Why the War Couldn't Wait - 5 December 2003

I see Jack Nicklaus, the most famous golfer of his time, says that he can't remember a day for 30 years in which he didn't spend a little time thinking about the golf swing, which takes two seconds to perform.

By an unexplained whimsy of the way the mind associates things, it struck me that in the past 13 years scarcely a day has gone by in my life that I haven't give an hour or so, not to the golf swing, but to the far less agreeable but equally baffling subject of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Let's see what I've learned. For most Americans and Europeans the beginning came in August 1990 when Saddam suddenly invaded Kuwait.

I think it's fair to say that until that day the vast majority of us knew very little about Saddam and even less about Kuwait.

It was only then, however, that it became necessary for a reporter to do some boning up on the long, sorry, murderous history of Iraq.

To me, even as late as 1990, Iraq still had the sound of a new name. I'd known it, as a boy and a student, as Mesopotamia and had, in the early 20s, two school masters who'd been in the army there in the First World War and took occasional breaks from their profession during recurrent bouts of malaria.

Otherwise I was, as a history student, well disposed to Mesopotamia. TE Lawrence convinced us of the nobility of the Arabs.

The Treaty of Versailles had given Mesopotamia to Britain as a mandate and the British colonial secretary, one Winston Churchill, set up a kingly dynasty.

Much later Baghdad had a special place in my historical memory as the very fount and cradle of medical knowledge and practice.

When in the summer of 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait, our knowledge about him embraced some very unpleasant facts.

That he was simply the latest of a succession of military dictators who murdered the first two kings, were themselves murdered by successors, eventually leaving the whole of Iraq in the hands of this Baathite socialist, this most repressive dictator who began by trying to suppress, kill or banish the Shia Muslims and thus provoked a war with Iran, which lasted eight years.

Saddam emerged as the victor. He next thought to put an end to the age-long campaign over the Kurds in the north to become an independent nation, using artillery and bombing planes to attack several hundred villages.

More than 80 of them were sprayed with poison gas, causing a hundred thousand Kurds to flee into Turkey.

Next Saddam decided once for all to dispose of the nuisance of Kuwait - a small, independent and now oil-rich nation on the Gulf which for long Saddam had regarded as an interference with the sweep of his country, much as the Spaniards have thought of Gibraltar as a defiance of their sovereignty.

One incident, never satisfactorily explained to this day, preceded Saddam's sudden swoop south to occupy Kuwait and plunder its wealth.

It seems that in the early summer of 1990, when he was making threatening sounds about Kuwait, the American ambassador to Iraq held a meeting with him.

The ambassador was reported as implying, yet not saying outright, that Saddam's plans about Kuwait did not greatly concern the United States.

Accordingly, in August 1990, Saddam invaded and occupied Kuwait and - promptly for once - the Security Council of the United Nations gave him, in the old-fashioned way, an ultimatum to withdraw, which of course he rejected.

Twenty-nine member nations of the UN resolved to expel him and a UN force, mainly American and British, did so in a land campaign of 100 hours, forcing a retreat of his forces, including his crack Republican Guard - so helpless and disorderly that President Bush and General Colin Powell gave up the pursuit, saying that to continue at the pace and with the weapons they were using would constitute a massacre of an army already defeated and on the point of surrender.

So the deed had been done and there was an outcry from many Americans to pursue him to Baghdad and throw him out of power.

But that was no part of the United Nations brief, which was simply to get Saddam out of Kuwait.

However, while the rest of us went about our business it was not over for the administration.

The Pentagon, once called the war department, was aroused before the State Department, by the brutally plain revelation that Saddam still had the fourth largest army in the world.

Moreover after his surrender and with that immense army he vigorously renewed his, shall we say, war-mongering ways, putting down a Shia rebellion in a holy city and deciding once more and for the last time to invade and crush the Kurds.

The Kurds had been tough rebels for centuries and they were not crushed, though another 400,000 of them fled to Turkey and 500,000 to Iran, which promoted the hugest relief experiment in the history of the United Nations.

The appeals to the United Nations to do something, to stop the adventurism of a re-invigorated Saddam continued.

And, in the face of the evidence of his continual re-arming and missile construction, another resolution was brought to the Security Council ordering weapons inspectors to go into the vast, California-size country of Iraq to search, to declare and to destroy such weapons.

This resolution was only the first in a series of 16 running through 12 years - lots of us have forgotten that.

Much was found but much lay hidden. Saddam grew increasingly impatient, not to say defiant, of all the resolutions and of the inspectors and he physically stopped them at picked sites, denying the military uses of much suspect material, and by the middle of his second term President Clinton, now, was ready to propose another ultimatum for Saddam.

Unfortunately whatever commanding authority Clinton might have had to follow through was ruined by the sordid revelations of his Lewinsky affair.

So the next president - George W Bush - came to the White House and found on his hands this hugely humiliating problem.

The Pentagon was all for an invasion of Iraq . The United States and Britain went in alone.

By now there are troops from Poland and Spain and, in various civilian ways, the help of 26 other countries.

After we discovered that the toppling of Saddam's statue was only the beginning - where do we stand?

The first battle, mistakenly thought to be the war, was quickly won. But the aftermath has been an unanticipated muddle.

The destruction of the power grids of Baghdad and Basra was the most obvious mistake.

The administration made a disastrous assumption - which any other administration could well have made - that the Iraqi police would return to their stations and 300,000 Iraqi troops would happily join the allies.

Neither thing happened. Iraqi police or soldiers who started to help the allies were immediately targeted as enemies.

It became starkly plain with every passing month that the resistance was not random but better and better organised.

By whom? Where was the Republican Guard?

And - something the administration's never admitted in public - there is no such thing as the "Iraqi people". There are at least four tribal, religious, political mainstream factions, each of which wants to be top dog or at least the nucleus of a new overriding government.

Mr Bush wants to arrange to lead them all into a national democracy, which is surely - though nobly intended - a mirage.

We know the many things that have gone wrong in the wake of the false dawn of victory but, among people who've been against the war from the start - whether on the streets or in the study - there is a question that is still unanswered.

I've put it to many people, including a famous philosopher and a leading delegate of a major member of the Security Council.

Last March, if you had a choice of agreeing to invade or having the UN approve a three-month round of more inspections, what third alternative would you have had in mind? No answer.

The true, unconfessed alternative was to say - okay, Saddam, you win; go about your missiles and your labs. We'll wait till you try to shatter Israel overnight, acquire a flock of allies and become king of Arabia, and then by golly we'll start to fight you.

That was, in March, the true alternative on everyone's mind that dared not speak its name.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.