DURING the last twelve years or so we have all known of America’s intense disapproval of Saddam Hussein’s style of rule, his assemblage of the largest apparatus of military force in the Arab world, his quest for dominance in the region, his territorial ambitions beyond his country’s own borders, and, above all, his alleged acquisition of weapons of mass destruction. Plans to get rid of him by means short of war have not worked, and periodically the option of invading Iraq has been broached.

Talk of invasion has lately become shrill, possibly because the principals believed to have instigated the events of 9/11 (Osama bin Laden and his ally, Mulla Omar) have not been seized. Given their elusiveness, President Bush and his advisers have focused their wrath once again on Saddam Hussein. Initially, many of us did not take the threatened invasion seriously, for it did not make sense. I am still not sure that it will actually be launched, but reason and good sense may not give the same message to those who decide issues of war and peace as they do to students of politics.

Recounting the misfortunes that have befallen the Muslim world from the doings of Changez and Halaku to those of President Bush in a recent article in this paper, Mr Roedad Khan wondered if America had gone mad. Mr Nelson Mandela believes Mr Bush cannot think straight, and so do some of the European statesmen. But let us not be hasty in coming to a conclusion, and let us consider the related issues some more.

Why is President Bush itching to invade Iraq? Secretary of State Colin Powell said just the other day that war could be avoided if Saddam Hussein would leave Iraq and take his family and friends with him, the clear implication being that the American war aim is to oust Saddam Hussein from power. Why is that so important? Surely not just because he is a cruel and vindictive dictator. Rulers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and some other Latin American countries were mass murderers but the United States did not invade any of them to secure a regime change.

Saddam Hussein had America’s approval and support in his eight-year war with Iran. According to one well-known version, he invaded Kuwait in 1990 after the American ambassador’s ambivalence had led him to believe that her government would not object to his invasion. Since the end of the Gulf war, he has caused the United States no trouble that one knows about. Instead, his regime has been at the receiving end of insults, humiliations, and penalties.

The ouster of Saddam Hussein is a complex project, which may be the reason why the American forces did not march on to Baghdad in March 1991 after the Iraqi army’s retreat from Kuwait. There was the general apprehension at the time that, in the absence of an alternative political force in Iraq, Saddam’s removal would create chaos that might break up the country: the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south might go their own separate ways, and the latter might even come under Iran’s influence.

These risks still exist. Saddam Hussein has never allowed any political force, other than his own, to get organized in Iraq — with the result that an orderly succession to his rule is difficult to contemplate. If America does invade Iraq for the purpose of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, its commissioners and forces will have to stay there and govern until the way can be prepared for a democratic regime to take charge. It is hard to believe that President Bush has thought this through, and that he is ready and willing to take on this awesome responsibility. That Iraqi dissidents, living abroad, will return home, win the allegiance of the Iraqi people, and form a stable government may be nothing more than a pipe dream.

The principal objection to Saddam Hussein may not be that he is a cruel ruler but that he has acquired weapons of mass destruction, which he — more than any of the other known nuclear powers — is to be deemed capable of using, considering that he has in fact used chemical weapons against his own people in the past. If he can use them to kill his own people, well, then he will not hesitate to use them to kill others. This is how the reasoning goes.

The above allegation relates to the use of gas by both Iraqi and Iranian forces in a battle for the town of Halabja in northern Iraq in March 1988. A report in The New York Times (January 31) suggests that the Kurds who died in the area were killed by a cyanide-based gas that the Iranians were believed to have used, and not by mustard gas that the Iraqis were known to possess at the time. The charge that Saddam gassed his own people may then bear further investigation.

Iraq says that it no longer possesses any weapons of mass destruction — chemical or biological. After a great deal of looking around a few years ago, and then again in recent months, the UN inspectors have found none. The chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix sees no reason for an American invasion. He has seen no evidence of any link between the Iraqi regime and the Al Qaeda, and he wants inspections to continue as do numerous governments in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

It may be argued that neither the character of Saddam Hussein’s regime nor its possession of weapons of mass destruction is the issue, and that Mr Bush’s real goal is to take control of Iraq’s oil resources. Let us then examine this possibility. In good times — that is, before the Gulf war — Iraq produced 3.5 million barrels of oil a day (compared to between five and six million barrels a day for Saudi Arabia at that time and about the same towards the end of the Shah’s rule in Iran). It now produces 2.1 million barrels a day, which brings in about $13 billion a year.

That revenue is barely enough to meet Iraq’s most basic needs. Note that nearly 60 per cent of its population receives free or highly subsidized food rations from the government. If good times return, oil revenues might increase to about $22 billion a year. But before that can happen, a huge inflow of capital will be needed to modernize the plant in oil industry, which is said to be in disrepair.

Let us now suppose that having conquered and occupied Iraq, the United States takes control of its oil. Actually, American oil companies, or a consortium of American and British companies (and not the American government) will take charge. How much of the Iraqi oil income can the new controllers take home? This income may not meet even the cost of occupation, not to speak of the needs of the Iraqi people. America cannot leave these people to starve. The mission of making a substantial profit from the intended venture in Iraq is problematic even if the United States spends its money to modernize the Iraqi plant and increases production back to the pre-Gulf war level.

The Gulf war in 1990-91 is said to have cost about $80 billion, almost all of which was paid by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and a few others. When the American ground action began, the Iraqi army chose not to fight and the war ended in a couple of days. But if the Iraqis decide to fight this time, the war might go on for months, in which case the cost could easily run into a couple of hundred billion dollars. Can Iraq be made to pay this bill? I don’t see how even the most ingenious can draw blood from a stone.

The greater likelihood is that the American taxpayer will have to bear the cost of this war if it does come. He is already beleaguered by a persistent economic slump. The federal budget, currently in the works, will show a deficit larger than any in recent memory. Budgets of state governments, cities, and counties are in such a bad shape that hundreds of thousands of positions are being cut and employees laid off, including those in essential services such as police and fire departments.

American young men and women, graduating from colleges and universities, are having tough time finding jobs. If Mr Bush burdens the already harassed American voter with the cost of waging a war against Iraq, he is not likely to get re-elected in 2004. If that is one of his purposes in going to war, the undertaking will probably turn out to have been in vain.

There are still other costs the United States, as an occupying power, will have to meet. Experts at the United Nations estimate that rebuilding Iraq after the war will cost at least 30 billion dollars. If the invasion involves bombing of cities, which it probably will, water treatment plants and sewage lines will be knocked out causing a great many deaths from epidemics. There will be a multiplicity of other social and economic disruptions. Iraq cannot possibly meet the cost of its own reconstruction. It is a country where the annual per capita income is only about $700. It owes $60 billion in foreign debt, much of it to Russia, and $170 billion in unpaid reparations to Kuwait.

American forces cannot just march into Baghdad, oust Saddam Hussein, and come back home. They will have to stay there and meet the consequences of their invasion. Iraq will be no bed of roses for an occupying power, and it will become altogether thorny if the Iraqi people mount resistance to the occupation. It would then seem to follow that, whichever way one looks at it, the projected American invasion of Iraq does not make sense.

E-mail: syed.anwar@attbi.com

IN recounting President Musharraf’s many failures his one success glossed over is that in his three-year rule Pakistan has clambered up a bit out of the pit of corruption in which it had sunk during the decade of the nineties. That is an index of the extent of corruption in the government’s business deals. When it comes to the ordinary citizens seeking justice or vindication of their rights, the country has sunk deeper into the pit.

Even the regime’s imperious National Accountability Bureau, while boasting that it went for the big fish, conceded that corruption at lower levels had eluded it. Truthfully, the bureau or the government itself has made no effort to rid society of corruption. The so-called reforms only aggravated it. Some big fish were caught but more escaped or were allowed to; for the small fry it remained life as usual.

To reduce corruption to a level where life becomes tolerable for people of all ranks and hues is a formidable task. Toward that end NAB has recently advertised a new strategy praising the “hard work and dedication” of the foreign consultants and experts who made it, perhaps, gratis. The people for whom it is meant do not yet know what the strategy is nor were ever told that it was in the making.

The strategy is said to hinge on “political will” and “increase in remuneration”. That assumes, so to speak, bringing Jinnah back to life to lead the nation, and pay to the revenue and police officials at least ten times as much as they are paid now just to match their illegitimate earnings. Then there are the teachers, nurses, inspectors and myriad others in the state sector who cannot be left out. A failure thus has been pronounced on both counts even before the strategy is announced.

That however remains to be seen. Looking at the events and the government decisions of the past few months and the shadow they cast on the future, the looming fear is that the country may soon slide back to the bottom of the corruption pit.

The manipulation and expense that preceded the elections to the assemblies and then pervaded the polls were, by most accounts, unprecedented in magnitude and foulness. The Election Commission had authorized an expenditure of Rs. 1.5 million for a National Assembly constituency and half of that for the provincial. Nowhere it is believed to have been less than five times as much. The commission had also laid down a host of other conditions for the fair conduct of the polls by the candidates, voters and officials. They were all extensively violated.

If the Election Commission took cognizance of the excess expense or other violations, the people are not aware of it. Knowing how publicity conscious the Chief Election Commissioner has all along been, it will be safe to assume that no irregularity was probed, everyone got away with whatever he/she did, and the aggrieved are left to fight their own battles in courts till the next elections.

That is a past story. The price now set for the Senate seats, according to reports in newspapers, ranges from five to 20 million rupees. The political pacts are endangered by the lure of money and ministry. The priests are said to be succumbing to this lure as fast as their more modernist counterparts. The cycle of bribery thus has been set in motion. The money that the MNAs and Senators have spent will be in course of time charged to the account of the people, who are waiting for a dispensary or a drain to be built.

What strategy the NAB chairman expects to work and what political will is he looking for if this rampant corruption at the very pinnacle of the democratic system is allowed to go unchallenged? In conjunction with the Election Commission and, of course, with the support of the president and the prime minister, he should investigate and haul up all those who have corrupted the electoral process and consequently the new governance at its very inception. Chasing the contractors and officials later would yield no result but spread the menace of bribery still further.

It also calls into question NAB strategy’s second premise of higher remuneration. Did the MNA who received money for his Senate vote need it for his living when he had millions to spare for his own election and will also cost the public treasury almost 50 times as much as the income of an average citizen? Punishing the people at the top when on ascendancy (and not when they are fighting with their backs to the wall) will deter the corrupt at the lower levels, and not paying more to them.

While the deliberately prolonged electoral process is still wading through a sea of corruption, every day a new door is opened to squander or embezzle public funds through discretionary grants and appointments by nomination in an already oversized government. The present appalling standards of public works and services are a result of discretionary investments and recruitments. The guts having already been torn out of the administrative system, the return to arbitrary and unnecessary appointments will lead to its total collapse.

Not to be left unsaid in any discussion of corruption are the two broad elements aggravating it. One is the insecurity caused by confrontation with India, global terrorism and economic stagnation that flows from both. The other is the falling confidence of the people in the judiciary when the executive is tending to be increasingly oppressive and society intolerant.

The remedy for both is simple. All that has been done to diminish and demolish the executive and judicial institutions and services since the separation of East Pakistan should be undone. The corruption was there then too but a fraction of what it is now. The people have been diddled by the reformists and strategists long enough. The governance should go back to its simple old ways which delivered more and corrupted less.

As quoted by Kuldip Nayar in his column in Dawn on February 2, the law minister of Bangladesh, Maudud Ahmad, had the gall to say: “Our destiny is linked with India. We have nothing to do with Pakistan which is a failed state”. The minister is only partly right. While the other links may have snapped, Pakistan and Bangladesh yet remain bound by the thread of corruption. Bangladesh now occupies the place Pakistan vacated three years ago as the most corrupt country in the world. A failed state is a nebulous notion. Corruption is a real phenomenon. It is not a moment to crow but to contemplate.

The destiny of all of South Asia — and not of Bangladesh and India alone — is interlinked. Individually striving but fighting with each other, they are all destined to remain stuck in the quagmire of poverty and unemployment and hence corruption.

THE road to Iraqi disarmament has produced the gravest crisis within the Atlantic Alliance since its creation five decades ago. What is most extraordinary about the controversy is its irrelevance to the real options before the Atlantic countries.

Questions such as whether military action should follow several more months of inspections or whether containment of the Saddam Hussein regime is truly an option pale before the central issue, which, bluntly stated, is as follows:

Were the United States to yield to the threat of a French veto, or were Iraq encouraged by the action of our allies to evade the shrinking non-military options still available, the result would be a catastrophe for the Atlantic Alliance and for the international order in general. If the crisis ends without regime change in Baghdad, if the United States marches 200,000 troops into the region and then marches them back out without having achieved more than a nebulous containment of a regime that has violated UN directives for more than a decade, the credibility of American power in the war on terrorism and in international affairs will be gravely, perhaps irreparably, impaired.

In such circumstances, the governments that have supported or tolerated the American buildup in the region will be jeopardized or driven to look for an exit. If the Saddam Hussein regime continues in power, based on the claim that he has complied with UN Resolution 1441 or that no adequate proof of violations exists, the UN process will have produced a debacle. Sanctions will be lifted or substantially eased as they nearly were two years ago. Iraq will then emerge as the richest country in the region, with either caches of undeclared weapons of mass destruction or new ones built with the additional resources freed by the lifting of sanctions.

But if this is not what France and Germany seek, what is their objective? The satisfaction of an implacable public opinion their leaders foster rather than try to shape? The thwarting of a powerful ally? A French price to Germany’s current self-absorption in exchange for a greater say in European union? The fact that this crisis has broken out at such a late stage in the political process demonstrates an amazing lack of understanding in Europe of American realities.

No government exposed to President Bush or his principal advisors after the passage of UN Resolution 1441 in November, 2002, should have doubted that, within months, it would face an American claim of a material breach and measures to overcome it. Why vote for the first resolution and then threaten to veto its inevitable follow-on? In the end, French realism will not permit France to stand aside while its strongest ally — that has stood by it through two world wars and the cold war — pursues its vital interests with a coalition of the willing.

But even if France acquiesces in the end — as is probable — a legacy of distrust will continue to weigh on Atlantic relations. The necessary reassessment of the existing poisonous atmosphere would do well to learn from history. Current disputes are not sui generis. A generation ago, comparable discord arose even though the Soviet threat at the time set limits to the implications. The two sides of the Atlantic are repeating a play in which they were principal actors once before and in the same region: the Middle East. Only now the roles are totally reversed.

In the mid-1950s, Britain and France still thought of themselves as major world powers. Britain had special interests in Egypt and the Gulf, France in Syria and Lebanon. Our European allies treated these interests as a flank of the cold war. As they became increasingly conscious of the lack of resources to sustain that role, they invited America to undertake a joint effort in the Middle East as it had with respect to Greece and Turkey when Britain was no longer able to hold that line.

But the United States declined to assume the mantle. It was not prepared to associate itself with British and French interests in the Middle East (seen as essentially colonial), much as our European critics now seek to dissociate from the American definition of its interests in the region. And just as today our European critics support the war against terror but insist on fighting it with methods essentially of conciliation, so in the 1950s, the United States sought to serve its cold war strategy by dissociating from its European allies on regional issues, expecting that post-colonial regimes would then seize the opportunity to join the struggle against Soviet imperialism.

It was not to be. The post-colonial radical leaders treated US overtures as helpful assists from a renegade imperialist, very rarely as acts of partnership in the cold war. Indeed, as the role of Britain and France diminished, the United States increasingly became the target of Middle East radicalism, which viewed Moscow not as a strategic threat but as a useful lever to extract concessions. This trend became particularly pronounced after the Soviet Union jumped over the containment belt along its southern border by selling arms first to Egypt, then throughout the developing world.

The difference in perspective came to a head when, on July 26, 1956, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France considered this a mortal threat to their lifeline to the Middle East — and to their great power status. They called Nasser’s motives comparable to Hitler’s and declared that no outcome would be acceptable that would permit a single power to “exploit (the canal) purely for purposes of national policy.”

This should have signalled that Britain and France, whose leaders had experienced appeasement as the cardinal sin, were prepared to risk war. But the United States was not, and it treated the British and French warnings as bargaining manoeuvres. The Eisenhower administration formally accepted the European objective of an internationally guaranteed use of the Suez Canal. But it rejected the use of force. In such circumstances, diplomats resort to stalling and seek to transform substance into procedure — as our European critics are now doing in the UN Security Council.

And Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was a master diplomat. On Aug. 1, 1956, he proposed a maritime conference of 24 principal seafaring nations to devise a system of free navigation through the canal. But he negated the impact of that proposal on Aug. 3 by stating: “We do not want to meet violence with violence.” Nasser rejected the scheme on Sept. 10. Three days later, Dulles came up with the proposal of a User’s Association to operate the canal and collect revenues by a line of ships just outside Egyptian territorial waters at either end of the canal. Once again, Dulles undercut his own proposal by abjuring the use of force. On Oct. 12, the United Nations adopted a Six Point Plan combining the conclusions of the Maritime Conference and some elements of the User’s Association. It was vetoed by the Soviet Union.

In exasperation and frustration, Britain and France went to war. Planning incompetently, distracted by the simultaneous Soviet suppression of the revolution in Hungary and burdened by bringing in Israel as an ally, Britain and France found themselves confronting an overwhelming UN vote of condemnation. The UN charge was led by the United States, voting with the Soviet Union against its allies — for the only time in the cold war — and withholding support for European currencies in financial markets.

The analogy thus far stops before a formal allied dissociation from American policy. France and Germany still have the option of permitting themselves to be persuaded by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council or Hans Blix’ final report. In making that decision, America’s European critics should remember that none of the hoped for benign results of America’s dissociation from its allies in 1956 were achieved. Nasser showed no gratitude for having been saved by American concern for the nonaligned. Instead he presented the outcome as a personal triumph extorted from a reluctant United States. Pro-Western regimes toppled throughout the Middle East, among them Iraq’s, starting a series of ever more radical convulsions in Baghdad.

Within five years, Egyptian troops invaded Yemen. In 1967, Nasser threw off the restraints established in the aftermath of the Suez crisis along the Israeli border and in the Straits of Tiran, unleashing the Six Day War, after which Egypt broke relations with the United States. These were not restored until Anwar Sadat drew the conclusion in 1973 that blackmailing America with Soviet arms was a dead end — a lesson that should have been taught two decades earlier.

As for the Soviet Union, it interpreted Western divisions during the Suez crisis as an opportunity to exploit allied divisions closer to home. In 1958, Nikita Khrushchev proclaimed an ultimatum ushering in four years of crises over Berlin.

The most profound impact was on the Western alliance, though it took years to work itself out. France’s decision to build a national nuclear force either resulted from, or received an enormous impetus from, the crisis in which the United States voted with the Soviet Union and Khrushchev felt free to threaten Britain and France with nuclear weapons. Even German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, as good a friend as America had in Europe, saw in the Suez crisis the possible precursor of a diplomacy in which Europe would be a bystander unless it organized itself for an independent course. According to then French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, Adenauer said on the day Britain and France accepted the American ultimatum: “There remain to (France and England) only one way of playing a decisive role in the world .... We have no time to waste. Europe will be your revenge.”

History, of course, never repeats itself precisely. Nasser was no Saddam Hussein; the threat of Third World radicalism backed by Soviet arms was less insidious than contemporary terrorism combined with weapons of mass destruction. But then, as now, America’s task was to overcome strategic dangers while fostering the aspirations for dignity, equality and progress of the peoples of the region. This goal did not require the humiliation of allies.

It may be argued that the Suez crisis shows that, over a period of time, containment proved more effective than confrontation. This is belied by the consequences described above. And there was one fundamental difference: In the 1950s, the United States had the option of replacing Britain and France in the search for stability and progress in the region; there is no comparable option for France and Germany if the current crisis ends badly. Radicalism will then reign unchecked.

The main issue then, as now, concerns the nature of alliances, especially when no Soviet threat exists to set limits to allied discord. During the Suez crisis, America put forward three principles: that allied obligations were circumscribed by a precise legal charter; that recourse to force was admissible only in strictly defined self-defence; and that the United States had an opportunity to build relations in the developing world, in effect, at the expense of its allies. These principles are now being applied with a vengeance against America by its European critics.

They were not valid when the cold war defined certain inescapable necessities. They are even dangerous today when the international system is in revolutionary flux; Schadenfreude is not a policy. Alliances do not function because heads of state consult their lawyers; they thrive precisely when they involve moral and emotional commitments beyond legal documents. And alliances whose partners believe they can benefit in the long term from the failures of their allies turn into a contradiction in terms. If the Atlantic Alliance is to remain relevant to the challenges of the new period, its leaders must find a new definition for these imperatives. —Dawn/Tribune Media Services