Posted on 24-12-2003
Bush
has thrown open Pandora's box in a paradise for international
terrorists
David Hirst
2003 has been a crucial year for the Middle East, with war
in Iraq and the continuing intifada in Israel. The Guardian's
acclaimed commentator on the region assesses what happened,
what it means, and where it might lead next year
This was the year the Middle East became the undisputed, tumultuous
centre of global politics. When, at dawn on March 20 the US
and its British ally went to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq,
they were intervening in the region on such a scale that Arabs
everywhere compared the invasion, in its potential geopolitical
significance, to that seminal upheaval of the last century:
the collapse of the Ottoman empire. That led to the arbitrary
carve-up of its former Arab provinces by the European colonial
powers and, in 1948, to the loss of one of them, Palestine,
to the Israeli settler-state.
In Arab eyes, it was a final mortal blow to the so-called "Arab
system" through which the component parts of the greater
Arab "nation" collectively strove to protect the territorial
integrity and basic security of the whole. To the disgust and
shame of the Arab peoples, it was not merely incapable of preventing
the conquest and occupation of what, properly governed, would
have been one of the most powerful and prosperous Arab lands,
it was largely complicit in it.
It simply stood and watched as the world's only superpower
embarked on its hugely ambitious, neo-colonial enterprise: to
make Iraq the fulcrum for reshaping the entire region and, with
regime change and "democratisation", cure it of those
sicknesses - political and social oppression, religious extremism,
corruption, tribalism and economic stagnation - that had turned
it into the main threat to the existing world order. It did
not formally envisage a full-scale redrawing of state frontiers,
but it looked as though by an inexorable momentum that might
come to pass.
It was seen as a second Palestine, not so much because it was
a foreign conquest of another Arab country, but because, via
the Bush administration's neo-conservative hawks, it was at
least as much Israeli in inspiration and purpose as it was American.
The mighty blow struck in Baghdad would so weaken other Arab
regimes that the Palestinians, more than ever bereft of Arab
support, would submit to that full-scale Israeli subjugation
and dispossession of all but a last pitiful fragment of their
original homeland.
This grandiose enterprise began well enough. The rottenest
regime of a rotten Arab order collapsed swiftly as expected.
Within three weeks the Americans were in Baghdad and an American
tank teamed up with a jubilant crowd in the symbolic act of
toppling Saddam's statue in Firdaous Square. On May 1 a triumphant,
flight-suited George Bush strutted aboard an aircraft carrier
to declare major combat operations at an end.
Fateful
But America was to find no weapons of mass destruction, demolishing
the prime official war aim. More seriously, the goodwill it
had earned from most Iraqis for overthrowing the despot soon
began to dissipate amid the evidence of just how ill-equipped
the US was for the "nation-building" that was to follow.
There developed a competition, fateful for the success or failure
of the whole enterprise, between a majority of Iraqis, who for
all their growing exasperation with the occupation wanted it
to remain until a healthy, independent Iraqi order could take
its place, and a minority who wanted to end it by any means.
By June the first American soldiers began to die. The resistance
begun by Saddam loyalists widened to other groups, overwhelmingly
Sunni, until by October the CIA concluded that 50,000 people
were active in it. The US military responded with drastic methods
- collective punishments, massive firepower, demolitions and
razings - that could not but incite a greater militancy.
In the wider Arab world, a virulent anti-Americanism was not
offset, as it was for the Iraqis, by a hatred of Saddam and
the fear of his possible return. So it warmed to the Iraqi resistance
more than most Iraqis did - and spawned militants of its own
who were drawn to this new arena from which to conduct their
jihad against the enemy of Islam and Arabism.
As they struck at almost any target, Iraqi, American or foreign,
military, civilian or philanthropic, the itinerant suicide bombers
also exploded another pretext for the war: that Saddam had been
a partner with Osama bin Laden, and that overthrowing him would
deal a critical blow to international terror.
"By pretending that Iraq was crawling with al-Qaida,"
the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it, "Bush
officials created an Iraq crawling with al-Qaida." And
not just Iraq: since the invasion the terrorists have struck
in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Turkey, mostly at the expense of
other Muslims.
Nor was there any sign of the beneficent effect which such
radical intervention in one great zone of Middle East crisis
was supposed to have on the other one. The long-established
linkage between Iraq and Palestine reasserted itself but with
the new occupation interacting with the old one in ways that
further complicated the whole neo-imperial grand design.
Ariel Sharon staged Israel's first air raid on Syria in 30
years. Ostensibly it was retaliation for a particularly atrocious
Palestinian bombing, but it was also a blatant bid to cast Israel
as an operational ally of the US in the "reshaping"
of the region and the punishing of that other Ba'athist dictatorship
which, in the neo-conservative scheme of things, was next in
line for the Saddam treatment.
Then it was revealed that in Iraq US forces were adopting counter-insurgency
techniques the Israelis had taught them. This could only deepen
the Arab and Muslim conviction that what the American soldiers
were now doing to Iraqis was what the Israelis had been doing
to Palestinians for the past 50 years. Resistance in one place
could only inspire and reinforce it in the other.
Fiasco
In this unfavourable climate Mr Bush sought to launch the long-stalled
"road map" for peace, but only at the price of casting
the noblest of his official war aims - "democracy for Arabia"
- in a very curious Israeli-tinted light. To try to supplant
Yasser Arafat with the Palestinians' new prime minister, the
hapless Abu Mazen, was actually to subvert democracy in one
of the few Arab societies whose leader was, more or less, its
authentic electorally proven choice. This short-lived fiasco
foundered on Mr Arafat's obduracy, Mr Sharon's intransigence,
renewed suicide bombings by Hamas and the partisanship of the
most pro-Israeli US president ever, who was not going to risk
the wrath of his Jewish and rightwing Christian constituencies
in the run-up to next year's presidential election.
Likewise, on the Iraqi front, becoming as it was the greatest
potential threat to Mr Bush's prospects of a second term, exalted
foreign purpose fell suddenly and flagrantly prey to the expediencies
of domestic politics. The capture of Saddam was indeed a timely
public relations triumph. But it seemed as likely to broaden
the anti-American insurgency as to diminish it, and thereby
amplify the growing murmur that here was a new Vietnam in the
making.
In the closing weeks of 2003 Mr Bush and his lieutenants kept
swearing that America would stay the course "till the job
is done", even as they began casting about for plausible
exit strategy. With the dexterity that has marked the whole
ideologically driven Iraqi enterprise from the outset, they
suddenly decided they would end the occupation and transfer
authority to an Iraqi government by next summer, reversing the
order of events they had formerly envisaged - giving real power
to the Iraqis only when they were truly ready for it.
This new Iraqi order would be sovereign and democratic, but
the first thing it would do would be to ask American troops
to stay on to preserve that sovereignty and democracy.
With this subterfuge, Mr Bush might just, as he apparently
plans, manage to declare "mission accomplished" on
the eve of the presidential election. But it would be remarkable
if such an essentially US-installed government, presiding over
a hastily reconstructed army and police, was able for long to
master the maelstrom of colliding passions and political interests
which the removal of the tyranny has unleashed.
An Iraq at loggerheads with itself, and a paradise for international
terrorists, would spare none of the principal actors in this
geopolitical drama. Not the US, confronted as it then would
be with the classical colonial dilemma of whether to pull back
or plunge yet further in. Not the Arab world, whose regimes
in their people's eyes only differ from Saddam's in the degree
of their degeneracy, nor Israel.
The danger is what Arab commentators habitually call "Lebanonisation"
- first of Iraq and then, by an inevitable contagion, the rest
of the eastern Arab world. Hizbullah, that most successful of
anti-Israeli insurgencies, grew out of a single failed and fratricidal
state. What might an entire failed region throw up?
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