THE publication of the report of the Iraq Study Group led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton represents a landmark review of the Iraq policy and a whole clutch of useful proposals for the disengagement of the United States from the grave crisis in that country. It defines in fairly severe terms the task of the present Iraqi government.

It does not fight shy of addressing the underlying causes and brings out the salience of the Palestinian — Israeli conflict. It demolishes many of the myths that the neoconservatives had loaded the American policy with and challenges President Bush to move towards a bipartisan solution of the American dilemma. It is my intention to discuss its possible impact in two inter-related articles.

It stands to reason that great powers endowed with an extensive infrastructure of information-gathering and equally impressive intellectual resources for policy formulation should have a grasp of the intended and unintended consequences of their actions. But there is no dearth of instances where great power chauvinism and hubris induce a disease of perception in which you see and hear only selectively. It does not happen only in dictatorships. Moral and political blindness can afflict even democracies where entrenched bureaucracies wired to vested interests circumvent elaborate systems of checks and balances.

What is happening in the United States is a reassuring example that in a functioning democracy comes a time when costly errors of overweening ambition and bad judgment begin to stir large masses who demand a fundamental change. In fact, the post-Second World war United States has seen this process more than once: it has witnessed cycles of excesses of power and the people bridling that power. The memorable mid-term elections in November showed that the ability of the American people to confront an untenable stasis may well have been dulled by manipulative media technology but has not been lost.

They could not stop the launching of an illegal war but are all too aware of its cost to the United States and to that benighted country. Assessing the blood and treasure invested by the United States, the Baker-Hamilton report reminds the nation that nearly 2,900 Americans have lost their lives serving in Iraq, another 21,000 have been wounded, the United States has spent roughly $400 billion and that the estimates for the final cost of the US involvement in Iraq runs as high as two trillion dollars.

On the other side, as many as 655,000 Iraqis may have already perished since the invasion, their number going up on an average by 100 a day. One of the potentially most affluent Arab states lies in tatters. The cradle of human civilisation that is of particular importance to the three great Semitic religions has been pillaged and denuded of much of its most precious heritage. Worse still, the future of its people has been pawned to blood thirsty militias. Over the entire region hangs the spectre of a long drawn out sectarian conflict that is a direct consequence of a disastrous policy to fan sectarian and ethnic tensions in the cynical calculation that it would weaken the resistance.

The Baker-Hamilton report is as candid as it could be in the heavily polarised political climate of the United States. After all, its raison d’etre was the revival of bipartisanship in an hour of crisis. It enables the Democrats who now control the House of Representatives and the Senate to indicate the vital, perhaps indispensable space in which they could move forward to meet a presidency known for its stubborn unilateralism while, at the same time, making the same space available to the president to embrace a bipartisan agenda in the larger national interest.

In fact, drafted by 10 leaders who are pillars of the Washington establishment and have extensive governmental experience, the report clings to a cautious candour. It has deliberately avoided a discussion of the systemic reasons why the United States gets sucked into such quagmires and why it ignores the friendliest voices raised all over the world to flag the perils of the path that it chooses occasionally. Implicit, however, in its account of the crisis and the likely consequences of continuing the present policies is an indictment of the decision-making process under this administration.

There are and will be, as in the case of Vietnam, other voices that deal with the deeper aspects of the crisis and its moral dimensions. In a remarkable essay in the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner observes succinctly that the ideological canopy has been finally lifted. But underneath the canopy were a host of dark moments that brought much suffering to Iraq. There was the Kissinger moment when the best known exponent of the realist school of foreign policy said that Iraq had to be invaded “because Afghanistan was not enough” in the conflict with ‘radical Islam’ which wanted to “humiliate us”, and that now “we need to humiliate them”.

Many others sugar-coated Kissinger’s crusade as bringing democracy to the region for which the hapless Iraq had to provide a demonstration model. “Victory” (they expected), writes Danner, “would be quick and awe-inspiring; in a few months the Americans, all but a handful of them, would be gone: only the effect of the ‘demonstration model’, and the cascading consequences in the neighbouring states, would remain.’ As victory was proclaimed, many of the architects of the Iraq war openly debated when Syria and Iran would be laid low.

The archives of this page in Dawn bear witness that with only a few exceptions of pro-West cheerleaders, our commentaries on the unfolding tragedy has kept enumerating factors which showed that it was a Pyrrhic victory and that a string of vengeful decisions would inevitably push the country into an inexorable slide towards anarchy. The disbanding of the entire army and security apparatus of the ancien regime in an effort to completely reconfigure the polity of 22 million people created a security vacuum that the lean, if lethal, legions of Rumsfeld could never have fulfilled.

With hindsight, many American observers have noted that more than 50,000 secularly trained Iraqi soldiers were humiliated and handed over on a platter to a growing national resistance demonised as Al Qaeda. Then came the de-Baathification programme in a society where for decades there was no security and no decent career without a demonstrable association with the ruling Ba’ath Party.

It is often claimed that these decisions were based on the happy experience of post-war Japan and Germany. But that is only half the truth and the remaining half is much less honourable. That other half lay in reversing the time-honoured policy of the Ottoman empire to keep a lid on sectarian and ethnic differences.

In an earlier article in this newspaper I recalled how Sultan Abdul Hamid successfully urged Jamaluddin Afghani to put aside his own work for a year and come to Iraq to help unify Shia and Sunni subjects under the banner of Islam and the caliphate. Now the decision was to conflate Ba’athist beliefs and a large part of the army with the Sunnis who had to be rendered powerless for all times to come. Simultaneously, at the ethnic level, the autonomy of the Kurds who had doubtless suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein was to be invested with the symbols and institutions of independence.

The climax of this policy which predictably turned out to be totally counterproductive came in the form of two assaults on Fallujah which reduced the city to rubble. Its wanton destruction eliminated whatever chances there were of Sunni cooperation in “nation-building”, made the planned political plan suspect and transformed the resistance into a do-or-die struggle to ensure that the occupation would not succeed in putting down any sustainable constitutional and administrative structures.

Suddenly, Fallujah crystallised all the unease in provinces which have about 40 per cent of Iraq’s population into a belief that the disbanding of the army, the de-Baathification, the adverse hype about the Sunni Triangle and the encouragement to certain sectarian militias were part of the same design to destroy the Sunni population. There were widespread apprehensions that the occupation wanted to split the country into three weak entities.

The Iraq Study Group recommends the withdrawal of combat troops by the first quarter of 2008. It is clear in its mind that a changed policy would need substantive diplomatic initiatives that embrace Iran and Syria as well. In proposing a new kind of diplomacy in the region it challenges President Bush to free himself from the bondage of his unfortunate “axis of evil”. Iran helped in the case of Afghanistan as it was equally intolerant of the Taliban’s particularly narrow sectarian interpretation of Islam. In Iraq, where a well-defined zone of Iranian influence has emerged, Iran would expect wide ranging accommodation that includes a reversal of George Bush’s stubborn campaign to bring about a regime change as well as on the nuclear question.

In Syria, President Asad has made a number of statements that cumulatively point to a possible rapprochement with the United States. But the lynchpin of a broader agreement would certainly bring up the question of Israeli evacuation from the Golan Heights.

President Bush has said that there is no graceful exit from Iraq. His intensely held religious convictions are a formidable barrier to re-conceptualising the Middle East policy. And yet he has to live with a different Congress. Also the Republicans would be averse to let him preside over a defeat in the next presidential election. We will turn to these and other issues next week.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

THE names of the most famous contemporary writers have become international brands. When they speak, the world listens. And increasingly, they speak not just through their fiction, but also via newspaper opinion pages, influential magazines, television chat shows and literary festivals.

Novelists are no longer just novelists — they are also global pundits shaping our opinions on everything from art, life and politics to civilisation as we know it. What we want from them is clear: insight into the human condition.

From the most favourable conditions in human history we have generated terror, war and a proliferation of tensions grounded in mutual fear and hatred. Humanity is unquestionably in need of help. But is it amenable to literary soundbites? Do literary pundits provide us with the best insight into our conundrums or serve as useful guides to the future?

The British literary landscape is dominated by three writers: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. All three have considered the central dilemma of our time: terror. Indeed, Amis has issued something of a manifesto on the subject he terms “horrorism”. In their different styles, their approach and opinions define a coherent position. They are the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives — or, if you like, the “Blitcons”.

Blitcons come with a ready-made nostrum for the human condition. They use their celebrity status to advance a clear global political agenda.

The Blitcon project is based on three one-dimensional conceits. The first is the absolute supremacy of American culture. Blitcon fiction is orientalism for the 21st century, shifting the emphasis from the supremacy of the west in general to the supremacy of American ideas of freedom.

If we are to read McEwan’s beliefs and intentions through his fiction, the western canon is the very essence of humanity. His novel Saturday is set on 15 February 2003, when almost two million people marched in London to protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Its neurosurgeon protagonist, Henry Perowne, is a “professional reductionist” who cannot appreciate great literature. In order to cure him, his daughter Daisy spoonfeeds him Flaubert, Tolstoy and other “great writers”.

We are supposed to see this as a joke. But the joke evaporates as soon as we realise that Saturday really assigns a mystical dimension to western literature: the poetry of Matthew Arnold not only serves as an antidote to brutish violence, but literally saves the day at the end of the novel. As a corollary, we are forced to conclude, those who have never read War and Peace, for example, are not fully human.

The second Blitcon conceit is that Islam is the greatest threat to this idea of civilisation. Rushdie’s suspicion of and distaste for Islam is obvious in his novels Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses. In Shame, Rushdie describes Islam as a mythology that cannot survive close examination, but in The Satanic Verses it becomes an abomination. The novel suggests, Islam runs contrary to every decent value known to man.

The third Blitcon conceit is that American ideas of freedom and democracy are not only right, but should be imposed on the rest of the world. There is an exercise beyond the reach of any of the Blitcons. There are exotic creatures they cannot imagine in their fictions and diatribes: the generality of Muslims, people who believe in something other than the Blitcons’ understanding of Islam; people who live humdrum lives on the streets of Bradford, Karachi or Jakarta; people far removed from the festering imagination of the Blitcon. Amis has never even met an ordinary Muslim in his life.

But I lie. He has met one. In The Age of Horrorism, Amis tells us that in Jerusalem he came face to face with the “maximum malevolence” of an Islamist, the gatekeeper at the Dome of the Rock. Amis writes that he wanted to enter the mosque in contravention of some “calendric prohibition” — there are none, actually — which led to a transformation in the gatekeeper: “His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant.” By the simple observation of facial expression, Amis was able to divine the entire plot. But might it not be that the humble gatekeeper had never encountered such an obnoxious, arrogant and ignorant tourist?

The real world is not a fiction. The ideology of mass murder has a history and a context in all its perversity and evil. But the wild imaginings of the Blitcons are not an appropriate guide to the eradication of this horror. Turned to this end, the manipulative power of literary imagination is nothing but spin. And such spin is simply hatred answering, mirroring and matching hatred. Like minds reach across intervening swaths of the world and, in their hatred, embrace each other. That is all Blitcons tell us. But it is hardly enlightening for those of us desperate to find a sustainable path from destruction and slaughter. —Dawn/Guardian Service The writer has been appointed a member of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. This is an edited version of his article in the current issue of the New Statesman.

THE MMA is once again in the news. But this time they are batting on a pretty sticky wicket. It’s one thing to protest against an unelected president who continues to wear both his hat and his helmet, and is hell-bent on ensuring that he stays at the crease — a dissent in which they are supported by two mainstream parties — and quite another to protest against the abolition of a code of laws that brings out the worst aspects of a repressive Stone Age culture.

The chief of the JUI has asserted that the majority of the population is with the religious parties and wholeheartedly supports them in their opposition to the women’s protection law. One doesn’t really know where he got that one from. The majority of the population is busy eking out a living and trying to make both ends meet. Fighting for a cause that continues to tarnish the image of this country abroad couldn’t be very high on their agenda.

Perhaps he has been listening to some of the insiders in the Q League, or has seen that rather mystifying programme that was aired on one of the local TV channels a couple of weeks ago, in which three women of various political persuasion and vintage were interviewed by a moderator with the exuberance of a recently dug up pharaoh, and dilated on what they believed was the real motive behind the passing of the bill.

The trio had apparently dabbled in religious jurisprudence and kept tying up the viewers in knots. After 30 minutes of innuendo and meaningless discourse, during which the ball landed heavily on both sides of the net, one got the distinct impression that the panel didn’t have the slightest idea what it was talking about. The only point that emerged from the talk was that there is really nothing wrong with the Hudood ordinances. It is just that they have been incorrectly applied.

Curiously enough, none of the panelists mentioned the inordinate obsession of the religious parties with adultery — the reason why the ordinances were introduced in the first place — or the fact that not a single man who had wrongly accused a woman of licentious behaviour out of malice or spite had ever been punished under the law.

Nevertheless, the holy warriors felt an irrepressible urge to protest against the passing of the women’s protection act, and reacted somewhat impulsively when it became part of the law of the land. Their instinctive reaction was to resign en masse. They were a little peeved when the gesture didn’t produce quite the response they expected.

Predictably, the PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s faction of the Muslim League urged the MMA not to resign their seats in the National Assembly. They said it would be bad for democracy if the men of the cloth threw up the sponge. Besides, they didn’t want to lose an important ally in the fight against dictatorship. And predictably Chaudhry Shujaat, head of the Q League, who is anxious not to rock the boat at this juncture, decided to give the mullahs a sympathetic ear. But this time he had the presence of mind not to repeat his earlier faux pas which delayed the passing of the bill and infuriated the president.

Meanwhile, chinks began to appear in the armour of the holy warriors. What the nation had known for some time, that there was a deep division between the two main factions of the religious alliance — the Jamaat-i-Islami and the JUI — began to surface and ruptured during the two-day meeting of the MMA supreme council.

Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the unyielding and unbending hardliner, and Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the compromising and pliable pragmatist, locked horns over the issue of how to deal with the passing of the bill. The former wanted the mass resignation of all members of the MMA, as had been earlier proposed, while the latter opted for a more cautious approach and stated that the JUI MNAs would hang on to their parliamentary seats, in spite of what had been earlier decided, if it came to a showdown. And so the meeting ended in a deadlock with the understanding that the issue would be decided after Eid.

One can’t really fault Maulana Fazlur Rahman for swimming against the tide. It must have occurred to him, though somewhat belatedly, that the MMA parties stood a far better chance of fighting for what they believed in, if they were inside parliament, rather than on the street stoning the US embassy, throwing rocks at passing cars and burning old tyres.

He must have also realised that seats vacated in the by-elections would be filled by secular opponents, and that a sudden withdrawal from the parliamentary scene would mean that the religious zealots would never again be able to repeat the success they scored in 2002. But no matter which way one looks at the issue, the current political somersault by the JUI will be seen as a volte-face, especially as it was their leader who had hurled the initial threat about the mass resignations.

Of the six parties that form the religious alliance, the Jamaat-i-Islami is undoubtedly the most significant. It has a closely-knit organisation, a highly dedicated and committed following and a stratified structure. Though many writers have attempted to describe the philosophy behind the party, the most concise and succinct description that this writer has come across of this political grouping is the one written by M. Mujeeb, a former vice chancellor of Jamia Milla, Delhi, which appears in The Partition of India, Policies and Perspectives 1935-1947, published by George Allen and Unwin.

“In the literature of the Jamaat-i-Islami we find categorical assertions of the superiority of the Sharia of Islam over all principles and forms of social and political organisation. But its real appeal derives from a rhetorical denunciation of western civilisation. The Jamaat has also evolved a concept of the Islamic state of which any Muslim anywhere can be a citizen and which will be the best government, because only Muslims of acknowledged piety and integrity will be entitled to hold office and to be elected to its consultative

bodies.”

The basic thinking and beliefs of the founder of the party have been transmitted through some process of cultural osmosis to the current leadership of the Jamaat. And though Qazi Hussain Ahmed has on occasion had to make the odd political compromise, so far as the basic tenets of the party are concerned, he has shown the same rigidity and consistency as his predecessors.

In the crisis within the religious alliance, Maulana Fazlur Rahman might have come across as the more sensible of the two leaders by distancing himself from the politics of agitation and showing more accommodation, while his adversary demonstrated his street power which resulted in 3 hundreds of his followers being locked up. But it is Qazi Hussain Ahmed who has displayed the greater moral fibre by sticking to his guns. So far as he is concerned a principle has been violated. With all the highs and lows of the ecclesiastical drama, he is increasingly reminding this writer of the Valkyrie who rides a lame horse into a hurricane.

In the current struggle between the hard-liners and the pragmatists in the religious alliance, it does look as if the latter might prevail. This will certainly affect unity in the alliance which is split down the middle, especially after the Jamaat chief has instructed his legislators not to sit in the National Assembly or to avail of any of the perks, and hasn’t shown the slightest inclination to compromise.

What is a distinct possibility is that neither of the leaders of the two major parties will budge when the supreme council meets after Eid and the deadlock will continue. What this in effect means is that members of the religious alliance might formalise the split and contest the next election as two separate political parties.

If, however, the MMA survives as a political entity, it is not very clear if it will be able to retain its predominantly religious vote bank. As it is, most MMA supporters are incensed at the failure of the leadership to protest against the military operations in the tribal belt and Balochistan, and its failure to implement some of the promises made to the electorate at the time of the last national election.