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September 19, 2003
America in the Quagmire of Iraq
President Bush’s address to the nation on September 7, 2003, was in effect a call to his people to take on an additional burden of $87 billion in next year and an appeal to the UN, as the representative of the world community, to extricate US from the much-warned-against quagmire in Iraq.
The world-wide demonstrations against the war on Iraq - unprecedented in world history in scale and emotional intensity - were totally ignored by the Bush-Tony Blair combine. Egged on by special interest groups representing oil companies, large corporations looking for businesses in that region, Israeli lobbies bent on defanging Iraq, and above all the unmitigated arrogance of the sole super power whose sensitivities were affronted by 9/11, the risky venture was launched in the confidence that the foreign forces would be welcomed as liberators by the local population. Considering the noxious nature of Saddam’s rule, such an expectation was not altogether self-deluding.
But the venture was badly flawed internally as much as externally. On the home front, the people already enraged and in a retaliatory mood over the 9/11 catastrophe, were misled by the tendentious media and the administration with an overt or covert agenda, into believing that they were likely to be targeted next by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. British Premier, Tony Blair, would frequently come out with statements and open-to-question statistics about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in enormous quantities in Saddam’s basement.
Envelopes bearing anthrax virus were systematically posted perhaps by quarters having a vested interest in the spoils of war to well-known persons to create panic and war hysteria. The FBI, on its part, issued quite frequently warnings, supposedly based on their ‘reliable’ intelligence, that terrorist attacks were imminent. Objectivity became a casualty in the cacophony generated by the warmongers.
The people of America constitute a great nation which is willing to make the utmost sacrifice in the promotion of a national cause. The episode of 9/11 had already put them in a retaliatory mood. Some freaks went to the extent of killing even Sikhs just because they wore turbans. The Congress accepted the concept of pre-emptive strikes and authorized the President to go to war against Iraq.
Since the stories about the formidable war machine of Iraq and its stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were far from the situation on the ground, the American and British troops had an easy walkover. President Bush has called this a very quick and humane war. Indeed, it was. It couldn’t have been otherwise. Iraq was like a humming bird as compared to the elephant of America. Matter of fact the entire Middle East is like a stamp on a large envelope. The 22 countries of the region comprising some 300 million people have a GDP of $500 billion - almost equivalent to that of Spain which too is not a highly productive country.
Four months back in early May, President Bush announced an end to “major combat operations”. His “Top Gun” landing on aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and the way his speech was drafted unfortunately gave the impression that Americans were gloating.
But, the people in this country had started questioning the motive behind the war, particularly as no weapon of mass destruction was found by any of the 145,000 American soldiers on Iraqi soil. The British Prime Minister is truly in hot waters as he had presented to the world the so-called evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear arms, with Saddam.
Similarly, no concrete evidence could be had about Iraq’s direct or indirect link with Al Qaeda or Bin Laden. Matter of fact Saddam and Bin Laden were reported to be not even on talking terms. Bin Laden and his followers were extremists, if not fanatics in their religious and political outlook. Iraq, on the other hand, was a progressive, socialist state often at loggerheads with its Arab neighbors. Its ruling Baath party had close relations with that of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. It had therefore an adversarial relationship with Israel. It could indeed pose a threat to Israel. In its destruction lay the strengthening of the security of Israel. Mr. Bush had called the US-Israel relation as “unique”. That could provide some justification for the war. But, no member of American administration has ever mentioned this as the causus belli - the reason for the war.
Americans as a nation would be found willing to fight to any length a war which is morally justified. A glaring example of this was provided by the Vietnam War. Once it was realized that the war had no justification, America pulled out of that country. The difficulty arises when the government is unable to provide convincing logic for continuing its belligerence on a foreign territory. People expect justifiably for their government to level with them.
In the case of Afghanistan, it was faulted for leaving the Mujaheddin, the freedom-fighters, in the lurch and pulling out once the Soviet Union had withdrawn. That was an immoral, unjustified act that went against the American national proclivities. The young Muslim men who were trained by the CIA to fight the Soviets, found themselves rudderless, and turned against their former mentors for letting them down and abandoning them. Efforts are being made now to rehabilitate that war-ravaged country.
In the case of Iraq, the very raison d’etre for the war is now being openly questioned, as the reasons given before the war could not be substantiated later on.
Even a paper like the New York Times was constrained to comment editorially a day after the President’s address to the nation: “Given the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been uncovered in Iraq, the President needs to be much more up-front with the American people about why our troops are there…Mr. Bush’s tendency to refer to everyone from Baath Party loyalist to guerrilla fighters as terrorist seems designed to confuse the public rather than clarify the administration’s goals.”
The same day, a columnist in Washington Post remarked: “Sorry, Mr. President. You can’t politicize a national security argument before an election and then just assume that people will believe you are leveling with them now - especially if you don’t level with them on how we got into this fix.”
Another columnist, Marc Kaufman, compared in his lengthy write-up, in Washington Post of September7, the current predicament of the US in facing the spate of guerrilla attacks on American forces and interests with that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Kaufman having closely watched the war in Afghanistan and witnessed the withdrawal of Soviet forces, has this to say: “Guerrilla wars are fought militarily and, probably more importantly, as a battle for the ‘hearts and minds’. So now that the US is working to both pacify and develop Iraq, its enemies are working equally hard to create havoc and keep Iraq without electric power, without medical supplies and without hope for a peaceful, American dominated future. To accomplish these goals, Iraqi guerrillas are taking a page from the playbook of the Afghan mujaheddin, who forced the Soviets out of their country.”
The US and its coalition forces had marched into Iraq defying world opinion and by-passing the UN which was dismissed by Mr. Bush as “irrelevant”.
In a clear self-repudiation, Mr. Bush has now sought UN help for pacifying Iraq and participating in 14 critical areas of reconstruction recently identified by the World Bank. Negotiations are continuing to involve donor countries in the rehabilitation efforts. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Turkey are being approached to send their troops for peacekeeping operations. These are all wise steps, but for an abiding peace in the entire region, the US will have to take bold steps to pursue its road map for the solution of the Palestinian issue.
The US must stop looking at the problem through the Israeli prism . Mr. Bush is indeed a very courageous leader and the time has come for him to demonstrate it in the sole interest of his nation by pursuing whole-heartedly his peace plan. He can’t do that unless he discards the prism to go down in history as the savior of the Middle East. Also, that would extricate him from the Iraqi quagmire.
Arifhussaini@hotmail.com September 11, 2003
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