Those murders on the airport road symbolise the battle that is taking place throughout Iraq. For all the mistakes made by the US-led coalition, its mission is creative — to help the Iraqi people build a decent society for the first time in their lives, and to encourage other states in the Middle East in the same direction. By contrast, the mission of the terrorists who killed Sergeants Wisdom and Clary and so many thousands of other Americans and Iraqis, including women, children and teachers, is only destructive. They have nothing to offer Iraqis except vengeance, religious insanity and death. ~William Shawcross, The Spectator

The word Manichean gets thrown around too often, especially in Europe by people who clearly don’t know what it means, but I think it is right to say that Mr. Shawcross falls into the category of the genuinely Manichean. Thus he can say, presumably in all seriousness, that an invasion and occupation of a country is in some way “creative.” To create something is to bring it into existence, so properly speaking none of us actually “creates” anything but only composes it. At the level of man fashioning things, however, the virtue of ‘creativity’ depends on the inclination of the will and the purpose of the creation. To say that we are trying to create something, while the enemy only wants to destroy is a trope so old and unconvincing that I doubt Mr. Shawcross himself really believes that. There is scarcely anyone alive who desires only destruction–even violent anarchists and fanatics desire destruction of the present order to create something else. Of course, we do not desire that something else, but it is the supplanting of the present order that most of us fear, and not nearly so much the prospect of mere physical violence and devastation.

We do not fear sheer nihilism, because we are confident that it is bereft of life, energy and durability. What we fear in any enemy is what they will create if the contest of strength against strength turns in their favour. In Iraq we have the rather unusual circumstance of being confident that we cannot be compelled to leave by force combined with the knowledge that we will never be able to compel the near-unanimous obedience to the new order required to make it work. Whatever is born after December 15 will be suffocated by the continuation of the war. Fledgling representative states that must simultaneously invent their institutions and practises, hitherto unknown in their land, while also fighting a protracted war, whether internally or not, do not survive–they collapse into dictatorships or oppressive oligarchies. Aggressive wars do not beget the creation of anything.

Mr. Shawcross can dismiss the objectives of Islamists and insurgents in Iraq as “religious insanity and death,” but if this were really the only alternative being offered it is difficult to fathom how the insurgency would not bleed itself out very quickly. That Islamists represent the maddest of an insane religion may be a solid polemical argument against them, but it is still difficult to transform our war of aggression into much of a cause of righteousness. What the insurgents claim to offer is what any resistance has offered to those who resent an occupier: to be rid of the occupier. No promise of better life, functioning institutions or justice is made by resistance groups. They promise only to make the invader leave, and for more than a few that is more meaningful and something worth ‘creating’ than anything we will ever be able to provide or build for the Iraqis. Withdrawal is not only imperative for our forces and the good of our country, but it is necessary if Iraq is to avoid more of the radicalisation that the war has already fostered.

Even granting, for the sake of argument, that “helping” to “build a decent society” had something to do with the actual mission objectives (regime change and, supposedly, disarmament), let’s be quite clear that Iraq is further now from having a “decent society” than it was three years ago. This is because Iraq continues, and will continue for some time, to suffer from the depredations of a war Mr. Bush began without good reason. Iraq may end up with a constitutionally more liberal and actually less abusive government, but its society has been ravaged terribly. Leave it to a democrat to readily identify state and society and mistake the “improvement” or “reform” of the one with the progress of the other.

When Mr. Bush made the decision to attack, he accepted the responsibility for further ruining Iraqi life, perhaps for a generation, to advance his cause. He willed destruction with the blithe, short-sighted hope that it would be limited and that Iraq could be rebuilt at virtually no cost to our government, and the complete lack of post-war planning shows that Mr. Bush had no interest in the “creative” goals Mr. Shawcross is so thrilled about.

Very little can be created in wartime (though the experience of war has occasionally given rise to important literature, created afterwards); it makes nonsense of language to say that the mission of our military there is “creative.” Protective in some sense, maybe, but not creative. Armies as armies do not create anything (if they are made to do construction work for PR purposes, they are no longer acting as an army), though they may establish and maintain a kind of order–not necessarily an enduring or good order, but order nonetheless. Our forces, always undermanned for the ludicrous task expected of them, cannot do even that. The “Coalition,” as Mr. Shawcross continues euphemistically to call it, does not have a “creative” mission–its mission, to the extent that the objectives are still clear (and if we can take Mr. Bush seriously–always questionable), is to win “complete victory” over the insurgency while the Iraqis cobble together whatever political system they can manage. It is doubtful that such “complete victory” is possible, but what is more clear is that this has nothing directly to do with anything “creative.” It is a perversion of language to say so, and this perversion bespeaks a corruption of thought.

There is a moral difference between what our soldiers are doing in Iraq and what “the terrorists” are doing, but I would be hard put to say that it is one of kind. Our soldiers signed up to serve and defend their country, and the government has told them that this is what they are doing in Iraq, but it will not shock anyone if I say that this was false. The terrorists may believe they are liberators, or those who will restore true religion to the land, or any number of other things, but their objective is obviously something beyond the seemingly endless string of bombings and inflicting death on others.

What our soldiers are left doing now is killing native rebels, who are in rebellion against our elaborately decorated puppets and ourselves. Our men are defending some lives in the process and taking other lives, and sometimes the latter are the lives of bystanders who are killed as unjustly as those targeted by car bombs. The realist may shrug and say, “C’est la guerre,” but then it becomes of tremendous significance who initiated la guerre and who, cheered on by unscrupulous propagandists, insists on continuing it.