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Ajit Roy

IF the Anglo-American bloc's Iraq war proved soothsayers on both sides of the firing line fairly wide off the mark on its outcome, it has left them equally confused in predicting post-war scenarios.

On the one hand, while the technological performance of its war machine and the deadliness of its `mother of all bombs' shocked and awed, Pentagon's expectations of a cake-walk victory and a joyous welcome by the Iraqi people were somewhat belied.

The pro-Iraq commentators' prophecies of a `Stalingrad' at Baghdad and `Vietnam' in Iraq were proved equally wrong. The thousand-strong Arab jehadis, reported to have poured into the country from across the borders, seemed to have evaporated into thin air, causing little annoyance to the forces of occupation.

Whether this was due to a top secret deal by Saddam himself or a betrayal by some of his top aides may come to light in the future.

The coalition forces' ostensible reason for aggressive action — the mission of seeking and destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was as baseless as the citing of the provocative firing at US tanks from the lower floors of the Palestine Hotel as the reason for shelling the suite occupied by foreign journalists.

Other accusations, such as Mr Tony Blair's allegations of the Iraqi execution of a British POW, or the Americans' shifting the blame for the devastation of a suburban market area in Baghdad to a misguided Iraqi missile, have proved to be the proverbial victimisation of truth in the course of war! Various subterfuges and prevarications by Washington's before and during the Iraq war are only embellishments of the fundamental facts — the US President, Mr George W. Bush's declared policy to assert, protect and extend his right to pre-emptive action — economic political and military — in the country's perceived self-interest in any part of the world.

Thus, Mr Bush launched and conducted a war with neither the authorisation of the US Congress/Senate nor the UN Security Council, leaving a trail of human agony and hardship.

With enormous technological, military, political and economic resources, the US is today seen as the supreme arbiter of the world. The Iraq war apparently proved the impotence of the other powers — Russia, China, Germany, France, and so on — independently and collectively.

More important, the climate of intimidation, created by the US' actual/potential striking power, it is said, has made it nearly impossible to think of any effective mobilisation of opposition in the international power structure.

To cite an example of contemporary thinking from nearer home, a leading Kolkata daily, in a recently editorial, deplored the Lok Sabha resolution on the Iraq war thus:

"The emergence of a unipolar world, after the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union and socialism, has radically altered international relations ... the Iraq war has ... shown the irrelevance of any kind of protest against US policy... International relations know only the play of power. They do not recognise morality and ideology."

For the first time after about a century, a global mobilisation of popular forces, and on a much broader scale than ever before, took place on the international political stage to confront a domineering force.

The most striking feature in the world today is the emergence of a real countervailing force to the US' global dictatorship — more decisive than its erstwhile superpower rival. It is the concerted mobilisation of `people power' across the globe. The US pretenders to world domination are really much more vulnerable than generally realised. The US has been the world's largest debtor for more than half a century, but has been permitted to call the shots by some strange irony of world dispensation!

The US has to draw external credit of about $2 billion a day now to meet its external deficit. By tightening the economic screws, the victims of US domination can turn the table against it! Indeed, Iraq itself showed the way when it decided to swap its $10 billion reserves for the Euro.

(The author is a Kolkata-based freelance writer.)

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