Weak-minded moralism, on the one hand, and incapacity to grasp the implications of the limitations of US power and Saddam Hussein’s ambitions, on the other, alone can account for much of the writing on the Gulf war in the Indian print media. It is difficult to explain it in other terms.
There is nothing new about our weak-minded moralism. It has informed the thinking and behaviour of significant sections of the dominant Western-educated intelligentsia for almost 200 years. I have discussed this fatal weakness in our response to the world in this space earlier. I, therefore, need not traverse that ground again. Pertinent in the present context is only to point out that this weak-minded moralism leads many of us instinctively to conclude that Saddam Hussein must be in the right and worthy of our support simply because he belongs to the Third World and is militarily much weaker than the coalition led by President Bush.
The talk of pax Americana is also not new to us. We indulged in it freely in the fifties and early sixties in our ignorance of the dreadfully cruel and incompetent character of the Soviet rival which the West was trying to contain. But in the late sixties and early seventies we concluded that the American dream of world hegemony had turned into a nightmare in the jungles of Vietnam. And the proven incapacity of the US economy for well over two decades to compete effectively with West Germans and Japanese subsequently confirmed us, quite legitimately, in our view that America was facing what was perhaps an irreversible decline.
Those of us who have now revived the spectre of pax Americana cannot argue that the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the near collapse of the Soviet system and economy have by themselves taken care of the decline in US power. For since the seventies and the eighties this decline has been discussed primarily not in relation to Soviet power but in relation to the growing economic might of Japan and West Germany.
As for Saddam Hussein, most of us do not understand him at all for the simple reason we are generally ignorant of Arab history, culture and personality. The American record in this regard is not much better. But that is another matter.
Among all those who have written on the Gulf conflict since August 2 when President Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, I find the French historian, Jean Gimpel’s assessment, as reported briefly from London in the January 17 issue of The Times of India, most pertinent.
Gimpel takes the view that Saddam Hussein has a sense of history, that he has been wanting to revive the empire of the Caliphs which under the Abbasids was ruled from the same Baghdad he now presides over, that his ambition is not altogether misplaced in view of the West’s decline and willingness to sell weapons capable of being used for its own destruction to him; and that he would indeed have started a new Arabic cycle if immediately after the occupation of Kuwait, he had gone on to take over Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and thus acquired control over more than one-half of the world’s future oil supplies.
Since I have seen only the summary of Gimpel’s assessment, I am in no position to say whether he has related the concept of Arab nationalism itself to the memory of Ummayad-Abbasid caliphate from the seventh to the tenth century and to the fact that from that time onward till the end of World War II Arabs were by and large not in command of their affairs. But the relationship is so obvious that no serious student of Arab affairs can miss it.
The Arab empire under the Ummayads as well as the Abbasids was an incoherent affair. Both faced dissent and revolts from within and the Abbasids finally collapsed under assaults by Turkic nomads from Central Asia. Even so that represents the most glorious period in the history of Arabs, making it difficult for them to resist its pull.
Nasser yielded to this pull with disastrous consequences for Egypt. But that too has not proved a deterrent for would-be successors. Saddam Hussein is the latest and deadliest among them. It was not an accident that during his war with Iran, he referred again and again to the famous battle of Qadisiya in 637 whereby Arabs finally conquered Persia and subordinated that ancient and proud civilisation to Arab Islam.
No commentator or policy-maker, to my knowledge, took Saddam Hussein at his word then. Everyone treated his statements as part of self-serving rhetoric, intended to fool Arabs, especially oil-rich Arabs, into believing that he was waging the war against Shia Iran on their behalf and thereby trying to undermine Ayatollah Khomeini’s claim to the leadership of Muslims all over the world. Indeed, American policy-makers were so obsessed with the threat Khomeini supposedly posed to them that they not only encouraged Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to bankroll Iraq’s war against Iran – Saudi Arabia advanced around $40 billion and Kuwait about 10 – but also intervened directly on the side of Iraq and ignored its frequent use of chemical weapons against Iran and then against Kurds within Iraq.
As far as I am aware neither the Saudi and the Kuwaiti rulers nor their Western,, including American, backers recognised that implicit in Saddam Hussein’s claims to act on behalf of Arabs against Iran was his claim to the right to ‘unite’ them under his leadership, which is his context meant hegemony.
It can, of course, be argued that American, Saudi and Kuwaiti policy-makers did not have much of a choice but to back Iraq so long as the war lasted because it was vital for them that Iran, possessed by fundamentalist messianism, did not emerge victorious. The argument is not as strong as it might appear on a surface view. Iran suffers from an inherent limitation by virtue of its being Shia which its Islamic claims cannot possibly help it overcome.
In any event, Americans, Saudi and Kuwaitis would have been quick to take precautionary measures to protect themselves against Saddam Hussein’s ‘secular’ messianism if they had been aware of the implication of his claim to be entitled to wage war on Iran on behalf of Arabs. They did nothing of the kind. On the contrary, the Bush Administration continued to extend credit and other facilities to Iraq even after Saddam Hussein had threatened to incinerate one-half of Israel with the use of binary chemical weapons he claimed to possess.
It is possible that Saddam Hussein had not thought and planned that far ahead when he decided to go to war with Iran in 1980 on the obvious assumption that it would be a cake-walk for him in view of the havoc the Ayatollahs had wreaked on their armed forces. But the same might have been true of Hitler when he decided to seize Rhineland and Saar and militarise them. That he had spelt out his long-term objectives in the Mein Kemf long before he came to power in 1933 is besides the point. Appetite in such cases grows with eating.
Saddam Hussein has been compared with Hitler by any number of Americans, including President Bush. But, as far as I know, no one has compared his Iran war with Hitler’s anschluss (takeover of Austria) and claim to German-inhabited part of Czechoslovakia (Sudetanland). That tells us a lot about those who influence and make decisions in Washington, especially in view of the fact Saddam Hussein quickly gave up the gains of the war with Iran when he seized Kuwait.
Saddam Hussein bears comparison with Hitler in respect of popularity as well. Hitler was widely popular with the German people; his ruthless suppression of all forms of dissent notwithstanding, he touched a deep chord in the German psyche. The same appears to be true of Saddam Hussein.
We have the testimony of Yevgini Primakov, President Gorbachev’s special envoy who has known the Iraqi leader well for years. He has said that Saddam Hussein is popular because he has become a symbol of independence and because he evokes strong emotions by his opposition to the USA and Israel. Saddam Hussein has successfully rolled the two into one in his propaganda campaign and thus possibly erected a pretty invulnerable object of hate for Arabs and, indeed, for the larger Muslim community.
Unlike Hindus, Arabs and Muslims are generally sensitive to power. So if Saddam Hussein is seen to be losing and in fact loses the war decisively, their reaction may not be stronger than sullen despair. But if he manages even to survive, he will at once be a ghazi and a shahid in their esteem. It might be possible to contain Saddam Hussein divested of Kuwait and much of his military muscle. But even then it is not going to be easy. And certainly Americans are not the kind of people (or system) to undertake the task successfully. They lack the capacity for perseverance in an ‘unpleasant’ commitment.
As reported by Novosti (see The Daily, Bombay, January 19), Primakov has made two other points which deserve to be noted. First, Saddam Hussein miscalculated in that he did not expect Saudi Arabia to invite US troops and other Arab countries to align themselves with the US and he expected the Soviet Union to behave differently. Secondly, Saddam Hussein had sent him (Primakov) a cassette with a recording of an intercepted telephonic conversation between one King (read Fahd) and one Emir (read El-Sabah) which suggests an attempt at his assassination with US help.
Both points are easily taken care of. If Saddam Hussein’s evidence of conspiracy to kill him was good enough, he would have presented it to the world and strengthened his moral position. Similarly, even after the Saudis had invited American forces and Egypt and Syria had agreed to join the coalition, Saddam Hussein had more than enough time and opportunities to revise his strategy, if he was interested in avoiding war. Clearly, he was not interested. But pertinent for the world is not so much the weakness of Primakov’s assessment as its possible implication. It appears that some influential people in Moscow want Gorbachev to distance himself from Bush in preparation for pursuing an ‘independent’ line in West Asia.
Another article deserves attention for understanding Saddam Hussein. Prof Edward Said, of Columbia University, wrote in The New York Times before the outbreak of hostilities on January 17: …“The traditional discourse of Arab nationalism is inexact, unresponsive, anomalous, even comic. It is as if Saddam Hussein has collected all the tattered remains – anger, colonialism, despair at being unable to deal with Israel, noble rhetoric about Arab honour – and forced them into a row of banners for people to salute” (See International Herald Tribune, January 12-13).
This underscores the aptness of the comparison with Hitler. The discourse of pre-war German nationalism was equally “inexact, unresponsive, anomalous, even comic.” Witness the demand for lebensram (more living space) for a highly industrialised country, the passionate hatred of Jews, the nonsensical talk of pure Aryan race. And can anyone deny that Hitler “collected all the tattered remnants” – the Versailles treaty, anti-semitism and search for an empire in an age when empires were no longer a paying proposition – and “forced them into a row for people to salute.”
That is where Gimpel goes wrong. Saddam Hussein could not have started a second Arabic cycle even if he had conquered Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He could possibly have acquired the power to force his terms on Tel Aviv and indeed on the rest of the world because in view of Europe’s and Japan’s critical dependence on Gulf oil, it would have been difficult for the US to try and contain him. But that is about all.
Like Nazism, Arab nationalism harks back to an anachronistic past which cannot serve as the basis for grappling with the present and marching into the future. Its true potentiality is destructive, not creative. And nothing is available to replace it with. That is the measure of the tragedy the world faces.
Sunday Mail, 27 January 1991