Bush has thrown open Pandora's
box in a paradise for international terrorists
2003
has been
a crucial year for the Middle East, with war in
Iraq and the continuing
intifada in Israel. The Guardian's
acclaimed commentator on the region
assesses what
happened, what it means, and where it might lead next year
By David
Hirst
The
Guardian, UK, December 23, 2003 - This was
the year
the Middle East became the undisputed, tumultuous centre of global
politics. When, at dawn on March 20 the US and its British ally went to
war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, they were intervening in the region
on such a scale that Arabs everywhere compared the invasion, in its
potential geopolitical significance, to that seminal upheaval of the
last century: the collapse of the Ottoman empire. That led to the
arbitrary carve-up of its former Arab provinces by the European
colonial powers and, in 1948, to the loss of one of them, Palestine, to
the Israeli settler-state.
In
Arab
eyes, it was a final mortal blow to the so-called "Arab system" through
which the component parts of the greater Arab "nation" collectively
strove to protect the territorial integrity and basic security of the
whole. To the disgust and shame of the Arab peoples, it was not merely
incapable of preventing the conquest and occupation of what, properly
governed, would have been one of the most powerful and prosperous Arab
lands, it was largely complicit in it.
It
simply
stood and watched as the world's only superpower embarked on its hugely
ambitious, neo-colonial enterprise: to make Iraq the fulcrum for
reshaping the entire region and, with regime change and
"democratisation", cure it of those sicknesses - political and social
oppression, religious extremism, corruption, tribalism and economic
stagnation - that had turned it into the main threat to the existing
world order. It did not formally envisage a full-scale redrawing of
state frontiers, but it looked as though by an inexorable momentum that
might come to pass.
It
was
seen as a second Palestine, not so much because it was a foreign
conquest of another Arab country, but because, via the Bush
administration's neo-conservative hawks, it was at least as much
Israeli in inspiration and purpose as it was American. The mighty blow
struck in Baghdad would so weaken other Arab regimes that the
Palestinians, more than ever bereft of Arab support, would submit to
that full-scale Israeli subjugation and dispossession of all but a last
pitiful fragment of their original homeland.
This
grandiose enterprise began well enough. The rottenest regime of a
rotten Arab order collapsed swiftly as expected. Within three weeks the
Americans were in Baghdad and an American tank teamed up with a
jubilant crowd in the symbolic act of toppling Saddam's statue in
Firdaous Square. On May 1 a triumphant, flight-suited George Bush
strutted aboard an aircraft carrier to declare major combat operations
at an end.
Fateful
But
America
was to find no weapons of mass destruction, demolishing the prime
official war aim. More seriously, the goodwill it had earned from most
Iraqis for overthrowing the despot soon began to dissipate amid the
evidence of just how ill-equipped the US was for the "nation-building"
that was to follow. There developed a competition, fateful for the
success or failure of the whole enterprise, between a majority of
Iraqis, who for all their growing exasperation with the occupation
wanted it to remain until a healthy, independent Iraqi order could take
its place, and a minority who wanted to end it by any means.
By
June
the first American soldiers began to die. The resistance begun by
Saddam loyalists widened to other groups, overwhelmingly Sunni, until
by October the CIA concluded that 50,000 people were active in it. The
US military responded with drastic methods - collective punishments,
massive firepower, demolitions and razings - that could not but incite
a greater militancy.
In
the
wider Arab world, a virulent anti-Americanism was not offset, as it was
for the Iraqis, by a hatred of Saddam and the fear of his possible
return. So it warmed to the Iraqi resistance more than most Iraqis did
- and spawned militants of its own who were drawn to this new arena
from which to conduct their jihad against the enemy of Islam and
Arabism.
As
they
struck at almost any target, Iraqi, American or foreign, military,
civilian or philanthropic, the itinerant suicide bombers also exploded
another pretext for the war: that Saddam had been a partner with Osama
bin Laden, and that overthrowing him would deal a critical blow to
international terror.
"By
pretending that Iraq was crawling with al-Qaida," the New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd put it, "Bush officials created an Iraq crawling
with al-Qaida." And not just Iraq: since the invasion the terrorists
have struck in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Turkey, mostly at the expense
of other Muslims.
Nor
was
there any sign of the beneficent effect which such radical intervention
in one great zone of Middle East crisis was supposed to have on the
other one. The long-established linkage between Iraq and Palestine
reasserted itself but with the new occupation interacting with the old
one in ways that further complicated the whole neo-imperial grand
design.
Ariel
Sharon staged Israel's first air raid on Syria in 30 years. Ostensibly
it was retaliation for a particularly atrocious Palestinian bombing,
but it was also a blatant bid to cast Israel as an operational ally of
the US in the "reshaping" of the region and the punishing of that other
Ba'athist dictatorship which, in the neo-conservative scheme of things,
was next in line for the Saddam treatment.
Then
it
was revealed that in Iraq US forces were adopting counter-insurgency
techniques the Israelis had taught them. This could only deepen the
Arab and Muslim conviction that what the American soldiers were now
doing to Iraqis was what the Israelis had been doing to Palestinians
for the past 50 years. Resistance in one place could only inspire and
reinforce it in the other.
Fiasco
In
this
unfavourable climate Mr Bush sought to launch the long-stalled "road
map" for peace, but only at the price of casting the noblest of his
official war aims - "democracy for Arabia" - in a very curious
Israeli-tinted light. To try to supplant Yasser Arafat with the
Palestinians' new prime minister, the hapless Abu Mazen, was actually
to subvert democracy in one of the few Arab societies whose leader was,
more or less, its authentic electorally proven choice. This short-lived
fiasco foundered on Mr Arafat's obduracy, Mr Sharon's intransigence,
renewed suicide bombings by Hamas and the partisanship of the most
pro-Israeli US president ever, who was not going to risk the wrath of
his Jewish and rightwing Christian constituencies in the run-up to next
year's presidential election.
Likewise,
on the Iraqi front, becoming as it was the greatest potential threat to
Mr Bush's prospects of a second term, exalted foreign purpose fell
suddenly and flagrantly prey to the expediencies of domestic politics.
The capture of Saddam was indeed a timely public relations triumph. But
it seemed as likely to broaden the anti-American insurgency as to
diminish it, and thereby amplify the growing murmur that here was a new
Vietnam in the making.
In
the
closing weeks of 2003 Mr Bush and his lieutenants kept swearing that
America would stay the course "till the job is done", even as they
began casting about for plausible exit strategy. With the dexterity
that has marked the whole ideologically driven Iraqi enterprise from
the outset, they suddenly decided they would end the occupation and
transfer authority to an Iraqi government by next summer, reversing the
order of events they had formerly envisaged - giving real power to the
Iraqis only when they were truly ready for it.
This
new
Iraqi order would be sovereign and democratic, but the first thing it
would do would be to ask American troops to stay on to preserve that
sovereignty and democracy.
With
this
subterfuge, Mr Bush might just, as he apparently plans, manage to
declare "mission accomplished" on the eve of the presidential election.
But it would be remarkable if such an essentially US-installed
government, presiding over a hastily reconstructed army and police, was
able for long to master the maelstrom of colliding passions and
political interests which the removal of the tyranny has unleashed.
An
Iraq
at loggerheads with itself, and a paradise for international
terrorists, would spare none of the principal actors in this
geopolitical drama. Not the US, confronted as it then would be with the
classical colonial dilemma of whether to pull back or plunge yet
further in. Not the Arab world, whose regimes in their people's eyes
only differ from Saddam's in the degree of their degeneracy, nor
Israel.
The
danger is what Arab commentators habitually call "Lebanonisation" -
first of Iraq and then, by an inevitable contagion, the rest of the
eastern Arab world. Hizbullah, that most successful of anti-Israeli
insurgencies, grew out of a single failed and fratricidal state. What
might an entire failed region throw up?