The US and its warmongering allies say they are fighting to uphold moral principles, “waging war today to strengthen peace latter”. This smacks of the “white man’s burden” all over again. And it is nonsense. If facts and figures are required afresh to disabuse this hypocritical delusion we refer readers to Noam Chomsky’s lucid rebuttal on page 7 of TFT.
Saddam Hussein says he is crusading for the glory of Islam against the infidels. He’s a liar just as much as George Bush. And his belated effort to inscribe Allaho Akbar on the Iraqi flag and send his pathetic Scuds scurrying into Tel Aviv mocks our intelligence and strains our integrity.
As for all this enthusiasm elsewhere for the elusive Muslim Ummah, the less said the better. There is no civilisation more creaking at the moral joints than the so-called Islamic one today. To support a tyrant, thief and megalomaniac just because he is a Muslim by birth is beyond the realms of credibility.
But there is more to the Gulf war than this. While Saddam Hussein certainly provoked the present crisis for purely mercenary reasons (just as much as the militant response of the Western powers) such motives are of purely academic interest now, five months later. What needs understanding today is that he is himself the creation of a larger injustice imposed upon the Middle-East after the breakup of the Ottoman empire when the Europeans reneged on their promise, brought Arab provinces under their own rule, divided them into artificial entities and in the greatest humiliation of all, foisted the militant state of Israel on the Palestinian segment of the fractured Arab homeland.
Saddam’s present mindset probably derives some sustenance precisely from the repeated humiliations and deepening sense of impotence and frustration inflicted upon the Arabs by Western powers in over decades of history. It has also been argued that the role of the underdog probably fits into certain strands in crescent Arab traditions of preferring to absorb bloody punishment and pain rather than knuckling under a vastly superior foreign enemy. Such decisions reflect a cultural machismo in the Arab mindset in which standing one’s ground, fighting and being bloodied gains respect from allies and enemies alike. Examples of this are Gamal Abdul Nasser over Suez in 1956 and Sinai in 1967, the PLO under Arafat in Beirut and Hafiz al Assad in Lebanon against Israel in 1982. All three were defeated but each emerged, in the eyes of the Arab people, as a hero. In military defeat against a conspiratorial foreign enemy, Nasser inspired the PLO, just as the defeated PLO in turn inspired the Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza. Similarly, yesterday’s Western ally King Hussein is today’s gallant Arab hero because he stands proudly against a vastly superior foreign force.
Thus, even if he is eventually defeated militarily by the Western powers, Saddam Hussein has already acquired the mythical status of a winner in the Arab world, a modern day Saladin for Muslims all over the world.
The real tragedy, of course, is not that a tyrant like Saddam Hussein should emerge victorious in defeat by claiming the hearts of Arabs and Muslims, but that the Western mind should persist in refusing to grasp the obvious linkages in the Middle-East and undo the historic injustice perpetrated in the region.
After August 2, there was never any question of going back to the status quo ante — the Kuwaiti-Iraq crisis had already transcended its unscrupulous origins and become, instead, part of the larger crisis of security and stability in the Middle-East. The ‘linkage’ to the question of Palestine which the West so foolishly and adamantly denies Saddam Hussein has become all the more real and inextricable in the larger conflict in the Middle-East after the invasion of Kuwait. And the Iraqi Scuds on Israel, more than on Saudi Arabian soil, are additional proof, if any is still required, to drive home this point, just as much as the violent backlash of widespread Muslim and Arab public opinion in support of Iraq is evidence of it.
The parallels and linkages between the fate of the Palestinians and that of the Kuwaitis are obvious to all except the US and Britain. In both cases, a grave injustice has been done to the Arab cause, once earlier by the West and now by an Arab himself. But it is equally clear that this Middle-Eastern war is unlike any of the previous six in the region — no Arab country has hitherto conquered and annexed another.
Which is why, without a political settlement to the question of Palestine, the war to destroy Saddam Hussein will not lead to the liberation of Kuwait or to the protection of Western interests in the Gulf, including those of its Arab allies. If anything, the destruction of Iraq might unleash, in the long run, a string of Saddam Hussein all over the Middle-East and much of the Muslim world and devour all efforts to achieve lasting peace in the world.