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US to win a Pyrrhic
victory
By B Raman
The
Americans have valid reasons for anger against President
Saddam Hussein, to whom President George W Bush has now
issued a 48-hour ultimatum to quit or face military
action.
Not because he has clandestinely acquired weapons
of mass destruction for use against the United States
and Israel. Despite all their fabricated evidence, so
diplomatically and so embarrassingly exposed by
the United Nations inspectors for what it was, they
have not been able to prove that he had such weapons.
However, there is a strong possibility that the American
Special Forces will plant in Iraq chemical and
biological weapons from US stocks so that they could
ostensibly recover them during the forthcoming military
operations and tell the world they were right and the
rest of the international community was wrong. The
Americans can be unprincipled when it comes to ways of
proving their point.
And the anger of the
Americans could not be because Saddam was hand in glove
with Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda. He was not. Bin
Laden's hatred of Saddam is well documented, except
until last month when bin Laden came out in support of
the Iraqi leader for the sake of Islamic solidarity.
The American anger is because Saddam funded the
acts of suicide terrorism against Israel and failed to
grieve over the deaths of thousands of Americans and
others on September 11, 2001. In their view, as in the
view of Israel, a resumed march towards a political
solution to the Palestine question would not be possible
as long as his regime continued in power and as long as
the government of Iran continued with its support of the
suicide bombers of the Hizbollah and the Hamas. They
think that the war on Iraq will ultimately herald the
beginning of peace in Palestine, send a strong message
to Teheran to mend its ways and moderate the equally
oppressive regimes in other parts of West Asia.
From their perspective, Americans are justified in
wishing to see the end of Saddam's regime in Baghdad. To
be fair to Bush, it has to be underlined, as it has not
been by many analysts, that it was not he who initially
thought of the change of regime as the objective of US
policy in Iraq. Large sections of American people and
Congress have been calling for it since the 1990s.
Many forget that it was Congress that called
for the overthrow of the Saddam regime by enacting the
Iraq Liberation Act, signed by then president Bill
Clinton on October 31, 1998, and allocating US$97
million for this purpose.
Article 3 of this act
laid down the aim of American Iraqi policy as the
overthrow of Saddam and US help in setting up a
democratic regime in Baghdad. Article 4 called for US
support to anti-Saddam opposition groups for this
purpose in the form of training by US army instructors,
supply of arms and ammunition and propaganda material.
On January 16, 1999, seven Iraqi opposition
groups - out of about 80 - were selected for US
assistance - the Iraqi National Accord, the Iraqi
National Congress, the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan,
the Movement for Constitutional Monarchy, the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
Only the latter three have roots in Iraq. The rest were
largely unknown to the Iraqi people until the US
embraced them and started projecting them,
unconvincingly, to the world as the standard-bearers of
democracy in Iraq.
On January 21, 1999,
Madeleine Albright, the then secretary of state,
designated Foreign Service Officer Francis Ricciardone
as "Special Representative for Transition in Iraq" to
coordinate the implementation of US policies to bring
about a regime change.
The covert
means initially adopted under the Clinton
administration failed to produce results because of US failure to
come to terms with certain ground realities. The
most important of these was that Shi'ites constitute
the majority in Iraq, forming 51 percent of the
total population as against 46 percent Sunnis.
Introducing democracy in Iraq meant helping the Shi'ites to come
to power and rule the country. The Americans wanted to
use the Shi'ites as surrogates in their operations to
have Saddam overthrown, but were not prepared to
support their rule in the country lest it send shivers up
the spines of the pro-American rulers of Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait and Bahrain.
It was an act of hypocrisy
to proclaim the US policy objective as democracy in Iraq
if Washington was not prepared to tolerate the majority
community acquiring the reins of power. Even though the
present hotch-potch anti-Saddam coalition backed by the
US has Shi'ite personalities in important positions, it
is doubtful whether the US will let them emerge in the
driving seat in Baghdad once Saddam either quits or is
driven out.
What the US advocated and continues
to advocate for Iraq is not democracy as perceived by
the majority of Iraqi people, but democracy as designed
in the Central Intelligence Agency that would serve US
national interests. If one were to argue from the US
angle, what the situation called for was to examine why
the covert operations failed to produce results and to
introduce the necessary correctives. Continued covert
operations would have had the advantage of promoting US
policy objectives, though more slowly than overt
invasion, without adding to the Islamic anger against
the US in the world today.
Islamic anger against
the US is another ground reality, the implications of
which have not been adequately analyzed and understood
by US policymakers. It was this anger post-1991 that
spawned the likes of bin Laden, Ramzi Yousef, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammad and their ilk and led to their acts of
terrorism - initially against the US and subsequently
against anybody else whom they perceived as enemies of
Islam.
The US has certainly made progress in the
war against international jihadi terrorism. India, the
most suffering victim of pan-Islamic jihadi terrorism in
the world today, has reasons to be gratified over the US
success in its operations. Even though these operations
are designed to protect American lives and interests and
not those of India, there is likely to be a beneficial
fallout for India, but on a limited scale.
But
the way these operations have been carried out not only
in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but also in the US itself,
has added to the Islamic anger against the US at a time
when an equally important US policy objective should
have been to reduce this anger. The increase in this
anger has already led to a strengthening of the
political influence of the Islamic fundamentalist and
jihadi forces in Pakistan and could cause an anti-Hamid
Karzai backlash in Afghanistan. India cannot hope to
remain insulated for long from the impact of this anger
on its own Muslim community, the second largest in the
world after Indonesia's, which has so far treated bin
Laden and his ilk with disdain.
If Saddam
refuses to quit, the triumph of the inevitable US
military action should not be in doubt. The question is
not whether the US will win, but how soon. But it will
be a Pyrrhic victory, which will not contribute to
enhanced peace and security for the US, Israel or the
rest of the international community.
The world
has nearly a billion Muslims. No world leader can afford
to be insensitive to their feelings of hurt and anger.
Ultimately, whether the world is spared the consequences
of their anger is not going to depend on the autocratic
rulers of the Islamic world on whose support the US is
counting for removing another autocratic ruler from
power. It is going to depend on the perceptions and
feelings of rage of the ordinary Muslims in the streets,
mosques and madrassas (religious schools) in
South Asia.
They perceive the US's war on Iraq
not as a war to liberate the Iraqi people from an
autocratic ruler and give them the fruits of democracy,
but as a continuation of a war on Islam being waged by
the "crusaders" and the Jewish people. The aggravation
of their anger consequent on the US military action will
not bode well for peace and security.
B
Raman is Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet
Secretariat, Government of India, and presently
director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former
member of the National Security Advisory Board of the
Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also
head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research
& Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence
agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.
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