It took a young, 31-year old cleric to realize the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority’s worst nightmare in Iraq: an uprising by the Shiite majority population, a violent uprising that began last Sunday, just 88 days before the scheduled transfer of sovereignty to a new indigenous government.
This came close on the heels of the gruesome spectacle last Wednesday of a cheering mob of Iraqis in Fallujah mutilating the bodies of four US contract workers, which shocked Americans and predictably evoked a similar 1993 mob scene of a US soldier’s body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, that finally resulted in the withdrawal of American forces from Somalia. Beyond being morally unacceptable and Islamically forbidden, the wanton savagery in Fallujah served only to reinforce the worst images that bigots have of Arabs as a people breaking the rules of all civilized behavior.
The US response to the Shiite uprising, led by Moqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army, was to “act quickly and with overwhelming force,” and the same could be said of the response in Fallujah, where Marines mounted an aggressive operation against Sunni insurgents based there.
True, the US finds itself in a fine mess in Iraq, but it is not likely to turn tail, as it had done in Somalia, and leave the country. This time around, more than American influence and prestige are on the line — what is on the line here is no less than Washington’s grand international strategy.
Call it the “Fallujah moment” if you wish, a shocking reminder that US forces are waging a “war after the war,” as some analysts have come to refer to the fact that Americans continue to die in Iraq, a year after President Bush declared hostilities over, with more than 600 dead and another 3,400 wounded. And no one believes that the curtain will fall on this drama, or that the human suffering of Iraqis will end, any time real soon.
Whether or not the US should have gone to Iraq in the first place — whether or not the administration, in other words, should have indulged the neocons’ fantasy about Iraqis cheering American forces as true liberators — it is there now, and Washington knows of the costs to the US of a precipitous withdrawal: the beginning of the end of the American imperium, since never again will it be able to project its power profile around the world again.
And like it or not, unilateralism will remain the cornerstone of Washington’s relations with the outside world for many years to come, whoever is in the White House.
After the end of the Cold War, the US had the option of running the show as the only superpower around — expecting other nations to get out of the way — or accepting the loss of influence that would result from stepping back, shedding some of its international responsibilities, and working multilaterally with others. It went with the former.
Ironically, this supremacist projection of power does not have deep roots in the American national character or in American ideological traditions. In keeping with the admonitions of the Founding Fathers, America had kept to itself as a young nation, with one exception: when it flirted, temporarily, with brazen imperialism in the 1890s. The times have changed.
Today, America the unilateralist finds itself globally engaged almost by default, bearing the burdens that come with global hegemony. And especially after Sept. 11, support for unilateralism runs strong with the American public and the American elite.
In Iraq things are slipping out of control, for it is unclear how insurgents can be brought to heel and the mayhem to an end without some serious fighting going on between coalition forces and rebels, the latter armed, in addition to heavy weapons, with their martyrdom narrative. And it is equally unclear whether the conflict may finally descend into ethnic and sectarian conflict very much resembling civil war.
None of us in the Arab world want to see that happen in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, anymore than we want to experience again that sense of horror, disgust and revulsion we did at what happened in Fallujah last week.
