LAHORE, May 14: The United States will not allow holding of free and fair elections in Iraq because it has never done so in the other oil-rich states, according to rights activist Tariq Ali.

Delivering a lecture on ‘Infinite War and the American Empire’ here on Wednesday, he said almost all the players, except Information Minister Saeed As-Sahaf, would be brought back to the Iraq’s politics because the US could not handle public resistance in the state.

The Eqbal Ahmad Foundation and ASR Resource Centre organized the Eqbal Ahmad Distinguished Lecture 2003. The last time Mr Ali, also a noted writer, had expressed his views in Pakistan in 1969 from the forum of the Awami Fikri Mahaz, which was later banned by the then government.

He argued that the US had no experience of directly ruling an occupied land and it had always trusted armies for the job, a fact that would further create problems for the American administration.

Bringing back the old players had become a compulsion for Washington, which was surprised to see that the Iraqis did not welcome the Baghdad’s invasion, he said. “The US officials had assumed before the war that the masses would garland the allied troops when they would enter various Iraqi cities for liberating them from the clutches of a long-time dictator.” However, the Iraqis had reacted in a different way.

The US had also failed to create a rift between the Sunni and the Shiites, he believed.

According to Mr Ali, the sole super power of the world could not be defeated through military means for it was better equipped in defence technologies than any other nation. The other option was to organize a political resistance and that too within the United States itself.

Such an anti-imperialist movement had been successfully launched by American writers and intellectuals Mark Twain and Henry James during the occupation of the Philippines by the US forces, he said.

This resistance movement had begun in the shape of historical anti-war rallies across the world, though it could not get an immediate success, he said.

Answering a question, he said the Iraq war could have been averted if there had been a big anti-war upsurge in America or in the Arab states. The lecturer was all praise for the Turkish parliament, which kept the war pending for two weeks by disallowing transportation of allied troops through its territories.

Had Germany, Italy and France refused to allow the use of their military bases and airspace for the attack, the war could have been averted, he also said.

Mr Ali expressed disappointment over the Muslim countries’ reaction to the war. “Only a few thousand people took to streets in Arab and other Muslim states.”

He lamented that in Pakistan the issue was taken up very late by the MMA alone while all ‘secular parties like the PPP’ ignored it.

Answering another question, he said the United Nations had always been used by countries equipped with veto power to meet their nefarious designs. The UN laws were complied with only when these suited plans of the big powers, he added.

He said the US’ request for seeking Pakistani and Indian troops to patrol the Iraq-Jordan border and Basra and Baghdad was not a new phenomenon. The Pakistan army had been providing the services in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states since 1975 under a policy of the US foreign ministry, Mr Ali concluded.