THE US-led coalition force’s frustration at its failure to achieve its objective of overwhelming Iraq in a short and swift war is evident from the intensification of the bombardment of Baghdad from air and the ground artillery and also from the increasingly ruthless attacks on Iraqi civilians.

On Tuesday — the thirteenth day of the war — reports spoke of eight Iraqi civilians being shot and killed at checkpoints set up by the coalition in the southern part of the country. The attack on a vehicle carrying an Iranian family of fifteen earlier last week killing all of them, also heightened concern over the growing scale of civilian casualties.

There are indications that despite the intensive use of some of the deadliest weapons, the US-British force advancing on Baghdad has yet to consolidate its position in the southern part of the country which it occupied within days of the start of the war. The commander of a US airborne (Apache helicopters) battalion conceded on Tuesday that though his unit had been involved in fierce offensives since the start of the war, the battle for “the control of the area around Najaf was not yet over.” British troops deployed around Basra too were still confined to positions gained on the outskirts of the historic city and are awaiting reinforcements. It was clear that the force had yet to achieve a breakthrough.

South of Baghdad, American troops had to call in air strikes in their attempt “to try to smash the resolve of the Iraqi defenders who hit back with tanks, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.” This is in spite of the fact that before the war started, western military spokesmen and the media had spoken of the Iraqi forces being poorly equipped and trained.

Asserting that the campaign against the Iraqi forces was “on track”, Gen Richard Meyers, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, in a TV interview, has attempted to explain the slow progress of the coalition force towards Baghdad saying that “we are going to be patient... and we are going to start major pushes when we think it’s to our advantage at a time and place of our choice.” He has also tried to minimize the encounters with the Iraqi forces by referring to them as “fire fights.” He has admitted, however, that “the heaviest fighting” may still lie ahead as the coalition troops advance to engage the Republican Guards.

US secretary of state Colin Powell’s sudden dash to Ankara to discuss matters with the Turkish government suggests that he may have come to the conclusion that the progress towards Baghdad would remain slow until the coalition forces could also move in from the north through Turkey. The Turkish parliament had earlier rejected the proposal for the use of Turkish bases for attack on Iraq. Another US worry is the possibility of Turkey sending its troops to the northern border to prevent any uprising by Iraqi Kurds which might spill over into its side of Kurdish areas. Latest reports say Turkey has agreed to allow the US military the use of its bases for operations in Iraq.

While it would be unrealistic to think that the Iraqis would be able to hold off the vastly better equipped coalition force for long, there is no doubt that the war has not been going as the US and British strategists had initially hoped. Some observers even suggest that the American troops could come up against the same sort of situation in Iraq that they had faced in Vietnam in the sixties and seventies.

Iraq does not, of course, have the kind of military and material support that the guerillas in Vietnam had from Soviet Russia and China. The squabbling between the US defence department and the field commanders in Iraq can be attributed to the Iraqi resistance which the coalition forces have been facing since the start of the war.

President Bush’s message to the Iraqi people that the coalition forces would “liberate” them from the oppressive rule of the Saddam regime seems to have gone unreceived. There is nothing to suggest that the Iraqis are waiting to be “liberated.” On the contrary, there have been reports in a section of the British press that as the coalition force is engaged in a “slow advance” on Baghdad, it is faced with the prospect of “a guerilla war waged by local militias.”

A Guardian report has spoken of a gathering of tribal chieftains and clan leaders in Baghdad for the past several days. It says that the tribal and clan leaders “with scimitars flashing beneath their gold-edged cloaks” could prove crucial to the defence of Baghdad. The correspondent goes on to maintain that “such displays of patriotic fervour have occurred with increasing regularity, suggesting that President Saddam Hussein has succeeded in convincing Iraqis this is not a battle for the preservation of his regime but for their homeland.”

Another Guardian report quotes the Baghdad radio as reporting on Sunday that about 4,000 Iraqis in Jordan had left their jobs there and returned home to fight for their country. Iraqi officials have claimed that they had recruited a similar number of volunteers from the neighbouring Arab states, including Saudi Arabia.

Reports like the one telecast by he Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Peter Arnett (who earned fame with his fair and bold reporting of the Gulf war in 1991) that the American-led coalition’s first war plan “had failed because of Iraq’s resistance and strategists are trying to write another plan” could only add to President Bush’s discomfiture. Combined with this is the fear that a serious cleavage may have already developed between Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the US chiefs of staff over the handling of the Iraq operation.

Arnett, who has since been dismissed by his news agency for his controversial statement which he made in an interview on the Iraqi TV, has admitted that it was wrong for him to have discussed his observations and opinions about the war planning on the Iraqi TV. He insisted, however, that his remarks were analytical in nature and not intended to be anything more.

Even more disturbing for the American planners would be the view expressed by Roger Hill, former chief inspector for the UN special commission for Iraq, who in 1998 had led a high-powered team of weapons inspectors to hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Hill maintains that the majority of such stocks were “destroyed prior to the present conflict or are currently being destroyed.” Before the present military operation against Iraq started he had predicted that the US, Britain and Australia would find no evidence of the WMD. Iraq’s possession of such weapons and the threat they posed to America’s and its allies’ security was their major excuse for launching George Bush’s reason for the attack on Iraq.

However, President Bush has somewhat shifted his ground for the war by claiming lately that the war is for the “liberation” of the Iraqi people from the tyranny and persecution of a ruthless dictator.

Whether or not the Arab envoys’ call for a UN General Assembly session actually leads to an early end to the war which is getting uglier by the day is anybody’s guess. It is clear, however, that with the coalition troops poised for a final assault on Baghdad, the war will enter the most critical phase in the next few days.

WAR against Iraq should never really have been in doubt. However, for those of us who believed that world public opinion and the will of the majority in the UN Security Council might somehow prevail, it only became a certainty when George W. Bush side-stepped the UN Charter and, backed by Britain and Spain, formally declared war on March 19.

As we in Pakistan follow the conduct of hostilities in the Middle East, it is with an acute awareness of some crucial global realities implicit in these. First, of course, it would help address the sense of a world made hostage to an artificially manufactured crisis and the myth of multilateralism in a unipolar context. Let us not flinch from the facts.

The concerned, dissenting voices of France, Russia, China and Germany have failed, as perhaps they were bound to, to rein in the world’s sole superpower or, for that matter, Britain or even Spain. The reason seems obvious. Whether or not weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are ever discovered in Iraq, ‘compliance’ by Saddam Hussein was never, at least for the US, at issue. What was is no secret: control over Iraq against an economic and geostrategic backdrop. While 9/11 may have made for drastic readjustments in the American world picture, US security concerns were not an immediate motivating factor in respect of the current military adventure.

Second, if the coalition forces’ objective in Iraq is, avowedly, regime change (and the missiles being fired today are not the ‘informal’ ones we saw in the case of the attack on Libya in 1986), then the principle of national sovereignty must, by the same token, be thought of as one of this war’s prime casualties. The question then arises: if the US and Britain have effectively presided over the demise of both the UN and the concept of the nation-state, what remains?

The Iraq war is, at some level, the product of a particular fixation of the American establishment as of 9/11: political hygiene. It had become imperative for it, from that date onwards, that the world be transformed into a cleaner, safer, more US-friendly place. So the Patriot Act was duly framed and passed, curtailing what were perceived by the US administration as potentially expensive civil liberties. With America in the grip of a xenophobic fever, scores of Muslims were rounded up. The aid of veteran ideologue, Henry Kissinger, was enlisted for the formulation of a rationale for the new counter-terrorism campaign. A global coalition was hastily cobbled together. And, very much in the spirit of a latter-day crusade, Afghanistan was carpet-bombed.

A reprieve ensued though, not, it would seem, ideologically. Within the White House and at other administrative levels, the ‘crusader’ mentality persisted. Inevitably, then, it would seem to have been in a moment of illumination, as a symptom of an ideology, not unlike the Fuhrer’s, which had at last managed to take root, that the so-called ‘Axis of Evil, was conceived and subsequently put before the world.

As we know, Iraq was placed at the centre of this axis. At about the same time, Kissinger propounded his extraordinary justification for the US position on Iraq by postulating the right of “pre-emptive strike” in the event of a perceived threat to any one state from another. The document in question provided the US with what was, in effect, a clear case for war against Iraq, by arguing, in the context of the Palestinian problem that “the road to Jerusalem lay through Baghdad”. So Iraq had been indicted and indeed strategically selected for punitive action long before the passage of Resolution 1441 by the UN Security Council.

If we ask ourselves what sort of mindset is at play here, the answer would scarcely be difficult. It is one that is committed to the preservation of what Theodore Roszak calls the “Great Society” and the faits accomplis of its “decision-makers”. (The Making of a Counter Culture). It is interesting that this mindset has today, once again, invoked a bizarre ‘crusader’ rhetoric for the attainment of its colonialist ends. Consider the miscellaneous psychological-cum-logistical strategies, the massive propaganda effort, of the Allies as they go on the rampage inside Iraq, seeking, quite like a divinely mandated fifth column, to foment rebellion against the country’s legitimate president, Saddam Hussein.

One can but gape with disbelief when confronted with the ‘liberationist’ theme of the thousands of leaflets, addressed to the Iraqi people, being airdropped over their country. Equally charged with bravura are the cynical references, in between bombing raids, to ‘humanitarian’ aid for the Iraqis or the Christian ‘compassion’ with which the current military campaign is being advertised as being conducted.

There may be great dexterity about all this but one with underpinnings which tend to get exposed. In fact, the lofty morality being touted for the purposes of the present campaign, with the whole paraphernalia of a relief mission or crusade, merely serve to highlight what they are being made to cover: the reality of an invasion. What is amazing, though, is that this incredible public relations exercise is one which a vast number of people, from small-time defence planners in Washington to media persons embedded with Allied troops in Iraq, seem perfectly happy to go along with. But, then, this is what colonialism is all about: an unabashed display of collective dedication when the stakes are high.

What does the Muslim world make of this? Individuals from countries such as Indonesia are volunteering to go to the help of their Iraqi brothers. And why not? If the Allies can trot out their Christian ‘care’ for the occasion? So can Muslims their equivalent jihad. One sincerely hopes? of course, that Pakistanis will refrain from following this example. This is no time for emotionalism. Rather, it is a time for reflection, for an awareness of the possibility of a widening of the present conflict and for the adoption of a national posture in keeping with this.

Above all, we should be aiming at setting our house in order and, for this, at evolving a fresh consensus as to domestic direction. Also, we can be asking ourselves some relevant questions. The Kashmir issue notwithstanding, is undiluted militarism the key to a prosperous Pakistan? Do we not merit more than a democratic sham? Is there still room for the emergence of a genuine civil society which can serve as a check on the government’s “permanent tendency”, in the words of the philosopher, Foucault, to “exceed its brief”? Or is it just a little too late?

AMERICAN generals are not political innocents, though they have to act as if they were. When Lieutenant General William Wallace, the commander of American ground forces in Iraq, ruefully told journalists last week that “the enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against” and predicted a much longer war, he was launching a (deniable) cruise missile straight at the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.

Everybody in Washington knows that it was Rumsfeld who ignored professional military advice and insisted on ‘War Lite’ in Iraq.

Rumsfeld and his civilian allies control the upper echelons at the Pentagon, and the war on Iraq was a chance for them to prove that they could carry out overseas interventions at low cost. (They have a long wish-list of such interventions: last month John Bolton, under-secretary of state for arms control, told Israeli officials that it would be “necessary to deal with” Iran, Syria and North Korea after the war in Iraq.) So when US professional soldiers who respected the Iraqi army’s capabilities insisted that to invade Iraq they needed ‘heavy’ forces as large as those used in the first Gulf War in 1991, Rumsfeld simply over-ruled them.

The head of the US army, General Eric Shinseki, a twice-wounded Vietnam veteran, wanted to move the 1st Cavalry Division from Texas and the 1st Armoured Division from Germany to the Gulf for the invasion, but Rumsfeld refused to send them. He wanted to prove that his project for re-ordering the world to America’s taste by force could be done on the cheap, exploiting the military superiority that he and his neo-conservative cronies believed that US forces now had thanks to new technologies. If you have to send most of the US army just to deal with a country like Iraq, then it’s such a big deal that you won’t get to do it very often — but if you can do it with ‘light’ forces, then it could become an almost annual event.

The conflict between the ideologues and the military professionals became so acute that Rumsfeld, unable to fire the army chief, took the unprecedented step of announcing Shinseki’s successor’s name 18 months in advance. By last December, the US armed forces were so alarmed by Rumsfeld’s strategy that former Marine Corps commandant General James Jones, now commanding US forces in Europe, took the risk of publicly criticising “those who seem to think this is pre-ordained to be a very easy military operation” in an interview with the ‘Washington Post’.

In January General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of US forces during the 1991 Gulf War, worried aloud in the same paper that “when (Rumsfeld) makes his comments, it appears that he disregards the army.” But Rumsfeld was the boss, which is why there are now fewer than 100,000 US combat troops in Iraq, why the operation has stalled before Baghdad, and why the Pentagon has belatedly ordered another 120,000 troops to the region (while insisting publicly that plans have not changed).

All those stupid, old-fashioned American professional soldiers were right after all. The Iraqi army turns out to be full of tough, brave men who are willing to die defending their country even if they don’t love Saddam Hussein. They are using guerilla warfare, ambush tactics, even suicide attacks — anything that lets them avoid fighting out into the open where US air power would destroy them. Their long-term strategy remains to draw US forces into the cities and inflict massive casualties on them, but there are not currently enough American combat troops in Iraq to even think of fighting their way into Baghdad.

It will take at least until the end of April for all these reinforcements to reach the outskirts of Baghdad, and by that time other US positions in the Arab world may have been destroyed. Popular outrage in the Arab world at the US attack on Iraq is building by the day, and pro-American regimes are increasingly at risk. Then American troops must fight their way into Baghdad street by street in the May heat, probably losing a few thousand soldiers in the process. Of course, Iraqi losses will be twenty or fifty or a hundred times as great, and America will still win in the end — but the real problems start on victory day, because nobody in their right mind would want to occupy Iraq.

As General Shinseki told a congressional committee in February, the United States will need a force in the hundreds of thousands to police post-war Iraq. Rumsfeld immediately denied it, saying that the army chief was “far off the mark,” and a ‘senior administration official’ told the Village Voice newspaper that Shinseki’s remark was “bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars.” So General Shinseki, in an act of insubordination that stunned his colleagues, went right out and told another congressional committee the same thing.

The rupture between the ideologically driven civilians who run the Pentagon and the professional military is now almost complete. That is a recipe for a longer and messier war, leading to a post-war occupation regime that promises to be an utter nightmare. — Copyright

DURING the US presidential campaign of 2000, George W. Bush’s stand on foreign policy was regarded by most analysts as being ‘pragmatic’ and ‘isolationist’ rather than ‘interventionist’ or ‘adventurist’.

A State Department website quotes the new president as saying that “America must be involved in the world. But that does not mean that our military is the answer to every difficult foreign policy situation... American internationalism should not mean action without vision, activity without priority and missions without an end... an approach that squanders American will and drains American energy.” He is further quoted as stating categorically that “the US should not be the world’s policeman.”

On the culmination of the five-week long messy electoral battle in the court rooms of Florida, when Bush named Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice as his first cabinet nominees, in interviews and statements both Powell and Rice confirmed the reserved isolationist stand adopted by their boss throughout the election campaign, causing analysts to surmise that the tone bad been set for the foreign policy the incoming administration was likely to pursue. Even after being sworn-in as president, before the 9/11 incident, there were no indications from the White House of any rethinking or reassessment of foreign policy objectives identified during the election campaign.

The 9/11 incident changed the world forever. Among other things, it also transformed George W. Bush’s foreign policy into a diametrically opposed image of its former self. But the speed, nature and dimension of this change must raise questions. Notwithstanding the massive impact of 9/11, how did a ‘pragmatic isolationist’ metamorphose into the crusading Warlord of the West practically overnight. It is important to study the nature of pressures and influences acting on the US president in the shape of the advice he was receiving from key cabinet members and aides. The minutes of White House, State Department and Pentagon meetings are not part of public record, but one can nevertheless get a good idea about the nature of advice being offered to the president by his advisers by looking at the past record of these advisers and their actions leading up to, and in the wake of, 9/11.

The main impetus for massive military action against Iraq came not so much from the president himself but from his dogs of war and it is clear from their past record that war against the Muslim world was a top priority on their agenda even before the election of George W. Bush to the White House. Their foreign policy priorities were at odds with Bush’s pre-9/11 foreign policy pronouncements and they remained far more focused on achieving their objectives. Today, as daisy cutters and tomahawks rain down mercilessly on the hapless citizens of Iraq, from Umm Qasr in the south to Mosul in the north, President Bush, now transformed into as much a hawk as any of his advisers, is often seen to be stumped by probing and insightful questions from reporters at press conferences in which his performance has been dull and unconvincing, whereas his war mafia continue to defend and promote their views on war with zeal, vigour and venom.

The overwhelming nationalistic euphoria in the wake of 9/11, which the Bush administration milked to the fullest extent, began to fade noticeably when the Enron and Worldcom scandals hit the headlines. Bush aides realized that not only was the administration losing credibility but was also losing control over the national agenda. The American invasion of Afghanistan did little to divert public attention from the domestic failures of the Bush administration. It therefore became imperative to turn the focus of national attention back to war. Iraq was the most obvious choice.

The Bush administration has uncomfortably close affiliations with the defence industry in America, which has suffered significant setbacks since the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. The Carlyle Group, the biggest investment consortium in the defence industry, is a perfect example of this. Its present members include George W. Bush’s father former President George Bush Sr., former Secretary of State James Baker and a close personal friend and confidant of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Frank Carlucci.

There is nothing explicitly illegal about the administration’s links with organizations like the Carlyle Group, but such links mark a definite conflict of interest. In the absence of a clearly identifiable enemy, such as communists, inordinately inflated defence budgets are a prickly issue that defies justification in the face of budgetary constraints and pressures.

However, defence industry interests, along with President Bush’s advisers, whose mistrust of and prejudices against the Muslim world bear alarming similarities to the anti-Communist rage and paranoia of the cold war era, have succeeded in prevailing on the president. He has recently asked Congress to approve a primarily military package worth nearly $75 billion for the Iraq war. The US defence budget is set to rise to approximately $350 billion this year and to $500 billion over the next five years.

Oil, as always, is an important consideration. Iraq’s oil reserves are second only to those of Saudi Arabia. By controlling Iraqi oil and establishing lower prices than other OPEC countries, the United States can effectively destroy Opec. Apart from this, the massive oil services industry in the United States would benefit immensely. When George Bush Sr. went to war with Iraq in 1991, Vice-President Dick Cheney was then defence secretary. When the war was over he left the government and secured appointment as chief executive of Halliburton, a Texas based oil services company. When sanctions against Iraq were relaxed and it was permitted to buy spare parts for its oilfields, Halliburton and its subsidiary companies cleaned up on several contracts amounting to tens of millions of dollars.

On being elected vice-president in 2000, Dick Cheney severed his ties with Halliburton, but profited personally to the tune of $ 36 million in stock options and benefits. Halliburton is once again poised on the sidelines in anticipation of acquiring mopping up contracts in Iraq, since it has the experience and now the connections in the White House. It has already been granted the contract for putting out oil well fires in Iraq without any bidding. Much more, no doubt, is yet to come.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had long ago identified American predominance and supremacy in the emerging New World Order with the eradication of the troublesome Muslim militancy in Persian Gulf. Both have, since long before the 2000 presidential election, been advocating a regime change in Iraq through military action.

On January 26, 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, working for the right-wing think tank, The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to order a military strike against Iraq to dislodge the Saddam regime. The letter was also signed by William Kristol, the founder and head of the PNAC. In the letter they wrote, “We urge you to turn your administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power... American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.”

Clinton, preferring to maintain a relatively soft approach at that time, rejected this advice, mainly because of the hectic diplomatic efforts of the UN Secretary General, Kofi Anan, who travelled to Baghdad to negotiate an agreement with Saddam Hussein in order to avert an American military strike. Undeterred by Clinton’s rejection of their grand design, they penned another letter to Senate Republican majority leader Trent Lott and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on May 29, 1998, proposing the establishment of a strong American military presence in the Gulf with a view to using force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. They wrote, “We should take whatever steps are necessary to challenge Saddam Hussein’s claims to be Iraq’s legitimate ruler, including indicting him as a war criminal.”

Neither Senator Lott nor Gingrich were in a position to order the implementation of such proposals. Testifying before the House National Security Committee on September 18, 1998, Paul Wolfowitz blasted the Clinton administration’s soft stand on Iraq, calling it a “muddle of confusion and pretence” as it avoided the “heart of the problem” which was the continuation of the Saddam regime.

In September 2000, the PNAC produced a document for Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush’s younger brother, Jeb. The title of the document was “Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century.” This document has now become the grundnorm on which the Bush administration’s foreign policy is being built by the men this document was aimed at.

It is nothing less than a blueprint for US world domination in the New World Order and current events unfolding in the Gulf clearly illustrate that this blueprint is being systematically implemented. The document categorically states that “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security, while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

The PNAC document promotes “maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests” to “discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

To be concluded