Can non-military interventions yet save the day in Iraq?

A consensus for change?

The depth and extent of civil disenchantment with the Iraq policy of George W Bush and Tony Blair has brought British public life to a place it has not been before. Washington and London have managed to create in Iraq the very situation they are most nervous about - a "weak and failing state" in the Middle East. Levels of hatred and resentment are boiling over, US troops are being shot and stoned, and jihadis have identified Iraq as the arena to fight the US. It is unprecedented for 52 former senior diplomats to publicly excoriate the foreign-policy options being promoted by a serving prime minister as "doomed to failure", as happened on 27th April last (and shortly to be matched by an equally strong critique of Bush from a group of their opposite numbers in the USA).

Authoritative voices of concern are not confined to the civil service. Former senior military officers are also speaking their minds. In a newly published contribution to the journal of the Royal United Services Institute (a bastion of establishment military thinking) Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden and General Sir David Ramsbotham offer a trenchant military critique of current government defence policy. Their paper, entitled, 'About Face - The British Armed Services: Which Way to Turn?' points out that "much of the United Kingdom's defence policy appears to be geared to conforming to the requirements of an ally, whatever the cost" and that these requirements have resulted in "losses to British national prestige, our reputation in the invaded region - in which we have long enjoyed particular interests and ties of friendship - with all the long-term results that may result, including an ability to pursue our national ends. In the minds of many, Britain is now so closely inter-linked with the United States, that it is an equally attractive target for international terrorism, particularly by militant Islam."

Given the strong social and professional ties within senior military and civil service circles, the views of retired staff are unlikely to be at variance with those who, while currently serving the government of the day, are not free to speak. Retired individuals of this distinction must be considered mouthpieces for the concerns of their serving friends and former colleagues.

All of this suggests that an urgent search for fresh thinking is exercising the minds of increasing numbers of policy makers in Whitehall and Downing Street. Those who have long argued that war fighting often creates more problems than it solves are finding that government is more willing to listen to their arguments than has been the case for many years.

Peacekeepers or war fighters? We may have to choose.

Timothy Garden and David Ramsbotham argue that those controlling military spending face a choice which cannot be fudged, given the assumption that defence spending is not set to increase any time soon. Either the UK makes the massive technological investment needed to join with US-led high-intensity war-fighting operations (as envisaged in the 2003 Defence White Paper), or it invests in building up its considerable expertise in conflict prevention, nation-building, counter-terrorism and humanitarian relief. It cannot do both. There are just not the resources of either manpower or equipment.

They conclude "If it is UK policy that serious warfighting can only be conducted under US leadership and with US capabilities, we should accept a reduction in our investment in this area. This would allow us to build up a well-equipped, readily deployable force, designed to stabilise troubled areas around the world. In this we have unique, world-class expertise. The tragedy is that it is in danger of being lost through underinvestment." Yet is is precisely the peacekeeping roles of the UK military that are most relevant to the stated priorities of a little known government initiative - called the "Global Conflict Prevention Pools (GCCP)"

Four years ago former development minister Clare Short and current finance minister Gordon Brown, proposed that three ministries - the foreign office, the MoD and the department for international development (DfID) - would work jointly on the prevention and resolution of conflict. The allocated GCCP budget (at approx £120 million per year) is less than 1% of the UK military budget. More spending here could bring huge benefits, for the simple reason that conflict resolution is cheap and cost-effective. Successful third-party mediation in Mozambique in 1989-92 cost approximately $350,000; the gun return scheme organised by businessmen in El Salvador (1995-9) cost $1.3million; and the task force set up in former Yugoslavia in 1999 to forge effective, united democratic opposition to Slobodan Milosevic cost $240,000. Creative conflict prevention and peace-building brings results.

The importance of non-governmental activity

Techniques of conflict prevention and resolution have advanced dramatically over the past decade in the non-governmental world. There are now over fifty institutes in the UK alone developing, testing and costing these methods. The groups we work with, Oxford Research Group and Peace Direct, list these institutes in a new report: Cutting the Costs of War: non-military prevention and resolution of conflict.

We and our colleagues have been examining what works and what doesn't in terms of dealing with conflict without violence, and in getting rid of oppressive regimes. In the latest report we describe living examples of thirteen of the methods that do work.

The damage done to the fabric of society by any war has to be healed. Innocent people on all sides have been killed, and the resulting rage and grief, if not addressed, will foment revenge and future terror. Women who have been raped will go to their graves unable to forgive and forget. Children have been made mute from the horrors they witnessed. Other children struggle to manage stumps of limbs. Other children are yet to be blown to pieces by unexploded bombs. That's why human security is the issue of our time, and why war prevention is the coming science.

War prevention works on the same principle as inoculation for smallpox - it has to be done methodically, with proven vaccines and as a fundamental, properly funded policy. We want these methods to be enlarged and established, to be in conscious focus before any action is taken - so that every non-military option is tested before war is started.

Policy-makers need to integrate this agenda into their planning, to examine what the UK is doing that simply reinforces problems rather than finds solutions, and to allocate serious funding to other ways of managing conflict.

How can non-military options help in Iraq now?

One key reconciliation measure is simple and cheap: listening. When people are marginalised and furious as in Iraq today, on top of decades of fear and deprivation, a massive programme is required to listen and attend to their needs. Liaison centres need to be set up all over the country where people with acute problems such as disappeared relatives, destroyed houses, rape or wrongful arrest can tell a trained interviewer what their problem is and get some help. Specific action could then be requested and quantified under certain headings, enabling the authorities to plan and respond to public need.

A record would begin to become available of the extent of need. People's frustration at having no recourse whatsoever would be alleviated. Such an approach is being undertaken by Sami Velioglu, a British Iraqi returning to his home town of Kirkuk in May this year, to set up a pilot liaison centre there. A similar approach worked well in Osijek, Croatia, one of the areas where "ethnic cleansing" had been most severe in the wars of ex-Yugoslavia. There, a small and determined group of citizens set up such a centre to help people rebuild their lives after the war. It was so successful that it swelled to employ 300 people and became a model for post-conflict reconstruction.

There are other well-tested "active reconciliation measures" which could be used effectively in Iraq today. Efforts to stir up religious hatred like the bombs in Karbala could be countered by a widespread programme of bridge-building modelled on the experience of Lucknow in 1992. There, when extremist Hindus destroyed the mosque at Ayodhya, bloody rioting broke out across India; 900 were killed in Bombay alone. But in Lucknow, near Ayodhya, the main high school arranged nightly meetings of religious leaders who agreed messages of unity and restraint, which the students and their parents then broadcast with jeeps and loudspeakers all over the city. As a result no one was killed in Lucknow.

It's easy to be cynical about such "people initiatives" because they can appear small-scale, soft, slow - too "local". But the reverse is actually the case. The drivers of positive change for weak and failing states will only be found in the growth of civil society - in the emergence of community leaders, community initiatives and organisation, and women.

Finally, it needs to be accepted that civilian peaceworkers cannot function in a security vacuum. New and creative proposals are need to develop structures in which military and non-military capacity can be jointly planned, developed, and deployed to the greatest good of the indigenous populations. This may require new accommodations on both sides. Military planners will need to engage with civilian peaceworkers far earlier and more comprehensively than they may feel comfortable with. Conversely, peaceworkers may have to temper their critical independence with a pragmatic commitment to dependence on, and partial "interoperability" with military forces, particularly in the early stages of deployment. But such accommodations must be forged if they provide the best chance of putting right the mistakes of the past and avoiding further unnecessary bloodshed.

Scilla Elworthy is Chair of the Board of Directors of Oxford Research Group and founder of Peace Direct.

John Sloboda is Executive Director of Oxford Research Group (www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk") and co-founder of the Iraq Body Count web-site (www.iraqbodycount.org).