The
Price Of Failure In Iraq
By David Hirst
05 June, 2004
Al-Ahram Weekly
In
the New York Review of Books veteran commentator Edward Sheehan wrote
from Nablus recently about a Palestinian expectation that this summer
would witness a simultaneous 'explosion' in both Iraq and the occupied
territories. That is yet to happen, but the mere expectation is an ironic
comment on perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the Iraqi enterprise.
For the Bush Administration's neo-conservatives, overthrowing Saddam
Hussein was to be nothing if not region- wide in purpose, Iraq to be
the fulcrum of grand design which, through 'democratisation', would
'transform' the entire Middle East, with a final Arab-Israeli settlement
as the core of it.
The neo-cons were
right about one thing: the Arab world, however fractious otherwise,
is bound by strong psychological and cultural ties, and whatever happened
in Iraq would profoundly affect the whole. The trouble is that the interplay
works two ways. Just as American success in Iraq would have made it
likelier elsewhere, so the failure that now so ominously threatens will
breed it elsewhere. Not merely does the situation in Palestine get worse
because of Iraq, so it does, via the rebound, in Iraq too. And this
interaction between the region's two great crisis zones is only the
kernel of a multiplier effect that ramifies everywhere, with local troubles
that have an anti- American aspect -- and what troubles, these days,
do not? -- coalescing, emotionally, politically, even organisationally,
in a single stream. An American disaster in Iraq always had the built-in
propensity to become a regional one, commensurate with the vast scale
of neo-con ambitions that took the US there in the first place.
Click to view caption
Following a night of fighting between US occupation troops and Shia
gunmen, an Iraqi man carries a boy through the rubble of a destroyed
home outside Kufa
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For years it had been all but axiomatic that any Western intervention
to bring down Saddam needed to be matched by intervention -- an essentially
pro-Palestinian one -- in the Arab- Israeli conflict too. The West created
the Israel settler-state at the Palestinians' expense, and any settlement
should so far as possible redress that historic injustice; the 'roadmap'
Tony Blair wrung from Bush was a feeble genuflection in that direction.
Otherwise, all the war's official objectives -- not to mention any unspoken,
real ones -- would be dismissed out of court, by Arabs and Iraqis alike,
as just another, blatant episode in the history of Western conquest
and exploitation.
The neocons bought
the axiom -- but turned it on its head. Thanks to them, and the most
aggressively pro-Israeli US Administration ever, the Iraqi invasion
was really, in this respect, the supreme expression of double standards
that have forever vitiated US Middle East policies. In theory, the settlement
was to come about under the auspices of democratisation, reform and
other blessings of America's 'civilising mission'; the Arabs' embrace
of Israel would be final proof that they had truly assimilated them.
In practice, it would come about through a far higher level of external
co-ercion, radiating from the invasion, than had ever been applied before,
and by a yet more extravagant bias in Israel's favour; the settlement,
essentially Sharonian, would have been a drastic regression from what,
during decades of peace-seeking, the world, the US included, had come
to regard as reasonable. Even now, as he slips deeper into the Iraqi
quagmire, Bush hasn't tried to compensate in pro-Palestinian coin. On
the contrary, mainly for domestic, electoral reasons, he has put America
firmly and openly behind Sharon's Greater-Israel, expansionist designs.
So while the Palestinians
have their own, American-created reasons for stepped-up resistance,
they naturally view that of the Iraqis, who increasingly have theirs
too, as an integral part of the same anti-imperialist struggle. More
tellingly, Iraqis have adopted Palestine as part of their own. Or re-adopted
it; for there had been some ground for the neo-cons' belief that here
was a key Arab country that could have been weaned away from the pan-Arab
nationalism that is anathema to them and Israel. The Palestine cause,
and a widespread Arab propensity to look upon Saddam, their monstrous
tormentor, as a serious champion of it had bred resentment of all things
Arab and Palestinian, especially among those most brutally persecuted
communities, Kurds who aren't Arabs anyway, and Shias who were always
ambivalent about pan-Arabism. But now, in Falluja, Sunni Islamists do
battle in the name of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin; in Najaf, the rebellious
Shia cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr calls himself the 'striking Iraqi army of
Hizbullah and Hamas.' Suspicions about an Israeli role in the counter-insurgency,
and now the prisoner abuse scandal, cannot but intensify the community
of purpose.
In Iraq and Palestine,
more obviously than anywhere else, the US has now directly or indirectly
empowered the very forces -- Islamist and nationalist, populist, violent
and fanatical -- it came to quell, because that is where Western interference,
full-scale colonization in Palestine, mere occupation in Iraq, has gone
further than anywhere else. But such forces are also the progeny of
the Arab condition itself, the moral and political bankruptcy of the
official Arab order. The forms the bankruptcy takes may often be strictly
local and domestic -- despotism, tribalism, corruption, social injustice
or economic stagnation -- but one is region-wide. Arab governments have
collectively failed in what should be the basic duty of any state, the
defense of land, people and sovereignty against foreign assault and
domination. From that standpoint, the Islamists, or 'Islamo- nationalists',
are simply non- state actors, welling up from below, who have assumed
that duty themselves, with jihad, terror and suicide substituting for
the conventional warfare which decadent Arab armies are incapable of
waging. 'They are meeting the expectations of the Arabs,' said one Palestinian
scholar, 'offering resistance with pride, without fear of self-sacrifice',
and profiting from a climate in which, another said, 'the Arab masses'
greatest joy has become to see Bush's reverses piling up, the US invasion
of Iraq becoming ever more painful.'
Al-Qaeda, quintessential
expression of pan-Arab, pan- Islamic outlook and action, is the most
fearsome of profiteers. America has turned Iraq, where it had no presence
before, into the perfect arena for conducting the pan-Islamic struggle
against the western infidel and the 'apostate' Arab order. Lebanon's
Hizbullah is strictly local in origin and membership, and, being Shia,
at odds with al-Qaeda's fierce Wahhabite orthodoxy, but it enjoys greater
region-wide prestige than al-Qaeda, because it confined itself to fighting
-- and besting -- Israel in a classical guerrilla war which few but
Israelis and America classified as terrorist. Like the Palestinians,
it now regards Iraqi resistance as accessory to its own. Increasingly
accused by the Israelis of planning, directing and financing Islamist
resistance in the occupied territories, and of accumulating a vast new
firepower of its own, it is ready and waiting for a cross-border conflagration;
but it wants Israel to start it, so that its re-entry into the jihadist
arena is legitimate as well as dramatic. Iraq cannot but hasten the
day. Last week, breaking new ground, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah
told a throng of 200,000, garbed in the white shrouds of martyrdom,
that the struggle against Israel and America was one, and that he only
awaited the call from his Iraqi brethren to join the latter. Iraq and
Palestine, and the grassroot passions they arouse, also explain another
phenomenon: the growth of seemingly almost random, spontaneous acts
of terror, like the anti-Western rampage in the Saudi town of Yanbu,
or a mysterious shoot-out in Damascus.
A triumph for Islamists,
American failure will give free rein to another, no less disruptive
category of non-state forces. Some are Islamist too, and hostile to
the US, but their defining characteristic is that they are ethnic or
sectarian, and hostile to each other. With his Sunni minority rule,
Saddam went further than any other Arab regime in the ruthless exploitation
of confessionalism. That meant that any 'democracy' that replaced him
had to be confessional too: a system in which all the country's communities
felt that they had a representative stake. Hence the careful allocation
of seats on the American-appointed Interim Governing Council. Success
in this could have led in time to a higher form of democracy. But failure
will lead back to tyranny -- or, more likely, to anarchy and civil war,
Lebanese-style. Thirteen years ago the Arab regimes, with American help,
finally put out the Lebanese fire that threatened to consume them all.
But Iraq will be a Lebanon writ large. So big and pivotal a country
at inter-communal loggerheads with itself will infect an entire region,
and not just Arab parts of it, replete with potential conflicts of the
kind. Unprecedented Kurdish disturbances in Syria in March, stirrings
among the Shia communities of (the Gulf) Kuwait, Bahrain and the oil-rich
eastern province of Saudi Arabia, are but premonitory tremors of convulsions
to come.
The flow of oil
and the security of Israel are fundamentals of US policy in the Middle
East. As its soaring price portends, the spread of the Iraqi contagion
to the Gulf will pose a real threat to the first. As for Israel, American
debacle in Iraq will be very disturbing indeed. Israelis already voice
well-founded fears that the US public will come to blame them for pushing
their government, via the neo-cons, into catastrophic misadventure,
that America's will to stand by Israel whatever the cost to its interests
in the Arab world will be grievously impaired, and that anti- American
forces in the region will redouble their efforts to make the cost unbearable.
How the likes of Sharon would react, against Arabs and Palestinians,
to the mere hint of abandonment by Israel's indispensable superpower
patron will become one of the most pregnant questions in a Middle East
where the worst is yet to come.