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Monday, November 13, 2006

The thirsty giant


Hmida Ben Romdhane




In October 2002, I attended a State Department sponsored program on "Policy making process" in the US with a number of fellow journalists from several countries. The bellicose propaganda was at its peak and the drums of war were deafening. One day by a sunny afternoon, as I was walking in M Street heading to Georgetown, I suddenly had a strange feeling of fear. Washington seemed to me at that moment as a giant in fury ceased by an intense need to crash something, to commit a folly.
The last day of this program, we gathered around a table and our American hosts asked each of us about our feelings and comments after three weeks passed in close contact with political and social life in America. As for me, I said that I was scared, and the only feeling I was going back home with was fear. Everybody was surprised to hear such an unexpected thing, except a Palestinian friend from Jerusalem who was also invited and who shared my feeling. Scared about what? About what the Bush team was preparing then for the Arabs.
The huge energy deployed by the neoconservatives and the American media to focus on the danger presented by Iraq, after having turned their back to Afghanistan and Al Qaida, didn’t aim to scare Saddam or make pressure on him, but to prepare the American public opinion for the war planned to uproot the political regime in Baghdad. This was clear for anyone visiting Washington in 2002, provided he or she had the basic skill to analyze the bush speeches of West Point or Cincinnati, the comments on Fox News about the aluminum tubes and the yellow cake from Niger, or the warnings of Condoleezza Rice on CNN against the terrifying “Mushroom Cloud” Saddam was purportedly preparing for his enemies.
As I was walking in M Street, the giant in fury appeared to me terribly thirsty. Thirst of revenge and thirst of oil. It was, in my view, the explosive combination of this double thirst that made the war inevitable, given the fact that the neoconservatives control all the aspects of the decision making process in Washington.
A country which saw nearly 3000 of its citizens killed in few minutes couldn’t help feeling an intense desire of revenge. Didn’t Donald Rumsfeld ask on 12 of September 2001 “if we can attack Iraq, because there are no valuable targets in Afghanistan?” The secretary of defense expressed simply then an overwhelming feeling in America’s heartland. On the other hand, a country which needs more than 20 million barrels a day for its cars, planes and factories, and at the same time sees with great concern its own crude-oil production winding down year after year, couldn’t help being obsessed by the idea of toppling an unfriendly regime which controlled the second oil reserves in the world.
The thirst of revenge has been satisfied with much bigger cruelty then needed. The average American in West Virginia, Ohio or Texas had his desire of revenge largely appeased by watching the terrible images of Abu Ghraib, Najaf or, more recently Falloudja that many consider already as the Arab “Guernica”. But by satisfying the thirst of revenge so cruelly, the GI’s fueled dramatically the insurgency and created a situation in which the appeasement of the thirst of oil becomes out of reach.
The combination of arrogance and incompetence displayed by the Bush administration made it impossible for America to win the hearts and minds in Iraq after having toppled a regime hated at home and abroad. Yet, it was not an impossible mission if the White House and the Pentagon had the cleverness: 1- to keep in place the Iraqi army and gain it to their cause by treating it respectfully and by increasing the salaries of its soldiers exhausted by the infernal years of Saddam’s wars; 2- to keep in place the hundreds of thousands of low ranking baathist bureaucrats in order to assure a continuity to the administrative management of the country and avoid the chaos and the high scale looting of private and public properties; and 3- to offer the Iraqis the opportunities to work and reconstruct their beleaguered country. Instead, the neoconservatives convinced that nothing can resist the US military might, have made the choice of brutal force and, thus, opened the way to the steady engulfment of America in Iraq.
The US can’t appease its thirst of Iraqi oil unless it assures three conditions: 1- the uprooting of the insurgency; 2- the installation of a number of powerful military bases in a pacified country; 3- the installation of an Iraqi government with no program of its own, but obsequious enough to implement the decisions taken in Washington and transmitted to him by the huge US embassy in Baghdad. These three conditions are undoubtedly at the heart of the Bush administration’s strategy. But it’s nothing more than a wishful thinking.
The US misadventure in Iraq showed the world that a country can possess a huge military might and, at the same time, remains frustrated by its inability to translate its wishes into reality. In other words America, which spends more than a billion dollars a day for its military and has the ambition to dominate the world by making the 21st century an American one, couldn’t carry out its program in a country on its knees by a series of destructive wars and more than a decade of suffocating sanctions.
If anything, the inability of Washington to implement its Iraqi agenda is not seen in many countries as a matter of concern. It is rather seen as a matter of relief and not only in the Arab and Moslem countries. When Richard Armitage told Al Djazeera that “France doesn’t want us to succeed in Iraq”, he was not exaggerating. One can hardly argue that M. Chirac spent sleepless nights because the American neoconservatives got trapped in the Iraqi quagmire. For the hardships America is facing in Iraq are good news for the multipolar world France is defending. The most relieved countries are of course Syria and Iran. It is not question here of schadenfreude, the bad joy the human being feels sometimes. But one needn’t to be an expert to understand that the security of the Syrian and Iranian regimes has been assured till now by the Iraqi insurgents.

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