IT IS regrettable that disregarding Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s unequivocal declaration in his very first public statement that normalization of relations with India is among the top priorities of the new government, top Indian leaders should have attacked Pakistan with their barbs of baseless allegations.

In his all too familiar hawkish fashion, India’s Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani has held Pakistan responsible for the terrorist attack on two Hindu temples in Jammu last week, killing 12 persons. Taking cue from what his senior colleague, the Indian foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha, has called on the world community to impose economic sanctions on Pakistan for sponsoring cross-border terrorism, provoking the Pakistan foreign office to say that this sort of slandering makes it clear that India continues to be caught in its “mindset of coercive diplomacy.”

There is no basis to link Pakistan with what has happened in Jammu. Islamabad has invariably condemned all acts of terrorism in India, including the latest. But then New Delhi wants to gain the maximum diplomatic mileage out of the current anti-terror phobia to malign Pakistan. As an Indian researcher of the Brookings Institution in the US has admitted in a recent research paper, with the ‘terrorism card’ gaining currency since 9/11, India too has attempted to “deftly use it for impressing upon the international community of Pakistan’s role in sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir.”

The tendency on the part of the Indian leadership to blame Pakistan for most acts of violence and subversion in India and in held Kashmir. In that mood they have chosen to turn a blind eye to the shift in the Pakistan establishment’s approach to relations with India as with other countries of the region because in the changed context Islamabad wishes to concentrate its attention and resources on its own social and economic development. Normalization of relations with India is an inevitable component of this new policy orientation as Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri made plain the other day.

Pakistan has always been receptive to peace initiatives. If Mr Vajpayee took the dramatic step of travelling to Lahore in February 1999, Pakistan responded positively to the suggestion for an India-Pakistan summit, opting for peace rather than for continued confrontation. Gen Pervez Musharraf’s decision to go to Agra was not — as some Indian hardliners now suggest — an exercise in deception.

It is now widely realized that but for the last-minute intrusion of some hardline specialists in diplomacy from both sides, the summit would have ended on a positive note and the course of India-Pakistan relations would have been significantly different from what it has been since then.

The then Indian foreign minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, told a press conference after the summit broke down that India would “pick up the threads from the visit of the president of Pakistan” but the prime minister did not even make his promised visit to Pakistan in November in response to Gen Pervez Musharraf’s invitation. He now appears reluctant to come to Pakistan even for the SAARC summit in January.

The ‘Track Two’ non-official peace initiatives are also no more in sight. The former Indian naval chief Admiral Ramdas’ recent visit to Pakistan created the hope that India might lift its ban on road and air links traffic between the two countries but so far there are no signs of that happening.

Addressing the officers of the Pakistan foreign ministry, last Monday, Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri expressed the hope that India would respond positively to Pakistan’s repeated call for the resumption of bilateral talks and that peace would ultimately prevail in the region. He also wanted Mr Vajpayee to visit Pakistan for the SAARC summit. What India’s response would be to these positive overtures and pronouncements from this side is difficult to say. Perhaps, left to himself, Mr Vajpayee with his reputation as a moderate would respond positively. But then, there are too many hawks and chauvinists around him to keep him in line.

V.R. Krishna Iyer, a former judge of India’s Supreme Court, who is known for his active involvement in human rights issues, in an article some time ago deplored the fact that “Indian ministers and minions talk obsessively only of cross-border infiltration... (and) Kashmiris, their pathetic lot, their national and internal grievances and horrifying human rights questions are eclipsed by a totalitarian concern for perennial cross-border infiltration.” He said, in sum, cross-border infiltrations are the political opium of the people.”

The former Supreme Court judge also reminded the Indian leaders that “peace is India’s first charge” under the terms of the Indian constitution (Article 51 dealing with international relations) and India should not be rigid on what he called “bilateral bigotry” and, in fact, sit together with Pakistan and display a measure of “negotiable flexibility.” He also expects the Kashmiri leaders to be involved in any discussion of their fate.

India is also only too well aware that while its relations with Pakistan have remained strained and confrontational, in the past decade or so, religious fanaticism has made substantial inroads into its political mainstream. A parallel development has manifested itself in Pakistan as well. It is also apparent that further uncertainty and lack of stability will further strengthen this trend. Both countries must work within their respective domain to create an environment of sanity which will foster the growth of liberal and democratic forces and help them regain their place in the political mainstream. Normalization of relations between the two countries will provide a fillip to such process.

PRESIDENT George Bush delivered a philippic recently at the NATO summit in Prague, comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and calling on America’s allies to join his crusade against Iraq.

Who says history does not repeat itself?

Flashback to 480 BCE. Ultimatum from Persia to Athens: “Emperor Xerxes orders you to surrender your weapons and become an ally.” Message from Xerxes to his satraps — subordinate rulers within the mighty Persian Empire: “I intend to...march against Greece, and thereby gain vengeance on the Athenians who have wronged Persia and dared to injure me and my father!”

Ten years earlier, Xerxes’ father, Darius, had attacked Athens but failed to crush the defiant little state. Now Xerxes was summoning his satraps to finish the job, warning that Athens was a threat to the entire civilized world. Contingents (modern terminology: coalition) from Parthia, Egypt, Media, Pontus, Scythia, Phoenicia, Assyria, and a score of other satrap kingdoms rallied under Xerxes’ banner.

Flash forward 2482 years to Prague. “He’s the guy who tried to kill my dad!” says Bush Jr. of Saddam. Bush’s cartoon characterization of Saddam Hussein as a second Hitler plays well in unworldly Peoria and the US Bible belt, but it produced derision or dismay among sophisticated continental Europeans, many of whom regard the sabre-rattling, imperial-minded Bush administration as more alarming than Iraq or Osama bin Laden.

Undaunted by such concerns, President Bush forged ahead with plans, first presented last September, to press NATO to deploy a 20,000-man rapid reaction force composed of European, Turkish, and Canadian troops whose prime mission would be to attack ‘rogue states,’ Islamic militants, and any other violators of the Pax Americana.

In keeping with the Bush administration’s ever closer identification with the ethos and methods of the former British empire, Europeans, Canadians, Turks, and, most lately, Australians, are to become the sepoys of America’s new imperial forces, providing a diplomatic fig-leaf and cannon fodder for aggressive missions. Washington is demanding of its subordinate ‘allies’ to contribute troops whenever it so orders, just like Darius, Xerxes, and every feudal system and empire in history.

The British, ever the moon to America’s sun, and the seven, small former Soviet-ruled East European states just invited to join NATO, eagerly volunteered token troop contributions, but the rest of Europe was deeply troubled by the prospect of what the late West German defence minister, Franz Josef Strauss, aptly called “playing foot soldier to America’s atomic knights.”

After half a century of being an obedient junior partner to the US (France excepted), a now united Europe is timidly asserting its independence, the most recent example being Germany’s refusal to obey Bush’s imperial command to join his anti-Iraq jihad.

The EU is struggling to form a 50,000-man European intervention force that America clearly sees as a rival to its own plan for a US-directed Euro ‘rogue state’ swat team. Europe’s reaction force is designed for peace-keeping; the Bush administration wants its Euro-force to fight America’s enemies.

The White House pushed hard for admission to NATO of militarily feeble Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia. This was primarily because the US needs their air bases as refuelling and logistical waypoints on an air bridge that extends from North America to new, permanent US bases in the Mideast and Afghanistan, the 21st century version of the British empire’s old ‘imperial lifeline’ that ran through Gibraltar and Suez to India and beyond.

These economically weak nations are quickly becoming US dependencies, replacing increasingly ‘undependable’ European allies like France and Germany. Even so, few noticed that the admission of these four states, plus Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, would likely weaken instead of strengthening NATO by draining rather than adding to its military resources.—Copyright Eric S. Margolis, 2002

NOW that the elections are over we can return to the serious matters at hand. One is the revelation that Princess Di’s butler has gone public with many of her secrets.

Paul Burrell sold his memoirs — or rather, her memoirs — to the Daily Mirror and also ITV for $700,000. He didn’t do it for the money, but to add to the royal family’s memory book.

This is what we know so far. Princess Di had an affair with a brain surgeon, whom she referred to as her “soul mate.” Burrell said he smuggled the doctor into Kensington Palace in the back seat of a car, under blankets, so he could have tea and crumpets with Princess Di.

We also know from the butler that Di did some interesting things. For instance, she went out in the street with nothing on but a fur coat and gave money to prostitutes if they would give up their profession. When the anti-fur people heard this, they picketed the palace.

THE flurry of reports, leaks, and misinformation about the looming US war against Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq continues with increasing density. It is impossible to know, however, how much of this is a brilliantly managed campaign of psychological war against Iraq, how much the public floundering of a government uncertain about its next step.

In any event, I find it equally possible to believe that there will be a war or, on the other hand, that there won’t be one. Certainly the sheer belligerency of the verbal assaults on the average citizen are unprecedented in their ferocity, with the result that very little is totally certain about what is actually taking place.

No one can independently confirm the various troop and navy movements reported on a daily basis, and given the lurching opacity of his thinking, George W. Bush’s real intentions are difficult to read. But that the whole world is concerned — indeed, deeply anxious — about the catastrophic chaos that will ensue after another Afghanistan-like air campaign against the people of Iraq, of that there is little doubt.

And yet, one aspect of the deluge of opinion and fact that is most disturbing quite on its own and without reference to its actual intention, is the spate of articles concerning post-Saddam Iraq. One that I would like to discuss in particular is obviously part of a continuing effort by an Iraqi expatriate, Kanan Makiya, to promote himself as the father of what he calls a “non-Arab” and decentralized post-Baath country.

Now it is quite clear to anyone with the slightest concern about the travails of this rich and once-flourishing country that the years of Baathist rule have been disastrous, despite the regime’s early programme of development and building. So there can be little quarrel with trying to imagine what Iraq might look like if Saddam is toppled either by American intervention or by internal coup.

Makiya’s contribution to this effort has been a steady one, both on the airwaves and in quality journals where he is given a platform to air his views, about which I shall speak in a moment. What has been made less clear, however, is who he is and from what background he emerges. I think it is important to know these things, if only to judge the value of his contribution and to understand more precisely the special quality of his thoughts and ideas. Usually identified as having a research connection with Harvard and as a professor at Brandeis University (both in Boston), Makiya, when I knew him first in the early seventies, was closely affiliated with the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As I recall, he was then an architecture student at MIT, but he hardly said anything during the occasions I saw him. Then he disappeared from view, or rather from my view. He surfaced in 1990 as Samir Khalil, the author of a vaunted book called The Republic of Fear that described Saddam Hussein’s rule with considerable dread and drama.

One of the media-rousing works of the first Gulf War, The Republic of Fear seemed to have been written — according to a fawning interview with Makiya that appeared in the New Yorker magazine — while Makiya took time off from working as an associate of his father’s architectural firm in Iraq itself. He admitted in the interview that, in a sense, Saddam had financed the writing of his book indirectly, although no one accused Makiya of collaborating with a regime he obviously detested.

In his next book, Cruelty and Silence, Makiya attacked Arab intellectuals whom he accused of opportunism and immorality because they either praised various Arab regimes or remained silent about the various governments’ abuses against their own people. Of course, Makiya said nothing about his own history of silence and complicity as a beneficiary of the Iraqi regime’s munificence, even though, of course, he was entitled to work for whomever he pleased.

But he said the vilest things about people like Mahmoud Darwish and myself for being nationalists, allegedly supporting extremism and, in Darwish’s case, for having written an ode to Saddam. Most of what Makiya wrote in the book was, in my opinion, revolting, based as it was on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation, but the book, of course, enjoyed a popular moment or two since it confirmed the view in the West that Arabs were villainous and shabby conformists. It seemed not to matter that Makiya himself had worked for Saddam or that he had never written anything about the Arab regimes until his Republic of Fear, until, that is, he was out of Iraq and done with his employment there.

He was hailed here and there in America for being a brave man of conscience and for having defied the self-censoring practice of Arab intellectuals, but this praise was usually heaped on Makiya by people who had no knowledge of the fact that Makiya himself never wrote in an Arab country or that whatever meagre writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West.

Except for his two books and an article urging the US administration to occupy Baghdad during the first Gulf War, Makiya was not much heard from after that. Then last year he produced an unreadable novel proving somehow that the Dome of the Rock was really built by a Jew; it was sent to me by the publisher, so I happened to have skimmed it before it appeared officially, but was nevertheless aghast at how badly written it was, and how, unable to resist showing off how many books its author had read, it was peppered with footnotes, surely an unusual thing for what purported to be a work of fiction. It died a merciful death, however, and Makiya lapsed back into silence.

Until the government inspired campaign against Iraq broke out a few months ago, Makiya had said little about the war against terror, the events of 9/11, and the war in Afghanistan. It is true that he did a kind of commentary for a popular American bi-weekly of Mohammed Atta’s supposed Islamic terrorist handbook, but even by his standards, it was a negligible performance.

I vividly recall, however, that late last summer I happened by chance to hear a radio interview with him in which he was identified for the first time as heading a US State Department group planning for a post-war, post-Saddam Iraq. His name had not appeared among those mentioned as being part of the US-funded Iraqi opposition groups, nor had he contributed anything that could be read by a member of the general public about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or any other Middle Eastern issues, although I had heard that he had visited Israel a number of times.

The most complete version of his plans for Iraq after an American invasion that derive from his current employment as a resident employee of the US State Department, appears in the November 2002 issue of Prospect, a good liberal British monthly to which I subscribe. Makiya begins his “proposal” by enumerating the extraordinary assumptions behind his arguments, two of which almost by definition are unimaginable. The first is that “the unseating” of Saddam should not occur after a bombing campaign. Makiya must have been living on Mars to imagine that, in the event of a war, a massive bombing attack would not occur even though every single plan circulated for ‘regime change’ in Iraq has stated explicitly that Iraq would be bombed mercilessly.

The second assumption is equally imaginative, since Makiya seems to believe against all evidence that the US is committed to democracy and nation-building in Iraq. Why he thinks that Iraq is like Germany and Japan after World War II (both of which were rebuilt because of the cold war) is beyond me; besides, he does not once mention the fact that the US is determined to bring down the Iraqi regime because of the country’s oil reserves and because Iraq is an enemy of Israel. So, he starts out by making preposterous assumptions that simply fly in the face of all the evidence.

Undeterred by such unimportant considerations, he presses on. Iraqis are committed to federalism, he says, rather than to a centralized government. The proof of this that he offers is pretty negligible. Like all his other attempts to convince his reader that he makes telling points, his logic is so weak because it is based equally on fictional supposition and his own highly dubious personal affirmations. He is committed to federalism, and so he says are the Kurds. Where federalism as a system is supposed to come from (other than from his desk in the State Department), he does not bother to say.

Clearly, he plans to have it imposed from the outside, although he makes the largely unsubstantiated claim that “everyone” is agreed that federalism in Iraq should be the outcome. This “means devolving power away from Baghdad to the provinces,” presumably by a stroke of General Tommy Franks’ pen. One would have thought that post-Tito Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country’s federalism was a total success. But Makiya is so committed to his views as a king-like theoretician of government that he simply ignores consequences, history, people, communities, and reality altogether so that he can make his ludicrously improbable case.

This of course is exactly what the US government likes — that is, to have miscellaneous Arab intellectuals responsible to no constituency who urge the US military on to war while pretending to be bringing “democracy” to the place in full contradiction of America’s real aims and its actual historical practices. Makiya seems not to have heard about ruinous US interventions in Indochina, Afghanistan, Central America, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, and the Philippines, or that the US is currently involved militarily with about 80 countries. —Copyright 2002, Edward W. Said

To be concluded