The height of George Bush’s power can be measured very easily, by the depth of Arab impotence. Bush is as potent as Arab governments are impotent. The two are directly related.
It can be argued that the major lesson that the United States learned from Vietnam was to choose its enemies with far more care than it chose its friends. This is an important lesson. It took ten years after the Vietnam defeat in 1973 for America to mobilize again, when Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of tiny and inconsequential Grenada in 1983. He then took on Libya in 1986, but only from the air, and for some 24 hours. Attention was also paid to the local parish: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama. But there was nothing significant until Saddam Hussein, an American ally till that moment, offered an opportunity by occupying Kuwait. America mobilized the world against Iraq, and then sent a bill; the world paid up, because what Saddam had done was so manifestly wrong. Bill Clinton’s adventurism was totally airborne, and always pinned to a moral cushion, whether it went right, as in Yugoslavia (1999) or it went awry, as in Sudan and Afghanistan (1998).
George Bush is a soft-target war-maker. He would never have brought America from the air to the ground without carefully measuring cost and consequence. He will never go to war against North Korea, which advertises its weapons of mass destruction, since that would take him into China’s zone of influence. Critical to Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was his analysis of the Arab world in general and Saddam Hussein in particular. He understood a few facts about the Arab world that are unarguable.
First, all pretense to Arab unity is a sham. If the Arabs do nothing about the merciless pounding of Palestinians, whose cause would be obvious to the blind, delivered daily and in full view of international media, then there is no likelihood of Arab governments working together to protect established states. This situation has been brought about because virtually every Arab country is either under an archaic regime that needs Western support to sustain itself; or is burdened by an oligarchy that has long outlived its utility, assuming that army regimes ever had any utility in a modern environment. It is unsurprising therefore that not a single Arab country in the bonfire area, barring Egypt, can claim to have any semblance of a national defense system, and Egypt has been purchased by the annual transfer of billions of dollars in aid in reward for its compromise with Israel during the Carter-Sadat-Begin era.
Most of the Arab world has virtually handed over its defense to powers that control their oil, and never paused to consider the irony. Those Arab governments that did not mesh into this pattern, were slowly squeezed into stagnation or decay. This was made easier by the fact that Arab nations, even after their oil wealth explosion, have made barely any attempt to industrialize. A region that cannot create consumer products can hardly hope to develop an indigenous defense industry. Instead, local elites thought they had entered the modern world because they could import office stationery and fill their cities with luxury car dealerships and McDonald’s franchises.
Given such welcome conditions all that George Bush needed was an excuse, and he picked one up from the nearest trash can, those famous weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration once claimed that such weapons existed on some 14,000 sites. The war is over without any such weapons having been used; Saddam Hussein and his government have vanished (rather literally), and there is still no sight of any such weapon. Maybe the wags are right when they point out that the only weapon of mass destruction discovered during the war was called CNN. CNN did a very effective job in damaging the credibility of mass media.
There is said to be despair among Arabs at the sight of Marines giving orders from Saddam’s palaces (which have suddenly become useful, after being symbols of decadence for so long). Despair is another term for self-pity. Introspection might be a more appropriate response.
George Bush’s calculations have brought Iraq under the orders of a military regime headed by Gen. Tommy Franks and a civilian administration under Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. But his miscalculations may offer a significant opportunity for change beyond his comprehension.
In search of oil, construction contracts and the security of Israel, George Bush has created vacant space in Baghdad. He does not know what will fill this vacuum. Bush may have won a war but intellectually he is not significantly different from the man who could not remember Pervez Musharraf’s name before the elections that made him president. He wants to repeat Afghanistan, and place a Hamid Karzai prototype at the head of an obedient administration. The Iraqi Karzai is Ahmad Chalabi. Chalabi has not set foot in Iraq for 45 years, after he was involved in a bank fraud in Jordan. I do not know if Karzai has surrendered his American passport yet or not, and I suppose Chalabi will be another advocate for dual citizenship.
The anger against a Chalabi-Garner-Franks administration is already evident on the streets of Iraq. This does not equate to any sympathy for the Baath Party. Saddam’s excesses have destroyed the Baathists. Since cynicism is a natural outcome of dissent, some seemingly preposterous linkages are being made. There is certainly the extraordinary matter of a whole Cabinet that disappeared into thick air — the air was thick with American satellites and roving eyes and warheads. One television station has shown footage of Saddam alive after the heavy bombing that was meant to have killed him. How could he have vanished so neatly, and with his family, his colleagues and their relatives? The buzz originates from a banished past:
The allegation, repeated by American insiders now ready to talk, that Saddam Hussein was on the CIA payroll when a law student in Cairo. In 1963 the CIA’s Cairo bureau planned the coup that overthrew the pro-Soviet government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem in Baghdad. The agency was helpful again when Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr organized the internal putsch in 1968; Saddam took over from his protégé in 1979. Was there a last-minute deal between Saddam and the Americans in which four full Republican divisions disappeared instead of making a stand in Baghdad, thereby saving their own as well as American lives? No one knows, and perhaps no one will ever know for certain. But such whispers are the brushwood of new fires that seek to burn as fiercely against the despot as the invader.
The biggest miscalculation that George Bush made was to believe that the Shiites of Iraq would not be loyal to their nation. In a sense both Saddam and Bush miscalculated. Saddam thought he could mobilize support inside Iraq indefinitely for himself by confronting America. And Bush thought he could mobilize support inside Iraq for America by confronting Saddam. The facts were askance of perception in both cases. Paradoxically, by removing Saddam Hussein, George Bush may have released the Shiites from any ambivalence: The despot has gone, now the foreigner must leave. A demand is already being heard in Iraq, that Shiites and Sunnis must unite to confront foreign occupation. This will appear romantic to the hard-boiled, but Iraq is in ferment, and passion creates new equations. Those who dwell too strongly on the differences forget that for many centuries Persians and Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis harmonized well enough to create the infrastructure of the substantial empires that were ruled from Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo.
This confrontation between a resurgent Iraqi people, energizing along the way other Arabs, and the American alliance, is not inevitable, but it is difficult to see how it can be prevented, given the initial American impulses. Bush preferred to protect the Oil Ministry building while permitting the loot of Iraq’s priceless cultural heritage of over 170,000 pieces from 5,000 years of civilization. These were the memories of Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Parthian, Sassanid, Arab and Jewish culture and religion. The Baath Party may have been despotic, but they were not Taleban. Did Bush need to remind the world of an analogy that he must resent — the destruction of Baghdad’s cultural heritage by the Mongols?
Was any of this necessary? The Bush-Blair answer is to establish a Palestinian state, and Ariel Sharon has been requested, very politely, to start delivering. But Israel has already conveyed 14 objections to the famous Bush road map. That is for starters. Wars can be won in three or thirty days. The management of its consequences is a longer process. Bush and Blair may have noticed the deafening silence with which their victory has been greeted by the rest of the world. The cheering has been restricted to Washington and Tel Aviv. The moment may be on the side of the victors, but time could be on the side of the defeated.
Arab News Opinion 20 April 2003
