Message-id: <b9eb3efe.0312230513.182af513@posting.google.com> writes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1112026,00.html

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

David Hirst
Tuesday December 23, 2003
The Guardian

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?