Right war, Wrong reasons

What Rushdie feared, and what has indeed turned out to be the case, is that this might have been the right war waged for the wrong reasons. Had it been explicitly a war of liberation, in Rushdie8217;s terms, designed to remove the yoke of tyranny from a profoundly oppressed people, then whatever misgivings might have been expressed about preemption and the violation of sovereignty at least could have been justified on the grounds of humanitarianism and social justice. It could have been argued that radical surgery in the name of a just cause was a necessary expedient to excise a virulent political cancer.

But, unfortunately, doing what was right for the Iraqi people had little to do with why the decision was made to go to war. It was nothing more than an incidental byproduct of the primary motivations for attacking Iraq. This is attested by the fact that if Saddam had at any time agreed to come clean about his WMDs and remove them in accordance with US and the UN dictates, the dogs of war would have been called off. Everyone would have congratulated Saddam for 8216;8216;seeing the light8217;8217;, while the victims of his Ba8217;athist tyranny would have continued to suffer and die in his dungeons.

When Saddam launched his unprovoked attack on Iran following Ayatolla Khomeini8217;s rise to power, which led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, the United States quietly acted as an enabler and, once again, raised not a finger in behalf of the victims of this barbaric war. Nobody insisted that the gassing of thousands of Kurds was grounds for sending in the army and the marines to put a stop to the genocide. Because neither the flow of oil nor 8216;8216;global grand strategy8217;8217; were affected by the wanton murder of innocents.

When Saddam invaded oil-rich Kuwait and threatened to carry his campaign into oil-opulent Saudi Arabia, it was a different matter. Action was swift in coming! George Bush, the First, had a massive military force in place in a matter of days. Abrams tanks and smart bombs were in no time making a shambles of the Iraqi army and the country8217;s infrastructure. When the campaign was finished, Saddam was reportedly in a panic and ready to capitulate, and the Iraqi nation lay prostrate at General Schwarzkopf8217;s feet. Yet no advantage of this opportunity was taken to liberate the regime8217;s real victims once it was determined that this had nothing to do with realpolitik. Saddam was let off the political hook. Iraqi gunships were given leeway to rain death and destruction on innocent Shiite and Kurdish civilians whose leaders unfortunately had taken seriously American assurances that liberation was just around the corner. Saddam8217;s human rights victims remained in their dungeons, still suffering and screaming in pain at the torturer8217;s hand.

Twelve years later, George Bush, the Second, and his neo-conservative tribe have repeated the saga undertaken by the Father. Was this done in the name of Iraq8217;s suffering millions whose plight had essentially been ignored the first time around? Once again, as Rushdie suggests, the real victims of the Ba8217;athist dictatorship were treated as no more than collateral beneficiaries of the crusade. Admittedly, American troops did not round up and brutalise the ordinary citizens who poured into the streets once the political coast was clear. They helped them pull down a few statues of Big Brother and deface his public portraits. They opened the prison doors and allowed their occupants to disappear into the milling crowds.

But the WMDs for which the Iraq attack was ultimately justified never were and still have not been found. This fact has prompted the Foreign Briefings Editor of The London Times to ask, 8216;8216;Why have American and British Forces not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? The most plausible answer,8217;8217; he avers, 8216;8216;is that there are none8217;8217;. The reason, declares Raymond Whittaker of The Independent is that 8216;8216;the case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication8217;8217;.

So it might turn out that the Saddam regime was telling the truth all along. This will be the final irony, of course, if it turns out that the French, Germans, Russians, and the international community generally were right all along in advocating that more time be given for UN inspections before contemplating any military action. Ironically, however, even here the losers once again would have been the oppressed Iraqi people.

Meanwhile, it is clear that systematic plans for replacing tyranny with civil society after the military operations were completed were never properly formulated. Establishing public order, restoring public services and protecting Iraq8217;s national treasures were low on the American priority list. What mattered most was securing the battlefield, making sure that the oil fields were not sabotaged, and cordoning off government ministries which managed the country8217;s economic resources. If the artifacts that chronicled the rise of seven thousand years of Iraqi and Western civilisation were trashed and looted, then, to use a Hindustani phrase, 8216;8216;Kya karay What to do?8217;8217;.

Being 8216;8216;right8217;8217; for the wrong reasons, in other words, increased the chances that the 8216;8216;liberation8217;8217; forces unleashed at the grassroot level would have unanticipated repercussions which for that reason would prove difficult if not impossible to cope with. The Shiite backlash in southern Iraq dramatically illustrates the point. Demands for a fundamentalist, Shiite Islamic state are hardly what the White House and the Pentagonists had in mind following the fall of Saddam! Nor are the frenzied demonstrations in Baghdad demanding that Americans go home. Other troubling surprises undoubtedly lurk in the wings. Most notably, the possibility that the only way Ahmed Chalabi and his band of hand-picked expatriate politicians-in-waiting will be able to achieve political paramountcy in Iraq is at the point of American bayonets!

If this turns out to be true, the whole point of bringing Saddam down will have been negated. We will be confronted with de facto colonialism all over again. The United States and Great Britain will have confirmed, as nothing else could, the accuracy of Salman Rushdie8217;s somber injunction that waging war under false pretenses has many thorns, even when a coincidental gloss of social justice for the masses is retrospectively painted over it. Perhaps one should suggest that even though the wellbeing of the Iraqi people did not rank very high in Bush8217;s original political calculations, maybe the time has come for the rank order to be revised in their favour.

The writer is a visiting scholar at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia