Yesterday’s dramatic sweep by US forces into central Baghdad has to be seen as much in terms of psychology as military tactics. The Americans hope to shock Saddam Hussein’s regime into collapse. The message was that they can move in and out of the capital at will; the Iraqi government is no longer in sole possession. Whether the tactic succeeds, it is no longer a question of if the regime collapses, but when. There is no way that it is going to survive. The only question is how soon it falls — and that depends on how capable the Iraqi forces in the capital remain. Their efforts, brave though they are, appear to be completely disorganized, like the mindless thrashings of a dying beast — dangerous but ultimately doomed.
Inevitably the issue that now begins to dominate is the battle for Iraqi hearts and minds. It has taken on an urgency that was absent a few days ago. In war, there are winners and there are losers — although differentiating between the two can sometimes be difficult after the event; the Nazis and Marshall Tojo’s militarist regime in Tokyo were the losers in World War II, but by the 1970s it looked as if the Germans and Japanese with their dynamic, reconstructed economies had been the real victors. What will be crucial after this war, if Iraqis are to be won over, is that that they should feel that they too are winners, like the Germans and Japanese before them. For that two things are imperative. First they should feel that the new Iraq belongs to them and no one else — not the Americans, not the British, not the UN, not even other Arabs. Secondly, they should feel materially better off. That will not be so difficult after 12 years of UN sanctions, but this is about far more than food in the shops and medicines in the hospitals. It is about Iraq prospering as never before. It could happen if the US, the EU and others instigated an Iraqi Marshall Plan. The country has the material resources (especially water), the infrastructure (despite the bombing), the education and skills, and a work ethic that could transform it into both the breadbasket and the workshop of the Arab world.
But politics have to be part of this. If it appears to Iraqis that they have exchanged dictatorship for occupation, no amount of prosperity will soften their bitterness and anger. On the wider Arab front, there will be similar anger. Nothing raises Arab hackles more furiously than occupation. It is the dirty word in the Arab political dictionary. Arabs have had to fight it for centuries. Occupation is what Israel is all about, which is why the average Arab on the street is so implacably opposed to anything to do with Israel. Arabs will not tolerate the return of occupation elsewhere. Washington must accept Iraqi faces in the running of the country very quickly or reap the dire consequences of Iraq and an Arab world united in joint, implacable hostility toward it. There has to be an interim Iraqi-run administration at the soonest. It may be that American forces stay on in Iraq for a couple of years, as suggested by Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the exiled opposition National Iraq Congress leader and the man tipped to succeed Saddam Hussein; that is a different matter. But a US military administration will not do. It will backfire. It will provide the best recruitment drive anti-US terrorists have ever hand.
In which case, there will be no winners to this war at all. Thousands of lives will have been wasted for nothing. That will only make Arabs even more bitter.
