WHAT is driving America towards another war with Iraq? We began to address this question in this space last week, suggesting that finding an answer to it will be enormously helpful for Pakistan to develop its own response to the rapidly developing situation in the Middle East. We cannot afford to be passive spectators of this drama not only because it is being staged in our neighbourhood. We have to be mindful of the script that has been prepared to stage this play because it could affect our own relations with America and the Middle East. And — most important of all — Islamabad will have to deal with the “Muslim” street, particularly if the war in the Middle East does not go well.

The fact that the Muslim Street could erupt as a consequence of the coming war with Iraq was voiced by several speakers who addressed the two-day session of the Security Council summoned at the request of the 116-nation non-aligned movement. The meeting was held on February 17 and 18. The sternest warnings concerning a war’s possible consequences came from Muslim nations, which laced their calls for peace with denunciations of Israel as an aggressor but then offered very specific assessment of potential destabilization in the impending conflict.

Representatives of states from Morocco to Yemen echoed the words of the Iranian envoy, Javad Zarif, who said that “the extent of destabilization in the region and uncertainty in Iraq in the case of a war may go far beyond our imagination today.” But one outcome is almost certain, he went on to say, which is that “extremism stands to benefit enormously from an uncalculated adventure in Iraq.”

Given these widely shared apprehensions and given the enormous outpouring of popular support for attempting a non-war solution to the Iraq problem, why was the Bush administration prepared to take such an enormous risk? In last week’s article we had assigned smaller weight to the two popular explanations for Washington’s real motives as simplistic. Interest in providing Israel with a more secure environment and having oil continue to flow into western pipelines may have contributed to the push for war. But these are not the only reasons, nor the primary ones. The real reason is much more complex. There are three strands woven into it.

The first is a strong moral streak which has persuaded American policymakers for decades that the country has the right — perhaps even the obligation — to spread to the world the system of values on which it was founded. Providence, it is often suggested, has entrusted the Americans with the great experiment of liberty and federative development of government. In the words of historian Alan Brinkley, what the Americans have is akin to the “right such as that of the tree to the space of air and the earth suitable for the full expression of its principle and destiny of growth.”

This belief was to be encompassed over time in a point of view which came to be called “manifest destiny.” America, during the years of territorial expansion, used the concept of manifest destiny to move westwards and southwards and occupy much of the continent that now makes up the country. Later, it used the same approach to bring under its influence the countries and the people who could benefit from learning the system of values America espoused.

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, a number of serious thinkers in the Bush administration are convinced that the moment has arrived when America could influence — and, wherever necessary, also force — the rest of the world to adopt its system of values. The values America wants to export embrace all aspects of human endeavour — politics, economics, finance, family and community relations. This point of view is held by a group generally known as the neo-conservatives. Several members of this group hold important positions in the administration of President George W. Bush.

To understand how this group has begun to influence American foreign policy we should go back in history a bit and refer to the document on national security unveiled by Washington on September 20, 2002. The 34-page document combined the Jacksonian assertion of American interests and the Wilsonian promise to “bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the world.” As one commentator suggested, the policy’s ambition was breathtaking.

“The United States possesses unprecedented — and unequalled — strength and influence in the world. Sustained by faith in the principles of liberty and the value of a free society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations and opportunity. The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favours freedom,” said the strategy’s opening paragraphs. It was recognized that America now faced a challenge different from the one it had to deal with during the cold war. “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. We are menaced less by fleets of armies than by catastrophic technologies in the hands of the embittered few. We must defeat these threats to our nation, allies, and friends...

“However, the nature and motivation of these new adversaries, their determination to obtain destructive power hitherto available only to the world’s stronger states, and the greater likelihood that they will use weapons of mass destruction against us makes today’s security environment more complex and dangerous.”

How should America deal with this new challenge? The new strategy gave up on containment — the approach that had worked during the cold war and ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead, it opted for preemption. “We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends. Our response must take full advantage of strengthened alliances, the establishment of new partnerships with former adversaries, innovation in the use of military forces, modern technologies ... and increased emphasis on intelligence collection and analysis...

“It has taken almost a decade for us to comprehend the true nature of this new threat. Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.”

This was a clear and unambiguous message. America was now arming itself with the right to strike preemptively at the states or “stateless people” when it determined that it could be hurt by them. Not only that. It was also certain that its values — economic, political and social — were the right values to be pursued by all peoples around the world. When there was too sharp a deviation from the pursuit of these values it could use force to bring the errant states and people in line. Providence had chosen America and its leaders to act out this role on the world scene.

This then — and not necessarily to aid Israel and preserve the flow of Iraqi oil into its economy — is the real reason behind the formulation of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. “September eleven” had demonstrated America’s vulnerability to attacks launched by people who operated on the fringes of the civilized world. These people had to be deterred by whatever means since they were so deeply committed to the pursuit of their cause that they were prepared to lay down their lives in the process. All the calculus of the cold war and the arithmetic behind the strategy of mutually agreed destruction (MAD) was no use in a conflict in which the enemy feared nothing, including its own destruction. From the enemy’s perspective the cost-benefit ratio of an event such as “nine-eleven” was weighed enormously in its favour. The new American strategy was in the works even before nine-eleven. The terrorist attack gave it the backdrop needed to reveal it to the world. It was made public in September 2002, a year after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and nine months after the collapse of the Taliban regime in Kabul, Afghanistan. America was triumphant; it looked good and felt good.

The easy triumph over the Taliban in Afghanistan brought about by the support of the entire world community helped reinforce the three strands of thinking that have defined the approach of the Bush administration toward international affairs: that American power was the natural outgrowth of American ‘righteousness’; that it was America’s ‘manifest destiny’ to use that power in favour of ‘good over evil’; and that, eventually, America always triumphs in pursuing its manifest destiny. These beliefs were now formally translated into a statement of national strategy.

Iraq offered the first opportunity to apply this strategy — to opt for war in pursuit not only of national interest but not to “allow the triumph of hatred and violence in the affairs of men.” These words were used by President Bush in a much anticipated speech given on February 26 at a dinner organized by the American Enterprise Institute. The speech was directed more at the international audience — in particular the Muslim populations in the Middle East — whose opposition to the coming war against Iraq had begun to draw attention in Washington. “We meet here during a crucial period in the history of our nation and of the civilized world. Part of the history was written by others; the rest will be written by us.”

The message that came out of Washington on the eve of the second Iraq war was clear. The Bush administration was about to go on a ‘mission’ to redesign the Muslim world; to bring that world closer to the West in terms of social and political values it pursued. A large number of people who had weight in Washington wished to follow a course they were convinced was right not only for America but for the Muslim world.

Muslim countries were in the grip of obscurantist forces or were held in the clutches of rapacious elites. They had to be freed. Iraq was the first step in that mission and it was America’s manifest destiny to undertake it.

SO ANXIOUS are we about the coming war in the Middle East that we sometimes overlook the one that is already going on. It takes an unusually bloody round of killing by Israelis and Palestinians like the one last week to remind outsiders that they are still at each other’s throats.

Yet the hostilities between the two peoples are clearly as great a source of instability, violence, and terror as anything for which Saddam Hussein is at this moment responsible. Clearly. And yet that is not clear to the Israeli government, nor to the Bush administration in Washington, welded as it is to Ariel Sharon and his purposes. Their blindness is familiar enough, but familiarity does not mean that it is any the less dangerous.

The worst prospect of all is that a project to permanently suppress the Palestinian people could become part of a supposed new order in the region after an American victory over Saddam. It is not that the evidence for such an outcome is conclusive. It is not. But the mere fact that the question is at all open is in itself outrageous.

That the Palestinian cause is being neglected, or shuffled off till a more “convenient” time is deeply unfair and wrong, as well as enormously risky at a time when the US and Britain are contemplating the invasion and occupation of an Arab country.

Those risks are obvious everywhere in the region. Even in Iraq itself, however grateful people might immediately be for liberation from Saddam, can it be imagined that they would for long tolerate without protest an intimate connection with a US involved in cheating the Palestinians? Let alone the kind of close relationship with Israel that some in Washington seem to envisage for a new Iraq?

The resentment some may feel at the way the Palestinian cause has obscured the plight of the Iraqis and at Yasser Arafat’s past associations with Saddam will be a passing thing. The democracy the US wishes to help establish in Iraq would surely make the early expression of pro-Palestinian feelings more rather than less likely.

Neglect and procrastination are bad enough, but what about the worst possibility, a regression to the era of “bye, bye, PLO”? The question of the Palestinian future is open because of tendencies in both Israel and the US, which recent events may have strengthened. The coalition which has taken over in Israel after Sharon’s victory in the January elections includes one party whose main support comes from settlers in the territories and another which has openly raised the question of “transfer”, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

True, Sharon would have preferred a less extreme coalition including the Labour party, but that party’s leader, Amram Mitzna, rejected this because he feared that all Sharon wanted was camouflage for his policies of delay and obfuscation on negotiations with the Palestinians. The meretricious Sharon likes to appear to be steering his way down the middle between doves on the one hand and hawks on the other, while in fact he is as hostile to a Palestinian state as his constant calculations of American reactions allow him to be.

The inclusion in the new coalition of the secular Shinui party, relatively moderate on the Palestinian question, shows him continuing this charade in a new form - but charade it is. The other arm of Israel’s government, the senior military, is often more direct, as when the chief of staff said recently that Israel has no interest in real negotiations with the Palestinians until they accept that a return to anything like the pre-1967 boundaries is out of the question. The paradox of Israel’s democracy is that while Israeli citizens indubitably gave Sharon and his party a victory in the election, he and his government are nevertheless thwarting their will.

As expressed in frequent polls, that will is for both an acceptance of a two-state solution and an acceptance that this means the evacuation of settlements in most of the territories, in other words a real state with real land from which Israelis have fully withdrawn. Sharon, in other words, is resisting the wisest instincts of the majority of Israelis.

The battered Palestinian leadership acts, as it has to, on the basis that Sharon can ultimately be outflanked, while no doubt fearing otherwise. Hence, its acceptance of the road map, its recent reforms of the Palestinian Authority’s institutions, in response to American and European requirements, its attempts to bring Hamas into a ceasefire and its passivity as the Israelis have in recent weeks increased their assaults on the recalcitrant Islamists.

But that leadership knows full well that the Sharon government regards this battle against Hamas as a sequel to the humbling of Arafat and Fatah and how likely it is to dismiss the efforts of the Palestinian Authority and give nothing in return.

The Bush administration in theory understands the logic and necessity of a true, as opposed to a fraudulent two-state solution. But in practice it betrays a constant willingness to follow the rightwing Israeli version of this solution, which is, to put it simply, that the words and phrases will be retained but real statehood will be denied to the Palestinians. The administration is, for instance, delaying on the so-called “road map” for progress toward a two state solution because of a mass of Israeli objections. These as usual would have the effect of binding the Palestinians completely to their commitments.

As the administration moves towards war with Iraq in a state of anger over allies and friends who have obstructed its plans, the fear is that there will be less readiness, particularly if the war is quickly and successfully over, to listen to advice from those who see the situation more clearly. Yes, there will be an American push on Palestine after Iraq, but Sharon and his allies in the US will certainly seek to finesse it, and on past evidence might well succeed.

It could be a case of the American government being unable to resist this strategy because it does not want to anger important constituencies at home. It could be a case of the inner counsels of the administration being won over by those within it who take the fantastical view that a suppression of Palestinian aspirations is not only sustainable but could actually be a cornerstone of a new kind of American-Israeli primacy in the Middle East.

Or it could be a case, as Tony Blair and other European leaders hope, mainly of a deep distaste, arising from the Clinton experience of the 1990s, for serious involvement in negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, a distaste which time and events will overcome. Even this interpretation is of course worrying. What kind of events, and how much time, and what may happen while we are waiting for the scales to fall from Washington’s eyes? —Dawn/Guardian Service

THE New York Times has commented editorially on the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operations chief of Al Qaeda, in Pakistan on March 3, and asked the Bush administration to keep working with other nations in its fight against terrorism, instead of pushing for a war few people want.

The Pope himself is planning an appeal to the UN Security Council, pleading for a peaceful solution to the crisis over Iraq. Indeed, the Bush-Blair plan to press on with the war option against Iraq, appears needlessly hawkish, and out of tune with the global sentiment.

There is relief in the US that the person most likely to be planning the next terrorist move against the US is in custody. There were several attempts earlier to catch this individual, but he had slipped out of the traps laid for him. His capture, timely as it is, raises a number of questions pertaining to the global fight against terrorism, as well as about the apparent rush to war against Iraq in spite of Baghdad’s full cooperation with the UN weapons inspectors.

The view held by the Europeans — France and Germany in particular — is that there should be no hurry to launch an attack on Iraq, and that the UN procedures for inspection and verification should be more fully tried and all other avenues explored, before the formidable forces assembled in the Gulf region are into action. What is the situation on the ground? Iraq has been extending full cooperation to the UN inspectors, though there can be little doubt that it has been responding to the pressure being brought to bear on it with the war threats rather than on its own. Dr Hans Blix has not relented either in the matter of inspection or in the demands made on the government of President Saddam Hussein.

The international concern over the possibility of a resort to force does not arise out of any soft feelings for Saddam Hussein, whose gory record is well known, but out of solicitude for the long suffering people of Iraq. Tens of thousands of them, including women and children, will die within days after the war starts.

The spread of anti-war protests throughout the world is a reflection of deep unease over the implications of an unilaterist policy of force. The resolve of President Bush and the hawks around him to resort to pre-emption appears to be motivated by a determination to demonstrate the US military might and to achieve a paradigm shift in the management of global affairs through sheer force.

Europe in particular cannot forget the great wars of the 20th century when mankind suffered terribly from resort to brute force in pursuit of national dominance.

The US also needs to recall its role in the creation of the UN to provide a viable mechanism for peaceful settlement of conflicts and crises through conciliation and mediation. The other aspect troubling people everywhere is that the war on Iraq looks like the start of a clash of civilizations, and as Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia put it in his address to the recent Non-Aligned summit in Kuala Lumpur, the Islamic world generally feels targeted by the war being planned against Iraq.

The capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad has served to focus world attention on the fact that the post-9/11 threat to the global order comes from terrorism, as personified by the Al Qaeda. That Pakistan played a “pivotal role” in tracking him down shows the importance of working in concert with other nations, as The New York Times put it. The same principle applies to Iraq. Though President Bush could achieve a military victory without broad international support, he “won’t be able to rebuild Iraq, much less change the political and economic dynamics of the Islamic world, without a great deal of foreign assistance”.

The growing Iraqi cooperation with the UN inspectors, including the destruction of its Al Samoud 2 missiles, warrant giving more time to the UN to see whether a solution short of war is still possible. Indeed, several Arab countries have even advised Saddam Hussein to go into exile to save his people from the ravages of a US-led invasion. However, the Europeans are questioning the reasonableness of targeting the present regime in Baghdad, since no clear link has yet been established between it and the Al Qaeda network. This was pointed out by the French ambassador to the US when he explained the reason behind French opposition to another UN resolution authorizing war against Iraq.

The advice given by the New York Times is that the US should not invade Iraq without broad international support is eminently sensible. The paper points out that even if there were a quick military triumph, many things could go wrong in the long haul. “The Turks could intervene militarily in Northern Iraq, to assert control over the Kurds there, who have established an autonomous — and democratic — government. The fragile Pakistani government could be toppled in an anti-American reaction, endangering the war on terror. Iraqi biological and chemical weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists”.

World opinion is increasingly sceptical that the threat of war against Iraq would lead to a positive outcome. The powerful Jewish lobby, joined by the oil tycoons around President Bush, has been pushing for an agenda that is no longer focused on fighting terrorism. An overwhelming majority of people everywhere would prefer that the UN route be followed, both to fight terrorism and to counter the threat from weapons of mass destruction. There are fears that once the war route is taken, the negative consequences would be far greater than any positive ones.

The world economy is already in recession, and the effect on energy costs of a prolonged conflict in the Gulf region could be catastrophic. The weak economies of developing countries like Pakistan would be especially hurt, as their exports are bound to be hit as shipping is disrupted and its cost goes up. Even after a relatively quick victory, the risk of oilfields being set on fire, and oil supplies falling short of demand, together with unpredictable consequences for internal peace and stability in many regional countries, might even touch off a wave of civil strife and commotion. No wonder, the Non-Aligned summit, where all the Gulf countries were represented, urged a peaceful solution.

The capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad has reminded the world that the anti-terrorist campaign must remain the focal point of the post-9/11 agenda. The Bush administration has used the counter-terrorist card to reinforce its unilateralist agenda, in which its broader strategic aims of dominating the world and containing the supposed threats from the Muslim world and from a resurgent China remain uppermost. To that end it has developed the preemptive doctrine that would enable it to take preventive action not only in the name of fighting terrorist threats, but also to achieve regime change wherever it chooses.

Israel in Palestine and India in South Asia are following Washington’s example of using terrorist threats as a cover for pursuing their political and strategic aims. Both have enthusiastically embraced the Bush doctrine as a convenient and nearly sanctified tool for achieving their immediate as well as longer-term assist the hawks in the US in turning the 21st hegemonic ambitions. Israel has stepped up its ruthless suppression of the Palestinians by dubbing them terrorists, and India has done likewise in Kashmir. It has also found it convenient to close the door on any peace dialogue by accusing Pakistan of sponsoring “cross-border terrorism”.

The BJP stalwarts believe they have discovered the secret of electoral success: create communal tensions by victimizing Muslims, then reap a rich harvest of Hindu nationalist votes through Muslim- and Pakistan-bashing. However, the Indian electorate has demonstrated greater maturity and did not respond to the formula in Himachal Pradesh. One hopes that the distortion of the electoral process through communalization of politics will not prove a durable factor in India’s political life.

The Rawalpindi arrests have brought the welcome realization that the anti-terrorist campaign has been hijacked by interested politicians in Washington, New Delhi and Tel Aviv who are intent on their own narrow agendas regardless of their long-term implications. Prudence and statesmanship lie in concentrating on catching the terrorists while dealing with the root causes of the menace by tackling the festering points of injustice, repression, poverty and exploitation under the emerging world political and economic order.