When soldiers die in dubious battle

Published on Saturday 21 August 2004 01:56

IT MAKES heartbreaking reading, Maxine Gentle’s open letter to the Prime Minister about the loss of her soldier brother Gordon, killed in Iraq two months ago.

It was predictable that, as the war in Iraq wore on, the agony of the bereaved families of servicemen and women would become an increasingly significant political force on both sides of the Atlantic.

Michael Moore’s record-breaking movie documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 trades powerfully on it; and here in Britain, too, an unusually large number of bereaved families have broken ranks to protest against the sacrifice of their loved ones in a war which they regard as unnecessary or unjust. It would be wrong, of course, to imply that the families who have expressed these feelings are necessarily in a majority. Indeed, for every bereaved family that makes such a public protest against the war, there are probably several who, with less public attention, take a much more traditional patriotic path, finding that the only way to make sense of their loss is to believe that it was in a good and justifiable cause.

But the difficulty facing George Bush and Tony Blair, 17 months into the Iraq conflict, is that as society becomes less deferential and more individualistic, that traditional reaction becomes rarer and less reliable; and is increasingly replaced by a tendency to ask awkward questions, and to respond with outrage to the sacrifice of young lives in any collective cause.

Some, of course, will read this simply as a sign of moral decline; compared with the valiant generations of the past, they will say, we have become a feeble bunch, unwilling to defend our way of life with our lives if necessary, to take our losses on the chin, and to show the stiff upper lip that is the badge of resolution and maturity.

But the problem, for those who would wish to turn the clock back to the days of old-fashioned martial stoicism, is that every word they use in defence of that tradition is now open to challenge as to its precise meaning. Who, for a start, are the "we" who are supposed to be willing to sacrifice our lives, if - as Maxine Gentle angrily points out - the children of the powerful and privileged are obviously no longer among their number? And whose way of life, exactly, are we defending?

The way of life of Tony Blair and his millionaire mates? Or the way of life of a British Asian kid suffering racial and religious abuse on the streets of Bradford or Edinburgh? For better or worse, none of these terms and points of reference - "we", "the country", "our way of life" - can any longer be taken for granted. And people sending their children to a possible death in Afghanistan or the Gulf therefore need more than old-fashioned platitudes about "doing the right thing" or "serving their country" to convince them that the risk is worthwhile; they need explanations that carry some real meaning in the post-millennial world, and which refer to principles in which thinking 21st century citizens can take some pride.

And this is where the story of Tony Blair’s handling of the Iraq crisis begins to take on a certain tragic quality. For there is no doubt that the Prime Minister believed, and still believes, that there was a state-of-the-art moral and principled case to be made for the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam, as a bloody dictator whose rule could not be allowed to stand. And if he had stuck to that moral case, he would perhaps have been in a better position to ride out all the awkward questions about why this particular murdering dictator must go, while so many flourish unmolested; after all, every attempt to punish crime, and to build a civil and peaceful society, has to start somewhere.

But in the first place, Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq was based not on any structure of international morality and law, but on his personal pledge of unswerving shoulder-to-shoulder support for President Bush in any action he might choose to take. Then secondly, in his desperation to win the support of parliament and of his own party, Tony Blair notoriously descended from the moral high ground to fight his political battle in the marshy flat-lands of spin, disinformation and ill-founded public panic-mongering.

And it’s this series of misjudgments that have brought us to the present sad situation, in which the hopes for an enlightened new world order cherished by millions after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seem to have been comprehensively betrayed, not only by those who were unwilling to lift a finger to create any such new order, but - more destructively - by those like Tony Blair who wanted to do so, but have now come close to discrediting the whole concept.

It’s overwhemingly true, after all, that no peaceful civil society can survive without a willingness to enforce its basic rules. In that sense, political leaders such as Tony Blair have to be prepared, on occasions, to ask young men and women to risk their lives in defence of those rules; and in fact, in the first six years of his premiership, the Prime Minister had done a fair job - in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Sierra Leone - of convincing the British people that the task of seeking to make peace and defend basic human rights in some of the most ravaged corners of the earth was one in which British troops could take pride, and which was worth their self-sacrifice.

But in order to retain the right to ask for that sacrifice under 21st century conditions, leaders themselves must, crucially, be seen to respect the rules which they seek to impose on others; and it’s a sense of outrage at the recent failure of our leaders to do so - at their willingness to suspend human rights, fan the flames of ethnic hatred and flout the principles of international law in pursuit of their own agenda - that is feeding the anger of Maxine Gentle’s generation, and that rings from venue to venue across this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. "You make me sick, greasing changes in the rules to suit yourself!" roars the furious fictional Antigone in Glyn Cannon’s fine new version of the play, Gone, at the Pleasance Theatre. And behind that youthful rage, there is a real note of fear. Because without any credible hope of law and justice and the civil settlement of conflicts, what can possibly lie ahead of us in the future of our troubled and interdependent planet? Nothing but blood and barbarism; and the long-term horror of a world in which only might is right.