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BRET STEPHENS:
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A War in three takes

The battle for Baghdad — remember that? It was supposed to have been the full brass fanfare in the war on terror. Now it seems more like a horn signal. It lasted 22 days and took some 170 British and American lives and 2,000 Iraqi ones. As in Afghanistan, it ended in the vanishing — but apparently not the killing — of the chief foe. For Americans, its aftermath has been bloodier and more expensive than the war itself. The reasons for which it was fought have never been more in doubt. The war’s ostensible winners may yet prove to be its casualties.

It’s still too early for anything definitive to be written about it. Instead, there are insta-books - fun-to-read eyewitness accounts that are the foundation stones for more serious historians — and three stand out.

The best of these is 30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War, by former Times editor Peter Stothard. From Monday, March 10, through Wednesday, April 9, Stothard spent his waking hours in the company of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior-most entourage, and was present at summits with George W. Bush in the Azores, Camp David, and Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland.

These were make-or-break days for Blair. He did not lead his country to war with 70 percent popular support, as Bush did. Nor did he have the backing of his rank-and-file, as Bush did. Blair staked his premiership on conviction: that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of rogue states were unacceptable; that a strong partnership with the US - whatever the administration — was Britain’s most basic interest; that getting rid of dictators like Saddam Hussein on the basis of their awfulness alone was decent foreign policy.

"What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay,‘ the prime minister muses on the eve of war. ’They ask me why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let’s get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can, you should."

Through the crisis, hordes of protesters gather in Parliament Square, chanting "Not in Our Name.‘ Mister Cool Britannia transmogrifies into ’Bush’s Poodle." Cabinet ministers resign. At 10 Downing, there is an air of siege.

"I don’t know how he does it,‘ says one Labour supporter after a Blair speech. ’If I were him, I’d be on Lomotol by now."

"Lomotol?‘ Stothard inquires. ’Is that some new chemical cosh for the classroom?"

"No, it’s the stuff you take for diarrhoea. I’d be shitting myself right now if I were him.‘ Why isn’t he? There is, Stothard observes, the anchor of family life, of three-year-old Leo. There is ’the powerful Christian seriousness of the not-quite-yet convert.‘ And Blair seeks his place in history. Bill Clinton’s ’failed and cautious second term [is] a permanent reminder of what he does not want for himself."

After six years in power, Blair no longer seems hungry for the approval of other diners at Granita. The praise of an Iraqi dissident, who calls him "one of the most courageous prime ministers Britain has ever had," is enough.

Not that it’s seen that way in much of Britain. Blair frets that he isn’t getting his message across; his media machine at Number 10 thinks it’s being jammed by what they’ve come to call the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation. "What we need when this is over,‘ says Labour Party Chairman John Reid, ’is a reckoning with the media about whether a democracy will ever again be able to fight a fascist dictatorship."

IN FACT, down the road in the flap over the so-called dodgy dossier. But that bit of flawed BBC reporting was just the tip of the iceberg. For a fuller picture of the Beeb’s malfeasance, we turn to The Battle For Iraq, a collection of essays by BBC correspondents.

Nobody should be in doubt that the BBC remains capable of superb journalism; the book’s six "front-line stories‘ testify equally to the courage and reporting skills of some of their correspondents. Most of the book, however, is given over to analysis: ’The Road to War‘; ’Bush Rises to the Challenge‘; ’An Inevitable Victory"; and so on.

These essays vary in length and quality, but what immediately disturbs the reader are their frequent errors of fact. Turn to page 71.

President Bush, writes Washington correspondent Matt Frei, "spends as many weekends as possible on his 16-acre ranch in Crawford…" Actually, the ranch is 1,600 acres.

Next paragraph: "Bush Senior combined old money and status… with an education at Princeton…" Actually, it was Yale.

Three paragraphs after that: "In 1973… Bush Senior was a congressman." Actually, in 1973 he was leaving his post as US ambassador to the UN to become chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Each of these errors seems trivial, but then again so were the several errors in Andrew Gilligan’s now-famous report about the dodgy dossier. Gilligan, in fact, was the BBC reporter who notoriously denied US troops had taken the Baghdad airport even as the rest of the news media was reporting otherwise; wisely, his contributions are excluded here.

But Gilligan was not the only BBC reporter to get things wrong in Iraq. "Who dreamed up this line that the coalition are achieving ’small victories at a very high price’?‘ asked defense correspondent Paul Adams in a memo to his bosses leaked in late March. ’The truth is exactly the opposite. The gains are huge and the costs still relatively low."

Adams has an essay in this collection, and it is one of the finest. By contrast, there is Rageh Omaar, the BBC’s main man in Baghdad. Omaar delivers a somewhat insipid account of his seven years of on-and-off reporting from that city. What he does not mention, however, is his close relationship with the head of Iraq’s Ministry of Information, and how that relationship shaped his reporting. For instance:"After promising and promising to have dinner with you for such a long time — we finally did it.

Alhamdullilah!!! For me, it was the main achievement of my visit."And:"It’s been such a long time since we last saw each other, and I would really like to see you again. As you once said to me: Once you have tasted the waters of the Tigris, you can never forget Baghdad!!!"

What a picture of courage, that Rageh Omaar. And what a picture of corporate integrity, that BBC.

FOR REAL courage and integrity, we turn to the last of our insta-books, Baghdad Blog by the pseudonymous, anonymous, Salam Pax.

A "blog‘ is a running commentary on events posted on the Internet, and a ’blogger" is its author. Matt Drudge is the father of the genre, but by now there are thousands of imitators. What distinguishes Salam Pax is that he is a young Iraqi who kept his blog going from Baghdad from September 2002 until June of this year. The writing — in English — is amazingly fluent, nuanced, modern, and colloquial, which gives rise to the suspicion that he is either a fake or the child of a high Ba’athist party official.

But from the evidence of his own writing the first allegation is plainly false. The level of detail is too great. As for the second, it seems at best irrelevant, as Salam is absolutely merciless in his descriptions of the regime.

On December 25, Salam posts a note describing Uday Hussein as a "sick monster."

"He had already driven himself into a dead end before his father did. Families walk out quietly when he enters a restaurant, because he is known to send one of his boys to bring him the women sitting at the closest tables to ’join’ him. People hate him as much as they fear his father.‘ On January 6, he rates a speech by Saddam Hussein: ’The president was never a great orator. If you’re looking for great, then you have to listen to Mubarak. But this time Saddam didn’t even shout at us the scary bits. Just the ’Da-da-da’ school of oration."

And on February 21, he makes delicious fun of the"human shields":"One of the latest groups to arrive in Baghdad, mostly Europeans, was welcomed at the al-Rasheed Hotel, which is like the Waldorf Astoria of Baghdad… All of them were wearing T-shirts with what was supposed to be be Human Shields in Arabic, but they had it all wrong. It said Adra’a Basharia, instead of Duru’u Basharia, which got them a few giggles…"

When the war comes, the account becomes riveting. Salam is watching satellite news broadcasts like everyone in the West, except the US bombers he sees taking off from their bases are coming his way. "The most disturbing news today has come from al-Jazeera,‘ runs his post of 21 March. ’They said that nine B52 bombers have left the airfield in Britain and are flying ’presumably’ towards Iraq. As if they would be doing a spin around the block! Anyway, they have six hours to get here." Unlike Omaar and the other foreign correspondents, the Coalition does not know where Salam’s house is. The danger to him and his family is real. Yet through it all, Salam writes with a sangfroid that makes his courage all the more impressive. He remains, throughout, liberal and urbane; he wants his readers to know not just about Saddam and the war but also about his taste in movies and in pop music, his ideas about religion.

Above all, there is his desire for a modern life in a normal country. Will it happen? About a month after the war’s end, Salam tells the story of a conversation with a taxi driver, who bewails the looting and chaos and the lack of basic services — so unlike the good old days of Saddam.

"This is usually my cue for going into rage-mode," Salam writes.

"We Iraqis seem to have very short memories… I ask them how long it took for us to get the electricity back again after the last war? Two years… Hussein Kamel used to literally beat and whip people to do the impossible task of rebuilding.

"Then the question that would shut them up: ’So, dear Mr. Taxi Driver, would you like to have your Saddam back? Aren’t we just really glad that we can now at least have hope for a new Iraq? Or are we Iraqis just a bunch of impatient fools who do nothing better than grumble and whine?"

That is the question. It’s worrying that it has to be asked. But it is a sign of hope that, in Salam Pax, we have found an Iraqi who thinks to ask it. Every word he writes serves as a fitting rebuke to those who took to the streets and airwaves convinced that bringing democracy to Iraq was a hopeless enterprise. A man like Blair could ask for no better evidence that this was a war worth fighting.