NEW DELHI, 10 November 2002 — There is one opinion poll which is totally accurate, without any margin of error, devoid of any imponderable variable, and above criticism. It is called an election. There can be no two opinions, as it were, about the results of an election.
The history of elections can rarely have seen a period such as the one we witnessed in the last few weeks. In the last six weeks or so, all the three names dominant in the news have won elections: Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and George Bush.
All right, the elections are hardly alike. In Saddam’s Iraq, a second opinion has always been fundamentally injurious to your health. But for some reason the world’s most famous dictator found it necessary to throw some kind of moral veil over his regime with an election that gave him 100 percent of the vote. This was only a marginal improvement upon the past, since Iraqis had traditionally insisted on supporting him with 99 percent of the vote, so Saddam’s popularity in effect increased by only one percent.
But I suppose this complete national unanimity behind the dictator was meant to send a message to someone somewhere that you messed around with Saddam at your own peril. That someone somewhere could not be the Iraqi. The citizens of that unfortunate nation got their message some two decades ago. Was that message meant for George Bush? If so, it should have been formed differently.
A 100 percent vote is too silly an idea to travel anywhere. Saddam may have friends in the West who are not enthusiastic about the Bush Doctrine for Iraq, but that is not because Brother Hussein deserves to win the Nobel Prize for both Peace and Literature.
Both George Bush and Osama won legitimate elections. Bush’s victory was obvious, and will have substantive consequences for the world. His political campaigns of the past year have created a particular mindset in a majority of the Americans, and the rewards are evident. Osama and 9/11 created a defined and powerful enemy for America, its first real enemy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It is always more useful if the enemy has a face, and as long as Osama’s face was visible on the screen a mass mobilization of the American mind was easier. But after the victory in Afghanistan Al-Qaeda disappeared into the shadows and Osama went into oblivion: The enemy became an idea rather than an army. Bush transferred the American angst very adroitly towards a face it could identify, that of Saddam.
There were many associate advantages. Osama was an ideological and elusive opponent. This did not make him any less real; what could be more terrifyingly real than 9/11? But America is also a superpower with economic interests and the incumbent White House is focused on energy resources to an unprecedented degree, for reasons both national and personal. Oil is never far away from the White House; but never has oil got this close either.
Where Osama evokes a visceral and emotional response, Saddam is the more rational enemy. A regime change in Baghdad would mean a profitable shift in the manipulation of vast reserves of energy. It would also complete a chain that would extend direct American control from the Caucasus to Kazakhstan.
The United States takes its role as policeman of the world seriously. It has some half a million troops stationed across the globe, from traditional post-World War II centers like South Korea and Germany to new points like Georgia, where some 200 Special Operations soldiers were deployed earlier this year.
Why Georgia? And why is Russia so ready to pay a heavy price for the continued occupation of Chechnya, Georgia’s neighbor?
Both Georgia and Chechnya actually have fairly limited oil and gas reserves, but both small regions are essential routes for the pipelines that take the huge supplies of the Caspian basin to Turkey and Europe. The Russian pipeline, from Baku to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, goes through Chechnya.
Competing US companies want their pipelines to pass through Georgia and Armenia on their way to the West. The new American presence across Central Asia — from a small deployment of 300 troops on the Chinese border in Kyrgyzstan, bound to increase, to a more comfortable 1,000 troops in Uzbekistan, keeping local governments in check with their presence and always an excuse for escalation if attacked — is an assertion that the United States has placed a marker on the next energy market.
Iraq is the odd man, or odd power, out. It was not meant to be so. Saddam was quite a favorite of the American establishment when he provoked Iran into a long, deadly and ruinous war in the Eighties.
As is well known, Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney is an old hand at making money out of Saddam’s Iraq. But Saddam, fooled into complacency by the record of American support, made the dangerous mistake of having ambitions of his own, that came into direct conflict with the plans of his erstwhile friends.
The invasion and seizure of Kuwait tipped the balance in his favor, and that tip created unstable equations. Since then Saddam has, cynically, repositioned himself into a leader of the Muslim street and a pillar against neo-colonialism.
The power of this reposition was first demonstrated during the war for the liberation of Kuwait, when, in 1992, despite being on the wrong side of both sense and morality, Saddam received surging support from the bazaars of the Muslim world. The present, building confrontation is heavy with various kinds of irony. On the one side, the interests of America and Iran have begun to merge, leading to cautious, and silent strategic cooperation between these antagonists of the last quarter century. Do not expect a dramatic makeover of relations, but do not underestimate Iran’s desire for a regime change in Baghdad either.
Iran’s reasons are not the same as America’s. Iran has long believed that the Sunni minority of Iraq has denied the Shiite majority its due political rights.
But there is a greater irony at play, which has not been recognized sufficiently. Saddam has serious competition on the Muslim street and bazaar.
His name no longer evokes the emotional appeal of a Saladin giving a call for a legitimate jihad against the foreign Crusaders. That space has been taken over by Osama.
Saddam’s Saladin-equity has been diluted by Osama. Saddam is now perceived as what he really is: Another dictator interested primarily in the protection of the wealth and power of his own family, clique and extended circle of exploiters. The mystique that arose suddenly in 1992 has faded. This will help Bush. In the short run.
There is after all the third victor. Osama was the real winner of the fractured elections in Pakistan, if only because he was, for the first time, a legitimate candidate for power through a popular ballot. The alliance of religious groups which won from Balochistan and the Frontier, on the borders of Afghanistan, campaigned in the name of Osama.
Here was proof that a new hero had arrived, and taken his followers from a lost corner of the political arena to a point where their leader could dream of becoming prime minister with the help of a secular force like the Pakistan People’s Party. How long this hero will remain in public affections is impossible to say. But even if it proves ephemeral tomorrow, it is a fact today.
There is little doubt that Bush has radicalized Muslims into anti-American postures. The sweeping victory of an Islamist party in secular Turkey is a dramatic instance of the emerging mood. This does not mean that the Islamist party has become an Osama clone, but it has been boosted by the changes taking place in the Muslim mind across the globe.
Change is never equal. It must do its work on existing conditions and not all conditions are equally receptive to it. A forest may sprout in one climate and only a bloom in another, but you know that the seed has taken root.
The only certain thing is uncertainty. No one knows the consequences of minor plays, leave alone something as provocative as a war between Anglo-American forces and Iraq.
No one knows the meaning of either victory or defeat. Uncertainty is a swamp with many sleeping crocodiles and alligators.
The United States of America is passing through a phase of its history when it is too powerful militarily to be defeated by anyone, except itself. More empires die of suicide than defeat. As America negotiates its way through the swamp of uncertainty, it might remember that the world may have but a single superpower left, but it has more than one opinion.
