Past imperfect, present tense

To cap it all, Sunday saw the crash of a military transport helicopter in Fallujah that killed in one stroke 16 US troops and wounded 20 others.

As of November 1, 377 US soldiers had died and 2,149 were wounded, while other coalition forces had lost 56 men, for an occupation that is costing the Pentagon $ 4 billion a month.

Additionally, covering the bill for Iraq’s economic needs will require ‘‘several tens of billions of dollars’’. So was the invasion of Iraq worth the cost in Anglo-American blood and treasure?

Few respectable war historians will proffer a straightforward answer to this question barely six months after major combat was declared over. After all, the last comparable cases of military defeat followed by nation-building are Germany and Japan, and in both instances no clear verdicts could be passed until many years had passed.

Of course, back then there were no 24-hour TV networks awash with talking heads to analyse every minute development threadbare. Nor had public-opinion polls become a daily staple of the mainstream press and a crucial factor in government decision-making.

The present age being what it is, George Bush and Tony Blair will obviously have to work a lot harder than their predecessors to earn their place in history. But if the Anglo-American duo intend to stay the course, as they show all signs of doing, the occupation of Iraq — despite the costs and setbacks — may well be viewed years from now as a showpiece of benign interventionism.

From the human-rights angle alone, the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and his clansmen was an end that justified almost any means.

If European and American liberals were right to support Nato’s bombardment of Yugoslavia to save Bosnian and ethnic Albanian Muslims from Slobodan Milosevic’s war machine, then by the same token Iraqis — Shia and Sunni Muslims, Christians, communists et al — deserved the benefit of international intervention too, only long before it finally arrived.

In retrospect, all the lofty talk about Iraq’s sovereignty and Muslim sensitivities was just a cover for the international community’s lack of political will to see the job of the first Gulf War through to the finish.

With the collapse of the Baathist regime opening up Iraq to media scrutiny, the enormous damage inflicted on the country’s social, ethnic and economic fabric by long years of totalitarian rule in the guise of Arab nationalism is plain to see.

Despite sitting atop the world’s second biggest oil deposits, Iraqis today have a wealth of only weapons of individual destruction — small arms and light weapons — and a standard of living appalling by the Arabian Gulf’s standards.

Large sections of both the Sunni and Shia communities were lumpenised by Saddam’s policy of divide-and-rule enforced through coercion and patronage. As a result, the secular roots of the Iraqi middle class are in no shape to keep the body politic free of the blight of fundamentalism currently sweeping large parts of the Arab and Islamic worlds.

To blame the US-led occupation for turning Iraq into a playground for career criminals and magnet for Islamic extremists is to deprive Saddam of the credit he deserves. At best he kept a lid on their activities, but they were a product of his repressive rule anyway.

To use a favoured phrase of Donald Rumsfeld, the absence of their evidence was not the same as evidence of their absence. At least, the invasion has laid bare the true extent of radicalisation of a vast swathe of Iraqi society under Saddam’s supposedly secular rule.

And ‘‘sunlight’’, as the US justice Louis Brandeis said, ‘‘is the best disinfectant’’.

At the regional level, the demise of the Baathist regime in Baghdad has had the effect of the main wheel coming off the Arab world’s axis of hardliners and shifting the balance of power away towards the moderates, namely the wealthy and relatively well-governed Gulf Arab monarchies.

Supported by Syria, Lebanon and other like-minded actors, Iraq under Saddam was the undisputed champion of political grandstanding at meetings of the Arab League, OIC, the Security Council.

With plenty of oil and lucrative contracts to pass around, Baghad never lacked company when it came to opposing western-backed Middle East peace initiatives and financing Palestinian radical groups.

Saddam’s exit, however, has left the Arab world’s shouting brigade high and dry, on the one hand powerless in the face of US arm-twisting and, on the other hand, facing internal discontent due to economic mismanagement.

By contrast, the pro-western conservative Gulf states these days are under no apparent pressure to toe the Arab Street’s nationalist line.

Last but not the least, the occupation of Iraq by American and British forces has solved the great mystery of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Until the last day, not even chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix could vouch for the fact that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

As a documented user of chemical and biological weapons against the Iranians and Kurds in the 1980s, and a tireless procurer of nuclear-weapon components, the Iraqi regime’s half-hearted denials could hardly have been accepted at face value.

The failure of the occupation forces to find any evidence of non-conventional weapons should therefore have come as a welcome relief from the pre-war suspense and recriminations, to say nothing about the economic sanctions that had made ordinary Iraqis’ lives miserable.

Yet critics of Bush and Blair insist on using, without a trace of irony, this vital piece of information yielded by Saddam’s removal to question the logic of regime change itself.

None of this means that the war was painless or that stability is around the corner. According to an Associated Press tally, over 3,240 Iraqi civilians died across the country during a month of war.

While the north as well as the British-administered south have more or less returned to normality, the area around Baghdad, especially the so-called Sunni Triangle, remains a hotbed of anti-coalition militancy.

An upsurge in violent crime is taking a tragic human toll all over the country while the Iraqi Governing Council is struggling to win legitimacy abroad and public confidence at home. Most Iraqis, weary of violence and privation, still dream of leaving their homeland to start life afresh in the West.

Against this backdrop, Kanan Makiya, the best-known Iraqi intellectual living in America and a passionate advocate of regime change, spoke perhaps for many of his compatriots when he said upon returning from his third visit to his broken homeland, ‘‘Whatever one thinks of the war itself, it almost doesn’t matter at this point. By utilising the current situation, one can have an enormously beneficial effect on the region as a whole and on the relation between Arabs and Muslims have in general with the US.’’

Makiya was careful to add, ‘‘But that is not something that will show up in the short term.’’

(The author is a senior Indian journalist working in the Middle East)