inside the glass house

'Coalition of the willing' is not so willing anymore
NEW YORK-- Long before the US military attack on Baghdad last March, Iraq's deputy prime minister told a University of Warwick researcher the outside world was skeptical that a military occupation of Iraq could spark a Vietnam-style urban guerrilla war against US forces.

"People say to me, 'You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps,'" Tariq Aziz said. "And I reply, Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles.'"

Exactly one year after the US invasion of Iraq, Tariq Aziz is in American custody, possibly threatened with charges of war crimes. But his prophetic words may have come true judging by the rising suicide attacks, roadside bombings and mortar attacks against US forces in the streets of Baghdad and Basra.

As of Friday, the war had claimed the lives of 569 American soldiers -- and this in a country where Bush administration officials proudly claimed that US forces would be greeted with rose petals by grateful Iraqis lining up the streets to welcome American soldiers.

Finding itself right in the middle of a military quagmire, the administration is now looking for a face saving formula to bail out of Iraq in a politically-sensitive presidential election year.

And last week, the United Nations was being suckered into sending a team to help the US-installed Iraqi Governing Council to hold nation-wide elections. The US is also getting ready for another Security Council resolution to gradually hand over Iraq to a reluctant UN whose staff union has warned against the dispatch of staffers to a country where all foreigners are sitting ducks for Iraqi insurgents.

As the Bush administration keeps changing the justification for war -- from a search for weapons of mass destruction to the introduction on multi party democracy in a onetime repressive regime -- the growing instability in the country is threatening to split Iraq into three different states and trigger a civil war.

Secretary of State Colin Powell who sneaked into Iraq last week, possibly under cover of darkness, to celebrate the bitter-sweet US victory congratulated American soldiers -- but only for their success in capturing "the tyrant Saddam Hussein".

For the Bush administration, the message outside Iraq isn't positive either. A survey in nine countries by the Washington-based Pew Research Centre for the people and the press found strong anti-American sentiments across most of Europe and in virtually all of the Muslim world.

According to the survey, an overwhelming majority of people outside the US, ranging from a high of 96 percent in Jordan to a low of 57 percent in Britain, were critical of the Bush administration.

When Britain and Spain, two close American allies, decided to join the US in the war against Iraq, the support really came only from the governments, not from the people of the two countries. The opposition to the war in the streets of London and Madrid last year was just overpowering.

Last week the Spanish government that supported the US war was ousted from power dealing a heavy body blow to the Bush adminstration. In an outspoken statement after his victory, which was also followed by terrorist bombings in Madrid, the prime minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero described the US military occupation of Iraq as "a fiasco". "There have almost been more killed after the war, from a year ago, than during the war", he said.

To honour his campaign pledge, the prime minister-elect has also announced plans to withdraw the 1,300 Spanish troops currently in Iraq. "Fighting terrorism with bombs, with Tomahawk missiles, isn't the way to beat terrorism, but the way to generate more radicalism", he said.

And to add injury to insult, Rodriguez Zapatero was quoted as saying that American voters should follow the example set by Spain and change their leadership by supporting Senator John Kerry for president in the November elections in the US.

The headline in Thursday's Washington Post -- "Spain's next prime minister says US should dump Bush" -- is what the White House would have expected from "a tinpot Third World dictator", not from a longstanding European ally. With the "coalition of the willing" in danger of falling apart, the president of Poland Aleksander Kwasniewski, a key American ally, said last week that he had been "misled" into believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Although Poland is not likely to withdraw its 2,400 troops from Iraq anytime soon, a nationwide survey revealed that about half of Poles are opposed to their country's involvement in Iraq.The ouster of the Spanish government is also a warning to two other US allies, Britain and Australia, which are scheduled to hold elections over the next 18 months.Asked if he expects a voter backlash over his support to the US war in Iraq, Australian prime minister John Howard said last week: "That is one of the many things people will take into account in going to the polls later this year."

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