The Hindu : After Saddam, what next?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 02, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

After Saddam, what next?

By Sudhanshu Ranade

The U.S. clearly means to go on the rampage. If no illicit weapons are found, even after the CIA has told the inspectors where to look, it only means that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, is not cooperating `proactively'; letting the U.N. inspectors go where and when they please, without prior notice, is just a ploy. If Mr. Hussein were to destroy his Al Samoud 2 missiles, because in one or two tests they landed a bit beyond the permitted 150 km range, the U.S. President, Mr. George Bush, would remain unimpressed. Mr. Bush told the CBS White House news correspondent that the missiles were anyway just "the tip of the iceberg". Mr. Hussein would first refuse, then "change his mind", destroy the rockets, and say, "see - I've disarmed". The whole thing, Mr. Bush said, was only a part of (the irremediably evil and insane) Mr. Hussein's campaign to persuade the U.N. that he was disarming when he really wasn't.

In the war that follows, power plants, telephone exchanges, warehouses, roads and bridges, and even `dual use' items such as trucks and buses will be `totalled'. Breathtaking videos of bombs zeroing in on their targets will be widely televised, to entertain and impress the people back home. Iraq (though not the dead Iraqis) will be brought back to life after the war, with magnanimous doses of aid; even as Mr. Bush turns his attention to yet another rogue regime that makes an easy target. Sudan, for instance, rather than North Korea, openly allied as it is with China. Whether the `world' will become a safer place after the war, even if it does not cause any spillover effect, and wreaks maximum damage with a minimal loss of `American lives', will depend on the ability of the U.S. to install a viable regime in place of the one that is now in place. As Walter Lippmann wrote in December 1963, there is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed; self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed. These words, Huntington says, were written "in a moment of despair (in and) about the United States". There was no end in sight to the war in Vietnam, anti-war sentiments in the U.S. were becoming stronger, civil rights had become a burning issue, hundreds of thousands of young Americans were turning to drugs and other forms of escapism, the non-aligned caucus in the U.N. was becoming ever more cacophonous; and as if all this were not bad enough, President Kennedy had just fallen to an assassin's bullet.

Still, serious as the plight of the U.S. then was, it is small potatoes compared to the problem of simultaneously setting up viable regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, starting from scratch. Only the most brazen sycophancy could have prompted some of Mr. Bush's close advisors to publicly dismiss the problem about whether Mr. Bush `can walk and chew gum at the same time' as a storm in a teacup. In the minds of sane people, worry about the enormous damage that can be done by the king's high-tech horses has therefore been superseded by the catastrophe that can be wrought by the king's men.

The U.S. does not have a good record on `regime building'; mainly because it could not care less. Examples that come readily to mind, because of painstaking documentation by conscientious American scholars, are the way the U.S. made Laos and Cambodia the battleground for its war against Vietnam; the way it installed the murderous government of Gen. Pinochet in Chile; and the total lack of concern for `collateral damage' in the fighting of its proxy wars with the Soviets in Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua. In all these cases the U.S. simply switched off once its immediate interests had been served. It was no longer interested. The chaos that followed was predictable: more and more people went hungry, fell ill and died; crime, violence and depravity soared; and the demand for crutches shot up as unexploded bombs and mines took their relentless toll, day after day; even decades after the wars had `ended'. In fact, the U.S. has a poor record even as regards regime maintenance. The regimes it supported in Argentina, Chile, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia (at times with the help of Mossad) were or are incredibly brutal in the repression of their own people. And as for the poor Israelis, the less said the better. They would have lived more peaceful lives but for the `help' from American allies, which had the predictable effect of ratcheting them on to ever higher levels of intransigence and belligerence.

Statecraft in the U.S. has not always been so callous and shortsighted. Horrible as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, and the deliberate bombing of civilians in Germany (and Britain), the only really new thing about the phenomenon was its horrible scale. The significant thing, the unprecedented thing, was rather the energy and foresight with which the U.S. thereafter went about the task of reconstruction; in victorious and defeated countries alike. An influential school of thought in the U.S. even lobbied strongly for the extension of the Marshall Plan to the Soviet Union. (That this very school of ideologues is today content to let the country stew in its own juice is another matter).

But all this is now history. It has been ages since the U.S. last undertook serious reconstruction to at least partially remedy the horrendous havoc it caused. It is therefore important for the U.S. (and others; whether allied, opposed or simply sitting on the fence) to be sober in their assessments of what is do-able. And to give serious thought to what might happen if things go wrong — the extent to which the `ripples' might spread.

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After Saddam, what next?