- The US and British governments have dragged us into a
mess that will last for years...
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- So far, the liberators have succeeded only in freeing
the souls of the Iraqis from their bodies. Saddam Hussein's troops have
proved less inclined to surrender than they had anticipated, and the civilians
less prepared to revolt. But while no one can now ignore the immediate
problems this illegal war has met, we are beginning, too, to understand
what should have been obvious all along: that, however this conflict is
resolved, the outcome will be a disaster.
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- It seems to me that there are three possible results
of the war with Iraq. The first, which is now beginning to look unlikely,
is that Saddam Hussein is swiftly dispatched, his generals and ministers
abandon their posts and the people who had been cowed by his militias and
his secret police rise up and greet the invaders with their long-awaited
blessing of flowers and rice. The troops are welcomed into Baghdad, and
start preparing for what the US administration claims will be a transfer
of power to a democratic government.
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- For a few weeks, this will look like victory. Then several
things are likely to happen. The first is that, elated by its reception
in Baghdad, the American government decides, as Donald Rumsfeld hinted
again last week, to visit its perpetual war upon another nation: Syria,
Iran, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea or anywhere else whose conquest may be
calculated to enhance the stature of the president and the scope of his
empire. It is almost as if Bush and his advisers are determined to meet
the nemesis which their hubris invites.
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- Our next discovery is likely to be, as John Gray pointed
out some months ago, that the choice of regimes in the Middle East is not
a choice between secular dictatorship and secular democracy, but between
secular dictatorship and Islamic democracy. What the people of the Middle
East want and what the US government says they want appear to be rather
different things, and the tension between the two objectives will be a
source of instability and conflict until western governments permit those
people to make their own choices unmolested. That is unlikely to happen
until the oil runs out. The Iraqis may celebrate their independence by
embracing a long-suppressed fundamentalism, and the United States may respond
by seeking to crush it.
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- The coalition might also soon discover why Saddam Hussein
became such an abhorrent dictator. Iraq is a colonial artefact, forced
together by the British from three Ottoman provinces, whose people have
wildly different religious and ethnic loyalties. It is arguable that this
absurd construction can be sustained only by brute force.
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- A US-backed administration seeking to keep this nation
of warring factions intact may rapidly encounter Saddam's problem, and,
in so doing, rediscover his solution. Perhaps we should not be surprised
to see that George Bush's government was, until recently, planning merely
to replace the two most senior officials in each of Saddam's ministries,
leaving the rest of his government undisturbed.
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- The alternative would be to permit Iraq to fall apart.
While fragmentation may, in the long run, be the only feasible future for
its people, it is impossible, in the short term, to see how this could
happen without bloodshed, as every faction seeks to carve out its domain.
Whether the US tries to oversee this partition or flees from it as the
British did from India, its victory in these circumstances is likely to
sour very quickly.
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- The second possible outcome of this war is that the US
kills Saddam and destroys the bulk of his army, but has to govern Iraq
as a hostile occupying force. Saddam Hussein, whose psychological warfare
appears to be rather more advanced than that of the Americans, may have
ensured that this is now the most likely result.
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- The coalition forces cannot win without taking Baghdad,
and Saddam is seeking to ensure that they cannot take Baghdad without killing
thousands of civilians. His soldiers will shelter in homes, schools and
hospitals. In trying to destroy them, the American and British troops may
blow away the last possibility of winning the hearts and minds of the residents.
Saddam's deployment of suicide bombers has already obliged the coalition
forces to deal brutally with innocent civilians.
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- The comparisons with Palestine will not be lost on the
Iraqis, or on anyone in the Middle East. The United States, like Israel,
will discover that occupation is bloody and, ultimately, unsustainable.
Its troops will be harassed by snipers and suicide bombers, and its response
to them will alienate even the people who were grateful for the overthrow
of Saddam. We can expect the US, in these circumstances, hurriedly to proclaim
victory, install a feeble and doomed Iraqi government, and pull out before
the whole place crashes down around it. What happens after that, to Iraq
and the rest of the Middle East, is anyone's guess, but I think we can
anticipate that it won't be pleasant.
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- The third possibility is that the coalition forces fail
swiftly to kill or capture Saddam Hussein or to win a decisive victory
in Iraq. While still unlikely, this is now an outcome which cannot be entirely
dismissed. Saddam may be too smart to wait in his bunker for a bomb big
enough to reach him, but might, like King Alfred, slip into the civilian
population, occasionally throwing off his disguise and appearing among
his troops, to keep the flame of liberation burning.
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- If this happens, then the US will have transformed him
from the hated oppressor into the romantic, almost mythological hero of
Arab and Muslim resistance, the Salah al-Din of his dreams. He will be
seen as the man who could do to the United States what the mujahideen of
Afghanistan did to the Soviet Union: drawing it so far into an unwinnable
war that its economy and its popular support collapse. The longer he survives,
the more the population - not just of Iraq, but of all Muslim countries
- will turn towards him, and the less likely a western victory becomes.
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- The US will almost certainly then have engineered the
improbable chimera it claims to be chasing: the marriage of Saddam's well-armed
secular brutality and al-Qaida's global insurrection. Even if, having held
out for many weeks or months, Saddam Hussein is found and killed, his spirit
may continue to inspire a revolt throughout the Muslim world, against the
Americans, the British and, of course, Israel. Pakistan's unpopular leader,
Pervez Musharraf, would then find himself in serious trouble. If, as seems
likely in these circumstances, he is overthrown in an Islamic revolt, then
a fundamentalist regime, deeply hostile to the west, would possess real
nuclear weapons, primed and ready to fire.
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- I hope I've missed something here, and will be proved
spectacularly wrong, but it seems to me that the American and British governments
have dragged us into a mess from which we might not emerge for many years.
They have unlocked the spirit of war, and it could be unwilling to return
to its casket until it has traversed the world.
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- <http://www.monbiot.com/>www.monbiot.com.
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