The Israel Settler-state Is THE PROBLEM

The ominous price of American failure in Iraq

By David Hirst
Senior Culture Writer
Monday, June 07, 2004

In the New York Review of Books recently, veteran commentator Edward Sheehan wrote from Nablus about a Palestinian expectation that this summer would witness a simultaneous "explosion" in both Iraq and the Occupied Territories. This has yet to happen, but the mere expectation is an ironic comment on perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the Iraqi enterprise. For the Bush administration's neoconservatives, overthrowing former President Saddam Hussein was to be nothing if not region-wide in purpose - Iraq to be the fulcrum of a grand design that, through "democratization," would "transform" the entire Middle East with a final Arab-Israeli settlement at its core.

The neocons were right about one thing: The Arab world, however fractious, is bound by strong psychological and cultural ties, and whatever happened in Iraq would have profoundly affected the whole. The trouble is that the interplay works both ways. Just as American success in Iraq would have made success likelier elsewhere, so the failure now so ominously threatening will breed failure elsewhere. Not merely does the situation in Palestine become worse because of Iraq, but the rebound makes the situation in Iraq worse too. This interaction between the region's two great crisis zones is only the kernel of a multiplier effect that ramifies everywhere, with local troubles that have an anti-American aspect coalescing, emotionally, politically, even organizationally, in a single stream. An American disaster in Iraq has the built-in propensity to become a regional one.

For years it had been axiomatic that any Western intervention to bring down Hussein needed to be matched by intervention - essentially pro-Palestinian intervention - in the Arab-Israeli conflict too. The West created the Israel settler-state at the Palestinians' expense, and any peace settlement should, so far as possible, have redressed that historic injustice. Otherwise, the Iraq war's official objectives would be dismissed by Arabs and Iraqis as just another episode in the history of Western conquest and exploitation.

The neocons bought the axiom - but turned it on its head. Thanks to them the Iraqi invasion became the supreme expression of double standards that have forever vitiated US Middle East policies. In theory, the settlement was to come about under the auspices of democratization and reform. In practice, it would come about through a higher level of external coercion, radiating from the invasion, than had ever been applied before, and by a yet more extravagant bias in Israel's favor. The settlement would have been a drastic regression from what the world, the US included, had come to regard as reasonable. Even now, as he slips deeper into the Iraqi quagmire, Bush has not tried to compensate in pro-Palestinian coin. On the contrary, he has put America firmly behind Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's expansionist designs.

So while the Palestinians have their own, American-created reasons for stepped-up resistance, they naturally view the Iraqis, who increasingly have theirs too, as an integral part of the same anti-imperialist struggle. More tellingly, Iraqis have adopted Palestine as their own. Or re-adopted it; for there had been some ground for the neocons' belief that Iraq was a key Arab country that could have been weaned away from the pan-Arab nationalism that is anathema to the US and Israel. The Palestine cause, and the widespread Arab propensity to look upon Hussein as a champion, had bred resentment among Iraqis against all things Arab and Palestinian. But in Falluja, Sunni Islamists battled in the name of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin; in Najaf, the rebellious Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called himself the "striking Iraqi army of Hizbullah and Hamas."

In Iraq and Palestine, more obviously than anywhere else, the US has now directly or indirectly empowered the very forces - Islamist and nationalist, populist, violent and fanatical - it came to quell. But such forces are also the progeny of the Arab condition itself and of the moral and political bankruptcy of the official Arab order. The forms the bankruptcy takes may often be strictly local and domestic, but one is region-wide: Arab governments have collectively failed in what should be the basic duty of any state, the defense of land, people and sovereignty against foreign assault and domination.

From that standpoint, the Islamists, or "Islamo-nationalists," are simply non-state actors who have assumed that duty themselves, through jihad, terror and suicide. A Palestinian scholar has observed: "They are profiting from a climate in which the Arab masses' greatest joy has become to see Bush's reverses piling up; the US invasion of Iraq becoming ever more painful."

Al-Qaeda, the quintessential expression of pan-Arab, pan-Islamic outlook and action, is the most fearsome of profiteers. America has turned Iraq into the perfect arena for conducting a pan-Islamic struggle against the Western infidel and the "apostate" Arab order. Lebanon's Hizbullah is strictly local in origin and membership, but it enjoys greater region-wide prestige than Al-Qaeda, because it confined itself to fighting - and besting - Israel in a classical guerrilla war.

Like the Palestinians, Hizbullah now regards Iraqi resistance as accessory to its own. Increasingly accused by the Israelis of planning, directing and financing the Islamist resistance in the Occupied Territories, and of accumulating vast new firepower, the party is ready and waiting for a cross-border conflagration; but it wants Israel to start it, so that its re-entry into the jihadist arena is legitimate as well as dramatic. Iraq cannot but hasten that day. Two weeks ago, breaking new ground, Hizbullah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah declared that the struggle against Israel and America was one, and that he only awaited the call from his Iraqi brethren to join them against the US.

A triumph for Islamists, American failure will give free rein to another, no less disruptive category of non-state forces. Some are Islamist too, and hostile to the US, but their defining characteristic is that they are ethnic or sectarian, and hostile to one another. With his Sunni minority rule, Hussein went further than any other Arab regime in the ruthless exploitation of confessionalism. That meant that any "democracy" that replaced him had to be confessional too: A system in which all Iraq's communities felt they would have a representative stake.

Success in this could lead in time to a higher form of democracy. But failure will lead back to tyranny - or, more likely, to anarchy and civil war, Lebanese-style. Thirteen years ago Arab regimes, with American help, finally put out the Lebanese fire. But Iraq will be a Lebanon writ large. So big and pivotal a country at inter-communal loggerheads with itself will infect an entire region. The unprecedented Kurdish disturbances in Syria in March, the stirrings among the Shiite communities of Kuwait, Bahrain and the oil-rich eastern province of Saudi Arabia, are but premonitory tremors of convulsions to come.

The flow of oil and the security of Israel are fundamentals of US policy in the Middle East. As soaring oil prices portend, the spread of the Iraqi contagion to the Gulf will pose a real threat to the free flow of oil. As for Israel, an American debacle in Iraq will be very disturbing indeed. Israelis have already voice well-founded fears that the US public will blame them for pushing the US government, via the neocons, into a catastrophic misadventure; that the American will to stand by Israel, whatever the cost to its interests in Arab world, will be grievously impaired; and that anti-American forces in the region will redouble their efforts to make that cost unbearable.

How Sharon would react against Arabs and Palestinians to the mere hint of abandonment by the US is one of the most pregnant questions in a Middle East where the worst is yet to come.


David Hirst, a long time Middle East correspondent for The Guardian, is author of "The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East." He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR