Trauma response syndrome, or Zionist plot? Abdel-Moneim Said* continues his exploration of the myriad explanatory frameworks being deployed to illuminate the war on Iraq The Middle East is a complex strategic area, characterised by intricate interrelations not only at the inter-Arab level, but also between Arab countries and other Middle Eastern countries (Iran, Turkey and Israel), and between the components of these two layers on the one hand, and the diverse and complex components of the global order on the other. Referring to a strategic region suggests that the nations within that area have delineated for themselves a network of interests that form the foci of alliances and tensions. It also means that there has evolved a form of mutual dependency among various key issues. In the case of the Middle East, these issues are the questions of Iraq, Palestine, and more recently Afghanistan and the war against terrorism. Thirdly, the interplay between interests and these mutually dependent issues generates a complex whole whose overall determining pattern -- the law that binds together its diverse threads -- should be identifiable through inquiry. Generally, crises or wars can serve as illuminating moments that throw into relief such patterns or laws. The Iraqi question which has emerged from the Anglo-Saxon war on Iraq sheds considerable light, not only on Iraq, the US and the other parties involved directly or indirectly in that conflict, but also on the primary trajectory of the course of events. Wars and crises are shaped by complex series of major and minor events which, if we were to try to keep track of them all, would drown us in a sea of detail and blind us to the larger forest. Since last September alone, we have witnessed a lengthy series of developments, stretching from George Bush's address to the UN General Assembly, through the deployment of US forces in the Gulf, to the onset of war and its conclusion -- not to mention all the diplomatic and political manoeuvring that has gone on in between. Indeed, the many scenarios, predictions and commentaries on events in and around Baghdad, all of which are saturated with the typical admixture of whim and vested interests, are enough to make anyone's head spin. Last week, I discussed several possible approaches which might be able to impose some sense of order and coherence on that jumble of information, irrespective of the degree to which such attempts actually succeed in portraying the truth. One of these approaches held that the purpose of the Anglo-Saxon war on Iraq was to eliminate an obstacle to globalisation; another, which is a variation on the first, that it was part of a process of clearing away the debris of the Cold War. A third and fourth explanation similarly functioned as variants of one another, the one maintaining that the war was a manifestation of US imperial expansion, and the other that it was a reversion to 19th century colonialism. According to yet another approach, the war was simply a way of releasing America's surplus military might, while a sixth took this contention one step further to argue that advances in military technology have rendered recourse to the instruments of armed warfare a faster and more cost-effective way to achieve foreign policy objectives which were traditionally sought through conventional diplomacy. Before the war, the European powers urged giving the international weapons inspectors more time -- another 30 days at most, was one suggestion. For the US, even that limited amount of time would have been more costly than immediate war, because the longer it waited, the greater the outlay needed to sustain a level of preparedness that would permit for rapid action with minimal losses to its troops. To illustrate this last point, let us note that the five-year long US civil war (1860-65) cost 600,000 dead, while its economic cost was 115 per cent of America's GDP at the time. In World War II, the US sustained a toll of just over 400,000 dead over the four years of its involvement (1941-45). In the war to liberate Kuwait, American battle casualties dropped enormously, to less than 150 dead in the six-week long war, while the war against Iraq, lasting only three weeks, brought 130 dead and cost less than five per cent of GDP, or a third of the amount that had been expected before the start of operations. This enormous reduction in the length and costs of war has only been made possible by huge progress in military technology, especially aerospace technology. This was abundantly apparent in the decisive role played by military aircraft and their smart bombs in the second Gulf War, as well as in Bosnia, Kosovo and even Afghanistan. Since then, such progress has extended further to the ground forces which, in the war on Iraq, were vital: first in the process of paralysing the Iraqi armed forces, and then in sweeping away the figureheads of the Iraqi regime, which an eloquent trope turned into the faces on a deck of cards, to be toppled one after the other. Certainly, the recent war will go down in military history as a landmark in the coordination between the various branches of the armed forces under a single command-and-control system which had to operate under the same circumstances as the soldiers themselves, and in real time. Such advances in the technology of war have made military action not only more effective, but more desirable to the US leadership. In the words of the American neo- conservatives: in the big jungle, unarmed people try to avoid or placate the bear, while those with powerful and accurate guns hunt it out and kill it. A seventh approach to understanding the Iraqi question takes as its starting point 11 September and its effect on American political behaviour. If US neo- conservatives had long been planning a war on Iraq, such a project would have fallen on deaf ears had it not been for that cataclysmic conflagration that struck New York and Washington. Although Congress approved the act to liberate Iraq on 31 October 1998, it would have been impossible to put that law into effect had 11 September not created the appropriate climate for, among other things, the strategy of preemptive war and the general readiness to accept the claim that the Iraqi regime posed an immanent threat and had tangible connections with Al-Qa'eda and terrorism. Perhaps more profoundly, 11 September generated a mood among the US public in favour of handling instances of "civilisational conflict" militarily, and this in turn entailed not only defeating nations hostile to US interests and goals, but also remaking an entire region or civilisation so as to stop it from "breeding" terrorists in future. The eighth approach takes us to the traditional theory of balances of power, not only between the US and Iraq, but also between the US and the entire Arab world. The Arab Human Development Report, appearing only months before the war, drove home many of the deficiencies of the Arab nations, not only in terms of standards of living and human resources, but also in terms of civil liberties, women's rights and education. Simultaneously, the legendary powers of the "Arab street" proved modest at best, and was indeed little more effective than the Arab League, which had sunk to an all time low -- the nations that have voted for its resolutions now going their own way regardless. International organisations do not tend to meet with such a fate unless they lack the minimum resolve necessary to achieve a level of effective unanimity on the basis of mutual interests, rather than through resort to emotional blackmail -- generally sung to the tune of the same "undying principles of Arab nationalism" which are continuously spouted by Al-Jazeera. In short, the political and economic weakness of the Arab order not only acted as an invitation to the strong to invade Iraq and make that country a platform for changing the rest of the region, but it also guaranteed the failure of both those who sought to prevent the war and those who supported it in the hope that it might improve the chances of obtaining Arab rights in Palestine. A ninth theory places the recent war in the context of the confrontation between two orders, one democratic and the other dictatorial. It is a classical paradigm, one that has played itself out in the past between democracy and Nazism, and between democracy and communism. On this interpretation, the victory of democracy was pre- programmed, as much for moral reasons as for reasons pertaining to the efficacy of the democratic order. To a certain extent, the Iraqi crisis was reduced to the contest between democratically-elected Bush, forever accountable to the press and held in check by legislative and judicial authorities, and the unelected, unaccountable Saddam, with his heavily-cultivated aura of immutability and prophetic authority. At other times, it appeared like a battle between a politically, ethnically and religiously diverse and dynamic polity and a regime entirely incapable of accommodating diversity and plurality. With the Kurds having effectively seceded in the north and the Shi'ites having done more or less as much in the south, Iraq as both a government and sovereign nation was already clinically dead. It remained only for the Americans to pull the plug. Finally, there remains the approach which emphasises Israel's role in the whole process. It was Israel and its lobby in Washington, according to this perspective, which essentially defined US interests in the region from the outset and which persuaded Washington of the need to go to war. And it was Israel and its lobby that ultimately formed the team that would go on to administer Iraq. From the beginning to the end, Israel was shaping a new history for itself and the entire Middle East. Perhaps for this reason, the Israeli leadership viewed the war as a total victory, while the Arabs regarded it as a categorical defeat. The reality is, however, more complex than that. The end of a regime that had inflicted heavy attrition on the Arab order, and the emergence of a new, moderate and democratic state in the region, will probably alter many balances of power -- and not necessarily in favour of Israel. There are undoubtedly other ways to make sense of the Iraqi question in addition to the ten perspectives I have mentioned above. Nevertheless, what is most important at this juncture is to take the subject forward, as we probe the mists surrounding both the Iraqi and the Arab questions. * The writer is director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
