THE easy victory in Iraq appears to have set a precedent in determining geopolitical landscape. The intriguing question is whether the invasion of Iraq was meant to topple a rogue regime and seize weapons of mass destruction or it was merely a first shot in a war to remake the world in American image — a war that began in Baghdad but has not ended there and which may go even beyond the Middle East.

Since Damascus is just a few hours by tank from Baghdad,the Baathist government of Bashar Asad must be wondering whether they are the next target for a regime change. The Syrian government as well as the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein have been ruled by the Arab nationalist Baathist party. However, the Syrian and Iraqi factions of the party have been at loggerheads with each other for decades. In the first Gulf war, Syria even backed the US military action, gave shelter to many anti-Saddam exiles and maintained close ties with the furiously anti-Saddam Kurdish groups in northern Iraq.

Though many analysts rule out military action against Syria, at least in the near future, the barrage of accusations levelled by Washington against Damascus has caused widespread concern in the world. President George Bush himself has accused Syria of possessing chemical weapons and supporting the deposed Iraqi regime and sheltering its fleeing leaders.

A White House statement has described Syria as “a terrorist state”. Defence Secretary Rumsfeld has accused Damascus of carrying out tests involving chemical weapons over the past 12 to 15 months. The increasingly influential hawkish Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently told the US Congress that Syrians were behaving badly, and if they continued with hostile acts against Washington, the US would have to rethink its policy towards Damascus.

Taken together, these warnings sound ominously. Syria has earned the US wrath because it supported the losing side in the war; it stood up for Iraq in the Arab League and the UN Security Council. It sponsored big anti-war demonstrations in the country, permitted a top Muslim cleric to call for jihad against the Americans and let a stream of pro-Iraq volunteers cross its border to fight against the Americans. Syrian denials of these accusations have cut no ice with Washington.

But the most important reason for Washington’s ire, which it hesitates to state publicly, is that Syria continues to be in the “rejectionist” camp that is opposed to any concessions to Israel to end the confrontation between it and the Palestinians. After the overthrow of the Saddam regime, the leading member of the “rejectionist” group, only Syria and Iran now remain to be subdued. It is no coincidence that currently Pentagon’s briefings on terrorism mention Palestinian Hamas and the Shiite Hezbollah militants more often than Al Qaeda. Hamas has its headquarters in Damascus and Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, is allegedly supported by Syrians and Iranians.

US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has described Hezbollah as “the A team of world terrorism”. Also,it is no longer a secret that reining in of Hamas and Hezbollah is an important component of the Middle East ‘road map’ agreed between the US and Israel. Israeli defence minister Shaul Mofaz has demanded of Syria to get Hezbollah fighters out of Lebanon and stop Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad from using Damascus as their headquarters.

The torrent barrage of accusations from Washington and the shifting of focus from Baghdad to Damascus must have come as a shock to Syria which had earned appreciation of Washington by providing to the Americans useful intelligence about Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. It may also be recalled that when Bush took aim at the “axis of evil” — Iraq, Iran and North Korea — Syria’s name was not mentioned. Also, Syria is the only one of the seven countries on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorism-supporting countries to have full diplomatic relations with the United States.

The overnight change of attitude is a classic illustration of the dictum that today’s allies are tomorrow’s rivals. There is also a lesson to be learnt by those Third World countries which have come to lean too heavily on Washington after having helped it in the context of its fight against terrorism and the Al Qaeda network.

Until the fall of Baghdad,the Bush administration had shown no great concern about the so-called Syrian weapons of mass destruction. Raising this issue at this stage makes for a frightening scenario since Iraq was invaded on the pretext that it possessed weapons of mass destruction and was engaged in promoting and sponsoring terrorism.

The real danger to Syria, Iran and other countries comes from the increasing influence of xenophobic neo-conservatives in Washington who believe that the U.S has entered a new era of undisputed military supremacy. According to a report in the Herald Tribune of 29-30 March, 2003, at a meeting of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, attended by Richard Perle, the eminence grise of the Bush administration, the agenda for American security and foreign policy was formulated.

It was agreed that Iraq was just the beginning. After North Korea and Iran, Syria was added to the list of states to be treated with the American recipe for ‘regime change.’ The agenda also provides for France and Germany to be contained and the United Nations reformed.

Implicit in the above agenda is the policy of unilateralism in assessing the intent of another state and judging a threat from it purely on the basis of its perceived capabilities — shades of the “we know best” doctrine. This reminds us of the 19th century British imperialism.

However, it is highly unlikely that Washington will soon follow its victory in Iraq with an attack on neighbouring Syria. The Americans hope the dramatic display of US power and determination in Iraq will persuade the other “rogue states” — Syria and Iran in particular — to heed the warnings and clean up their act. North Korea appears to have already taken its cue and indicated that it is willing to accept multilateral talks to resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula — a big turnaround from its original stance.

For the time being the Americans will be content to put diplomatic and economic pressure on Syria which, unlike Iraq, does not have oil. Its economy is already faced with a crisis. The end of Saddam Hussein’s regime means an abrupt loss of hundreds of millions of dollars that came through smuggled Iraqi oil. The American forces have already shut down the pipeline carrying oil from Iraq to Syria. Less money in Syrian coffers means less cash for the already underfunded Syrian military which has fallen much behind the Israeli military since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The irony is that the oil-rich Arab countries will express verbal sympathy with the Syrians but will not dare help them financially for fear of offending the Americans.

Syria is now in a tight corner. Unless it removes the real cause of friction — its support for Hamas and Hezbollah — it will continue to be a part of the “axis of evil”. After September 11, Bush’s policy has been to make no distinction between terrorists and the regimes that support them. If Syria does not get the message, its fate will not be very different from that of Iraq.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.

I WAS studying at the Northwestern University in America in the early fifties when McCarthyism was at its height. Individuals or groups were publicly accused of political disloyalty without proof. Every liberal was dubbed a communist.

It turned neighbour against neighbour. Idealism touched its nadir. Few people thought that the US would be able to get over those dark days. Still it turned the corner in the beginning of the sixties. Old values of liberty and democracy returned with a vengeance. Must we conform? The people asked. It was their right to rebel.

People felt generally ashamed of that phase of bigotry. But the suffering, which the period of McCarthyism brought on people, can never be forgotten. It was a lawless rule. Some lost key positions; some got their unblemished reputation soiled. Some of the best brains left the fields of art and science. Even today most Americans recall that period with horror and hate.

I have no doubt that a decade or so later, the same thing will happen: the US will remember the current time of arrogance and boorishness with similar pangs of conscience. By then, the Bush administration would be history. And the feeling of unlimited power would be tinged with some humility.

The same society, which has failed to realize that it imposed an unjust and illegal war against Iraq, would introspect and admit that it was wrong in doing so. Wreaking vengeance for the World Trade Centre’s destruction on the civil population, including women and children, in Iraq would be considered an act of inhuman cruelty.

The vision and the message of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy would be refurbished. President Bush would be relegated to an insignificant footnote in the history of America. The problem is how long this period of non-accountability would continue.

Even if Bush is defeated in 2004, the feeling of being the most powerful country in the world — America has 43 per cent of the world’s wealth — can tempt the likes of Rumsfeld and Powell to arbitrarily change the world order.

It is not oil alone. It is the hubris of power. The real America has been pushed to the background by a new breed of power-crazy men in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department. The world should be patient till the old America, which liberated itself from Britain and founded a pluralistic society, asserts itself again. The concept of individual freedom and independence are too deeply rooted in the land to be ended by Bush who, in any case, is an appointee of the US Supreme Court.

A US Supreme Court justice, Robert L Jackson, chief US prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials, said on August 12, 1945: “We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies justify resort to aggressive war. It is an utterly renounced and condemned instrument of policy.”

But the world cannot sit absolutely idle till the old concept of “we, the people” re-emerges in America. The anger generated against the Iraq war is too wide and too deep. The indignation that brought the young and the old together in a series of protests against the WTO is surfacing again. As days go by, the opinion against America’s unilateralism will become more vocal. I only hope that the protest does not become parochial — that of the Arabs and Muslims. It is a worldwide anger. Let it stay that way.

The problem is to push the governments of our region to take a stand against America’s might which has already exposed the UN. The western media dominates the world. Even people in countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who have come on the streets to protest against the war on Iraq, depend on western news agencies for information. The prejudice of the agencies gets reflected in our newspapers and most of the electronic media. And we disseminate what we get.

But this is not the first time it has happened. The Indian media has always been found wanting in the coverage of war or peace outside its shores. Our dependence on western news agencies is pathetic. Our two main news agencies — PTI and UNI — have disseminated whatever Reuters of the UK or the Associated Press of America send. Since the Anglo-American media is controlled by the military during wars, the distortion, the misinformation and the psychological warfare in which they indulge creep into our media.

Nobody is pleading for Saddam Hussein and his dictatorial behaviour. Nor does anyone doubt the victory of Anglo-American forces. The criticism is against the manner in which America, supported by Great Britain, went ahead with the attack without getting the sanction of the UN. It would have come if the two had only waited a bit longer.

Our media’s complaint is that western news agencies did not cover the fierce resistance the Iraqis put up at Basra and other places. As someone rightly said, the foreign TV networks tried to sell the world “an antiseptic war, one in which there were no torn and bleeding victims.” No weapon of mass destruction has been found in Iraq. Still the information the western media put across from day one was nothing but that. First the emphasis was on the removal of Saddam and his two sons, the demand made by Bush. As he changed, the western media too asked for a new regime. In the end, it was the installation of a democratic set-up by the Iraqis. Woefully, the western media has become a willing tool in the hands of America and the UK.

We were run down when we caved in during the emergency (1975-77). I am certain that the press in the West, with all its democratic traditions, would behave in the same way if something like the emergency was imposed in America or the UK. Like us, they would also crawl. All the Pulitzer Prize winners would have a question mark against their credibility.

Writing well is not enough; writing the truth is more important. For the sake of “national interest” the media should not swerve from its path. Journalists have to be objective. In a democracy, the media cannot afford to have even an iota of doubt raised about what it says. What holds good for India is true of both Pakistan and Bangladesh or, for that matter, most countries in the Third World. There too, the media uses the copy from the western agency. And it did so to cover the Iraq war.

It is strange that India should see Pakistan and Bangladesh through Reuters or AP and vice versa. Of course, during even a small conflict, as was seen at Kargil, the truth becomes a casualty because of the jingoism that takes over.

But an exchange of even a tainted report by Indians and Pakistanis may be better than what is available now. The problem with India and Pakistan is that their minds are so prejudiced against each other that they would rather depend on the western news agencies than use something that has the authentic flavour of the region and truth.

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.

FULL of contradictions, flat-out lies, groundless affirmations, the clotted media torrent of reporting and commentary on the war against Iraq (which is still being waged by something called “the coalition,” whereas it is still an American war with some British help) has obscured what has been so criminally stupid about its planning, propaganda, and justifying discourse by military and policy experts.

For the past two weeks, I have been travelling in Egypt and Lebanon trying to keep up with the unending stream of information and misinformation coming out of Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan, a lot of it misleadingly upbeat, but some of it horrifyingly dramatic in its import as well of course as its immediacy.

The Arab satellite channels, Al Jazeera being by now the most notorious and efficient, have given on the whole a totally opposed view of the war as compared to the standard stuff served up by “embedded” reporters — including speculations about Iraqis being killed for not fighting, mass uprisings in Basra, four or five “falls” of Um Kasr and Fao — who have supplied grimy pictures of themselves as lost as the English-speaking soldiers they have been living with.

Al-Jazeera has had reporters inside Mosul, Baghdad, Basra and Nasriya, one of them, the impressible Taysir Aloni, a fluent journalistic veteran of the Afghanistan war, and they have presented a much more detailed, on-the-spot account of the shattering realities of the heavy bombardment that has devastated Baghdad and Basra, as well as the extraordinary resistance and anger of the Iraqi population which was supposedly to have been only a sullen bunch of people waiting to be liberated and throw flowers at Clint Eastwood look-alikes.

Let us get straight to what is so unwise and substandard about this war, leaving aside for the moment its illegality and vast unpopularity, to say nothing about the way American wars of the past half century have been lumbering, humanly unacceptable and so utterly destructive. In the first place, no one has convincingly proved that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction that present an imminent threat to the United States. No one.

Iraq is a hugely weakened and sub-par Third World state and was ruled by a hated despotic regime: there is no disagreement about that anywhere, least of all in the Arab and Islamic world. But that it was any kind of threat to anyone is a laughable notion, one which no journalist of the legions who swarm around the Pentagon, State Department and White House has ever bothered to pursue.

Yet in theory, Iraq might have been a challenge to Israel sometime in the future, since it is the only Arab country that has the human, natural and infrastructural resources to take on Israel’s arrogant brutality. This is why Begin’s air force bombed Iraq preemptively in 1981. Note therefore the creeping replication of Israeli assumptions and tactics in what the US has been planning and implementing in its current post-9/11 campaign or preemptive war. How regrettable that the media has been so timorous in not investigating the Likud’s slow taking-over of US military and political thinking about the Arab world.

So fearful has everyone been of the charge of anti-semitism bandied about recklessly, even by Harvard’s president, such that the neo-conservative-cum-Christian Right-cum-Pentagon civilian hawks stranglehold on American policy has become a sort of reality forcing on the entire country an attitude of total belligerency and free floating hostility. One would have thought that but for America’s global dominance we would have been headed for another Holocaust.

Nor, second, could it have been true by any normal human standard that Iraq’s population would have welcomed the American forces that entered the country after a terrifying aerial bombardment. But that that preposterous notion became one of the lynchpins of US policy is testament to the outright rubbish fed by the Iraqi opposition and the two accredited Orientalist experts identified long ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami.

What made Lewis’s work so appalling in its effects was the fact that without any other views to counter his, American (policy-makers in particular) fell for them. His last book What Went Wrong? became a post-9/11 best-seller and, I am told, required reading for the US military, despite its vacuousness and unsupported, usually factually incorrect, statement about the Arabs during the past 500 years. Reading the book, you get an idea that the Arabs are a useless bunch of backward primitives, easier to attack and destroy than ever before.

Lewis also formulated the equally fraudulent thesis that there were three concentric circles in the Middle East - countries with pro-American people and governments (Jordan, Egypt and Morocco), those with pro-American people and anti-American governments (Iraq and Iran), and those with anti-American governments and people (Syria and Libya). All of this, it would be seen, gradually crept its way into Pentagon planning.

Ajami is a Lebanese Shi’a educated in the US who first made his name as a pro-Palestinian commentator. By the mid-1980s, he had become a professor at Johns Hopkins and a fervent anti-Arab nationalist ideologue, who was quickly adopted by the right-wing Zionist lobby (he now works for people like Martin Peretz and Mort Zuckerman) and groups like the Council of Foreign Relations. Dick Cheney quoted him in a major speech last August as saying that Iraqis would welcome “us” as liberators in “the streets of Basra.” Like Lewis, Ajami has not been a resident of the Arab world for years.

If Ajami and Lewis are the leading intellectual figures in US Middle East planning, one can only wince at how even more banal and weak-minded policy hacks in the Pentagon and White House have spun out such “ideas” into the scenario for a quick romp in a friendly Iraq. The State Department, after a long Zionist campaign against its so-called “Arabists” is purged of any countervailing views, and Colin Powell, it should be remembered, is little more than a dutiful servant of power.

Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were consultants to Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996 election campaign. Saddam Hussein is of course an awful tyrant, but it is not as if, for instance, most Iraqis have not suffered terribly because of the US sanctions and were far from willing to accept more punishment on the off chance that they would be “liberated.” After such liberation, what pray?

After all, look at the war against Afghanistan which also featured bombing and peanut butter sandwiches. Yes, Karzai is now in power of a very iffy kind, but the Taliban, the Pakistani secret services, and the poppy fields are all back, as are the warlords. Hardly a brilliant blueprint to follow in Iraq, which does not resemble Afghanistan very much anyway.

The expatriate Iraqi opposition has always been a motley bunch. Its leader Ahmad Chalabi is a brilliant man now wanted for embezzlement in Jordan and without a real constituency beyond Paul Wolfowitz’s Pentagon office. He and his helpers (the thoroughly shabby Kanan Makiya who has said that the merciless high-altitude US bombing of his native land is “music to my ears”) plus a few ex-Baathists, Shia clerics and others have also sold the US administration a bill of goods about quick wars, deserting soldiers, cheering crowds, equally unsupported by evidence or lived experience.

One can not, of course, fault these people for wanting to rid the world of Saddam Hussein: we would all be better off without him. The problem has been the falsifying of reality and the creation of either ideological or metaphysical scenarios for basically ignorant and unchecked American policy planners to foist undemocratically on a fundamentalist president and a largely misinformed public. In all, this Iraq might as well have been the moon and the Pentagon and White House Swift’s Academy of Lagado.

Other racist premises underlying the campaign in Iraq are such thought-stopping propositions as having the power to redraw the Middle East map, setting in motion a “domino-effect” in bringing democracy there, and holding fast to the assumption that the Iraqi people constitute a kind of tabula rasa on which to inscribe the ideas of William Kristol, Robert Kagan and other far right deep thinkers. As I have said in an earlier article, such ideas were first tried out by Ariel Sharon in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion, and then again in Palestine since he took office two years ago.

It is hard to believe that things will be much different from that bloody episode, but with other countries like Syria and Iran involved, shaky regimes shaken more, general Arab outrage inflamed to the boiling point, one cannot imagine that victory in Iraq will resemble any of the simple-minded myths posited by Bush and his little clique.

This is the stupidest and most recklessly undertaken war in modern times. It is all about imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in brutal violence and cruel electronic gadgetry. To call it “faith-based” is to give faith an even worse name than it already has.

What winning, or for that matter losing, such a war will ultimately entail is almost literally unthinkable. But pity the Iraqi civilians who must still suffer a great deal more before they are finally “liberated.” — Copyright 2003, Edward W. Said