SECURE in the White House, thousands of miles from the theatre of war, President George Bush has lately been professing a great deal of humanitarian concern for the Iraqi people and for the need of the reconstruction of their homeland after their “liberation” from the tyranny and persecution of their “despotic ruler”.

He would also want the world to believe that the Iraqi people are simply waiting to be liberated and would rise in revolt against the regime in Baghdad at the first sight of American (or British) soldiers. At the time of writing, there is no evidence to suggest that any such thing is about to happen. On the contrary, although the American and British forces were able to seize a great deal of Iraqi territory within the first few days of the attack, it has been taking them unusually long to consolidate their hold.

On a few occasions correspondents from the frontline even reported that at places the invaders were facing resistance. At the inset of the offensive George Bush asked the Iraqis not to yield to the “unlawful commands” of their rulers. This was reminiscent of the exhortation of his father, President Bush Sr, at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, who called on the Iraqi military and people “to take matters in their own hands” and force Saddam Hussein to step down. Then as now, Iraqi people have shown no interest whatsoever in the sort of hocus-pocus.

In the same vein President Bush has also stressed that the conduct of the war would be “humane”, in accordance with established norms. But the way the war is actually being carried on proves the falsity of such pronouncements. To prove the point, precision guided missiles have targeted crowded residential and shopping areas resulting in heavy casualties.

Numerous media reports have suggested that in fact President Bush barely waited for the ultimatum given by him to President Saddam (to quit or face war) when he decided to go on the offensive. Disregarding a rule laid down by the then US president, Gerald Ford, in 1976 not to plot the assassination of any foreign head of state, President Bush reportedly accepted the advice of his CIA director, George Tenet, not to miss the opportunity to eliminate President Saddam and some of his close aides hours before the expiry of the ultimatum.

Tenet claimed that he had received “inside” information that President Saddam and his close aides would be present in an underground shelter at a particular time and pleaded for the immediate launch of a “surgical strike”. According to a report carried by The Independent of London, Tenet wanted to start the war 24 or 48 hours earlier than planned. The US-led ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was not due to start until two or three days later. The CIA director believed that “the chance to take out President Saddam in person might not come again”.

US officials also believed that as soon as the ultimatum expired, Saddam Hussein would become the commander-in-chief of Iraqi forces and thus become a legitimate target. Bush gave his approval to the change in the start of the war. Thus shortly after the deadline passed, Bush was informed that Saddam Hussein had made his “final mistake” and had not left the country. Soon thereafter American stealth fighters carrying heavy “bunker buster” bombs were over Baghdad.

The first air raids over the Iraqi capital included 40 of the deadly tomahawk missiles and several precision-guided bombs. The casualties and damage caused to the Iraqi capital was not immediately known, nor about the fate that Saddam Hussein may have “suffered”. However, shortly afterwards the Iraqi president appeared on TV to address his people and certainly to disprove any claim or rumour that he had been seriously injured.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made one more crude attempt to persuade the Iraqi army to revolt. He said at a briefing in the Pentagon: “The Iraqi soldiers and officers must ask themselves if they want to die fighting for a doomed regime — or they want to survive, help the Iraqi people in the liberation of their country and play a role in a new Iraq”.

In a dispatch from Baghdad about that first raid over the Iraqi capital, the Guardian correspondent said that barely two hours after the first cruise missiles were fired President Saddam Hussein “popped up” on television “to demonstrate that he was alive and well, and thoroughly in command”.

President Bush’s decision to attempt to kill President Saddam Hussein while he was in his underground shelter, without a declaration of war, has been at the centre of a controversy in a section of the western press. Writing in the Guardian last Friday, a correspondent quoted Jim Ross, senior legal analyst of Human Rights Watch as saying that “the Iraqi president could be regarded as a fair target because he is chief of the Iraqi military at the time of war”.

Ross says that the Geneva Convention gives a great deal of leeway when it comes to attacking combatants. However, if the US agreed to a truce whereby President Saddam gave himself up in return for an end to war, it would be illegal to kill him.

Incidentally, the Guardian correspondent maintains that it was the fear of a retaliatory attack on an American leader that prompted President Gerald Ford in 1976 to issue a ban on the assassination of heads of state. President Ford’s ruling apparently has been signed by every US president subsequently, although at times some of them have attempted to “sidestep it”.

According to a comment in The Independent of London, when President Bush was elected to the White House, he already had Iraq “in his sights”. Quoting “new inside accounts”, correspondent Mary Dejevsky says that, while President Bush did not necessarily wish to have anything to do with the Middle East, the 9/11 attacks confirmed “his view that the greatest threat was where terrorists and a ‘rogue’ regime came together: Iraq”.

Some London-based political observers maintain that some think tanks in Washington could be behind President Bush’s thinking, and that many who now hold key positions in Bush’s administration are known to be affiliated to these think-tanks.

When war comes in the door, free speech can go out the window. Americans are now bitterly fighting against each other.

I was dining at the Brodericks’ the other night. The dinner started off civilly.

Sebastian Decatur said, “When it comes to war, I prefer Katie Couric to Diane Sawyer.”

Hal Barrow said, “Why do you say that?”

“Katie Couric gets twice the salary of Diane Sawyer, so she must know twice as much.”

Then the conversation got nasty.

Barrow said, “I don’t like what Bush is doing.”

Sebastian said, “He is our commander-in-chief and we all have to support him.”

Barrow replied, “I’m not criticizing what he is doing in Iraq, I’m talking about his domestic programmes and the fact that he’s bankrupting the country.”

Sebastian snorted, “Spoken like a left-wing traitor.”

“This is a free country and I can say anything I want to against Bush. I didn’t elect him,” Barrow said, raising his voice.

“Thank God we have Homeland Security. Now when I disapprove of what you say I no longer have to defend your right to say it.”

I tried to change the subject and talk about Michael Jackson’s face, but Sebastian would have none of it. He said to Barrow, “I saw your daughter on TV marching in a protest parade last Saturday on the Mall.”

Barrow got red in the face and sputtered, “She has the constitutional right to protest. Are you calling Mitzi anti-American?”

Sebastian replied, “Well, she was wearing a T-shirt with ‘PEACE’ stencilled on it.”

Barrow yelled, “It speaks for itself!”

I could see Sebastian was ready to pounce. “If she is such a good American, why did she major in French at school?”

“We’re lucky she didn’t major in Russian or she would have been recruited by the CIA.”

Sebastian countered, “Not when the FBI develops their film showing Mitzi at the Washington Monument.”

Mrs. Broderick asked, “Would anyone like more broccoli?”

Sebastian said, “If I had known Barrow was going to be here I wouldn’t have come.” Barrow said, “That goes double for me.”

Sebastian continued, “You probably don’t even have duct tape or a gas mask in your house. Tell us how you really feel about Saddam Hussein.”

“I hate him but I believe in the United Nations.”

“Spoken like a U.N. bleeding heart. Does anyone at the table believe that if we hadn’t attacked Saddam Hussein he would have attacked us first?”

The rest of us knew better than to say anything.

Barrow said, “No one knows how much it will cost us to rebuild.”

Sebastian shot back, “We can afford it. Bush knows we can have guns and butter, but he doesn’t want the French, the Germans or the Russians to find out about it.”

I said, “Can we get off Iraq and talk about something we all understand, like North Korea?”

Mrs. Broderick said, “Can we talk about North Korea after dessert?” —Dawn/Tribune Media Service

ON September 11, 2001, when the 19 Arab hijackers from Al Qaeda struck the most visible icons of America’s military and financial power — the Pentagon and the Twin Towers — there were more than a few pundits who concluded with some satisfaction that the “clash of civilizations” they had been predicting had finally arrived.

The concept of a “clash of civilizations” was first drafted in 1990 by Bernard Lewis, a committed Zionist, to describe the conflict between political Islam and the West. “This is no less than a clash of civilizations — perhaps irrational but surely a historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.” Unable to adapt to modernity and secularism, Islamic societies had rejected western values and were now transforming Islam into a militant movement against the West.

A few years later, in 1993, Samuel Huntington elevated the thesis of a clash of civilizations to a universal historical principle. Civilizations are the largest human aggregates that command human loyalties; and conflicts between civilizations account for much of the bloodshed in recorded human history. The cold war marked a brief departure from this pattern, but now that this aberrant period was happily over, civilizations could go back to their old pastime — waging wars against each other. In this new era, Huntington predicted, the most serious challenge to the West’s hegemony would come from Islam and China.

The Huntington thesis was an instant success that is not hard to explain. The military establishment seized it as a suitable replacement for the loss of the Soviet threat. If Islam and China could be inflated into worthy enemies, they could save the military budget and Nato. Other substitutes — such as drug cartels — were examined but they were not worthy opponents of imperial United States. The thesis was manna to the Zionists, who had been working hard to convert their war against the Palestinians into an American war against Islam. It gave comfort to right-wing Christian zealots who see Islam as the chief adversary in their war to win souls for Christ.

So when Osama’s men struck, it instantly produced demands for a “civilizational war” against Islam. Not surprisingly, the Zionist voices were the most insistent and articulate. Within a few hours of the terrorist strikes, I had seen every current and former Israeli leader on the major US networks, not counting less eminent Israeli representatives, all of whom were urging the United States to carry the war against Islamic terrorists to their home ground — in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya and Pakistan. It was no time to mince words. The United States and Israel now had the same enemies: they were fighting the same war.

The call to arms was loud and clear. Writing on October 29, 2001, in The Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, strong supporters of Israel, were predicting that Afghanistan will only be an “opening battle” in a long war that will “spread and engulf a number of countries in conflicts of varying intensity.” More ominously, they declared, this war “is going to resemble the clash of civilizations everyone had hoped to avoid.” Other pro-Israelis were more direct. Norman Podhoretz, editor of the Commentary, a leading Zionist monthly, was urging the United States to be ready to “fight World War IV — the war against militant Islam,” and to “impose a new political culture on the defeated parties.” There was an air of triumphalism in Zionist pronouncements.

It is a testimony to the power of the pro-war lobbies that the Bush administration lost little time in embracing their plans for a civilizational war against Islam. After a quick but illusory victory over the ragtag Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the United States moved quickly to convert the campaign against terrorism — a campaign in which it has received the cooperation of nearly every Muslim country — into a war against countries that oppose Israel’s hegemony over the Middle East. President Bush’s embrace of Likudnik policies was complete when Ariel Sharon, admonished by his country’s courts for complicity in the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla, was declared to be a “man of peace.”

Is America’s intimate embrace of Likudnik policies, its on-going war in Afghanistan, its war against Iraq, and projected wars against Iran, Syria and possibly Pakistan, proof that the clash of civilizations has begun? Hardly. This only demonstrates the power of the lobbies that have been planning, predicting and promoting the “clash” against Islam and Muslims. They were predicting what they were planning to carry out in due course of time. The attacks of September 11, 2001, only advanced their war plans.

The sharpest refutation of the Huntington thesis comes from the West itself. A growing chorus of western voices now proclaims that the war against Iraq is not their war. In poll after poll, they have been asserting that this is not a just war, that Iraq does not pose a clear or imminent threat to their security, that the United States constitutes a greater threat to world peace than Iraq or South Korea. They know that Iraqis are mostly Muslims, but that has not stopped them from recognizing their common humanity; this has not diminished their outrage over economic sanctions that have killed half a million Iraqi children. There are many in the West now who feel that they have more in common with the oppressed Iraqis than they do with Bush and Blair, or the warmongers who guide and use them. Perhaps for the first time, the imperialist warlords have failed to use religion to divide mankind.

The partisans of war claim that ‘Islam is evil, it preaches terror and hatred, and it must be destroyed before it destroys us’. It is a tribute to the moral clarity of so many in the West that they are not buying this Manichean notion that apportions all virtue to one’s own tribe and all evil to one’s adversary. Most remarkably, it is the Christian leaders in the West who have firmly rejected this Manichean vision, and who now stand tall in their opposition to the war against Iraq. They are challenging the bigotry of Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells. Even Bush’s own Methodist Church has declared that the war against Iraq is “without any justification according to the teachings of Christ.”

If the thesis of an inevitable clash between the West and Islam still had any semblance of credibility, it was shredded by the global anti-war rallies of February 15, 2003. It is estimated that some 30 million people joined those rallies in more than 600 cities across the world. Significantly, the most massive of these rallies were staged in the capitals, cities and towns of western countries. It was westerners who took the lead, while braving freezing sub-zero temperatures, to tell their governments that they did not want this war against Iraq. These demonstrations were most massive in countries — such as Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia and United States — whose governments supported the war.

The warmongering Bush-Blair team has gone ahead with the war, disregarding the clear democratic verdict of their own people. But so massive a rejection of war cannot be ignored without consequences; and by this is meant not just consequences for the personal careers of Bush and Blair. When the voice of the people is so blatantly flouted, it undermines the illusion so sedulously cultivated of democratic societies that pay heed to the will of the people. In one instant, the charade of democracy, of a free press, of governments following the will of the people will have been tested and shown to be hollow.

But there was also a deeper, more hopeful message in the massive rallies of February 15. In the past, the great powers have nearly always succeeded in manipulating their citizenry into supporting their overseas adventures, even when these have destroyed millions of lives. However, one can sense the stirrings of a new consciousness amongst the privileged sections of the world’s populations — an awareness that their privilege contributes to the misery of so many across the world — a global apartheid that cannot endure without destroying everyone.

It appears that they are beginning to understand that their privilege places a special burden on them: that they must act to restrain and rectify the rapacity of their own governments and corporations. At the least, they are now demonstrating that they will not permit their governments to murder in the name of the values that they cherish. Once before, slavery was abolished when that horrid aberration became morally unacceptable to a growing number of people in slave-owning countries. Now for the first time, with the anti-war movement, the people of privilege are beginning to say that global apartheid is unconscionable.

We cannot doubt that these developments are causing alarm in the inner sanctums of the war-mongering parties. Even as world conscience shows signs of evolving towards a new post-tribal stage, we can be sure that plans are underway to reverse this. When the dominant cliques in the core countries are frustrated in their hegemonic designs, they will not hesitate to shed their democratic facade. They will redouble their efforts to sow fear, raise alarm, breed mistrust, incite hatred. They will seek to curtail liberties in the name of national security. They will attempt to suppress dissent on the pretext of suppressing terrorism.

All this is already underway in the United States. And only the coming days, weeks and months will reveal whether the United States will follow the path of other capitalist democracies in trouble — and descend into fascism — or the forces of justice and democracy, true to the highest human ideals, will triumph over the dark forces that have held ascendancy over the fate of mankind.

The writer is professor of economics at Northeastern University, USA. E-mail: m.alam@neu.edu.