A riveting American drama

BUSH is facing huge difficulties. The problems facing the United States and its citizenry are momentous; taken in their entirety, they suggest that America’s power and affluence may well have peaked, crested, in the last decade of the 20th century. And, to a public accustomed to living in a nation which is not only a superpower but the globe’s most dynamic economic engine, this is unwelcome news.

It is not yet time, of course, to write off the US as the world’s sole superpower. But then few could have predicted in, say, 1985 that the Soviet Union would shortly move from superpower status to — to whatever Russia, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, and other nations are today.

The example of the USSR is not merely coincidental. There, stress lines revealed by an endless and unwinnable war in Afghanistan led to ultimate fracture. The Soviets thought that Afghanistan was simply a matter of military assertion — and lost not only a war, but their socialist ‘union’ to fragmented nationhood.

Advanced nations seem particularly vulnerable to wars of attrition. Perhaps the French did not know this when they embarked on their military adventurism in Vietnam and Algeria, but they learned it soon enough. Americans thought they could do what the French could not, and so intervened in Vietnam and eventually became an occupying force — and lost a war for the first time in their history.

Today, President Bush’s invasion of Iraq has led the American nation into what is looking more and more like a quagmire. Already, the count of Americans who have died in Iraq since President George W. Bush declared victory while aboard an aircraft carrier (his arms aloft, clad in a military flight suit) is greater than those who died in the war whose conclusion he celebrated. Recently, President Bush in a reserved manner pronouncedly different from his normal combative assertiveness, addressed the nation on television to deliver news he could no longer keep secret: The cost of the Iraq adventure, in the coming year alone, would be $87 billion.

Most Americans seem aghast at the expense. Seemingly, Iraqis are equally unhappy with a plan which would extend American rule and presence into a distant future. If anything characterizes the difficult situation, it is the daily reports of American, Iraqi and UN casualties. And, with a coldly received speech at the United Nations, Mr. Bush’s is finding little possibility of an international effort to resolve the situation. A quagmire, indeed, sapping American finances and the American military, angering not only the Iraqis but many in the family of nations — and with no end in sight.

How did the United States get into this calamitous misadventure? Why did Mr Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice ignore recent history and embark on a war in Asia?

The answers lie in domestic politics, cowboy diplomacy and greed. The president, ‘elected’ by a decision of the nation’s highest court rather than a mandate from the voters, was relatively unpopular until the catastrophe of September 11, when the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York mobilized the American public to support its commander-in-chief. There was widespread American and international support for a military action against Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda, the force behind the September 11 attacks, was based. President Bush’s domestic popularity ratings soared to an unheard of 90 per cent.

So, a year later, Mr. Bush’s political advisers told him that the best way to sustain his popularity — which he used to push through massive cuts in taxes for his wealthy supporters, and to pass legislation seriously curtailing civil liberties — would be to fight and win another war. In victory there is always a flush of political benefit. The image of a strong president, his advisers believed, would enable him to cruise to reelection in the 2004 presidential contest.

There was also a confluence between these political concerns and a strange, minority view of American international relations. Mr. Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz argued that ever since the United States pulled out of Vietnam, America has been afraid to use its troops elsewhere. (With good reason, as history has shown.) What is the sense of having the world’s best-equipped and strongest army, they argued, if you don’t use it?

What the world needs, they claimed — it pains me to write this, it sounds so smug and stupid — is a good demonstration that America is the military power in the world. For The Bush administration, continued American dominance would be assured by letting nations everywhere know that American military might would be used to keep them in line. That was the underlying motive behind the new American doctrine of preemptive war.

So, ignoring both history and those who pointed out it was easier to invade a country than to withdraw from it, the Bush administration mobilized for war. They convinced the nation — contrary to fact — that Iraq was involved in the events of September 11. Even today, 60 per cent of Americans believe the canard that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Centre. (Thus the irony so clearly visible to others in the world is lost on most Americans: the single most significant result of the American threat to attack the ‘axis of evil’ has been to create, in Iraq, a centre for terrorists and a new rallying cry for their cause.)

Contrary to what Messrs. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz expected, the war in Iraq has had several incontrovertible results. Instead of demonstrating the breadth of US military power, the war has shown how American forces can be stretched thin by a single and localized conflict. Instead of showing the strength of America’s military, the war has revealed how susceptible a well-equipped army is to urban guerilla tactics. Instead of uniting the world against terrorism, the war in Iraq has turned a large number of nations against a United States which turned to preemptive war to advance the partisan interests of its chief executive.

And instead of securing new business for American corporations (consider Iraq’s vast oil reserves, consider the selection of Halliburton — the corporation formerly headed by Vice-President Cheney — as the lead contractor in ‘rebuilding’ Iraq), the war in Iraq has highlighted America’s economic difficulties. Especially because that $87 billion to defend and rebuild Iraq has to come from somewhere.

It won’t come from American taxpayers. President Bush has pushed through Congress not one but two of the largest tax cuts in American history, with the result that even without its Iraq expenses the government faces the largest deficits in its history. And Mr. Bush can’t rescind the tax cuts — to be scrupulous, he could but he won’t — because the bulk of those cuts went to the wealthiest Americans, the people who funded George Bush’s last campaign and will fund his next one. This is a president who would never ask, could never ask, his wealthy friends to share in any financial burden.

So the $87 billion will enlarge the deficit even after it is partly offset by cuts in domestic social spending. Therein lies a huge problem for Mr. Bush.

Most Americans cannot understand why the United States should rebuild Iraq when the American economy itself needs rebuilding. In the past three years, the United States has lost over three million decently paying manufacturing jobs, a staggering number when one considers that it amounts to well over 15 per cent of the manufacturing jobs in the nation. Unemployment is rising, and underemployment is rising as well.

The great British economist John Keynes transformed government policies everywhere by showing how government spending creates jobs. When those who get jobs because of this spending in their turn use their wages to buy food and clothes and cars, their purchase of goods and services stimulates further job creation and further spending. This phenomenon is known as the multiplier effect, and impels governments everywhere — from capitalist to socialist — to justify deficit spending even when, especially when, economic times are difficult.

The loss of manufacturing jobs creates a reverse multiplier effect: when workers no longer receive wages for making steel or textiles or automobile parts, there will be workers in other sectors whose jobs are more precarious precisely because there are now fewer people with the money to spend on computers, clothes, and cars.

Yet in the face of this massive job loss and its reverse multiplier effect, the Bush administration is committed to creating new jobs not in the US, but in Iraq. With breathtaking simplicity, it is to be new sewers for Baghdad, but not for Chicago. The administration plans to provide health care for Iraqis, but not for the one out of three Americans who either has no health insurance or has inadequate insurance.

Likewise, and in apparent disregard of the larger interests of a majority of American voters, the current administration in Washington is proposing no programmes to employ the unemployed, upgrade the education of the underclass, or renew infrastructure. This wilful disregard of domestic reconstruction is not just because of the $87 billion to be committed to Iraq: there is a huge reduction of government revenue in place — largely those tax cuts to the president’s wealthy supporters — which will create a budgetary shortfall, according to the government’s Congressional Budget Office, of six trillion dollars over the next ten years.

The twin problems of the war and the economy signal many difficulties for Mr. Bush. He will deal with them differently as president and as candidate.

As president, he will deal with the twin difficulties through an ostrich-like strategy of burying his head in the sand: he will ignore the problems and change the subject. He will tell the nation its greatest danger is not economic disintegration, but that some people want to allow homosexuals to marry. He may find a new small war — President Reagan once invaded that military power, Grenada, and later, finding the strategy successful, invaded that other armed giant, Panama — which can be quickly and easily won, with lots of television coverage to celebrate missiles exploding and soldiers marching victoriously into small cities. He may even suggest that a minority — blacks or people of colour, Jews, Muslims, immigrants — is responsible for the American nation’s problems.

As candidate President Bush will, of course, avail himself of this same diversionary strategy. But his main bulwark will be money. Mr. Bush will raise more campaign funding than any candidate in American history, far more than his opponent. (campaign financing is the dark basement of the American political system. Americans legalize bribes by calling them ‘campaign contributions,’ arguing that such contributions are merely an extension of free speech. But large contributions are not free speech: they are merely a legal way to buy access and influence.) Unpleasant as it is to report, the candidate with the most money can buy elections, especially because money allows candidates to saturate television with feel-good advertisements touting the candidate and also attack ads that tear down his opponent.

There is a growing feeling in the American nation that not all is going well, either in the international-military arena or in the American economy. Will that translate into votes against Mr. Bush, or will his deep pockets, filled with checks from campaign contributors, enable him to shift focus from that malaise and thereby win re-election? A riveting drama has begun whose resolution is not clear.

I, as many in the world, am saddened by news of the death of Edward Said, a fellow contributor to the editorial pages of Dawn. Professor Said was my teacher and friend, a man who combined fierce intellectual honesty with a great generosity of spirit. His presence among us will be missed.

The writer is professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is a columnist for “The Statesman” in Kolkata.

A world beyond the rockets

PRESS conferences in Islamabad, which involve the head of state, invariably follow the same pattern. There is the odd trendy foreign correspondent in the audience, flaunting his intellect, who notes with that icy politesse that a hatchet is about to fall. There is the member of the home grown variety who asks questions he doesn’t really care about. And then there is the insider who has the irritating habit of always requiring precise information. The latest conference was no different.

On October 8 Pakistan Television crackled with unbounded vigour as President Musharraf once again regaled the nation with unfailing relish on how good things were on the home front. The armed forces are fully capable of defending the country. Pakistan has missiles and rockets that can reach targets far and wide and has built tanks that are bigger and better than that of the enemy, whoever that is supposed to be. The economy has never been better. In fact, things have never been rosier than they are today.

This is stirring stuff. But one gets the impression that the president is doing this a little too often. Drawing on the enormous resources of an ever-growing arsenal, and throwing in diverting novelty numbers, is all very well. But diminishing returns are bound to set in, and critics will see this as a sign of faltering angst.

A short while ago, Pakistan’s eternal legal aide-de-camp, Sharifuddin Pirzada, tried to divert the attention of the public from the unsavoury controversy over the LFO, by suddenly coming up with the sensational story that Miss Fatima Jinnah did not die a natural death, but had actually been murdered. Unfortunately for Mr Pirzada and the elitist clique in Islamabad, the gimmick didn’t work. The Pakistani public, which is possibly the most cynical in the world, wanted to know why the eminent lawyer had taken such a long time to speak up, and why he had kept it under wraps for so long.

Mr Pirzada doesn’t normally make mistakes, and is known for his political sagacity and impeccable timing. But on this occasion he completely miscalculated the effect of his ‘disclosure.’ The fact is that except for a clutch of people who knew and came into contact with the late Miss Jinnah, and were politically active in the days after partition, the announcement did not cut much ice. For the generation born after 1960, Miss Jinnah is just another face in the history books, along with Tamizuddin Khan and Khwaja Nazimuddin.

How different things were in 1965 when the highly spirited sister of the Founder of the Nation took up cudgels against the military dictator Ayub Khan, and was defeated in one of the most skilfully rigged elections the country has seen. What added a touch of irony to the whole sordid business is that some of the bureaucrats who were instrumental in ensuring that Miss Jinnah should lose, later became the champions of democracy and the people’s freedom.

Nobody can doubt the fact that the armed forces are capable of adequately defending the country against external threats. But what about the internal threats that continue to strain the fabric of society? I am not referring to the squabble over the LFO, or the protests in Sindh over the construction of dams, but to the dreadful, totally unpredictable, professionally organized and managed terrorist attacks against religious and civilian targets.

What makes these incidents truly frightening is the total lack of intelligence, military or civilian, available in the country. But it isn’t only the professional executors who are terrorizing the country. What about the armed bandits who hijack cars and break into people’s homes?

On the very day the chief minister of Sindh announced that the law and order situation in the province was much better, the metropolitan section of this newspaper carried a story of a gang rape victim being in a serious condition in a Karachi hospital. What gave the story an unfortunate twist was the fact that when the matter was reported by the victim to the police station, the 19-year-old girl was allegedly humiliated by the SHO. Incidents of police indifference or harassment are becoming all too frequent, ever since this law enforcement agency was given the status of a para-military power.

There were two other news reports in the same issue. The first stated that Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami, was going to stage a sit-in at Mandi Bahauddin. He was going to mourn the death of a male minor, the only bread winner of his widowed mother, who was first sodomized by some influential people of the area, and then chopped into pieces. Surely this is something that the president should look into. The perpetrators of this heinous crime must be caught and punished. Foreign exchange reserves and growing exports, and bigger and better rockets, are meaningless in a country where justice is denied to the poor and defenceless.

This is not the first time that Qazi Hussain Ahmed has publicly expressed his sorrow over such a crime. He was the only MNA out of the scores of elected representatives of the people who stood up and publicly condemned the dreadful goings-on in Meerwala. Where are the Muslim Leaguers who are now speaking with one voice, and who are supposed to have drawn inspiration from the All-India Muslim League.? Why hasn’t a single member of the quintet raise his/her voice? Is it because they are not concerned about the poor and the people who cannot defend themselves?

The other news item reported that a judge of the Multan bench of the Lahore High Court granted bail to four of the accused in a gang rape case in which the victim was a mentally deficient girl. The granting of bail by judges, on payment of surety to the court, is part of the judicial system, and is at times employed to keep prisoners out of the clutches of the Punjab and Sindh police who are known for their brutality.

But the item that raised a number of legal eyebrows was the recent decision by the High Court of Sindh to acquit, for lack of evidence, two men who had been given the death sentence by an anti-terrorist court for breaking into the house of a woman, raping her, her daughter and a young boy and killing all three. What is terrifying is the number of gang rapes that are taking place, which often end in murder.

These are usually dismissed as some hazards of life in the Third World. After all, don’t similar crimes take place in New York and London? But what about the menace of Karo-Kari, the practice that continues to paint the picture of a barbaric society abroad? Both the chief minister and the governor of Sindh are on record having said that a law will soon be promulgated outlawing this barbaric practice. It is not very clear why fresh legislation is required, when Section 302 already exists in the Penal Code of Pakistan. All that is required is to label the so-called honour killing as murder and a non-bailable offence.

What is truly astonishing is that it has taken 56 years for somebody in power to at least publicly recognize the fact that there is need for some sort of legislation in this area. A social worker whom I met at a seminar had the last word. How different things would be if instead of continuously agitating against the LFO, the opposition MNAs and MPAs agitated against the menace of Karo-Kari, he said. But then, are the parliamentarians really interested in putting things right?

Email: a-mooraj@cyber.net.pk

Taking Aids seriously

THE World Health Organization has announced an ambitious plan to treat 3 million Aids victims in the developing world with antiretroviral drugs by the end of 2005.

That’s only half of the people who desperately need care, but it’s 10 times as many patients as are currently receiving these life-sustaining therapies. In sub-Saharan Africa, in fact, only 50,000 people are getting care. As a result 8,000 people die every day — people who could be saved — and societies are collapsing. The WHO plans to put the emergency response skills it developed in connection with the Sars outbreak to work in countries hard hit by HIV.

It aims to deliver, in large volumes, a standardized package of antiretroviral therapies and to train local health-care workers in the delivery of these therapies and related services. The new urgency at WHO is welcome, and its plan seems well conceived and deserving of support.

Treating people with Aids in Africa is a problem of such magnitude that it can induce a certain paralysis in policymakers, many of whom have fallen back on prevention as the only viable way to stop the pandemic. Yet at a certain point — a point long since past — it becomes immoral to focus narrowly on preventing further infection, as governments are now recognizing.

It also doesn’t work; people are more likely to come in for testing _ and so further the goal of prevention — if they know treatment is available for those in need. Nor are the cost of drugs or the sorry state of Africa’s health infrastructure excuses for inaction. Drug prices will continue to drop the more people are treated, and infrastructure will just have to be built.

— The Washington Post

An angry CIA fights back

FOR the Bush administration, which has wrapped itself in faux patriotism, accusations that it revealed the identity of a serving CIA agent are a huge political embarrassment and another blow to its sinking credibility.

Last July, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV contradicted President Bush’s assertions that Iraq had imported uranium ore from Niger. Wilson said his investigations in Niger found the whole story was a fake, based on forged documents. Bush nevertheless claimed Iraq was importing uranium in his keynote State of the Union address.

Wilson’s patriotic act ruined his career and made him the target of a vicious White House smear campaign. At least six Washington journalists were told by Bush administration sources that Wilson’s wife was an active CIA officer. Journalist Robert Novak cited her name in his column. Revealing names of CIA agents is a federal crime.

The consensus here is that the likeliest source of the story was office of Lewis Libby, Vice-President Cheney’s powerful chief of staff. Libby and Pentagon civilian allies, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, played the key role in engineering the war against Iraq. They brought intensive pressure on CIA to tailor intelligence to produce proof of hidden weapons and links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Behind the Wilson scandal, a far more important battle is raging. The Bush administration has so far spent one billion dollars in the fruitless search for unconventional weapons in Iraq. The non-existence of these weapons — the main excuse for the invasion of Iraq — has badly damaged the White House; eroded the power of Cheney’s ‘men’ — Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle — who jestingly call themselves ‘the cabal,’ and humiliated the hapless Colin Powell.

Now, the ‘cabal’ and some politicians blame CIA for the failure to find Iraq’s non-existent weapons and alleged links to Al Qaeda. But CIA is fighting back through leaks, accusing the administration of distorting, corrupting and politicizing the conduct of national security.

CIA does deserve some sharp criticism over Iraq: it had a shocking lack of reliable intelligence there, forcing the agency to rely heavily on dubious defectors and foreign intelligence, rather than its own resources. Ironically, France had excellent intelligence on Iraq and rightly warned Bush that his war would lead to a disaster. But Bush was too busy listening to the neo-conservatives’ cooked intelligence to heed France’s excellent and reliable advice.

So far, CIA chief George Tenet has refused public comment over the attacks on CIA, but agency sources report him to be furious with the White House and its neo-conservative Pentagon allies. CIA staffers are waiting for Tenet to go public and take on the neocons who are trying to blame CIA for the fiasco they created.

When VP Cheney and the Pentagon ‘cabal’ decided CIA was not providing the damning evidence on Iraq they needed to promote war, they created a special intelligence unit reporting to Wolfowitz and Feith, that cherry-picked bits and pieces of negative data about Iraq, trumpeted lurid claims by Iraqi defectors, then passed them on to the White House as fact.

They used Iraqi exiles who were used as a primary conduit for the disinformation, and provide the Iraqis funding and political support. The New York Times’ Judith Miller repeatedly parroted the Iraqi defector’s lies and distortions.

Wolfowitz’s special intelligence office reportedly sought to link with Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency in the anti-Iraq campaign. But Mossad was too professional to have anything to do with this ad hoc operation. However, members of Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s cabinet reportedly provided the neocons’ special intel unit with a stream of negative stories about Iraq.

CIA’s professionals were enraged by this end-run, and appalled that defectors’ wild tales and self-serving foreign-supplied material were being packaged as fact and used to formulate US national security policy.

Before the war on Iraq, Director Tenet took the unprecedented step of publicly warning that many of the claims about Iraq were not justified by facts. But he was ignored in Bush’s rush to war and did not repeat his caution. Warnings by ranking CIA officers that their country was being stampeded into war by neo-conservatives with a hidden agenda were also ignored.

The Wilson affair has exploded at a time when the extent that the nation’s professional intelligence cadre was circumvented, or bullied and intimidated into silence by the Bush administration has become a major issue.

Such politically motivated pressure on the nation’s intelligence establishment by men with little American flags on their lapels is totally unacceptable and gravely endangers national security. Real patriots do not start wars to win elections and divert attention from financial scandals.

CIA chief Tenet ought to come out and denounce the cabal that led the US into an unnecessary war that has become a bloody and unimaginably expensive mess. But CIA officers are trained to remain silent and obey the chain of command.

So, it’s up to Congress to demand a full investigation of the corruption of national security, and of the extremist ideologists who misled America into a war that should never have been waged. — Copyright Eric S. Margolis - 2003

Israel’s pre-emptive attack on Syria

JUST as the turn of events in Iraq was calling into question the doctrine of “pre-emption” proclaimed by the Bush administration in its National Security Strategy Paper of September 2002, Israel has chosen to attack a refugee camp 15 kilometres from Damascus, further escalating the conflict in the region.

The neocon hawks around President Bush, whose morale and credibility had fallen after the negative outcome of this strategy in Iraq, are likely to step up their pressure for continued US backing to Israel and to counter the growing pressure within the US for a return to traditional diplomacy, and for lowering tensions in the Middle East.

The debate in the emergency session of the Security Council called by Syria again saw the US delegate castigate Syria for harbouring terrorists. There is a general expectation that the US will again veto a resolution that will be critical of Israel, unless it lays equal stress on condemning Palestinian militants and their backers. President Bush’s remarks on the incident, defending Israel’s right to unrestricted self-defence, raises doubts whether Washington will continue to play a meaningful role in support of the “road-map”, without which the situation in the region will keep deteriorating.

There were indications that the political problems that had persisted despite military victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, and rising US and coalition casualties might induce a review of the strategy of relying on overwhelming force. The need to win the hearts and minds of the people of these countries, and of the masses in the Arab and Islamic countries which feel targeted by the West after the 9/11 events was being stressed. The approach of the presidential election next year, and the decline in the support of the Republican administration were other factors that had raised expectations of a change in US policies.

The Israeli escalation, reflected in the attack on Syria, may prompt greater assertiveness by the neocons around Bush whose approach is being subjected to increasing criticism owing to the adverse situation that has followed the military victory in Iraq. There is an obvious nexus in the thinking of Ariel Sharon and the neocon ideologues such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol. These three are generally acknowledged to be exercising the same kind of decisive influence in foreign policy under Bush as the “wise men” who formulated the cold war policies of President Truman, and the Harvard Brains Trust that advised President Kennedy.

Truman’s advisers produced Nato and the Marshall Plan, while Kennedy’s braintrust left the legacy of Vietnam. What the neocons around Bush have produced in the shape of pre-emption and unilateralism appears to be unravelling, especially in Iraq, in the opinion of many analysts in the US. The US electorate appears to be emerging out of the trauma of 9/11, and realizing that both the moral leadership and economic pre-eminence of their country could be at risk unless there is a return to the more enlightened policies that had been adopted following the Second World War. A recent poll in the US showed a large majority in favour of an enhanced role for the United Nations.

Sharon’s escalation was predicated on the assumption that the US would continue to back his aggressive policies. Indeed, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he may have resorted to this dangerous course with the encouragement of the neocon ideologues in Washington. A significant pointer towards this is that, while announcing the attack on Syria, Israeli spokesmen also referred to Iranian backing of terrorists operating against Israel. As is well known, the neocon agenda for pre-emption also includes Syria and Iran. President Bush showed his continued adherence to the neocon approach in his defence of Israeli aggression against Syria, despite the fact that all members of the Security Council except the US had condemned it.

Speaking at a ceremony on 7 October marking the 30th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Sharon felt encouraged by the White House support to declare that Israel was ready to hit its enemies anywhere. This would be music to the ears of the neocons in Washington, who are concerned that the Iraqi quagmire threatens to jeopardize the policy of pre-emption, as casualties and costs mount. However, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, speaking after the Sharon statement, clarified, “We’ve always said Israel has a right to defend itself, but they should always take into account the consequences of any actions, they may take.”

Syrian President Bashar al Assad accused Israel of trying to drag Syria and the rest of the Middle East into a wider conflict. The Arab League is strongly backing the Syrian resolution in the Security Council that condemns Israel’s attack on Syria and calls upon it to desist from further acts of aggression against neighbours. The OIC has described the Israeli attack as “unacceptable” and its forthcoming summit may concentrate on this act of pre-emption.

The Bush administration may find itself in an unenviable position following its pre-emption in Iraq. While it has yet to formally table a resolution in the Security Council to secure UN cover for military contingents from other countries, it is running into difficulties that may delay a vote. In the meantime, though Turkey has decided to send 10,000 of its troops to Iraq at US request, the US-created Governing Council in Iraq has voted against the acceptance of Turkish troops, the strongest opposition coming from the Kurdish members. Even if the US can twist the arms of the Council into acceptance, Turkish forces may not be more immune than the coalition troops to Iraqi resistance.

The situation created by the Turkish decision, that is said to be opposed by two-thirds of the people of Turkey, raises serious issues for other countries that have been requested by Washington to send their troops. Pakistan, whose president and prime minister have been to Washington recently, has had such requests coming with increasing insistence, especially as US casualties in Iraq continue to be on the rise.

President Musharraf had taken the precaution of spelling out the conditions under which Pakistan would send its troops to Iraq during his visit to Canada in late September. Such a decision had to be acceptable to the people of Pakistan, on the one hand, and to the people of Iraq on the other. After the Israeli pre-emptive strike against Syria, and US support to it, sentiments within Pakistan will not be favourable. The way the US-created Government Council in Baghdad has reacted to the Turkish decision to send forces suggests that Iraqi public opinion would also be opposed to sending of forces that will reinforce the occupation forces. The Iraqis want an early self-rule. Our demand for a UN resolution that turns the role of foreign forces into that of peacekeepers rather than supporters of occupation is also unlikely to be met.

The Israeli pre-emption, therefore, presents the international community in general, and the Arab and Islamic countries in particular, with a serious challenge. The nature of the debate over a US resolution on Iraq may undergo a change, with the US facing a difficult task on account of the generally adverse reaction to Sharon’s arrogance. For Pakistan, an additional consideration would be the effect on the hawks in India, who have talked of pre-emptive attacks on “training camps” in Azad Kashmir.

Our nuclear deterrent and conventional capabilities have prevented escalation, and may continue to do so. However, the world needs to react appropriately to the Israeli pre-emption. If the US were to veto a resolution that condemns the Israeli action, that could have serious consequences both internationally and even domestically for the sole superpower in an election year.

The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan.

The 9/11 commission

THE National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has issued its second interim report. Like the first, issued in July, it dealt to a substantial degree with the administration’s level of cooperation with the bipartisan 9/11 commission.

There is much good news: Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton report that executive branch agencies — no doubt spurred by criticisms in the last report — “have worked hard to assist the Commission.”

Its staff now has access to more than 2 million pages, which is “already more than four times what was provided to the Congressional Joint Inquiry” that investigated intelligence failures leading up to the attacks. Production of “high-level agency records on policy deliberations” is “nearing completion.” And the commission has “obtained access to many of the key White House and National Security Council documents.”

Yet issues remain, and they need to be addressed quickly, because the commission labours under a May deadline. The administration has apparently attached difficult conditions to the review of some material, and “extensive negotiations” are continuing “so that the Commission gets the additional information it needs.”

There is no point in having a national commission if it has to put together a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing or delivered too late to be useful.

— The Washington Post