inside the glass house

Its not about winning the war but keeping the peace
NEW YORK-- The word from the White House is that the war is not over-- at least not yet. Cautious in its assessment of the mood of the sharply-divided Iraqis-- Sunnis vs Shiites in a potential civil war -- the Bush administration is not ready for a victory celebration.

But as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd put it, the right wing hawks (giving a bad name to those fast-flying birds of prey) are trying to change the American culture "to accept war as a more natural part of a superpower's role in the world"-- no matter how much of blood is spilled to achieve that goal.

As every political and military observer noted before the war, the US military superiority over Iraq was a foregone conclusion. But how far will the US succeed in keeping the peace in post-war Iraq.? And what are the implications of a US military invasion in a Middle East that is overwhelmingly anti-American?

In Afghanistan, the US created a puppet government headed by a quisling named Hamid Karzai. But he is unable to step outside his office without a retinue of body guards and a phalanx of American secret service agents. Will the soon-to-be US-installed Iraqi leader be modelled on Karzai?

As one newspaper commentator said last week, the US has to be careful whom it installs in Baghdad because "we may be fighting this same guy 10 years later".
After all, the US was such a close buddy of Iraq when the Iraqis fought the Iranians in 1980-1988 prompting the current superhawk Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to personally meet with Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to express support to an Arab leader whom the US had to topple about 20 years later.

The Pentagon's favourite candidate for Iraqi leadership is Ahmed Chalabi, head of the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC). Retired General Anthony Zinni, a former head of the US Central Command, once described Chalabi and his cohorts as "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London" who are totally out of touch with average Iraqis.

Chalabi, who was convicted for bank fraud in Jordan in 1989, has already been airlifted to Iraq to play a key role, if not lead, the proposed US-installed Interim Iraq Authority. In short, the US plans to replace a repressive dictator with a convicted bank robber.

A post-war Iraq also has far reaching implications for multilateralism and world peace.
Rumsfeld has already warned Syria, Iran and North Korea as possible future targets if they do not clean up their acts: stop producing weapons of mass destruction, end their support for terrorism, and hold back their anti-American rhetoric.

The concept of a pre-emptive strike, which characterised the US invasion of Iraq, is likely to find adherents the world over: China against Taiwan, Russia against Georgia and India against Pakistan.

The State Department had to come up with a frantic response to a statement made last week by Indian Foreign Minister Yaswant Sinha who said that India had a "better case" for a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan than the US had against Iraq.

A senior US official responded by saying that any comparison between Kashmir and Iraq was "overwhelmed by the differences between them." The irony of it is that India was one of the few South Asian countries which had the courage to publicly deplore the US attack on Iraq angering American officials in the process.

A post-war Iraq has also reduced the United Nations to a political non-entity. At their summit meeting in Belfast last week, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed there should be a "vital role" for the UN in post-war Iraq.

But this "vital role" will only be as a glorified clean-up crew tidying up the war-devastated country, feeding the hungry, and caring for the wounded and the dying. British Development Minister Clare Short says that post-war reconstruction in Iraq would be illegal without a UN mandate.

The hardliners in the Bush administration have overwhelmingly rejected any UN role in keeping the peace or running the day-to-day administration in post-war Baghdad.
"We don't want a bloated UN peacekeeping bureaucracy," scoffs an unnamed US official in Washington.

Charles Krauthammer, one of the more vociferous hawks backing the White House, made a frantic plea to Bush asking him to dump the world body. "Don't go back, Mr. President. You walked away from the United Nations at great cost, and with great courage. Don't go back," he wrote in his Washington Post column. "'The American people are now with you in leaving the United Nations behind," he added.

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