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The spectacle of Western armies capturing an Arab capital is a profound <br>humiliation, exacerbating the already deep sense of impotence and frustration <br>that afflicts Arab peoples everywhere. It is likened to the loss of Palestine <br>in 1948..."Americans and Israelis," said a commentator, "would never have <br>dared to transgress on Arab lands had it not been for the pathetic state of <br>our regimes." But this self-reproach in no way diminishes the region-wide <br>hatred of the US, now at unprecedented levels. <br>----------------------------<br><br><br><br>The Irish Times (Ireland)<br>Thursday, April 10, 2003<br><br>A regime change with potentially enormous consequences<br><br>David Hirst AKS WHAT OTHER ARABS MUST FEEL AT SEEING IRAQIS WELCOMING US <br>SOLDIERS IN BAGHDAD?<br><br> <br> <br> With American forces moving inexorably and almost unopposed towards the <br>complete takeover of Baghdad, with officials of the Iraqi government <br>disappearing, with Saddam Hussein reported to be either dead or in flight, <br>and - most spectacularly - with the city's Shi'ite inhabitants at last <br>furnishing the Anglo-American "liberators" with the enthusiastic greeting, <br>the flowers and rice, they have long awaited, the detested, 35-year-long <br>Baathist tyranny is clearly at its last gasp.<br><br>The fall of this bloodiest and most brutal of Arab regimes is a convulsion of <br>potentially enormous consequence, not merely for Iraq itself, but for the <br>whole region in which this rich and potentially prosperous - but now ravaged <br>- country occupies such a pivotal position.<br><br>"It presents the United States," said Kenan Makiya, one of the leading <br>thinkers of the Iraqi National Congress, the leading opposition group, "with <br>a historic opportunity that I believe is going to prove as large as anything <br>that happened since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the entry of the <br>British in 1917."<br><br>It is, in fact, back to those times, in a great reversal of history, that the <br>Anglo-American invasion is seen to have taken the Arab world. Iraq is the <br>first of the Arab countries to lose the independence that it only acquired <br>after centuries of foreign rule. The spectacle of Western armies capturing an <br>Arab capital is a profound humiliation, exacerbating the already deep sense <br>of impotence and frustration that afflicts Arab peoples everywhere. It is <br>likened to the loss of Palestine in 1948.<br><br>It is all the more shocking in that, as they Arabs see it, the Bush <br>administration, or at least the neo-conservative hawks who dominate it, have <br>an Israeli agenda as much as an American one, in which Iraq is expected to <br>become the fulcrum of a whole new Israel-friendly Arab order.<br><br>It is recognised as a defeat not just for Iraq, but for the Arab world, in <br>that Saddam himself is seen to be only the most flagrant embodiment of all <br>that was rotten, despotic and corrupt in the region as a whole.<br><br>"Americans and Israelis," said a commentator, "would never have dared to <br>transgress on Arab lands had it not been for the pathetic state of our <br>regimes."<br><br>But this self-reproach in no way diminishes the region-wide hatred of the US, <br>now at unprecedented levels. Imagine, then, what the Arabs feel at the <br>spectacle of a large segment of Baghdad's citizens welcoming Americans as <br>liberators.<br><br>The great question now is what these "liberators" will do with the country <br>they have liberated. The void which, with his brutality and misrule, Saddam <br>has left behind is so great that Iraq's opposition forces, from within or <br>without, cannot fill it on their own. So will the new masters of Iraq manage <br>to preserve it in one piece, or will it fall into chaos and civil war, and <br>become a prey to the competing interventions of neighbouring states?<br><br>That welcome which the long-oppressed and rancorous Shi'ites of Saddam City <br>gave the new occupiers also highlights the principal danger: sectarian strife <br>that could turn very nasty unless it is brought swiftly under control.<br><br>For Iraq is by nature one of the most turbulent and fissiparious of Arab <br>countries. It breaks down into three basic ethnic or religious communities: <br>the Sunni Muslims of the centre, who constitute some 15 per cent of the <br>population; the Kurds of the mountainous north, at some 20 per cent; and the <br>Shi'ites of the central and southern plains, at some 65 per cent.<br><br>Historically, the Sunnis have always dominated Iraqi political life. Their <br>conception of the kind of country Iraq should be - nationalist and pan-Arab - <br>has shaped its domestic foreign polices since the independence it has now <br>lost. They have always preserved their ascendancy at the price of a <br>centralised authoritarianism and discrimination against the other communities <br>which reached their apogée under Saddam.<br><br>So the obverse of that joy in Saddam City is the thirst for revenge against <br>all those - overwhelmingly Sunnis - on which the Saddam regime depended; and, <br>beyond that, an aspiration for a fundamental rearrangement, in the Shi'ites' <br>(and the Kurds') favour, of the confessional balance of power in the whole <br>new order that is about to emerge. The question is whether this can be done <br>in a orderly and peaceful manner, or only in an exceedingly violent one. That <br>depends in great measure on the Americans.<br><br>The Americans proclaim the liberation of Iraq as the dawn of a new democratic <br>era. But that will be a challenging undertaking indeed. It is not yet clear <br>what kind of administration they plan to set up, what role in it, in the <br>early stages at least, they will assign to Iraqis themselves.<br><br>The US State Department is known to favour a more cautious approach in which <br>only the upper echelons of the existing regime are removed, with the basic <br>administrative structures remaining in place. On the face of it, at least, <br>the Pentagon, where the neo-conservative influences are stronger, is more <br>radical: it professes to want a root-and-branch purge of the existing regime, <br>to be replaced by a fully-democratic federal system, apparently to be <br>presided over by its chosen instrument, Ahmad Chalabi, and his Iraq National <br>Congress.<br><br>But it seems already clear that the US plans to establish a degree of direct <br>rule to which, if it lasts for long, most opposition leaders will more and <br>more strenuously object.<br><br>This has heightened fears that America's real objectives are less the welfare <br>of the Iraqi people than the promotion of their own strategic and economic <br>interests - and Israel's.<br><br>Despite the flowers and rice, there is a great deal of latent anti-American <br>feeling among all Iraqis, and not least the Shi'ites, who have not forgotten <br>the role which the West played in supporting the despot and enabling him to <br>survive for so long. Some are already recalling that, when the British <br>conquered Iraq in 1917, it was the Shi'ite religious leaders and clan <br>chieftains who staged the most effective rebellion against their colonial <br>rule. <b off></b> <b off></b>
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