The chink in the armour

In his calculation, with Iraq safely under wraps surely the other members of the 'axis of evils' as well as ne'er do well Syria -- would now be able to read the writings on the wall. After all, even a stubbornly defiant Muamer al-Gaddafi did. Apparently panicked at the fate of Saddam when he was still in tiding he had voluntarily announced the disarmament even of his conventional weapons. A newly confident Bush claimed that the US military had sufficiently clarified the choice left to the potential adversaries. The re-elected President boasted to the reporters at White House, "I hope other leaders will find an example in Libyan decision.

Earlier after the false dawn marked by the fall of Baghdad and Bush's famous 'mission accomplished' appearance on the aircraft carrier 'Abraham Lincoln' on May 1, 2003 -- the mission of unconstrained US supremacy and the arrival of an American century seemed finally at hand, at least according to its advocates as 2004 opened.

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But with the US troops still struggling against what, by all accounts, is an even more lethal and sophisticated insurgency a year later, the unipolarist America so devoutly sought after by the neo conservative and aggressive nationalists make up the Bush Administration's foreign policy establishment seem more septic than ever. Washington's continued preoccupation with Iraqi situation -- in spite of many muttered warnings to Tehran and Pyongyang make it clear to friends and foes alike (if not to the administration's chronic diehards while not yet the pitiful helpless giant that tormented farmer president Nixon's sleep the American colossus is not yet upto global domination.

It is not just that the Pentagon finally admitted, if implicitly, that it did not have enough troops in Iraq even after dispatching 12,000 more troops to reinforce 1,38,000 already deployed there, to control the country under occupation Washington's weakness is also manifest in the dwindling number of its famed 'coalition of the willing' that took part 'however nominally' in the US-led invasion in March 2003. The unipolarists have long claimed that the US was so dominant that, as the world saw it succeed in Iraq, the recalcitrant allies like France and Germany and even strategic rivals like Russia and China would have no choice but to fall dutifully into line behind it if only to claim a part of the spoils.

The neo-conservative Charles Krauthammer predicted in last January in Washington Post that "France will be speaking very differently of the US when a decent, democratising, pro-American government in liberated Baghdad begins its rule and opens bids for all oil contracts." Everyone loves winner -- so the proverb goes. Not withstanding such prediction the face of the baptised France is yet to be seen. To add insult to injury, out of 44 countries, including non-entities like Solomon Island that participated in US', Iraq invasion enabling Bush administration to claim multilateralism of sorts, only 28 remain now. More than anything else it is a testimony as to how cridible US power and its chances of 'winning' are now seen even by its closest partners 21 months later.

Of its allies at least the "New Europe" was looked upon by Pentagon --particularly its chief a superhawk Rumsfeld to be the Pro-American 'Trojan horse' to prevent the EU from emerging as a geo-political counterweight to the US. That may not exactly happen while in a telling irony Washington's favourite Viktor Yushchenko promised to withdraw Ukrain's several hundred troops from Iraq during his successful presidential campaign.

In a presentation on American Foreign Policy for a unipolar world at American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Krauthammer, one of the prominent proponent of US unipolarity, asserted that the US had been designated custodian of international system by virtue of its military superiority. It's a neo-conservative conviction which has been in many ways challenged by the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Yet the neo-cons believe that the US has the capacity and power to enforce its will on the rest of the world without the support of other nations that is seen as increasingly dubious.

Contradicting the vision of the likes of Krauthammer another neo-conservative, Frances Fukuyama, a realist wrote in last spring that 'Krauthammer's vision "is strangely disconnected from reality in its apparent belief that the Iraq war -- the archetypical application of American unipolarity -- had been an unqualified success."

"There is not the slightest nod towards the new empirical facts that have emerged in the last year such as, the failure to find any WMD, the virulent anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East, the growing insurgency in Iraq, the fact that no credible democratic leadership has emerged there, the enormous financial and human cost of war, the failure to leverage the war to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front and the fact that America's fellow democratic allies had by and large failed to fall in line and legitimise American actions ex post," wrote Fukuyama in "The National Interest" quarterly.

Fukuyama concluded prophetically by saying that the poorly executed nation building strategy in Iraq will poison the well for future such exercises undercutting domestic political support for a generous and visionary internationalism just as Vietnam did."

Fukuyama's insight which has become only more persuasive as a result of a series of unsavoury events -- such as the torture in Abu Gharib prison, the growing Iraqi and American death toll, the plunge in the US dollar, the administration's $600m budget deficit. Then to what extent the critique has penetrated Bush himself is the crucial question.

There are evidences that the entire US project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed and its armed forces are being vanquished by a ferocious guerilla army. The security situation in occupied Iraq is clearly acquiring calamitous proportion with 1600 to 3000 guerilla attacks launched on the Americans every month. Both Iraq's interim government and the US, its mentor are in a fix whether to hold the election scheduled on January 30. The ever escalating sectarian violence will only aggravate if there is an insistence on going ahead with the polls even without Sunni participation. On the other hand if the elections are postponed the fears are that the Shias may take up arms and they will be formidable force.

In the meantime the American tormentors, after the massacre of Iraqis, are being vanquished by a ferocious guerilla Army comprised mostly of the Sunnis who do not show any sign of relenting. This is a new phenomenon in Iraq's long struggle for freedom since 1920s. A conservative estimate is that over the past 12 months at least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves apart. So much blood spilled and sacrifices made do have a purpose. They can't be for nothing. That's where lies American nightmare.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.