| 16 July 2004 | Friday | 27 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
Sick and tired
For the second time in less than a fortnight, the Anglo-American establishments that waged a war on Iraq stand discredited. On Wednesday in London, the much-awaited Butler report scuttled the legal and moral basis of last year's invasion of Iraq when it said the Baathist regime did not possess any "significant - if any - stocks" of weapons of mass destruction.
The intelligence in this respect, it said, had "serious flaws". The Butler findings come within a week of a similar report across the Atlantic in which the Senate committee accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq.
That neither of the two reports held Prime Minister Tony Blair or President George Bush personally responsible for intelligence doctoring is of little import. What is important for record is that the two governments stand thoroughly exposed before the bar of history and world opinion for deliberate falsehood and fabrication.
What led to the war was naked geopolitics, the aim being to punish the only Arab country that was not only defiant but was considered by Israel as its principal enemy.
Taken together, the two reports only confirm what the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission led by Mr Hans Blix had already said much before the war in its report to the Security Council - that Iraq had no "smoking gun".
Evidently, the Blix report prompted Washington and London to come up with new, contrived pretexts for a war on Iraq for supposed security reasons. This frenzy showed itself in the intelligence dossier - the notorious "dodgy dossier" - being "sexed up" to include the "45 minutes" fabrication, the thoroughly spurious report which Secretary of State Colin Powell felt uncomfortable reading out at the UN Council, the false uranium trail to Niger, the drama surrounding the BBC report on Dr David Kelly and his suicide, the resignation last month of CIA Director George Tenet in the wake of the Senate committee report.
All these merely betray a mind-set that wanted a war on Iraq in any case so as to make a terrible example of that country for the edification of the rest of the Arab-Islamic world. No wonder, a war whose premise was based on falsehood should have ended trapping the victors in a cul de sac.
The latest from Iraq is horrible both for its people and for the occupying powers. On Wednesday, the convoy carrying the governor of Mosul was attacked, leaving him and his bodyguard dead, while a suicide car-bomb explosion killed 11 people in Baghdad.
On Thursday, another blast killed 10 people in Haditha in western Iraq - a relatively low casualty figure considering the havoc which bomb blasts have caused in Iraq in May and June.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi condemned the latest bombing, claiming it was in response to the recent crackdown on criminals, and vowing to bring "these criminals to justice". That is where the prime minister is wrong.
The violence one sees in Iraq these days is not the work of a few criminals; it is a manifestation of the Iraqi people's determined resistance to foreign occupation. The provisional government does not inspire the people's confidence. It is seen as a tool in American hands - like the interim governing council that preceded it.
The Allawi government is now supposed to organize an election to a transitional assembly, which will draw up a constitution. One doubts if the Iraqi people and the world would recognize these elections as fair and free.
The only way in which the electoral exercise would be seen as transparent and fair is to involve the United Nations with it in a meaningful way. Without a credible UN role and without the presence of a UN peacekeeping force, the holding of elections will be an exercise in futility.
The Americans have also given no definite date for the withdrawal of occupation forces. Thus, an election under American occupation would lack credibility, and the violence that one sees in Iraq today will continue.
In the aftermath of the release of the two reports in Washington and London, the powers that launched the war should now ask themselves whether the world is more peaceful and secure today than it was before the war, and whether Iraq's neighbours and the entire region are more secure against terrorism and anarchy than they were when President Saddam Hussein was ruling the roost in Iraq.
Sick and tired
This litany of "Pakistan must do more" should stop. Pakistanis are getting sick and tired of it. Every other day, you have a US official or an Afghan leader saying Pakistan must do more - to uproot training camps for militants, to stop terrorism or to reform madressahs, depending on what is the dish of the day and the place where the statement is being made.
Pakistan is described as a valuable ally in the 'war on terror' and President Pervez Musharraf singled out for praise, as if he is working individually and apart from the rest of the official apparatus, including the military.
Yet there are still these daily homilies about more vigorously pursuing terrorists and doing more. A couple of things must first be got out of the way. Pakistan has rendered itself open to lecturing because of its earlier alignment with, and total backing of, the Taliban and its messing about with militancy in Kashmir.
The so-called U-turn did come about under international pressure, and so it is now assumed in Washington and other western capitals that the pressure must be publicly kept up to keep us in line.
So it is actually the folly of our earlier policies whose cost we have to pay in terms of rebukes and exhortations. Our reputation as a breeding ground for extremism has not been entirely unjustly earned.
Second, we need to crack down on militancy in all its forms for our own sake. We have seen the terrible damage inflicted on our political, social and civil society structures by encouraging and tolerating such trends.
There can be no two opinions about the need to move ahead quickly to a more democratic, liberal and inclusive dispensation. Having said this, it should also be understood that this is our problem and we must sort it out.
Constant badgering on this score is counter-productive. It has begun to irritate even liberal sections of society. When America itself needed to do more, it didn't - for instance, by balking at sending its ground troops for deployment when it attacked Afghanistan and by leaving the task to the Northern Alliance.
Then it quickly forgot Afghanistan and attacked Iraq. More than mere irritation, western statements of this kind play into the hands of militants. They provide them with a handle to brand any action against terrorism as US-inspired, the Wana operation being an instance in point, and the way it has been botched up makes criticism come more easily.
Rather than strengthening the government, the statements make the government self-conscious and even more hesitant. The immediate inclination is to appease the right, both in the political spectrum and within the establishment itself.
This has led to innumerable distortions in governance, wrecked normal political processes and permitted the religious parties and elements sympathetic to them to call the shots.
If our western benefactors were a little more thoughtful and circumspect about it, perhaps the struggle against reactionary trends in our society - which America at one time loved dearly to promote - would be easier to wage.