I had faith in America’s plan for Iraq. I was wrong

Before the bombers went in, there were many obvious and powerful arguments against invading Iraq. There were many people who expressed those arguments forcefully, in good faith and in bad.

But there were many people who, like me, supported the invasion nonetheless because we had faith that the Americans knew what they were doing and believed it was in our best interests and right for Britain to support them.

It seems I was wrong.

It would be hard to imagine anything more absurdly trivial, in the light of the misery in Iraq, than the recantation of one journalist in a London suburb or even the recantation of a handful of us, now there is beginning to be a fashion for it.

However, I believe that the disillusion I feel is spreading fast among Britons who are admirers and supporters of the United States and that, in so far as British attitudes matter much to the Americans or to international affairs, real harm has been done.

I never imagined that the real reasons for the Iraq invasion were idealistic. The messianic rhetoric of George W Bush and Tony Blair about a conflict between good and evil — and their neo-colonialist mission to be a light unto the nations, beginning by conferring democracy and western values on Iraq — always struck me as absurd.

Blair has a terrible tendency to take off on the wings of this sort of poesy. Sometimes I thought they were both deluded enough to believe it; at other times I assumed it was just demagoguery, manipulating the masses.

Nor did I imagine, whatever they said, that their primary purpose was to deliver a suffering people from its oppressor. They could have done that elsewhere in the world, for example in Zimbabwe.

Of course, the Iraqis’ liberation from the cruelty of Saddam Hussein sounded like a welcome byproduct of war, not to mention a useful justification for it. But the real purpose of regime change, I imagined, was enlightened self-interest, as Bill Clinton had also believed.

From a western point of view, especially after the September 11 mass murders, the Middle East needed sorting out somehow.

It is an unstable, enraged part of the world that produces terrorists, rogue regimes and oil, along with a threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and nuclear proliferation.

It may not be high-minded, but there is nothing necessarily wrong with self-interest. Those liberals who professed to be shocked that the proposed invasion was “really” about oil had clearly not given much thought to what western democracy, and western hospitals and factories, would be like without secure oil supplies. As for the warnings of the fury of the Arab “street” if infidels were to invade the holy lands of Iraq, there was hope that it might be calmed if the country became safer and richer for Iraqis in the process.

It wasn’t at all obvious to me before the invasion that Iraq was the place to start dealing with these threats but Saddam was clearly aggressive and dangerous, and I assumed — to the incredulity of my anti-war friends and now to my own — that the US government had a cunning strategic plan.

Not being privy to state secrets, I hardly expected to know what it was. It did seem rather a mystery, the more I thought about it. But, in the end, you have to trust your government (however deceitful and manipulative, like Blair’s) and its chief ally to know what to do and how to do it, without being forced to reveal secrets.

To my amazement, it has become clearer and clearer that any such trust was misplaced and that the Americans really did not have a cunning plan, or much of a coherent plan at all, any more than Saddam had WMD.

Such plans as they did have, following a swift early victory, have been executed with what one commentator has called unfathomable incompetence.

Perhaps it is too early to despair. Perhaps in time the threat of “Balkanisation” and civil war in Iraq may recede.

Perhaps it is irresponsible to add, however minutely, to the demoralisation of coalition forces while there is still some slight hope of an acceptable outcome.

The occupation of Iraq appears, certainly, to have collapsed into chaos and shame but that appearance may have a lot to do with the professional deformity of many reporters — exaggeration and media machismo, complicated often by political bias and a convoluted desire to believe the worst of any situation, and particularly of the West.

All the same, it is impossible to discount the terrible news of recent days. The siege of Falluja has proved a disastrous humiliation.

For all their might, the Americans felt obliged to retreat and then went through a terrible black comedy of handing over security first to one former general of Saddam plus motorcade, only to dump him suddenly and pick another one instead.

Meanwhile, Iraqi support for the coalition appears to be dwindling. According to an opinion poll for the newspaper USA Today (published before last week’s torture photos appeared), 82% of people in Baghdad said they saw the coalition forces as occupiers rather than liberators and more than 60% of Arabs across the country, both Sunni and Shia, said the American and British troops should leave immediately. The handover sounds like a dangerous mess and there is talk of partition.

ITN reports that the Americans have lost control of many key highways, and that reconstruction work has virtually ground to a halt. About half of all foreign workers have left Iraq temporarily or for good.

The world is awash with shock and schadenfreude at the pictures of an American trailer-trash Jezebel humiliating helpless

Arab prisoners; and Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, had to apologise abjectly on Friday for what Senator Edward Kennedy has called “a catastrophic crisis of credibility for our nation”.

The public figure who mentioned My Lai was none other than Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, who was clearly tormented. President Bush is now calling for more troops and another $25 billion.

Where is the plan here? What was the plan? It remains a mystery. The coalition seems to be failing even on the simplest grounds of self-interest, let alone on any idealistic grand project. I trusted the Americans to know what they were doing and how to do it.

Instead, it seems, there has been a long, unresolved struggle going on in the US administration between different planners and different plans, between neo-conservative visionaries, old-fashioned conservatives and various vested interests. There has been a tragic tension between the messianics and the minimalists.

As a result, there has been not just mission creep but mission lurch and mission muddle, followed ignominiously now, in the fog of war, by mission shrink — the temptation to cut and run. That would be very wrong.

I wish we could trust the coalition not to do it, but trust has been one of the many casualties of this war.

Britain’s new apartheid makes strangers of us all

Sometimes something happens which is a perfect incarnation of an idea, an attitude made flesh. This happened in the unlikely person of Clive Wolfendale, deputy chief constable of north Wales, who decided to favour the inaugural meeting of the North Wales Black Police Association with a rap performance.

It is hard to imagine the scene, but a white middle-aged senior officer in uniform regaled a group of policemen from various ethnic groups with some cod hiphop about the difficulties of “bein’ in the dibble” when you’re black: “You’re better chillin, lie down and just be passive / No place for us just yet in the Colwyn Bay Massive”.

The bottom line was that police of all backgrounds must trust each other and work together, to which nobody could possibly object. But the lyrics seem to me lamentable and the idea itself even more so.

It is not merely embarrassing that a senior policeman chose to ape a disaffected young black rapper in front of a mixed group of junior colleagues, whose only common feature was that they were not white. The whole occasion was a perfect illustration of the confusion and cultural loss of nerve in this country. It stands for all the patronage, misguided ingratiation, guilt and double standards that bedevil the way officialdom deals with race relations.

The case of Abu Hamza, the Egyptian-born Muslim cleric, is an even more glaring example of this cultural funk. Known to the tabloids as Captain Hook, Hamza is without question a serious menace to this country.

He has been preaching racial and religious hatred for many months in public (causing regular traffic jams in the process), and the Home Office has for long been convinced that he is closely linked with several international terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda. He gives comfort to our enemies.

At last the home secretary has decided to strip him of his British nationality in order to deport him. However, under British law Hamza is entitled to appeal, no matter how undesirable he may be, and his appeal hearing was due to start last Monday. Yet neither he nor his solicitor turned up in court, nor did he submit any evidence to support his appeal (although he was ordered to do so many months ago).

What is the result of this astonishing contempt of court, and of this country? A postponement of his case until January. Until then he will be free to carry on as before.

For there are the summer holidays to consider, and then the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and then it will be Christmas, and then the Treasury might kick up about legal aid but hasn’t decided yet, so really it will not be convenient to get round to dealing with this fellow for nearly nine months.

In a moment of exquisite understatement the judge commented that Hamza’s delays were “regrettable”, and the Home Office’s QC said with almost equal severity that “if he (Hamza) carries on like this, maybe the time will come when we might be making an application to you to dismiss the appeal”.

How about tomorrow? Why this astonishing lack of nerve? It is incredible that officialdom lacks the resolve to dismiss the case or to settle the legal aid problem in advance or to try the man under existing laws against incitements to violence, or even to call a witness to court during the month of Ramadan. This is a multicultural nonsense which is new to me and a bad precedent.

As a result, for his insolent, triumphant contempt of the appeals court and of the manners and morals of this country, Hamza has not been punished. He has been rewarded with nine further months to do his worst here, unchecked, at vast public expense.

A gaggle of Christian clerics got together last week to denounce the British National party. They did not, however, for all the scary allegations about his terrifying secret “war cry” tapes, denounce Hamza. The BNP at its worst has never articulated, still less preached, anything like as bad or as racially inflammatory material as has Hamza. It does not advocate breaking the law, while Hamza incites atrocities.

Yet it is the BNP, in divided and guilt-ridden Britain, that excites more righteous indignation. One can only wonder what is wrong with the sense of perspective: white bigots evil, but un-white bigots un-evil. There seems to be one standard for white people but another standard for others.

One can only wonder, too, at the skewed perspective of the functionaries in Manchester who have been planning to set up a school in Bangladesh, at British taxpayers’ expense, for British-born Bengali children who miss many weeks of school because their parents take them for long trips to the old country to learn about their heritage and culture.

Out of respect for their lengthy cultural researches during term time, therefore, we the taxpayers must pick up the bill for special schooling in Sylhet.

Not only Manchester council and the local head teachers, but also John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads’ Association, thought this was a good idea. He advised other education authorities to do likewise.

Things are rather different here for white children who bunk off school and for their parents. A white Englishwoman has recently served not one but two prison sentences for failing to make her teenage daughters go to school.

I don’t suppose anyone thought to ask whether the girls were having culturally important experiences down the shopping centre with their mother at the time, or offered them home tuition to fit in with their leisure activities. (I should point out that a huge proportion of truants in this country are caught when shopping with their parents, which is to say with their parents’ consent and in accordance with their “culture”.) In the view of the educational establishment in Manchester, at least, it seems that there is one law for indigenous whites and another for non-whites.

Various people who should have denounced this nonsense have done so, including the Department for Education and Skills. The head of the Commission for Racial Equality has condemned it. But the fact remains that this sensibility exists and is widespread inside and outside officialdom.

Take, for instance, the case reported last week in Tower Hamlets of an old people’s housing block that is to be built for Asians only at public expense. It will be run by Bengali-speaking staff with halal food and Muslim religious facilities. The council says in its defence that it is responding to the needs and wishes of local residents, 30% of whom are Bangladeshi.

Yet if some local residents said they wanted a white-only, or Christian-only, purpose-built old people’s unit at public expense, they would be told that their needs and wishes were “inappropriate” and indeed against the law. In fact there would be a massive public outcry. Yet again there seems to be one rule for whites, another for non-whites.

What all these cases amount to is not merely confusion or bad faith or hellish good intentions; it is nothing less than the new British apartheid.