President Bush has got a great deal for you. He’s selling the Brooklyn Bridge today, and it’s all yours for a bargain price. Interested? C’mon, what do you reckon?

Is the international community, including America’s Arab and European allies, going to fall for that scam — namely, that going to war against Iraq in order to topple Saddam Hussein, Washington’s bete noire there, is a great idea whose time has come, and, heck, what’s good for the United States is good enough for the rest of the world?

Let’s face it, the powerful, like the rich, are different from you and me: If nothing else, they have the resources to do what they darn well please, and that includes testing the illusion that their vision of reordering objective reality is easily recognizable.

If an invasion of Iraq is to come early next year, as some administration officials have all but stated, then there are a lot of hard questions that America’s allies, not just America itself, need to ask.

It is a given that US military forces can defeat Iraq, overthrow its regime and even capture and/or kill its head of state. All done before you can say Jack Robinson, as it were. That would be the easy part. But what of the day after? Do Americans have the stamina to stick around long enough to see a “stable, peaceful and democratic” society emerge from the ashes, their ostensible goal, or will they turn tail and leave behind a fractured nation with its many ethnic, sectarian and ideological factions competing, perhaps in a long civil war, for ascendancy?

If you, like me, lean toward the latter, that would be a tragic fate to inflict on the people of Iraq. That’s for starters. For then will come the geopolitical consequences of such a dreadful eventuality. Iraq clearly is not Bosnia or Afghanistan. What happens to and in the “Land Between the Rivers”, as the country is known, will be pivotal to Middle East politics, and thus world politics, for decades to come.

But even in the unlikely event that Washington’s intentions in Iraq are so benign as to mirror those in postwar Japan, where the US went in on a grand scale to rebuild the country’s government, politics and society in the American image, Arabs in general are not going to take kindly to unilateral military adventures in their part of the world, a la 1870s, where an imperial power sets out to swing its big ego around in order to oust a regime in its “sphere of influence” whenever that regime’s policies come into conflict with its interests.

Today, the American administration, with little or no support from its European friends, including its NATO ally, Turkey, and with Arabs incredulous at the brazenness of it all, still soldiers on, pitching its case to the international community for pre-emptive action.

Long on rhetoric and short on evidence, American officials have not yet produced anything convincing to justify their plans to go to war, beyond that tiresome refrain about “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam’s possession.

To be sure, there are clearer heads in government outside that circle of zealous militarists like the loquacious R. James Woolsey and the hawkish Donald H. Rumsfeld. The Washington Post reported on its front page last Sunday, for example, that “despite President Bush’s repeated bellicose statements about Iraq, many senior US military officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat and that the United States should continue its policy of containment rather than invade Iraq to force a change of leadership in Baghdad.” The reporter, Thomas E, Ricks, who had spent several weeks researching his piece, adds: “The senior officers’ position — that the risks of dropping a successful containment policy for a more aggressive military campaign are so great that it would be unwise to do so — was made clear in the course of several interviews with officials inside and outside the Pentagon.”

The risks are indeed great, just as the consequences are likely to be convulsive. It is clear that such a war could not be waged without destabilizing the entire Middle East or, as some experts fear, without those “weapons of mass destruction” — were they in fact to exist — being used, not from a calculated attack by Iraq, but from a US intervention that forces Saddam Hussein’s hand to use them, in a Samson-type posture, as a last resort, in a last stand.

Consider what happened during the Gulf War, when Baghdad fired missiles against Israel, whose leaders were prevailed upon not to respond by Washington, which promised to take care of the whole situation itself. What if, this time around, Saddam sends missiles flying into Israel as he had done then? Does anyone really believe that a war criminal like Ariel Sharon will sit on his hands as his predecessors had done in 1991? Will he have any qualms about nuking Baghdad and slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians?

The war that allied forces, including those from Arab countries, waged against Saddam’s regime 12 years ago was waged for compelling reasons: The Iraqi leader invaded a neighboring Arab state — a clear violation of the Arab League Charter, if nothing else — and stood poised to threaten the entire Gulf region, all the while refusing UN, Arab and Islamic mediation efforts, that stretched over a six-month period, to convince him that that kind of brinkmanship would be a disaster for his people, as indeed it turned out to be. The Iraqi leader, whose name translates into English as “the confrontationst,” did not budge. If there was then ever a casus belli, surely that was one.

Pre-emtive war, such as the one contemplated by the US today, however, is of a different order, bringing with it no rhyme and no reason, and fraught as it is with dangerous uncertainties. Moreover, it poses a clear and present danger to all Arabs, in the sense that, collaterally if not directly, an attack on Iraq will be an attack against them all.

President Bush, urged on by his hawkish advisors to go the whole nine yards, and cheered on by right-wing, ill-informed pundits from the op-ed and talk-show rafters, who thinks the whole adventure is going to be a piece of cake, would do well to read “The Prince,” Machiavelli’s seminal work on statesmanship, in which the renaissance theoretician showed how “wars begin when you wish, but do not end as you please.”

They never do. Nothing happens by chance, true, but then nothing happens wholly by design either. There is always a teleological hand out there active in the making of history.

Here’s a good book for George Bush’s beach bag this summer: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I say let’s drill a bit of humility into the man, don’t you? ([email protected])

1 August 2002