Informed Comment

*British authorities have been casting about for some way to deal with Abu Hamza Misri, the fiery engineer-cum-preacher at Finsbury Park mosque who has preached and written justifications of the September 11 attacks. They raided the mosque in connection with their discovery of an Algerian cell linked to al-Qaida that had ricin poison in its possession. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, also worshipped there. Misri as a British citizen has been hard to touch, despite his horrendous hate speech. Now it turns out that he may have come by his British citizenship fraudulently, via a 1980 marriage to a British woman. It seems that the woman was at the time still married to her first husband and had not secured a legal divorce. This may be grounds for stripping him of his citizenship and charging him with polygamy (a crime in Britain), and deporting him to Egypt. Presumably the Mubarak government is looking forward to debriefing him and hosting him.

*On a list, the question came up of why Saddam seems so willing to risk everything for the sake of his weapons of mass destruction programs. I replied:

1) Saddam is extremely ambitious. He does not want to be dictator of a

third-rate country. He wants to be a major Power. Iraq alone cannot

provide the proper platform for a regional superpower. But if he had been

able to keep both Khuzistan and Kuwait, he might have had something.

Failing such territorial aggrandizement, WMD is another route to Power

status.

2) Saddam is paranoid about the intentions of his neighbors. He fears

that not only will he fail to make Iraq a major Power, but nefarious

interests may harm Iraq itself and thus reduce him to weakness. He rants

against the Turks and their designs on damming the Tigris and Euphrates.

He fears Kurdish separatism, often backed by outside powers like Iran or

the US. He fears Shiite irredentism and Iran. He fears the conservative

Gulf monarchies are trying to undermine him. He fears Israel and Mossad

(he has called the inspectors spies for the CIA and Mossad; to be fair,

both agencies appear at one time or another to have seriously planned for

taking him out). He fears the US and the UK, even when they aren’t

actively planning an invasion. Before the first Gulf War he interpreted a

VOA report comparing him to Ceaucescu as a sign that the US planned to

arrange his overthrow.

My reading is that Saddam’s combination of overweening pride and ambition,

and profound fear of everyone around him drives the obsession with WMD.

Without the latter, he would just be a tinpot dictator of a small 3rd

world country. It doesn’t suit his self-image. It would be like Napoleon

being satisfied with just having France. But also without it he would

feel weak and helpless before the designs of his nefarious enemies. It

isn’t a completely crazy conviction. After all, we’ve decided that

Khomeini was only repelled with the aid of WMD.

The syndrome whereby authoritarian personalities represent themselves as

victims of the scheming of others and think of their bullying and

aggression as merely self-defense, is common in history. Milosevic did

this to the Bosnians, e.g. Saddam is not even the only leader in the ME

who thinks this way, and has WMD.

*The question was raised on a list of what would happen if the US invaded Iraq and found there were not weapons of mass destruction there. I fear I replied somewhat cynically, but also called it as I see it. If Iraq turns out not to have much WMD, the administration will fall back on its other main argument, that Saddam is a monster who has killed and brutalized his own people and repeatedly invaded his neighbors. We already have had Halabja survivors among the Kurds protest the doubts some Westerners have expressed about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and willingness to use them. They say, basically, *we* know all about WMD. And, given the thousands of Shi`ites the Baath killed in the south, there are almost certainly mass graves that will provide a macabre justification ex post facto for the removal of that regime. Footage of the Iranian vets injured by mustard gas could also be put on television. How wars are justified before they are launched and how they are justified afterwards is frequently different. If there is a relatively quick victory, no one will inquire into the justifications too closely. If it becomes a quagmire, it won’t matter what the justification was: the public will turn against the war anyway if it goes badly.

*The fundamentalist parties in Pakistan have called for all US visitors to that country to be fingerprinted and registered, in retaliation for how Pakistani visitors to the US are being treated. I’ve got news for them. When I visited Pakistan in the 1980s, I always had to register with the authorities, and I had to get a no objection permit from the police before I could leave Pakistan again. Fingerprinting is a different matter, but the registration of foreigners has been insisted on by Pakistan for a long time. It is not therefore such a big slap in the face for Pakistani visitors in the US to have to register. My objection is that the law should be for everyone, and if Muslims have to register, so should Chinese, Indians, etc.

*On another list someone raised the question about whether Sharon will attempt to expel the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories, perhaps under cover of a second Gulf War.

The American Friends Service Committee has spoken on this issue at:

AFSC Urges

Public Statement by U.S. Government

98 Israeli academics circulated a petition on this possibility recently. See:

http://www.nimn.org/jewishper/IsraeliAcademe.html

I think it is more likely that Sharon will simply continue to annex Palestinian lands to Israel and leave the Palestinians with weak Bantustans that cannot have a hope of coalescing into a real state –sort of like the US Indian Reservations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not necessary to ethnically cleanse a people if you can corral and decisively cow them.

Expelling the Palestinians during a second Gulf War would be an even more extreme slap in the face to the US than any of Sharon’s provocations in the past 18 months, and I very much doubt he would risk it. Perhaps the extra $10 bn. the Israelis are asking the US for is in part a quid pro quo for avoidance of very bad behavior.

* Iraqi Vice President Tariq Aziz has warned Kuwait that Iraq would not rule out hitting it if it allows US troops to launch an invasion of Iraq from its soil. Such complicity, he said, would make this action legitimate. (It is not clear exactly what Aziz is threatening to do. However, if it involved the deliberate targetting of civilian populations, it would not be legitimate; it would be a war crime. Aziz should be careful; he may find himself in the docket.)

*Jabir al-Mubarak al-Sabah, Kuwait’s Minister of Defense, said he was not surprised by this threat, and that it revealed the sort of intentions Iraq had toward its neighbors. He pledged that the Kuwait armed forces stood ready to repel any threat. (Kuwait is a nice little country, but I’m afraid its armed forces aren’t exactly up to this, and that it is the American umbrella that emboldens the minister).

*Saddam Hussein asked his generals to be vigilant against traitors in their midst who might sell out to the Americans. He saw the same reports the rest of us did, that the Saudis and other neighbors have been trying to convince someone to make a coup and depose Saddam so as to avert the looming war. (I wouldn’t hold my breath. Saddam is not the resigning kind; he is a genocidal megalomaniac. And all the generals who even thought about a coup are pushing up daisies. Of course, if he and his circle of Tikritis actually cared about the country and the people they have looted and brutalized, they would go into exile. But they aren’t that sort of person to begin with, which is one of the reasons we stand on the brink of war).

*Newsday reports that US Vice President Dick Cheney and special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad have been working to expand the expatriate committee of Iraqi politicians primed to succeed Saddam Hussein from 65 to 100, so as to dilute the influence of the pro-Iran bloc of 15 members from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Khalilzad is said to envisage a situation where policy makers will be drawn from the committee, but technocrats from inside Iraq will also be given power if they are untainted by association with Saddam Hussein. Khalilzad is said to recognize that since some 60 percent of Iraqis are Shi`ite, a similar proportion of high government officials will be. But apparently he has come to realize that SCIRI’s support inside Iraq may actually be shallow. Many Iraqi Shi`ites are secularists. Apparently he will be looking for such secular Shi`ite technocrats as a counter-ballast to the clerical SCIRI.

One problem: If SCIRI’s troops, the 15,000-man al-Badr Brigade, plays a “northern-alliance” type role in this new Iraq war, it may well be positioned to garner enormous political power in the aftermath despite the planning on paper going on now. A SCIRI dominated Iraq would be a huge gift to the clerical hardliners in Tehran, and it has long puzzled me why the Bush administration was putting so many eggs in that basket. Now they are backing off, causing a furore.

*Some 18 out of about 100 radical troops of a joint Hizb-i Islami /Taliban/ al-Qaida force have been killed near Spin Baldak in Afghanistan. This was the biggest battle between US forces and remnants of the radical Islamists since Anaconda, 10 months ago. Hizb-i Islam is the guerrilla group of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, who has made an alliance with Taliban remnants in Waziristan, tribal Pakistan. Hikmatyar was the darling of the US and of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence during the 1980s when the Reagan administration used him to batter the Soviets. He was all along a frightening extremist. In his youth he had thrown acid on unveiled women in Afghanistan. Having created this Frankenstein’s monster, the US now has to deal with the mess the Reaganauts made. Our brave military men wouldn’t be risking their lives in a battle against this guy if the Reaganauts hadn’t gone overboard in backing extremely unsavory elements in the 1980s.

*Bush’s State of the Union address gave specifics about what weapons of mass destruction the US thinks Saddam has and what he would have to prove he has destroyed to satisfy the Bush administration: 25,000 liters of anthrax; 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin; 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent; 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents; mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ warfare agents. But the wording was a little unclear, since the president kept saying Iraq had had materials sufficient to produce these quantities of these weapons, but seemed to sidestep the question as to whether it actually had done so. Apparently the anthrax and some of the chemicals were provided to Iraq in the 1980s by the Reagan administration to ensure that Iran did not win the Iran-Iraq war. I suppose that is how this administration is so sure Iraq has this stuff; it has people serving in it who provided the material to Saddam. Anyway, it seems clear to me that Bush is set on war. They are saying now it might not be until mid-March.

*Stanley Kurtz has written a lame reply to my History News Network response to his attacks on the Middle East Studies Association. He admits he knows nothing serious about Middle East studies (but trumpets his Hindi. Kiya hal hai, bhai? Zera aram karo!) He admits that MESA gets no money from the US government. He basically backs down on all the particulars of his irresponsible libel of the association. He retains vague and unstated reservations. And then he insists he has the right to judge the field even though he knows nothing about it. Well, of course. That is what punditry is. It is persons paid by sugar daddies to push agendas even though they know nothing about the subject. Sometimes they even push agendas they know to be false. Gasp. A survey showed recently that most people who are incompetent at their jobs can’t even recognize the fact, not having enough competency to judge themselves. Kurtz cannot see how cartoonish his ill-informed rants about MESA are. Has he even ever attended a MESA conference? Apparently not. Another survey showed that having to work with or be around incompetent people can give you a heart attack. It is a hell of a thing.

The Journal of the International Institute ( University of Michigan)

Winter 2003, vol. 10, no. 2, p. 3

The Risks of Peace and The Costs of War

Juan Cole

Most discussion of the looming war against Iraq by the United States quite naturally focuses, in this country, on the pros and cons of such an action for America. I would like instead to talk about regional perceptions of the issue in the Middle East itself, and about likely costs of war and risks of peace there.

Risks of Peace

Let me begin with the risks of peace, reversing our title. The Gulf War of 1990-91 was a status quo war. It was conceived by the international community and even by the United States as a way of turning the dock back to July 1990, before Iraq invaded Kuwait. The problem was that the status quo ante was highly unsatisfactory. The Persian Gulf is the site of two-thirds of the proven petroleum reserves in the world. Yet the countries along its littoral have no means of providing security to themselves. They tend to be small if not tiny and militarily weak. The two exceptions here are Iran and Iraq.

The British created this situation of small states in the Gulf, to provide for the security of their shipping and communications to India in the colonial period. Yet they withdrew from the Gulf in 1969, and left behind no obvious successor. Nixon and Kissinger attempted to promote the Shah of Iran as the new guarantor of Gulf security in the 1970s, but that went sour in 1978-79 with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Iraq made a bid to become the premier Gulf military power with its attack on Iran and the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, in which it was broadly speaking backed by the United States (which, however, played both sides against one another). Iraq did so badly in the Iran-Iraq war, however, that it left itself without credibility as security provider in the region. It also was left deeply in debt. The attack on Kuwait was aimed at regaining the sort of petroleum wealth that would allow Iraq to launch itself as a great power in the region. But it was unacceptable to the world community and Iraq was pushed back and made a pariah.

The post-war arrangements were a tragic failure. Bush’s call for an uprising of Shi’ites and Kurds against Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party succeeded only too well. Alarmed, and perhaps under Saudi pressure, the US appears to have made a deliberate decision to allow the Iraqis to put these uprisings down with helicopter gun ships, which could have been interdicted under the terms of the armistice. Tens of thousands of Shi`ites were killed then and subsequently. Although the United States ultimately stepped in to protect the Kurds, it did not do the same for the Shi’ites in the south, who continued to be victimized.

The sanctions regime initially allowed too little food and medicine into Iraq, harming civilians and children; and the Baath regime’s insistence on skimming off profits from smuggled petroleum or later from the oil for food program of the UN only worsened their plight. This situation created vast discontents with the United States in the Arab world and in the Muslim world more generally. The mastermind of the bombing of a Western dance club in Indonesia that killed over 180 persons gave the US actions against Iraq as one of his motives. Although Iraq has arguably been contained, its containment has come at a very high price.

Domestically, the civilian population and children have suffered enormously from lack of medicine and from poverty produced by the sanctions and by the distribution of wealth toward party members. Politically active Shi’ites have been killed in the thousands and dissident villages in the marshes have seen their swamps drained. Internationally, the United States faces constant opprobrium for keeping the sanctions in place. Now we are told that after all this suffering, its prime aim, of preventing Iraq from continuing to militarize and to develop weapons of mass destruction, may well have faded anyway. The risks of peace therefore include: continued lack of good security in the Persian Gulf region, imperiling both the people who live there and the assured access to energy supplies on the part of the US and its allies; the continued brutalization of the Iraqi population by a totalitarian regime that has conducted virtual genocide against Kurds and Shi’ites; the continued demonization. of the United States in the region and in the Muslim world for the negative effects of the sanctions regime; the possibility that Iraq will develop enough in the way of weapons of mass destruction to break out of containment and to attempt to gain popularity by attacking yet another of its neighbors, perhaps Turkey or Israel. The aggressive, militaristic nature of the Saddam Hussein regime makes such a scenario, however unlikely, at least plausible.

I do not personally believe that a risk of peace includes an Iraq weapons of mass destruction attack on the United States itself, nor is there any solid evidence in open sources of a firm link between Iraq and anti-US terrorism.

Costs of War

The regional costs of a US war on Iraq are potentially great: The war will inevitably be seen in the Arab world as a neo-colonial war. It will be depicted as a repeat of the French occupation of Algeria or the British in Egypt-or indeed, the British in Iraq. These were highly unpopular and humiliating episodes. The US, even if it has a quick military victory, is unlikely to win the war diplomatically in the Arab world. Pan-Arabism has been more aspiration than reality in the past century, but this US war against Iraq might well promote the formation of a stronger regional political bloc.

As a result of resentment against this neocolonialism, the likelihood is that al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations will find it easier to recruit angry young men in the region and in Europe for terrorist operations against the US and its interests. The final defeat of the Baath Party will be seen as a defeat of its ideals, which include secularism, improved rights for women and high modernism. Arabs in despair of these projects are likely to turn to radical Islam as an alternative outlet for their frustrations. The Sunnis of Iraq could well turn to groups like al-Qaida, having lost the ideals of the Baath. Iraqi Shi’ites might become easier to recruit into Khomeinism of the Iranian sort, and become a bulwark for the shaky regime in Shi’ite Iran.

A post-war Iraq may well be riven with factionalism that impedes the development of a well-ensconced new government. We have seen this sort of outcome in Afghanistan. Commentators often note the possibility for Sunni-Shi’ite divisions or Arab Kurdish ones. These are very real. If Islamic law is the basis of the new state, that begs the question of whether its Sunni or Shi’ite version will be implemented. It is seldom realized that the Kurds themselves fought a mini-civil war in 1994-1997 between two major political and tribal fac- tions. Likewise the Shi’ites are deeply divided, by tribe, region and political ideology. Many lower-level Baath Party members are Shi’ite, but tens of thousands of Iraqi Shi’ites are in exile in Iran and want to come back under the banner of ayatollahs.

Internal factionalism is unlikely to reach the level of Yugoslavia after the fall of the communists, since US air power can be invoked to stop mass slaughter. But there could be a good deal of trouble in the country, and as the case of Afghanistan shows, the US cannot always stop faction fighting.

A new government in Iraq raises questions about its relationship to its neighbors. Turkey is strongly opposed to Iraqi Kurdish control of the oil fields of Kirkuk. The Kurds have all but announced that they will try to grab them when fighting breaks out. The Turks have said that in case this happens, Turkey may well invade Iraq to stop it. It is unacceptable to the Turkish government to have well-funded autonomous Kurds on their borders. They fear Kurdish nationalism, which might well tear eastern Turkey away from Ankara. Shi’ite Iran will certainly attempt to increase its influence among Iraqi Shi’ites once the Baath is defeated.

Shi’ite political parties may well turn to Tehran for funding. A US-occupied country where the Iranian ayatollahs have substantial influence is a disaster waiting to happen. An Iraq war may have a negative impact on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A democratic Iraq, if any such thing emerges from an American occupation, will not necessarily be less opposed to Israeli policies toward Palestinians and the creeping annexation of the West Bank. Iraqi individuals and political organizations, freed from Baath monopoly, might well support the Palestinians, including Palestinian guerrillas, at a higher level than does Saddam.

The chaos of war could allow for an outbreak of major violence between Palestinians and Israelis. The Baath may target Israel with scuds tipped with poison gas, e.g. Israeli retaliation will make the war look even more like a joint colonialist and Zionist effort among Arabs, and further inflame passions against the US in the region.

Those who support an Iraq war argue that the potential negative fall-out consists of improbable scenarios that are no more likely to come to fruition than did the dire forecasts about overthrown Arab regimes in 1990. They argue that if we can get a genuinely democratic, modern Iraq out of the war, its beneficial effects will radiate throughout the region. They may be right. But it is worth remembering that we were promised a democratic Kuwait in 1991 and a democratic, stable Afghanistan in 2002, and have yet to see either.

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