The Hindu Business Line : Clueless in Iraq

Happenings in Iraq continue to mesmerise and elbow out more worthwhile topics. I am sure most of us have often vowed not to allow happenings there to intrude into our priorities and neglect issues of direct and immediate concern to us. But no: We find ourselves transfixed, with some new fall-out or the other forcing us to mull over its significance, or at least try to make sense out of it.

From all that is emanating from Iraq, it would seem that the aftermath of the war, and particularly the process of getting out of the quicksand that it is fast becoming, will pose a far more formidable challenge for the US than the war itself. Hurling missiles from ships and planes and from a safe distance is easy, compared to finding the way through the emotional cauldron, cultural quandaries and political maze in the country of occupation, not knowing whom to trust or how to get the whole polity back on its feet.

Pretext for attacking Iraq

The US, in particular, is famous, when its ire is roused, to jump into the fray with guns from both hips blazing and wonder about the reasons for it later.

One pretext for attacking Iraq was to cleanse the place of weapons of mass destruction; there is not a clue as to where they are, and whether they are at all there. Another was to ‘liberate’ the people, without their asking for it, from their own President, Mr Saddam Hussein who, like Osama, has vanished. General Tommy Franks has boasted that he has Mr Hussein’s DNA, God knows for what purpose. If it was to match it with the bodies under the rubble in Baghdad, there is no explanation as to why Tommy is taking so much time to do it.

The fantasying by the US that the moment their soldiers set foot on Iraqi soil they would be welcomed and showered, Arab-style, with kisses on both cheeks has also come unstuck. (In fact, some of the scenes of cheering shown by American and British networks seemed distinctly synthetic.)

The goings-on in Baghdad during the past few days are as far away from a grateful ovation as can be imagined. It looks as if the US has ended up having a tiger by its tail.

Perturbing scenario

Large numbers of Iraqis (whether spontaneously or at the instigation of Shia clerics, it is hard to tell) are pouring out into the streets with strident slogans asking the Americans to go home. The Iraqi National United Movement, a hastily assembled spearhead for channelling their protests, is pitted against the US-supported Iraqi National Congress. A much more perturbing scenario, if the clerics have their way, is that Iraq will be turned into a fundamentalist Islamic State, thereby becoming more of a thorn on the flesh of the world community than Saddam’s regime ever was.

The role of the UN in installing a credible Government and rebuilding the country is as vague as ever. The US is meddling and muddling on its own without forging a long-term strategy in consultations with other countries.

In short, after all the trampling on canons of international law and the shocking loss of lives, what the so-called coalition of the willing has managed to achieve is exactly opposite of its own war aims on every count.

B. S. RAGHAVAN