CAMBRIDGE, Mass., 12 September 2003 — What is the most-wanted item on the list of “deliverables” drawn up by President George Bush for Pakistan’s Gen. Pervez Musharraf? A contingent of Pakistani troops to Iraq. Bush is likely to have repeated the request in his latest telephone conversation with the general.
The US is now desperate for foreign and especially Muslim troops in Iraq. But the refrain of the unwilling Muslim states has been: Not without UN command. Hence Washington’s decision to go to the Security Council.
But the Security Council cannot resolve the issues that are at the heart of the Muslim states’ unwillingness to send troops: the questions of the command and framework of operations in Iraq and of the mandate for the troops.
The US-authored draft resolution on Iraq currently under review does not address the command and the political framework issue.
Paragraphs 10 and 17 of the draft merely reaffirm the current political and military arrangements without addressing the concerns of other council members. Essentially the demand of the international community is to change the political framework so that it provides a realistic and definitive road map for transition from US occupation to Iraqi self-rule. The present resolution draft merely reinforces the logic of occupation.
The second question — the mandate for troops — is what exactly an international force is expected to do. In his first address since May, when he announced the end of the US war in Iraq, Bush ominously told the Americans: “Iraq is now the central front.”
Post-Saddam Iraq is the second “hub” of terrorism after Afghanistan, and like Afghanistan, Bush will “clean it up.” This “vision” of Iraq complicates matters for most Muslim countries. While no one condones terrorism, the US anti-terrorism agenda may mean that all Iraqi opponents of its occupation will be legitimate targets for its army.
Iraq is beginning to look like a second Afghanistan. US and European intelligence believe that the second-tier Al-Qaeda leadership is opening up a front in Iraq.
A State Department official quoted in a Sept. 6 Washington Post story said that “most intelligence agencies think Baathists are behind the current violence. Yet Rumsfeld’s men are tutored differently. On the ground US forces will conduct a deep and desperate search for Al-Qaeda. All Iraqi resistance to US occupation can only be delegitimized through the Al-Qaeda label.”
US intelligence-based media reports maintain that US occupation of Iraq has propelled another trans-national Muslim outrage. The Egyptian arrest of 23 men heading to fight US troops included Bangladeshis, Turks, Indonesians and Malays. Others prevented from going to Iraq have included German Muslims, Algerians, and Tunisians with Italian passports. Their numbers are small but they are crucial for what they signal — anger and resentment of the weak and the violated.
Ironically, as Bush seeks to enlist the support “of other nations for a free Iraq”, various Iraqi and now evidently transnational Muslim groups are coalescing to resist US occupation. Unless the framework of the occupation is changed, these numbers may grow.
Even if under international pressure the US occupation framework does change so that the emphasis is on the Iraqi people and it is genuinely supported by a development and security framework under the aegis of the UN, the resistance will continue.
Pakistan, for its part, already has its hands full having to handle the bitter blowback of the Afghan jihad. Yesterday’s blue-eyed boy of the anti-Soviet world, Pakistan was praised for organizing the “international jihad” bank-rolled by the Americans and the British. Today it is everyone’s favorite punching bag. Internally too we have suffered. If we have learned our lessons, we must avoid partnership in the latest “jihad”: an American battle against terrorism.
