A rchive Date
[ 02-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_london.html
Bin Laden, Saddam forces complementary
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the London Free Press
April 2, 2003
The most famous observation on war was made by Carl von Clausewitz, that war is a continuation of politics by other means.
Clausewitz, a Prussian military officer, was a contemporary of Napoleon, and his study, On War, belongs to another age. But the essential truth of his observation has never been more clear than when television captured the nature and costs of American war in Vietnam in real time.
Ever since Vietnam, the war that was lost first in the living rooms of America, the corollary to Clausewitz's observation has been to make unmistakably clear why the pursuit of politics through war is necessary or unavoidable following the exhaustion of all other means. Any weakness or inability in providing such an explanation can amount to the loss of public support in waging war before the political objective is reached.
In the second week of the U.S.-led campaign to bring regime change in Iraq and freedom to Iraqis, the first signs of doubt about the reasons for this war surfaced in America due to the level of resistance by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
These signs will be contained, and quickly disappear, once the stalled military campaign regains momentum in attaining its objective of liberating Iraq speedily and with a minimum of casualties.
But should the resistance of Saddam's regime continue, the coalition forces remain stalled and civilian casualties mount as the military campaign extends beyond weeks into months, then a point will be reached where the war could be lost politically, even if the eventual military objective were achieved.
In Clausewitzean terms, the extent and duration of public support in America and Britain is essential for the positive outcome of the war.
And public support will only remain solid if the public understands why the costs and sacrifices required are worth the goal of the military campaign.
U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have both offered a menu of reasons for regime change in Baghdad. However, the length of reasons paradoxically obscures the primary purpose of the war.
Dr. Ahmad Chalabi, a leading member of the Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, has described Saddam's regime as "a totalitarian dictatorship, augmented by a medieval clan structure." It is a 20th-century phenomenon similar to the Nazi regime in Germany or Soviet communism under Stalin, cemented by tribalism that reduces an individual into a mere shadow and echo of the tyrant.
Saddam's regime during the first Gulf War co-opted Islam, a universal faith of transcendent purity, to serve its totalitarian ends. Thus a faith and a culture were bent, broken and corrupted to become an instrument of Saddam's tyranny and genocidal repression within Iraq.
Outside of Iraq, Muslim fundamentalism -- an ideology shaped in the context of 20th-century politics within the Muslim world that has as much to do with Islam and the traditions of Prophet Mohammed as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christ and Christianity -- mutated into the international terrorism of Osama bin Laden and his worldwide network.
The primary victims of Saddam's totalitarian tyranny and bin Laden's terrorism have been Muslims, first in Iraq and later from Algeria to Afghanistan. Then the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York came as an omen of future terror.
Saddam's totalitarianism and bin Laden's terrorism are only technically distinct and separate. In the subterranean world of the politics of intimidation, repression and organized violence, they merge, and in this fusion of their means and ends they are a present threat to global peace and security, as European fascism was during the first half of the 20th century.
The primary purpose of this war is to snuff out this threat before it becomes even more menacing and the costs to liquidate it astronomical.
Securing the freedom of Iraqis is a political objective inseparable from eliminating Saddam's regime, which can only be demolished from the outside.
If the public fully understands the twin nature of Saddam's totalitarianism and bin Laden's terrorism, of how these evil forces complement each other and threaten the world beyond their sanctuary, its support will remain firm behind the political objective achieved by military means.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com
 World Fact Book (CIA]
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