Iraq war launched; Arab world faces the unknown,
headlines the
Beirut daily An-Nahar, following the American air and missile raids on
Baghdad that signaled the start of the long-awaited invasion.
The paper is one of few in the Arab world to have managed to report the opening shots of the war in the early hours of the morning before going to press. By way of reminding readers that they have been here before, it publishes a special supplement consisting of a reprint of its Thursday, Jan. 17, 1991 edition, which reported the first day of the US-led campaign aimed at ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
Most Arab dailies seem to have been anticipating a more dramatic start
to the latest war than Thursday's apparently limited dawn strikes,
following leaks suggesting the US military would initiate hostilities
with a display of firepower of unprecedented magnitude intended to
instill shock and awe.
They accompany their accounts of the military preparations with
reports of how various Arab governments have been positioning
themselves to accommodate the outbreak of a war they all professed to
oppose: the last-minute offer made by Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa,
the king of Bahrain, which is home to the US Fifth Fleet, to provide
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with sanctuary; renewed assurances by
Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdel-Aziz, after his talks
with US military chief General Tommy Franks and with American forces
reportedly deploying in various Saudi air bases, that the Kingdom will
not participate
in the conflict, and the speech by Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak blaming Saddam for the impending American
occupation of his country.
In reporting Mubarak's speech, the leading semi-official Cairo
daily Al-Ahram gives more prominence to the passages in which he
exhorted his countrymen to defend our domestic front and preserve
Egyptian national security,
and implicitly to refrain from
criticizing government official policy over Iraq.
But other Arab newspapers highlight Mubarak's damning verdict that
Iraq itself bears the brunt of responsibility
for the outbreak
of war because of its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the security
fears
and the deployment of US troops in the Arabian Peninsula it
triggered, and Saddam's subsequent failure to regain trust.
Arab commentators are divided over Mubarak's stance and the underlying attitude it reflects, amid continuing controversy over the Arab world's collective failure to prevent the mugging of Iraq.
An-Nahar's chief editor Gebran Tueni approves of Mubarak's
sentiments, but wishes the Egyptian president had spoken out earlier
against Saddam, and that he and other Arab leaders had taken up the
UAE's call on the Iraqi leader to resign so as to spare his
country from attack. But he says the ambivalence displayed by the Arab
states during the crisis had one positive
side effect: it
dispelled the dangerous impression, which some have sought to
encourage, that this is a Crusader
war targeting Arabs or
Muslims as such. Tueni also expects that Washington will complement
the stick
it is wielding against Baghdad with the carrot
of a political settlement in Palestine. It is no coincidence
that Mahmoud Abbas was named Palestinian prime minister just ahead of
the opening shot in the war on Iraq, to implement the road map
which the US revived in an attention-grabber to appease opponents of
the invasion, he says.
This being the case, and with war having become a reality for us
all, we must move on from opposing war and crying over spilled milk,
to fortifying our positions so we can formulate a comprehensive idea
of what we want for the future of our countries,
Tueni writes. In
Lebanon's case, he urges Hizbullah not to wage someone
else's war on our territory
so as to avoid giving Israel an
excuse to exploit the war on Iraq to bombard us or settle its
scores at the expense of Lebanon and all the Lebanese.
But An-Nahar columnist Ali Hamadeh takes a dim view of Mubarak's
attempt to deflect attention
from the American invasion and
occupation of Iraq by lambasting Saddam. This, Mr. President, is
not the time to hide behind the Iraqi regime's faults as a way of
justifying stillness,
he comments. Hamadeh remarks that despite
all the talk of how the Iraqi leader could have avoided war by
relinquishing power, the Americans made clear when quizzed about the
48-hour ultimatum that their troops would invade regardless whether he
quit the country or stayed.
This, he says, sheds a different light on the so-called UAE
initiative,
which was cast as a way of avoiding war, but which
avoided answering the key question: would Saddam's voluntary
departure actually forestall a US invasion?
Hamadeh says the responsibility
for the war is not confined to
Saddam and his disastrous regime,
but shared by most of the
other Arab states. They include Egypt, whose self-styled Arab
leadership
has disappeared without trace; Saudi Arabia, which now
faces the prospect of a major crisis
following the collapse of
its relationship with the US; the Gulf sheikhdoms, whose principal
loyalty is to wealth;
the Hashemite Kingdom, which is panicking at
the prospect of the Americans adopting the Likudnik concept that
Jordan is Palestine;
and Syria, which is mourning the demise of
a fraternal arch-rival,
and bracing for tough times ahead.
This is an Arab world that is bracing itself for a new era of
direct foreign occupation, after having lost its capacity to shoulder
the responsibility of national independence,
Hamadeh writes. An
Arab world whose rulers don't dare have their names included on
the US secretary of state's list. He spoke of 45 countries, 30 of
them (Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Colombia, the Czech
Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia,
Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia,
the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania,
Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan) allied to
the US in the full glare of the sun, and another 15 allied under cover
of darkness. It wasn't difficult to conclude that the later are
the Arab states!
In the Saudi-run daily Al-Hayat, Abdelwahhab Badrakhan proclaims the
start of the first illegal war of the 21st century,
after a
furious international quarrel not just over the morality of the war
itself but particularly the morality of US policy.
He writes that although Washington went through the motions of seeking
UN approval, it only did so while completing its military
preparations. In the interim, all the UN arms inspectors succeeded in
doing was to make America's military task easier by disabling
Iraq's missiles and probing its defenses. Not for a moment did
Washington deviate from its preconceived timetable. Even at the
moments when it showed restrain and a willingness to wait longer, it
was acting in keeping with the plan.
Badrakhan stresses that opposition to war does not reflect sympathy
for Saddam, but alarm at the new rules of international conduct the US
is instituting. Having applied its doctrine of pre-emptive war to
Iraq, no one will be able to prevent it in future from targeting
any other country merely because it does not submit completely to its
dictates,
he warns.
Indeed, America might not have to wage its future wars in the same
manner. The sheer scale of the death, destruction and suffering it
inflicts on Iraq could serve as a sufficient lesson
to
others. Badrakhan says that while the war on Iraq is the first of
its kind,
it is also in some respects a scaled-up replica
of last year's Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank, with
similar, methods, pretexts and goals. This in turn raises the question
of how much bearing Israel and its supporters in the US have on the
war, the subject of a growing debate in America.
The critical British MPs who bombarded Prime Minister Tony Blair with
probing questions during the debate in the House of Commons, Badrakhan
says, highlighted another facet
of the war. They wanted to know
what assurances he could offer about the moral conduct of the war,
what weapons would be used, the avoidance of civilians, the situation
in Iraq after the regime change,
and post-war stability in the
Middle East.
The questions here are more important than the answers,
Badrakhan comments. The prime minister has been attempting to reply
to them for months. But he failed to persuade, and was no more
persuasive yesterday, for the simple reason that he is not in a
position to offer any assurances. It's all in American hands.
Publisher/editor Abdelbari Atwan predicts in his pan-Arab Al-Quds al-Arabi that the US invaders will encounter more resistance in Iraq than is generally anticipated.
Invading American forces will control Iraq's skies, and they
will have the upper hand on the ground,
he writes. For the US
is the mightiest military power in history, ancient and modern.
But the demise of great empires begins with small setbacks, he
writes. We must always remember that it was at the gates of Acre
that the end of Napoleon's empire started, and that the collapse
of the Soviet empire began at the hands of the Afghan mujahideen.
Atwan quotes an unnamed senior Iraqi official as telling him that
while Baghdad is well aware of the disparity between its military
capacity and America's, unlike in 1991 it has made ample
preparations for steadfastness and resistance
modeled on the
experience of the Palestinians in withstanding vastly superior Israeli
forces. The official remarked: We will not let you down this time.
We know our enemy well, and we are relying on ourselves and not
counting much on our Arab brethren. We have factored into our
calculations that the vast majority of Arab regimes will stand in the
enemy trench. Atwan says that while it is impossible to tell
whether this prediction will be fulfilled, what we do know is that
the real battle will be in Baghdad and other cities such as Mosul and
Tikrit,
and that America's massive technological edge
diminishes greatly when engaging in urban guerrilla warfare. US forces
could face legendary resistance
in the capital and suffer heavy
casualties, because unlike 1991 the Iraqis will be defending their
national soil this time. We will not be surprised if Basra, Amara,
Nasseriya, Mosul and Kirkuk fall, nor if large numbers of regular
Iraqi troops surrender. For the huge disparity in the balance of power
is flagrant. But we should always remember that the real war will not
begin until after the military defeat,
says Atwan.
Looking ahead to the aftermath of the earthquake
for Iraq and
the region, US-based Palestinian academic Hisham Sharabi considers two
possible scenarios
for the future.
Under the realistic and pessimistic scenario,
he writes in the
Jordanian daily Ad-Dustour, the Iraqi military surrender in Baghdad
and other besieged towns, and no popular resistance is mounted. US
forces occupy Iraq's oil fields and main water sources. The Iraqi
state is abolished
and a number of self-governing political
entities are set up under US control. The power of friendly
ruling elites is strengthened in order to suppress any popular
opposition. The US uses Iraq as a springboard for besieging
rogue
states and opponents of the new regional order, and to
crush the social and popular movements that resist it under the rubric
of the war on terror.
The Palestinian intifada is stifled, and
the Palestine question is resolved by creating a nominal Palestinian
state
in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli
political and economic tutelage.
But things might also go very differently, Sharabi suggests. An alternative scenario: the Anglo-American campaign fails to achieve its objectives in full, the situation in Iraq and the region remains unstable, and pockets of resistance surface here and there. Popular uprisings crop up in various countries, triggering US military intervention. The Palestinians continue their uprising and reject the solutions offered by Israel and America. Order and security in the region break down.
We should not forget that this war differs from all previous wars
in history, for its objective is not only the occupation of Iraq and
hegemony over the Middle East, but control of the world,
Sharabi
adds.
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