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Iraqnophobia versus Reality
- The University Press of Kentucky
- Chapter
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Incredibly, in less than eighteen months, the Bush administration has turned worldwide support for the United States following the September 11 attacks into the biggest foreign policy debacle since the Vietnam era. This administration ’s policies on Iraq have bitterly divided NATO, the UN Security Council, the U.S. Congress, the European Union, and even the Arab League. It’s an old joke in Washington that a politician’s most embarrassing moment is when he (or she) inadvertently blurts out the truth. Both President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell had such moments recently. In his 2002 State of the Union speech, President Bush inadvertently mouthed a line written by either Condoleezza Rice or some obscure White House speechwriter : “Iraq has great potential wealth.” Exactly. That’s the whole point of the aggressive U.S. posture. It would be hard to imagine the United States amassing 180,000 troops for a preemptive strike on Rwanda. It therefore turns out, if one examines the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) reports and looks more deeply into the situation, that the present conflict is not really about weapons of mass destruction after all, despite years of hype from the Western media. Nor is it about oil or even wealth per se, but about the vision Iraq has for the future of the Middle East, as opposed to the vision the United States projects. The conflict is therefore about ideas—specifically, political ideas. Consequently , the deeper conflict with Iraq cannot really be fought and won by bombs and missiles. It will have to be fought on the airwaves, on television and the Internet. It is more about winning hearts and minds than winning territory . If that is so, and regardless of what happens on the battlefield or to the regime in Baghdad, the real front lines of the war are to be found in the field of communications. The chief correlate of that proposition is that this will be a long-term battle. The widespread belief that the 1991 Gulf War was a real war and that it would settle the issue of Iraq turns out, in retrospect, to have been mistaken. Longterm observers of the Middle East know that the Gulf War was not so much a war as the first battle of a long campaign or series of wars. For the most part, people in the Middle East understood it that way from the beginning. Iraqnophobia versus Reality James Jennings 283 In that region, events are measured in generations and centuries, not in quarterly phases, as insisted on by American corporations, or in two- or four-year cycles, as U.S. politicians tend to think. Often in the history of the Middle East, it has taken three wars in succession to settle a question, and sometimes not even then. Europe is not much different, where we have the examples of the Thirty Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War. And in our lifetime, we have endured a decades-long cold war that ended not in a quick military victory but in a drawn-out economic triumph. As far as the Middle East is concerned, “If you are not prepared to stay, then don’t go” would be the rule taught by experience. THE IDEAS THAT DRIVE THE CONFLICT WITH IRAQ The Baath ideology is not well known to Westerners, but the essence of its philosophy is expressed in the term renaissance. In short, the Baathists stand for an Arab renaissance. On the surface, there should be no objection to this idea from anybody. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights supports the concept that every group of people deserves to enjoy its own culture and celebrate its own history. In principle, a coalition of Arab states is just as legitimate as a European Union. But when it comes to history, there is a rub. To Arabs, the idea of renaissance evokes powerful political and territorial ambitions that cannot help but create fear and rejection from the West. The remembrance of an overarching Islamic threat to the West, present in some degree since the seventh century, may have faded during the latter half of the twentieth century , but it still exists and was revived in large part at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the methodology of terror exhibited by small bands of extremist Muslims. A succession of Middle Eastern political leaders has created extraordinary fright in the West. These leaders have consequently been vilified as monsters, elevated...