On April 10th, 2003, the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad offered viewers worldwide the perfect televisual image of the crushing victory of the Anglo-American invasion force in Iraq.
The campaign on the ground had been swift, coalition casualties light, the "elite" Republican Guard had melted away, and, though Saddam had not been captured, the rejoicing of what appeared to be the ordinary citizens of Baghdad as the symbol of his power and domination was pulled down seemed to augur well.
A year later, with much less optimism around, Roy Greenslade in the Guardian performed a useful service in reminding us of the pro-war pundits' somewhat premature declarations of victory way back then. For the Sun, "the spontaneous outpouring of joy" across Iraq was a "message to the world that America and Britain are liberating allies, not oppressing invaders". The victory of Blair and Bush was all the more remarkable, it added, given that they had been "virtually alone on the world stage, and blocked at all sides by the treachery of the French, Russians and Germans".
"Hopes are high that \ will soon become the most democratic state in the Arab world," wrote Michael Gove in the Times, while Richard and Judy assured Daily Express readers that "weapons of mass destruction, or their components, will surely soon surface". The inevitable "doom-mongers", wrote the Sunday Telegraph, were pointing to the low-level looting in Baghdad as a sign of trouble ahead. "But if that is the worst they can find to complain about, then there is much cause for optimism." In April 2004 there is certainly more "to complain about" and considerably less optimism. "The big question now," wrote Patrick Sabatier in Libération, "is how the US is going to extract itself from the Iraqi bog".
Iraq is not yet George W. Bush's Vietnam," he continued. "But it is certainly the chronicle of what is already a disaster foretold." For Madrid's El Mundo it was "evident that the war is not over and that our troops are now directly involved in a conflict which is becoming more violent every day".
For former British foreign secretary Robin Cook, writing in the London Independent, President Bush's rhetoric in response to the latest violence was based above all on denial. It is difficult to believe, he concluded, that the coalition forces will find a solution until they first admit they have a problem.
Manuel Carvalho, writing in Público of Lisbon, thought the coalition's problems were primarily due to its failure to understand history or respect its lessons. The US concept of "nation-building", he argued, was nothing other than "an extremist ideology, a dangerous combination of Messianism and voluntarism which is completely devoid of any sense of history". "In seeking to make Iraq a testing ground for this belief, Bush and his falange of radicals are demonstrating their complete failure to understand an elementary truth: you never make friends by the use of force." The "theologians" of Washington could do worse, Carvalho thought, than to read T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, where they would learn of the effect British invasion of Iraq in 1916 had on encouraging the emergence of Arab nationalism.
In the Daily Telegraph British historian Niall Ferguson wrote of a meeting he had had in Washington where an official charged with reconstruction in Iraq told him she was looking principally to central Europe's post-communist economies as a model for the Iraqi process.
"Not for the first time," wrote Ferguson, "I was confronted with the disturbing reality about the way the Americans make policy. Theory looms surprisingly large. Neoconservative theory, for instance, stated that the Americans would be welcomed as liberators, just as economic theory put privatisation on my interlocutor's agenda. The lessons of history come a poor second, and only recent history preferably recent American history gets considered." In 1917, Ferguson reminded us, a British general proclaimed in Baghdad: "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." Within a few months there was an anti-British revolt, which by 1920 had become a full-scale rebellion. The agitation began in the mosques and soon, contrary to British expectations, united Sunnis, Shias and even Kurds. After horror stories of mutilated British bodies and thousands of casualties, the rebellion was eventually put down by a campaign of aerial bombardment of tribesmen and punitive village-burning, followed by the installation of a puppet monarchy.
It seems that at the moment, Ferguson concluded, "US policy in Iraq is in the hands of a generation who have learnt nothing from history except how to repeat other people's mistakes".