The UN’s Removal From Iraq Means Ascertaining It As A War Zone Between The Forces Of Terror And The Occupying Forces

Raghida Dergham     Al-Hayat     2003/08/22

To take the Iraqi people hostage in the terror war is an historic and a humanitarian crime. They have paid dearly the price of oppression, wars, misery, the regime's narcissism and the arrogance of might. If the Arab and Islamic peoples do honestly feel truly sympathetic with the Iraqi people, they have to stand publicly, openly and firmly against those who uphold the Destruction Doctrine, whether they are Islamic extremists of Al Qaeda and its derivatives, or mercenaries of Saddam Hussein's regime, which ravaged the people of Iraq. Concurrently, they have to cease the relaxation mode with determination in facing those upholding the Preemptive Doctrine, be them some empowered neo-conservatives or some influential leaders in the American administration. Those have brought terror to the Iraqi scene through their deep arrogance and shortsightedness. They want now channel all resources for their war on terror inside Iraq, rather than rationing them to heal the Iraqis and allow them to regain their country.  

This competition between the doctrine of destruction and the preemptive doctrine has some commonalties; one of which is that those of both ideals want chaos as the basis for their ends. The sort of unruly chaos that leads to disintegration and crumbling of the ability to think, in order for societies in the midst of chaos to fall in a terrible spiral. It is the chaos of exhaustion.

The issue is no longer theoretical or hypothetical because this chaos' scene is the Arab societies. It reaches in the depth of the realist present. Hence, if today is a bad one, the worst is yet to come.

Let us use the blame rhetoric, since it is a language Arabs are experts at, maybe it would awaken something new in Arab thought.

Targeting the United Nations' headquarters in Baghdad is a crime against innocent international civil servants and against the Iraqi people. This is terrorism itself; blind in the stupidity of its perpetrators and vile in the objective of its planners. Religion and conscience do not allow the killing of International staff of different nationalities whose mission is to help the Iraqi people and work towards rebuilding it.

To anyone stricken with gloating, revenge, or sick justification, this point: an American, Rick Hooper, was among the victims. Ask about him the people of Gaza and Palestinians in camps, to whom he spoke in fluent Arabic with a Palestinian accent. Ask about him in Syria and Lebanon. He is one of the brightest minds that worked for the Palestinian cause with the most refined sense of justice and the deepest commitment. This American who dedicated himself to the Palestinian cause was, as luck would have it, in Baghdad to cover for a friend on leave. This rare man was killed by the fundamentalism of demagogue, destructive men who abuse the Palestinian and Iraqi peoples and raise the banner of their causes in falsity. Their judgment with God is dire.

Not only are the souls of innocent international workers on their hands, but also those of innocent Iraqi people because removing the UN from Iraq means the removal of blocking turning the country into a war zone between the forces of terror and the forces of occupation.

At the time when the international community wants to consolidate the presence and role of the UN in Iraq to help it recover and get rid of the occupation, the forces of destruction purposely threw the UN in the corner of enmity and branded it as an accomplice in the occupation.

To be sure, the international organization is not without guilt or fault. It stood against the U.S.-British unilateral war on Iraq until it began, without its approval. Later, it gradually agreed to a marginal role. The UN was sometimes forced to bend to the arrogance of radicals in the American Administration, rather than arm itself with the most important ammunition, which is the moral authority.

The hawks in the American administration bear a large part of the blame of events in Iraq today. No one expected an American defeat in the war on Iraq in facing Iraq's regular armies. All those who opposed the war spoke of postwar Iraq warned of consequences to the narrow-minded arrogance and the vague titles of the preemptive war. The war was launched in the name of the war on terror, which was not really in Iraq, and among its consequences is that terror came to Iraq after the war and as result of it partially.

So far, the preemptive doctrine has failed. The U.S. has won the conventional war in as far as the military combat, but America, however, remains a hostage of fear. The American troops in Iraq feel besieged in a bunker mentality, unable to control security.

President George W. Bush may pay a high political price for what the neo- conservatives and the Department of Defense's radical gang of hawks set him up for and set up America in the process.

President Bush may have to resort to the "draft" should there be a further quagmire of the war on terror as it is waged in Iraq and the confrontation between occupation and resistance. This is a high tax, the cost of which Americans will hold him responsible for.

Destruction ideologists my say, "this is a good thing." Since, from their viewpoint, defeating Bush, his administration and his hawks is something that calls for celebration. Hence, they are ready to cease Iraq and hold its people hostage to realize the ideological and political victory that they want for themselves. Not for Iraq. This is what they did to the Palestinian people. This is what they are doing to the Iraqi people. To them, all Arabs and Muslims are fair game.

What they deliberately overlook is that Iraq, Palestine and the entire region will pay the price of the doctrine of destruction, which they uphold. The current battle is, in their view, with the Bush administration. But the war is with the United States, regardless if its president was Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. It is a deep and decisive war. The destructionists are aware of that. They are ready for that. In their dictionary, Arab peoples are pawns on a chessboard. They are exactly like the Arab leaderships who played the peoples for their narrow ends. It is the neo- narcissist ultimate power.

What to do, then? Where do the doctrines of destruction and pre-emptiveness meet and where do they clash? Where are the Arab peoples in the balances of war between the two doctrines, in which terrorism has become a crucial part, in its launching and in fighting it? Here we go back to the condition of the Arab peoples relaxing in fear or carelessness or absence of self-confidence, and the role of the Arab intellectual elite, other than the ones who were polarized or fell victim to the narcissism of power. It is time to make effective standpoints because, not only the fate of generations is at stake,but also today is a perilous condition. No one is safe. Linking Arab and Muslim cultures to terrorism is nothing to be proud of. Toppling Bush from his throne in the White House is no victory if the price is turning Iraq into the battlefield of the war on terror.

The Iraq war, regardless of its reasons, saved the Iraqis from oppression and tyranny they would not have come out of except by the American war on Iraq. Let us take the positive side and build positively on it. Let us get rid of the complex of which is worse: Saddam Hussein's oppression and tyranny, or an occupation inflicted with fragile security and an obsession that turned Iraq into a zone of terror?

They are both as bad as each other. However, the horizons of constructive possibilities are wider now should the Iraqi people be given priority. This is highly important. The Kuwaiti writer Mr. Mohamad Al Rumaihi wrote, last Wednesday in Al-Hayat, of "national occupation" and deduced that the downsides of an internal occupation far exceed those of an external occupation because, "there is a moral and political justification to resist the external one."  Now, the moral and political justification to resist the internal occupation is on par with the justification to resist the external one. The internal danger is not lesser than the external one, but greater.

Al Rumaihi mentioned the "laugh" in an important indication of obvious rights stolen by oppressive regimes, which the destruction idealists want to copy and magnify. Not too long ago, regimes only allowed marriage with the party's permission. Today, opponents to these regimes want to create an alternative to obvious civil rights; and they so in the name of the Arab and Muslim peoples. From oppression to oppression. This is the internally proposed equation. From tool to tool. This is the externally proposed equation.

Between the two choices lies the fate of the Arab region's peoples. And exactly between those choices is an open space other than either the preemptive or the destruction doctrine. A space, which requires guts to challenge those seeking chaos in order to seize the future.