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Welcoming our new American colonial masters
An
Arab press review, By The Dail Star
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As the US presses the UN Security Council
for a new resolution tacitly endorsing military action against Iraq, Arab
newspapers offer conflicting forecasts of the outcome and duration of the
clash of wills between Washington and the anti-war majority in the world
body.
In Syria, the only Arab member of the Security Council, the official
Tishrin daily suggests the opponents of war are likely to block the
resolution, which it describes as being calculated to pull the plug on
Resolution 1441 and ongoing UN arms inspections in Iraq and “start the
countdown to aggression.”
The paper says George W. Bush’s US administration is fully aware that
Resolution 1441 has not been exhausted and has the capacity to see the
crisis through to a peaceful resolution. The other members of the Security
Council, “except Britain, of course,” support the peaceful approach
and “see no rationale for a new resolution so long as the first one
suffices for the purposes specified by the UN.” As a result, Washington
is likely “to find itself in a worse position than it was at the session
held on the 14th of this month, when Secretary of State Colin Powell was
besieged with voices opposing war,” it says. “If the expectations of
informed observers are correct, Washington will walk out of the Security
Council and into unilateral military action against Iraq, which by
international standards amounts to direct aggression. Thus it, rather than
Iraq, will be in material breach of Resolution 1441, of UN legality, and
of principles sacrosanct to the states of the region. And thus it will
have initiated the process of destabilizing the post-Cold War world and
opening the door to endless conflicts.”
Tishrin adds: “War could begin at any moment, and no one doubts the US
capacity to wage it with its gargantuan military machine and sophisticated
weapons. But what will this war mean, and what conditions and
repercussions will result from it? This is where the grave danger lies,
not just for Iraq but for all the countries of the region primarily, and
for international peace and security.”
The Damascus warns that a war on Iraq will make the US a host of new
enemies who will seek to hit back at it politically or economically, and
also encourage the use of military force in other trouble spots, while
creating new flashpoints.
“Everyone will lose confidence in the UN and its ability to deal with
developments and conflicts, and the world will be reduced to a mere
onlooker amid an unprecedented international political and security
breakdown,” the paper cautions. “All this so the US can hold on to its
misconceived and unwarranted war plans, whose consequences could easily be
avoided by recourse to the United Nations and by continuing to tackle the
Iraqi problem via Security Council Resolution 1441, which is adequate to
the task and has secured Iraq’s cooperation and the world’s
backing.”
A columnist in the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat puts the onus on
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to prevent war by stepping down, and
suggests this is what the upcoming Egyptian-hosted Arab summit should
demand of him.
Among continuing sharp differences between key participants over the
timing and agenda of the proposed summit, Beshara Nassar Sharbel writes
that once the Arab leaders get around to meeting, the first thing they
will have to do is “forget” the recent acrimonious meeting of Arab
foreign ministers in Cairo and the split it caused in their ranks.
There is no need for them to convene at all if all they are going to do is
“divide between opponents of war and facilitators of the American
army’s action against the Baghdad regime,” he says. Nor is there
any point in the summit if its upshot is a meaningless “consensus
statement” which “rejects war in principle and calls on Baghdad to
implement UN resolutions,” Sharbel writes. “All the leaders know that
things have gone past that stage, and war is just a stone’s throw away.
They also know that Resolution 1441 does not pardon Saddam’s regime from
paying its head as the price of full compliance, however much France’s
Jacques Chirac may try to spare it that cup or the Kremlin may replicate
Yevgeny Primakov’s failed 1991 mission.”
It is “last chance time,” and the Arabs have an opportunity to
“abandon their doublespeak, both over their attitude to the crime of
Sept. 11 and to the issue of getting rid of the Iraqi regime,” he says.
“They will not escape from their state of marginalization and
ineffectiveness unless they realize that rejecting the principle of war
must entail ceasing to facilitate the continued suffering of the Iraqi
people and avoiding the trap of procrastination and indefinite arms
inspections.”
They must also “take into account that 200,000 US troops have not come
to the region on a picnic and that when the sole superpower turned its
attention from Osama bin Laden to Iraq, it definitely meant to reshape the
region.
“The initiative that is needed is not, of course, an eloquent consensus
statement that upholds international legality and condemns the use of
force,” Sharbel argues. “Nor is it a Taif conference on Iraq (a
reference to the 1989 Taif Accords that ended Lebanon’s civil war), as (Hizbullah
leader) Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah proposed a few years too late, to restore
peace to Iraq as it did to Lebanon. “What are needed are a single-item
agenda and a bold initiative that can save Iraq from war and the region
from the tyranny of the super-hawks in the US administration. And the
initiative will not be serious if the summit does not issue a joint
statement that demands Saddam’s resignation, plus a reconciliation which
excludes those who involved Iraq in two aggressive wars, caused the exodus
of millions of Iraqis, and didn’t flinch from using chemical weapons.”
Sharbel says this is the “only way” Arab leaders can “spare Iraq
war, spare the region its consequences, and spare the regimes, especially,
the challenge of instability.”
Egyptian columnist Assayed Zahra notes that a considerable number of
commentators in the Arab media have recently taken to parroting the US
line on Iraq, justifying and even welcoming the prospect of the country
being invaded.
He writes in the Bahraini daily Akhbar al-Khaleej that they remind him of
Egyptian nationalists in the early 1940s who used to hope the German Army
in North Africa would overrun Egypt. They thought that would rid Egypt and
the rest of the Arab world of “loathed British colonialism,” he
recalls. But those presently cheering on the US are advocating the
recolonization of Iraq and the entire Gulf region.
“How could this be?” Zahra asks. “Forget about the statements made
by officials and rulers, which are governed by all sorts of
considerations. How can writers and ‘intellectuals’ allow themselves
to openly bless the American colonization of an Arab country and provide
it with excuses and justifications, when the whole world is warning of the
devastation and domination to which that will subject the entire
region?”
To Zahra’s mind, there is a range of reasons why various Arab pundits
have taken to acting as cheerleaders for an American war.
“There are, for example, writers and ‘intellectuals’ who think
invading and colonizing Iraq is reasonable and acceptable come-uppance and
welcome retribution for what Iraq did in the past when it invaded
Kuwait,” he says. Others are motivated by “base sectarian
instincts,” and “think America will hand the reins of Iraq to the
‘sect’ and that this will be the prelude to ‘sectarian dreams’
coming true in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province and other parts of the
Gulf.” A third variety of Arab pro-war “intellectuals” are outright
opportunists, who have no principles or integrity and always defer to
superior power and wealth, “even a foreign colonial invader,” Zahra
charges. “And then there are those who strike that posture because it is
the posture of their governments and they are with the government in every
circumstance and case.”
All these groups are now egging on the US military to mug Iraq, when until
recently they wouldn’t have dared say such things openly.
“What new thing has happened?” Zahra asks. “Where did they get the
audacity to flaunt their disgraceful positions without shame? What has
happened, dear reader, is that all these people are convinced the American
invasion and colonization of Iraq is unstoppable. So they consider they
are now, and will remain in future, under the direct protection of the
American colonizer and no one can touch them.”
Against the backdrop of the Non-Aligned Movement conference in Malaysia,
the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh urges the countries of the world to come
together to roll back aggressive American global hegemony.
It suggests that although the Non-Aligned Movement has been eclipsed since
the end of the Cold War, there is a renewed need in today’s world for
someone to play the anti-colonial role it once performed.
“America’s reversion to a direct colonial role in Iraq constitutes a
new phenomenon: usurping people’s rights in the name of enforcing
international legality and promoting democracy. It uses the same arguments
as the old colonialism, whose objectives were to acquire primary resources
and energy and monopolize markets,” the Saudi daily remarks. But the
world will not “remain hostage to a single superpower forever,”
Al-Riyadh says. Empires have a habit of overstretching themselves, “and
America will enter into the same tunnel so long as the world shows the
capacity to resist.” This depends on the countries of the world coming
together in a “front” committed to managing international affairs
peacefully and promoting “coexistence rather than clashes of
civilizations and religions.”
The paper suggests that if various “effective” countries were to join
the Non-Aligned Movement, they might help build it into such a “front”
to counter US hegemony and domination of the international order. They
could, for example, push for fairer representation of the international
community on the UN Security Council — from which many countries that
are more important than Britain and France are excluded — in the hope of
“rectifying the equation before America leads the world into anarchy and
announces the death of international law.”
Following former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov’s hush-hush
visit to Baghdad for talks with President Saddam Hussein, the Saudi
pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat reports that the Iraqi leader has been
reminding visitors that the US sabotaged a last-ditch Soviet effort to
prevent the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait, in which Primakov also served as
envoy.
The paper runs the transcript (appearing simultaneously in the Russian
newspaper Zaftra) of a conversation in Baghdad last week between Saddam
and a visiting Russian delegation led by Community Party leader Gennady
Zyuganov, in which he recalls Primakov’s 1991 mission, when the US-led
air war on Iraq was under way but the ground offensive had not begun.
“At the time, we succeeded in coordinating some policies in principle,
and agreed to (Primakov’s) arguments to prevent the combat operations
from turning into ground operations,” the Iraqi leader explains. “But
the US took no account of Moscow’s view, and we ended up being deceived
as a result of his visits. There was an agreement that they would defer
the assault until after they got detailed information from him, but they
hastened to attack even before he got back to Moscow. It was a treacherous
deception.”
Elsewhere in his reported remarks to the Russian delegation, Saddam speaks
of how beneficial it would be for Russia if it were to rebuild its
Soviet-era economic and other links with the Third Word in general and the
Arab world in particular. He also argues that Washington’s current
targeting of Iraq is, in one respect, part of a broader endeavor to keep
post-Soviet Russia weak by depriving it of international partners.
Saddam stresses that “the Iraqi people don’t want war, but not at any
price. The US wants to force us to surrender under the threat of war and
occupation. Their pretexts are only aimed at concealing their real
objective, which is to destroy Iraq. If the US had wanted a mutual
understanding, it would have arrived at one with us on a proper basis. It
is entitled to normal economic relations with Iraq, like any other
country, but it wants to colonize the region and the entire world.”