Arabs and Iraq’s resistance

An Arab press review, Daily Star, 3 April 2003

Syria is not overly alarmed by the bellicose rhetoric the administration of George W. Bush has been directing at it, and won’t be cowed into abandoning its vociferous opposition to the American invasion of its eastern neighbor, Waleed Shoucair reports for the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat from Damascus.

He says the thinking in Damascus is that the warnings and threats voiced by the US secretaries of state and defense have less to do with Syria’s anti-war stance and its alleged supply of military equipment to Iraq, than with finding excuses for the setbacks the US military campaign has suffered.

They’re looking for someone to accuse to justify their failure to achieve a quick and easy victory, say Shoucair’s informed sources. Syria had warned from the outset that an invasion of Iraq would be no picnic and that the Iraqis would fiercely resist.

Are Washington’s warnings an endeavor to deter President Bashar Assad from supporting the Iraqi resistance? Shoucair asks. The sources reply that the president did not talk about supporting the resistance in his policy statements on Iraq.

As to reports that US forces have deployed just across the Syrian-Iraqi border to intercept Iraq-bound military equipment and convoys of volunteers, Syria’s position is that the border is open and anyone whose documents are in order is free to cross, including Western journalists and Syrians and Arabs with business in Iraq. There are no convoys or military equipment, and if there are any volunteers, they don’t have it written on their foreheads or passports that they are volunteers. If the Americans object to that, they are rewriting international law.

Shoucair says the Syrians intend to persist with their diplomatic efforts to rally international opposition to the invasion, and are relieved that a period of tension with Egypt appears to have been overcome. Cairo lodged a formal protest when anti-war protesters in Damascus chanted slogans denouncing President Hosni Mubarak’s stance on Iraq, but he recently reiterated Egypt’s commitment to its strategic relationship with Syria.

Al-Hayat commentator Ghassan Sharbel says Washington’s latest charges-cum-threats regarding Syria’s support for Iraq, terrorism and its quest for weapons of mass destruction cannot be viewed in isolation from the hawkish noises that have been coming Syria’s way from Israel. The Israelis and Americans are jointly trying to cow Damascus and prevent it from banking on the ultimate failure of the invasion that is currently targeting Iraq, he writes.

Sharbel suggests the two sides want to deter Syria from adopting the same role in Iraq as it did in Lebanon, where its support was instrumental to the success of the armed resistance that overcame Israel’s overwhelming military superiority and ended its occupation of the south. Perhaps it is to exact revenge for Lebanon that the Israelis are hoping to turn the clash of interests between Syria and the US in Iraq into a confrontation of sorts, he remarks.

Sharbel writes that while Damascus is well aware of the short-term dangers of standing up strongly to the US over Iraq, it understandably feels it has no other option. If an American client regime were to be installed in Baghdad, the Arab-Israeli imbalance of power would become deadly. And if Iraq were to explode under the pressure of American blows it would be a disaster for all the Arabs.

These longer-term factors must inevitably outweigh considerations of immediate safety or short-term interest for Syria. Damascus may not be able to alter the course of the war, but it can object to it, and refuse to acquiesce to its conduct or its consequences, Sharbel says. Jordanian columnist Yaser Zaatra links Washington’s fury at both Damascus and Tehran to the efforts they made during the buildup to the war to galvanize opposition to the US invasion among Iraqi Shiites.

He writes in the Amman daily Ad-Dustour that the anti-invasion stand taken by Iraqi Shiite groups opposed to the Baghdad regime bore clear hallmarks of lobbying by Syria, Iran and Hizbullah. It also helps account for the effectiveness of the Iraqi resistance that US forces have encountered, contrary to the expectations of American military planners.

Being placed top of the post-Iraq hit list prompted Syria and Iran - especially Syria—to take a number of steps to encourage Iraq’s steadfastness, so as to ensure that the country does not fall easy prey to the invaders, and thus whet their appetite for more. Hence Syria’s fulsome backing for Iraq at the UN Security Council and its advocacy of a defiant Arab stand, followed by the stories about volunteers and martyrdom-seekers, which further infuriated the Americans, Zaatra explains.

The Syrian and Iranian response to the American challenge in Iraq has been clever as well as compelling, he notes. It amounts to trying to turn Iraq into a quagmire for them, and a liability for the hawks in the Bush administration.

And if the American hawks are in a predicament, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Co. feel it even more deeply, Zaatra remarks. US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed AIPAC, Israel’s main lobbying organization in America, in an effort to reassure them about a future that they have staked on the war, in the hope that it will vanquish all their enemies and make them lords of the region. But the dream dissipates further with every report of an Iraqi istishhadi or the death of an American or British soldier on the battlefield.

Israel’s influence is highlighted by the Syrian government-run daily Tishrin, which writes, While speculation abounds about the likely duration and cost of the US invasion of Iraq and its ultimate outcome, the one constant is that it has as many, if not more, Israeli objectives than American ones.

The Damascus paper recalls how hard the Israelis lobbied to persuade the Bush administration to adopt the idea of invading Iraq as policy, and then to translate it into practice as quickly as possible. This resembles the efforts they exerted to ensure continued US backing after the end of the Cold War by playing up the Iraqi threat and the terrorist threat.

The picture was completed by Powell when he took the platform at AIPAC to list the services his administration has rendered Israel, even while waging a war on Iraq, and level threatening statements at Syria and all those who are hostile to Israel, Tishrin writes. He promised an extra $10 billion in aid to a nuclear-armed serial violator of UN resolutions that is waging a war of genocide against the Palestinians, while Iraq is being subjected to a full-scale invasion on the pretext of disarming it of doomsday weapons it does not possess.

Israel is the only threat in the region . behind everything being hatched against the Arabs, Tishrin writes. No one can separate the aggression underway in Iraq from Israel’s aggressive plans against the Arabs. The danger thus doubles up, and it becomes both a national and pan-Arab duty to confront this American aggression.

Jordanian columnist Tarek Massarwa says the position adopted by Syria and Iran is one reason why the Iraqis believe that, so far, the battle is going according to plan for them. He writes in the Amman daily Al-Rai that both countries are shifting from a position of positive neutrality to one of negative neutrality at the invasion. Washington has served notice that it will settle scores with them once it is finished with Iraq, so supporting Iraqi resistance has become a matter of self-defense where they are concerned, he argues.

Meanwhile, the opening of a northern front has been effectively blocked, Massarwa remarks. The Turks, including the army, are furious with the Americans, and may even deny their warplanes overflight rights, he suggests. Their threat of military intervention has meanwhile prevented Iraqi Kurdish forces allied to the US from advancing on Kirkuk.

Massarwa says how enthusiastically the Americans bombarded the Ansar al-Islam enclave in northeast Iraq, which Kurdish warlord Jalal Talabani’s men had failed to capture, after declaring it a chemical weapons production site allied to Saddam Hussein. But not even a pharmacy was found in the ruins of the little group of impoverished villages.

It is starting to be whispered in the Pentagon that the Kurds `have let us down’ just as the Turks did, Massarwa says. The whispers in the American media about how the Iraqi people `let them down’ are growing louder. We wouldn’t be surprised if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were to repeat after the Kuwaiti university professor that the millions of anti-war protestors who took to the streets of every world capital were merely Saddam’s hirelings! he quips. Massarwa concludes that despite the intensity of the American blitz, Iraq is faring well. It has blunted the ground offensive. The Iraqis have proven that they are not Sunnites, Shiites, Arabs and Kurds but Iraqis first and foremost. And Saddam Hussein’s regime has shown that it is capable of fighting a third war against a superpower and rescuing the region from fear and arousing its living forces.

Meanwhile, there appears to be little mileage in Saudi Arabia’s latest contribution to developments in Iraq: Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal’s call on American TV for Saddam Hussein to resign in order to spare his country further devastation.

The idea elicited an instant rebuke from the Iraqis, with Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan describing its Saudi proposer as an agent. Rumsfeld also implicitly dismissed it when he insisted that the US would accept nothing short of the Iraqi leader’s unconditional surrender. Abdelbari Atwan, publisher/editor of pan-Arab Al-Quds al-Arabi, is appalled that the Saudis should call on Saddam to stand down and hand over his country to the invading forces at a time when Iraqis are uniting in its defense and mounting brave resistance that has forced the attackers to rethink their military plans.

We don’t know the reason for this Saudi addiction to coming up with initiatives aimed at demoralizing the Arabs and driving them to surrender and submit to American and Israeli dictates, he writes in a front-page commentary.

It reminds him of the famous normalization initiative, which the Saudis launched last year and imposed on the Arab summit in Beirut, only to see it crushed by the Israeli tanks which reinvaded the West Bank two days later.

Saudi Arabia has no right to propose initiatives or ideas relating to Iraq, says Atwan. First, because it is itself a party to the aggression, with American warplanes and missiles launched from its territory; secondly, because it has not maintained diplomatic relations with Iraq; and above all, because it does not possess the stature it had in the past, and which it acquired by using the oil weapon in the Arabs’ battles against their enemies.

Atwan recalls that the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, admitted Riyadh tried before to engineer a military coup to topple the existing regime in Baghdad. Having failed to manage that, it is scarcely in a position to demand that the Iraqi president stop leading his country’s steadfastness and resistance to the aggression, and flee to a safe haven abroad under the pretext of protecting the Iraqi people and stopping the war.

He is also critical of Mubarak’s stance, and suggests his call for establishing a new Arab order based on modern principles is suspiciously in tune with Washington’s professed desire to reshape the Middle East after its occupation of Iraq.

What kind of Arab order does he want to establish, when he is allowing the American warships to transit the Suez Canal in broad daylight? Atwan wonders.

To those who want to establish a new Arab order on the ruins of Iraq’s steadfastness and resistance in line with American and Israeli directives, we would say this: Move away and let this nation face up courageously and manfully to its fate and its invaders. You should disappear in disgrace for having conspired against it and colluded with its enemies, he says.

The ones who ought to be resigning, before the angry masses force them to, are those Arab leaders—and they are all, incidentally, commanders in chief of their armed forces—who watch American missiles rock Baghdad and crush the skulls of children in Basra without doing anything, Atwan writes.