LONDON: The Anglo-American war now being fought in the Middle East is without question the most flagrant act of aggression carried out by a British government in modern times. The assault on Iraq which began a week ago, in the teeth of global and national opinion, was launched without even the flimsiest Iraqi provocation or threat to Britain or the US, in breach of the UN charter and international law, and in defiance of the majority of states represented on the UN security council.

It is necessary to descend deep into the mire of the colonial era to find some sort of precedent or parallel for this piratical onslaught. However wrong or unnecessary, every previous British war for the past 80 years or more has been fought in response to some invasion, rebellion, civil war or emergency. Even in the most crudely rapacious case of Suez, there was at least a challenge in the form of the nationalization of the canal. Not so with Iraq, where the regime was actually destroying missiles with which it might have hoped to defend itself only a couple of days before the start of the US-led attack.

But there is little reflection of this reality, or of Anglo-American isolation in the world over the war, in either the bulk of the British media coverage or the response from most politicians and public figures. Little is now heard of the original pretext for war, Iraq’s much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction, and regime change — that lodestar of the US hawks which Tony Blair struggled to dissociate himself from for so long — is now the uncontested mission of the campaign. Having lost the public debate on the war, Blair has demanded that a divided nation rally round British troops carrying out his policy of aggression in the Gulf. And under a barrage of war propaganda, the soft centre of public opinion has dutifully shifted ground — in the wake of those members of the British Parliament (MPs) who put their careers before constituents and conscience once Blair had failed to secure UN authorisation. Many balk at criticizing the war when British soldiers are in action, but it’s hardly a position that can be defended as moral or principled when the action they are taking part in arguably constitutes a war crime. And whether public support holds up under the pressure of events in Iraq — such as Wednesday’s civilian carnage in a Baghdad market — remains to be seen.

Events have, of course, signally failed to follow their expected course. The pre-invasion spin couldn’t have been clearer. The Iraqis would not fight, we were told, but would welcome US and British invaders with open arms. The bulk of the regular army would capitulate as soon as soon as they saw the glint on the columns of American armour. The war might even only last six days, Donald Rumsfeld suggested, in a contemptuous evocation of the Arabs’ humiliation in the Six Day war of 1967. His hard right Republican allies insisted it would be a “cakewalk”. British ministers, as ever, took their cue from across the Atlantic, while the intelligence agencies and US-financed Iraqi opposition groups reinforced their arrogant assumptions.

But Rumsfeld’s six days have been and gone and resistance to the most powerful military machine in history continues to be fierce across Iraq — in and around the very Shia-dominated towns and cities, such as Najaf and Nasiriyah, that the US and Britain expected to be least willing to fight. Nor has the Iraqi army yet collapsed or surrendered in large numbers, while regular units are harrying US and British forces along with loyalist militias. One senior US commander told the New York Times, “we did not put enough credence in their abilities,” while another conceded that “we did not expect them to attack”. The International Herald Tribune recorded dolefully that “the people greeting American troops have been much cooler than many had hoped”.

There was little public preparation for the resistance that is now taking place. Third World peoples have after all been allocated a largely passive role in the security arrangements of the new world order — the best they can hope for is to be “liberated” and be grateful for it. There has been little understanding that, however much many Iraqis want to see the back of Saddam Hussein, they also — like any other people — don’t want their country occupied by foreign powers. No doubt Ba’athist militias are playing a coercive role in stiffening resistance. There are also those who cannot expect to survive the fall of the dictatorship and therefore have nothing to lose. But the scale and commitment of the resistance — along with reports of hundreds of Iraqis struggling to return from Syria and Jordan to fight — suggests that it is driven far more by national and religious pride. Most of these people are not fighting for Saddam Hussein, but for the independence of their homeland.

To fail to recognize this now obvious reality is not only condescending, but stupid. But then we have been subjected to such a blizzard of disinformation in recent days — from the reported deaths of Tariq Aziz and Saddam Hussein to the non-existent chemical weapons plant and Tuesday’s uprising in Basra — that it should come as no surprise to hear everyone from British and US defence ministers to BBC television presenters refer to Iraqis defending their own country as “terrorists”.

Of course, the US has the military might to break Iraqi conventional resistance and impose a puppet administration in Baghdad in order to change the regional balance of power, oversee the privatization of Iraq’s oil and parcel out reconstruction contracts to itself and its friends. But the course of this war will also have a huge political impact, in Iraq and throughout the world. This is after all a demonstration war, designed to cow and discipline both the enemies and allies of the US. The tougher the Iraqi resistance, the more difficult it will be for the US to impose its will in the country, and move on to the next target in the never-ending ‘war on terror’. The longer Iraqis are able and choose to resist, the more the pressure will also build against the war in the rest of the world.

Almost 86 years ago to the day, the British commander Lieutenant General Stanley Maude issued a proclamation to the people of Baghdad, whose city his forces had just occupied. “Our armies,” he declared, “do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators.” Within three years, 10,000 had died in a national Iraqi uprising against the British rulers, who gassed and bombed the insurgents. On the eve of last week’s invasion Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins echoed Maude in a speech to British troops. “We go to liberate, not to conquer”, he told them. All the signs from the past few days are that a new colonial occupation of Iraq — however it is dressed up — will face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein has gone; and that the occupiers will once again be driven out.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

IN the matter of allocating seats to members of the Senate, the chairman, Mohammadmian Soomro, seems to be facing the same sort of dilemma as the one which was earlier faced by Chaudhry Amir Hussain, Speaker of the National Assembly. On the second day running, the chairman seated them all in alphabetical order instead of dividing the house, as necessitated by rules of business, between the ruling alliance and the combined opposition, with the former occupying seats on the right of the aisle and the latter seats on the left.

As in the National Assembly, in the Senate as well the choice of leader of the opposition has become difficult to make as the MMA has 22 on its side out of 43 of the combined opposition while the rest, led by about 11 of the PPP, make up 21. And as long as a decision is not made, the seat located immediately to the right of the prime minister’s across the aisle remains vacant which then makes it difficult to allocate seats to other opposition leaders and their parties in accordance with a set order of precedence.

The NA Speaker resolved the issue by keeping this seat in question vacant. Perhaps the chairman of the Senate too will follow suit if the opposition does not come to some kind of in-house understanding on the matter of its leadership.

The PPP is claiming the office of the leader of the opposition in the NA on its original strength of 81 which got depleted to 60 after 20 of them opted for the last resort of you- know-who and turned into patriots without resigning from the party on whose ticket they had won their seats. While this issue is likely to linger in the NA until about when it is time to vote for the budget, there exists no such ambiguity in the case of Senate. There are no patriots in the Senate and the MMA has a clear majority of one over the rest of the combined opposition. But the wrangling continues. Both the MMA and the non-MMA opposition groups appear confident of winning the top slots in the two houses.

The majority of the ruling alliance in the Senate hangs by a thin thread of eight votes in the 100-seat house. But the opposition with its 43 combined votes also faces its own predicament. And while the LFO has divided the nation into two clear-cut groups, it has also brought together disparate groups, some of whom are separated by an unbridgeable ideological divide.

And if the party-wise vote count of the last general elections and the genuine turnout for the referendum are taken as a measure of where the nation stands on the LFO, the so-called support to the LFO in the two houses, though numerically just about a little more than what it is on the side of the opposition, is too tenuous to be of any comfort to the president. And the combined opposition, despite its wrangling over the offices of leader of the opposition in the two houses and despite the ideological divide marring its moorings, is likely to give the ruling alliance a run for its money on the LFO in the coming days and weeks.

On Friday, the opposition members who participated in the debate on the Iraq war condemned the USA and the UK roundly. But the ruling alliance, obviously fearing presidential rebuke, went to great lengths to avoid using the word in their speeches. Seemingly, therefore, a consensus resolution on Iraq war appears as far away as it was when the NA concluded its debate on the matter without adopting a resolution.

The president and his close confidantes are said to have already expressed their resentment over Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali’s cancellation of his visit to the US. The ruling alliance, therefore, is said to be in no mood to invite an additional reprimand from the president by condemning the US which is understood to have promised to help out Gen Musharraf with India on the issue of Kashmir.

When told that Jamali could not have done anything other than what he did in view of domestic public pressure, those claiming to have the ear of the president reportedly recalled, for comparison’s sake perhaps, that right at the time when the victorious Northern Alliance were pushing into Kabul, Gen Musharraf was standing with President Bush in Washington addressing a joint press conference. This according to these sources was a courageous act on the part of Musharraf, and the Americans reportedly liked it very much, and that was why they said Washington had remained so tight with the president all through the ups and downs of the Iraq crisis as well.