THE Iraq war resolution which was passed unanimously by the Senate on Wednesday not only did not condemn the aggressors, it did not even name names while “deploring” the war. It did not ask for immediate withdrawal of the invading troops and neither did it warn against attempts at regime change inside Iraq by outside forces.

And while translating the resolution into Urdu, the upper house resorted to low cunning when for the word ‘deplore’, the translated version which interestingly was not put to vote, used the term ‘muzzammat’ which means ‘condemn’.

The party which stood completely exposed by the passage of this resolution was the MMA. All its street thunder and its rhetoric inside parliament went missing from what was put to vote in the upper house on Wednesday. The PML-N too went along, perhaps because of the permission the government granted to Shahbaz Sharif’s family to return to Pakistan for a short period to attend to some family affairs.

The PPP and other opposition groups were never overly passionate in their denouncements of the US over Iraq. So here there was no question of any big loss of face. And the PML-Q and its allies in the government could not have done anything better because they had to keep looking all the time over their shoulders to see what pleased the uniformed president who is known to be very tight with President Bush.

But what did the MMA gain out of this blatant compromise? Or was it a part of the deal it is finalizing with the ruling alliance for joining the government at the centre? The MMA is already in coalition with the ruling alliance in Balochistan. In Islamabad, their candidate, Prof Ghafoor Ahmed of Karachi, was elected to the Senate with the votes of the ruling alliance. And in the NWFP itself where it commands an overwhelming majority it conducted the Senate elections in such a way that the establishment managed to get at least four of its candidates elected to the upper house without much ado.

Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri is a sensible, down-to-earth person. He has been doing just fine since he became Pakistan’s foreign minister. But his performance on Wednesday while he was reading the official statement on the Iraq war and answering questions raised during the debate left much to be desired. At one stage it appeared as if he was drowning all his points in his own verbiage. In the first place, he did not make any new points. Second, he was only articulating the 50 or so year old foreign policy of Pakistan framed in the GHQ and sustained by military take-overs every 10 years. And about the Iraq war he was, indeed, only repeating all that the government has been saying all these weeks. But the way he was putting all this across on Wednesday in the upper house, it appeared as if he had come to the house determined to play to the gallery. And it all sounded very funny because the Churchillian thunder in his delivery could not camouflage the servility of our foreign policy formulations.

What is more painful is the fact that such a mild resolution was passed by the upper house unanimously after the US had stabbed Pakistan in the back by announcing its sanctions against the KRL. Even if it is accepted that the sanctions would have no impact one way or the other on the operations of the KRL, the timing of the announcement looks ominous. And the explanation that has come from the US sounds even more ominous. The US seems to be attempting to break open a crack in our nuclear armour in order perhaps to get a toehold when and if required at some ‘opportune’ time in the future.

And by the way, the US will not need to use India against us if it decided any time in the future to apply the doctrine of preemption on Pakistan. It would only need to close down all the dole-taps through which we get our aid. We were brought to our knees when aid was stopped after the 1965 war. The same thing happened when in 1990 the Pressler amendment was invoked by the US. And recently when all kinds of sanctions were slapped on us after we tested our nuclear device in 1998 and then when the military took over in 1999. The $10 billion that we have accumulated in the foreign exchange reserves are just about enough to pay for just one year’s imports.

Did the president talk to Colin Powell on Monday on the issue of the KRL? Information Minister Rashid says he did. Foreign Minister Kasuri says he is unaware of any such contact between Pakistan and the US in the immediate past. What is happening? PPP’s Enver Beg raised this in the upper house on Wednesday in his own inimitable way, but the question went begging.