Hilal Khashan
Political Science and Public Administration Department, American University of Beirut, P.O. Box 11-0236, Riad El Solh, Beirut 1107 2020 Lebanon
The
salvoes of Tomahawk cruise missiles that fell on Baghdad in the early morning of
20 March 2003 set off the Third Gulf War, for which the U.S. military command
found no better appellation than Operation Iraqi Freedom. Twenty days later,
American “liberators” entered the Iraqi capital to a jubilant reception by
hordes of looters who took over the streets of Baghdad in a grotesque revelation
of portending Iraqi democracy.
The
brute Mongol armies of Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked and burned
Baghdad in 1258, including its famous library. More than eight centuries later
the armies of democratic America delegated the gruesome task of pillaging the
capital of Harun al-Rashid, including its famous museum, to Shi’ite mobsters
in Saddam city, their gate of entry to Baghdad’s centre. Thanks to playing on
the country’s visceral divisions, the U.S. is tipping Iraq into the throes of
civil war by nurturing an environment of intense instability that pits Kurds
against Arabs and Shi’ites against Sunnis. American occupation forces in
northern Iraq, scrambling for Kirkuk, sufficed themselves with controlling the
city’s oil fields and, as a measure of protection, the hills overlooking them.
Their surrogate peshmerga scavengers took it upon themselves to prey on
government buildings, business establishments, and private residences.
The collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime serves as a stark reminder of
the demise, in December 1989, of Nicolae Ceausescu in
Romania. The two regimes bear a striking resemblance to each other, except that
Ceausescu’s leadership fell as a result of a domestic uprising, whereas
Hussein’s crumbled as M1 Abram tanks, an icon of the U.S. formidable
juggernaut, flooded across the Tigris into the streets of Baghdad. In the two
instances, the regime became a glaring anachronism in an era of neo-liberal
globalism.
The
U.S. launched its latest war on Iraq to topple its government—devastated by
two previous colossal wars and crippled by onerous sanctions1—against the will
of the UN and despite massive opposition from nearly all states, whose
publics’ vehement objection to Washington’s intentions manifested itself in
unprecedented outrage. Time and again, uninspiring George W. Bush and Tony
Blair, desperate to get their own people’s endorsement for this groundless
war, spoke unconvincingly about the need to disarm Saddam Hussein, whose alleged
weapons of mass destruction, they saw as a menace to their fine liberal
democracies and to world peace. Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector, who
submitted to UN Security Council several half-hearted and inconclusive reports
on Iraq’s disarmament, spoke his mind only after the fall of Baghdad. In a
revealing statement, cited by a Pakistani daily, he said that “the invasion of
Iraq was planned well in advance, and that the United States and Britain are not
primarily concerned with finding any banned weapons of mass destruction”
(Daily Times April 10, 2003). When
everything has been said about the real motives for the war against Iraq, they
are bound to cling to the world’s collective consciousness as an act of
banditry of the highest order and as a nauseating affirmation of the dictum that
might makes right.
Unmistakably,
the war against Iraq shows a crossing of interest of predatory capitalism,
Protestant fundamentalism, and Washington’s powerful Zionist lobby. In the
case of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, it reveals a conflict of
interest, because of his membership on the Board of Advisors of the pro-Israeli
Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a position that he
expediently relinquished in appearance upon entry to government service in 2001.
It is common knowledge that the administration of apocalyptic and born-again
Christian George W. Bush seeks to achieve two primary objectives from its
decision to invade Iraq and occupy it, even if they embellish the latter, as
they will, in a fanciful democratic veneer. First, capturing Iraq’s important
oil wealth offers a valuable prize for some of Bush’s political entourage. No
matter how Bush sugarcoats his motives for invading Iraq, he cannot dispute the
war’s boosting the shared oil interests that unite him with power-elite
partners, namely Vice-President Dick Cheney.3 The overwhelming stench of oil
permeates Bush’s wanton Iraqi policy and makes Lucifer’s day. Second,
Bush’s eschatological mindset enabled agents of the American Israeli Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to sway him into action against Iraq in the name of
serving America’s national interests. The truth of the matter is that the Bush
administration includes several staff members whose political behaviour elicits
more commitment for Israel than for the U.S.
Desecration
of Iraq’s sovereignty and trampling on the pride of its people bespeak
America’s heavy-handedness and obsession with violent solutions. The violation
of Iraq also demonstrates the prevalence of lackeys, opportunists, and
hypocrites in the subservient-to-Washington international system. The
Anglo-American invaders acted as cold-blooded killers, by unnecessarily
unleashing their technologically far superior arsenals of death against a Third
World army decimated by 12 years of an appalling sanctions regime. The 2003 war
on Iraq teaches us unforgettable lessons about a number of players who directly
involved themselves in the Bush-Blair unholy crusade.
French
president, Jacque Chirac, tried to take advantage of the global crisis
precipitated by the U.S. over dismantling Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass
destruction to form a European coalition to counter American hegemony. German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder ardently aligned himself with the French president
and engaged in strident criticism of U.S. policy. In fact, he made it very clear
in his bid for re-election that he had nothing to do with Washington’s plans
for Iraq, which he emphatically criticized. Emboldened by French veto power, the
two countries worked together to force the U.S. to withdraw the draft UN
resolution on Iraqi disarmament tabled jointly with the U.K. and Spain. The U.S.
did not heed the Franco-German rebellion against its supremacy and went ahead
with the implementation of its war plans. Old Europe failed to effectively
challenge the lone superpower, the custodian of European security for nearly six
decades. In political failure, France and Germany shifted to cultural affinity
with the U.S. and U.K., which they employed in their effort to mend fences with
their Anglo-American strategic allies. In a bid to distance his country from
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, President Chirac repeatedly stated, even before the
beginning of the war, that France is not in the camp of the despots. Just after
the fall of Baghdad to U.S. marines, French foreign secretary, Dominique de
Villepin, addressed the British prime minister, “I would like to reiterate our
support for many of the things that Tony Blair has been saying” (BBC
2003a). Similarly, French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, instructed
government officials to avoid criticizing the U.S.-led war on Iraq. During the
war, German and French authorities continued to provide the U.S. military with
access to their airspace and military facilities on their territories.
Russian
behaviour throughout the Iraqi crisis did not deviate from the country’s stand
on previous issues, thus perpetuating Moscow’s legacy of subservience to the
U.S. Russian politicians and diplomats initially maintained a low profile on the
crisis. Their public pronouncements, nevertheless, eventually became
pronouncedly opposed to war, as a result of the strength of the Franco-German
decision to challenge the U.S. in the Security Council. Moscow vowed to confront
U.S. bellicosity. Yet its repeated threats to veto any draft resolution calling
for war were mere rhetoric. While the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, seemed
busy coordinating with Paris and Berlin in a bid to blunt U.S. war designs, he
dispatched to Baghdad Yevgeny Primakov, a veteran Middle Eastern specialist from
the Soviet era, in order to convince President Saddam Hussein to submit his
resignation and leave Iraq to defuse the crisis. Russia is the inheritor of a
fallen empire; it is no longer a superpower and it hardly qualifies as a
regional power. Despite this, its leaders would like to pose as resolute
politicians, who challenge U.S. supremacy only in front of TV cameras.
Kurdish
demeanour during the Anglo-American war on Iraq has forcefully resurrected their
reputation as the perpetual pawns of any state offering to use their guns, which
they never fail to brandish for hire. Ever since the rise of Kurdish nationalism
some 150 years ago, Kurds have allowed themselves to be manipulated by foreign
powers. The British recruited them in their bid to further erode the Ottoman
Empire, which, in turn, used them against Armenian nationalists. The Iranians
found them useful against Turks and Iraqis, whereas the Syrians exploited them
against their Ba’athist rivals in Baghdad. In every instance where a country
used the Kurds against an enemy, it eventually abandoned them to face
retribution. In 1988 a chemical attack in Halabja—ordered by Saddam Hussein as
an unusual punishment for Iraqi Kurds’ alliance with Iran during the war
between the two countries— killed about 8 000 Kurds. The proponents of Kurdish
nationalism—essentially tribal people—suffer from a chronic political vision
problem. They never miss an opportunity to alienate their neighbours and
conspire against them at the behest of another power. In America’s war against
Iraq, the Kurds put themselves fully at the disposal of the U.S. command, whose
military plans for northern Iraq were disrupted by Turkey’s opposition to
using its territory as a launching pad against Iraq. Kurdish peshmergas entered
every city, town, and village vacated by withdrawing Iraqi troops withered by
U.S. bombardment. In the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk the Kurds went on a major
looting spree of Arab property and fought street battles with local defenders.
Nobody
would have expected Iran to side with Iraq. The human and economic catastrophes
that resulted from the two countries’ eight-year-long war in the 1980s
continue to preoccupy the collective consciousness of their peoples. Iran
pursued its possible options in Iraq in the manner of taqiyya
(“dissimulation”), which pervades Shi’ite political thinking, much as it
responded to the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan. As an Islamic republic,
Iran could not ideologically afford to rally behind the U.S., which the late
Ayatollah Khomeini categorized as the “Great Satan.” Still, Iranian
relations with Taliban, who applied the austere Wahhabi doctrine in ruling
Afghanistan, were characterized by outright animosity and unsalvageable
ideological differences. The Iranian government condemned in public the war
against the Taliban but, on the other hand, its military diligently chased and
apprehended Al Qaeda members crossing into Iranian territory, whom it eventually
surrendered to U.S. troops. Interestingly, as the war on Iraq drew to its end,
Iranian officials stated that they would try, as war criminals, Iraqi officials
seeking refuge in Iran.
From the
onset of the Iraqi crisis, Iran stated that it would maintain a neutral posture
in any ensuing conflict, which it did. However, it appears that Iran has no
intention of allowing the revival of the city of Najaf in Iraq, the birthplace
of Shi’ism, as pre-eminent centre of Shi’ite learning. The triumph of the
Islamic revolution in Iran and the great attention it gave to the holy city of
Qum, as well as Saddam Hussein’s excessive heavy-handedness against Shi’ite
clerics’ opposition to his secular policies, undermined the religious
significance of Najaf for Shi’ite religious activists. It is most unlikely
that the leaders of Iran would allow Qum to lose the religious status it
acquired in recent years to the historically important Najaf. Unfolding
developments in Najaf attest to that. Ayatollah Abdul Majid al-Khu’i was
recently assassinated in Najaf, in Imam Ali’s mosque, just a few days after
his return to Iraq, purportedly by pro-Iranian Shi’ites. The same group
issued, shortly afterwards, an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who spent
years under house arrest in Najaf, to curtail his activities or leave the city
within two days. These examples lead us to expect Iran to play in the
foreseeable future, a divisive role in Iraqi politics in general and in
Shi’ite affairs in particular.
On 1
March 2003, the Turkish Parliament voted, in an unprecedented move, against
allowing U.S. combat troops to be stationed on Turkish territory. Earlier,
Turkish prime minister, Abdullah Gul, embarked on an Arab tour in an effort to
enlist Arab support for a unified stand against U.S. designs to invade Iraq. In
a fashion typical of Arab leaders’ incapacity to agree on consequential
matters, let alone implement decisions on them and in a manifestation of
perennial servitude to Washington, the leaders of Egypt and the Gulf states
blunted Gul’s hopes. Turkey’s ruling party, the Islamic-oriented Justice and
Development Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, took a valiant position and gave up
billions of dollars of U.S. aid and held its ground against the dictates of
George W. Bush, who displayed a great deal of impatience and disrespect in
reacting to the democratic vote of the Turkish Parliament. In the end, however,
after signs of an early U.S. victory became unmistakeable, Ankara acquiesced and
allowed truckloads of American supplies to cross into northern Iraq from Turkey.
The Turks took the stand, nevertheless, and in doing so, they unintentionally
exposed those Arab regimes that colluded with the Bush administration.
Well before the discovery of oil in the region, Britain, in the 19th
century, during the white man’s onslaughts on Asia and Africa, created a
number of colonial outposts on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf. Even though
the status of these outposts developed in the early 1950s into that of
mini-states, their essential colonial functions persisted virtually unscathed.
This applies to Saudi Arabia, whose royals have always prided themselves on
their country’s independence. The Kingdom, notwithstanding, has maintained
strong colonial attachments to the West, ever since its conception as a tribal
monarchy in the early 1930s. In 1945 King Abdul Aziz switched alliances from the
British colonial patron to its American cousin. Consistently played down by
Washington and Riyadh, U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia never made the
news. The two parties agreed there was no need for publicity. Western
colonialism, which shifted hands in the Persian Gulf from the British to the
Americans, became possible after London announced in 1967 its decision to pull
out from east of the Suez by 1971. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and U.S.
resolve to punish Baghdad invigorated the U.S. military presence in the region
and gave it the legitimacy it wanted. Gulf emirs and sheikhs may offer a
convincing case—in the name of reinstating Kuwaiti independence— for
inviting to their countries hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in 1990. But
their decision to allow U.S. and British forces to launch an unprovoked and
illegitimate war against Iraq in 2003 cannot be plausibly defended. In fact,
they do not. They find it sufficient to state, on the grounds that the U.S. is a
superpower, that they cannot challenge Washington’s will. They are quite
correct. This is how they were conceived from the onset.
Syria
took an altogether different stand on the Iraqi situation, in part because
Syrians see themselves as genuinely independent, and also because they consider
their state as the hotbed of Arab nationalism. There are other, more compelling
reasons for Syria to sympathize with Iraq’s doomed political order. The two
countries represent competing factions of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party,
which the U.S. administration derides as a cumbersome ideological leftover from
the Cold War years. George W. Bush’s rightist, pro-Zionist aides view the
Syrian regime as the other face of the same Iraqi coin. They consider both
countries as potentially threatening to Israel’s long-term security, hence the
need for taming them through de-ideologization. In essence, this leaves Zionism
unthreatened by other ideologies, namely the Ba’athist version of Arab
nationalism. The presidency of Bashshar al-Asad has not solidified yet and
essentially survives by maintaining, unchanged, Syria’s internal environment.
The Iraqi upheaval is bound to alter Syria’s precarious domestic environment.
Fully aware of Syria’s predicament, U.S. officials have already begun to
target Syria, even before declaring their victory in Iraq. Even the dovish
secretary of state, Colin Powell, alluding to Syria, said that “there [was] a
new situation in the Middle East following the removal of Saddam Hussein, and he
hoped all nations in the region would review their past behaviour” (BBC
2003b). Blunt Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a direct warning to Syria
about allegedly testing chemical weapons.
Ecstatic
over a cheap victory on Iraq, the Bush administration believes its plans to set
up a liberal and plural political system in Iraq will vindicate their democratic
domino theory of the Middle East. This naïve thinking illustrates the U.S.
policy of crushing its enemies into submission, which, in their opinion, paves
the way for instilling democratic values into their political culture. This
logic won the U.S. worldwide enmity after World War II. Iraq does not lend
itself to this oversimplified, black-and-white view of the world. The British
tried to democratize Iraq during the interwar period; this resulted in six
military coups, the last of which occurred in 1941 and had strong Nazi German
leanings. To tell the truth, during their one-sided war against Iraq, which they
insisted on calling a unique victory, the U.S. military did—in the course of
frequent friendly fire accidents—more to damage the British armed forces than
to promote of Iraqi democracy.
It is
most unfortunate that the West will not allow Arabs to develop their political
systems on their own. No argument can convince Arabs, even those inattentive to
politics, that the U.S.-led war on Iraq aimed primarily at dismantling Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction and introducing Western, liberal democratic values.
Involvement with Arabs for the past two centuries shows, without a shadow of
doubt, a determined Western desire to abort Arab development. European defeat of
the Egyptian army in the 1840 war, their stultification of the Arab nationalist
dream after the World War I, their collusion in creating a Jewish state in
Palestine, their destruction of Arab secularism in the 1960s, in part by
unleashing Israel against its Arab neighbours in 1967, all have entered into
Arab collective consciousness as bitter memories. Once Arabs begin to reflect on
the staggering implications of the recent war on Iraq, they are bound to
conclude that the burning of Baghdad, the wanton destruction of Iraq’s rare
cultural heritage, the stripping of hospitals of medical equipment, the
exacerbation of the country’s sectarian and ethnic divisions are all the work
of the new Mongols. The blood of thousands of Arab volunteers who fought and
died in Iraq has blended with the blood of countless Iraqis to nourish the seeds
of a new Arab political consciousness.
1
For an excellent account of the
devastating impact of the sanctions on Iraq and of U.S. rationale for keeping
them in place, see Simons. 2002.
2
Bush presided over Harken Energy Corporation and Cheney served as the chairman
and executive of Halliburton, an oil services company. Both of them developed
important oil contacts with Arab oil-producing countries in the Persian Gulf. It
is interesting to note that Cheney’s public remarks since the beginning of the
war have dealt only with Iraq’s need for foreign assistance to re-launch its
oil industry.
BBC
World News. 2003a. April 10.
————.
2003b. April 15.
2003.
Daily Times April 10. Accessed from http://www.dailytimes.com.pk./default.asp?page=story_10-4-2003_pg2-10
on the World Wide Web.
Simons,
Geoff. 2002. Targeting Iraq: Sanctions and bombing in U.S. policy.
London, UK: Saqi.
(Submitted 15 April 2003)
© The Arab World Geographer
Editorial: Falah
Contributions: Dalby / Dijkink / Lustick / Hixson / Farhan / Shuraydi / Khashan / Reuber / Sidaway
Commentaries: Wesbter / Murphy / Agnew