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Editorial: Grim news from Iraq
Tue Jul 15 16:15:03 2003
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Tuesday, July 15, 2003

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Editorial: Grim news from Iraq

Washington's liberal-imperialists need to go back to the drawing board. While President George Bush announced the end of combat operations in Iraq from the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, the war, by all indications, might just have begun. And this does not just relate to the rising militancy against US troops in the so-called Sunni Crescent, though that itself has killed nearly 50 US soldiers so far since Mr Bush's end-of-war speech. It also does not pertain, primarily, to the disillusionment of Iraqis with the Americans. Neither is it merely about growing lawlessness, long queues for gas, scarcity of everyday commodities and so on. The real war relates to Iraqi nationalism, which is more than the sum total of the parts that make for chaos in that country. Indeed, it is the very product of the success of the American enterprise and therefore is likely to pose the greatest threat to its perpetuation.

There is no merit in quibbling over whether the Bush administration went into Iraq to free it from the clutches of a dictator and establish democracy. Even if democracy were a ruse to legitimise invasion, the whole enterprise still boils down to - if for nothing else, than to establish a contrast between what Iraq was under Saddam Hussein and what it should be post the US physical presence. But while it is easy to theorise about liberal imperialism even in a post-colonial world, making that agenda stick in real terms is not easy, as Washington has begun to learn. Further, how does one tackle nationalism in a country actually made up of contending sub-national, ethno-sectarian and ethno-linguistic groups, gelled artificially by an authoritarian regime?

Paul Bremer, Washington's civilian administrator for Iraq, has postponed the setting up of an Iraqi interim administration. He has also told the US military to crack down on the bands of roving Saddam fedayeen, Wahhabis, former Ba'athists and other elements opposed to the US presence who are attacking and killing US troops. This is the first acceptance of the fact that democracy may after all not be the best thing for Iraq at the moment and any empowerment, without creating the necessary conditions for it, could result in what is now famously described as 'illiberal democracy'.

What does this mean for the United States? For one thing, it should cure Washington of its hubris that the world witnessed in the run-up to the war on Iraq. As Eric Hobsbawm, the great historian, recently wrote, "The world is too complicated for any single state to dominate it". Besides, as many observers have perceived, the United States, while remaining militarily strong, may be getting into localised conflicts with diminishing "assets" on other fronts. This means only one thing: if the United States wants peace in this world, it needs to embrace, rather than shed, multilateralism; and it needs to chalk out an equitable world-system. In other words, idealism, long the bane of realism, may actually come to define it. This is the real lesson of the Iraq war. And it should be reason enough for the US establishment to put the brakes on the misplaced grandiloquence of Washington's neo-conservatives.

That said, it also needs to be clarified that it would be a bigger mistake for the United States to get out of Iraq and leave it to the contending groups. As the public mood in that country sours, Washington needs to co-opt the rest of the world, especially Muslim countries, to share in the project of rebuilding Iraq. Any rising conception of US presence as neo-imperialism or, worse, as part of the clash of civilisations perception, will threaten the project of returning Iraq to normalcy and integrating it with the rest of the world. Washington has a tendency of chopping the world up into small pieces in order to grasp it. That is dangerous. A case in point is its rhetoric on Iran. That country is just emerging from the evolution following the 1979 Revolution. Its reformists and moderates are for real, not phony ex-pats returning to Iran atop US tanks. Pressuring Iran because of the remaining clique of hard-liners means reversing the evolution. There is a nexus between Iran and Iraq but not of the kind upon which the US is embarked. And when Washington talks of the Weapons of Mass Destruction capability, the Bush administration needs to remember its contribution to unraveling the arms control regime and its resort to use of force. It also needs to factor in Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East.

If someone were prepared to put the pieces together, much of the confusion would dissipate. It would not help matters at the micro level per se but by putting things in the right perspective it would help create a system more amenable to good order. We do not need to marshal arguments to prove that the Palestinian problem forms part of the larger picture. President Bush has already invested in a roadmap. He cannot now allow Ariel Sharon to sabotage it. But that is exactly what Mr Sharon appears to be doing. None of this is going to help Washington and it will certainly not help matters in Iraq. *