COMMENTARY It's Bush who is in the
dock By Ehsan Ahrari
As
evidence of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Gharib prison
in Iraq is mounting, critics are increasingly asking for
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.
After all, they argue, he was one of the chief
architects of the US military campaign. If the US were a
parliamentary democracy, the same critics would be
asking for President George Bush's dismissal. In the
final analysis, it was Bush whose decision it was to
invade Iraq. It was he who created the contentious moral
justification to democratize Iraq through military
invasion, and then of using Iraq as a "shining" example
of democracy for restructuring the Muslim Middle East.
Bob Woodward, in his recent book, Plan of
Attack, stumbles onto the justification that Bush
proffered for invading Iraq. In the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks on the US, Bush not only envisioned
those unfortunate events as a defining moment for his
presidency, but also started to talk about a major
"reorientation of the American foreign and defense
policy". It was that reorientation that drove him to
seek a connection between Saddam Hussein and September
11 - the "nexus of states that sponsored terrorism and
terrorists who didn't have allegiance to one state" -
even when US intelligence could not validate such a
linkage.
Woodward writes: "Soon after 9/11, Bush
had told [Carl] Rove [one of his top advisers and the
chief strategist for his election and reelection
campaigns], just like my father's generation was called
in World War II, now our generation is being called. 'I
am here for a reason, and this is going to be how we're
going to be judged'." That observation was not worldly
or secular in nature. Rather, it was heavily colored by
Bush's worldview as an evangelical Christian.
As
such, Bush decided to go on a mission to democratize the
Muslim Middle East. Explaining his mission to Woodward,
Bush said: "I believe the United States is the beacon
for freedom in the world, and I believe we have a
responsibility to promote freedom that is as solemn as
the responsibility is to protecting the American people,
because the two go hand in hand. No, it's very important
for you to understand that about my presidency."
The very coinage of the phrase "axis of evil" -
which was originally phrased as "axis of hatred" - was
driven by that evangelical zeal. It was, as Woodward
tells us, originally coined specifically for Iraq. North
Korea and Iran were added as a matter of pragmatism and
afterthought, to ensure that outsiders were not tipped
off about the then prevailing intense focus of top Bush
officials, including Bush himself, to develop a military
campaign plan to invade Iraq.
So the invasion
and the continued occupation of Iraq are fully driven by
that evangelical zeal. Bush has not even an iota of
doubt in his mind that God is on his side. No minor
distraction will force him to give up that "godly"
mission of democratizing and civilizing the Muslims of
not only Iraq, but of the entire Middle East. In his
frame of reference, the systematic abuse of Iraqi
prisoners by American soldiers is a minor distraction,
an aberration, which, as he reiterated in all his public
statements, does not represent what America is all
about.
Perhaps not so explicitly or
unequivocally, but Rumsfeld also represents a similar
frame of reference. When General William Boykin, deputy
under secretary of intelligence at the Pentagon,
publicly expressed confidence about victory over his
Muslim enemy because "my God was bigger than his God",
Rumsfeld, ignoring Muslim outrage, justified Boykin's
comments by observing "we're a free people". To this
day, no administrative action has been taken against
Boykin, symbolizing to whoever is paying attention that
insulting the Muslim faith while glorifying one's
mainstream faith is very much part of being "free".
More to the point, as far back as 2002, Rumsfeld
indicated that the US would no longer be bound by the
rules of the Geneva Convention about interrogating
prisoners. Why, then, is the world so flabbergasted
about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners? It is sheer
simplemindedness to label those abuses as mistakes, or
miscreant behavior of a few rogue soldiers. The roots of
that mistreatment are deeply buried in the cultural
condescension and arrogance of power that a number of
top US officials have systematically manifested,
especially since September 11.
Viewing the same
situation from the Iraqi side, reality appears starkly
different from Bush's perspectives. The defining moment
of the liberation of Iraq - which had a very short
window, indeed - was the tumbling of the giant statue of
Saddam in Baghdad. That scene also became the mascot of
the post-Saddam Iraq. In the wake of the incidents of
abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Gharib prison, pictures
of the hooded and wired Iraqi prisoners and the female
American soldier with a leash tied around the neck of a
naked Iraqi man became the mascots of occupied Iraq. No
one in the entire duration of the American invasion and
occupation of Iraq has been able to belittle or shame
the US as much as its own soldiers have through the
pictures that the world has already seen, or the ones it
is about to see, as Rumsfeld has already promised during
his congressional testimony.
Bush is now
attempting to salvage the situation by stating that the
abuse of prisoners will not distract the US from its
mission of working for the freedom of Iraqi people. The
sad irony related to that statement is that, even if
some Iraqis had believed in that rhetoric before the
scandalous Abu Gharib incidents, few inside or outside
Iraq believe in it any more.
The question now is
how will any government that is handpicked by the US's
Coalition Provisional Authority be able to function as a
meaningful entity, starting July 1. We already know that
the transfer of authority to Iraq will be limited in
terms of the exercise of real power after June 30.
Secretary of State Collin Powell has made it quite
clear. Even the notion of allowing the United Nations to
function as a visible source of legitimacy in Iraq is
highly dubious.
The preceding underscores that
the role of Rumsfeld is not as central when viewed in
the context of Bush's larger rationale for invading Iraq
and of the obdurate nature of occupation of that country
in the aftermath of the Abu Gharib scandal. That is not
to suggest, however, that Rumsfeld should not resign.
Events are likely to drive him, and even his deputy Paul
Wolfowitz - the so-called "theoretician" of the original
scheme of Iraqi invasion - from office.
However,
the final judgment about the correctness of the decision
to invade Iraq, or the lack thereof, will be made in
November's presidential elections. Thus far, the
American public has not shown the intense outrage and
repugnance at the pictures of abuse of Iraqi interns as
world public opinion has. But that lack of repulsion is
not likely to remain unchanged in the next few weeks and
months. Then the entire morality of occupying a country
in the name of "freedom and democracy" will undergo
close scrutiny, and people will pay the price. That
would include not just Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, but also
George W Bush.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is
an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic
analyst.
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