Dangerous times as desperate duo seeks new global threat

Dangerous times as desperate duo seeks new global threat

WHAT GEORGE Bush really needs now is another 9/11. It is more than five years since al-Qaeda got lucky with the plane bombings in Manhattan and at the Pentagon. Public enthusiasm for retributive justice has waned, not least since more Americans have now died in the war in Iraq than were killed in the twin towers. The danger is that Bush and his ally Tony Blair might now be searching for a new global threat to justify those deaths before the court of history.
Any thoughts that the prime minister has been having second thoughts about the war should have seen dispelled by his Portsmouth speech last Friday. There he was, "Basra" Blair, standing proud on a warship, surrounded by assault vehicles, extolling the virtues of "hard power" above that wimpish "peacekeeping" that other European nations have settled for. "I'm hard, me - feel my role."
This was Tony Blair as the great invader; the people's conqueror. His attempt to recast the Iraq disaster as a humanitarian intervention comparable to Kosovo or Sierra Leone was an insult to the British military who fought the actions there. Those were measured operations, taken in co-operation with the international community, designed to save lives and prevent ethnic cleansing. Iraq is completely different.
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It was - is - a unilateral exercise of neo-imperial power by America, which we legitimised through our uncritical support. And by engaging in this venture in defiance of international law and world opinion, Tony Blair has undermined Britain's capacity to launch humanitarian interventions in places where they are still desperately needed - such as Darfur. With the democratic world bogged down in Iraq, the world's dictators have been given a free ride.
Even George W Bush admits to making mistakes. Not so Tony Blair, who will not give an inch in his resolve to prove that he was right. Nor will he waver in his determination to follow Bush into the next phase of his bloody adventure in Iraq and elsewhere, even as he tells us that British troops are to pull out of Iraq.
The press portrayed Bush's escalation of the war last week as his "last throw of the dice", as if the president were sitting deluded and powerless in his bunker, desperately trying to stave off the inevitable. But what if this isn't his last gasp; what if last week's "surge" in Iraq is the start of something new and altogether more dangerous?
My fear is that the second battle of Baghdad is not a cover for retreat, but the start of a new conflict. That Bush is about to "go large" - rebuild his support by launching a bigger war.
Like Blair, the president has few options left and precious little time. Congress is in revolt open against the new troop deployments and threatening to cut off his access to federal funds. Popular support for the war has collapsed to barely 30%, according to US opinion polls. The military are making no secret of their fears that lives are being squandered in Baghdad.
The president has barely two years left in office, Blair much less. If they are to escape the wrath of history they are going to have to do something dramatic. Turn this squalid sectarian impasse in Iraq into a historic cause similar to that which followed 9/11, and which propelled America into the Iraq disaster.
This, I believe, is the New Year message Bush was sending by the assault on suspected al-Qaeda bases in Somalia following the execution of Saddam Hussein. It also explains the sabre-rattling by intelligence chief John Negroponte last week against Pakistan for supposedly giving Osama bin Laden a safe haven from which to reorganise and renew his global terrorist front. (The obvious answer to which is: if the US was so sure about the location of bin Laden, why did it abandon Afghanistan to launch an irrelevant war in Iraq?) The need to broaden the war also explains the threats against Iran. In his speech last week, Bush said: "We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq." This sounds pretty much like a declaration of "pre-emptive" war. Following last week's reports of an imminent Israeli nuclear strike on Iran's nuclear reprocessing plants, I think we would do well to brace ourselves for a regional war.
It would not be the first time that a leader desperate to restore his authority has resorted to military escalation. The quagmire in Iraq is destroying American military prestige, swallowing soldiers and costing many billions of dollars a year. There is no way out, short of admitting defeat or sending three or four hundred thousand troops there to mount a full-scale military occupation.
That's the kind of troop deployment Britain required in Iraq in the 1920s, and what the US military has been telling Bush for the past three years he needs today. Even his hawkish Republican ally, Senator John McCain, admits that the extra 20,000 is a drop in the bucket.
But, politically, there is no way in which Bush could get away with tripling the Iraq occupation force right now, unless there was a much greater perceived threat to American security. Only a major terrorist outrage or a broader war could mobilise sceptical American opinion behind Bush's military adventurism.
If Bush can provoke Iran into some form of belligerence, and can ramp up the terrorist threat from Somalia to Pakistan, then, perhaps, he can call for further sacrifice from America in the name of combating international terror.
Escalation is of course directly contrary to the policy advice given by the Iraq Study Group before Christmas. The Baker-Hamilton committee urged diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria and orderly troop withdrawal. But Blair and Bush have other ideas.
Obsessed with their own unpopularity, the two leaders have cast themselves as victims of a fickle public who don't realise the danger they are in and irresponsible opposition politicians willing to exploit public apathy. These are people who fail to understand that we face "the greatest military threat since revolutionary communism", as Blair put it.
Bush and Blair see themselves as standing alone against this sinister new challenge. Mystified at the failure of this threat to actually materialise, despite all their forecasts of a wave of al Qaeda plane and suitcase bombs, they are determined to prove themselves right before they are dumped into the dustbin of history.
They are the most dangerous men in the world: desperate politicians running out of time and willing now to do almost anything.