ONE would be hardpressed to come up with something good to say about George Bush since he became US president. His record in office is a long list of negatives: deteriorating international relations, abandoned multilateralism and civil liberties, economic downturn... the list goes on. In recent weeks though, this administration, already scraping the barrel, has managed to sink to new lows.

The entire process leading to war with Iraq — the out-of-hand rejection of diplomacy, brushing aside the UN, attacking those who voice opposition to the US, persisting with claims that this is a ‘war of liberation’ — is a litany of shame. Hypocrisy, arrogance and petulance are just three in a very long list of negative traits that characterize the process.

Start with the desire to go to war. It has long been apparent that the stated reasons for this — WMD (weapons of mass destruction), terrorism, defiance of the UN — are not the real ones. Had the US been concerned about Iraq’s WMD it would have acted when there was clear proof that Saddam was using them (in the Iran-Iraq war, and in 1988 against the Kurds). Had there been a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein this would have come out in the intensive investigation that took place after 9/11.

Had Iraq not been cooperating with UN weapons inspectors, they would not have reported real progress and insisted on more time to carry on their work. (Not to mention that if Washington were so concerned about the sanctity of UN resolutions, it would have insisted on their enforcement elsewhere — starting with Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.)

The fact is that Iraq no longer poses a WMD threat to its neighbours or to the US; there is no link between the Saddam Hussein regime and Al Qaeda; and Iraq was doing everything asked of it by the UN. America’s stated reasons for war simply do not add up. They are merely a cover for the real — wholly unjustifiable — reasons: domestic politics (war wins Bush votes), right-wing ideology, the desire for assertion in the Middle East and oil.

With hindsight it is clear that Washington only agreed to pursue the UN route to war because it assumed that this would work. It took UN endorsement of its war plans for granted. Such an endorsement would have enabled George Bush to claim the legitimacy of international law for his assault. More importantly, it would have strengthened the hand of his hawkish partners — Tony Blair (Britain), John Howard (Australia) and Jose Maria Aznar (Spain) — all of whom face hostile, anti-war public opinion at home.

Once the UN started putting up resistance to American war plans, the US revealed its utter lack of concern about getting UN endorsement. Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld and others stressed again and again that America did not have to secure ‘permission’ for its actions. The US perceived itself to be in danger; based solely on its own perception, it could take action against the source of the threat. It did not need the UN.

That was bad enough, but the manner in which the Bush administration attacked the UN and blamed it for its failure to get a second pro-war resolution, was truly breathtaking in its gall and audacity. The White House equated the UN’s relevance with compliance with American wishes: as long as the UN did what America wanted it had a role, if it refused it was irrelevant. It was not America that had to prove the case for war, but the UN which had to prove itself. Bush’s ultimatum after the Azores summit that it was “a moment of truth for the world” betrayed an unprecedented degree of arrogance.

American warmongers never expected to face the kind of determined opposition put up by the French and Germans, and taken up by other governments and peoples across the world. Anyone else would have responded with at least a nominal effort to address those concerns. Not Washington: it responded with the vindictiveness and petulance of a spoilt child once he starts losing a board game — throwing all the pieces on the floor and attacking the other players. Tolerance and democracy (the right to speak one’s mind) are fast becoming endangered species in the new America — an America that knows what is best and expects everyone else to agree.

The French, in particular, have been subjected to vicious assaults. The administration blamed France for the failure to get a second UN security resolution (and hence for the collapse of the diplomatic process), while the American media and public simply blamed the French for being French. ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, ‘the rat that tried to roar’ (a reference to Chirac by the Wall Street Journal) and rewording ‘French fries’ as ‘freedom fries’ are just part of the totally immature and petulant American response to French opposition: don’t bother with the message; just shoot the messenger.

George Bush’s pre-war address to the nation and the Iraqi people was further proof of how far this administration has distanced itself from global opinion, how far it is deluded by its own rhetoric and spin. To an Iraqi nation about to face mass bombing, death, destruction and invasion, Bush’s message was ‘do not destroy your oil wells’. To a people terrified of the war coming their way, Bush urged rejoicing because their ‘liberation’ was nigh. The recent pictures of Baghdad burning starkly highlight the utter cynicism of such exhortations.

Which brings us to the war itself. What is taking place in Iraq is not a ‘war’ in the conventional sense: a struggle between armed opponents for supremacy. In this case the disparity between combatants is so great — on the one hand, the world’s sole superpower and on the other a country brought to its knees by war and sanctions — that their engagement cannot be described as ‘battle’ or ‘fighting’. This is a walkover, a formality. Bush, Rumsfeld, Blair and their cohorts might praise the courage and bravery of their ‘fighting men and women’ but there is no pride in such unequal victory.

Post-war, the Americans will no doubt act with even greater arrogance. They will probably use the ease of their victory to justify the decision to remove Saddam Hussein by force. The ‘irrelevant’ UN will be called in to deal with the humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, lucrative contracts for reconstruction have already been awarded to American companies — the only ones who met all the ‘necessary criteria’. The American flag that was planted at al-Qasr was a sign of things to come: occupation, not liberation.

And after Iraq? The manner in which America has conducted itself in recent months and weeks raises serious questions — and serious threats — for all nations. Concepts of justice and law — concepts that took centuries, many wars and many deaths to become established as the norm for international relations — have been thrown out of the window. They have been displaced by the old principle of ‘might is right’. America can and is riding roughshod over international opinion and law because it has the power — overwhelming, unstoppable military power — to do so.

This arrogance of power that the US has shown in its conduct over Iraq could be used to strike other so-called threats: Iran, Syria, North Korea... This — not terrorism or WMD — is the real challenge before the international community: how to curb an out-of-control United States?

THE fearsome Sudanese nationalist leader known as the ‘Mahdi’ was a dire threat to his own nation, the neighbouring Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Egypt, and the entire Christian world, proclaimed Britain’s Imperial government. The Mahdi’s Dervish Army had taken Khartoum by storm and killed the saintly British Sirdar, or proconsul, of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Sir Charles ‘Chinese Gordon.’

So the British Empire sent a ‘coalition’ army of white troops and Egyptian native units up the Nile under the command of Lord Kitchener with orders to crush the Mahdi before his calls for freedom of Muslim peoples from British imperial rule might infect the entire dark continent. The Dervishes were the first major Islamic resistance against European colonial occupation.

On 2 Sept, 1898, the British army met the Dervish army outside Khartoum at Omdurmam. In spite of fanatical bravery by the Dervish cavalry and Nilotic tribesmen popularized by Rudyard Kipling as ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzies,’ their spears and broadswords were useless against Britain’s field artillery and Maxim guns(machine guns), which mowed down the oncoming waves of enemy cavalry. The Dervishes lost 10,000 dead, 16,000 wounded. British losses were 41 dead; 382 wounded. The modern age of industrial imperialism had dawned.

The British poet Hillaire Beloc summed it up well: “Whatever happens we have got/ the Maxim gun and they have not.”

Now, the newest Islamic bogeyman to threaten the West’s colonial interests in the Mideast, Saddam Hussein, is about to meet his fate as once again another imperial army, this time of US, British, and Australian troops, marches up to Tigris and Euphrates to lay fire and sword upon Baghdad.

The US-British imperial forces are expected to encounter little resistance until they plunge into downtown Basra, or reach Nasariyah on the Tigris. If three Iraqi divisions deployed in the southern region fail to stoutly defend their positions, it will hasten the collapse of military moral by the regular army. If the Iraqi army fails to defend Amara and Kut on the Euphrates, or fight for the Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf, this will mean the road to Baghdad will be wide open. Without major resistance- vanguards of the US 3rd Infantry Division and Marine expeditionary force should reach Baghdad’s outskirts any day.

Meanwhile, a top secret front has been opened due west of Baghdad. US and British forces seized the huge H-3 airbase and the small H-2 base, both built when Britain was colonial ruler of Iraq. Light armour — notably the US army’ pet new striker wheeled vehicles — will be airlifted in or inserted from Jordan and used to mount a brigade-sized dash 140 miles east down the main desert road to Baghdad. H-3 could also be quickly turned into a base for US air operations.

In the north, the US 101st Airborne Division is expected to drop around the oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, both with good airfields, to prevent Turkish troops advancing southward from seizing the fields, one of the great prizes in George Bush’s war. Light mobile forces can then be airlifted in to begin a southward race for Baghdad. Iraq’s six divisions in the north are unlikely to put up much of a fight, bereft as they are of any air cover and attacked on all sides by US forces and Kurdish irregulars.

Within this week, the moment of truth should be reached. Will Iraq’s best troops — Republican Guards and assorted security units — defend the two concentric rings of fortified positions drawn around Baghdad, a city of five million? Will President Hussein make good his vow to turn the Arab world’s second city into a ‘Stalingrad?’ As of this writing, it is impossible to determine if the Iraqis will fight, or succumb to a long, intensive US psychological warfare campaign to shake the loyalty of the regime’s troops and provoke an army coup, mass defections and surrenders.

If Iraqi forces do indeed fail to resist with vigour, and begin collapsing, the US may be unable to deploy many new high-tech shock weapons that it planned to use in the war. Iraq was to have been the test lab for many new, 21st century military technologies. The Pentagon will be disappointed, but there is always Iran or Syria, both of which are being named next priority targets by the group of Bush administration hardliners intimately linked with Israel’s right-wing Likud Party who crafted this war. PM Sharon of Israel recently called on the US to ‘march on Tehran” the day after Baghdad is occupied.

As of now, Saddam Hussein’s days look numbered in weeks, at most. The imperial forces may have no more trouble reaching Baghdad than Lord Kitchner did in taking Khartoum. The conflict between 286 million Americans and 22 million Iraqis, half of whom are in revolt against their own government, is a war between a mastodon and a mouse.

Iraqis may still fight hard around Baghdad and from other urban areas. But the outcome of this second imperial war of the 21st century (Afghanistan was the first), is certain. After all, the US has the Maxim gun, and the Iraqis have not. And that, poet Belloc noted, is the might that makes right.—Copyright: Eric S. Margolis, 2003.

IN the context of politicians and personalised politics the best thing that regular elections do is to separate the chaff from the grain. At least this is what the book of democracy says. (It may be a little different with us.)

Those who do not deserve, and those who cannot hold their own in the storm of politics, keep dropping on the way, while those who keep on going may not necessarily have anything positive to give to the voters, but they do have people to vote for them in numbers sufficient to get them elected.

All this of course comes true if the elections are transparent, free, fair and un-rigged. Otherwise, as it has happened since 1988, several candidates are able to win because voters are not able to see through them, but an interested establishment succeeds in seeing them through.

Our misfortune is that for long years elections became rare or irregular because of intrusions by the military hankering after civil power. The result was that the separator went idle, and the chaff and the grain went on mixing till you couldn’t tell one from the other. This was unfair to the grain, but the chaff managed to have a good time till one of the infrequent elections came and tried to act as the separator.

It doesn’t take a high IQ to understand that I am talking about genuine and selfish politicians. Perhaps these two words are not exactly appropriate. The expression should be politicians with an appealing programme and a bit of personal charisma and those without either of the two. Even these two categories can be further broken up.

For example, a politician may have no programme but a lot of charisma about him for a certain area, like Mr Ghulam Mustafa Khar, known for a long time as Lion of Punjab. Or he may have a sound and sensible programme but no personal charm like Air Marshal Asghar Khan (as I wrote last week). Another may be lucky to have both in ample measure, like Ms Benazir Bhutto, but have other handicaps.

Before the division of the subcontinent the political and social state of Muslims was of a particular kind. After the birth of Pakistan it has undergone basic changes. It is in the light of these changes that we should have formulated our concepts of culture, which we have still not done.

The partition gave birth to a new country — Pakistan. A new nation came into being. Every region has its own language and modes and customs which are not like the products of a factory, nor have they come about as a result of government rules and regulations. They all spring from historical, geographical, political and social realities. When we talk of different areas we must also remember that they also possess many common features which can form the foundation of a national culture. Of these, by far the most important is a common religion. Equally important is geographical contiguity and a shared historical experience.

If there is a difference in the ways of life of two or more regions, it should be taken as a difference and not as a contradiction. We should emphasize the similarity and likeness of as many of the features as possible. National integration cannot come about by negating these differences of diversities but by accepting their existence and by mixing them together. There is no country in the world (nor there ever was one) where the way of life of all its components is absolutely identical or possesses no variations. Are England and Scotland and Wales the same in their way of life?

To describe any discussion about these differences as propagation of four nationalities or promotion of provincial prejudices is absolutely wrong and misleading. Actually it is a purposeless war of words, since we have acquired this term or definition from the English language. It is now creating much misunderstanding because of its meaning and interpretation. In my view the meaning of nationality, as current in English, is different from that of the Urdu word qaumiyat, because the complexion of our nation and language is different. Despite the fact that linguistically it may be the correct translation, it is not acceptable under given social conditions. That is why it has given rise to this war of definitions.

The other thing that I said on television was that normally the boundaries of a state and its culture do not correspond. There are many countries of Central Asia which are deeply influenced by the Arabian and Iranian civilisations. In several European countries the civilisations of Greece and Rome have left deep imprints. Same is the case with Pakistan. No doubt our cultural heritage includes Delhi and Agra and Meer and Ghalib, and also Samarqand and Bukhara, and Hafiz and Saadi, but we must differentiate also between manifestations and vestiges of civilisations that are present in our country and those that lie outside it.

Take the case of Europe. All European countries accept the arts and civilisations of Greece and Rome as their own heritage. But still the national cultures of France and Britain are different. The cultures of Holland and Germany are not the same. When the people of these countries talk of national pride, then the Englishman expresses his admiration for Shakespeare, not for Homer. The Germans take pride in Goethe and the French in Victor Hugo. For them their own art and literature come first.

Similarly, after the establishment of Pakistan, the fundamental requirement in this behalf is that we should learn to look up to whatever arts and crafts and antiquities we have here. In this context there is need for us to amend our basic point of view to the extent that the Pakistan society is not the society of undivided India, nor is the Pakistani nation the same Muslim nation that it was in the united subcontinent. Pakistan is a new country, and Pakistanis are a new nation. Therefore those who live here must learn to love this land and be proud of it. Whatever there is present here, and whatever history has given us, we should own all of it, and whatever has come from outside and permeated our way of life, we should accept it.

Admittedly the Taj Mahal and Samarqand and Bukhara are closely related to us, but we do not possess them. Our possessions are Moenjodaro and Sehwan Sharif, Taxila and Lahore, and Multan and Khyber. In short we should not become like the (proverbial) frog in the well in matters of culture. There is no need to shed all that we have acquired from everywhere, or disown it or expel it from our way of life. On the other hand we should not be acquisitive too, and ignoring what really belongs to us, boast about others’ possessions as ours.

No culture can be brought into being by speeches and articles and slogans and posters, or by announcements and advertising. Nor can these vehicles of propaganda pose a threat to any civilisation. Culture is a product of love, and flowers in an atmosphere of peace and goodwill.

This war won’t leave the world as it found it. And this is true not only for the Muslim world but for Europe and America too. The irritations that seem a constant of American-European relations during the last few years have become almost a battle zone.

If the academic studies were not so convincing on the subject that democracies never go to war with each other one could perhaps imagine in the foreseeable future a state of armed hostilities between the rival camps. Certainly the common mood all over Western Europe is that we don’t want to be part of the great transatlantic alliance anymore, if it means that every couple of years we have to follow America to war.

In the crucible of the preparations for war European citizens have forged their own common foreign policy. Europeans have never been so aware of their common identity nor so conscious of what separates them from their old kissing cousins across the Atlantic — an abhorrence of war, the gun culture, brutal prison regimes, and capital punishment. Add to that the two codes of justice, one for the well-to-do and one for the poor. Ditto for the health services. Ditto for education.

All this has taken a long time to come to the surface. But the roots are deep. They go right back to the Iron and Steel Community, the precursor of the European Union, when France and Germany decided they must never go to war again and that the way to avoid it was to bind themselves economically together.

The debate over Iraq has crystallised this mood of Euro-solidarity, which if it had been left to mature on its own without outside stimulus might have taken a few more decades to solidify. And if the war goes wrong, triggering off great instability in the Middle East and adding new muscle to the depredations of Al Qaeda the fault lines will deepen even further, and even more so if the U.S., confronting a chemical or biological attack, decides, as it has said it would, to use its nuclear weapons.

Indeed, resentment of American prowess now runs so deep that one can well imagine that a terrorist attack on Europe will unleash more anti-American feeling than anti-Arab. Not for nothing are polls showing all over Europe that the United States is regarded as the real rogue of our times.

Washington is sitting too comfortable with these developments. From the eye of the White House it looks as if “old” Europe is nicely divided with Britain and Spain on its side and out there is “new” Europe to the east more pro American than ever. But this is to assume the most optimistic scenario imaginable — that the war will go so smoothly that the kaleidoscope of Europe won’t be re-shaken. The chances are the war will cause great upheavals and one senses that this is part of the fine calculations being made in the Kremlin by Vladimir Putin.

It is only last year that observers were admiring the geo-political athleticism of President George Bush as he appeared to leap over Europe’s head and embrace Putin. Europe seemed marginalised and a Russo-American condominium all too capable of calling the biggest shots. But it has not turned out this way. Contrary to expectations and in the face of last minute blandishments by Washington to set in motion a number of matters that favour Russia, Putin has turned towards the Franco-German axis, where many influential Russians from Mikhail Gorbachev on, with his talk of building “a common European house”, have always felt Russia’s interests lay.

What this means for the East Europeans who have rallied to Washington’s cause is becoming clearer by the day. They may resent President Jacques Chirac’s threat to stall their membership of the European Union, but it is a serious threat and neither Washington, London nor Madrid can help them out of this hole they have dug for themselves. They have made a serious tactical mistake and one that could have deeper ramifications if prime ministers Jose Maria Aznar and Tony Blair lose their crowns in the days ahead.

Although public opinion in Spain is even more anti-war than it is in Britain it is Tony Blair who is the more vulnerable of the two. If the war goes wrong he will lose his premiership, whilst Aznar will just slide away as planned at the next election. In both countries whoever takes over will be far less pro-American and also more amenable to a common identity in European foreign policy. (And one that includes Russia more often than not.)

The process of creating a powerful single unified voice of Europe capable of speaking with great authority to the outside world, now in obeyance because of the current splits, will take a great leap forward. One can expect to see European encouragement to the American urge to wind down many of their bases in Western Europe, but also forestalling the simplistic American desire to move their bases into Eastern Europe.

The question is will Americans of influence, rather than ribbing Europe with accusations of playing Venus to America’s Mars, realize that Europe is tough and strong enough to have its own valid point of view and it has come to these opinions out of strength not of weakness, out of perception, not ignorance?—Copyright Jonathan Power

TO start with, it was more ‘aw, shucks’ than awe and shock. Defying the expectations raised by its own spokesmen, the shots that signalled the launch of the Pentagon’s aggression against Iraq last Thursday were aimed at a ‘target of opportunity’, as the jargon has it. The CIA had apparently learnt that much of the Iraqi leadership, including Saddam Hussein and his sons, would briefly be under one roof. The first strike, thus, was aimed at ‘decapitation’.

Presumably the CIA’s information was not quite right, even though Saddam’s subsequent appearances on Iraqi television failed to completely kill off rumours that he may be dead or incapacitated. One can only wonder what the consequences would have been had the initial blow indeed felled the Iraqi government.

Notwithstanding the obvious illegality of the action — effectively indistinguishable from an assassination attempt against the occupants of the White House or No.10 Downing Street — it may, within the context of existing circumstances, have proved to be the least undesirable outcome from the point of view of the Iraqi people. If, that is, it could have forestalled further death and destruction.

However, that’s a pretty big if. It would be futile and perhaps even a trifle fatuous to complain about the largely one-sided nature of the reports and images emanating from Iraq and Qatar. Yet it doesn’t require a grounding in rocket science to work out that the war isn’t exactly going according to plan.

After all, it’s reasonably safe to assume that substantial casualties through misadventure and friendly fire within the first few days weren’t part of the plan. Nor have there been any early indications that Iraqis are welcoming their ‘liberators’ with open arms. It would be interesting to discover the extent to which American forces are fooled by their own propaganda.

George W. Bush sounded an ominous note with his admission that the conquest may take longer than anticipated. Politically, the last thing he and Tony Blair need is a drawn-out military campaign entailing large-scale casualties on both sides. This isn’t an objective that many opponents of their aggression would be prepared to argue with.

The war ought not to have been launched; but now that it has begun and will not end short of the fall of Baghdad, the least undesirable scenario is that it should be over and done with as swiftly as possible. The longer it continues, the more deaths it will cause. It is particularly important that Iraqi civilians should be spared any more suffering. For the past decade they have lived — and died — under the twin-edged sword of a repressive regime and international sanctions. At the same time, it’s worth remembering that soldiers - Iraqi, American and British — too are human beings. They have been cast into the cauldron of an unjustified conflict by irresponsible leaders. It must be hoped that most of them will come out of it alive, without too much blood on their hands.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the old adage about truth being the first casualty of war isn’t really applicable in the context of this thoroughly lopsided contest. Not because any of the parties concerned is wedded to veracity, but because the chorus of lies reached a crescendo well before hostilities broke out. The chief culprit has been the US government, ably assisted by the right dishonourable Tony Blair. Washington’s unparalleled military might, in other words, is matched by its propensity to falsify facts.

Lately, one of the most notable manifestations of this tendency has been the pretence that the “coalition of the willing” (itself a typically spin-doctored confection that offers little clue as to what the members of this coalition are willing to do beyond bending over backwards at the State Department’s behest) extends well beyond its Anglo-American core. The list of 30 countries named by the US runs from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan and includes Eritrea, Estonia, Nicaragua and the Netherlands.

With the obvious exception of Britain and Australia, it isn’t terribly clear what most of these countries are contributing to the aggression against Iraq beyond moral support — and even that has been squeezed out of them rather than volunteered. The US reaction to Croatia’s refusal to lend its name to this so-called coalition is telling. What’s equally telling is that 15 of the “willing” nations are unwilling to be identified.

In the case of Israel, it is quite conceivable that the impetus for concealment originated in Washington rather than Jerusalem. It can also safely be assumed that there are a few Arab countries involved — Kuwait and Qatar are obvious suspects; Saudi Arabia and the UAE barely qualify for the benefit of the doubt; and Egypt, next to Israel, receives the largest amount of American largesse in the region. Jordan can’t be ruled out either.

It is no secret that most neighbouring rulers will be glad to see the back of Saddam, even though they have had little to fear from him for the past decade. Since they are all dictators, the prospect of a democratic Iraq could potentially be giving them sleepless nights. They probably realize, though, that a popularly elected government in Baghdad isn’t likely in the short run — and they may even have received assurances from Washington on this count.

Their reluctance to stand up and be counted springs chiefly from the well-founded suspicion that openly kowtowing to the US at this juncture could decisively alienate their own subjects. Hosni Mubarak, for example, couldn’t be too pleased about the vociferous anti-war demonstrations in Cairo over the past week. The fact that Islamists appear to be particularly agitated lends credence to those who have argued all along that an attack on Iraq would fan the flames of extremism.

Any invisible members of the “coalition” outside the Middle East may well be motivated by similar considerations. Either that, or they are simply too embarrassed to publicly associate themselves with a dubious cause and an illegal war.

Be that as it may, the most significant — and most understated — point about this “coalition” is the number of nations that have unequivocally refused to join it despite overwhelming US pressure. More than twothirds of UN members are opposed to the Anglo-American war. At the same time, in many of the countries whose governments have aligned themselves with Washington — most notably Spain, Italy and Britain — large majorities have made it clear they do not accept democracy can be delivered via missiles and bombs.

With international public opinion arrayed overwhelmingly against the imperialist plot, the impotence of the United Nations is once more on display. The UN was willing and able to take action against Baghdad for the latter’s defiance of Security Council resolutions. But it is helpless to do anything about Washington’s conquistadorial lust. Kofi Annan can only wring his hands in despair and plead with the belligerents to spare, as far as possible, Iraqi civilians, while Pentagon adviser Richard Perle toasts the organization’s demise.

“As we sift the debris,” writes Perle, “it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.” The alternative, for him, is “coalitions of the willing”. In other words, bury the UN and let the US take care of business. As in the destruction and reconstruction of Iraq, with American firms primed to snap up contracts.

This conceit cannot be allowed to stand. The UN redeemed itself by refusing to authorize the use of force against Iraq. But its failure thus far even to contemplate any gesture against the aggression — a “moral majority” in the Security Council, a vote in the General Assembly — does not bode well. The organization ought at the moment to be devoting a great deal of attention to Iraq’s future. And its own.

It may have been a close call, but the UN has survived with some of its self-respect intact. At this crucial moment, it makes little sense to roll over and play dead.

Spokesmen for the US and Britain have been claiming that their war derives its legitimacy from Security Council Resolutions 678 and 687. Most British and even American experts in international law view this as a ridiculous argument, given that these resolutions were passed in completely different circumstances. Yet the very fact that London and Washington feel the need to cite them suggests that they cannot ignore the UN altogether, whatever Perle or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld may say.

Having failed to stop the war, the UN must make a determined effort to ensure that it — and not the US — takes charge of post-war Iraq and its resources. It may not be in a position to do anything about America’s weapons of mass destruction, but it has proved that it can affect the international standing of the US. The latter and its cohorts cannot be permitted to continue behaving like outlaws.

Reining in Washington could prove to be a near-impossible task, but it would be unforgivable for the UN to give up without trying, particularly when much of the world is on its side.

E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com