The military phase of the war has been neither the disaster I feared, and predicted, for much of the last two weeks, nor the bloodless victory I hoped for in the first few days.

As this NYT report says, the total number of Iraqis killed in the war will probably never be known, but it is clearly in the tens of thousands. The vast majority were guilty of no crime greater than serving in the army, mostly as conscripts, and subject to the threat of death for desertion or failure to fight.

Compared with Australian experience, the death toll appears comparable with that for the whole of World War II, but lower, relative to population, than that for World War I.

Saddam’s was an evil and brutal regime, but the war is not justified simply by his overthrow. The US and its allies are obligated to deliver the promise of a free, democratic and prosperous Iraq, and a just settlement of the Israel-Palestine issue. These will be difficult, expensive, and often thankless tasks. My opposition to the war (leaving aside the spurious debate about weapons of mass destruction) was based mainly on my doubt that the Bush Administration would have the capacity, or the will, to carry through with these obligations once Saddam was gone. My doubts have not been allayed by the conduct of the war

However, I was overly pessimistic about the course of the war, and perhaps Bush (or, more realistically, Blair) will prove me wrong about the peace. I hope so.

It looks as if the military phase of the Iraq war is almost over, and with less bloodshed than appeared likely a week ago. Whatever our views about the war we can all be thankful for this.

Ken Parish has posted on the depressing blog debate over the war, saying

Apparently thoughtful, rational people on both sides interpret exactly the same facts in diametrically opposed ways to fit their preconceived and immovable viewpoints, or choose to believe only those press reports that suit their ingrained prejudices.

Kevin Drum at Calpundit discusses the same issue, linking to Arthur Silber who says

Since the war began two weeks ago, I have noticed the following (it began well before then, but has become much more noticeable recently): almost every strongly prowar blog that I read references many stories which support the rosiest scenarios about how this war will play out, and what will happen in a post-war Iraq (and beyond). Similarly, most antiwar blogs I read link to many stories raising questions about the positive scenarios, stories which may show serious troubles arising, both now and in the future.

While there is some truth in this, the basic problem is more fundamental – the two sides are no longer interested in each others’ arguments.

Roughly speaking the prowar bloggers are concerned to argue that Bush was right in asserting that the US could and would crush its enemies. Their main concerns are that the Coalition should win quickly and suffer minimal casualties.

Conversely, summarising drastically, the antiwar bloggers are concerned to argue that Blair was wrong in presenting the war as an emergency exercise in international law enforcement. Their main concern is that the war has been justified on the basis of legal and political arguments that have now been exposed as largely spurious and on the basis of promises about the conduct of the war that have now been abandoned.

For a brief period, the Iraqi attacks on Coalition supply lines and resistance to the occupation of Southern cities produced an intersection of these two sets of concerns. Prowar bloggers mostly saw the question in more strictly military terms – was the Rumsfeld strategy being proved wrong? Antiwar bloggers saw this as evidence that both the war and the subsequent occupation would be bloodier and crueller than had been claimed and some hoped that an enforced pause in the US advance might lead to some sort of reconsideration.

The picture of mutual incomprehension was completed with the US military successes of the last week. From the prowar viewpoint these represented proof that the critics had been wrong all along. From the antiwar viewpoint, the relevant facts were the escalation in the number of civilian casualties, the further relaxation of restrictions on targeting, the use of weapons like cluster bombs and the massive death toll among Iraqi troops most of whom are conscripts.

In these circumstances, it’s scarcely surprising that the same facts are interpreted in diametrically opposite ways.

While we wait for the fall of Baghdad, and hope that it is as quick and bloodless as possible, it’s hard to think about much else but war. However, I have no idea what will happen next and no capacity to influence it, so I’m going to try to stick to economic aspects of the war for the moment.

Quite a few people have asked me to respond to various scenarios involving the role of the US and euro as competing reserve currencies. Since all these scenarios involve oil, I thought I’d try to clear the ground a bit by discussing the question “Is it all about oil?”.

The crudest (I use the term advisedly) version of a war for oil would be one in which the US seized Iraq’s oilfields and took the oil without paying for it. A more standard imperialist procedure would be to impose a highly unfavorable contract on the defeated government or a puppet government imposed by the conquerors. I don’t think the invasion of Iraq is a war for oil in this sense.

A more subtle idea is that the aim of the war is to expand Iraqi production and thereby drive down the price of oil. This kind of thinking is certainly present among those who pushed the war, but it must be remembered that high oil prices are good for the US oil industry which is obviously influential. So again, I don’t think a plan to drive down oil prices is a major motive for war.

There are however, several senses in which it is ‘all about oil’. First, the idea that the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) should have a big say in the way the Middle East is run is based on the assumption that oil reserves are crucial. There’s a nasty dictatorship in Burma, but don’t expect to see the Marines there any time soon.

Second, although the US oil industry as a whole has no interest in overthrowing Saddam, companies that supply oil industry services, like Halliburton and Brown and Root stand to do very well out of things, and have already grabbed the most lucrative jobs in the putative reconstruction.

Third, and most importantly, the logic of the postwar outcome ensures that it will be about oil to a large extent. It looks certain that the immediate outcome of the war will be US military rule which is illegal in terms of international law – having purportedly invaded to uphold UN resolutions, the US & UK have no grounds for resisting UN control of Iraq, but this is evidently unthinkable.

Hence, the only legal way to deal with the oil would be to leave all the earnings with the UN either to buy food and medicine or in trust for some democratically elected Iraqi government in the future. But that would leave the US footing the bill for reconstruction, and this is not going to happen – there is hardly money allocated for it and the US is deeply in deficit. Nor is there any serious prospect of internationally supervised democratic elections in the next year or two

Hence, sometime shortly after the war, either the US or a puppet government imposed by the US military will assert ownership of the oil by right of conquest and will use it to start paying the bills for reconstruction, most of which will go to US contractors. This isn’t exactly the same as pumping out the oil and shipping it back to the US without payment, but I don’t think that the difference will impress the rest of the world.

In response to my posting about Salam Pax, various people have pointed out implausibilities in the story, not to mention the fact that it’s fourth-hand news at best by the time I reported it. It struck me that this is becoming a war made up almost entirely of mysterious absences. In some ways Bin Laden set the pattern, but it has been amplified in the war on Iraq. There’s Saddam himself (dead, alive and in command, or already on the run?), the welcoming crowds of liberated Iraqis (hostile nationalists or still scared of Saddam’s secret police ?), the Republican Guard (demolished or run away to fight another day ?).

Most of all, there are the Weapons of Mass Destruction. As I pointed out before the shooting started, this was an issue which, for all practical purposes would be resolved on the first day. If Saddam had weapons and was not amenable to containment, the militarily effective time to use them was while US forces were still concentrated in Kuwait. When this didn’t happen, it was widely reported that Saddam’s weapons were concentrated in a ‘Red Zone’ and that Republican Guard units had orders to use them when Coalition troops entered the zone. Clearly if this had been true, weapons would have been used or found by now. Now perhaps, they are being stored for a final siege of Baghdad.

Some on the Coalition side are preparing a backup case, in which thecasus belli will remain intact indefinitely, even if no weapons are found. According to this story, it may take as much as eight months to manufacture find the evidence. (link via Tim Dunlop).

As with so many others, I find this war confusing as well as deeply depressing. I don’t know what to hope for now except that the people of Iraq will soon enjoy the peace Salam Pax took for his name and that he (?) will be among those who survive to enjoy it.

Update Jim Henley reports that Al Jazeera’s English-language site is up here, and there is no mention of salam. So I guess something got confused along the way as happens with rumours of war. I hope so, anyway.

From todays SMH, attributed to the Telegraph

British forces say they have “turned” a number of Ba’ath party members against the regime, who have inflitrated Iraqi military groups hidden in schools and hospitals.

At a smart housing complex outside Basra, untouched by looting from militia groups, British officers approached an Iraqi man at his makeshift stall.

“Do you know,” said one officer, “that unless Ba’ath party members start working for us, we’ll take it that they are working against us and we’ll have them shot?”

As the translator put the message across, the officer explained: “I didn’t really mean that. I’m here to offer him and his family safe passage but with these sorts of punters it’s best to play hard.”

“I see,” said the Iraqi, dragging on his cigarette. “Now I think about it, I do remember something.”

When I first read the story of seven Iraqi women and children killed at a checkpoint while trying to flee the fighting in Najaf, my immediate reaction was “Now, surely, those who have supported the war will see that it can only lead to disaster”. A little more thought made me realise, not only that I was wrong, but that this tragedy will probably make matters worse. War hardens hearts, and this will only make them harder. When this war started, it was claimed that the rules of engagement were the most restrictive of any war in history. Two weeks later, the rules are those of Vietnam in the war zones, and those of Northern Ireland in occupied territory, yet virtually no-one who initially supported the war has conceded that they were mistaken.

We have already come to accept the assassination, not only of top leaders like Saddam, but of anyone associated with the regime, both by bombing and CIA death squads. Shoot to kill policies for suspect civilians have been announced, then expanded. Restrictions on targets for bombing have been dropped. Food and water are being used as weapons, and the prospect of starving the Iraqi defenders out of Baghdad is already being mooted.

Given the increasing frequency of references to Northern Ireland and Guantanamo Bay it’s reasonable to assume that torture of prisoners classed as ‘terrorist suspects’ will begin within the next few weeks, if it hasn’t started already. This will be denied with great vehemence, then, when it comes out, defended as an inevitable response to Saddam’s evil methods.

Looking at the developing disaster of this war, I’ve been trying my best to think of possible exit strategies (not that anyone who matters will listen). Here’s the best I can come up with so far. Suppose that the liberation of Basra turns out the best that can possibly be expected – that is, at least some of the inhabitants join in a rebellion against the regime and succeed with the support of British troops. The chaos in Basra (no water, not enough food, remnants of the Fedayeen) would be sufficient to justify a lengthy pause in the fighting to establish Basra as the core of a liberated Iraq. Given enough time, something might turn up – Saddam might die of his wounds or whatever.

At worst, the establishment of a liberated Southern Iraq, and an expanded Kurdish area in the North could be regarded as settling the unfinished business of 1991. The Coalition could establish a provisional government, give it sufficient arms to deal with any remaining Fedayeen, and provide air support against any counterattack from Saddam. Then it would be time to declare victory and get out. Given sufficient chutzpah, the Coalition could even say that they have forcibly inspected all the WMD sites identified by their intelligence and destroyed a number of WMDs found there (zero, but zero is a number).

Josh Marshall has also been considering possible outcomes, two of which are disaster scenarios of different degrees of severity, and one (making Rummy the scapegoat and going back to Blix) is an exit strategy, though one I can’t see the administration going for.

If anyone has seen or thought of any other ideas that don’t involve either a siege of Baghdad or a new Stalingrad, I’d be keen to hear about it.

Ten days into the war, the high moral standards proclaimed by the Coalition leaders are rapidly being replaced by the brutal reality that this is going to be a war much like most others, with both sides committing grave crimes, and nobody really winning in the end. It’s already become clear that nothing said by either side can be trusted (I won’t resume the futile debate over which side is lying more). And, as the Pentagon has quietly dropped or relaxed restrictions on targeting civilian areas and civilian infrastructure, we can expect a steadily rising civilian death toll even before large-scale urban fighting begins. Of course, if Saddam had only surrendered peacably, or fought out in the open as the US wanted him to, none of this would have happened – the same is true of every war in history where one side has an overwhelming advantage in conventional terms.

Until now, I haven’t seen anything as disturbing as this Washington Post report which approvingly quotes the use of food aid as a weapon, not in the general sense of ‘winning hearts and minds’, but in the same way Saddam has long used it, with food being given as a reward for co-operation and withheld as a punishment for resistance.

Two trucks laden with food and water pulled up in front of a school this morning on the southern edge of this dusty industrial town where paramilitary fighters loyal to President Saddam Hussein have roamed the streets since shortly after the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq.

There was nothing random about the choice of this neighborhood for the first humanitarian effort by Special Operations forces. A local Shiite Muslim religious leader had been identified by a team of Green Berets as pro-American. …U.S. forces gave the Shiite notable a microphone to let the swelling crowd know that he, and not the soldiers, would determine who got the food. And, he said, more would follow in coming days.

The crowd applauded and a U.S. campaign to win political allies in southern Iraq through selective favors began in earnest….

“We have to give this guy legitimacy and let his people see that he’s the man that can get what his community needs,” said one Special Operations major of today’s operation at Zubair, a crossroads 10 miles southwest of Basra. “We have to find friends who can help us build support. There’s a purpose behind where we unload.”

An interpreter working with the Americans told the crowd over a microphone that they must be orderly or “we won’t come back.” …

The payback for such handouts, according to the major, is more than goodwill. With access to community leaders, the United States can obtain intelligence to target Hussein’s irregulars who are turning the 10-day-old war into a guerrilla campaign.

At a water treatment plant just outside Basra, for instance, workers who had been provided with food pointed out a hidden weapons cache to a Special Operations civil defense team after a second day of aid. (emphasis added)

And this is called a war of liberation.

I’ve decided not to post anything more about the war for the moment. I can see nothing but disaster ahead – huge Iraqi casualties, both military and civilian, then a long and bitter occupation, with the likelihood of substantial Coalition losses over time in subsequent ‘counter-terrorist’ actions.

Unfortunately, I also can’t see any way of averting this outcome. A withdrawal, leading to victory for Saddam, would be an even greater disaster than what can only be a Pyrrhic victory for the Coalition. If there is some sort of possible compromise, I have no idea what it is.

Life, and especially war, is unpredictable. Perhaps things will take a sudden turn for the better. I hope for a quick end to war and bloodshed, even though I see no reason to expect it.