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April 2, 2003

A View from the Arab World

Lessons from Other Asian Adventure

By Rami G. Khouri

The Iraqi man who detonated a car bomb that killed himself and four American soldiers last week seems to have ushered in a dramatic new phase of the war in Iraq, with consequent bad news for Iraqis and the Anglo-American invasion force. We should deal carefully with hyperbole that speaks of thousands of Arab suicide bombers who have gone to Iraq to attack the Anglo-Americans. Some will do so, for sure, but most probably reflect the heightened emotions of the moment, defined by a profound wave of what looks, sounds and feels like a form of anti-colonial resistance sweeping much of the Arab world.

The first two weeks of the war have been full of surprises and constant new developments, including the nature of Iraqi resistance and the inability of the Anglo-American attacks to overwhelm the regime in Baghdad with the initial massive bombing campaign. The military superiority of the Anglo-American armada leaves little doubt that Baghdad will be subjected to a siege and an assault, resulting in the overthrow of the current Iraqi regime. This is likely to come at a very high price, in terms of damage to two parties: Iraqi lives and property, and American political standing in this region and the world at large.

The suicide bomber who killed himself and the four American soldiers certainly defined his act as one of resistance to occupation, while the Anglo-Americans saw it as an act of terror. This is a fascinating but ultimately irrelevant argument, because the invasion and the resistance it generates both will go on, regardless of how the two sides define their acts. More important is the transformed perception of the dynamic under way in the minds of most people in the Middle East region. Arabs and many others who oppose the Anglo-American attack do not defend Saddam Hussein, but rather defend the right of the Iraqi people to be spared such unilateral assaults. The Anglo-American armada also is being viewed increasingly in this region as an army of occupation — and in some important ways, it is behaving accordingly.

The suicide bomber has led American and British troops to be much more careful about coming into contact with Iraqis. The troops are more nervous and more trigger happy, as we witnessed when American soldiers shot and killed a number of women and children in a van at a checkpoint Monday. Television pictures show columns of young American and British troops walking through Iraqi villages with their guns drawn and loaded. Men who approach the soldiers have to take their shirts off, to show that they are not carrying bombs. Troops break down doors and rush into Iraqi houses, guns drawn and sometimes blazing. Anglo-American guns shell entire Iraqi neighbourhoods. Tommy Franks, welcome to Nablus.

The Anglo-American army in Iraq is dangerously close to joining an ignominious list of modern occupation armies that generated fierce resistance among the local population, sought unsuccessfully to stay in place by the force of their superior firepower, and ultimately were driven out, dropped their imperial adventure, and returned home. The three most glaring examples of this cycle in recent memory are probably the Americans in Vietnam, the Russians in Afghanistan, and the Israelis in South Lebanon. The Anglo-Americans in Iraq may join this grim roster of defeated occupiers.

We already hear voices around the Arab and Islamic world asking for volunteers to travel to Iraq to fight and oust the invaders, just as tens of thousands of volunteers went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to oust the occupying Russians. Some have already made the trip, along with thousands of Iraqi men who have returned home to defend their country. The common emotional response to the Iraq war throughout the Arab world has been one of anti-colonial resistance. This war is being seen widely as merely the latest phase of a long-running colonial drama by which Western armies invade, subjugate, reconfigure and exploit the lands and resources of the Middle East. This may be a romantic notion, or it may be an accurate one.

Given the compelling historical lessons of the three other east, west and central Asian lands of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Lebanon, one would be a fool to be dazzled by the power and determination of a mighty nation that sends its army into distant Asian adventures. We should remember that these three other failed Asian episodes started with a superior military power occupying another land while repeating pleasant sounding rationales about security, democracy, liberation, prosperity and defending freedom. They all ended in humiliating failure at the hands of invaded men and women whose will to resist was greater than the invader's will to persist. The actions of both sides in the coming weeks may well reveal if we are moving in this direction.