Stay Out of the Mess
Praful Bidwai
The Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 25 July 2003
India should not collude with US plans for Empire, regardless of a UN 'mandate'
The world's sole Superpower is again proving to be a military giant with political feet of clay. It won the main war in Iraq virtually hands down. But it may be losing the peace-as well as the "classic" guerrilla war that its ground commander says the Iraqis are waging, with telling success. The number of US soldiers killed since March 20 already exceeds the total (147) killed in the 1991 Gulf War. Despite the reported killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein, there is no telling when the haemorrhage will stop.
More important, America's overwhelming military superiority has failed to deliver a modicum of order, leave alone tranquillity or peace in Iraq. There is a glaring disproportion between the money being spent on military operations ($3.9 billion a month) and that earmarked for "reconstructing" and running Iraq ($3.9 billion for the next six months), the bulk of which will come from the sale of oil and appropriation of overseas accounts.
The occupation forces' core approach to the prevailing chaos consists in, as the US official charged with building a new Iraqi police force put it, "kicking ass", using force indiscriminately. Wholesale "de-Baathification" has replaced "de-Saddamisation". Competent, irreplaceable civil servants and technocrats who were in no way responsible for the previous regime's misdeeds stand summarily sacked.
Consequently, most public services, especially electricity and water supply, remain crippled or extremely unreliable. Social discontent is rising, as is political opposition to what many Iraqis consider their country's unjust and illegal occupation.
The US continues to act in bad faith, e.g. in transferring the UN oil-for-food account surplus ($13 billion) into a fund it will control exclusively and indefinitely. This can only further enrage the ordinary Iraqi whose experience of the occupation has not been happy. One only has to read Amnesty International's reports, including one on torture and inhuman methods used by US forces, to appreciate this.
It now turns out that Washington repeatedly ignored warnings from its own intelligence agencies that post-war Iraq, with its "chaos and lawlessness", would be basically ungovernable. Not only did it opt for a fast-moving light invasion force unequipped to handle civil disorder, it allowed Donald Rumsfeld's "transformation" dogma and obsession with technological wizardry to prevail over the requirements of building a sense of security among ordinary Iraqis.
The US is now making a horrible mess of Iraq's "nation-building". The interim governing council stitched together by Paul Bremer after numerous false starts is yet to win credibility, domestically or globally. It cannot elect its own president. The UN has refused to admit it as a member.
America has no fallback option. Indeed, it lacks even a halfway-coherent political roadmap-in contrast to its elaborate military plans which took a whole year to prepare and even detailed the location of windows in targeted buildings!
This should cause no great surprise. The US has nearly always been a poor "nation-builder" It chronically ignores/misreads the political landscape or context of its intervention and underestimates the difficulties of creating alternative structures. It usually fails to translate military victory into stable peace.
A recent study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says the US has so far conducted over 200 overseas military interventions. Only 16 of these were "nation-building" attempts. Twelve of these were unilateral; ten failed. Of the total, only four (post-War Germany, Japan, Granada-1983 and Panama-1989) succeeded in establishing democracy lasting 10 years or longer.
This is the sordid backdrop against which the US is now scurrying to recruit other countries' troops for Iraq's "stabilisation" or "pacification". It has approached over 90 countries, but received commitments for only 13,000 troops from 19. It is desperate to put a plurilateral multicultural façade on the occupation.
India is again under pressure to become the second largest occupation force in Iraq. The US now says it will approach the UN to get some kind of mandate for sending troops. This must be put in perspective. The real argument against sending troops to Iraq is not about a UN mandate or its absence but about the illegitimacy of the war (which lacked a casus belli) and its deep unpopularity. The government brought the UN as a surrogate/substitute argument. This must not be allowed to prevail over the main, wholly valid, rationale. Nor should we forget that the Security Council can often be manipulated.
If the mandate is for a proper blue-helmet peacekeeping force under UN auspices and control, it could be considered-although there is no greater virtue in sending troops than in assisting Iraq economically, or to make a transition to a constitutional democracy.
However, if the mandate is an appeal for troops reporting to, and under, the US-UK occupation "Authority", then it must not be countenanced. It's altogether ludicrous to join or support a hostile occupation which is itself the result of an unjust, illegal and illegitimate war which the government and Parliament of India criticised. It won't do to talk loftily about "helping" Iraq's "people" or "contributing" to its reconstruction while colluding with a manifestly unjust "Anglo-American production" (Madeleine Albright).
The spirit of the unanimous Parliament resolution demands an end to the occupation caused by unjust war. This stands vindicated by recent disclosures about the "sexing up" of "dodgy dossiers" on Iraq's mass-destruction weapons and total failure to find any fully 3½ months after Baghdad fell.
Bush and Blair today face a unique credibility crisis even as their acceptance ratings plummet. After David Kelly's death (from extreme stress over revealing the truth about Iraq's WMD), Blair's moral authority has taken another blow. And Bush has compromised both the CIA director and his Deputy National Security Adviser and damaged what's left of his own credibility. The war and occupation are seen the world over as rooted in lies, prejudice, and devious logic.
Consider the larger context. Since September 11, 2001, the US has embarked on a catastrophic misadventure-an endless, no-holds-barred, unlimited war against "terrorism". In the process it has further destabilised an already volatile region-the new Arc of Crisis stretching from West Asia-North Africa through Central Asia and Afghanistan to South Asia, even parts of Southeast Asia.
The US has unleashed hostile forces which it barely comprehends, let alone controls. Blinded by militarism, Washington has no strategy to deal with the politics of the phenomena it wants to eliminate nor with the consequences of its own actions. In building a new global Empire, it seems destined to visit havoc and devastation upon the world.
The plea for despatching Indian troops to Iraq is a proposal for colluding with the US scheme for Empire, as a subordinate, minor, partner or client. Playing this role will necessarily bring India into hostile confrontation with political forces and ethnic-religious groups that it must live with and integrate into its modernist-democratic-secular project.
Our present rulers are unabashed admirers of Israel's tough, aggressive anti-Palestinian approach. That's why they have invited Ariel Sharon to visit India-something most European states won't do today. But even they might flinch at secular India being equated with Likudnik Israel as a despicable US collaborator-client and an object of righteous hatred of millions around the globe.
If the Indian government wants to retain a semblance of moral legitimacy and claims to universal principles like peace and justice, it must keep out of the Iraq quagmire-and US plans for Empire. The Opposition must tell the government this, not just through words, but through street-level action.
Copyright 2003 The Hindustan Times
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