As wars go, the shame of US defeats in Vietnam, : February 28, Bush admitted as wars go, the US-led high-tech assault on Iraq was a total mismatch. President Saddam Hussain of Iraq and his military machine were projected larger than life to provide justification for the deployment of hundreds of thousands of western troops and thousands of tanks and planes to destroy Iraq. Despite public gloating in the US about a great victory’, there was no war in the sense of real confrontation between the two sides. Saddam’s military machine created by the west was ultimately destroyed by it.
It is important to delineate the different strands in this war. it had little to do with the liberation of Kuwait although in a convoluted way, that has been achieved, if a US-occupied Kuwait could be called ‘free’. The UN too has been exposed as a mere tool of the US. President George Bush used the UN security council resolutions as a cover to assemble one of the largest armies since the Second World War in the Arabian Peninsula to teach a dictator from the “third world’ a view of the west and what it stands for. The air bombardment that went on for six weeks has been brutal in the extreme. Air superiority over Iraq had been achieved within days, if not hours, of launching the war on January 186. Yet, it continued relentlessly until February 27, destroying not only Iraq’s infrastructure but, more significantly, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. This war has once again shown that the west does not care how many people they kill so long as the dead are not Jews or white. Reports from our sources in Iraq suggest that the air bombardment may have killed as many as 500,000 innocent civilians in Iraq.
This war has also established the incontrovertible fact that all of today’s Arab rulers are clients of the west. None of them is capable of solving any of the problems of their countries, peoples or the region. They were placed in power for quite a different purpose: to serve the interests of their masters in Washington, London lesson as to who was boss. With or without UN resolutions Bush would have attacked Iraq. One need hardly look beyond Panama for proof. This war was really about washing away Iran and Lebanon. In a speech on much: “Thank God, the Vietnam syndrome has been buried.” It was also about glorifying US manufactured weapons of mass destruction and, finally, for. reestablish US hegemony in a region that was rapidly coming under the influence of the Islamic movement. Once cornered, Saddam, in the tradition of all secular rulers in the Muslim world, wrapped himself up in the “Islamic grab. The ruling elites are aware of the Muslim nun masses’ deep attachment to Islam. The elites exploit this sentiment to further their personal and parochial ambitions. Though Muslims categorically reject Bush’s pretensions to be their spokesman, when he asserts that this was not a war between Islam and the west, there is some truth in it: Saddam’s objectives and the nature of his regime were not Islamic. if was a war between a ‘third world” nationalist/secular country and the west. In a sense, it was really the defeat of an ideology created by the west to banish Islam. The pro-Saddam euphoria that swept through the world of Islam in recent weeks was in fact a public expression of the anti-western sentiment that has become part of Muslim political culture throughout the world. Future governments in all Muslim countries will have to take this mood of their peoples into account. “The conduct of the war too has reinforced the Muslims’ Dalit Voice or Paris. The invasion and occupation of the heartland of Islam by the forces of kuia shows that these client rulers have completely failed to fulfil even the task assigned to them. All of them must now be overthrown, including Saddam Husain, the amir of Kuwait, the Saudi dynasty, the Hashemite family in Jordan and presidents Mubarak and shame and destruction upon their people.
The overthrow of any one of them, especially the Saudi dynasty, would open up vast possibilities for the Islamic movement to restructure the entire region for the benefit of the oppressed Muslim masses. (Editorial in the Crescent International, March 16, 1991)
