A widening chasm

AMERICANS, more than most people, treat the passing of one year and the dawn of another as a moment of deep reflection. Many questions get asked. Among them the most frequent ones raised this year are those related to the way the country has performed in the year that has closed and how it will be shaped in 2006.

As 2005 came to an end and 2006 was ushered in, the question upper most in the American mind was Iraq. What has America achieved and what has it lost since it invaded Iraq almost three years ago? When President George W. Bush ordered his troops to move into Iraq, he did so with great confidence. He and his associates anticipated a quick victory; they did not think that the great American military machine would face any real obstacle in moving quickly through the Iraqi desert and taking over Baghdad. In Baghdad they expected to be received by hordes of Iraqis grateful for having been relieved from the tyranny of a brutal dictator, supported by a killing machine that operated in the guise of a political party.

Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party were likely to offer some resistance but in the end American troops would be cheered by a welcoming Iraqi population. Why would they mourn the passing of a despot and why would they not look to the future with unbounded joy which allowed them to pursue their lives according to their own wishes and desires? Unfortunately, for America it didnt happen that way.

Even those who had opposed President Bush’s decision to march his troops into Iraq did not seriously question that the Iraqi drama would be played more or less according to the above script. They opposed the Iraq project — or were uncomfortable with its execution — not on the ground that the American military would not triumph. Iraq, after all, was a Third World country whose economy and military had been weakened by a dozen years of sanctions imposed by the United Nations. The opposition to the war in Iraq was for other reasons.

Some questioned the premise on which the Bush White House had built its case against the regime of Saddam Hussein. They felt that a “slam dunk” case had not been made for Baghdad’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, or for its support of Al Qaeda, or for its ambitions to strike against America and American interests. Some others argued that even if the Iraqi leader was guilty as charged by Washington, America had no legal right to launch an attack unless it had the sanction of the United Nations. After all, America was one of the more important builders of the post-Second World War political order which was based on the sanctity of national borders. These borders could not be violated unless such an action was validated by the UN Security Council.

Some other felt that Washington should not get diverted by Iraq — a war against that country would only distract from the main objective at hand. There was a great deal of unfinished business that had to be completed. Osama bin Laden was still at large, hiding somewhere in the rugged mountains along the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan itself remained unsettled. Hamid Karzai, the handpicked Afghan president, had a lot of work to do in order to consolidate his hold over his fractious nation.

Across the border in Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, another ally of America, had not won many friends among his own people by giving total support to what the American administration called the “war against terror.” The newly emerging countries in Central Asia were still in the process of finding their identities. Most of them were governed by despots who were hold overs from the communist rule of the Soviet Union. In some of them radical Islamic groups were vying for political power.

Still others argued that by attacking Iraq, America would be jumping into an exceptionally difficult and unsettled part of the world. Arab countries were still in the process of adjusting to the post-colonial period. The Arab people had been poorly treated by the former colonial powers — by Britain, France and Italy. Until the end of the Second World War, America had been looked upon as a benign western power, less rapacious than many of the European colonialists of the 19th and 20th centuries that had operated in the Middle East. It had enhanced its stature as a fair arbiter in the 1956 Suez War in which both Britain and France had tried to reinsert themselves in the region.

Some of this evenhandedness was lost because of both the overt and covert support America had provided since then to Israel. Even then Washington had not used its military power as the Europeans had done in the past to conquer Arab land. The invasion of Iraq, many opponents of the war felt, would change all that.

In other words, America needed to concentrated its attention and spend its enormous energy on the piece of geography that included Afghanistan, the Central Asian states and Pakistan. It was appropriate for it to focus on the non-Arab part of the Muslim world while improving its standing with the Arab people. But oil and Israel pulled it towards the Middle East.

As I read what was written in the spring of 2003 when America launched a military operation against Iraq, there was almost nobody who predicted that events would unfold as they did. There are many wiser heads now and many theories on why the American involvement in Iraq did not produce any of the results foreseen by Washington. Even the over confident President Bush has been chastened by the scope of the insurgency unleashed by his country’s occupation of Iraq and by the inability of his mighty military to secure the land it had conquered.

In his December 18, 2005, address to the American nation from the Oval Office — only the second time he chose that locale to talk to his people, the first time being the eve of the US attack on Baghdad — he admitted that “the work in Iraq has been especially difficult, more difficult than we expected. Reconstruction efforts and training of Iraqi security forces started more slowly than we hoped. We continue to see violence and suffering caused by an enemy that is determined and brutal — unconstrained by conscience or the rules of war.” The reference to the rules of war was ironic since the Bush administration had explicitly or implicitly rejected all of those that pertained to dealing with the prisoners taken during the country’s many operations since the attacks of September 11, 2001. I will return to this subject in a later article.

Even the admission of these difficulties in Iraq was unusual for a politician who had never accepted that he ever made mistakes. Having acknowledged that Iraq turned out to be less than a “cake walk,” President Bush showed that his experience had done nothing to weaken his resolve. Should America withdraw from Iraq, as some influential Americans had begun to suggest?

“That is an important question, and the answer depends on your view of the war on terror,” said President Bush. “If you think the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone. This is not the threat I see. I see a global terrorist movement that exploits Islam in the service of radical political aims... These terrorists view the world as a giant battlefield — and they seek to attack us wherever they can. This has attracted Al Qaeda to Iraq, where they are attempting to frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat.”

But for Mr Bush, retreat was out of the question. “My conviction comes down to this: We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them. And we will defeat the terrorists by capturing and killing them abroad, removing their safe havens, and strengthening new allies like Iraq and Afghanistan in the fight we share.”

The use of military might, in other words, was still the preferred option. This choice only suggested that little had been learned since March 2003 and that all the ink that had been used by hundreds of analysts to understand the wider implications of the war in Iraq had gone to waste. Largely as a result of the Iraq war there is now a widening chasm between the West and the world of Islam.

The conflict was not just between Washington and Al Qaeda and its many off-shoots. As the train bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004, the attacks on London’s transport system on July 7, 2005, and the riots in the Muslim suburbs of Paris later in the summer showed, this clash had spread over a much larger area. There was plenty of dry wood lying around in the banlieus (low income suburbs of French cities), in the unintegrated town centres in Britain’s urban areas, and in the areas inhabited by the Muslim migrants to West Europe for a fire to be lit. The Iraq war provided the fuel.

As the American problems in Iraq increased and as the original reason for moving into the country was shown to be built on a series of false premises, the Bush administration began to search for new explanations for the conquest of Iraq. In his speech at the time of his second inauguration as president, George W. Bush chose to use the spread of democracy as the main reason for toppling Saddam Hussein. Is he succeeding in achieving that goal? Most evidence seemed to point the other way. A recent survey by Brookings Institution scholar Shibley Telhami found that 58 per cent of Arabs outside Iraq said the war had produced less rather than more democracy. A poll released by Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, a non-partisan think tank operating out of Washington, in November 2005 showed that only 34 per cent Americans believed Middle East democratization would happen.

Even with this evidence some believers were not prepared to lose heart. In one of the year-end opinion columns, Jackson Diehl of The Washington Post wrote: “That’s one of the perverse effects of the war: Amid all the noise of suicide bombings, talk of a quagmire for US troops and a sectarian conflict that could lead to Iraq’s disintegration, most people hadn’t noticed that in the rest of the Arab Middle East, the political momentum of the past year has been distinctly democratic.” But did causality really run that way? Is the seeming, albeit, glacial transformation of the Muslim world, the result of President Bush’s war on Iraq and on terrorism? I will attempt an answer to this question next week.

Britain’s new opium war

IN the next few weeks, an army of 3,400 British troops expects to be deployed to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. This is nearly half the number deployed in Iraq. Everything I have heard and read about this expedition suggests that it makes no sense.

British soldiers are being sent to a poor and dangerous place whose sole economic resource is opium. They will sit there as targets for probably the most intractable concentration of insurgents, Taliban, drug traffickers and suicide bombers in the world — until some minister has the guts to withdraw them.

Even the context of this expedition is obscure. The Afghan war was supposedly won and the Taliban defeated in 2001. It is fashionable, even in circles opposed to the Iraq war, to claim Afghanistan as a triumph. The Americans and British bombed the hell out of whatever was left of Kabul by the Russians, and the Afghans themselves. A ramshackle army of warlords and mercenaries was helped back into power and the status quo ante the Taliban was restored. That would have been the best time to leave.

As it was, neoimperialists in Washington and London couldn’t resist attempting that Everest of nation-building, a new Afghanistan. Their engaging puppet, Hamid Karzai, rules an increasingly insecure landscape, wholly dependent on western aid and a booming narco economy. Outside Kabul, the country appears to be in the hands of a disparate federation of local rulers, tribal warlords and Taliban commanders, all afloat on a sea of opium - the basis of half Afghanistan’s domestic output and virtually all its export and personal wealth.

The Americans are wisely treating this country as history. They are reducing their troops to some 10,000 based at Bagram, dedicated to pursuing George Bush’s Scarlet Pimpernel, Osama bin Laden. The rest is being handed over to role-hungry Nato. But Nato has no clue what to do. The French, Germans and Spaniards want no part in the madcap venture. The Canadians and Dutch are nervous, so much so that the Dutch may pull out. That leaves the British, mostly with the turbulent province of Helmand, which is sliding under the control of drug warlords in alliance with a resurgent Taliban.

The defence secretary, John Reid, said last month that the expedition’s mission is to promote security, which is “absolutely interlinked to countering narcotics”. This is to be achieved “by helping growers with an alternative economic livelihood”. This cannot make sense. There is no way 3,000 British troops can handle the Taliban now reinforced by drug profits. As for countering those profits, opium is to Helmand what oil is to Kuwait.

Eradicating Afghanistan’s poppy crop was assigned to Britain after the 2001 war. Before Clare Short arrived to oversee this task, poppies were grown in just six of the 32 provinces. By the time she finished, the UN recorded production in 28 provinces and a record export value of $2.3 billion. It was probably Britain’s most successful agricultural policy of all time. Afghanistan now supplies 90 per cent of Britain’s heroin market. Output is being curbed this year only because traders are worried about lower prices.

Even the Americans, who have spent decades trying to wipe out South America’s coca crops, are distancing themselves from Reid’s policy. Opium is crucial to the power of the warlords on whom they and Karzai’s regime depend. This is a repeat of the 19th- century invasion of China by Britain to maintain the illicit but convenient opium trade. But if the Americans are re-enacting the opium wars, Britain is inverting them. Trying to combat Britain’s addiction to heroin by burning poppies and smashing opium “factories” is like combating London’s traffic congestion by bombing oil wells.

If there is any answer to the opium trade, it lies in repealing Britain’s 1971 Misuse of Drug Act and controlling demand. Two years ago, when opium output was low, there might have been some purchase in the so-called Senlis Council project, to legalize the Afghan crop for medical use, as has been done in Turkey and India. But profits are now so high that this is probably a fantasy, like such alternatives as hemp, wheat or coffee. Any form of eradication by destroying poppy crops merely devastates the income of the poor growers and, by restricting supply, increases profits to traffickers. It is a cruel policy, which Reid’s troops will presumably enforce with their newly acquired Apache gunships.

In Chicago in 1999, Tony Blair set out five preconditions for British military intervention in the new century. They included legal certainty, military prudence and a clear national interest at stake. None is met in Helmand. Someone should make Blair read General Sir Rupert Smith’s recent study, The Utility of Force. His view is that an exaggerated faith in hi-tech armies against insurgency is now leading the West to create one ruined nation after another.

Smith points out that operations like those in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq are not like the Falklands or Gulf wars, where the military aim was to eject an enemy army from occupied territories. They are rather “wars among the people”, in which missiles, gunships, fortified bases and search-and-destroy missions are usually counterproductive. The enemy is not a state, vulnerable to “kinetic force projection”. It is a miasma of conspiracies, hidden loyalties and lasting hostilities whose combatants know no boundaries. The influence of outside armies over the outcome of such conflict can only be informal and limited.

The Helmand expedition arises from Blair’s obsession with global machismo and his addiction to abstract nouns. If I were its designated leader, General David Richards, I would not disobey orders but I would ask to see Reid before leaving. I would grab him by his lapels, ram his head against the ministry wall and scream in his face: “Tell me what the hell you really mean by sending my soldiers to that godawful place?” If the reply is yet more waffle about upholding democracy and combating terror, I would storm out with such a door slam as could be heard the length of Britain. —Dawn/Guardian Service

Sharon’s legacy of brutality

THE exit of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from Israeli political scene has removed the last colossus that bestrode Middle East politics.

No other personality in the region evoked such strong feelings of love and hatred or attained such notoriety and popularity among detractors and followers. Loathed by Palestinians as the butcher of Beirut, Sharon remained a demi-god to Zionists and young Jewish zealots.

Sharon began and based his career on violence and terrorism and he achieved his objectives through these deplorable means. From ‘Unit 101,’ a secret death squad in the Israeli army founded in 1953, to the massacre of Palestinian refugees living in the Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982 during the invasion of Lebanon, and brazen policies of annexation, expropriation, mass deportations and house demolitions during the second intifada, Sharon displayed a total contempt for international law and disdain for Palestinian lives.

He followed a policy of annihilation where the Palestinians were concerned denying them an identity. It was his visit to Al, Aqsa in Sept 2000 which provoked violence and ultimately sparked the second intifada.

His policies towards Palestinians and occupied lands led to an international outcry, but with devilish frenzy Sharon persevered in his course. The exasperation felt by the international community was best portrayed by Ken Livingston, the mayor of London, himself a Jew, when he said, “Israel’s expansion includes ethnic cleansing, Palestinians who had lived in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state.

Today, the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian lands for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, is a war criminal, who should be in prison and not in office.”

Sharon’s legacy thus is of denying the Palestinians their rights and a policy exclusively based on brute force. He pursued with single-mindedness the expansion of Israeli territory both to settle Jews who had immigrated and to erase the possibility of any viable Palestinian state. His unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza strip was also motivated by this strategy. It was he who in 1972 as commander of the southern command conducted a brutal eviction of Palestinians from Gaza, to make room for settlements.

Gaza is a tiny, overpopulated and desperately poor territory, inhabited by 1.3 million Palestinians. A dozen Jewish settlements were dismantled. The charade of withdrawing from Gaza was projected as a grand peace making gesture, though the fact is that the disengagement plan was calculated to freeze the peace process. Sharon’s advisor Dov Weissglass arrogantly declared, “Effectively the whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it entails has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.”

About 239,000 Israelis are living in the West Bank and 175,000 in East Jerusalem on Palestinian lands that has been expropriated forcibly. Sharon successfully followed policies of permanently absorbing in Israel as much land and as few Palestinians as possible.

Sharon’s was a one-dimensional world, where brute force, and only brute force, reigned supreme. Throughout his career, Sharon exemplified this belief and resisted all pressures and condemnation for his excessive use of force to crush the Palestinian resistance.

Yasser Arafat, the charismatic Palestinian leader and a Noble peace laureate, was condemned by Sharon as a terrorist. He humiliated Arafat, refused to negotiate with him, and finally incarcerated him in his own compound in Ramallah until his death.

Sharon endorsed the Bush roadmap to peace envisaging a Palestinian state, but consistently worked against it. He defied condemnation by the International Court of Justice of the construction of an elaborate concrete and steel wall encircling Palestinian counties, cutting them off from each other and thus completely separating them from Israelis. The 832 km long wall effectively annexes 47.6 per cent of the occupied West Bank and cuts off Palestinian territory into 16 isolated districts.

Sharon invoked the 1950 absentee property law to confiscate the ancestral lands within ‘Greater Jerusalem’ of Palestinians deemed “absent”, because their lands now fell on the other side of the wall. In short, before his political exit, Sharon had practically ended all prospects of the emergence of a viable Palestinian state. Some 245,000 Israelis live in 120 settlements in the West Bank. It has also rendered the “land for peace” principle of UNSC resolution 242 meaningless with new “facts on the ground”.

The Sharon era will be remembered in history for inhuman and barbaric policies against the Palestinians and the total disregard of international norms and accords. He unilaterally changed the entire course of the Palestinian discourse. The debate is no longer on the UNSC resolutions or even the Oslo accords, both of which he doggedly opposed. The inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by force, the rights of the Palestinians to return, the fundamental pillars of any peace move have been pushed into oblivion. The discussions on peace in the Middle East now focus on militancy and terrorism by Palestinians, and not on the link between peace and statehood as repeatedly affirmed by the UN resolutions.

The void created by his departure will be filled by a hard-liner, committed to Sharon’s policies if not his tactics, which could invite retaliatory extremism by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Sharon’s raw courage and audacious authority had the young generation in the all.’ In ideological terms Sharon’s era will live on, and the emergence of “an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state living side by side with Israel” will continue to elude.

The writer is a former ambassador.

I’m depressed, you’re depressed

ONE of the questions I am often asked is, “Do you ever get depressed?” The person asking me is usually depressed and feels better if I admit I’m in worse shape than he or she is.

Most people I know are depressed at one time or another — even a happy-go-lucky guy like me.

I get depressed over things I have no control over and can’t do anything about.

For example, I get depressed over the price of pills that are supposed to keep me from experiencing depression.

I also get depressed when the doctors on the independent board that’s supposed to tell us which medicines can do more harm than good admit they’re on the drug companies’ payrolls — but maintain it’s not a conflict of interest.

I get depressed over the Iraq war, but my psychiatrist friends say if I weren’t depressed over that I would be sick.

And I get the blues when I’m told our intelligence agencies are fighting over each other’s turf — the CIA vs. the FBI, Defence Intelligence against Homeland Security, and so on.

If that isn’t enough to put me into a black pit, there is always the cost of the war and the peace that follows.

Lawyers depress me — not the ones I know, but the ones I don’t. They’re the ones who put a product, such as a TV set or an automobile, under warranty in a contract with writing so small that I can’t read it. For an extra $150 dollars, at point of sale, you can get a real warranty that gives you an opportunity to sue the company, if, when you get home, your toaster doesn’t work.

I go downhill every time I have to deal with an insurance company. Whenever I make a claim, I always get two letters from the company. One letter informs me that, according to the fine print, my policy specifically says I am not entitled to any payment because it does not cover that particular claim.

The second letter, which arrives three weeks later, tells me they’re cancelling me because I tried to collect money without reading the fine print in my policy.

Everyday things depress me. I always hit bottom when I’m at an airport and my plane is two hours late and an agent announces over the loudspeaker, “The plane for Flight 234 to Boston has just landed.” What it means is the agent was not telling the truth when I discover Flight 234 is still waiting in Houston to take off. Like most people, I get depressed when a person yells at me. If it is someone in the family, I go to my room, lock my door and refuse to come out — a habit I picked up as a child.

If it’s a stranger, I walk away and say to myself, “I don’t know him. Why is he yelling at me?”

I become depressed at weddings. As the couple takes their vows, I wonder how long the marriage will last and whether I should have gone to Home Depot instead of Tiffany’s for a gift.

Mike Wallace, Bill Styron and I all had depressions at about the same time. We lecture about it and call ourselves “The Blues Brothers.” We are no longer in denial, and when someone in a doctor’s office keeps us waiting for two hours, we don’t jump out the window. — Dawn/Tribune Media Services