NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
August 18, 2004
Flypaper revisited
It must be rather galling to the U.S. Marines to be sent into the winding streets of Najaf Iraq at the risk of their lives among bystanders of strange language and unknown sentiments against the lethally-armed streetfighters of Moqtada al-Sadr's "Imam Mahdi Army" to do the Iraqi government's own dirty work. And then the same government sends a delegation to the al-Sadrites -- to the people you are trying to kill and avoid being killed by -- to negotiate an end of the fighting and their retreat to safety as if the Iraqi government were a neutral party. Such missions are very hard to sell politically back home in the United States; and it is a grace that the Western media are not following the plot or the unhappiness Stateside would be greater. They couldn't follow it if they tried for they are locked in their own cultural prison unable to imagine the complexity of the situation on the ground in Iraq. It was the same when members of the U.S. Senate expressed outrage on learning that Ahmad Chalabi the erstwhile American ally now abandoned to his fate had had dealings with the ayatollahs in Tehran. So does everyone have; just as everyone except Mr. Chalabi had dealings with Saddam Hussein. Mr. Chalabi had an office in Tehran long before the Iraqi invasion. Politics is like business in the Middle East it is a bazaar everyone dickers; some from positions of power and most from positions of supplication. And occasionally everything explodes in violence but then life returns to normal the next day. That is how things work in the region and if the Americans don't like it they can go home. Except they can't because there is no way out once you have entered into the peculiarly Muslim universe of assumptions and expectations. You can merely get used to ideas of loyalty and moral consistency that are truly non-Western yet which pertain in Iraq and among its neighbours. Ideas have consequences and the animating ideas of Islamdom and Christendom began moving apart 14 centuries ago. And yet by mucking in the U.S. and allies have succeeded in creating a theatre of conflict far from Europe and the U.S. that draws Jihadis away from where they could be operating. Quite often British and European I.D. is found on the corpses of the insurgents who were recruited in Western mosques. President Bush's stated resolution is to alter conditions throughout the Middle East to herald constitutional democracy. With the passage of months and years this ambition becomes ever more ludicrous not because the mission is absolutely impossible but because the cost of achieving it would be vastly greater than the U.S. and allies could be willing to pay. They would have to occupy the entire region the way Germany and Japan were once occupied and dictate norms and forms. And given the resilience of Islam they would have to occupy it for much longer. Mr. Bush is rhetorically trapped in his "vision" and yet it often happens that the right thing is done for the wrong reasons. I shocked or tried to shock a prominent Washington "neoconservative" over lunch the other day by declaring that the Iraqi mission was a complete success. "I hoped the U.S. would get into a quagmire in Iraq and now they' re in the quagmire. The operation has in fact gone more smoothly than I could have foreseen." This is because as I went on to explain simply by being there and not budging the U.S. has moved the focus of the international Jihad from the West back to the East. We thus return to the "flypaper hypothesis" I first expounded a couple of years ago in which the U.S. hangs out its flypaper far away from home and also as far from Israel as possible to collect as many as possible of the world's moveable Jihadis in a place where the U.S. has installed the equipment to kill them. It's working after a fashion. Iraq continues to soak the enemy up. But whereas I formerly thought the Bush administration had adopted this policy consciously I now realize it was a happy accident. They have consciously "taken the battle to the enemy" but the quagmire -- the "flypaper" -- was hung by mistake. Which makes the U.S. hesitate to do what needs to be done next given the existence of fly-hatcheries all over the region. And that is to put out more flypaper by moving U.S. troops on over Iraq's frontiers. Or to put it another way it is time to create a few more quagmires. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top