Waves of Chaos !

Rumsfeld, one of the main architects of US foreign policy, was appearing before a Senate commission to hammer home the favourite theme of Washington’s neo-conservatives, which is: in the war against terrorism we are going from victory to victory. The Taliban regime has collapsed. Afghanistan is being rebuilt. Saddam Hussein’s regime is now just a nightmare memory. Iraq, albeit with difficulties, is now on the road to democracy. And the offensive against al-Qaida is proceeding successfully.

How could it be otherwise, since force is the only language that Muslims and Arabs understand? Tom DeLay, leader of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, an evangelist Christian and member of the Christian Zionist movement, puts the position eloquently: "In the Arab world before 9/11, they thought the US was a paper tiger. We had a president [Bill Clinton] whose retaliation to terrorism was throwing a few bombs in the desert. They laughed at that. And now they see this real stuff, and real power. And they respect power" (1).

To those who were worried that a military adventure in Iraq would worsen terrorism, Daniel Pipes, a self-styled "specialist in the Muslim soul" and unconditional defender of the policies of Ariel Sharon, replied on 8 April: "The precise opposite is more likely to happen: the war in Iraq will lead to a reduction in terrorism. I expect that Muslim anger will likewise diminish after an allied victory in Iraq. This means a US victory in Iraq will protect more that it harms." Pipes, who is close to the present US administration, had in 1990 publicly expressed fears of a "massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange food and maintaining different standards of hygiene" (2). He had also shown foresight in 1987 when he argued for military support for Saddam Hussein in the war with Iran.

These US ideologues live in a dream world. Reality has no hold on them, and they are prepared to lie to back up their fantasies. But two years after the events of 11 September 2001 it is obvious to anybody examining the facts that the US may have had military victories at the start, but is now getting bogged down politically in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration may have won battles against terrorism, but it has not won the war.

Though al-Qaida has been hit hard, it still pursues its activities. The organisation (or groups identifying with it) struck on 12 May in Riyadh (35 dead), on 16 May in Casablanca (more than 40 dead) and on 5 August in Jakarta (a dozen dead). Last month there were two bombings in Baghdad, at the Jordanian embassy and the headquarters of the United Nations, and the assassination of a principal Shia dignitary in Najaf - just as Washington was complaining about the inflow of Islamist fighters into Iraq. Despite the optimism of people such as Pipes, there is no doubt that US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with its inability to do anything about Palestine, have recruited warriors for al-Qaida.

In a recent article, "L’erreur de l’Amerique" (America’s mistake), Olivier Roy denounced the Bush administration’s "ideologisation" of the struggle against terrorism, "which leads to choosing mistaken targets and diverting substantial resources to objectives that have nothing to do with terrorism" (3). He questions the "erroneous and preconceived strategic vision: the objectives had already been defined even before 11 September - rogue states (with Iraq at their head). Hence the definition of the struggle against terrorism in terms of war. However, all the al-Qaida personnel who have been arrested were caught through classic police means, surveillance or infiltration. Those who were the object of military attacks are either dead, providing no information, or, more often, very much alive (including Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar)."

Afghanistan was the first target of the global offensive against terrorism. Almost two years after the fall of the Taliban regime, reports from press agencies (rarely taken up by the media) give a sense of chaos there. In one week last month, from 13 to 20 August, about 100 people were killed: in Helmand province in the south a bomb exploded on a bus; in the neighbouring province of Oruzgan there was a battle between two commanders each loyal to the central government; there were confrontations in the provinces of Khost and Paktika with government soldiers battling hundreds of Taliban fighters, and more.

Are these just the aftershocks of war, or more deep-rooted? In a report on 5 August, The Problem of Pashtun Alienation, the International Crisis Group noted: "The risks posed by the grow ing disaffection among Pashtuns in Afghanistan should be self-evident. The Taliban came to power not only because of the military assistance provided by Pakistan, but also because local commanders had become notorious for abusive conduct toward civilians and extortion of traders. The Taliban’s initial success in disarming the south and restoring a modicum of security was welcomed as a respite by many of the local population. Today, insecurity in the south and east, impediments to trade, and continued competition for influence by neighbouring states present a set of conditions dangerously close to those prevailing at the time of the Taliban’s emergence. The risk of destabilisation has been increased by the re-emergence of senior Taliban commanders who are ready to capitalise on popular discontent and whose long-time allies now govern the Pakistani provinces bordering Afghanistan" (4).

A report by the American organisation Human Rights Watch, Killing You Is A Very Easy Thing For Us, published in July, confirms these conclusions and highlights "evidence of government involvement or complicity in abuses in virtually every district in the southeast". The human rights violations and widespread insecurity are "in large part the result of decisions, acts, and omissions of the US government, the governments of other coalition members, and parts of the transitional Afghan government". The report also denounces Allied forces’ collaboration with warlords responsible for the worst abuses.

During the current financial year ending in September 2003 the US devoted almost $10bn to the efforts of its 9,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, but only $600m to economic aid. Alarmed at the prospect of their efforts halting, the US administration is preparing to raise this figure to $1bn for the coming year, and send 200 advisers to aid the Afghan government. But will these gestures be seen as anything but colonialism?

Kabul and Baghdad have electricity cuts in common. In Baghdad, five months after the fall of the Iraqi regime, basic needs are still not being met. The inhabitants of both cities watch with amazement as US troops go on duty with their futuristic uniforms and equipment, advanced technological resources and efficient logistics that provide them with plentiful food and bottled water. They wonder why these supermen are incapable of connecting water supplies for everybody else, getting the phones to work, and guaranteeing electricity supplies. Even the inter national airport remains closed, prolonging Afghanistan’s isolation, and the Amman-Baghdad highway, the main lifeline during the embargo, is vulnerable to looters.

After the 1991 war, and despite sanctions, the Iraqi government was able to patch the country up and restore basic services within months, even though the damage was far more widespread than it is now. The collapse of the central government and of all semblance of authority this spring came as a surprise to the US "planners". For years the US had been deaf to alarms from NGOs. Not only were many children dying, and the population suffering from malnutrition and poor health care, but the whole of society was slowly falling apart: education suffered badly, a section of the middle classes fled abroad, and there was an explosive growth of crime and delinquency. Should we really have been surprised at the looting that marked the "liberation" of Iraq? Infrastructures that had been cobbled together after 1991 were unable to resist another war.

The setbacks to post-war reconstruction could also be seen as a result of the US administration’s desire for revenge, and not just on Iraq. Rebuilding power stations should have meant calling in German and Swedish companies (such as Siemens and ABB) that had originally modernised the electricity supply system; the restoration of the telephones should have brought in Alcatel (France), which had installed the networks and knew the place. But Washington is intent on punishing the governments of "old Europe" and guaranteeing juicy contracts for companies that finance the Republican party.

The Iraqi people are suffering. They are happy to have got rid of a dictator, but nervous about the intentions of the US, which they suspect of wanting to colonise Iraq. This ambivalence is well described by Max Rodenbeck in The New York Review of Books (5). He asked a provincial governor, a longtime opponent of Saddam Hussein, whether he knew where "Chemical Ali" (Ali Hassan al-Majid, a former leading figure in the regime, now under arrest) could be found. The governor replied that he did not know, but added: "But I do know where others are hiding. Why don’t I tell the Americans? Because I am a son of Iraq and my children will be raised here. Perhaps in future I would be judged a traitor . . . The real problem is that the Americans won’t say what they plan to do with their pack of cards (the most-wanted fugitives from the old regime). Will they send them to Guantanamo? Will they just let them go? If we knew these criminals would be tried here in an Iraqi court, it would be a different story." When Rodenbeck returned to his car his driver told him that witnesses had seen Izzat Ibrahim, former vice president and the US’s "Ace of Clubs", entering the governor’s house.

The Pentagon seems incapable of restoring order, security and basic services, and is now administering Iraq as a colony. It does not understand the Iraqi people’s resistance. It mistakenly attributes this resistance to supporters of the ex-dictatorship. It has failed to understand people’s suspicions. Why should they complain when the US has successfully rid them of a tyrant? The answer is that the Iraqis know the part Washington played in their sufferings. They are still waiting for an apology for the support the US gave Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (let alone apologies from the French). They have not noticed anyone expressing any regret for the passivity of the Allied armies during the insurrection of spring 1991, nor for the deadly sanctions on Iraq, nor for the thousands of civilian deaths in 2003, particularly those that resulted from cluster bombs and napalm (6).

On 17 August the organisation Iraqi Body Count (7) estimated the number of civilian deaths since the start of hostilities at between 6,113 and 7,830, with about 20,000 wounded during the war (which, according to President Bush, ended on 1 May). Many are handicapped, but US authorities are refusing to compensate them (8). Compensation, even at $10,000 each, would cost only $200m, paltry compared with the costs of the occupation. On 17 July the United Nations Compensations Commission decided to pay, with money confiscated from Iraq, $190m for damage done during the first Gulf war, more than half of which went to that needy country, Kuwait.

There has been much talk of US losses in Iraq since the official end of hostilities. But who spares a thought for hundreds of Iraqis killed in law and order operations? Or those who died as a result of handling unexploded munitions? Or the 5,000 or more prisoners detained without trial, most of whom had no connection with the crimes of the previous regime? In a report published on 23 July, Amnesty International denounced the "torture and mistreatment" of these prisoners. It reports that some have died in prison because of fire from coalition forces.

One of the first acts of the US forces was to organise local "elections" in Mosul in May: in this city of a million inhabitants the representatives of ethnic and religious groups (Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens) each chose their representative for the municipal council, and then named a mayor, who was to be a Sunni Arab.

Some weeks later the interim governing council was set up, a body with little power, intended to give an Iraqi face to the occupation. An Arab journalist noted the "terrifying nature" of the scene. "There were separate groups for side discussions, so the Shia got together with the Shia, the Sunni with the Sunni, and the Kurds with the Kurds. As for those who don’t belong to these groups or those who do but don’t consider their presence at the council to be attributable to their belief or race, they just sat waiting, and one even left the room until the end of the discussions" (9). Now, as previously in Lebanon and more recently in Bosnia, people are labelled with fixed identities, but by doing that (in the name of a perhaps commendable respect for minority rights), the occupiers effectively undermine the possibility of building a unified, democratic state

Increasing numbers of Iraqis believe the US only wants to get strategic control of Iraq and its oil, although the present oil revenues are too low to cover even part of the cost of the occupation. The US Congress voted, for the financial year 2003, an extra $62.37bn for operations in Iraq. The occupation is costing the US $3.9bn a month. Unlike the first Gulf war, where the $60bn bill was paid by the Allies, other countries are not exactly rushing to share the burden and the US budget deficit is growing alarmingly.

The US is also worried about the shortfall in available military manpower. On the eve of the conflict the US deputy secretary for defence, Paul Wolfowitz, was as lacking in imagination as his neo-conservative friends: "It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine" (10). There are still 148,000 US soldiers in Iraq: but it is clear from the murder of Shia Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim that this is insufficient to guarantee order and secur ity. Out of the 33 combat brigades of the US Army, 16 are deployed in Iraq, and all but three are committed to strategic reserve activity and other missions from Afghanistan to South Korea. The rotation of troops is a problem. These soldiers will stay where they are for at least a year, and this accounts for the recent anxieties of their families. Alarmed at the daily death toll they have begun a campaign with the slogan "Bring them home now".

The US is frantically seeking back-up troops from other countries. It says that several dozen countries have already sent soldiers or are preparing to do so. This is propaganda, since only a few of these countries will send more than 1,000 soldiers, and because in most cases their costs will be covered by Washington. This month Poland has taken command of the region which includes the holy Shia cities of Najaf and Kerbala. Side by side with Spaniards and small contingents from Honduras and El Salvador they will have to maintain order, negotiate with Shia dignitaries, and settle tribal disputes. They do have a secret weapon: they have brought speeches by their president Aleksander Kwasniewski, in Polish, English and Arabic (11), presumably to endear them to local hearts and minds.

From Afghanistan to Iraq a wave of chaos is running across that better world announced by Donald Rumsfeld. The US is fast getting bogged down in these countries, and seems incapable of imposing a just peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So what is the way forward? After the US victory against Iraq some people in France proposed an alliance with the "victors" (12); this was the logic that led Paris to support UN Secur ity Council Resolution 1483 on 22 May, sanctioning the US occupation. We have now seen the results of that occupation. Should we now be helping Washington to climb out of its Iraqi and Middle Eastern quagmire (13)? If anybody needs our help it is the Iraqis and other peoples of the Middle East. They have been the first victims of the chaos that war and the extremism of the Bush administration have brought to the region. The only way to peace is through the UN. Even the Bush administration seems to realise that now, but it wants both to have UN cover and to keep political and military control in Iraq. It needs to go further than that and give the UN the mandate to hand real power to the Iraqi people. For their sake, it is urgent that we take that route.

(1) International Herald Tribune, Paris, 26-7 July 2003.

(2) Quoted by The Washington Post, 25 July 2003.

(3) Le Figaro, 7 August 2003.

(4) International Crisis Group, Brussels, 5 August 2003.

(5) 14 August 2003.

(6) Libération, 14 August 2003.

(7) http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

(8) See The Washington Post, 31 May 2003.

(9) Abdulwahab Badrakhan, Al Hayat, London, 2 August 2003.

(10) Slate, 5 August 2003.

(11) Le Figaro, 14 August 2003.

(12) See Alain Gresh, "Crimes and lies in ’liberated’ Iraq", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, May 2003.

(13) Editorial, Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 July 2003.

Translated by Ed Emery