Leading article: Four years of the most grievous suffering

http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2374344.ece

Leading article: Four years of the most grievous suffering
Published: 20 March 2007

What an unhappy anniversary. It is four years since the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the tyrant Saddam Hussein. And the more time passes, the more this military adventure looks a disaster for everyone concerned. Not least the people of Iraq. The large-scale opinion poll conducted there by the BBC and others may not have been as scientific as conditions of peace would permit, but its verdict is a damning one. Asked if life was good, two years ago 71 per cent said "Yes", but now that figure has almost halved. Fewer than one in 5 has confidence in the coalition forces, and 51 per cent say that attacks on the occupying troops are justified.

Half of those who responded said life is worse now than under Saddam. Even the Iraqi weightlifting champion who, four years ago, was famously filmed pounding a statue of Saddam with a sledgehammer, said: "The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day." It was bound to get worse before it got better, the remaining few apologists for war say. But how long must we persevere with this unchanged policy before we admit that we are not going to turn any corner?

If the Iraqis are those who have suffered most grievously, they are not the only ones. The past four years have been bad for the British Army, whose troops have had to fight a war they know almost no one at home backs. Admiration for their courage and commitment cannot ennoble a cause which is not only futile but wrong. They have been bad years for the British political process, reducing public faith in our secret services and, most particularly, the political elite who, as Hans Blix put it recently, removed the question marks from intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and replaced them with exclamation marks. They have reduced credence in the impartiality of inquiries, with the highly politicised investigations of Lord Hutton and Lord Butler, and damaged the reputation of the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who first insisted that regime change was an insufficient legal basis for war and then mysteriously changed his mind.

They have been bad years for the relationship between Britain and the United States - maintaining which was, ironically, at the heart of the Blair strategy to fly at the wing of a bellicose president who, as one US academic put it, comes across as the quintessential ugly American: arrogant, uncouth, uncultured, ignorant, inconsiderate and aggressive. At his behest, Britain has been complicit in allowing intelligence and facts to be fixed around policy. We have managed to make a martyr out of the loathsome executed tyrant. And yet we have demonstrated no influence in pushing Washington to accept the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker, who was secretary of state under George Bush's father. Instead, the British and American leaders have flown on blithely, never having even the grace to admit, as did the two US pilots who shot the British convoy in which Corporal Matty Hull died and immediately exclaimed: "We're in jail, dude."

Immune as both men are from the discipline imposed by the need to get re-elected, they blunder on, thinking only of the legacy of history. It will offer a harsh verdict. Iraq has made the United States look much weaker in the eyes of the world. Britain has become almost as anti-American as France has been historically; only one-third of Britons now regard Washington as a force for good. The support of the public in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, and, indeed, in the rest of the world, seems daily to diminish rather than increase. Those who thought they had won the war are, with every day that passes, losing the peace.