A rchive Date
[ 09-04-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Salim_Mansur/2004/04/09/414175.html
A year in the war on terror
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
2004-04-09
This week marks the first anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad to the U.S.-led coalition forces.
A year later, the situation in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq - as the clock ticks toward to the planned June 30 handover of Iraqi sovereignty to the Iraqi Governing Council from the Coalition Provisional Authority - seems uncertain. Within the United States and Britain, as in other western democracies, debate over the decision for effecting regime change in Iraq as part of the war on terror has continued unabated since last spring.
This debate is not going to end any time soon in a U.S. election year. The media, particularly television, has played its role of being simultaneously a conduit of events as news, and of shaping the public perspective by editorial decisions.
News coverage and political debates have made for an information overload without a corresponding understanding of the events and, consequently, have produced a poor to negative public view of what is at stake, not only in Iraq but also in the wider war against terror. There is a disconnect here between public perception of the war against terror, as it considers the rush of incidents in isolation, and the real nature of the conflict.
What is needed is a broader view to place in some context the events in Iraq alongside those in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and terrorist bombings in cities across the world.
The spurt of insurgent violence in Iraq, pictures of the mob in Fallujah mutilating the bodies of American contract personnel, the escalation of militant rhetoric by a young Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, as he bids for power with his militia, are all part of the frantic effort of those in Iraq who ruthlessly oppose its incremental transition to democracy through a constitutionally mandated representative government.
This effort in Iraq, assisting change from tyranny to democracy, is unprecedented. There has not been another similar effort anywhere in the past half century, and none in the Middle East, where authoritarian governments of various stripes rule and people languish in a quagmire of lost opportunities, despair and resentment.
The closest analogy for the effort in Iraq were those of the Allied powers at the end of the Second World War in a divided Germany and Japan.
Iraq, under Saddam's tyranny, was the "heart of darkness" in the Arab world. It will take decades for Iraq, a country of varied ethnicity and religious sects, to purge itself of the poison fed into its bloodstream by Saddam's Baath party.
The blueprint for bringing regime change to Iraq would never have been executed if 9/11 had not occurred. Any such blueprint, prepared for policy makers by think- tank experts, would have remained in some bureaucrat's filing system, as it most likely did following the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Saddam's pillaging.
The 1991 war by the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq, reconsidered in the aftermath of 9/11, was a strategic blunder. Liberating Kuwait without eliminating Saddam left Iraqis in the tyrant's noose.
It earned Americans no gratitude in the Middle East for liberating Kuwait. It left Kurds and Shiites in Iraq nursing a legitimate grievance against American betrayal. And it brought about a UN sanction regime with its no-fly zones only the U.S. and Britain would police, earning them further enmity of the Arab-Muslim world for its effects that Saddam cynically exploited, without any intention of complying with the UN requirements for its lifting.
The events of 9/11 altered the perception of terror in the U.S. and elsewhere. Terror could no longer be viewed as isolated acts of deranged individuals, to be dealt with by law enforcement agencies and the courts.
9/11 was seen for what it was, an act of war through terror, unleashed against the West, particularly the United States - labelled as the Great Satan - by a transnational terrorist network of Arab-Muslim fanatics.
In return, President George W. Bush declared war on terror and its operatives worldwide.
The tendency to see 9/11 as an isolated event is compelling. It removes the burden of trying to understand the incubation and growth of terror, its capacity to intimidate states and enlist support from governments over the past several decades. Consequently, it serves the wishful thinking that terror of the order that produced 9/11 can be contained and eliminated by addressing its presumed root causes.
Terror emanating from the Arab-Muslim world has been a weapon of choice directed against the West.
It has taken many ideological forms to disguise its politics and acquire popular support. It has worn the garb of nationalism, socialism, communism and, in its latest incarnation, that of political Islam. In all instances, the politics of terror is indistinguishable from fascism, irrespective of its claims and rhetoric.
We now know the Second World War did not begin suddenly on
Sept. 1, 1939, in Europe, and Dec. 7, 1941, in Asia. It began when democracies refused to understand the nature of fascism and militarism, when Hitler, on coming to power in Germany in 1933, started to tear away at the Treaty of Versailles, when Mussolini's Italy seized Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1936 and Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931.
Similarly, the Cold War did not begin with the blockade of Berlin in June 1948 by the Soviet Union. It began when the Bolsheviks, under Lenin's direction, seized power in Moscow in November 1917.
There is no one date or one event that readily stands as a marker for the origin of Arab-Muslim terror as an undeclared war against the West. But the attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics by Palestinian terrorists was an opening act of this war, three decades before the attack on New York and Washington by agents of Osama bin Laden.
In the three decades since Munich, terrorism was sheltered and nurtured by a number of Arab states, most importantly Saddam's Iraq. As terrorists waged their war through hijackings, hostage-takings, assassinations and intimidations, the West was preoccupied by the Cold War and other pressing issues of East-West politics.
When the U.S. did respond in Lebanon and Ronald Reagan sent in U.S. marines in 1983, terrorists struck back by dispatching a suicide bomber into their barracks, killing 241 American soldiers and driving the rest out.
Terror as a weapon of choice in an undeclared war worked for so long, it was not understood for what it was. 9/11 changed that understanding with the governments in Washington and London, and in a few other capitals of the western world.
It is in this context of the war against terror that regime changes in Afghanistan and Iraq need explaining. It is also a global war of a new sort, different from previous global wars as the Cold War was different from the Second World War, and the war against fascism and militarism was from the First World War.
War is detestable, but it becomes unavoidable when all other options for negotiating differences are exhausted. Peace comes when those who violate it are deterred or eliminated.
With the transnational terror network subverting the existing state system, there could be no negotiations. And once this terror network, feeding on the entrails of failed and rogue states such as Afghanistan and Saddam's Iraq, brought to the open its undeclared war against the West, there could be no other response than the one that followed 9/11. It was the only response since all others, reaching back to the Munich Olympics, had been tried and failed.
But the war against terror is not limited to eliminating terrorists and their staging areas. It is also about reconstructing failed and rogue states, as it was in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Cold War. It is about bringing freedom and democracy - or at least to make the grounds for them favourable to take root - where tyranny had ruled.
Iraq, situated in the centre of the Arab Middle East, is the testing ground between the promise of a new future and the pull of a bankrupt past. The dark forces of the past are determined to derail Iraq's future.
Hence, what is at stake is not only the future of Iraq and the Middle East, but also of an interdependent world where no one can live alone in peace by bargaining with terrorists.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays.
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