It’s too early to decide with hindsight just how just this war on Iraq will have been, but events are certainly tilting in favour I’m in London for the long weekend for my sister’s wedding, so you will be getting English spellings for the duration of my stay.of the war party. The welcome given to US troops in Baghdad was undeniably moving, though not as pervasive as Fox News will have us believe.

Even CNN glossed over some points that were more accurately reported by non-US media. Unbridled gratitude towards the US was by no means the only emotion. Writing in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter, their correspondent noted that spontaneous discussions broke out among strangers on the streets, who, free for the first time to speak openly in over 20 years, berated the moronic marine who had to go drape an American flag upside down over the statue’s head. An upside down flag is an international distress signal, I was told by the helpful retired general on CNN; which leads me to wonder how the Japanese show distress. Perhaps they never do.She also pointed out that almost all of the celebrants were Shi’ite Muslims, persecuted by Saddam, whereas the more pokerfaced bystanders were Sunni.

Al Jazeera coverage was deflated; they could not bring themselves to show the scenes of celebration at the demise of a Saddam statue for the hour I watched them last night, noting (correctly) that there were relatively few people out on the streets, the bulk of Baghdad remaining at home. But the jubilation was infectious. When their correspondent was asked the leading question as to why the Americans needed to gloat by tearing down a statue of Saddam, he corrected the anchor, saying that it was the Iraqis who wanted the statue toppled, but that they couldn’t manage it by themselves, that they enlisted the help of the Americans; he even suggested that this was somehow symbolic of the entire conflict. On Al Jazeera!

This positive reception in Baghdad will take the sting out of the argument that the coalition is leading a war of aggression against Arabs. But it is important to remember that, much like the killing of Iraqi civilians in coalition bombings was collateral damage, giving Iraqis an open society is a collateral benefit of a war justified by the US on an unrelated legal case.

Giving Iraqis the gift of democracy is not worth $100 billion and 150 coalition lives. That level of sacrifice on the part of the US, UK and Australia could be expended to much greater effect elsewhere, if the aim were to improve the quality of the greatest number of lives. Instead, The US made the case before the Security Council that it knew Iraq to be in possession of prohibited chemical and biological weapons, putting it in material breach of its ceasefire obligations. This accusation needs to be proven true for the war to have any legal standing whatsoever; Colin Powell also insinuated before the Security Council that there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, mainly to bolster the claim that such a breach also constitutes an imminent threat. if no such proof is forthcoming, the war will still end up a fiasco.

I think it’s fair to suggest that Blair and Bush know this. They are waging a pre-emptive war on the understanding that its justification will be furnished retroactively. In the coming weeks, the pressure will grow on them to deliver on this essential promise. I can easily see Rumsfeld and Bush brushing off such concerns, however. Look at the happy Iraqis, they will, say, that is reward enough, and the proscribed weapons, should they not be found, could have been smuggled to Syria, or Iran. Indeed, such notions are already being floated by the more enterprising commentators on Fox News.

For hardcore Neo-cons, like our erstwhile dean Wolfowitz, Iraq is only the beginning. Combining Iraq’s intransigence vis-á-vis the U.N. with a lowered tolerance for outlaw regimes after 9/11 into a viable casus belli required the squaring of some legal circles, and the evident strain resulted in the balking at such an endeavour by many traditional allies. But making the case for invading Iraq may prove to have been relatively easy. Doing the same thing to Syria or Iran would result in much stronger resistance. For me, the worst case scenario would be that this easy victory over Saddam emboldens the Neo-cons to go remake some more Arab countries, ones that do not have tentative cease-fire agreements with the U.N. Best case scenario: Blair gets his way with Bush and they decide to remake Palestine. It should have been at the top of the list in the first place.

It’s April, so I must be reading another Bernard Lewis Book. The first Lewis Book I read—The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 years—had proven essential background reading on my first trip to Israel and Jordan in 2000; it was anything but brief, but Bernard Lewis was one for wry understatement, I reckoned. Then came What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, What Went Wrong? still smells of an especially mellifluous SPF 50+ cream.which I read in Jamaica last year. This year, he has just come out with The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; I picked it up instinctively at Hedengrens Hedengrens is one of the best bookstores I know; how many New York bookstores carry the entire range of the Penguin Classics?
 
Unlike the Republican Guard, winter is making a surprising last stand, with snow and freezing temperatures after a week of near-room temperatures.and have just read it this past weekend in a cabin on the Stockholm Archipelago.

These three books form something of a progression, and as such they deserve some comment. Each successive book is a Cliffs Notes of the preceding, it turns out. Each is about the same physical size, but the font size keeps on growing, and so they get less substantive. His latest book is positively slight, and I finished it in a matter of hours. The footnotes are shorter than those of many a SAIS paper that I wrote (and that is saying something), but I’ve come to suspect that this book is aimed at people who don’t look up footnotes in the first place.

I’m sure he’d hate it if I suggested that at the age of 86, he’s not up to something really fresh. Perhaps he’d hate it even more if I mused that he’s just doing it for the money. More kindly, he probably just relented after incessant hounding from his publishers to write something explicitly in response to September 11. The problem is, Bernard Lewis is the world’s pre-eminent authority on Middle Eastern Studies; he is so good that he already wrote the definitive book on the root causes of 9/11 before 9/11 happened: What Went Wrong was in page proof on September 11, 2001. What’s more, Lewis turned out to be right about a great many things that he predicted way back in 1990 in a seminal series of articles in The Atlantic Monthly.

In an afterword to Crisis, Lewis writes:

The nucleus of this book was an article published in The New Yorker in November 2001. In bringing it up to date and developing it from a long article to a short book, I have adapted a few passages from previous publications, especially some articles published in Foreign Affairs and The Atlantic Monthly. The rest is new.

The internet is a blessed thing: you can read both The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly articles for free—only the Foreign Affairs articles you’d have to pay for, if you didn’t already photocopy them in your local library. So how much is new?

Skimming the online offerings, I immediately recognized great chunks of what I had just read. Just one example: on page 53 of Crisis:

In 1593 an Ottoman official who also served as a chronicler of current events, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English Ambassador. He does not appear to have been much interested in the ambassador, but he was struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled: “A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul,” he wrote. “It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”

The 1997 Foreign Affairs article:

In 1593 an Ottoman historian, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English ambassador. He was not very interested in the ambassador, but he was much struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled. “A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul,” he wrote. “It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns besides other weapons . . . It was a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”

There is a lot more like this. Virtually every chapter starts verbatim from a previously published article. And where it does not, he distills notions that were covered amply in his more expansive books. Crisis is basically a cut-and-paste job.

This much is new, however: A rundown of quality-of-life numbers extracted from World Bank documents that seem straight out of a research assistant’s to-do list. The eagerness to prove the point (that Muslim countries are poor) builds up to a bizzare comparison:

The comparative figures on the performance of Muslim countries, as reflected in these statistics, are devastating. In the listing of economies by gross domestic product, the highest ranking Muslim majority country is Turkey, with 64 million inhabitants, in twenty-third place, between Austria and and Denmark, with about 5 million each. [. . .] In a listing of industrial output, the highest ranking Muslim country is Saudi Arabia, number twenty-one, followed by Indonesia, tied with Austria and Belgium in twenty-second place, and Turkey, tied with Norway in twenty-seventh place. [. . .] In a listing by life expectancy, the first Arab state is Kuwait, in thirty-second place, following Denmark and followed by Cuba.

Leave aside for a moment that Austria has a population of over 8 million. 8,169,929 in July, 2002, according to the CIA’s World Factbook “estimate”.How exactly is a life expectancy similar to that of Denmark “devastating”? Surely not because Denmark is a small country? Placing 32nd out of over 180 countries One assumes 180 countries. Data is sourced only to “indicators from the United Nations, the World Bank, and other authorities.”still means sitting well into the the top 20th percentile of the world.

Muslim countries may be badly off, but we know at least this much from reading Lewis’s latest: Kuwaiti life expectancy is doing just fine.

So avoid Crisis. Read What Went Wrong? instead—it’s a true scholarly work that focuses on the problem at hand without insulting your intelligence.

I can’t let this subject go, however, without first lamenting the truly horrid subtitles being brandished by books these days. How does Holy War and Unholy Terror exactly elucidate anything, beside apprising us of some editor’s unholy capacity for alliteration? Tellingly, the original subtitle for What Went Wrong? did not survive the transition from hardcover to paperback: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response became The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. Peddling clashes, are we? How about What Went Wrong? The Clash between Clarity and Sales in Publishing.

Predictably, both pro- and anti-war opinion mongers have found much in the war to date to bolster their respective moral high grounds. But that which is predictable is also boring. More interesting is to wonder what it would take to engender a change of heart on either side. Any conviction worth having should be falsifiable. Popper’s theory of epistemology turned conventional wisdom on its head in its contribution to the scientific method: Theories are only useful to the extent they are falsifiable, i.e. can be disproved through empirical tests.Beliefs that can never be tested against empirical evidence are merely dogmatic.

So I have constructed a set of tests that I offer up for consideration by both sides of the debate. For example, if you are for the war, you should agree now to admit it was a mistake if most of the following scenarios take place:

Conversely, if you are against the war, you should agree now to admit you were mistaken if most of the following scenarios take place:

Feel free to suggest your own criteria. It is of course possible for scenarios from both sides to play out, but the litmus test, I think, will be the reception of US and UK troops as they enter Baghdad.

As far as military objectives are concerned, I think the war is going well for the US, even after today. Anybody who assumed the US and UK would suffer at most the odd flesh wound is placing unrealistic expectations on the coalition. Television coverage is riveting, and worth a post all to its own. Here in Sweden, CNN is on all the time, but another channel achieves balanced coverage by alternating between hours of Fox News and Al Jazeera. Both are blatantly partial, and bizarrely compelling.

But Iraq has the potential of turning into another Vietnam, with a nightmare scenario wherein the civilians are liberated against their will, and good intentions pave a path to hell. Gulf War One is widely considered to have been the war where the US decisively overcame its Vietnam War syndrome. But one hopes that the US military did not forget the lessons of Vietnam. Afghanistan is not a good comparison for the challenges facing the US and UK in Iraq: There are much larger population centers in Iraq, there is a trained, patriotic army defending them, and they have the morale boost of defending their homeland against foreign invaders. The coalition operates with the handicap of an unwillingness to inflict civilian casualties, yet with a likelihood of such casualties occurring and with the success of their mission depending to a large extent on their reception by this civilian population.

Confidence based on expectations of inviolability is the most brittle kind. And the morale of soldiers who are not absolutely convinced they must fight to save their families is the most vulnerable. For coalition troops, the coming days will test both their confidence and their morale.