-Irak: Histoire d'un désastre (Iraq: History of a Disaster), Ignacio Ramonet, Paris: Galilée, 2005. pp199; -Le Moyen-Orient à l'épreuve de l'Irak (The Middle East and the Challenge of Iraq), Nawaf Salem, ed., Paris: Actes sud, 2005. pp172 Ignacio Ramonet is editor of the French newspaper Le Monde diplomatique, and his essay , Irak: Histoire d'un désastre, a reconstruction of events leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, presents a negative analysis of US policy that will be familiar to readers of this influential political monthly. Ramonet argues that with the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq the United States, whose foreign policy he says is controlled by a cabal of big business and military interests surrounding President G.W. Bush, has embarked on a course "simply to impose the hegemony of the US on the world," in particular by marginalising or ignoring the United Nations and asserting the right of the US to act without reference to multilateral procedure or international law. Described by its publishers as a "passionate examination of the ambitions of American neo-imperialism," the book will be widely read as an expression of European opinion and as an indication that the US has a long way to go in winning the battle for hearts and minds in that region, despite recent charm offensives. Ramonet begins by reviewing the "march to war" on Iraq in 2002 and 2003, setting statements made by US and British officials at the time against subsequent developments, notably the failure to discover the weapons of mass destruction allegedly held or being developed by the Saddam regime, which served as the main justification for the war. He reminds readers of the so-called "dodgy dossiers" produced by the British government in its efforts to justify war and to undermine what turned out to be the successful UN inspection efforts, and he resurrects allegations made at the time, which presumably their authors would now prefer to forget, that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be ready "45 minutes after the order for their use is given" (Blair) and that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium and aluminium tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production" from Niger (Bush and others), a claim known to be false at the time at which it was made. Ramonet points out that though the former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made great play in his presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003 of an alleged Iraqi programme to produce anthrax and nerve gas, concealing this from UN inspection through the use of "mobile laboratories", the same Colin Powell had earlier told reporters in February 2001 that far from being able to develop weapons of mass destruction, Iraq was not then in a position to use even conventional weapons against its neighbours, so successful had the UN-imposed sanctions on the country been. According to Ramonet, quoting from a report filed at the time for the International Herald Tribune, Powell had been far from happy with the script prepared for his 2003 presentation, exclaiming "I'm not going to read that sh*t," before being encouraged to do so by the then CIA director George Tenet. Ramonet's view is that the US decision to invade Iraq was taken in November 2001 and was a result of a desire to capitalise on the authorisation to engage in a "war on terror" handed to the US administration by Congress, with only one dissenting vote in the House, in the wake of the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Quoting reports from US commentators such as Bob Woodward in his Plan of Attack (2004), Ramonet argues that the 2001 attacks were "a gift" for those within the administration wanting to launch an attack on Saddam's Iraq, their aim being to blur the distinction between Ossama Bin Laden's Al-Qaida, responsible for the attacks, and the then Iraqi regime, suggesting that it was Iraq that was really behind the attacks or was at least in some way associated with them. However, as the US and other experts quoted here by Ramonet confirm, there was never any reason to suppose that the Saddam regime was linked to al-Qaida. Ramonet quotes, for example, from Lewis Lapham, editor of the US magazine Harpers, on the "parody of the debate" in Congress in October 2002 authorising the administration to use military force against Iraq. "The joint resolution giving the president the power to order the invasion of Iraq whenever he wished and for any reason that to him seemed fit was voted in haste by a docile majority in the Senate (77 votes to 23) and in the House (296 to 133)," he writes. "Few congressmen asked themselves why the United States should attack Iraq if Iraq had not attacked the United States." Ramonet devotes a section of the book to what he calls the "manipulation and propaganda" put out by the US administration both before and after the invasion of Iraq, of which the association made between al-Qaida and the Saddam regime is one example. He notes that the New York Times, in the United States considered a liberal newspaper and one by no means naturally sympathetic to the Bush administration, in May 2004 published an editorial recognising its "lack of rigour" in publishing material in the run up to war insufficiently critical of administration policy and depending on a narrow circle of Iraqi exiles, some of whom were funded by the CIA. The Washington Post made a similar gesture of mea culpa in August 2004 in an article noting that the paper's editorial line had "coincided with support for the war" and had not presented an independent viewpoint. For Ramonet, such after-the-fact protestations merely confirm what to him is self-evident: the subservience of the mainstream US media and the lack of critical or independent voices having access to it. Ramonet's conclusion is that the US now wishes to play a selfish role in the world, at odds with its own best traditions. "While the working classes continue to fall into poverty in the United States," Ramonet writes, "the new imperialism promoted by Bush and his entourage (Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld) is demonstrated by a will to dominate politically and militarily, going with a desire for economic supremacy, above all in the areas of oil and of the heavy industries traditionally linked to the military-industrial complex [in the United States]." "However, it aims above all simply at the exercise of power for power's sake. What is imperial hegemony? This is how Wolfowitz defines it: 'to show that our friends will be protected and that we will take care of them, and that our enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support us will regret it.'" Much of Irak: Histoire d'un désastre is devoted to the state of transatlantic relations, as seen from Paris, and this is a theme taken up by Eric Rouleau, former Middle East editor of Le Monde and an occasional contributor to this newspaper, in his contribution to Le Moyen-Orient à l'épreuve de l'Irak, a collection of essays on the Middle East in the wake of the Iraq crisis. Rouleau reminds us that in the early months of 2003, as US troops prepared for war against Iraq, there were no fewer than "2,978 demonstrations against the war involving 35.5 million people in 95 countries," many of them European. In addition, though European hostility to the US-led war was dismissed at the time by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an expression of "Old Europe", public opinion in the ex-Communist Central and Eastern European countries was also against the war, and the "three European states most in favour of war, the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy, saw the highest numbers of demonstrators: 1.8 million in Britain, 7.4 million in Spain and 6.2 million in Italy." For Rouleau, European opposition to the US-led war on Iraq is only one feature of a more general tension between the US and Europe. Though US actions in Iraq opened up a transatlantic gulf that "has never been wider", there were already signs of disagreement over US economic and foreign policy, including, but not restricted to, policy on the Middle East, even before the events of 2002-2003. Thus, "as far as the economy is concerned, the protectionist measures taken by the US administration, despite its sacrosanct philosophy of free markets, had led to a number of appeals to the World Trade Organisation, which mostly found in favour of the Europeans," he writes. On foreign policy, Rouleau notes that France and Germany had protested against "simplistic" US notions, such as those of a "war on terror" or an "axis of evil," before the invasion of Iraq, with the then British European Commissioner for External Affairs, Chris Patten, expressing discomfort at a world order in which the "United States prepared the meal and the Europeans did the washing up." However, if US actions in Iraq have thrown transatlantic relations into disarray, they have done much the same for Arab affairs and for relations between the Arab countries and the United States, according to the book's other contributors. Among these, Henry Laurens, professor at the Collège de France in Paris, examines the history of relations between the Arab Middle East and the United States, setting current US policy in historical perspective, while Nawaf Salam, a Lebanese academic and the book's editor, looks at the weaknesses the Iraq crisis has revealed in the Arab League, arguing that this organisation needs root-and-branch reform. Camille Mansour, professor at the University of Paris, recounts episodes in the relationship between Iraq and Palestine, arguing that successive Iraqi regimes wished to manipulate Palestinian politics for their own advantage, and Burhan Ghalioun, also of the University of Paris, looks at US plans for a "greater Middle East," aiming, according to some formulations, at remodeling the region in the light of democratic changes underway in Iraq. "Emerging from a half century of struggles for freedom, equality and prosperity, Arab societies today find themselves destabilised, poverty stricken, demoralised and drifting without direction" Ghalioun writes. Remedying this situation will require the re-establishment of dialogue between the region's people and its elites, in order to achieve consensus on the best path forward. Europe and the United States have a part to play in the re-establishment of this severed dialogue, but this will require the "substitution of a logic of partnership for that of containment and marginalisation." It is to be hoped that such a logic can be found.
