As the invasion of Iraq enters its second week, the mounting toll of civilian casualties not only outrages commentators in the Arab world but increasingly convinces them that the Americans and British are going to find it harder to achieve their war aims than they imagined.
Fifty people killed by cluster bombs in Basra. Over 600 dead in
Najaf. Tens of bodies in the Baghdad market yesterday, scores more in
Nasseriya the day before. And we’re still at the beginning of
the war, meaning we’ve yet to see all its American and British
filth,
writes Abdelwahhab Badrakhan in the Saudi-run pan-Arab
daily Al-Hayat.
They are ‘liberating’ Iraq via massacres, the same
way the Baathist regime took control of it. And the Iraqis, who are
being promised salvation from this regime, are also being pledged a
foreign occupation of their soil and their homeland
Yet so-called coalition
military briefers remain obsessed with
the idea that their forces will be greeted with roses
as though
they were friendly UN peacekeepers, hence the outrage they express at
the Iraqi resistance they are encountering.
They only realized the error they made when they raised the Stars and
Stripes over Umm Qasr and gloated at TV images of Iraqi soldiers
surrendering after they began seeing pictures of their own dead and
captured. In any case, these pictures shattered the myth of a
‘clean’ war. Even those who might have heeded the
American leaflets calling on them to surrender found they had been
deceived,
Badrakhan writes.
And they are not the only ones being duped in a war that was based
from the outset on a set of deceptions,
he says. In Basra, under
siege by British forces and facing a humanitarian catastrophe, British
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon forgot
that the city had been
pounded with cluster bombs, and accused the regime’s forces
of shelling local civilians.
The British have now been assigned the task of taking the city, and
are hoping for a repeat of the 1991 uprising. The city wants to rise
against the tyrannical regime, of course, but it won’t do so at
the press of a button by Geoff Hoon so that his men can enter it and
govern it. The British have lost their senses. There’s no
consideration for the circumstances and conditions inside the
city. They want there to be a civil massacre, and they want it now.
But that other genius, Donald Rumsfeld, has advised the Basris not
to revolt. Which advice should they heed, American or British?
The pan-Arab daily Al-Quds al-Arabi writes that the steadfastness
of the Iraqis has taken aback the Americans and their allies, together
with the Arab leaders. They all banked on a swift collapse and even
quicker surrender, but what happened was completely different.
The paper says America’s strategy appears to have been thrown
into confusion. One day they say their goal is to occupy Basra, and
another day they say they don’t want to occupy the cities but to
head straight for the main address, Baghdad. But it seems that getting
there will neither be speedy nor easy.
Their advance on the capital must be meeting fierce resistance and
sustaining setbacks, which they do not admit. Otherwise they would
have been at the city gates by now even if they had been traveling
on mule-back.
Al-Quds al-Arabi says the clearest evidence that the war has largely been going Iraq’s way to date, despite its obvious military inferiority, is the way officials in George W. Bush’s administration have been burying their earlier predictions of a quick war.
The predicament of Tony Blair’s government is even worse, with mounting British casualties fuelling domestic opposition to the war and raising fresh doubts about its justice, true motives, and what British interest is served by it, amid talk of differences between Blair and Bush.
It is Iraq’s impressive steadfastness that is shuffling all
the cards and overturning all the political and military
equations. And it is growing by the day, despite the fact that the war
is still in its early stages, while the countdown has begun to the
collapse of the morale of the British and American troops taking part
in it,
Al-Quds al-Arabi says.
A news analysis published in the Oman daily Al-Watan says the biggest US mistake appears to have been misreading the Shiite opposition in Iraq. This opposition consists of several groups, it says, including:
l Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim’s Tehran-based Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), with its Iranian-based guerrilla army. Despite sitting on the opposition leadership committee formed under American auspices in the Kurdish capital Arbil, it declared on the second day of the war that it would not join in it and considers it to be an act of aggression and invasion.
Al-Watan says that while the Iraqi Shiite opposition is united in
condemning the US invasion and won’t take part in it, it is
still unclear how it will resist. Its stance is one of negative
neutrality,
opposed both to Baghdad and Washington, but giving
precedence to strategic and national considerations, which implies
giving the external threat precedence over the internal one, and means
that Iraqi Shiites are increasingly likely to turn to fighting
American forces if Saddam Hussein holds out.
While it may surprise the Americans, who imagined the Shiites were waiting to greet them as liberators, this stance is the product of extensive consultations among Shiite leaders in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, Al-Watan suggests. They culminated in talks between the leaders of Syria and Iran in Tehran, as a result of which a common position was agreed and SAIRI’s plans to send its forces into Iraq were suspended.
Al-Watan stresses that the anti-invasion stance of the Shiite opposition is not only due to the mistrust fostered by the Americans’ betrayal of the 1991 Shiite uprising. It also reflects dismay at the way the US treated the Shiite opposition during the buildup to the war, and its refusal to offer any guarantees about its role in the post-Saddam period. This ambiguity fuelled suspicions that Washington only wants to use the opposition to assist it in the war, and then discard it in favor of American military rule or an Iraq plagued by Shiite-Sunni sectarian rivalry and conflict, which the Americans would use to strengthen and justify their control of the country, its politics and its oil.
A third consideration is the disastrous consequences an American
occupation would have for Iraq’s future and that of the region,
especially Iran and Syria, far exceeding the threat posed by Saddam
Hussein. Accordingly, the Shiite opposition’s interest in being
rid of his regime is no longer paramount. It has been superseded by
its interest in getting rid of the American occupation, or at least
limiting the damage and fallout from it, or undermining it and forcing
it to enter into a compromise with the opposition and its regional
backers,
Al-Watan says.
The Beirut daily As-Safir features an exclusive interview with Syrian President Bashar Assad in which among other things he speaks out forcefully against the war on Iraq and implies that the regime’s opponents should rally to the country’s defense.
In his lengthy conversation with publisher Talal Salman, Assad says he is not surprised by the intensity of the resistance being mounted against the invasion, likening it to Lebanon’s experience under Israeli occupation, and saying that far from provoking a refugee exodus, it has prompted many Iraqi expatriates to return to defend their homeland.
The US and Britain will not be able to control all of Iraq,
he
forecasts. There will be much fiercer resistance. This shows the
falsehood of the claim made by some Arab officials who, deliberately
or unwittingly, wanted to see or portray things differently.
The Syrian leader repeats his earlier criticisms of unnamed Arab states for colluding in the aggression, and failing to heed the call not to allow the US to use their bases, and warns of the popular backlash this will cause.
There is very strong resistance from the army and people in
Iraq. But if the American plan succeeds, and we hope it won’t
succeed and doubt it will succeed, in any case there will be Arab
popular resistance to the occupation, and it has begun,
Assad
says.
He suggests the backlash may not be confined to the aggressor and
occupiers, if there is to be an occupation,
but could extend to
those who lent verbal or material support to this war,
and perhaps
even to the Arabs sitting on the fence.
Assad also acknowledges the threat posed to Syria by the war, and the
prospect of it being one of the countries that could be targeted by
the US, largely on behalf of Israel, after Iraq. The threat is
there so long as Israel is there, aggression is being mounted against
an Arab country, and there is a war on our border. If you don’t
worry in circumstances like these, then you’re not looking at
reality or you cannot see it,
he says, adding: Worry does not
mean fear, but preparing for confrontation.
But Assad also stresses that the threat of aggression against his
country does not mean they’ll be able to carry it out.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose performance throughout the Iraq crisis has brought him under attack in the Arab press, comes under further criticism for suggesting the UN should help alleviate the humanitarian distress caused by the invasion while dodging the politics of the issue.
Following his call on the Security Council to give the UN an aid mandate in Iraq, Jordanian columnist Jareer Marqa contrasts the way Annan has been discharging the duties of his office with the approach of his distinguished predecessor Dag Hammarskjöld, who died in 1961 while trying to halt the war that colonial forces had triggered in Congo.
The latter, he writes in the Amman daily Al-Rai, demonstrated that
the secretary-general of the UN is not just an international employee,
but trustee of the UN Charter, a firm defender of international
legality and fighter for peace and security for all the world’s
peoples.
Annan, in contrast, has abandoned the responsibilities of his post on at least two occasions: When he pulled the plug on the UN inquiry into the war crimes committed by the Israeli Army in Jenin last year, and when he kept quiet about the US and Britain’s blatant violation of international law and their war of aggression against Iraq.
Indeed, he facilitated the start of the invasion by pulling UN arms
inspectors and personnel out of Iraq, instead of strengthening their
presence in order to deter it,
Marqa charges.
And Annan implicitly rubber-stamped the Anglo-American objective of
regime change
by suspending the oil-for-food program without
Security Council authorization, and began discussing his
post-Saddam role as though he were an employee of the US State
Department,
he writes.
Annan must know that he bears a special moral responsibility for
the blood that is being shed in Iraq, and the hunger, thirst and
destruction that he has permitted to take place,
Marqa remarks.
He must not await the outcome. He has a duty to rectify his
approach and adopt a public stance that is consistent with the UN
Charter.
If he fails to do that, the world will mourn the demise of the post
of UN secretary-general more bitterly than it grieved at the plane
crash that killed Hammarskjöld.
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