By JEFFREY SIMPSON
The Globe and Mail
Tuesday, March 4, 2003
The American 'dream palace'
The Bush administration has wanted to get Saddam Hussein from day one. Until Sept. 11, however, no even remotely plausible pretext could be found. The attacks on New York and Washington changed all that. Ever since, "regime change" in Iraq has been the administration's abiding objective.
Alliances were sundered in its pursuit. Countries such as Turkey were bribed -- thus far, unsuccessfully. Publics around the world seethe with anti-war and anti-American sentiment. Sympathy for the U.S. plunges everywhere. Even supportive governments such as Tony Blair's endure internal splits. It doesn't matter. Washington's "war party" wants Saddam Hussein, and nothing will stop them.
Last week, Jean Chrétien evinced surprise that "regime change" was the objective. Surely it was disarmament through the United Nations, he said.
The Prime Minister must have been either kidding or ill-informed. He had been told by some -- but not all -- of Canada's top diplomats of the Bush administration's real intentions.
He could have read George W. Bush's lips. He could have studied the hawks, Likudniks, evangelicals and conservative ideologues around Mr. Bush -- plus the supporting chorus of right-wing "might makes right" U.S. commentators -- to discern the administration's real intentions.
Iraqi disarmament alone was never the objective of the "war party." The UN gambit has been an elaborate camouflage to make it appear as though the U.S. really wanted only disarmament. It didn't matter what Mr. Hussein did; the Bush administration would have found reason for invasion.
The reason was twofold: eliminating Mr. Hussein and kick-starting a breathtaking, hubristic attempt to change Arab political culture. A president who has never set foot in an Arab country has now publicly articulated what the "war party" had only spoken of privately: remaking the Arab world from Morocco to Bahrain, starting with a U.S. protectorate in Iraq.
Mere disarmament would never have sufficed to kick-start the long-term objective of the "war party." The whole purpose of replacing Mr. Hussein's regime with one tutored by the U.S. was to send a shock throughout the Arab world -- and maybe to Iran, that other country so maladroitly linked by the ideologues to the "axis of evil."
The fall of Mr. Hussein would signal that no country could defy the United States. No country could harbour terrorists. Even a country with such unproven links to al-Qaeda as Iraq would be a target.
Arab countries -- with their corrupt leaders, secret police, fire-breathing mullahs, sclerotic economies and "dream palace" politics that underscored victimization and resentment instead of modernity and progress -- would change, and for the better, once their publics witnessed the U.S.-led transformation of Iraq.
Mr. Hussein's fall would show Palestinians that they must stop drawing comfort from "rejectionist" states that dream of eliminating Israel. The shock would bring them around to negotiating with Israel, largely on Israel's terms, the precise strategy of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his U.S. supporters, including the Likudniks in the Bush administration.
These, then, were the administration's underlying objectives, always apparent but now revealed. Many are dubious, some are dangerous, and all will lead to the perception in the Arab world that there is, indeed, a "clash of civilizations" -- one launched by the West's most powerful country against the Arab world in particular and the Islamic world in general.
The "dream palace" will be one in which the Americans are led by their political and military leaders through unfamiliar cultural territory, using largely inappropriate means toward long-term engagements for which Americans are not prepared, financially or psychologically.
An administration with revolutionary objectives is running U.S. policy. The realists have been banished or marginalized, considered wimps too inclined to compromise.
The ideologues believe they are the terrorists' nightmare, but, instead, they are the terrorists' dream, because they have overreacted. By pursuing "regime change," starting with a U.S. general running Iraq for two years or more, the U.S. will turn even more people against them and provide the best recruiting ground yet for militant fundamentalism.
The shock sought by the Americans, therefore, will more likely be to themselves. Unless, of course, the U.S. does an Afghanistan, and turns Iraq, once conquered, from last year's headlines to today's back pages. In which case, Iraq, an artificial country, will fall apart in chaos.
