The audit of war

Following the example of progressive local authorities, this magazine will not, on this page this year, be celebrating Christmas but an alternative festival of light in which Muslims can share too. It is called the elections for a permanent government in Iraq. As we go to press, the polling booths are being prepared to enable the people of Iraq, for the second time in a year and only the second time in their history, freely to elect their own leaders: this time for a four-year term. Like ‘winterval’, the secular, multicultural festival concocted by the City of Birmingham, nobody is quite sure what it all means. Does it mark the beginning of better times, or will civil war be inevitable anyway? Once the new government is installed will it really be safe, as is already being mooted, for British and American troops to begin a long, phased withdrawal from the country? We are no wiser than anyone else. But as the troops prepare eventually to come home, this is as good a time as any to try to draw the audit of the war.

This magazine supported the war, and it did so for a simple reason, which turned out to be simplistic. We thought the world would be a better place for the removal from Baghdad of Saddam Hussein, and we believed that the Pentagon would have the means to achieve that end speedily and without too much fuss. We objected strongly to the way in which the government’s spin machine manipulated military intelligence to exaggerate the threat from weapons of mass destruction, but it would be dishonest to use this as an excuse for saying we were bamboozled into a war which we would not otherwise have supported.