Iraq: Awaiting a Tet moment

The savage attacks on New York and Washington further added to this streak of unilateralism which found expression in a war on terror that often seemed to digress from its original aim. Ostensibly, its aim was to save the US from the scourge of terrorism. However, as it unfolded itself, the war gave the impression of being a crusade against all Muslims around the world. As Edward Said aptly remarked, the Bush Administration seemed to wish to avenge the blood of innocent people killed in the World Trade Centre by shedding the blood of innocent people in Afghanistan.

Despite the paradoxes and the dismal failure of the neo-con fanatics' Iraq project, Bush combatively rededicated himself in his second term inaugural address to the goals that had defined his presidency since September 11, 2001. And while doing, so he failed to allude to any of the consequences of his earlier policies. Isn't that a bit-odd? If freedom and liberty are to be dispensed, by military force if necessary, to nations considered deficient in these abstract attributes, and if Iraq is a shining example of a state that has been pumped full of these gifts, with democracy to follow in short order -- then why not proclaim that success?

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Bush might be an exception, and would enthusiastically do that, but many of the neo-conservatives whose agenda he has embraced are not equally delusional. They know all too well that the invasion and colonisation had nothing to do with freedom, liberty, and for that matter, Saddam's weapons of mass destruction either. All but the most fanatical of them do realise that as far as Iraq is concerned, their project is a disaster. Even if the invaders apparently stepped into a minefield of uncertainty they still do not possess enough prescience or else how could they say that the Iraqi insurgency would wither away once Saddam was captured. Last November's determined destruction of Fallujah, they thought, would break the back of the resistance. That clearly hasn't happened.

In truth, the US has little idea precisely who it is up against. It is rumoured among Iraqis that Zarqawi was an American concoction when they needed a bogey man to replace Saddam -- elusive in the battle field. Yet what the Americans somehow find it difficult to understand is that most Iraqis consider the occupation of their country a humiliating abomination. There would have been abiding resentment in the face of relatively civilized behaviour on the part of invaders. But then, civilization and the arbitrary invasion of sovereign states are contradictory phenomena in the first place.

Finding no credible objective for heaping all the blame on -- the Americans have bandied about the idea lately that the prevailing instability and chaos in Iraq are a direct consequence of the vicious nature of Saddam's regime, although the truth is that today's bloody mess in Iraq is a direct consequence of the gratuitous invasion initiated by a small bunch of fanatics in Washington. History certainly won't absolve the Iraqi dictator but it may have an even sterner verdict in store for the Perles, Wolfwitzes, Rumsfelds, and Cheneys.

It is worth recalling, meanwhile, that the history of US imperialism suffered a serious blow on January 30 thirty-seven years ago. The National Liberation Force in South Vietnam mounted what came to be famous as its Tet offensive -- briefly over-running the US embassy in Saigon and several other strongholds of the puppet government. Although the effect of that military success was temporary it proved to be a turning point in the history of the Vietnam war, because the audacity of the attacks convinced most Americans that their nation's war against Vietnam was unwinnable. Robert Fisk feared that a decline in suicide bombing for sometimes past could mean special preparations on the part of insurgents to enact another Tet on the next Sunday, again January 30. Even if it did not happen, a Tet moment for Iraq cannot however be totally ruled out.

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.