One thing administration officials and foreign policy intellectuals, along with that cabal of neocons at the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board (DPB), must be pondering quietly at this time is the wisdom of the American colloquialism: “Always make your words sweet, moderate and palatable, because you never know when you might have to eat them.”
As the conflict’s cost, duration and dangers become more apparent each day, these folks must be wondering how they could have been so very wrong.
Consider how American officials, early on in the game, repeated the refrain that as soon as war was launched, Saddam Hussein’s troops would “step aside,” and that the fighting would last mere “weeks, not months.” Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board and top honcho among the neocons, claimed that the Iraqi president “rules by fear” and thus “support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse after the first whiff of gunpowder.”
Another member of the DPB, Kenneth Adelman, went out on a limb saying, “I believe demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq will be a cakewalk.” How so? “Let me give simple, responsible reasons: 1) It was a cakewalk last time; 2) They’ve become much weaker; 3) We’ve become much stronger; and 4) Now we’re playing for keeps.”
And finally this from Vice President Dick Cheney: “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. The streets of Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.”
Last Friday they were greeted by the first suicide bomber, and now the military establishment is asking for an additional 100,000 troops and saying the war will extend well into the summer. The blitzkrieg that was to bring about a quick triumph has not taken place. Meanwhile, British troops are bogged down around Basra, engaging the very Shiite forces that, we were assured, would welcome them as liberators, forces whose leaders have reportedly enjoined them to “defend the Iraqi homeland, your dignity, religion and holy places from the attacks by evil invaders against the lands of Islam.”
What has American superpowerdom wrought!
Sure, before this mess is resolved, a lot of innocent Iraqi civilians will have been killed and along with them, a lot of young Americans who had joined the army not to kill Arabs, but for the golden opportunity to get a free education, acquire vocational skills, and go on to lucrative careers in the private sector. These kids do not know neocon ideas from a hole in the wall. Take 20-year old Jessica Lynch, one of the first casualties of the war, who hails from the town of Palestine, in West Virginia.
And just as sure, a lot of mayhem will be unleashed on Iraq as the occupation sets about subduing a country of 24 million people who are already asking: “And who the devil are Americans anyhow to invade our independent nation and regroup it in response to their interests at this late date in postcolonial times?”
But the most daunting problem that this war will create — whose end result will be the poisoning of wells between East and West — is how this imperial foray will be viewed by future generations of Arabs.
Count all you want how many will die in this war, and contemplate all you want how the destruction of their country will affect the hearts, minds and lives of ordinary Iraqis, but consider above all how long it will take for America, in the coming decades, to convince Arabs that the war against Iraq was not a brazen war of occupation, with imperial underpinnings, and that they should not feel a bad taste in their mouths every time they uttered the name of the United States.
If Bush, who clearly has been given bum advice by his team of neocons — a group of men hellbent on going out there to “get the gooks” — is in the business of making enemies around the world, then he has certainly cornered the market.
The question — and I know of none more urgent — that decent American folk should ask now is this: Has this foolhardy resort to the use of American steel to sort out international disputes so wantonly resurrected that archetypal mistrust between East and West? With the exception of Britain’s Tony Blair, European leaders, who repeatedly warned of the uncertainties with which this war would be fraught, can be seen to nod.
Arab News Features 3 April 2003
