- In this highly-politicised city where anger over the
invasion of Iraq alternates with pride in the resistance, there is one
sure way to lighten the mood. Suggest that George Bush and Tony Blair launched
their war because of Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction.
Hoots of derision all round. Whether they are Syrians or members of the
huge Iraqi exile community, everyone here believes this is a war for oil.
In nearby Jordan and across the Arab world the view is the same.
-
- Some suggest a second motive - Washington's desire to
strengthen Israel. Under one theory US hawks want to break Iraq into several
statelets and then do the same with Saudi Arabia, to confirm the Zionist
state as the region's superpower. Others cite Donald Rumsfeld's recent
comments about Iran and Syria as proof that war on Iraq is designed to
frighten its neighbours, who happen to be the leading radicals in the anti-Zionist
camp.
-
- Oil is the war aim on which all Arabs agree. While the
Palestinian intifada is resistance to old-fashioned colonialism with its
seizure and settlement of other people's land, they see the Iraqi intifada
as popular defence against a more modern phenomenon. Washington does not
need to settle Iraqi land, but it does want military bases and control
of oil.
-
- Many Arabs already define this neo-colonial war as a
historic turning point which might have as profound an effect on the Arab
psyche as September 11 did on Americans. Arabs have long been accustomed
to seeing Israeli tanks running rampant. Now the puppet-master, arrogant
and unashamed, has sent his helicopter gunships and armoured vehicles to
Arab soil.
-
- The US has mounted numerous coups in the Middle East
to topple regimes in Egypt, Iran and Iraq itself. It has used crises, like
the last Gulf war, to gain temporary bases and make them permanent. In
Lebanon it once shelled an Arab capital and landed several hundred marines.
But never before has it sent a vast army to change an Arab government.
Even in Latin America, in two centuries of US hegemony, Washington has
never dared to mount a full-scale invasion to overthrow a ruler in a major
country. Its interventions in the Caribbean and Central America from 1898
to 1990 were against weak opponents in small states. Three years into the
new millennium, the enormity of the shift and the impact of the spectacle
on Arab television viewers cannot be over-estimated. Is it an image of
the past or future, they ask, a one-off throw-back to Vietnam or a taste
of things to come?
-
- Blair sensed Arab suspicions about the fate of Iraq's
oil when he persuaded Bush at their Azores summit to produce a "vision
for Iraq" which pledged to protect its natural resources (they shrank
from using the O word) as a "national asset of and for the Iraqi people".
No neo-colonialism here.
-
- Unfortunately, the small print is different, as could
be expected from an administration run by oilmen. Leaks from the state
department's "future of Iraq" office show Washington plans to
privatise the Iraqi economy and particularly the state-owned national oil
company. Experts on its energy panel want to start with "downstream"
assets like retail petrol stations. This would be a quick way to gouge
money from Iraqi consumers. Later they would privatise exploration and
development.
-
- Even if majority ownership were restricted to Iraqis,
Russia's grim experience of energy privatisation shows how a new class
of oil magnates quickly send their profits to offshore banks. If the interests
of all Iraqis are to be protected, it would be better to keep state control
and modify the UN oil-for-food programme, which has been a relatively efficient
and internationally supervised way of channelling revenues to the country's
poor.
-
- Drop the controls on Iraq's imports of industrial goods.
End the rule that all food under the programme has to be imported, thereby
penalis ing Iraqi farmers and benefiting rich exporters in Canada, Australia
and the US. But maintain the programme for several years to keep helping
the 60% of Iraqis who depend on subsidised food (it will be more after
this war) rather than channel revenues to a new Iraqi government or a World
Bank-administered trust fund which will be under pressure to pay it to
US construction companies to repair the infrastructure which Bush's war
machine has destroyed. US and UK taxpayers should finance the peace as
they have financed the war. Iraqi oil earnings must stay out of US and
British hands.
-
- If Downing Street has a better grasp than Washington
of the need not to appear to be occupying Iraq, it was equally misinformed
about Iraqis' views of invasion. Both governments confused hatred of Saddam
with support for war. War has its own dynamic, trapping millions in the
desperate business of daily survival. Naturally they blame US and British
troops for the chaos. Yet, even before the first bomb fell, most Iraqis
were against "liberation" by force.
-
- People living under Saddam Hussein's rule do not give
opinions easily but British and US officials should have done a better
job of talking to Iraqis in Jordan and Syria who are in close touch with
their families in Iraq.
-
- On the eve of the war, I interviewed 20 Iraqis in Amman
individually or in groups of two or three friends for an hour each on average.
They included Sunni and Shia, property owners, artists, factory workers
and several unemployed. Most were fierce critics of the Iraqi president.
But on the over-riding issue of whether Bush should launch a war, a majority
was opposed. Nine were against, four were torn and only seven were in favour.
Now that war is no longer a theoretical option but a reality affecting
every Iraqi at home and abroad, patriotic feelings are stronger.
-
- Western governments apparently confined their research
to people with a narrow vested interest. They financed exiled politicians
who want a share in US-supplied power and then talked to them as though
they were independent. They listened to businessmen eager to cash in when
the US privatises the economy. They were fascinated by nostalgic Hashemite
monarchists.
-
- The voices of the poor and the professional classes were
not deemed of interest, although these are the people who benefited from
the surge in social investment from 1975-85 and later fell back under sanctions.
London and Washington convinced themselves that Saddam Hussein had ruined
the economy without asking whether Iraqis shared this view. If they now
divert Iraq's oil revenues, they will be following a long tradition of
blunder and exploitation.
-
- <mailto:j.steele@guardian.co.uk>j.steele@guardian.co.uk
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,926043,00.html
|
