the French ministers believe he has them hidden, and two days ago flashed their first light on the dark scene by saying that if Saddam dared to use a bio chemical weapon by way of retaliation they might join the fight.

After secretary Powell there was the team of Prime Minister Blaire and secretary Straw. Mister Straw's plain talk was a breath of fresh air in a dungeon of jargon, and like nobody else speaking in favour of the war prime minister Blaire made the same simple damning argument over and over, and spoke as a man deeply believing that this was an honourable act to save first and then middle east, and then the rest of us from a ghastlier war next year or the one after that. And then there was the President (little strange don't you think that I've gone on so long without mentioning him?) to be frank I have to say that from the beginning of his presidency I have come to deplore the abruptness of his administrations diplomacy, indeed it's constant lack of diplomacy, I'll give one example to stand in for many, The Kyoto treaty. The United States might have gone to the European and other capitals and said quietly "we know that over a hundred and fifty nations have had scientist working on this and persuaded you to sign it, we did so ourselves but after long thought we've decided not to ratify it. Instead one day the president woke up and announced in a tone of bravado and seeming defiance "the United states will not ratify the Kyoto treaty" "horror!" "Outrageous!" cried every European foreign office and newspaper. The new president was a trigger happy bully and a cowboy.

No nation I heard of among the horror stricken remarked "by the way, we haven't ratified it ourselves have we?" one nation (Romania wasn't it?) ratified it. Now the public build up to the confrontation with Saddam was the administration critics contend "Too rhetorical. Too long winded, and offering different war aims from day to day" and many people otherwise sympathetic to the President, if not his review to the Woodrow Wilson Christian crusade, have been more embarrassed than impressed by his speeches. Because (though often well written) they sounded like a bad actor reciting good words. But, but I do believe that Mr Bush's ultimatum speech on Monday was exactly right, it was short and sombre and sounded like the speech of a simple man facing up to what he believes to be an awesome and unpredictable duty but a duty first of all.

Anyway a month before the last council debate and the presidents ultimatum, only thirty nine percent were in favour of (so to speak) "going it alone" today seventy one percent. It's also my guess that the television scenes of the reservists, the more than one hundred thousand ordinary young men and women leaving daily jobs and their families. I believe lots of us for the first time felt for them with a touch of guilt. As I talk the support has gone up still higher after we learned of the thirteen million pamphlets dropped on Iraq to explain the elaborate precautions the United States military is taking to try and avoid or protect civilians. This effort has by the way taken months of work of a special division in the defence department, and I should hope it might do something to soften or temper the picture of secretary Rumsfeld as Wild Bill Hickok.

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