Worsening chaos in Iraq

With no end in sight to violence - April being the bloodiest month for US troops since the occupation of Iraq - Washington is trying hard to involve the United Nations in Iraqi affairs to give some legitimacy to its continued control of the country.

There are indications that the United States and Britain want a Security Council resolution to bless the transfer of legal sovereignty to the Iraqis while keeping control over some vital matters, particularly those related to security.

It did not come as a surprise when President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair declared, after their last meeting in Washington, that the United Nations should be given "a central role" in Iraq.

In the wake of recent surge in violence, Washington has agreed to allow the UN a decisive say in selecting the interim government which will take over on July 1. According to the plan devised by UN's special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, Algeria's former foreign minister, the present governing council of the country, handpicked by the Americans, is to be dissolved and replaced by an interim government of technocrats headed by a prime minister.

The members of the interim government will be chosen by the UN in consultation with the coalition leaders (practically the Americans) and the current governing council members.

The demise of governing council will go unmourned as it failed to win support from most Iraqis partly because of incompetence but mainly because the Americans allowed it little scope. It is hoped that the interim government of technocrats will have a better chance of performing well till elections are held in January 2005.

But the real bone of contention is the scope of sovereignty the proposed interim government is to enjoy after June 30. The Americans want to put some curbs on the Iraqis' ability to control the armed forces and pass new laws.

Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear on April 27 that the interim government, due to take power on July 1, would have to give up some of its sovereignty to allow a free hand to US-led forces.

France, on the other hand, has made it clear that it wants a full transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi government. Serious differences amongst Security Council members on the scope of sovereignty to be transferred to the Iraqi interim government will have to be resolved before a UN resolution, blessing the transfer of legal sovereignty to the Iraqis, can be adopted.

But at the moment it is not the transfer of sovereignty but the restoration of security and law and order that has assumed top priority. It is most unfortunate that the bloody chaos, into which Iraq has descended, has been partly due to some unwise policy decisions and high-handed tactics adopted by the US occupying forces.

Being over-stretched, American troops adopted Israeli-style overkill in Fallujah and other cities, with disastrous consequences.

After four American contractors were killed and mutilated on March 31st, an American assault on Fallujah, according to The Economist, killed hundreds, including civilians who were targeted in several ways. The power station was bombed and the bridge across the Euphrates was closed.

It is only recently that the gruesome details of what happened in Fallujah have appeared in the English press and the outside world remained in the dark about them for quite some time.

As Fallujah's main hospital stands on the western bank of the river and almost the whole city is on the eastern side, the doctors in the hospital, after the closure of the bridge, were sitting idle in the empty hospital while people were dying in droves on the other side of the bank.

Consequently, the doctors shut down the hospital, took the limited supplies and equipment they could carry and started working at a small out-patient clinic in the city. But the inadequacy of the make-shift arrangement resulted in the death of scores of patients.

At Najaf, the al-Sadr teaching hospital (formerly Saddam Hussein teaching hospital) was closed in mid-April by the Spanish garrison 'Plus Ultra' because it overlooks the garrison's base and its roof can be used by resistance snipers.

The hospital's 200 doctors were given two hours to leave, allowing them to take away only personal items but no medical equipment. Al-Arabiya has reported that a hospital in Qaim, near the Syrian border, was closed, after some fighting had broken out, with American snipers positioned atop nearby buildings.

Iraqi minister of health, Khudair Abbas has accused the American troops of having fired at ambulances in Fallujah and other places. According to the GUARDIAN, the Americans have killed more civilians in one month in Fallujah than all the terrorist bombings of the past year..

If the policy makers in Washington ask the question as to what has been their biggest failure in the past three years, the inevitable answer will be that they have made America far more unpopular in the Islamic world than ever before. It is most unfortunate that the deepest rift to have opened up since 9/11 is the one between America and the world of Islam.

Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel Berger, writing in this month's Foreign Affairs magazine about the Bush advisers, has perceptively observed: "Key strategists appear to believe that, in a chaotic world, United States power - and especially military power - is the only real force for advancing United States interests, that as long as the United States is feared, it does not matter if we are not admired."

It appears the Bush administration has taken a fancy to the famous saying of Roman Emperor Caligula (A. D. 37-41): "Let them hate, as long as they fear."

Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri has confirmed that Pakistan is "considering" sending troops to Iraq. This startling revelation was made by him during his recent visit to Malaysia in connection with the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

According to him, the United States has requested Pakistan to send troops for the protection of UN personnel in Iraq. But if that is so, the request should have come from the United Nations.

It is not yet clear what role, if any, the UN is going to play in Iraq. So far the United Sates has only allowed the UN a key role in selecting the interim government which will take over on July 1. But even this issue has become controversial in view of the French opposition to any curbs being placed on the sovereignty of the interim government. This could scuttle agreement on a Security Council resolution authorizing the United Nations to play any role in Iraq.

In an earlier article, one had, while discussing the non-Nato ally status of Pakistan, observed that the US would now expect Pakistan to send its troops to Iraq to bolster the peace-keeping efforts of American troops if some political cover through UN resolution could be provided.

Before taking a decision on this delicate issue, Pakistan must carefully weigh the pros and cons involved. It will be unwise to send troops to Iraq if the US is not willing to hand political control of security over to the UN.

The pull-out of coalition partners like Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic as well as the wavering comments from Poland, Thailand, Kazakhstan, and the Philippines should also be kept in view when taking a decision An extended period of American involvement in Iraq may be necessary, but it must be integrated with a good degree of internationalization. If that does not take place, Pakistani troops will be seen as forming part of US-led occupation forces.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Rising above mistakes

Speaking very quickly, the Squire said that "the premises being thus settled, I am prompted to observe that the concatenation of self-existence, proceeding in a reciprocal duplicate ratio, naturally produces a problematical diaologism, which in some measure proves that the essence of spirituality may be referred to the second predicable" - "Hold, hold!" cried the other. "I deny that."

Confecting such wonderfully nonsensical arguments in The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith showed that trying to be wise is - how shall we put it? - a mug's game. Yet it is a game that journalists, among others, have to play. It is expected of them. Especially of columnists. Since this is my last regular column for the Guardian, I am prompted to a few thoughts.

It is not only that sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night, as a fellow columnist on this paper once confessed, saying to yourself: "Why on earth did I write that?" Or that on bad days the word "bullshit" sometimes rises unbidden to mind.

The problem is that writing a column is like writing a single huge piece in instalments. Any defect in its parts takes away from the unity towards which the column strives, for it is an attempt at consistency of judgement over time and over a wide range of subjects.

It is also a self-portrait. The writer may wish to flatter himself but, as the brushstrokes accumulate on the canvas, be less than pleased at the likeness. Mistakes, perhaps forgivable singly, may point, as the years go by, to a much less forgivable blindness to the costs of policies systematically favoured.

It would be odd if elements of vanity and pretension did not enter in, and they also leave their mark. There is the temptation to re-order, subtly or otherwise, the formulations offered yesterday in order to claim a prescience not in fact demonstrated. There is the peril of triangulation, striving to find an interpretation that will be equally satisfactory to different constituencies.

Another portrait is also painted, that of the reader. The column tacitly proposes an alliance between right-thinking writer and right-thinking reader against those who are making the wrong decisions, fighting the wrong wars, or voting for the wrong people. A certainty not always felt is another source of falsity. Confessions of perplexity are, it is assumed, not wanted.

The column represents in its particular way what all journalism is to do with - catching, as events pelt down, the essence of what they are about. The separation of fact and opinion is a good principle, and journalism must always be concerned with establishing facts and recording new ones without delay.

But it is also about intuition and rapid judgement, a daily or weekly leap off the cliff summed up in the American reporters' adage: "You gotta go with what you got."

Apart from those valuable moments when reporters on the spot rightly confine themselves to a witness's account, what you go with is not so much the inevitably scrappy extra bit of knowledge of that day or week, but the feel for the larger story of which the little story, even if it is very dramatic or terrible, is just a fragment.

That grasp is at its best when a whole press corps forges, out of the combination of competition, co-operation and late-night disputation, a powerful collective picture of events, as the early American press corps did in Vietnam and as the international press has done in Israel and Palestine.

This is more than just establishing the sweep of what is going on, since it also involves moral judgement. It is the journalist's version of the daily struggle to make sense of life and to assign meaning, the modern equivalent of the Victorian oscillation between faith and doubt.

For most westerners, in Britain certainly, the "religion" that is alternately justified and doubted is the faith in progress, science, regulated capitalism, liberalism, and democracy.

Then there are the riders: whether the West is or is not a force for good in the world, and what are the natures of the countervailing forces, whether socialist, nationalist or religious.

My own time reporting and commenting on international affairs began with an American mess in Vietnam. Now we have the Americans and the British struggling to make good in Iraq.

If there is a common theme connecting these two, it is the question of whether power, particularly western power, can be reliably used for worthwhile purposes, or at least for purposes in which self- interest and the collective interest are mingled. Virtually every major story of the years between Vietnam and Iraq has involved this question.

At bottom there is a conflict here between activism and quietism. Intervention, and not just military intervention but forceful diplomacy and international economic policy-making as well, is presumptuous and hazardous.

Its justifications are always a cloak to some extent for other motives. Leaving other societies alone to work out their own destinies, for good or ill, is the alternative policy. It would rule out ill-considered action by ruling out all action.

But the West so often wants to be up and doing, and so often thinks that things can be fixed. Except, that is, when interest dictates that it looks the other way. Iraq muddled and muddied a decade of argument about right action, but that does not mean that the argument should be abandoned.

The connections linking apparently disparate problems grow ever closer. Who would have thought, when deliberations on a European constitution began, that its fate may be decided on the streets of Fallujah? Unless Iraq comes round, Blair's credit may not be enough to get him through a referendum, and a failed referendum in Britain could have large consequences.

Iraq will come round, however, only if Iraqis can rise above their own and American mistakes and seize the project for themselves. Iraq is only one theatre of human obstinacy. Israelis try to defy demography and geography alike. Islamist terror groups attempt to stop history. Russia grinds the Chechens into the ground. The Chinese break their promises to Hong Kong.

Some in America, in spite of Iraq, still pursue the chimera of total safety through total dominance. The Bosnians refuse to get along, while the Serbs embrace the very forces that have already ruined them, and the Kosovars still cannot ensure the safety of their Serb minority.

Ordinary Europeans persist in unfounded suspicions of the EU, which has done so much to change their lives for the better, and may be frivolously ready to vote it down in order to vent their discontents.

"Etiquette," said Mark Twain, "requires us to admire the human race." The obduracy and obstinacy of human beings is what enables them to fight for their countries, repel invaders and maintain their solidarity. But it is also what makes it so hard to fix what needs to be fixed. -Dawn/The Guardian Service