With Vice
President Dick Cheney describing the US presidential
election result as "a broad, nationwide victory",
secured on the platform of an unapologetically hardline
foreign policy, the world should expect more of the same
from President George W Bush and his administration in
the "war on terror" he declared on September 12.
Specifically, this means Bush, Cheney and their
coterie of neo-conservative ideologues will continue to
visualize the ill-defined "war on terrorism" in purely
military terms and deploy the Pentagon as their primary
instrument to win it. What that undoubtedly translates
into is an immediate assault on Fallujah in Iraq to
destroy a bastion of insurgents resisting the occupation
of their country, and ratcheting up pressure on Iran
under the rubric of "countering Tehran's nuclear arms
ambitions".
This will take place in a context in
which anti-American feeling, already rife in the Muslim
world, is rising yet again in the wake of a recent
report from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School
of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. It concluded
that some 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died between March
2003 (when the Bush administration with its British
allies invaded Iraq) and September 2004; that the
largest number of these deaths were caused by the
unleashed air power of the invading and then occupying
armies; and that women and children had suffered most.
In other words, the invaders may have managed to
kill up to a third as many Iraqis in a year-and-a-half
as president Saddam Hussein did in his 24-year
dictatorial rule. This comparison led the Riyadh-based,
pro-government Saudi Gazette to ask rhetorically, "If
this is a war on terror, then who are the terrorists and
who are the terrorized?"
The net result of
Washington's escalating confrontation with Muslim
countries and peoples under various guises will only be
to widen further the gulf that already exists between
the US and Muslims in general, paving the way for a
much-dreaded "clash of civilizations" that never need
have happened.
Attacking the fly on the horse
The Bush administration is clearly intent on
attacking Fallujah despite warnings from Ghazi al-Yawar,
interim president of Iraq, Kofi Annan, secretary general
of the United Nations, Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al-Faidhi
of the Association of Muslim Scholars, which represents
3,000 mosques - and a string of bombs that on Saturday
killed at least 34 people in Samarra, a northern city
recently "retaken" from the insurgents and now plagued
by fighting between the local police and the
American-trained Iraqi National Guard.
"I
completely disagree with people who see a need to decide
[Fallujah] through military action," Yawar said. "The
coalition's handling of this crisis is wrong. It is like
someone firing bullets at his horse's head because a fly
landed on it; the horse died and the fly went away."
In his letter to the American, British, and
Iraqi governments on October 31, Annan insisted the
escalation in violence that the taking of Fallujah
represented would be "very disruptive for Iraq's
political transition" and would also put civilian lives
at risk. He added that he wanted the UN to help prepare
for elections in Iraq in January, but feared that a
further rise in violence could disrupt the process. "I
have in mind not only the risk of increased insurgent
violence, but also reports of major military offensives
being planned by the multinational force in key
localities such as Fallujah," he wrote.
Faidhi,
on the other hand, was not so diplomatic. "If the US
invades Fallujah or any other city in Iraq, all the
clerics in Iraq will call for a boycott of the
election," he stated. Even if the phrase "all the
clerics" were to be qualified with "Sunni Arab", that
would still mean one-fifth of the Iraqi population
concentrated in the country's crucial areas.
A
majority of the residents of Baghdad, which accounts for
one-quarter of the national population of 25 million,
are Sunni. So, too, are the inhabitants of Mosul, the
second-largest city in Iraq, not to mention the
resistance cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.
It is
worth recalling what happened last April when the
Pentagon mounted an offensive against Fallujah in
retaliation for the murder of four Americans working for
a Pentagon security contractor. A four-week running
battle with the Iraqi insurgents ensued in which the
application of overwhelming force by the US Marines led
to nearly 600 Iraqi deaths, mostly civilian, and 65
American military fatalities. And yet during that period
the Pentagon kept reducing its demands in stages until
rebel demands that only Iraqis should police Fallujah
and that the Marines should withdraw to their bases were
essentially accepted.
In the glow of his
electoral victory, Bush is unlikely to grasp the
significance of this statement of Annan's in his letter:
"The threat or actual use of force not only risks
deepening the sense of alienation of certain
communities, but would also reinforce perceptions among
the Iraqi population of a continued military
occupation."
Long used to blocking unwelcome
reality, the president and his advisers are no more
likely to take note of what is happening on the ground
in Samarra, a city the US military reconquered from the
insurgents - for the third time - in early October, and
handed over to the interim Iraqi government. Interim
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi now holds Samarra up as a
model for the fate of other rebellious cities still to
be retaken, and yet it is an omen of what a military
approach to the Iraqi situation is likely to yield.
Forced underground but not out of town,
insurgents in Samarra, a predominantly Sunni settlement,
are now so well organized that last Saturday they were
able to set off four car-bomb explosives within minutes
of one another. On the government's side, fighting has
already broken out between the interim government's
National Guard, whose troops have been recruited from
Baghdad and predominantly Shi'ite areas of southern
Iraq, and the local police, a Sunni force, which is
heavily infiltrated by the insurgents or their
associates.
Since their arrival in the city, the
National Guardsmen have been breaking into homes without
warrants, arresting people arbitrarily, and firing into
the air at random. As for the local police, they extract
bribes from the Samarrans and cooperate with criminal
gangs. "We are now caught between an arbitrary authority
[the National Guard] and a corrupt authority [the
police]," was the way Hisham Nouri al-Samarrai, a tribal
leader on the local council, summed up the situation.
An attack on Fallujah, say most analysts, will
act as a catalyst, uniting disparate resistance groups
throughout Iraq. It is also expected to increase
resentment among Iraqis and swell insurgent ranks. It's
worth remembering that the siege of Fallujah in April
was the tipping point when insurgents - hitherto seen by
most Sunni Arabs as imbued with Islamic fundamentalism -
gained popularity. Fellow Sunnis, witnessing the carnage
the Americans had caused in the besieged city, shed
their fear of religious fanaticism and embraced the
resistance fighters and their cause. It also gained the
Sunni insurgents sympathy in a section of the Shi'ite
community that put nationalism above sectarian
affiliations. This time radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr has already expressed solidarity with the
insurgents in Fallujah with whom he shares the aim of
establishing an Islamic republic in Iraq.
Following tactics they had already developed in
Samarra in late September, most Iraqi and foreign
insurgents have already left Fallujah for other
destinations in the Sunni heartland. Those who have
stayed behind will undoubtedly fight to the death, and
the resulting heart-rending carnage - shown on numerous
Arab satellite channels - is sure to intensify
anti-American feelings not only among Iraqis but also
among the inhabitants of the surrounding Sunni-majority
countries of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey.
Finally, a pacified and half-razed Fallujah,
handed over to Allawi's interim government, will most
likely only replicate the recent history of Samarra.
No carrots, all stick In speeches
last week in Europe, Allawi singled out Iran among
Iraq's neighbors for being uncooperative. This was not
accidental. He was echoing his master's voice, that of
the man who installed him as the interim executive prime
minister - Bush. Nor is it accidental that the Bush
administration has refused point-blank to endorse the
package that the European Union trio - France, Germany
and the United Kingdom - has offered Iran as a way to
begin to settle the nuclear issue, even though the offer
was backed by the European Union summit in Brussels on
Friday.
"A full and sustained suspension of all
[uranium] enrichment and reprocessing activities, on a
voluntary basis, would open the door for talks on
long-term cooperation offering mutual benefits," said
the EU communique. It further pledged resumption of
suspended negotiations on a Trade and Cooperation
Agreement between Iran and the EU.
Earlier, when
shown the EU trio package, John Bolton, the
neo-conservative American under secretary for arms
control and international security at the State
Department, said, "I don't do carrots."
In
contrast, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei, delivering
his weekly sermon on Friday in Tehran, repeated his
opposition to "the production, stockpiling and use of
nuclear weapons", which, he asserted, are forbidden
under Islam. "They [the Americans and Israelis] accuse
us of pursuing nuclear weapons program," he added. "I am
telling them as I have said before that we are not even
thinking about nuclear weapons."
Yet Washington
is pressing its allies to start drafting a UN Security
Council resolution of condemnation as a preamble to
imposing sanctions against Iran. There can be little
doubt that, even before its second term begins, a
re-energized Bush administration is thinking once more
of assembling "a coalition of the willing" - this time
to wield against Iran, which is still firmly ensconced
in its "axis of evil" along with North Korea. "They [the
Americans] wanted an international coalition against
Iraq," mused Jaswant Singh, former foreign minister of
India, whose country refused to join the Iraqi version
of the coalition. "But they ended up getting virtually
an international alliance against America."
Unfortunately for the world at large, there is
no sign yet that the Bush administration's disastrously
flat-learning curve has risen even by a fraction of an
inch. The disjunction between the perceptions of
policymakers in Washington and Muslims abroad is so
total that our planet is certain to become ever less
safe as the new four-year term of the Bush White House
unfolds.
Dilip Hiro's latest book is
Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and
After, a sequel to Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm
(Nation Books, New York). He is based in London,
writes regularly for the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Observer, the Guardian, and the Nation
magazine, and is a frequent commentator on NBC, CNN,
BBC, and Sky TV.
