The rising cost of America-centricity

Saddam was an appalling tyrant who ruled by fear and terror, and the groups and dissidents that suffered most under his regime suffered terribly. But the Iraqi people as a whole suffered far more from the US-led UN-imposed post-Desert Storm sanctions than from Saddam’s dictatorship, not to mention the havoc wrought by the US “liberation” and its ongoing aftermath. And most indigestible is the uncomfortable reality that unlike the US, the Saddam regime understood the region and its people intimately and kept Iraq more stable than the Americans can now even dream of doing.

The question inevitably arises as to the morality of taking no action to slay a tyrannical dragon when action is possible. I’d contend that it depends on the dragon and the location of his lair. Hitler was a threat to the freedom of the whole of Europe, and tomorrow the world, and had to be stopped. Saddam was no threat outside his borders, having had any expansionist ambitions cruelled by the disastrous outcomes of the war with Iran and the US-repelled invasion of Kuwait.

The WMD ruse was always a ruse. There were doubtless multiple motivations behind the US Iraq campaign, but I do not believe that genuine fear of direct WMD attack by Iraq of the US or even Israel was ever one of them. Iran’s weaponry is far more sophisticated, as is frankly acknowledged today, and Iran would have been the obvious target, rather than Iraq, if WMDs were really the primary issue.

The noble objective to rid Iraq of a dictatorship and set up a model for Middle East democracy in its place, if indeed that truly was intended as the crowning achievement of the Iraq campaign, has been subverted by the terrorists, who have utilised their devastatingly effective guerrilla tactics and local knowledge to wrong-foot the lumbering American giant every step of the way since the “fall” of Baghdad.

The Americans are paying a high cost for their ignorance of the complexities of Iraqi culture, and particularly of the depth of the ancestral divides that obstruct any real prospect of national unity. Further, as they now admit, they have vastly underestimated the regional resistance to their occupation and their capacity to contain it.

If the clock could be turned back, I wonder what proportion of the Iraqi people would choose the current situation over Saddam’s regime. I doubt the Americans would care. Given their time over again, they would not be poking sticks at the hornet’s nest that is Iraq. They’d be keeping the hell outta there.

America is now caught in an un-winnable fight in a region it does not understand. Force-feeding democracy - in itself a contradiction - cannot work. No exit strategy is in place, and it is now difficult to imagine any way out that will spare either America and its Allies, or Iraq, immeasurable further damage, let alone rectify that already done. This is the price of America-centricity and the unchecked assumptions and ignorance of other cultures that are symptoms of such insularity.

It is America’s right to defend and protect democratic ideals and Western values, and to use its military power to support allies under threat of attack. But to forcibly impose its political will on an entire nation - dictatorship notwithstanding - that is not a threat to its homeland or allies smacks of a righteous moral absolutism that is little different from that the terrorist enemy draws upon in perpetrating unspeakably immoral acts of violence on innocents.

Let there be no doubt that my allegiances are with America in its fight to rid the world of the scourge of terrorism. Flawed though its practice is, I believe in democracy and the freedoms that come with it. Those freedoms do not, in my view, include the forcible imposition of democratic systems of government on other nations.

Democratic nations, starting with America, need to get clear on where their ideological confines begin and end. While this remains blurred, so does the distinction between the mindsets of America and its allies and that of the terrorists they are seeking to nullify.