April 13, 2003

For a clash of civilizations, it takes two parties of more or less equal strengths. There is neither any strength in the Islamic bloc, nor, for that matter, is there a civilizational monolith to speak of. New Rome is here to stay

THE architects of Washington’s brutal invasion of Iraq had hoped to instil Shock and Awe in the hearts of their Iraqi quarries. Instead, they have only managed to stir deep resentment and hatred of their crass war-mongering, not only amongst the Iraqis, but in greater part of the civilized world.

Few in the rational world, outside the numbing parameters of the American establishment media, are prepared to lump the propaganda buzz word that US is in Iraq only as a ‘liberator’ of its oppressed people, and not as a conqueror of a land which has long been in its sights.

The world has come a long way since March, 1917 — exactly 86 years to the day — when another imperial invader of Iraq had tried to pass himself off as a ‘liberator.’ This was General Sir Fredrick Stanley Maude of the British army who had entered Baghdad at the head of a conquering force which had just mauled the Ottoman Turks and exhorted the Baghdadis in these words: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”

After that noble proclamation, the British ‘liberators’ of the Iraqis stayed on in Mesopotamia for 20 long years and used every brute method of force to subdue and subjugate the Iraqis in vain. In the end, they vacated their occupation only because the Iraqis had raised the cost of it beyond bearable limits.

George W. Bush and his coterie of neo-cons and born-again Christian fundamentalists have been trying to copy the same language and syntax that the British imperialists and colonialists deployed at the peak of their global power. But the impact of their verbal jugglery and wizardry has fallen as flat as snow flakes on a heated surface.

They went through various cycles of self-deception — from inspection to disarmament to regime change. But the world could always see through their flimsy facade. It was, from the beginning to this end, always one primordial motive and one over-riding objective: to occupy Iraq because of its vast reservoir of oil, and use it as a launching pad for US imperialist aims in the most sensitive and strategically important region of the world.

Anybody believing that the invasion of Iraq was meant to be an end in itself must take a more intrusive look at the history of US expansionism in the past one hundred and fifty years to get a broader perspective on the issue.

The imperialist streak is not new to the US psyche or state policy. It started soon after the Americans had finally cremated the ghost of British colonialism in the wake of the 1812 abortive British military incursion into Washington during which they burnt the White House.

It was President James Monroe who proclaimed, in 1828, the Caribbean and its periphery to be the backwaters of US, and, thus, essential to be shielded against any hostile power. The Monroe Doctrine was the unveiling of Washington’s own imperialist ambitions in the Caribbean and Central America, and opened the door for US expansionism in an area of vital strategic and economic import to Washington.

It soon embroiled the US in battles with Mexico, then a crown colony of Spain, itself the then paramount colonial power in the region where Monroe had staked American claims. The states of Texas, Nevada, Arizona and southern California were snatched from Mexico as war booty.

The American civil war caused a temporary hiatus in Washington’s territorial expansionism, but, that over, a new thrust was imparted to it by the American-Spanish War of the 1890s which garnered a hefty bonanza of new territories for the US, captured from a vanquished Spain.

Puerto Rico was a war trophy which is still a ‘commonwealth’ of US more than a century later. Cuba became as good as an American colony with a corrupt and thieving ruling class beholden to the US. It was not until Fidel Castro’s successful revolution of 1959, which uprooted the moth-eaten system, warts and all, that the Cubans gained their independence and self-respect from American tutelage.

The Philippines — all 7,000 islands of them — was fought for, as Iraq currently, in the name of ‘liberating’ it from Spanish overlordship. But as soon as the Spaniards had been defeated and expelled from there, the sugar and tobacco-rich archipelago was occupied by Washington as a colony, and so it stayed under the American thumb until the end of World War II in 1945.

The Wilsonian liberalism that blossomed in the period immediately preceding World War I was regarded as an antidote to the imperialist syndrome. However, its lifespan was short, largely because of it, and it wilted soon after the end of the War. So powerful was the backlash from the soloist-imperialist lobby that the US Senate dealt a mortal blow to Woodrow Wilson’s cherished dream of becoming a lead participant in the League of Nations — a brain-child of his. The hostility now being displayed by the neo-cons around George Bush against the UN is an echo of that archaic mentality of the 1920s.

The great economic Depression of the 1930s again injected a lull in the imperialist ardour, but soon enough World War II imparted to it a mega boost.

There were two major post-War developments to whet Washington’s ill-disguised imperialist appetite. One was the emergence of the US as the undisputed military leader of the world; the second was the birth of Israel as a Western military outpost in the heart of the Arab world.

Israel’s baptism was a unique phenomenon in more ways than one. It was a state born out of ‘sin’, literally. The Europeans and the Americans had come together in penitence to expiate for the sin of the Holocaust by delivering a state to the Zionist movement, literally on a platter, not anywhere in Europe, but in Palestine. Land for the Jewish state was seized not from those who had sinned against the European Jewry, but from those hapless Palestinians who had not a shred of contribution in the crimes perpetrated against the victims of Nazi barbarity.

But Israel was not born in peace. The Zionists had waged a bloody terrorist campaign to hound out the innocent and terrorised Palestinians from their ancestral homes, as well as unhinge the British Mandate authority in Palestine.

As copiously documented by Avi Shlaim in his seminal work, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, the Zionist movement had used the British, through the Jewish foreign secretary James Arthur Balfour, to secrete from them the promise of a ‘Jewish Home’ in Palestine. But the bulk of financing for the terrorist campaign had come from the US.

It was a main plank of the Zionist campaign to establish an impregnable base in a country of redoubtable military might, and the US fitted that bill ideally. Washington did not disappoint the Zionists by championing their campaign for a full-fledged state on the lands they thought had been pledged to them by God.

The Cold War that ensued quickly on the heels of World War II robbed the US of the chance of becoming the sole superpower in the world, but the Jewish influence and pre-eminence in the shaping of American foreign policy in the Mideast in particular increased exponentially in the period of the Cold War.

The Jewish lobbies working overtime in Washington had a one- line agenda: make Israel impregnable militarily. And for the success of it, it was primordial that the US must revert to its imperialist mode with as much urgency and panache as possible.

The folly of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan in 1979, and the disaster it spelled for the Soviet Empire, was the beginning of the end for the Soviets, but also heralded the birth of the US, not only as the sole military power on earth, but also as Rome-reincarnate.

The US security blueprint for the 21st century, on which the neo-cons and US Zionists started working soon after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989, has the mantra of US being the Rome of the 21st century, by virtue of its awesome military might, at its bed-rock.

The authors of this document-which sprang to life as soon as George W. Bush was heralded into the White House — as a result of a highly engineered effort by the Republican bigwigs and the US Supreme Court — were souls such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle who are now at the epicentre of the tirade against Iraq. Both of them, with the blessings of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, are the principal architects of the military campaign against Iraq because they have succeeded in getting their blueprint adopted as the Bush Doctrine for the 21st century Pax Americana.

The neo-imperialists now calling the shots against Iraq — and threatening to unleash similar terror against Iran and Syria, among a long list of potentially ‘troublesome’ ‘rogue states’ — believe that the US in the 21st century has acquired the military muscle and global reach that would be the envy of imperial Rome at its zenith.

Rome didn’t have the awesome military might that Washington has managed to accumulate. But even with its correspondingly limited military capability, Rome reigned supreme in its heyday because it took its own decisions (George Bush arrogantly asserted this right in his State of the Union address in January this year) and had the will to back them up with military action, without help from any other quarters. Rome did not allow any constraints to hamper the advance of its imperialist ambitions.

This Rome analogy was in its fullest evidence in the disdain constantly shown to the UN in the months that preceded Bush’s decision to move militarily against Iraq with only a handful of ‘willing allies.’

The choice of Iraq to be the recipient of New Rome’s opening salvo in what its architects believe to be a series of such manoeuvres is deliberate and well-crafted. It serves the interests of the neo-imperialists as well as of the Zionists. The fear that its success is likely to instill in the hearts of Iraq’s neighbours would be a fringe benefit.

Iraq is one of the three most important Arab states of the Middle East; Egypt and Saudi Arabia being the other two, both of them have been in the US camp as faithful followers for long years. Eliminating the ‘cancer’ of Iraq would guarantee Israel’s security for decades to come.

It would also fit neatly into what Kissinger — an arch neo-imperialist and Zionist — conceived as his doctrine three decades ago on the heels of the first oil embargo of 1973. US must pick up ‘hostile’ Arab states one by one, he had argued with all the arrogance at his command, and ensure that Gulf’s oil resources were always available to it in plenty, or else its economy and the economies of its Western allies and Japan would be placed on a knife’s edge. Iraq’s abundant oil at the mercy of US companies would guarantee that for decades to come. Washington and its allies would have no worries on that account.

Of course, George Bush’s reckless and arrogant disregard of the global sentiment against war has stirred deep resentment around the world, including ‘old Europe.’ But the tone of criticism, sharp and pungent earlier on, has already been greatly modulated with the rapid advancement of US troops inside Iraq.

The critics, too, are now praying out loud for an early US victory and end to war. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to conjecture that the anti-American mood, which had put even the most robust champions of US unilateralism on the defensive before the missiles started raining down on Baghdad, would change with a minimal improvement in US attitude and policy.

The change would be predicated on two things, happening either simultaneously or in quick succession. One would be Washington’s willingness to share the Iraqi pie with other interested parties, such as France and Russia, which have had a considerable stake for years in exploiting Iraq’s huge untapped oil reserves. Saddam Hussain had awarded large swathes of Iraqi oil fields to these two countries in anticipation of the lifting of UN sanctions. Washington’s concurrence in these awards would array Paris and Moscow fairly quickly on its side.

Likewise, a major role for the UN in Iraq’s reconstruction and rehabilitation in every department, economic as well as political, would tear down the present barricades in Europe against US unilateralism. With their own long memories of exploiting their former colonies, the Europeans would hate to leave the Iraqi booty entirely to Washington. They covet the foil of UN for legitimacy and some morality.

Apparently, there is a lot of room for optimism and promise in the unfolding scenario for the Europeans. But there is precious little in it for the protagonists of a clash of civilizations. Indeed, it may, quite unwittingly, have sown the seeds of an eventual civilizational clash in the decades ahead, but for the moment the US invasion and impending long occupation of Iraq is nothing but a naked thrust of imperialism.

For a clash of civilizations, it takes two parties of more or less equal strengths. There is neither any strength worth mentioning in the Islamic bloc, nor, for that matter, is there an Islamic bloc or civilizational monolith to speak of.

The disunity of the Islamic world, so palpably and damningly in evidence at this crucial juncture in the Mideast, is the most eloquent disclaimer of any potential, or even desire, in the Muslim world to take on the new Imperial Rome. It would be entirely incidental if the defeat inflicted on Iraq ignites a spark in the Arab and Islamic world, and acts as a catalyst for unity in the tattered ranks of the Ummah. But, to a realist, even that possibility looks like a pipe dream at this stage.

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