| 1. IRAQ |
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| Now that the Iraq war is over and the Iraqis have been liberated from the despotism and totalitarian horrors of the Saddam regime, the Americans and their coalition allies face the even greater tasks of winning the peace, rebuilding the nation after Saddam's depredations, and establishing democratic institutions. The experience of other countries undergoing the transition from totalitarian and authoritarian rule to liberalism is that it takes a long time. With the nations of East Europe it was 4-6 years. There are four main phases in the process: One, the re-establishment of law and order; two, the restoration of services; three, the creation of income for the people; and four, the building of democratic institutions. | |
| Assuming that this process proceeds, on balance, satisfactorily, it is reasonable to expect that this, and the continued exercise of American influence, could lead to significant flow-on effects and changes in other parts of the Middle East. It might, for example, help the Saudis deal with their problems with the Wahhabis, persuade Syria and Iran to adopt different policies towards terrorist organisations, and help the world deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As we mentioned towards the end of APR 48 (25th November 2002) and again in APR 50 (24th February 2003), the US officials and a number of International strategists and Middle East experts long ago anticipated that the removal of Saddam could lead to these sort of changes. | |
| Prospects | What are the prospects for democracy in Iraq? Many people have scoffed at the idea, some of them dismissing the Arabs as little more than a bunch of warring tribes. However, some authorities have expressed a different view. For example: | |
| Hussein Hindawi, an Iraqi historian and editor of United Press International's Arabic News Service and John Thomson, a journalist and former diplomat with 35 years experience in Iraq, wrote a piece for UPI in April in which they argued that "even diehard Iraqi royalists... agree that sentiment is overwhelmingly strong for a Western-style democracy." | |
| They went on to say, "While there is no history of genuine democracy anywhere in the Muslim world... educated Muslim cadres have called for the equivalent of democracy for centuries..." Iraqi intellectuals and politicians argue that the essential factors of democracy have long existed in the country... In fact, Iraqi historians claim democracy first dawned in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) centuries before it was discovered by the Greeks." They added that "fledgling" Islamic democracies "such as Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia are viewed with longing by millions who have lived under autocratic rule for centuries". | |
| Arab academic, Fouad Ajami, Professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University, writing in the January-February issue of Foreign Affairs, cautioned against believing that Iraqis and Arabs, generally, are not capable of democratic stirrings. He saw a democratic Iraq adopting the sort of federal decentralised structure now being recommended by the Kurds, which would keep the country intact, but give the Kurds some measure of autonomy. | |
| Professor Efraim Karsh, Head of the Mediterranean Studies Program, Kings College, University of London, writing in the April 2003 issue of Commentary, says "it is not wholly inconceivable that, given the right guidance and support, Arab societies will indeed prove amenable to democracy... There is little doubt that Iraq's best hope lies with the creation of some sort of decentralised federal system in which each of the country's ethnic and religious groups would be given a proportional share in national power and resources, as well as extensive cultural and political autonomy. The clear results would be to elevate the majority Shi'ites to a position of political pre-eminence at the expense of the Sunnis, and to integrate the Kurds into the country's governing structures...(despite US fears), there is no fundamental hostility between Shi'ite Islam and the West. Prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, that Shi'ite country had served as America's foremost Middle Eastern ally and the protector of the (Sunni) monarchies in the Gulf." | |
| Responding to the observation that sources of legitimacy in the Arab world spring from the clan and tribe, Kenneth Pollack, the Director of Research at the Saban Center, Brookings Institution, says that tribal Iraqis probably make up less than 25% of today's population. The other 75% live in cities with tribal links weak or non-existent. Iraq, he said, is a potentially wealthy country. Many of its 23 million people are well educated, and there is a large and sophisticated middle class. Looked at from that perspective, the prospects for a thriving civil society and democratic governance seemed favourable. | |
| In a similar vein, Richard Butler, the former Executive Chairman of the UN Special Commission to Disarm Iraq (UNSCOM), wrote in August 2002 (The Bulletin), "The removal of Saddam would see off the scene a truly dangerous and condemnable person. It is hard to think who would not benefit. The Iraqi people would. They are decent and extremely talented. They could make a remarkable contribution to stability in the Middle East and elsewhere if they were given an even chance, through having a halfway decent government." | |
| Finally, ASIA PACIFIC REPORT remembers that 35-50 years ago it was said that Confucian and other Asian nations could never develop into Western style democracies. Many reasons were given for this, including their different values, temperaments, ancient cultures, racial diversity, tribalism and so on. But look now at Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia where liberal democracy has taken firm root and economic conditions have improved beyond all expectations of forty years ago ( and we grieve for what might have been in South
Vietnam and Burma). | |
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| Commentators | Much has been written about how so many academic experts, journalists, politicians, retired generals, self styled celebrities and others, of both the right and the left, got the war hopelessly wrong in so many ways. We don't wish to go over all of that again, but would like to remind our readers, who include many politicians and policy makers around the region, just how errant a number of Australia's widely touted strategic and military experts proved to be. | |
| Hugh White | For example, Hugh White, the Director of the government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former Deputy Secretary for Strategy in the Department of Defence told us back in early 2002 that President Bush would never invade Iraq. He said, "There are two very good reasons Bush will not go after Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The first is the likelihood that he wouldn't succeed. The second is the consequences if he did." The major consequence, he predicted, would be that a "US victory would leave the Gulf to be dominated by Iran". As to the likely nature of any such war, he said that "like all generals, the Pentagon has spent the past 10 years planning to fight the last war again." (Sydney Morning Herald, 4/2/2002). | |
| Later in the year in The Age, Melbourne (6th September 2002), White told us: "But what died this week is the idea that America - with or without allied support, with or without UN endorsement - would mount a full scale invasion of Iraq. What died was the idea of an invasion aimed not just at stopping Iraq's WMD program, but at removing Saddam, destroying his regime, democratising Iraq, and beginning the wholesale political refashioning of the Middle East." | |
| Then, on 30th January 2003 (The Age), faced with the more or less inevitability of the war, White set up two brief, simplistic possible scenarios for the war which would have been of little use to any ultimate decision maker, he himself expressing no preference between them. It is an interesting process and position for one who held such an exalted strategic advisory position, with its access to so much US and other international intelligence and military information and who is said to have written the Australian government's last Defence Review 'White Paper' in 2000. When the war eventually began, he started telling us how "Tommy Franks" was thinking and on 5th April he wrote in The Age that "Until the past few days, the bombing campaign on Baghdad appeared to be having little effect on the regime's ability to function" He went on to say that sitting outside of Bagdad there was not much more that Franks could do because his forces were too small even if reinforced with elements of the 101st Airborne Brigade. But, "That will still not be enough for the US to begin a full-scale assault on Baghdad. For that, General Franks will need the 4th Infantry Division, which will take at least 10 days to get to the front." As we all know, Baghdad 'fell' a few days later. | |
| Dr Alan Dupont | Then there was Dr. Alan Dupont, a former strategic analyst in the Australian Department of Defence and a Senior Fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University (ANU) who on 29 March 2003, told The Australian that "allied commanders, confronted by an enemy that was breaking warfare rules, need to be more ruthless and risk higher civilian casualties". He said, "What you are going to get down to now is a fairly dirty war. At all levels, the gloves are going to have to come off... particularly on the coalition side as they become frustrated that they cannot deploy their full firepower." Having stated on ABC radio the day before that he was certain that the Republican Guard was now located under hospitals, schools and mosques, he told The Australian that, in his view, the coalition would have to attack these targets. Two days later, The Age (31/3/2003) reported: "Dr. Alan Dupont...said that the US had seriously underestimated Iraqi resistance. 'It is clearly going to last months', he said, predicting that the Federal Government would need to look at rotating SAS units". | |
| Prof Desmond Ball | Around the same time, Professor Desmond Ball, also a member of the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, who is said to be one of the world's great Intelligence experts, was quoted as declaring that the war was already 'lost - politically, if not militarily'. (The Age, 31/3/2003) Anticipating a protracted conflict, he was also quoted as saying, "I think that over some months the coalition will capture or kill Saddam and the top leadership but that the principal political objectives of this war will most probably have already been lost... The security in the long term of coalition members is going to be diminished..." (The Australian, 31/3/2003) | |
| Why should we ever listen to anything these, and the many other erring experts ever say again? | |
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| The pre-war anti-war demonstrations in England, Australia, Canada, the US, Europe and elsewhere were among the largest in history. The demonstrators, including many religious leaders, said they were marching against war and for peace in Iraq and the world generally. (But as Jose Ramos Horta pointed out, the only peace that existed in Iraq was the peace of the dead. When he said that, the Old Left sneered at him.) But if they were truly interested in marching for peace, where are their demonstrations against the war in the Congo which has killed 4.5 million people over the past 5 years? Where were they during the 'genocide' in Rwanda of 800,000 people in 1994? When Christian Serbs massacred 7000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995? When Syria invaded and occupied the incipient democratic state of Lebanon? When Iraq invaded Kuwait? When Vietnam invaded Cambodia? When the Khmer Rouge massacred millions? When Russia invaded Chechnya? When Iraq invaded Iran? When China invaded Tibet? And what of France's current military 'intervention' in the Ivory Coast? The truth is they are not PEACE marchers but ANTI-AMERICAN Marchers. What motivates this? We are not sure. However, Nick Cohen, writing in the left wing British journal New Statesman, suggested it wasn't just anti-Americanism, "it was wider than that, it was part of a critique adopted by left wing intellectuals, which expresses absolute scepticism about everything from the West - except themselves." (New Statesman, May 5, 2003). William Shawcross, another left wing commentator, asked of the demonstrators, "Have these people gone completely and utterly mad? How come they don't realise that they are undermining the United Nations and making war more likely?" | |
| D. Other War-Related Points |
| We'd like to make a few brief observations on the media's coverage of the war and its aftermath. | |
| 1. Generally, the coverage was very ordinary. Very few of the journalists involved on the ground seemed to have had previous experience covering wars while most of them appeared to have little understanding of Iraq and its recent history. | |
| 2. The same journalists and media outlets who kept telling us that the war was going badly for the Coalition and that the Americans were "naive" and strategically stupid are now telling us that the peace is going even worse. The classic case is the BBC and its unrelenting anti-Americanism drone. As we said earlier in the report, the peace was always going to be more difficult than the war. Any country that comes out of 20 years of totalitarianism is going to be a mess and find it hard to re-orientate. We have the recent examples of Eastern Europe and Russia. The BBC and others affect to give the impression that before the war Iraq functioned perfectly, whereas, in fact, tens of thousands starved every year and countless more thousands were executed each year. It will take a long time to get it all up and running - if only for psychological reasons. How it will turn in then end, no one knows. But the BBC and its pathological anti-American friends are helping no one. | |
| 3. The boss of the same BBC has complained that the US forces did not do enough to protect the journalists killed and wounded in this war, including those shot on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Two quick points: from our own experiences we can say that any journalist who enters a war zone cannot complain about being shot, and with few exceptions, whatever the circumstances. As the old saying goes: nothing's fair in love or war, while in South Vietnam, where over 40 journalists were killed, there was another saying: 'you today, me tomorrow'. Secondly, the journalists killed on the Palestine Hotel balcony acted naively and stupidly. Their Iraqi Information Ministry and Intelligence minders had forbidden them from going out onto the balcony for fear that they might get shot. When the minders disappeared as the Americans entered the city, the journalists promptly went out onto the balcony, set up their tripod-based cameras which from a distance could be mistaken for weapons, and promptly got shot. (In much the same circumstances that some Indonesians claim the Balibo Five were shot
in 1975.) | |
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| The Christian Churches in the West have behaved less than admirably over this war. Priests and bishops went out of their way to condemn Bush, Blair and Howard while, in effect, giving protection to Saddam. They ignored the tens of thousands who died and starved under his regime every year while being deprived of nearly all other freedoms, including the freedom to practice their religions as they wished, to read what they liked and to watch international TV. Perhaps the most outrageous of all were the Vatican bishops and bureaucrats who denounced Bush and then asked the Pope to shake hands with Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, who the previous October had compared his murderous boss, Saddam, with Jesus Christ in terms of his compassion and generosity... Within days of Saddam's fall Aziz turned himself in to the Americans in an effort to save his own miserable skin. | |
| The bottom line for the Christian churches in the West was that if removing the totalitarian butcher Saddam and liberating 24 million Iraqis was not a just cause, what ever would be? This was always so. | |
