|
Commentary by Dr. Musa Keilani Editor-in-Chief, Al-Urdon Newspaper
Amman/Jordan, 12 April 2003 Last Wednesday, here in Amman , a group of human rights activists gathered to discuss the fallout of the war on their political platform since the issue of human rights was used by the American invading forces as an overt pretext for a regime change in Baghdad , while the covert reason was to usurp Iraqi oil . The consensus of the ten participant brain storming session was that an era has ended in the Middle East and the region would never be the same. For such is the impact of the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad. Enough and more has been said about the Saddam regime and it would not serve any purpose to say more either way. Each and every one of us knows how it has affected our Arab psyche and words fail to describe our pain caused by what happened in the last few weeks across our border. What confronts us today is the impact of the "regime change" in Baghdad and the way the regime collapsed. It was heart-breaking to see the US forces entering Baghdad, the famous and indeed revered Abbasid capital almost unchallenged. Surely, there was some treachery somewhere. After-war tales would surely bring that out. But that is no consolation to the sense of being left to watch helplessly when an Arab capital was being subjugated. It was disgusting and loathsome to see American soldiers having the run of an Arab capital, passing judgments about an Arab regime. It is no longer about Saddam or his "demonized" portrait that has become the West's favorite bed-time story. Saddam has gone. It is about Arab pride and nationalism as much as it is the suffering of the people of Iraq caused by the whims and fancy of a foreign leader, who, as many would put, appeared to be feverishly demon-driven to shatter Iraq. The first thing that came to mind was how and why an American soldier from somewhere in the heartland of America came to be in a position to tear through one of the second most sacred of Arab and Muslim lands. How dare any American pass judgment on Iraq, a land that is so rich in heritage, culture and civilization that no one from the outside world is qualified to compare their land with that of Iraq. If anything, no American is qualified even to set foot on the sacred soil of Imam Ali's Shrine in Najaf -Iraq, which is so dear and near to all of us in the Arab World; in no American has the right to incite the kind of trouble that led the brutal murder of Abd El Majid El Khoie, one of the most respected scholars among Muslims. But it has happened, and the Arab World was left helpless to do anything about. Somewhere down the line in Arab history, as our German host for that session said, someone would record that Arab disunity has reaped for an external force the ultimate prize which is control of an Arab country. The chaos and anarchy into which Iraq has been plunged could not but be foreseen. That is wars are all about. But it is all the more painful to watch the suffering of the people of Iraq. Surely, those who resorted to looting and plundering do not represent the Iraqi society; they are an aberration, if anything at all. There are millions of Iraqis out there left unable to do anything about themselves, confused about their fate, without water, food and homes. Indeed, the people of Iraq, like the Palestinians to our west, are among those destined to suffer. But for how long? Does the "regime change" answer their problems? Would it bring better food, cleaner water and livable quarters? We would not ask the obvious questions like whether the US did manage to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason that Washington cited for waging war against that country. Those questions are irrelevant in the immediate context, where the pressing need to ensure an end to the suffering and terror inflicted on 24 million Iraqis. The US and UK have succeeded in their objective of "regime change." But in the bargain, the people of Iraq have been put through the worst terror and suffering that any people were exposed to in modern history. Now, it is the American and British responsibility to address the problems they created in Iraq. Nice words that cost nothing are not enough. They will not bring any relief to the starving Iraqis and no medicine to the wounded. If the US and UK assumed for themselves the role of an international policeman when they set out for regime change in Baghdad in the name of weapons of mass destruction, human rights, liberty and democracy, then they should have been equally prepared to deal with the consequences of their actions on the people of their target country. Obviously, in their haste to wage war against Iraq lest the international community might come up with compelling reasons against it, the Anglo-American alliance failed to do its homework, and the people of Iraq are paying for that failure. Indeed, the alliance has its responsibilities and obligations to the people of occupied Iraq. They could not shirk from their inevitable obligations under international conventions. But can they be trusted to follow through? We have seen what happened in Afghanistan. Will the same be repeated in Iraq? No. Definitely not. Unlike impoverished Afghanistan with little natural resources, Iraq has a precious power to offer the US, a total control of the international oil market, and in order to be able to use that power Washington has to take better care of the people of Iraq than it does with Afghans. But they better do it fast, for failure to move quickly would result in nothing less than genocide in Iraq. We in Jordan are squeezed in between two precarious hot areas, one is the east bank which is Iraq with which many Jordanians identify so strongly that eight of the nine hundred Jihadi Islamists who crossed via Syria to fight there were killed . The other hot area is the west bank which is Palestine. We can not afford but be partially at the receiving end for whatever geo-political ramifications take place there.
|