What made the U.S. think they’d be greeted with open arms?
The war summit held at Camp David by US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair could more aptly have been termed a “crisis summit,” opines the UAE daily Al-Khaleej.
Along with other Arab newspapers, it sees their awkward performance at the joint press conference they held after their talks as a mark of how seriously their original invasion plans have been derailed.
They were incapable of fielding journalists’ questions about why the “surgical operation” they had promised failed to materialize, why military analysts are now talking about the prospect of the US and British armies getting bogged down in a long and costly conflict, and why the Iraqi people haven’t been welcoming them with open arms, the paper says in its main editorial.
They had led their peoples to believe, with the collusion of most of the American and British media, that the war would be won quickly, and their boys would soon be safely home after having triumphantly “liberated” Iraq. But eight days after invading, their forces are “standing still in military terms” and facing fierce resistance, which they did not expect or factor into their plans. And the military briefers have been reduced to deceiving reporters about the progress and achievements of the invading troops, Al-Khaleej remarks.
“If the invasion had been proceeding to plan there would have been no need for Blair to go to Camp David. It is because it is encountering a real problem on the ground, which worries them, that the war chiefs met to study and reconsider the failures and miscalculations.” The paper warns that their likely response to the setbacks they have encountered will be to escalate the war that they had promised would be “clean” and “quick,” and to “intensify the bombing and send more forces to Iraq to secure the result that they want to achieve at any price.”
The assumption that the mainly Shiite population of southern Iraq would rise up against the regime in Baghdad once the invading forces came marching in is identified by many Arab commentators as the key blunder made by the war planners.
Joseph Samaha writes in the Beirut daily As-Safir that this was not just an expectation, but also a fundamental component of Washington’s strategy for Iraq.
“It envisaged events unfolding in a number of steps as follows: We come in. They revolt. We take control. We govern. We divide the administration between the revolting insiders and the offshore opposition. We supervise a gradual handover of power in step with a detailed list of conditions. And we build a prototype based on detailed obedience to us over the range of domestic and external affairs,” the Beirut daily’s editor writes.
But the plan went wrong at step two, says Samaha. “No one revolted. This is crucial, because the US and Britain considered the Iraqi opposition to be part of the “coalition of the willing.” When they broke with the UN Security Council and with international law, they wagered that the warm popular welcome would silence Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, Bashar Assad, Gerhard Schroeder and the other rejectionists. And the anticipated popular welcome was not just a political factor but a military one, too, taken into account when deciding the details of the aggression: the size of the armies, the role of air strikes, etc.”
Samaha says while it would be wrong to portray the real resistance being mounted as a harbinger of defeat for the Americans, the negative reaction of Iraqis in the south to the invaders raises the prospect of a costly war, which will compel the US to amend its subsequent military and political plans. There are indeed sectarian and communal divisions among Iraqis and their attitudes to the regime differ. But they are also bound together by common national bonds, “and these have been strengthened by the stupidity, or rather arrogance, of the American promise to take the would-be rebels into a war against Iran.”
Developments in the north meanwhile indicate that those parts of Iraq that could prove “friendly” to the Americans “will get less friendly by the day,” he says.
Samaha acclaims that reaction in the Arab world to the invasion has been even more hostile than inside Iraq, forcing some governments to change the tone of their public pronouncements, others to respond meekly to harsh Iraqi criticisms, and others to “come up with initiatives and warn of the prospective deterioration of their relations with Washington. But more importantly, Iraq’s steadfastness has expanded the margin of freedom in the Arab world, emboldening people to criticize the authorities, making them accustomed to demonstrating and protesting, and obliging their rulers to think twice before cracking down.”
It also strengthens the worldwide anti-war movement, and if it persists it could heighten controversy within America proper about the war, putting the neoconservatives who conceived it on the defensive.
“Responsibility for the failure of stage two of the simplistic planning is shared by Iraqi dissidents, American extremists and kowtowing Arabs,” Samaha writes. But the major burden is on the former, the minority of Iraqi exiles who insisted their compatriots would relish an invasion as the harbinger of democracy, exaggerated the extent of the offshore opposition’s “networks” inside the country, and were contemptuous of Iraqi and pan-Arab nationalism.
Samaha singles out Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi-American academic who is “the thinking brains of (Iraqi National Congress leader) Ahmed Chalabi,” a member of the State Department’s post-Saddam planning staff, and darling of the pro-Israel American Right. Makiya described the sound of US bombs falling on Baghdad as “music to my ears.”
“The man is a main link between Iraqi opposition forces and the American war party. If he managed to present himself as an example of an ordinary Iraqi, no wonder the Americans are surprised they’re being shot at by Iraqis who don’t share Makiya’s taste in music, and on whom the sound of the falling bombs has a different effect,” Samaha says.
The Saudi daily Al-Watan sees an Iranian hand behind the increasingly anti-war posture being struck by Iraq’s biggest armed Shiite rebel group, the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI). The paper states its Tehran-based leader Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim, after initially indicating that his militia, the Badr Brigade, would stay out of the conflict, later indicated his forces would feel free to act if necessary, and stressed that they would not take orders from the Americans.
“Hakim wasn’t only speaking for himself, but also for the Iranian leadership, which appears to be sensing the danger looming from the south in the event of Iraq coming under American control,” Al-Watan says. The prospect of the US controlling their country’s politics and oil worries the Iraqi opposition, as does its lack of clarity about its plans for Iraq’s future. They are particularly alarmed by its failure to bury the idea of establishing an American military administration, which would gradually groom an interim Iraqi government to take over while preparing for elections and making a host of institutional and administrative changes.
The betting is that this will take long enough to entrench the Americans so firmly in Iraq “that it will be difficult to get them out of the region afterward,” according to Al-Watan.
Other newspapers highlight Syria’s resolute anti-war stance, and the trouble that seems to be causing Damascus with some other Arab governments. As-Safir publisher Talal Salman warmly applauds Damascus’s stance. He writes that President Bashar Assad can truly claim to be speaking on behalf of the Arabs as a whole when he denounces the collusion of some Arab states in the American aggression, and warns that it is part of a scheme to impose US hegemony on the whole region and help Israel impose her will on the Palestinians.
The young Syrian leader’s forthrightness shows not only courage but also foresight, and awareness of the need to “prepare for what is being hatched against Syria and all the Arabs’ lands,” he says.
“If the leaders of other Arab countries, with clout and with oil, shared this outlook, the situation in the Arab and Islamic worlds and internationally would be totally transformed. And the American invasion of Iraq would not have happened,” he says.
Waleed Shoucair states in the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat that Syria’s stand has seriously antagonized some other Arab leaders, who perceive it as being short on realism, long on nationalistic rhetoric, and aimed primarily at appealing to the Arab masses.
Other Arab leaders believe that now that the war has started, they must brace for the aftermath, and the prospect of the Americans targeting other Arab states including their own and their “regimes, roles and privileges.” This means keeping their heads down, and not crossing a Bush administration that “applies the rule of ‘with us or against us’ even to the verbal stands taken by other countries,” he says.
But Shoucair argues that this “realism,” which prompts some governments to feel they have to strike a neutral posture over Iraq or appease Washington, could be self-defeating in the longer run. Their anger at Damascus for hailing Iraq’s resistance and urging all Arabs to back it is misplaced, especially as it has been expressing its profound disagreement with them in measured tones.
“No rational person can demand that Syria accept with equanimity (or turn a blind eye to) the prospect of Iraq on its 600-kilometer eastern border being turned overnight from an ‘Arab’ neighbor into an Israeli-American one (so long as Ariel Sharon’s buddy Jay Garner is to be civil governor of Iraq), in addition to the Israeli neighbor in the Golan on its 70-kilometer southern border,” Shoucair remarks.
The way the Americans have been attacking the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel for its coverage of the war is seen in the Arab world as further evidence that things have not been going according to plan for them.
Abdelbari Atwan, publisher/editor of pan-Arab Al-Quds al-Arabi, balks at the hypocrisy of the Bush administration, a serial breaker of international law and treaties, denouncing Al-Jazeera for showing Iraqi TV footage of captured or dead US troops on grounds that this is in breach of the Geneva Convention. Iraq was compelled to display the captives and bodies to counter the US and Britain’s denials, he argues.
AI
