THE festival of Eid is a powerful reminder of the supranational unity of more than a billion people who despite the great diversity of realms, laws and political creeds hold on to a common allegiance that time cannot wither or waste. Apart from the great pilgrimage to Makkah , the Hajj, the majesty of Muslim worship has no better manifestation than the month of Ramadan. The holy month culminates in a moment of spontaneous joy which in the Islamic tradition has also been an occasion of remembering fellow Muslims facing adversity anywhere in the world.

In every mosque and every congregation across the globe, Muslim hearts would be heavy once again at another year of murder and mayhem in lands seared in memory as cradles of Islamic civilisation. Al Quds is still not free, more than half a million Iraqis have perished since their country was invaded, Afghanistan is still the scene of carnage and the valiant people of Kashmir have not advanced towards their cherished dream of “azadi”. On a deeper reflection, however, Muslims may find solace that they can see the first signs of daybreak in this benighted landscape of their hopes and aspirations. Their tormentors seem to be weary and dispirited. They may well be at a turning point of history.

Centuries ago, Ibne Khaldun taught the Muslims to look for the causes of their decline in the aridity and corruption of their social organisation, the gaping holes in their knowledge of statecraft, the oppression of their own armies, the self-centredness of their nobles and the growing disregard of the collective good of the people. Since divine purpose was for him the true provenance of the great drama of history, he warned the faithful against hubris, the overweening arrogance of the rulers, which of Islam does not condone or countenance.

In Muslim nations that are devoid of the protective dykes that democratic institutions provide, hubris has played havoc. I remember a remarkable meeting that late Mr Agha Shahi and I had with President Bakr of Iraq only a few months before his kinsman, Saddam Hussein, seized power. He spoke of Iraq’s prodigious resources — oil, water and the best trained manpower in the neighbourhood — that would enable his country to fill the leadership vacuum in the Arab world. But ever so often a dark cloud of uncertainty crossed his otherwise self-assured face.

After the meeting we had little doubt in tracing this uncertainty to the fear of the imperious Saddam Hussein supplanting him with tacit western support. It happened sooner than we had anticipated and the change in Baghdad led straight to a destructive eight-year conflict with Iran. I am also witness to Saddam Hussein’s impatience with the advice given by President Ziaul Haq, President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh and Yasser Arafat that he should accept a ceasefire and negotiations with Iran as his military campaign had run its course.

Exhaustion in the war against Iran led Saddam to the quick-fix invasion of Kuwait and the end of opportunistic western support for him. The invasion fired the neo-conservative dream of reconstituting the Middle East though the shock-and-awe operation of March 2003 was still far away. In January 1990, James Baker, who heads the Iraq Study Group these days, warned that the United States would take Iraq back to the pre-industry era. General Schwarzkopf spoke of crushing Iraq.

General McBeck said that the war against Iraq, a Third World country, was being planned “as if it will be the Third World War”. Devastated by this first Gulf War, Iraq was subjected to another 13 years of crippling sanctions and ever increasing air attacks. When reminded that half a million Iraqi children had died because of indiscriminate sanctions, the then US secretary of state thought that the price was well deserved and that the US would continue to prolong the long night of the suffering of the Iraqi people. Clearly, the objective had gone far beyond the liberation of Kuwait; it was fully revealed only after an utterly misguided group of terrorists provided the historic 9/11 pretext.

Afghanistan and Iraq have borne the brunt of the neo-con project launched in the wake of 9/11. On their part, the Palestinians have also paid a huge price. It is a fact of history that the Oslo accords were used by Israel for the heaviest colonisation of the West Bank and Jerusalem but the US still restrained an outright Israel’s aggression. As a natural ally in the new Middle East enterprise, Israel demanded and secured total freedom of action.

When its campaign of terrorising the Palestinians with a spate of target-killings did not break their will and they rallied around Hamas, Israel escalated the hostilities against them and then, on a much bigger scale, attacked the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Nearly one-third of Lebanon was destroyed but Israel failed to achieve its objectives and the successful resistance offered by Hassan Nasrallah there changed the nature of war itself in the region.

The lessons of this new warfare are beginning to sink in and with that come hopes of better times. Writing in this space soon after the invasion of Iraq, one anticipated that there would be prolonged resistance which, in turn, would force the occupation army to switch over to the policy of creating ethnic and sectarian divisions. This is precisely what the British invaders in Iraq had done when their grand objective was the destruction of the Ottoman empire.

Support for the virtual independence of Kurdistan and the maligning of Iraqi resistance as localised terrorism in the so-called Sunni triangle vindicated this reading of the occupation strategy. But then the tactic succeeded a little too well. Kurdish autonomy reached a point where the experienced leadership of the Kurdish people began to assess the pros and cons of pushing it further. It seems to have decided, at least for the time being, that Turkey and Iran should not be provoked beyond a certain point. The Shia-Sunni divide bought time and space for the occupation but in the process shattered the edifice of a so-called democratic state that would have provided a facade for the long term objectives of the invasion.

Modelled on Howard Zinn’s 1967 book, Vietnam; the logic of withdrawal, Anthony Arnove has now set down the moral and political case for getting out of Iraq in his new book Iraq, the logic of withdrawal. It represents an effort from the Left to tell the American people that what lies under the rubble of war is the Bush administration’s use of the war as a cover for worsening the income gap while enriching the big corporations. Many others who do not share the theoretical framework of this book now testify to the futility of persevering with this ill-conceived project for pragmatic reasons of state policy.

A major American columnist has compared recent attacks by the resistance forces in the Middle East to the Tet offensive that turned the tide against the US forces in Vietnam. President Bush has accepted the comparison though with a different spin on it by the White House staff. Sir Richard Dannatt, the British chief of general staff has created waves in the UK by publicly acknowledging that the continued presence of British forces is exacerbating the situation in Iraq.

Richard Haass, the respected president of the Council on Foreign Relations will have an article in the next issue of Foreign Affairs arguing that the American era in the region ended in less than 20 years after the end of the cold war. James Baker’s Iraq Study Group is reported to have reached at least one conclusion that the occupation “cannot stay the course” and that it was time for more viable options. As in the case of Iraq, there is a litany of comment that Afghanistan cannot be pacified by military means. A chorus of voices from both sides of the Atlantic is making the first announcement of the retreat of American military power from the region.

For the Muslims, it is a moment for reflection and introspection rather than facile triumphalism. The weapon which may bring about this retreat is double-edged. When asymmetrical warfare of our times becomes indistinguishable from indiscriminate violence to achieve results which should have come through a political dialogue, the result may be perennial chaos. The Arab-Islamic world must ponder over the factors that brought it to this state of affairs in the first place.

In a telling passage or two, Ibne Khaldun wrote about the times when a state benefits from the sword and the times when the sword should give way to the power of the pen. Our world needs an intellectual renaissance which is stubbornly inhibited by autocratic and militaristic regimes. It needs a rapid reconstruction of political institutions as lack of democracy inevitably leads to the kind of errors of judgment that I have mentioned in the reference to the Ba’athist Iraq.

Pakistan’s own history is replete with such errors and the price has been the loss of half the country and the mediaevalising of the other half. The only time available to the world of Islam, which sits on the highly coveted and contested strategic resources, is the gap between this and the next crusade. Al Quds is a living reminder of the fact that such gaps are not too long. History does not tolerate lethargy of mind and spirit. In our prayers this Eid, we need to resolve to take time by the forelock.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

THERE is one phrase that the thinking man in Pakistan is getting a little tired of hearing — and that is ‘The War on Terror.’ The saying pops up regularly in the newspapers, on television and even in conversations. And one is beginning to get the impression that the eradication of terror is the only thing that really matters in this country and elsewhere, and that all other endeavours must be accorded second place.

President Bush has made the war on terror the cornerstone of his foreign policy and doesn’t feel comfortable unless he makes a reference to some aspect of the threat, whether real or perceived, every time he appears on the glass bucket. President Musharraf is bravely following in his footsteps; and some of the hype has started to rub off on other world leaders who have distilled their collective wisdom and come to the conclusion that the world would be a far better place if they could somehow eradicate or contain those hooded, shadowy figures who, according to them, are keeping them on their toes.

Whenever the leaders of two countries meet to discuss “matters of mutual interest” — which is another way of saying that they really have nothing much to discuss — and issue a joint communique, they invariably pledge to pool their resources to fight the war on terror, without actually specifying just what they mean. However, it was the Americans that gave the phrase a specific meaning after 9/11.

Nobody in his serious mind could ever support the kind of things that Saddam Hussein had done to his own people and to the Kurds. He deserved what he got. But most people abhorred the way President Bush set about destroying the enemy. If only he had opted for a swift, efficient, surgical Mossad-like operation, instead of bludgeoning cities which resulted in the killing of over a hundred thousand civilians who had no connection whatsoever with the Baathist regime, he might have been seen, at least in the West, as a modern day liberator. But it was not to be.

In spite of what the western media would have us believe, American presidents appear to display a remarkable penchant for launching into conflicts based on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception. The Vietnam War, an ugly, mismanaged tragic episode in US history, with devastating loss of life for all sides, and the current skirmishes in Afghanistan and Iraq , are now being increasingly perceived by the world media as grand exercises in futility.

Curiously enough, there have been glaring differences in the percentage of gross domestic product going to the defence department during the last 50 years. In 1953, at the time of the Korean War it was 14 per cent. In 1968 at the time of the Vietnam War it was almost 10 per cent. And today it is a mere 3.74 per cent.

In Vietnam the US would have settled for any regime that advanced the Cold War agenda. The tragedy is that in the process they abandoned South Vietnam to its own fate. In Iraq the perceived goal has been the establishment of a liberal democratic government. Instead, the country has been turned into the worlds most dangerous place.

However, the issue was much more egregious in the case of Vietnam. US intelligence gathering agencies failed to understand just what it was that motivated Ho Chi Minh in the 1950s. They failed to recognise the depth of his nationalism. North Vietnam lost a little over a million soldiers and around a million civilians. And yet this nation of rice farmers was willing to fight on and on.

The key to understanding the Vietnamese enigma — in which a weaker side managed to prevail over a stronger one — lay in the concept of ‘the asymmetry of stakes.’ Victory meant everything to North Vietnam and precious little to the average American. It took the US establishment quite a while to realise this, by which time the casualties on the American side had mounted to unmanageable proportions.

In Iraq the allied intelligence gathering network again failed by giving incorrect information, and opponents of the British-American alliance came to the inescapable conclusion that it wasn’t so much a question of faulty intelligence, but wilful, outright deception. In spite of Saddam Hussein’s belligerent overtures and projection of the strong man of the Middle East , his regime did not really pose a serious military threat to neighbouring countries. And contrary to expectations, the Iraqi people did not rally to the support of the invading army as the intelligence agencies said they would.

Edward Kennedy has called Iraq ‘Bush’s Vietnam.’ A comparison between the two conflicts will nevertheless indicate that there are certain interesting differences. To start with, the US did not slip gradually, covertly or carelessly into Iraq, as it did into Vietnam. The onslaught on Mesopotamia was a full throttled attack with all cylinders blazing and was, in a sense, a continuation of the Desert Storm assault conducted in 1991.

The difference is that the senior George Bush adhered to a mission plan. He decided which causes were worth fighting for, how long the fight should last, and when it was time to go home. He freed Kuwait and brought back the troops. It was quick, effective and successful. This time round the adventure has backfired. President Bush has opened too many fronts and is now desperately looking for an honourable way to get out of the mess.

On the home front there has been a big turn in the mood about the war. The American people have known for some time that Iraq is far from becoming the pacified, liberal democracy that was promised in the original prospectus for the war, and that the goal to establish a legitimate indigenous government is not being realised.

President Bush is losing the public relations war at home. The American people now see him as losing his military campaigns, with the result that they are left with a gnawing sense of having become weaker in the eyes of the world. The most powerful country on the planet is now in the uncomfortable and peculiar position of being hugely indebted to the rest of the world.

The opinion polls show that a majority of Americans now feel that the war was a mistake and that the conflict has left them less secure. If one adds to that the recklessly unprotected spending, and the fact that the surplus inherited from Bill Clinton has been blown and turned into a staggering deficit, one can’t really see how President Bush is going to survive. There is also a serious danger that the Republicans may soon relinquish the tight grip they have had on the American people, a prospect that is not being viewed too favourably in Islamabad.

It is now being universally perceived that it would have been better if the fact finding missions had done a more thorough job of first finding out if the Iraqi dictator had weapons of mass destruction, than discovering, somewhat belatedly, that he hadn’t. The insurgency in Iraq is fragmented, and has no identifiable central leadership, though the insurgents appear to number in thousands.

The invading army is also faced with a new enemy, the faceless suicide bomber, an adversary of which the American soldier had no previous experience. So far the American high command in Iraq has not been able to deal with this problem. Most of the victims of the bombers are Iraqi citizens. But there have also been numerous American casualties, and the body bags keep piling up.

The refusal of major western TV networks to show bodies or upsetting gore during hostilities is particularly shameful, for it has kept vital information from western audiences. There is too much sanitising and political kowtowing, which gives the Asian viewer the impression that the information agenda in the West is still decided by First World War broadcasters.

WHAT A magnificent blow for truth, justice and humanity the French National Assembly has struck. Last week, it voted for a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians during World War I. Bravo! Chapeau bas! Vive la France! But let this only be a beginning in a brave new chapter of European history.

Let Britain’s parliament now make it a crime to deny that it was Russians who murdered Polish officers at Katyn in 1940. Let the Turkish parliament make it a crime to deny that France used torture against insurgents in Algeria. Let the German parliament pass a bill making it a crime to deny the existence of the Soviet gulag. Let the Irish parliament criminalise denial of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.

Let the Spanish parliament mandate a minimum of 10 years imprisonment for anyone who claims that the Serbs did not attempt genocide against Albanians in Kosovo.

And the European Parliament should pass into European law a bill making it obligatory to describe as genocide the American colonists’ treatment of American Indians. The only pity is that we, in the European Union, can’t impose the death sentence for these heinous thought crimes. But perhaps, with time, we may change that too.

Oh brave new Europe! It is entirely beyond me how anyone in their right mind — apart, of course, from a French Armenian lobbyist — can regard this proposed bill, which will almost certainly be voted down in the upper house of the French parliament, as a progressive and enlightened step.

What right has France to prescribe by law the correct historical terminology to characterise what another nation did to a third nation 90 years ago? If the French parliament passed a law making it a crime to deny the complicity of Vichy France in the deportation to the death camps of French Jews, I would still argue that this was a mistake, but I could respect the self-critical moral impulse behind it. This bill, by contrast, has no more moral or historical justification than any of the other suggestions I have just made.

In an article last Friday, the Guardian averred that “supporters of the law are doubtless motivated by a sincere desire to redress a 90-year-old injustice.” I wish I could be so confident. Currying favour with French Armenian voters and putting another obstacle in the way of Turkey joining the EU might be suggested as other motives.

It will be obvious to every intelligent reader that my argument has nothing to do with questioning the suffering of the Armenians who were massacred, expelled or felt impelled to flee in fear of their lives during and after World War I. Their fate at the hands of the Turks was terrible and has been too little recalled in the mainstream of European memory.

Reputable historians and writers have made a strong case that those events deserve the label of genocide, as it has been defined since 1945. In fact, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Orhan Pamuk, and other Turkish writers have been prosecuted under the Turkish penal code for daring to suggest exactly that. That is significantly worse than the intended effects of the new French bill. But two wrongs don’t make a right.

No one can legislate historical truth. Insofar as historical truth can be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts, testing and disputing each other’s claims without fear of prosecution or persecution.

In the tense ideological politics of our time, this proposed bill is a step in exactly the wrong direction. How can we credibly criticize Turkey, Egypt or other states for curbing free speech, through the legislated protection of historical, national or religious shibboleths, if we are doing ever more of it ourselves?

Far from creating new, legally enforced taboos about history, national identity and religion, those European nations that have them should repeal not only their blasphemy laws but also their laws on Holocaust denial. Otherwise, a charge of double standards is impossible to refute.

I recently heard the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy going through some impressive intellectual contortions to explain why he opposed any laws restricting criticism of religion but supported those on Holocaust denial. It was one thing, he argued, to question a religious belief, quite another to deny a historical fact. But this won’t wash. Historical facts are established precisely by their being disputed and tested against the evidence. Without that process of contention — up to and including the revisionist extreme of outright denial — we would never discover which facts are truly hard.

Such consistency requires painful decisions. For example, I have nothing but abhorrence for some of David Irving’s recorded views about Nazi Germany’s attempted extermination of the Jews, but I am quite certain that he should not be sitting in an Austrian jail as a result of them. You may riposte that the falsehood of some of his claims was established by a trial in a British court. Yes, but that was not the British state prosecuting him for Holocaust denial. It was Irving suing another historian who suggested that he was a Holocaust denier. He was trying to curb free and fair historical debate; the court defended it.

Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for dismantling them. We must practice what we preach. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

The writer is professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, US.