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| November 28, 2006 | Tuesday | Ziqa'ad 6, 1427 |
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A way out of Iraq
Malaria and dengue fever
Democrats’ outlook not much different
WE know what a dog does when the car it was chasing comes to a halt. It looks blank at the automobile’s rear end like a befuddled fool. The victorious Democrats are doing just that in America. They had declared the congressional elections a “referendum” on the Republican President George W. Bush’s stewardship of the Iraq war.
PRESIDENT Pervez Musharraf’s reference to “temporary upheavals” during an address to army officers in Lahore on Saturday deserves a closer examination. Every Pakistani would like to share the president’s enthusiasm when he says that the stir one finds in the nation today is a passing phenomenon. But the issues he referred to are of the kind whose ramifications will be felt for a long time. These included internal security, provincial autonomy, the controversy over the dams, the NFC award and the women’s rights bill. Internal security is a subject unto itself: it includes the consequences of Pakistan’s alliance with the US in the war on terror and the situation in Balochistan. The autonomy question is not confined to Balochistan alone, for in Sindh and the NWFP too some political parties want an amendment to the Constitution to increase the quantum of provincial autonomy. As for the women’s rights bill, the MMA’s decision to resign from the lower House and the government’s counter-strategy as spelled out by some of its over-enthusiastic functionaries only give an indication of the kind of confrontation that is developing.
This is no place to discuss Pakistan’s decision to throw in its lot with the US after 9/11. If the decision was justified and taken during those nerve-racking hours and days that followed the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the rulers could have done so in a way that would have been seen by the nation as an option with no alternative to it at that point in time. However, subsequent events have cast doubt on the government’s ability to conduct the war on terror in a way that would not be seen as compromising the country’s sovereignty and self-respect. In Balochistan, the killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti has not led to pacification, and acts of sabotage and clashes between militants and security forces continue. The dams continue to be controversial, especially in Sindh, the NFC award is still interim in character, and some aspects of it remain unresolved, but the greater cause for concern seems to be the women’s rights bill.
There is no doubt that the MMA is over-reacting to the bill, which it insists violates some Islamic provisions. But the purported threat that the bill will not be allowed to be enforced in the two provinces under MMA control defies common sense. A citizen can violate a law and suffer the consequences, but how can two elected provincial governments, led by parties whose members sit in all the six assemblies, decide not to let a federal law passed by parliament be enforced? Equally absurd is a federal minister’s threat that the federal government will dissolve the two provincial assemblies because the MMA’s decision constitutes an act of rebellion. This being the level of polemics on both sides, it is difficult to share the president’s optimism that these are temporary upheavals. Both the MMA and the government owe it to the nation to lower the level of confrontation. If the MMA has any reservations about the women’s bill, it should first exhaust the possibilities of judicial arbitration before it resorts to street agitation. As for the government, it must stop going it alone; its policies have also alienated the two mainstream parties, the PPP and the PML-N. A relentless pursuit of unilateralism can touch off more than temporary upheavals.
AS insurgents continue to be on the rampage in Iraq killing dozens of people almost every day, peacemakers have become active trying to figure out new approaches to resolve the Iraqi crisis. President George Bush, whose so-called peace initiatives have never gone beyond the narrow confines of his neo-con line in Iraq, has sought a meeting with the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, in Amman which the American leader will be visiting later this week. He is also working on his Arab allies to call a summit on Iraq. These are futile moves because Syria, which can play a key role in the pacification of Iraq, will be kept out of the moot because of the antipathy the Americans feel for Damascus. The other initiative in the Middle East involves meetings between Iraq, Iran and Syria whose leaders have been trying to draw up a common strategy vis-à-vis the turmoil in the region that is casting its long shadow on all countries in the neighbourhood. More significant is the report that the Iraqi government will be holding talks with the insurgents this week to start a dialogue with them.
It is plain that the Iran-Iraq-Syria move and the dialogue with the insurgents, if it takes place, have better chances of producing positive results. It is time Mr Bush realised that he has to change his policy in Iraq if he wants to withdraw his troops from that war-torn country and also ensure that Iraq does not lapse into total anarchy. As it is, Mr Bush will have to fight a battle at home when the Democrats take their seats in the Congress in January. They have indicated that they want a change of direction. The new initiatives by Iran, Syria and Iraq should provide an opening for Washington to change its strategy in Iraq. This would require America to swallow its pride and introduce a shift in its policy vis-à-vis Tehran and Damascus. These are the two countries which can exercise a profound influence on the groups operating in Iraq. But if they are kept out, there may not be any easy way out of the Iraqi quagmire.
WITH the spotlight on the large number of cases of dengue fever being reported from various parts of Pakistan, one tends to forget the prevalence of an equally, if not more, lethal vector-borne disease — malaria. According to some estimates, it causes some 50,000 deaths in the country every year. It is true that several preventive steps being prescribed to ward off dengue fever are also applicable to curbing the spread of malaria. Sleeping under insecticide-treated nets, the use of mosquito repellents and wearing protective clothing are all known to lessen exposure to mosquitoes, while regular fumigation of areas with stagnant pools of water is effective in reducing their breeding potential. Ideally, then, the campaign against dengue fever should also aim at imparting more information about malaria to drive home the point that guarding against mosquitoes prevents more than one disease.
Unfortunately, the fact that there is less of an effort to highlight the dangers of malaria may be because it strikes mostly in rural areas where the level of awareness is low and where there are few opportunities for information and awareness. It has been pointed out that the rural areas report fewer cases of dengue fever than the cities. But this is because of poor surveillance methods and the absence of labs equipped to detect the dengue virus in the afflicted areas. In order to record the relevant data and then act on it to reduce the incidence of both malaria and dengue fever in the rural areas, the health authorities must improve disease detection methods. Moreover, the campaign against dengue fever in the cities should be broadened to raise the level of the health delivery system in the rural parts of the country.
On the campaign trail, they savaged Bush and the Republican-majority Congress for the disastrous war and demanded its speedy end. Now that they have wrested control of both houses of Congress, they don’t have a plan to end it.
Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker to be, promises an undefined “new direction” on the Iraq policy. Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, the would-be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would split Iraq into three de-facto independent entities and then leave that country. Democratic Rep. Jack Murtha, a powerful anti-war voice, would begin the pullout soon. And so on.
They and other Democrats are also saying that they’re waiting for the report of the Iraq Study Group. The panel is led by Republican James A. Baker III, a former secretary of state; and Democrat Lee Hamilton, the former chairman of the House International Relations Committee. The group is expected to recommend next month that the United States begin phased withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, involve regional governments in the search for a solution of the Iraqi crisis and help speed the training of the Iraqi army and police.
The dramatic resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, a stumbling block to a revision of the US policy in Iraq, signals Bush’s readiness to accept most of the Baker Commission’s recommendations. Significantly, Robert Gates, his nominee to succeed Rumsfeld as defence secretary, has been a member of the group.
The inability of the Democrats, lately among the bitterest critics of the war, to offer an Iraq strategy of their own has disappointed many Americans. The party is studded with many bright minds. But most of them are basking in the glory of America’s “sole superpower” status. Like many Republicans, many Democrats too believe that America’s “victory” in the Cold War has left it the world’s natural hegemon and entitled it to impose its economic model and political values on other societies. Gone are the days when the Democratic Party was known for its broad global outlook and sensitivity to other people’s values and cultures.
There of course are Democrats who are still imbued with sensitivity to other cultures and aware of the limits of American power, but they have been marginalised by the party’s America-centric conservative wing. Forty years ago the party’s robust progressive, pluralist flank could see the immorality and perils of the Vietnam War and spearheaded the anti-war movement in time to spare America a total disaster.
In 2003 when a cabal of neoconservative “empire builders” coaxed a coterie of naive right-wing Republicans into waging Iraq war, “liberal” congressional Democrats vied with their Republican colleagues in churning out a resolution supporting the invasion. Richard Gephardt, then leader of the Senate Democrats, made a highly publicised visit to the White House to co-author that resolution. Superpower euphoria had rinsed the Democratic Party of its pluralist ethos and almost blotted out its broad-minded international wing. It reflected a surreal wind of jingoism that was sweeping America ever since the demise of the Soviet Union. A poll taken during the run-up to the Iraq invasion found 71 per cent of the Americans supporting it.
The unravelling of the Iraq invasion, thanks to the Sunni Arab insurgency, has eroded the American mainstream’s support for the war. Yet the American political, intellectual media establishments — including most of the Democratic Party affiliates — are still having the hangover from the post-Cold War victory party. They still believe that Americans are modern-day “chosen people” whose interests and values override those of all other societies.
Democratic and other critics of the Iraq war lament the loss of 2,800 American lives, a half-trillion American tax dollars and America’s global standing. Few of them mention the loss of 655,000 Iraqi lives or the near-destruction of the Iraqi state and economy. The fact that the war is illegal under international law is almost never cited in the American political or intellectual discourse.
This America-centric xenophobia has infected a large segment of the Democratic Party, as the results of the recent congressional elections have shown. Most of the new — and old — Democratic members of Congress are ideologically not very different from their Republican colleagues. Democrat Jim Webb of Virginia, whose cliff-hanger election has given the party its majority in the Senate, used to be a Reagan Republican whose strategic affiliation with the Democratic camp hasn’t changed his right-wing views on many social issues.
Claire McCaskill, elected to the Senate on the Democratic ticket from Missouri, supports gun ownership and death penalty, which traditionally have been conservative Republican positions. Democrat Jon Tester, elected to the Senate from Montana, also loves guns. Bob Casey, the Democratic senator-elect from Pennsylvania, opposes abortion, a defining trait of conservative Republicans.
Because the Democrats’ political outlook and sense of America’s place in the world are not fundamentally different from those of the Republicans, they’re having difficulty coming up with an Iraq strategy that’s different from that of the Republican administration. Yet having won the congressional elections on the Iraq issue, they feel immense pressure to be seen pushing for early troop pullout from Iraq.
Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who will become chairman of the Senate Arms Services Committee, is working on a bipartisan resolution proposing that the United States notify Iraq of its desire to begin incremental troop withdrawal “within four to six months.” Such a resolution, even if adopted, would only have a symbolic value as it would be non-binding.
Ultimately, the Democrats are waiting for the Baker Commission to pull their chestnut out of fire. Most Democrats, as most Republicans, are unwilling to leave Iraq bleeding and in chaos, which the American pullout may entail. (A public opinion poll found one out of two Americans share their concern.) Should the pullout be shown as compliance with the bipartisan panel’s recommendations, the blame for its adverse consequences could be defused.
The Baker Commission may cushion the Republican administration and Democratic Congress against some of the American criticisms for their lack of vision and courage. But it can’t cushion the Middle East or America against the war’s far-reaching effects.
The commission is unlikely to come up with a magic bullet with which to quell Iraq’s Shia-Sunni Arab civil war. Down the road the Shia militias could prevail over the minority Sunni militant groups but that could spill the sectarian bloodbath over to neighbouring states. In northern Iraq, the Kurds may attempt to set up an independent state of their own. That would send the Turkish army roaring in to crush the move. Turkey fears that the secession of the Kurdish provinces from Iraq would stir unrest in its Kurdish-majority south-east.
If anything could bring Iraq back from the precipice, that would be a joint initiative by Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other states bordering Iraq. America could be part of it, but widely perceived as responsible for the Iraqi tragedy and antagonistic to Islam, it would have very little leverage on events in Iraq or the region.
America’s debacle in Iraq would also embolden the anti-American political and guerrilla forces throughout the Middle East, who would step up their movements to roll back American hegemony.
These movements are in fact replaying an all-too-familiar drama the region has been staging continually since the dawn of history. Audacious religious doctrines, fascinating cultural patterns and rich material resources have lured waves after waves of foreign invaders and colonialists into the Middle East.
The people of the region have put up staunch resistance to most of them. So have they now against the Americans. Their anti-American struggle may fester for a while. If history can offer any clue, however, it will yield the same outcome as did their forebears’ resistance to the hegemony of the Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, Mongols, the French and the British: the retreat of the hegemon.
The writer is a Washington-based columnist.