Winning minds (everybody has given up on the “hearts” part of it already) is much on Americans’ minds these days, to wit, how to win the trust of the 25 million people who inhabit the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and whom architects of the war in Iraq were convinced would line the streets of their capital to welcome American troops as liberators; and to win the trust of the Arab world whose people have traditionally looked to Washington for an equitable resolution of the Palestine conflict.
To win that trust, Washington needs to set a date and set an example — set a date to pull out of Iraq and an example of evenhandedness in Palestine.
Sloganeering, about how the US “will stay the course” in Iraq, that “failure is not an option” and that under no circumstances will American troops “cut and run,” will not cut it. Today American policy there is in crisis as American troops face not only a violent insurgency that has grown increasingly brazen but an insurgency that that appears to elicit the support of growing numbers of ordinary Iraqi folk.
Certainly the bomber who killed the head of the country’s Governing Council on Monday highlighted the contention of critics that the country is unmanageable. Six weeks before the transfer of limited powers to a new Iraqi quasigovernment, one wonders what kind of self-rule is being handed over. From the outset, the success of the American mission in Iraq was conditioned on the assumption that Iraqis themselves were convinced that the American presence in their country was necessary for its future prosperity and political stability.
That assumption is now in doubt as public polls show that as many as 80 percent of ordinary citizens see Americans as occupiers, not liberators, and consider themselves worse off today than under Saddam Hussein. Unless the US manages in the short run to reverse this alienation against its presence in the country, it cannot stay the course, failure will be the only option, and cutting and running — perhaps in a manner evocative of that helicopter scene on top of the American Embassy in Saigon in the spring of 1975 — will be inevitable. And it will become inevitable if and when Iraqis insist that Americans should get out.
To avoid that dreadful scenario, with its apocalyptic vision of a resultant civil war, the US should tell Iraqis up front that not only will American troops “leave when asked,” but that a date will be set for them to pull out — ideally, following the election of a full-fledged Iraqi government, and the drafting of a new constitution, in 2005, even if both were not to pan out to Washington’s liking.
The long and short of it is that you cannot impose your will on another people, regardless of how much time you have, how much effort you put in, and how much cost in human life you sacrifice. This is a lesson that the leaders of the Israeli entity in Palestine are yet to learn, 37 years after the fact.
All of which brings us to how the people of the Occupied Territories, inhabiting a land in daily agony and despair, have, along with their brethren elsewhere in the Arab world, lost their trust in the US as an honest mediator. The vindictive devastation that Zionist occupation troops are inflicting on the Rafah region in Gaza resulting in the demolition of dozens of homes and the destruction of property, leaving behind them a concrete moonscape pockmarked with piles of rubble, would not have been made possible without the massive support that Washington had extended Tel Aviv over the last 37 years.
America has master plans to introduce democracy and human rights to the Middle East. Well, it should set an example of practice of these lofty notions by embracing a genuinely even-handed policy in Palestine. Since to date it has not, why then should we trust Washington’s intentions anywhere else in our part of the world?
The United States wants to do it its imperial way, and only its imperial way, because it is a superpower. Seen from that commanding nub, Palestinians will be a free people, Iraq will be rebuilt, and the Arab world reformed only through a violent transfusion of those social, political and ideological energies that animate the American temperament. Well, it ain’t gonna happen that way.
