Almost every development of significance in the last five years finds its point of origin in the disastrous US decision to wage imperial war on Iraq, writes Gamil Mattar There is a rule in science that holds that the factor that explains everything explains nothing. As I was looking through the articles and studies that appeared on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, it occurred to me that, to hundreds of commentators, Iraq might be the factor that explains everything. From what I read, I got the impression that every international issue, political and economic development, incident of terrorism or counterterrorism, and sectarian flare-up could be traced to the war on Iraq. Whoever would have thought that so many different things could converge on one single point of origin? I read that in the five years since that war began, which occurred three years into Vladimir Putin's rule, Russia revived and that the Kremlin would never have been able to make such progress and recover its international influence as rapidly and efficiently as it did had the US not been mired in a war against Iraq. That war, according to the article, helped raise oil and gas prices, and imposed a form of calm on Chechnya, with American assent and with the help of Arab governments that realised that the American presence in Iraq had sparked an expansion in the jihadist trend that exceeded all previously conceived borders. In five years, the popularity of the US plummeted, not only in the Middle East, the region that Washington had chosen as its platform for asserting its hegemony over the world, but also in many other parts of the world. Nevertheless, analysts are not of one mind over where exactly to pin the responsibility for this. Some say Bush personally or his administration or, to narrow it down further, the national security team headed by the US vice-president and consisting of a clique of racist and ideological and religious fanatics. Others lay the blame more generally on the substance, attitudes and exercise of US foreign policy. Surely it is preferable for history to record that a president, personally or through his administration, was responsible for the erosion of his country's popularity. At least then there remains the hope that there will come a day when the trend can be reversed, that day being when that president and his administration leave the White House. If, on the other hand, the fault lies with US foreign policy, as shaped by the domination of certain economic or social forces or some nasty vested interests, then that bodes ill. Take, for example, this part of the world where it is commonly believed that US foreign policy is behind the anti-Americanism that has come to prevail in the region. Nothing has more greatly distressed and infuriated the Arab people than America's support of aggression after aggression against the Arab world and its intervention in our domestic affairs. But many countries and people have not always viewed US policy so grimly. Indeed, some continue to regard it, as we used to half a century or more ago, with the romanticism of the 1940s. We used to see a superpower that had not practiced colonialism like European powers, until we realised that it practiced a new, improved and more ferocious form of colonialism. During the Cold War, peoples in Eastern Europe, for example, looked towards the US with hearts brimming with hope. Afterwards, they awoke to a new form of domination and found themselves subordinated to a different alliance and forced to implement the strictures of a single economic ideology. In other words, for them, capitalist America did not turn out all that different from communist Russia: both forced Eastern Europe into pacts, alliances, military obligations and economic straightjackets, closing the doors to alternative ideas and opportunities. We once heard from the West, in fact from Bush's own mouth, that the war on Iraq kindled the beacon of democracy in the Middle East and that if this war had a first cause it was not weapons of mass destruction or terrorism, but the spread of democracy. Five years down the line, the Americans themselves say that developments in Iraq forced Bush to suspend his evangelical mission in the Middle East. Even so, there were parties on all sides that found it in their interest to parrot the views coming out of Washington on democracy in the Middle East. But the fact, never officially acknowledged in Washington, is that the movement towards political reform in the Arab world began long before the war on Iraq, and Bush certainly had no hand in it. Reform advocates would come together here or there, in the Arab world or abroad, and went to enormous lengths and sacrifices to make their voices heard by the people. The reform that the US called for and ostensibly tried to impose on Arab governments did not initiate the reform drive. On the contrary, it put the brakes on the authentic reform process because anti- reformist forces could now use hostility to the war on Iraq to undermine genuine advocates of reform. As a result, the cause of democracy is in a more wretched condition now than at any point since the countries of this region won their independence. The five years of war on Iraq inaugurated the idea of spreading democracy under foreign occupation, in the morass of sectarian slaughter and after the abolition of political parties and purges of political elites. The past five years have been an uninterrupted disaster for all progressively minded democratic thinkers in the Arab world. The past five years have also brought a rush of nightmares that shocked the Arab mind out of its erstwhile dream. That was the dream of the American value system: respect for the principles of the constitution, the sanctity of individual privacy and the rule and justness of law. Five years ago, when we contemplated the US while still in the grips of that dream, there would be a transgression here or there, but they were too far and few between to startle us into awakening. Then, suddenly, in a matter of five years, the American value system toppled with a reverberating crash. Bremer's political and administrative sweeps, the plundering of Iraq's historical and material wealth and the kindling of sectarian strife were quickly followed by scenes of torture in Abu Ghraib, the mock trials that followed it, Guantanamo (the crown of thorns on the new American value system) and the kidnapping and transfer of suspects to America's allies and others countries in the Third World so that they could be tortured there. Then the Arab press, like newspapers elsewhere around the world, filled with reports of how certain American multinationals illicitly obtained million dollar contracts in Iraq, and we learned of the spread of corruption among American officers and soldiers, and of the crimes of privately contracted soldiers and mercenaries. There were times when those stories even seemed to drown out stories of local corruption in the Middle East. In the past five years, Arab readers discovered that the freedoms of the press and expression in the US were not as their teachers had led them to believe when they were students and, indeed, not the type of models that Arab liberals would be keen to emulate at home. That Bush reportedly personally threatened to bomb Al-Jazeera headquarters is the most vivid sign of the US administration's contempt for those freedoms. But there are many other instances, notably the brainstorm of "putting the media in bed with the military," for which reason not a single objective report on the course of the war, the death toll and concomitant human rights abuses came out of Iraq since the day US forces committed the massacre of Falluja (which threw open Iraq's doors to the influx of suicide bombers from all Arab countries and to the exodus of four million Iraqi refugees, all eyewitnesses to the American way of spreading democracy by force). A lot has happened during the five years since the US first invaded Iraq. I am not just talking about the million or so who were killed, or the destruction of the Iraqi nation and its wealth, or the 4,000 officially reported American dead and the unknown numbers of others whose names weren't listed because they were "private soldiers". Nor am I speaking just about the unimaginable amounts of money that the US is spending on that war, amounts so large that the only way our minds can even begin to grasp them is to reduce them to the smallest manageable units, such as $5,000 per second. I tried to think of ways the Bush administration might have helped the US by unleashing that war. I failed. I thought surely it must have given a boost to the military industrial complex and, therefore, that some of the war allocations may have remained stateside and circulated in ways that benefited the American people. I thought that maybe the war enhanced America's image as the sole superpower, at least to some forces in the US, which, in turn, could have stimulated a drive to make America live up to a moral tenor commensurate with this stature. I thought of other possible accomplishments, but was unable to find strong enough evidence to corroborate them, especially in view of the declining likelihood of the US emerging from its current economic crisis, which top economists in the West attribute to the war on Iraq. Nevertheless, we can still point to one feat, one that not many talk about because it is not purely American in the making. The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict testifies to strenuous American efforts to narrow its scope and reduce the numbers of participants. In this domain the US scored some considerable success. Then came the years of the war against Iraq, in the course of which the Arab-Israeli conflict became for the first time an Islamic-Israeli conflict, a development that is rife with the potential for new roles in this new/old conflict for the countries of the Gulf and North Africa, and beyond to the Muslim countries south of the Sahara and to Pakistan. In whose interest is this broadening of the scope of the conflict with Israel? Is it a separate and limited accomplishment, or is it another catastrophe to be added to the catastrophe of the war against Iraq? Is it a sign of a change in American strategy towards the conflict, or has the conflict become part of a broader wider-flung American strategy that has its sights set as far afield as China to the east and Siberia to the north? These and other such questions will be answered by forthcoming developments in the Iraq war and others in the coming years.
