Published on Sunday, September 7, 2003 by the Toronto Starby Haroon Siddiqui
On the eve of the second anniversary of Sept. 11, a few things are clear.
Terrorism is not only not licked, as the blasts in Bali, Casablanca and Jeddah show. It is thriving where it didn't before, namely in Iraq, as the assassinations of a top United Nations' diplomat, the top Shiite political leader and others testify.
America has already killed at least thrice as many innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq as were murdered in America by the 9/11 terrorists.
Thousands of other innocents have been snared, in the West and across the world, in the wide net cast by the war on terrorism.
America is good at war, disastrous at making or keeping peace.
It is incompetent at managing conquered turf and people. It is appallingly ignorant of foreign cultures, languages and politics.
Its hi-tech spying gizmos are no match for the low-tech evasions of its biggest nemeses: Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.
Afghanistan remains at the mercy of warlords, bandits and a regrouping Taliban.
Iraq is spinning out of control.
Future historians may study the series of unending disasters unfolding there under American watch for clues as to the rot at the core of the American empire when it was at its zenith.
They might wonder why a nation that mastered technology, food production and the guns and gadgetry of law and order could not provide electricity, water and security to a destitute people.
Only Americans could have managed to turn the initial goodwill of liberated Iraqis into outright hostility, just as the Bush administration turned the worldwide post-Sept. 11 sympathy for America into ill will.
The chaos in Iraq, far worse than in the early years of Vietnam, will continue for the foreseeable future.
While Washington is asking the Security Council for foreign troops, hard cash and a helping hand in humanitarian aid, it wants to retain military and political control of Iraq.
This does not represent a move toward multilateralism, as portrayed. It is a way of having others clean up America's mess, while America keeps the keys to Iraq.
The proposition is not likely to be acceptable, nor should it be, to France, Germany, Turkey, India or Pakistan, which opposed the war in the first place and got insulted and ignored for it.
More important, the United Nations should not be in the business of supplying a fig leaf for an American hegemonic enterprise.
Iraq should be placed under U.N. trusteeship. Paul Bremer, the American ruler of Iraq, should step aside.
America could keep military command so long as its troops form the biggest contingent and its commander reports to a U.N. civilian administrator.
International trusteeship would draw other nations, along with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
It would end the scandal of American corporations friendly to the Bush administration — Bechtel, Halliburton and others — raking in billions of dollars in contracts while Iraqis have little food, no jobs, no incomes.
The war booty does not end there. Americans are pondering the sale of Iraqi state enterprises or future oil revenue in return for a few trinkets now. How would this be different from the theft of native resources by past colonial empires?
A U.N. trusteeship would also free the U.S.-appointed, 25-member Iraqi Governing Council from the taint of being an American puppet. It needs legitimacy to usher in democracy.
But America is unlikely to let go of its territorial possession, the crass and medieval argument being that the one who spilled some blood to conquer it should get to keep it.
If so, the path ahead is clear enough: Immediately invest the needed $60 billion (U.S.) and announce a timetable for the promised handover of Iraq to Iraqis and the staged withdrawal of all foreign troops.
All of the above is only one aspect of the quagmire.
Not only have George W. Bush's claims for invading Iraq turned out to be fraudulent: no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; no proof of an Iraqi link to Al Qaeda; no hint of any Iraqi capability to attack Israel, let alone America. The domino effect he predicted hasn't materialized, either.
America is more hated than before the war. Anti-American Islamists, not secular liberals, have made record gains in elections in Kuwait and Pakistan.
The promised quid-pro-quo of peace in Iraq leading to peace on the Arab-Israeli front is a mirage. The notion that beating down Arabs on one front would cow them on the other has proven to be as false, as predicted.
Bush's road map for peace is not likely to succeed any more than previous Israeli or American plans, so long as both countries remain preoccupied with the tragic loss of innocent Israeli lives but not the far greater loss of innocent Palestinian lives. The failed search for more pliant leaders, such as Mahmoud Abbas, are no substitute for ending the 36-year occupation.
Bush pledged not to turn the war on Muslim terrorists into a war on Muslims. But he has allowed his cabal of neo-conservative zealots to engineer what is widely seen by Muslims as a clash of civilizations.
They see in the policies of the Bush administration, as well as in the public discourse of a pandering media and subservient academics, that Arabs, Muslims and Islam are routinely demonized in the racist terminology of collective guilt, cultural and religious deformities and genetic proclivities. They see Muslim nations subjected to a double standard.
Syria is accused, as was Iraq, of developing chemical and biological weapons. A back channel through which Damascus was providing Washington with useful intelligence on suspected terrorists has been closed.
Iran is accused, as was Iraq, of harboring terrorists, when, in fact, it has been tracking and arresting suspects, and in the case of Saudi captives, deporting them to their native land. An Iranian-American back channel in Geneva has been suspended. The rhetorical warfare against Iran over its nuclear intentions stands in contrast to the sensible diplomatic track being pursued with North Korea.
Neither the Syrian dictatorship nor the hardliners who control power in Iran deserve any sympathy. But American criticisms of them have little to do with the human rights or democratic aspirations of Syrians or Iranians.
Prejudice against Iran has also clouded American judgment in Iraq. The assassinated Ayatollah Muhammad Baqer al-Hakim, now being eulogized as a moderate, was mostly shunned because he was backed by Iran.
Bush promised democracy for Arabs. But his administration has been eroding American democratic values at home.
There's the McCarthy-esque treatment of critics, from Bill Maher to the Dixie Chicks to Susan Sarandon.
There's the continued incarceration of 680 unnamed people at Guantanamo Bay, and of an undisclosed number of others in secret locations abroad, without charge or access to counsel, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
There are the secret arrests, prosecutions and deportations from America of hundreds of Muslims, mostly poor Pakistanis, virtually none of whom had any terrorist connection. They were made sacrificial lambs to Attorney-General John Ashcroft's god of revenge.
Canadians smug about our resistance to American over-reactions were jolted recently with the arrest of 20 Pakistanis here, on seemingly paranoiac suspicions of terrorist intent.
No question that 9/11 shifted the balance between civil liberties and security in favor of the latter. It is better to be safe than sorry. But such dragnets have not caught terrorists while the real ones have been expanding their evil deeds across continents.
The war on terrorism has one more unsavory aspect: America's partnership with several repressive regimes, including undemocratic Muslim ones.
Some, such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, have been sub-contracted the work of torture. Indonesia and the Philippines have been given millions of dollars to co-operate in the battle against terrorism. They are now using the American support to crack down on separatist movements with genuine grievances. Russia has been given a free hand in Chechnya in return for dropping any opposition to American bases in Central Asia.
America became a great nation through a combination of military and economic might and democratic values. The Bush administration has squandered the moral part of that potent combination.
Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursdays and Sundays.
