The British empire is dead, finally

THE last days of the British raj extended from 1947 to the seventies when the paramount imperialists of the previous two centuries finally left Africa. Some thirty years later, the last traces of empire are disappearing from the pages of history. The British drew the maps of the 20th century. America is getting ready to redraw them as the 21st century begins. If the United States can sustain what it is setting out to do, which is infinitely more difficult, then, and only then, will it be able to call the 21st the American century.

The British took control of the last two great empires ruled by Muslims in the second millennium: the Mughal empire in South Asia and the Ottoman empire across West Asia and Africa. Success in both cases came in stages rather than through one decisive blow. On the Indian subcontinent the process was complete by 1857. It took defeat in the First World War for the Ottomans to surrender in 1918.

The British were nothing if not impartial: partition was their recipe for both the empires. In India they encouraged ‘Muslim nationalism’ in order to weaken the Indian nationalist movement. In the Ottoman lands they encouraged ‘Arab nationalism’ when they wanted an uprising against Ottoman Turkey during World War 1, when they had no desire whatsoever to give the Arabs any independence.

The betrayal of the Arabs by Britain and France was organized at the same time as the promise was being given. It was as cynical as that.

The Hashemite family (now rulers of Jordan), direct descendants of the Prophet, who had the honour of being the Sherif of the holy city of Makkah, sounded out Lord Kitchener, British agent and consul general in Egypt from 1911 till the start of the Great War, on possible British support for an Arab revolt against Ottoman Turkey. Six days before war was declared by Britain against Turkey, Kitchener wrote to Emir Abdullah, second son of Sherif Hussein, head of the Hashemites, suggesting that “it may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Khalifate at Makkah or Medina...” The Ottoman rulers had become the caliphs of the Muslim world from the time of Selim II.

When Britain declared war against Turkey, Sultan Mehmet V responded with a call for a jihad against Britain, France and Russia. The British were determined to disrupt this attempt to unite Muslims against the allies. They began distributing promises with abandon. In the summer of 1915, Hussein sent a letter to Sir Henry McMahon, Britain’s high commissioner in Egypt, seeking support for a Hashemite caliphate that would extend from the border of Turkey down south to Yemen, and from the Mediterranean to the eastern edge of Mesopotamia. Sir Henry agreed, in a letter to Hussein dated October 24, 1915, that Britain would “recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories included in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Makkah” with some differences, as for instance seeking a different status for regions that were not specifically Arab in demographic character.

He also retained the right of both Britain and France to keep ‘special measures of administrative control’ to protect their interests. There was no mention of Palestine, Jerusalem or Jews. In December Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, wrote to Sherif Hussein favouring “Arab independence of Turkish domination”. On June 5, 1916, Sherif Hussein fired a symbolic shot at the Ottoman barracks in Makkah to signal that the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule had begun.

No one of course had told him about two gentlemen who had begun to discuss the future of the region seven months before. In November 1915, Francois Georges-Picot, a former French diplomat in Beirut, arrived in London to begin talks with Colonel Sir Mark Sykes, a respected British Arabist. In May 1916, that is, only weeks before the Arabs displayed their hand and rose against their fellow-Muslims, they signed the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. There was very little talk of Arab independence here. Instead, it envisaged two regions, one under French control and the other under British control. The French would get Lebanon from north of Beirut to the south of Tyre; the British would rule Acre and Haifa while Palestine would be the responsibility of all three allies — Britain, France and Russia.

The peace conference that followed the war took up the fate of the Ottoman empire last, but nothing was forgotten. It ceded the Arab lands to the victors as ‘mandates’ sanctioned by the League of Nations: Britain got what is now Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan, while France was given Syria and Lebanon. The alliance did not prevent the victors from some bitter fighting over the spoils. An indication of what they really wanted was evident in the last days of the First World War when Britain raced to seize oil-rich Mosul although the Sykes-Picot agreement had placed it within Syria. But Britain refused to cede Mosul, and would do no more than award its ally some concessions.

This is not the place to record how Turkey, under Mustafa Kemal, united to defeat British plans to partition the country; or the schemes and scheming that saw London-purchased kings placed on suddenly created thrones across the Arab world by 1932. It is sufficient to note that the straight-line maps drawn by British Arabists, whether just or unjust, held through the century.

With the American invasion, and presumed conquest, of Iraq, these lines could fall apart.

Sub-nationalism is a problem in almost every contemporary country of significant size. Only those with good fortune (both as wealth and as luck) have been able to defuse demands for further ‘self-determination’. Iraq has at least three sub-nationalities. The Kurds in the north — allies in the American offensive against Saddam Hussein — are already practising autonomy and believe that the coming war will give them liberation from Baghdad. Iran has been encouraging the huge Shia majority in the east of Iraq to link its destiny with Shia Iran. The minority Sunni population is in power, but divided. One of the potential horror stories is revenge killings against Sunni civilians by Kurds or Shias if authority collapses in Baghdad and the United States cannot find the infrastructure to fill the vacuum.

No one believes that Iraq has a serious defence against an Anglo-American invasion. And no one knows what the implosion of the ruling Baath dictatorship would entail. If the Americans believe that they can replicate Afghanistan, where they replaced the Taliban with a patchwork coalition sanctioned by a supervized Loya Jirga, then they have little understanding of either the country or the region. A handful of exiled groups, protected by foreign armies, is unlikely to form a government that has any credibility. Relief from dictatorship will not subsume the demand for new nations.

The Kurds could be instrumental in unsettling the region, for they extend to Turkey and Iran as well. Turkey will not compromise on its territorial integrity, but might find it useful to send the troublesome element among its Kurdish minority towards this new Kurdistan.

There is greater danger if the eastern border — already the focus of a deadly but inconclusive war in the eighties between Iraq and Iran — begins to unravel. There are elements in the Bush administration that have already begun to dream of the next Crusade, after the “recovery” of Iraq. This is a war against Iran. American columnists with a connection to the State Department or the White House have begun to suggest that the real threat to western interests is not from an empty dictator like Saddam, but from an ideologically committed nation-state like Iran. Iran was named in George Bush’s “axis of evil”. Americans will be tempted to strike at Iran’s nuclear installations to snuff out its capacity to make a bomb. (The message from North Korea is not lost on anyone; its nuclear power is protecting it from invasion.)

The American military presence in the region will itself be a temptation for a counter-offensive by groups working in isolation, and any successful strike that kills a significant number of troops will work Washington up to a frenzy. American troops will have effectively encircled Iran if Baghdad falls. They are in Afghanistan, in the Gulf (on waters and on land), in Turkey and in Central Asia already. Iraq completes the circle.

President Pervez Musharraf has already said something startling — that Pakistan could be an American target after Iraq. One assumes that the words did not slip out accidentally, or thoughtlessly. The idea is in fact too careful to be thoughtless. President Musharraf is giving notice that American thoughts are turning to Pakistan’s nuclear capability, and powerful voices are suggesting that the only Muslim country to possess effective nuclear weapons should be defanged.

Turmoil may have a beginning, but who knows how it will end? This is what keeps nations like France, Germany and Russia from fully endorsing the Bush rush to war. It is difficult to see how George Bush can avoid war without self-destructing. He rules when American power is at its peak. He has received an extraordinary inheritance. We cannot yet say what his legacy will be. He is mapping his future around the contours of Iraq.

The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.

Bhutto’s shock to finance

BHUTTO in the title of this article is not Benazir — who also shocked the financial system in many different ways during her two tenures as prime minister in the 1990s — but her father, Zulfikar Ali. We will get to the Benazir Bhutto story later in this series of articles. For the moment our focus will be on the impact Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s policies had on the financial system.

Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister for more than five years — from 1972 to 1977 — instituted what his administration termed “reforms.” The main objective of the series of moves made by him was to reduce the economic power of the industrial and financial houses that had been identified — wrongly, we believe — as having captured the country’s economic system. Nationalization of the assets owned and managed by these houses was the blunt instrument used by the Bhutto administration to reduce the political influence of urban wealth.

As was suggested in the article last week, Ayub Khan’s government had created an environment in which various components of the financial sector had developed very well and had also prospered. By the end of the Ayub period, Pakistan had one of the more vibrant financial sectors in the developing world. Commercial banks had expanded their presence; insurance companies had begun to develop new products and attract new customers; the stock exchange in Karachi, helped by the National Investment Trust and the Investment Corporation of Pakistan, had begun to broaden the base of ownership of the various parts of the economy; and development finance corporations were successfully intermediating foreign assistance and making it available as equity and debt to new and old entrepreneurs. The only area left unattended by the government was the regulatory system.

Had the Ayub administration focused some attention on the task of regulating the various institutions operating in the financial system, some of the sins that were to be attributed to them by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto might not have been committed. There is no doubt that “crony capitalism” had flourished during the Ayub period. This had created alliances — described in exceptionally pungent terms by Bhutto as he campaigned around the country before the 1970 elections — involving the banking and the industrial sectors and the powerful civil bureaucracy.

Bhutto used nationalization to break up these alliances. He moved quickly to take over the industrial units owned by the large industrial houses. On January 1, 1972, the government assumed the management and control over 31 industrial units. However, he waited for two years before bringing the financial sector under the control of the government. The economic bureaucracy of the time, led by the indefatigable A.G. N. Kazi, seemed to have persuaded the prime minister that direct ownership of financial assets was not necessary to meet his political objectives. This could be done by persuasion — always an effective tool in a semi-authoritarian system — and the use of the regulatory system. Using these devices Bhutto would ensure that the resources managed by banks and insurance companies were channelled into the sectors he favoured.

Bhutto accepted this argument and delayed the nationalization of the financial institutions for two more years. Following his socialist instincts and determined to reduce the political influence of the big industrial class, the prime minister wished to move financial resources into the small and medium sectors. To achieve that objective, his administration created the National Credit Council (NCC) under the State Bank of Pakistan in May 1972. The NCC was mandated to get capital into small and medium enterprises. As an incentive, commercial banks lending money to the enterprises were to share all risks with the State Bank of Pakistan.

This way of controlling the flow of credit gives enormous power to the bureaucracy and, if the civil servants are beholden to politicians — as they increasingly became during the Bhutto period — it brings in political interference in the process of allocation of financial resources. This is precisely what happened. Civil servants, sometimes urged on by politicians and at other times acting on their own, began to influence the allocation of capital by the banking sector. The creation of the NCC, therefore, was the first significant foray of politics into finance.

But Bhutto was not satisfied. For him this was too complicated a way of controlling the distribution of money by financial institutions. A better way was to bring them under the direct control of the government — of the bureaucracy and its political masters. That was done on January 1, 1974 — two years after the first wave of nationalization.

In the second nationalization wave, the government took over all commercial banks and insurance companies and placed them under its control. This move was to have a much greater impact on the economy than the earlier take-over of large industries. By bringing 31 large industrial enterprises under its direct administration, the government did not acquire a significant presence in the sector. Its enterprises employed only four per cent of the industrial workforce and accounted for perhaps five to six per cent of the industrial output. But by nationalizing banks and insurance companies, the government was the complete master of the financial sector and, through, it of the entire industrial sector.

As economists are fond of saying, the financial sector is the heart of an economy — any economy, developed or developing, socialist or capitalist, industrial or agricultural. By nationalizing all modern financial institutions the government now held the economy’s heart in its hands. Inevitably the heart weakened over time. It failed to pump blood into the parts of the economy that needed it most. Without stretching this metaphor very far, it would be correct to say that by taking over the financial sector in its entirety, the Bhutto government turned what was once a vibrant economy into an increasingly sick entity.

While the proportion of industrial workforce employed and output produced by government-owned institutions following the nationalization of January 1, 1972, did not amount to much, the administration expanded the government’s presence through a series of new investments, mostly in the public sector. To do this, it turned to the instrument of the “development finance corporation” created in the 1950s and further developed by Ayub Khan in the 1960s. But, as we discussed in this space last week, Ayub Khan’s administration had used the DFCs such as PICIC, IDBP and ADB to provide finance for the development of enterprises in the private sector.

Almost the entire lending by these institutions came from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and some bilateral donors who subscribed to this model of development. But Bhutto wanted a DFC that could cater to the resource needs of the industrial enterprises acquired by the government in the first wave of nationalization. He also wished the public sector to make new investments.

These considerations resulted in the creation of yet another DFC — the National Development Finance Corporation (NDFC). A few years after its birth, the NDFC acquired an affiliate, the Regional Development Finance Corporation (RDFC). Together, the two public sector financial institutions received a significant amount of financing from the multilateral development banks. They came to dominate the financial sector.

Bhutto made other changes in the financial sector as well, some of which affected the quality of governance. Two of these were significant. First, the Planning Commission lost most of the authority it had gained during the Ayub period when it tightly controlled all public sector investment. This was done through due diligence of the projects to be financed, selected according to strict economic criteria. Bhutto, an impatient politician with contempt for serious economics, began to short-circuit the Commission. Increasingly the public sector development programme came to include projects that could not be justified on economic grounds. Among the most costly of these was the Karachi Steel Mill.

Second, Bhutto had no use for an independent central bank that could oversee the working of the various parts of the financial sector. Over time, the State Bank lost most of its authority and, effectively, became a part of the ministry of finance. If it sought to present a point of view different from that of the prime minister, Bhutto did not hesitate to remove its governor. This happened to Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who, in a well reasoned speech, had painted a more sombre picture of the economy than Bhutto was prepared to endorse.

In sum, Bhutto set the stage for the rapid bureaucratization and politicization of the financial sector. The stage was also set for a steady deterioration in the efficiency of the institutions functioning in the sector and for the arrival of corruption and political favouritism as the preferred criteria for conducting business.

Those who have chronicled Bhutto’s years in power have not given sufficient attention to the long-term damage that was done to the economy by the reckless way in which the financial sector was changed and restructured. This neglect may in part be due to the fact that the importance of the financial sector for sustained economic growth has begun to be fully appreciated only in recent years. Our awareness of this was increased by the great financial crisis that hit East Asia in the middle of 1997, demonstrating the fragility of the economies that had, until then, been regarded as exceptionally robust.

Since the East Asian crisis, analysts have begun to focus on the contribution finance makes to development. A weak financial system can shock even the strongest economy. A strong financial system can protect even weak economies against external shocks.

While there are exceptions to every generalization, a considerable amount of empirical work carried out by multilateral development banks suggests that disappointing macroeconomic performance is almost always associated with a significant public sector banking presence. A recent study by economists La Porta, Lopez-de-Sinales and Shlafer shows that a higher initial level of government ownership of banks leads to slower rates of economic growth. The conclusion from all this is obvious for understanding the loss of economic momentum during the Bhutto years. Simply by increasing the presence of the public sector in the field of finance, the Bhutto administration set the stage for anaemic growth rates for decades to come. Thirty years after Bhutto’s nationalization of the financial sector, Pakistan continues to struggle with the process of reversing the change introduced by the Bhutto government in 1974.

Before concluding, it will be useful to add a caveat to the general proposition that public sector banking inhibits economic growth. Several countries have turned publicly owned banks to successful enterprises. Examples of these include BNDES (Brazil), DSK Bank (Bulgaria), Bank Mandiri (Indonesia), and Bank Bumiputra (Malaysia). How this was done is a subject we will pick up in the next article in this series when we look at the handling of the financial sector by the government headed by General Ziaul Haq.

Shaking fists, flexing muscles

SO long as Pakistan and India continue to abuse each other and do not come to blows, it’s business as usual. It is, in a perverse sort of way, a kind of a dialogue.

Both countries have their hawks and doves but, as seems likely, neither will prevail, and the two neighbours will continue to live in a state of uncertainty, neither of the two blinking, both posturing, both investing their resources in weaponry, an arms race that has no finishing line, no winning post.

It is a kind of madness that has been passed on from generation to generation. I can remember this hostility since the days when I was young and now that I am old, there is still the same belligerence. Which means that there has been no change and positions have remained fixed, as if trapped in a time-warp. In the meantime, both countries have acquired nuclear weapons!

As I read the news of Pakistani diplomats having been expelled from New Delhi, I read the news of a grand rapprochement between France and Germany, two countries who had been locked in battle, in the Great War of 1914-18 and World War 11, when France was actually occupied by Germany and it wasn’t too long ago, France and Germany had been sworn enemies going even further back than these two wars, now both are determined to bury that bloody past. But more than that, both countries are prepared to invest in peace and have vowed to work together to prevent a war in Iraq and lead a European Union consensus in favour of a peaceful solution to the crises over Baghdad’s alleged weapons programme.

How tragic for the people of the subcontinent, that those countless millions are still yearning to breathe free, even though their countries won their freedom more than half a century ago, should remain permanent enemies. We have built our own Maginot and Siegried Lines. Not unexpectedly, Pakistan has duly expelled Indian diplomats. Pretty soon, the only traffic between the two countries will be the coming and going of diplomats.

As I was writing my book Once Upon A Time, which is about growing up in British India, I had to reach into my memories and was amazed at the buoyant mood of those times and how much hope there was. We blamed all our misfortunes on the British, “perfidious Albion” we had called them and once they were gone and we were free, there would be nothing but good times and blue skies.

To be sure, communal riots had been a regular feature of those times. But we were confident that once Pakistan and India emerged as free nations, each would mind its own business and find some accommodation to live, if not as friends, certainly not as intractable enemies. Both countries had enormous problems of which a deep and measureless poverty was pre-eminent.

We needed all our energies and we needed to invest our resources in creating conditions in which the people could live in dignity, beyond just limping endurance. The world was racing ahead, we needed to get out of the darkness of ignorance. It was not to be.

Instead, this hostility has turned into a nightmare. It is immaterial who strikes first with nuclear weapons, for that would be the end of the matter, but even a conventional war is too horrible to contemplate. It would leave both countries bankrupt, economically and morally. We must put a stop to brinkmanship, to this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. We must start to use the language of peace. We should heed the anti-war protests all over the world, the prospect of a strike against Iraq is a chilling one.

No less chilling would be a war between India and Pakistan. India is refusing all dialogue, making one pretext or another. In the case of Iraq, the United Nations is playing a pivotal role, its authority has been revived. The United Nations cannot sit back and wash its hands off an equally dangerous storm that is brewing in another volatile region. If Iraq must comply with the United Nation Security Council resolutions, so too must India. It is committed to a plebiscite in Kashmir.

Many years may elapsed since both India and Pakistan solemnly agreed to a plebiscite. That pledge has not become invalid. Indeed, it acquires an urgency given the conditions and the bloodshed in Occupied Kashmir. There is a clear and present danger and both countries have weapons of mass destruction. What is the United Nations waiting for? This may be a naive view of international politics, which is governed by realpolitik. But there is nothing naive about the dangerous drift to war between the two countries.

I have yet to meet anyone in Pakistan who thinks that a war between the countries is a good thing. I must presume the same good sense in India. Yet there is all this fist-shaking and flexing of muscles and the rhetoric is getting more shrill, more menacing. It does not make sense. Each country must look to the interests of its people and war is not in the best interest of either people. Let’s take that as a given and proceed from there.

War on the environment

THIS just in. The Pentagon has declared war on the terrorist environmentalists.

It has to do with the armed forces demanding that the government loosen environmental regulations that protect millions of acres of land set aside for endangered species and critical habitats.

The Pentagon says their military exercises are restricted by needless concern over the undeveloped land.

If our troops are going to be ready, they have to fire live ammunition, drop bombs and plant land mines in the country’s wilderness.

Who is right? An environmentalist told me, “The military is interested in readiness to protect the country and not in saving the endangered species that might be wiped out forever.”

The Pentagon said, “You can’t learn to kill people unless you have enough land to do it.”

The environmentalist responded, “What concerns me the most is not what live ammunition the military fires successfully, but the bombs and hand grenades that don’t go off. They will be a hazard to nature lovers all over the world.”

The Pentagon says it wants to loosen the regulations because currently it must file an environmental study before it can use its weapons. This requires a lot of unnecessary paperwork at a time when Bush declares that we’re at war.

“War, as we know, is hell,” a general said, “but we have no choice if we are going to police the world. We need practice, practice, practice.”

A spokesman for Save the Forests Primeval told me, “The military considers the land set aside for plants and animals their land. That is why they want to flout the present environmental laws.”

“No,” says a Pentagon spokesman, “you can’t kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan without first dropping practice bombs on California.”

The environmental groups who are trying to keep the land pristine are suing the Pentagon. They are going to court and will be opposed by Pentagon lawyers.

The laws that the environmentalists fought for are being threatened. Donald Rumsfeld says he needs the land to keep our country safe from terrorism.

The Defence Department argues that all the environmentalists want to do is save the Gnatcatcher, a small bird that contributes nothing to the Gross National Product.

Like everything else, the dispute is going to court — several courts — and possibly to the Supreme Court, where Rumsfeld vs. Gnatcatcher could be heard.—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Iraq war drive is a mystery

WEIGHTER decisions than those due to be taken in the next two to three weeks can hardly be imagined. In rapid sequence, the UN inspectors will make their report, Bush will give his state of the union address, the security council will meet to discuss Iraq, and the Israelis will go to the polls.

Tony Blair, the president’s principal supporter, will meet both Bush and Jacques Chirac, who is emerging as the leader of European opposition to a war against Iraq, in summits only a few days apart.

These decisions are particularly perplexing, for all but the committed core in the Bush administration, because the drive to make war on Iraq, or, rather, the larger American policy of which that drive is a part, is one of the most mysterious projects of modern times. How and why the administration conceived and nurtured it is still unclear.

It is possible to say, however, that an influential group, which grew in numbers over time and quickly came to include the president, intuited rather than reasoned that Saddam Hussein and his regime represented both a danger that had to be met and an opportunity that had to be seized.

They have nevertheless marshalled a case for war that is substantial, a case that fair-minded people might be inclined to accept more widely than they do — were it not that the case against war is at least equally strong. But it is the utter confidence of the American war party in the rightness of its cause, the sense that, with it, the war and the grand strategy of which it is a part are articles of faith, that is the best argument of its opponents. How can there be such an unblinking conviction that its course is right in as uncertain and as complex, and as new a world as the one we are living in today?

Whatever is thought of this American purpose, there is no denying its energy and force. The nations, including the people of the United States, are not deciding in the coming weeks whether or not there will be war with Iraq. As Bush said recently: “I get to decide that.” But they are choosing whether America and Britain will wage a lonely combat, and whether the attempt to relate the American purpose to the purposes of others, to channel it through international institutions, and to make it both more legitimate and more controllable will be abandoned or continue.

But here it is necessary to be as hard on many of the opponents of war as on its proposers, as well as to clear away the misleading idea that evidence that Saddam is concealing weapons of mass destruction is at the centre of the argument. It is at the centre of the manoeuvring, yes, but not of the argument. Among those knowledgeable about Iraq there are few, if any, who believe he is not hiding such weapons. It is a given.

We print accounts of them, with diagrams and charts, in our newspapers every day. That is why both the Americans and the British insist that it is not just a matter of the inspectors being able to go where they please, but of Iraq handing over the weapons that everybody knows they have.

In these circumstances, to treat Iraq as if it were an Agatha Christie thriller which it is necessary to read to the end is ludicrous. Of course, to wait for the moment of discovery may well be the right course procedurally, because it means the appropriate UN resolutions can be invoked. It may also be the right course psychologically, because it affects public support. But acting as if it is still genuinely an open question whether Saddam is cheating is dishonest, and likely to be a cover for opposition to the war on other grounds — whether those grounds are good or bad.

It is also dishonest to argue that, with the inspectors ranging over the country without serious obstacle to their activities and with the Iraqi regime clearly in chastened mood, Iraq is now once again effectively contained, so there is no need for military force. Containment has been revived, and the international community has been galvanised into a new attitude toward Iraq. But both of these are consequent on the American will to war and the increasingly visible preparations for it. Does anyone imagine that if those American troops were stood down, Iraqi co-operation would continue for long?

Yet it is here that there is a chance for a bargain between the United States and its allies that could take us through the summer and beyond. That bargain would be that America would shoulder the costs and risks of a prolonged deployment in the Gulf if the allies engaged to continue to take containment seriously, and to draw a line at some agreed point in the future where military action would once again be on the table, this time without any ifs or buts.

The advantages? Time, for Saddam to convict himself, and for the inevitability of his end to work its way more deeply even into his inner circles. The disadvantages for those driving American policy? Loss of momentum, loss of prestige, and gambling on friends they do not fully trust. The chances therefore are not high, particularly as, in the American and British view, similar bargains have been made in the past and not honoured.

In Washington, there is an obvious feeling that this is a tide that must be taken at the flood. If war therefore comes soon, and America and Britain fight it alone and without international endorsement, the precedent will not be a good one, and the damage to transatlantic relations will be large, as will that to relations between Britain and its European partners.

Even if the war is a low-casualty success, and the liberation of the Iraqi population can be counted as a boon, the dangers arising from a consequent American attempt to put into practice a master plan for the region are clear.

Yet it has to be said that there is a need for a new approach by America and Europe to the Middle East. But that needs to be something more modest in its aspirations and more sympathetic to Arab sensibilities and claims than that which the wilder spirits in Washington seem to be contemplating.

Perhaps the hawks can be bid down. A victory, with all the immediate difficulties and intricacies it would bring, could well sweep some unrealistic ambitions aside, as well as forcing the US to face problems in the region which it has been, until now, postponing.—Dawn/ Guardian Service