Will the war end with fall of Baghdad?

By M.J. Akbar

It is my pleasant duty to report that the Triple A
(Aussie-Anglo-American) invasion of Iraq has already had an impact on
one of the major elements of contemporary culture, the SMS message.

SMS is no longer filled with stupid or bawdy, or sometime stupidly
bawdy, jokes. The one I just received is a question: "Is it a
coincidence that war started on the 3rd day of the 3rd week of the 3rd
month of the 3rd year of the 3rd millennium? Is this the start of the
3rd world war?"

Will the war end with the fall of Baghdad? Or is that the end of only
the first battle?

The first thing to do in our quest for answers is to dispense with
official information. During war, information is disinformation. Those
who recall the first Gulf war might remember a singular image from that
conflict. It was the film of an Iraqi Scud missile being shot down,
mid-air, by an American Patriot response. That singular image was so
singular that it was single. Viewers might have been forgiven for
believing that Scuds were being hit every night; in actual fact only
one Scud was hit.

The propaganda machine kept repeating that footage to give the
impression that the whole Iraqi Scud arsenal was being destroyed. The
media derisively nicknamed the 5 p.m. briefings by the Pentagon as the
"Five o'clock Follies". Such habits die hard.

Within a day of the start of the second Gulf war, the American defence
secretary had claimed the capture of Umm Qasr and reported the
surrender of a full Iraqi division. The fact was that fighting was
still going on. Anyone in his senses knew that Umm Qasr would fall. It
was only a question of time. The difference was that it was not going
to fall without a fight.

And this difference presaged the nature of the conflict ahead as the
massed infantry and tanks rolled towards the only real objective of
this war, Baghdad. A key element of the American strategic plan is to
instigate a revolt against Saddam Hussein, either through anger or
through a feeling of futility. The psychological war is a parallel
strain with its own objectives.

Since this is also the first war with live commentary from reporters
"embedded" with the Triple A forces, we are going to get a much better
story than we had through the Five o'clock Follies. They are reporting
that battles have developed in Umm Qasr, around Basra, and in Kirkuk
despite unprecedented levels of air and artillery fire. But this too is
not the full truth, because there is no parallel reportage from the
Iraqi side of the battle.

We are watching a war whose outcome is known, if only because it is a
complete mismatch. Iraq does not have an air force; it has no answer to
the missiles and bombs pounding Baghdad. The skies are defenceless. If
there is a conflict on land, it is purely because human will finds some
inexplicable strength to resist aggression. The Triple A began this war
because it alleged that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
No one has found any evidence, and if there is no evidence even by the
time this war ends, the issue will be treated as irrelevant.

The target is one man. A nation is being occupied, the law of absolute
sovereignty that has kept the world reasonably stable for the last
fifty years has been sabotaged, the passions of religion and race have
been inflamed, because one group of people believes that American power
is meaningless if it cannot control, in partnership with Israel and
pliant Arab regimes, the natural resources of the West and central
Asia.

It is common knowledge that this invasion is the idea of a group formed
in 1997 that called itself, grandly, The Project for a New American
Century. Its members included Richard Perle (now chairman of the
Pentagon's Defence Policy Board), deputy defence secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams, who serves on the Bush National Security
Council and Randy Scheunemann, who was president of the committee for
the liberation of Iraq.

The marines who hoisted the Stars and Stripes over a building in Umm
Qasr before protest from the neighbourhood forced them to take it down,
were right: this is about occupation. The White House had made it clear
that Triple A troops would enter Iraq even if Saddam Hussein went into
exile; in other words, even if there was nothing to "liberate" the
Iraqi people from.

One wishes that liberators deliberated a little more before they set
out to save humanity. Imperialism has always and ever chosen the gospel
of liberation as its decoy. The "white man's burden" is in the clasp of
George Bush now since Tony Blair's predecessors wearied of that burden.
What a price the world is paying because a few chads in Florida got it
wrong in the last presidential election.

The seeds of the future are being sown each minute. They are going to
sprout into strange, hybrid plants. The results of this battle for
Baghdad are known, the consequences are not. The Law of Unintended
Consequences has begun to operate even before Saddam Hussein has been
eliminated. (Think ahead. If he is killed, his dead body will become
the most emotive image of this campaign.)

Turkey has already rattled the chessboard. Within 48 hours of the start
of the conflict, some 3,000 troops out of the over 50,000 on the
borders had crossed into Kurdistan. This was not part of the While
House script. Turkish troops were meant to protect the American
interest; they were not supposed to be so audacious as to protect their
own interests! The map of the post-Ottoman Arab world has begun to
change from precisely the point where the British and the French began
to change it after the First World War.

Britain, France and Turkey contested the control of oil-soaked Mosul
after that war. According to the secret Anglo-French pact during the
war, Mosul was meant to go to Syria, and thereby into the French
mandate. But Britain won out because of the oldest reason in the world:
possession is 99 per cent of the law - its troops had taken Mosul
before others could get there.

Iran is less confident than Turkey, or perhaps more patient. It is
waiting for the Triple A troops to get engaged elsewhere. It would
surprise no one if some Iranian "liberation" army also decided to
liberate the Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, even as Tehran
cooperated with Ankara to prevent any independent Kurdistan from
emerging.

America is now formally at war with Iraq, and informally at war with
mainland Europe led by France, Germany and Russia. One thing is clear:
it is no longer a unipolar world. What Russia failed to do alone, with
East Europe as its satellite, it has now achieved with the help of
Germany and France.

The European Union will have to revisit itself, because powerful,
divergent interests have split its unity. One key is the price of oil.
For instance, if the price of oil drops to below twelve dollars a
barrel then Russia is sunk because its cost of production is at that
level. For America the story is different. The cost of production in
the Arab empire that it hopes to control is only three dollars a
barrel. George Bush can win re-election on cheap gas, even while
driving Russia out of business.

The unwitting fall guy in this particular game could be Britain, which
needs as high a price as it can get for its lifeline, the North Sea
oil. Tony Blair can always ask for American aid, though. The world will
divide behind either the dollar and the Euro in a way that it never
divided between the dollar and the rouble. Even those on the side of
the rouble politically, stuck to the dollar, economically. In contrast,
even those on the side of the dollar, politically, might begin to find
the Euro more attractive, economically.

One outcome that the Bush White House may have actually wanted is the
conversion of the United Nations into the world's largest NGO. The
United Nations is now an office building, of some conceivable help to
refugees, and, of course, a marvellous pad for those in love with their
own voices. Its role as guarantor of peace and stability is over. It
has become what the League of Nations became after the First World War:
an irrelevant talk shop. Can this change? Anything can happen,
theoretically, but may I be permitted to have my doubts?

The worst unintended consequence could be, of course, the further
radicalization of young Muslims. Defeat would be the spur. This is what
is being heard in the mosques and madrassahs just now. A hadith (or
saying) of the Prophet Mohammad, the Messenger of Allah, is the theme
of sermons across the Muslim world: "The hour (of Doomsday, or the end
of the world) shall occur when the Euphrates unveils a mountain of gold
over which the people will fight." That gold is oil, of course.

There is another, among many, that is echoing through cafes as much as
mosques: "The cause of the great war before the final conflict will be
Christians. First, Christians and Muslims will ally to conquer a common
enemy. But Christians will be treacherous and claim victory on their
own strength, driving Muslims to arms against them." The
interpretation? Muslims joined the West to defeat the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan, and then were forgotten - until they were driven to take
up arms.

It is not important that every Muslim believes that this is happening.
War is fought by believers, whether in Washington or on the Muslim
street. George Bush may have just multiplied the force of those Muslims
who believe in a 3rd world war.