Baghdad can backfire

Because, in tragic contrast to the moral outrage of most Indians, much of the Indian establishment is in shock and awe, abjectly in thrall to American power. Our globalisation groupies seek our national destiny as camp-followers of the militarily muscular.

They see nothing morally wrong in Anglo-Saxons invading a sovereign Arab nation. Indeed, sovereignty itself seems to them to be a burden; so much better to be on the ‘‘winning’’ side. Twelve days into this war of naked aggression, however, they are getting a bit confused about which really is the winning side.

For this war is going exactly as all wars since World War I have gone: On their own steam, of their own volition, and without regard for the carefully laid plans of mice and men. The Anglo-American-Aussies have huffed and they’ve puffed but hardly blown the house down.

The start was suitably farcical. The US Central Intelligence Agency—which lacks for nothing but intelligence—slipped a note to the US president telling him exactly where Saddam and his cohorts were confabulating. So, without taking the essential necessary prerequisite of stationing CNN at the scene of action, George W. Bush III ordered a missile attack to ‘‘decapitate’’ the entire Iraqi leadership.

When neither mourning nor celebration overtook the streets of Baghdad, the propaganda machine of the world’s sole superpower put it about that Saddam had fled—but to where was a bit unclear. He could hardly have fled to Iran where the Ayatollahs have been itching to avenge themselves for the eight-year long war that Saddam Hussein, as a US surrogate, launched on them after Jimmy Carter’s Keystone Kops botched their mission to rescue the US hostages. Then where?

Unable to spot their target, the US launched on Iraq in a single night 1,200 Cruise missiles at US $ 660,000 a piece — that is, some $800 million of fire power to assassinate one man. More expensive than tickets to Chicago but so much more fun.

Especially as the fireworks over the Tigris were more spectacular than Diwali over the Yamuna. To no avail. Up popped Saddam next day on every couch potato’s TV screen, but wearing glasses and reading from a note-book. Not Saddam at all, said the spin doctors of the Bush-Blair school, obviously a double since: a) Saddam’s never before been seen in public looking like an old maid with spectacles; and b) reading from a hand-written text in a notebook instead of from an immaculately typed script on the best quality A4 bond paper.

So, Saddam next day obligingly took off his spectacles, had his uniform ironed, and gathered around him the top guns of Iraq’s supreme authority, the Revolutionary Command Council; then let in the visual media. The geniuses at Langley, Virginia, determined that this must be old footage, for how could every leader of the Iraqi Baath Party have escaped the pounding they gave everything standing in the narrow strip between Saffadoun Street—Baghdad’s Fifth Avenue—and the Tigris, Baghdad’s River Potomac?

It’s been the same story night after night, the Yanks in awe of their techno-might, unable to comprehend that patriotism, pride and human dignity are as shock-proof in Iraq than they proved to be in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Not everyone is as lacking in nationalism as our globalisation groupies.

Till a fortnight ago, the Iraqi information minister was certainly the world’s least credible spokesman. Rummy — Donald Rumsfeld, US secretary of defence—has now beaten him to second place. CNN/BBC having shown all the footage available of Iraqi PoWs, their hands tied behind their backs twitching in fear, Rummy went ballistic about how showing US PoWs on Iraqi TV violated the Geneva Conventions; then followed up his humanitarian concern by bombing to smithereens a market-place in Baghdad city almost as crowded as the World Trade Centre before Osama bin Laden.

We were told that Umm Qasr had been taken; that Basra was brimming with school children throwing confetti and pretty Iraqi girls lining up to kiss their benefactors; that the bridge-head over the Euphrates at Nassiriyah had been secured without a shot being fired; that the Shias of Najaf and Karbala were rising in rebellion shouting with joy, as in the last reel of the old WWII movies: ‘‘The Marines are here! The Marines are here!’’

Two weeks into Shock and Awe, the tiny flea-bitten overgrown village of Umm Qasr is still forbidden fruit; downtown Basra awaits its first Brit; Nassiriyah continues mowing down the foreign devils; Najaf holds out; at Karbala, the second most holy Islamic site after the Kaffaba, where in the seventh century AD the vicious caliph of Damascus, Yazd, slaughtered Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s favourite grandson, every member of his family and most of his entourage in a massacre which 1,400 years later reverberates in every Muslim mind as the most sacrilegious of injustices, a second Battle of Karbala is being fought against a 21st century Yazd.

The Anglo-American-Aussies have reached the gates of Baghdad. A tremendous military achievement, say Rummy and his acolytes. I am intrigued. One of my jobs as deputy chief of mission in Baghdad all those years ago was to drive out from Baghdad to meet the large number of Shias of Indian origin who thronged Karbala and Najaf.

We would set out in the morning after a leisurely breakfast, reach Karbala in time for elevenses, eat an enormous lunch at a Hyderabadi cleric’s home in Najaf, and drive back via the bridgehead over the Euphrates at Nassiriyah to be in Baghdad by dinner time. Moving unopposed over scrubland along Western-built motorways which bypass all habitations, and slowed only by traffic jams caused by your own convoys, is, frankly, no great shakes.

It is the angry towns and anguished villages left to the rear which contain the Iraqi irregulars raring to hit the enemy when his back is turned and his attention distracted. The coming Battle of Baghdad is Stalingrad in the making. Then will follow the journey into chaos. You still think Whitey is winning?

Write to msaiyar@expressindia.com