How Wrong The Liberals Were, As Usual
How Wrong They Were
By Hussein Shirazi
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 1, 2005
On May 17th, British parliamentarian George Galloway treated a
sub-committee of the US Senate to a tirade which appeared to bemuse and
amuse in equal measure. If we edit his testimony for shameless
mendacity (e.g. presenting himself as a consistent opponent of the
regime of Saddam Hussein), Galloway did make a couple of points which
reflect the consensus of the anti-American left, namely that the
current situation in Iraq is a "disaster" and that the root cause
of the violence is the "occupation" of the country by US and allied
forces. The implication, stated explicitly in a recent article by
Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, is that withdrawal of the
multinational forces would dampen if not terminate the insurgency.
While the flaws in this argument are obvious, given that the prime
target of the insurgency is now the elected government of Iraq and its
employees, there is another question we should ask: what is the track
record of those who want an immediate pull-out from Iraq in providing
accurate analysis and timely advice? What would have happened, let's
say, if the US and its allies had followed their advice in October
2001, at the start of their campaign in Afghanistan?
Let's start with Jason Burke, a British journalist who has made a
name for himself by writing a book on Al-Qaeda. On October 21st 2001,
one week after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, he wrote an
article for the Observer with the unequivocal title "Why this war
will not work". He made the following predictions:
=B7 the foot soldiers of the Taliban will not be troubled by the
forces ranged against them
=B7 the people of Afghanistan will rally behind the Taliban
=B7 the deployment of British and American special forces would
lead to a mass uprising against the invaders, while tarring the
Northern Alliance as western stooges
=B7 an American invasion force would suffer a similar fate to the
Soviet army during its decade-long occupation of Afghanistan.
His advice to the US government was to initiate negotiations with the
Taliban during a bombing pause in which the fate of Bin Laden could be
discussed along with the "root causes" of terrorism, namely
"poverty, repression and skewed policies in the Middle East."
Two weeks later, as the bombing of Taliban ground forces intensified,
Burke penned a further article in which he ignored the doomed military
campaign to focus instead on tales of "torture, treachery, and
spies", by which he meant US support for political opponents of the
Taliban, such as Adbul Haq and Hamid Karzai. Noting that the Taliban
had captured and hanged Haq, Burke made the following predictions:
Pakistan's all-powerful Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) would ensure
that the Taliban "aren't faced by any serious internal or external
threat" (sic), even if this meant disobeying the orders of president
Musharraf;
Hamid Karzai and his followers would suffer the same fate Haq.
One week after publication of this article the Taliban had been swept
from power by the Northern Alliance / US offensive, and shortly
afterwards the Afghan opposition selected Hamid Karzai as the head of
the interim government in Kabul. A master of the art of understatement
might say that Mr Burke, in retrospect, has been less than accurate in
his predictions. A more pertinent observation would be that US
strategists might have profited from reading Burke's articles by
following the maxim "believe the opposite of what he says, do the
opposite of what he recommends."
But it would be unfair to single out Burke for ridicule because his
analysis was typical of the anti-American left during the initial phase
of Operation Enduring Freedom. On November 2nd, 2001, the Guardian
published an editorial entitled "How not to win a war", which
confidently asserted that "If ever there was a new, Vietnam-style
quagmire in the making, Afghanistan must surely be it."
In addition to making dire predictions which failed to materialise, the
Guardian described the Americans as being "trapped in a B-52
mind-set", which reflects a common theme among supercilious Europeans
resentful of US power. In this model of international relations, the US
is a dumb giant which knows how to flex its muscles but lacks
understanding of complex political realities and local cultures,
resorting to brute force when more subtle methods are required.
In a lecture on October 30th, 2001, Professor Sir Michael Howard, the
eminent military historian, said that fighting terrorism by bombing
Afghanistan was like "trying to eradicate cancer with a blow torch"
and had put Al-Qaeda in a "win-win situation". His comments
received wide coverage in the British press, but were based on a
lamentable misunderstanding of US policy. As Colin Powell had
repeatedly stated in the fall of 2001, military action was just one
element of the War on Terror, which would also be prosecuted through
police work, intelligence sharing, cutting off sources of funding and
- yes - diplomacy and coalition-building. The military campaign in
Afghanistan was an essential and urgent action to remove the only
regime in the world which was allowing its national territory to be
used as a safe haven and training camp for Al-Qaeda. And as CNN
terrorism expert Peter Bergen noted, the removal of this safe haven was
a major blow against the terrorists.
The antiwar press in Britain, however, was sane and rational when
compared with the Asia Times, which describes itself as "a quality
Internet-only publication" that looks at issues "from an Asian
perspective". Many of its articles, nonetheless, are written by
authors whose names have a decidedly un-Asian ring to them, such as
Pepe Escobar, a tawdry hack who styles himself as a "roving"
international correspondent. In addition to flirting with 9-11
conspiracy stories, Escobar had no doubt whatever that the real
objective of the military campaign in Afghanistan was to enable the
construction of an oil pipeline from central Asia to the coast of
Pakistan, thereby giving the US access to a vital non-OPEC oil source.
Three years later the pipeline was triumphantly unveiled: unfortunately
for "Pipeline Pepe" its route does not pass anywhere near Afghan
territory, as indicated by the map helpfully printed in his article.
It is worth noting that some on British left did support Operation
Enduring Freedom. American readers will be familiar with the writings
of Chistopher Hitchens - to his name we should add John Lloyd, Nick
Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee, who
seemed genuinely perplexed that her colleagues could be so indifferent
to the fate of Afghan women under the misogynist tyranny of the
Taliban. In an article published on October 31st 2001, she solved this
puzzle for herself when she observed that the anti-American left
"might rather see America humiliated than Afghans liberated". The
quick and crushing victory in Afghanistan meant that Toynbee did not
have to wait long for vindication, and she did not shrink from
reminding those who had predicted a disaster on the scale of Vietnam of
how wrong they had been:
Just remember what they said: the Taliban was different, this was not
war as we knew it. Romantic Victorian paintings of British defeats were
dusted down to warn of the mythic Pashtun warrior spirit. Old film of
Russian conscripts dying in the Afghan snow was shown to foretell the
worst. The Pashtuns were not men, but a rare breed of fighting machine,
welded to their guns and tanks, hard as their rocky land. The jihad
martyrs would fight to the terrible end. Defeat was not in the
vocabulary of martyrs heavenbound for their 70 celestial virgins.
Fractious rogues of the Northern Alliance could never beat God-driven
maniacs. Bombing would do no good, as the crafty guerrilla army would
flit from cave to cave. Bombing would kill thousands of civilians
without touching this will-o-the-wisp foe. Well, it was all bunk. They
were ordinary men after all. Religious delirium may seize small groups,
but faced with a choice between this life or the next, even the devout
cling to their mortal coil. So they fled.
Returning to the situation in Iraq, opponents of Operation Iraqi
Freedom believe that their stance has been justified by the failure to
discover WMDs and the on-going violence in central Iraq. But more
reasonable opponents of the war also understand that Iraq's elected
government now deserves their support and will require help from US and
allied troops until its own security forces are strong enough to defeat
the insurgency. The anti-American left, however, has revealed its true
colors by continuing to treat the Iraqi government as a puppet of the
US and the presence of the multinational force as an "occupation"
of the country. As in Afghanistan, the humiliation of America is more
important than the fate of the people.
In some cases, this anti-Americanism has led to quite open support for
the insurgents and terrorists whose activities have perpetuated the
suffering of the Iraqi people. On January 12th 2005, the Asia Times
published an article about Sadr City (the densely populated Shia suburb
of East Baghdad) by Michael Schwarz, a Marxist professor from the State
University of New York. Schwartz constructed a virtual parallel
universe of disinformation and propaganda based on the following core
assertions:
Sadr City was a "liberated zone" under the control of Muqtada
al-Sadr's "Mehdi Army"
the Mehdi Army had instituted a form of self-government which had broad
support among the local population
similar developments had occurred in Sunni Arab towns such as Fallujah,
which would co-exist peacefully as "nascent city-states" if left
alone by the US military and Iraqi government forces.
In fact, the climate in Sadr City as of January 2005 was one of
peaceful campaigning prior to the eagerly awaited national elections
due at the end of the month. The Muqtada militia had surrendered its
heavy weapons several months before in a deal brokered with the interim
government, and its supporters were campaigning for their own party
list, the Independent Nationalist Elites and Cadres, which ended up
winning only three seats in the 275-member assembly - so much for its
broad popular support.
As for Schwarz's depraved characterisation of insurgent-controlled
Fallujah, the reign of terror that had existed in this "liberated
zone" was revealed to the world after the insurgents were driven out
in November - not local self-government or a "nascent city
state", but a base for fanatical terrorists intent on spreading
mayhem throughout Iraq.
The current situation in Iraq is that of an elected government seeking
to establish control over its national territory with the assistance of
US and allied forces acting with its consent and under a United Nations
mandate. This government has been recognised by all of Iraq's
neighbours, including regimes in Iran and Syria which are antagonistic
to the US. The insurgents now fighting the Iraqi government draw their
popular support almost entirely from within the Sunni Arab community,
who are 20% of Iraq's population. Even within this minority, support
for the insurgency is declining as more Sunni Arabs choose to
participate in politics and join the Iraqi security forces. The
insurgents have no unified political program, and ever more of their
attacks are terrorist outrages, often carried out by foreign jihadists
who have no compunction about murdering and maiming innocent Iraqis.
The insurgents are gradually being defeated. Their former strongholds
in Samarra, Fallujah and Haifa Street (in Baghdad) are now under the
control of Iraqi government and coalition forces. Their only hope is
for a premature withdrawal of the multinational force, before the Iraqi
army and police are strong enough to defeat them unaided. Their only
means of achieving this is by generating media coverage in the US that
will undermine public support for the mission being carried out by the
troops. The anti-American left is a de facto ally of the terrorists and
insurgents now operating in Iraq. It spreads their propaganda, it
shares their hatreds and it supports their main aim: the humiliation
and defeat of America.
The author is a British academic of Iranian descent who lives in
London.
.
|
