The Price Of Failure In Iraq
By David Hirst
05 June, 2004
Al-Ahram WeeklyIn 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.
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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.