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The real ‘Mother of all Battles’ is about to get under way

A major Arab country is about to be invaded by a Western army ­ the first time this has happened since the “Tripartite Aggression” against Egypt in 1956, which was aimed at overthrowing Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Then, US President Dwight Eisenhower forced Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from Egyptian soil. Abdel-Nasser survived, while his arch-enemy, Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Eden, was driven from office. This time, the likely aggressor is the world’s sole remaining superpower. Who in the world today can check Imperial America’s appetite for war? Certainly not the United Nations, or a divided Europe, or a post-communist Russia, or a feeble Arab world, or the tattered remnants of international law.

History will show that the real “Mother of all Battles” was not the  Gulf War, which expelled Iraq from Kuwait, but the coming war against Iraq itself. 

The big difference between 1991 and 2003 is that this time, the war will be waged on Iraqi soil. It will be a war of survival for President Saddam Hussein personally, his regime, the Iraqi Baath Party, the Iraqi armed forces, and the many other political, economic, military and security organs and institutions which together make up the modern Iraqi state.

Official American sources make clear that the ambitious objective is the complete “remaking” of Iraq on “democratic”lines. Whether this is a realistic objective or whether it is mere propaganda to justify the coming attack remains to be seen. What is being planned in Washington is nothing less than the destruction of the present Iraqi structure of power, the killing or capture of its leading personalities, the occupation of the entire country for a number of years, the dismantling of the vast Baath Party apparatus (which has produced, in American reports, the horrible word “de-Baathification”), the demobilization of much of the army, and the dissolution of elite units such as the Republican Guard, and the Special Republican Guard, and of security organs such as the Jihaz al-Amn al-Khas (the Special Security Organization) and the Himayat al-Rais (the Presidential Protection Unit).

US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech on Wednesday before the UN Security Council left no doubt about America’s intentions. He denounced what he called Iraq’s “policy of evasion and deception going back 12 years.” He showed satellite pictures, played intercepts of telephone exchanges between Iraqi officers, and quoted defectors ­ all to show that Iraq was still hiding an elaborate and ongoing capability to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. But although forcefully delivered, Powell’s speech was less than compelling. His further claim that Iraq had ties with an Al-Qaeda cell was weakened by the fact that the cell he mentioned is allegedly located in a Kurdish area of northern Iraq not under Baghdad’s control!

Nevertheless, Powell declared that Iraq was “deeper in material breach” of its obligations to disarm and must soon face the consequences. Saddam “will stop at nothing until something stops him.” Colin Powell’s detailed testimony will be carefully examined, but it will not convince everyone. The evidence he presented is, by its nature, un-checkable. Most people will want the inspectors to be given the chance to examine it. France, in particular, has pleaded for a reinforced inspection regime. Powell’s personal tragedy is that having long sought to check the Washington hawks from a naked use of American power, he has now joined them.

In a public seminar in New York on Feb. 4, a leading hawk, Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon’s Policy Advisory Board, declared: “Iraq is going to be liberated, by the United States and whoever wants to join us, whether or not we get the approbation of the UN or any other institution.” There could be no clearer declaration of war.
A precedent for such an armed Western intervention in the Arab world is not so much the Suez war of 1956 as the British seizure of three Ottoman provinces during World War I: Basra was occupied in November 1914, Baghdad in March 1917, and Mosul in November 1918. As the above dates show, it was not an easy or speedy process. An Ottoman counter-attack drove the British expeditionary force back to Kut, where it eventually surrendered in 1916 after a four-month siege. The British then regrouped with greater strength and, over the next couple of years, seized Baghdad and Kirkuk, destroying the Ottoman 6th Army.

The modern history of Iraq began with Britain’s merging of the three Ottoman provinces into a unitary state, the crushing of a widespread revolt in 1920 (in which about 6,000 Iraqis and 500 British and Indian troops lost their lives), and the decision at the Cairo Conference of March 1921, chaired by Winston Churchill, to establish a kingdom of Iraq and offer the throne to the Hashimite Amir Faisal (who had been chased out of Damascus by French troops the previous year).

The essential motive was to protect British interests in the Gulf. In much the same way, the essential motive behind the coming war is to protect American and Israeli interests. When all the pretexts and excuses are stripped away and all the talk of “democracy” and of weapons of mass destruction is forgotten, the fundamental reason for the conflict between the United States and Iraq, in 1991 as in 2003, is that Saddam Hussein poses a challenge to the American-dominated “order” in the Gulf and to the security of Israel. That is why the neoconservatives and pro-Israeli hawks in Washington are hell-bent on destroying him. They see Iraq under American control as providing a military and political platform for the projection of American power from the Gulf to the Caspian.
The first thing to note about the coming war and its aftermath is that the US is about to undo what Britain achieved during its Mandate over Iraq. Britain united the three provinces into a single state with Baghdad as its capital. The US is said to be planning to “remake” Iraq as a loose federation without a strong center, so that it can no longer pose a threat to anyone in the region ­ whether Israel, Kuwait or any other American client states. The US will thus be breaking up what had been put together in 1920. The de facto dismemberment of Iraq has, in fact, already taken place, seeing that the Kurds, after a decade of self-rule, will not easily agree to be reintegrated into a unitary Iraqi state.

A second consequence of the coming war is likely to be a reshuffling of the sectarian and ethnic mix in Iraq’s power structure. In 1920, there were about 3 million inhabitants in Iraq, of whom more than half were Shiite, 20 percent were Sunni, roughly another 20 per cent were Kurdish, and another 8 percent or so were composed of Jewish, Christian, Yazidi, and Turkmen minorities. Yet, as Charles Tripp points out in his new book, The History of Iraq (Cambridge University Press), the government ministers, the senior state officials and the officer corps were drawn almost exclusively from the Sunni Arabs. This, he comments, was not a promising basis for national integration.

Today, Iraq has a population of about 24 million. The proportion of Shiite, Sunnis and Kurds is about the same as it was, but power still resides largely in the Sunni community and, even more narrowly, in the hands of loyalists from Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit and from his tribe the Albu-Nasir. This concentration of power is certain to be challenged if, as seems probable, the United States smashes the existing structure.
The armed revolt of 1920 against the British ­ a decisive moment in Iraq’s modern history ­ was largely inspired by the tribal sheikhs of the mid-Euphrates and by Shiite mujtahids from Najaf and Karbala. But when the revolt was defeated, it was the old Sunni-dominated order of Ottoman times that was reinstated. This time, however, when Iraq is “remade” by the United States, the Shiite population is likely to demand a share of power commensurate with its numbers. Some Shiite leaders, either in underground groups like the Daewa or in the Higher Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, are said to have already established contacts with the Americans.

Be that as it may, the exact form of government in a post-Saddam Iraq, the identity of the future ruler, and the composition of the officer corps of a purged and reformed army are as uncertain today as they were in 1920. Equally uncertain is how the considerable cost of the transition will be financed and which foreign companies will secure the concessions to exploit Iraq’s vast oil reserves.

For the Arabs and their friends, the tragedy of the present situation is that the independent Arab “order,” established after World War II, has not proved robust or cohesive enough to protect its members from foreign attack and control.

Patrick Seale, a veteran Middle East analyst