Setback of the Century: 11Th September Cracks on the Mirrors of Iraq War

By Fatih Abdulsalam

Three months after the US war on Iraq in 2003, I decided to travel to my home town, Mosul in northern Iraq just to embrace my family members and close friends . While I was walking around Mosul streets seeking what has been left of my childhood, a US patrol stopped me to ask : "Where are you from? Why are you here?" Immediately, I burst out into laughter. The soldier turned to a sergeant next to him and wondered: "Is he mad?" Then, he angrily asked, "Why are you laughing?" That laughter soon turned into a philosophical question. "Imagine yourself in my place, what would you answer?. The soldier got more upset while the outrage was raging me. In the evening of the same day, I heard in the news, that a US patrol was hit in an explosion in the same street. The image of the 20-year-old soldier immediately flashed up in my mind to tell me: I wish I had an answer from that soldier to my question. This is how I came to write this book in an attempt to outline a wider scene of the backgrounds that led to wage that war on Iraq.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Mar 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456891763

Fatih Abdulsalam

The Author, Dr. Fatih Abdulsalam is an Iraqi daily columnist and novelist living at present in London. For over a decade he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the International Edition of the London-based Arabic daily newspaper, Azzaman. He witnessed several wars in his native country where he used to be a professor of modern Arabic literature and criticism at the University of Mosul. So far, he has published three novels, four collections of short stories and four books on criticism and thought. Historically speaking, his first short story appeared in 1977. Recently, his works were the theme of research papers by two Master's Degree university candidates. Since mid 1990s his literary and journalistic works were also a subject matter at the Iraqi universities.

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Copyright © 2011 by Fatih Abdulsalam.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2011904636

ISBN: Hardcover    978-1-4568-9175-6

ISBN: Softcover      978-1-4568-9174-9

ISBN: Ebook          978-1-4568-9176-3

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Contents

Before Reading

Introduction:    How Can Power Be Measured Up?

Chapter One:    Systems

Chapter Two:    Between two Historical Dates

Chapter Three:    The Politician and the Intellectual

Chapter Four:    The Arab Backwardness As a Result of Globalisation

Chapter Five:    Isolation

Chapter Six:    Where are Our Brains?

Chapter Seven:    Is It Partnership or Leasing?

Before Reading

In order for the war lords to be involved neither into another war nor with people that they don’t know anything about their cultures, crises, and dreams.

Perhaps the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are the mirrors for the whole world to look at and then purify and immunise themselves against all possible wars.

Introduction

How Can Power Be Measured Up?

The Superior Lining Up along with the Inferior

Naji Abdul Rahman, one of the most famous Iraqi paediatricians, who made a brilliant name in the city of Mosul of a population over three million people, spent forty-seven years in paediatrics since his graduation at a British university, and then he returned back to his hometown in order to heal children there. The U.S. war on Iraq wanted this famous doctor to delete his own history and pattern of personal life, and to reproduce himself in his daily life according to war requirements imposed by the U.S. soldier and the orders of war inside and outside the Iraqi cities.

One of the biggest concerns of this doctor was how to best think of avoiding being abducted and blackmailed like other doctors in a country that lost its social security after the occupation. For this, he had to choose to spend fewer hours in his clinic in order to respond to the needs of Mosul citizens. He also had to programme his mind and senses as millions of Iraqis did in accordance with the requirements of a war that resembled no other war in modern times since the Second World War during 1940s. When such a seventy-year-old paediatrician was unable to adjust himself to a single particle of this war, then it would cost him his life, and thereby he can easily be missed by his family and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children whom he used to treat by dint of his over-abundant intelligence and deep experience without resorting to any means of technological diagnosis, except for rare cases, due to its unavailability or beyond citizens’ capability to afford its costs, particularly when these citizens have been severely exhausted by the last U.S. war preceded by thirteen-year siege under the pretext of toppling down a political regime that did not fall then. Instead of that, a million of Iraqis, mostly pregnant women, children, and elderly people, collapsed due to lack of medicines and epidemics that are unbearable in any modern society.

That was a chapter turned out without being noticed by the UN (humanity or justice) or the UN Security Council of today. All children or women killed were listed under losses that should have been paid only by a political regime that was unflavoured and preferred by Washington and its regional circles. Yet it was not only the regime that paid for it, but the Iraqi people paid twice the price as well.

One day in the holy month of Ramadan, which Iraqis, Muslims, and non-Muslims alike glorify and sanctify, Naji Abdul Rahman left his clinic before sunset. He was fasting, driving home in his own car when a U.S. patrol had already imposed another ongoing war limit at that part of Mosul city. Since this paediatrician was burdened by the sick concerns and his own concerns as well as by those concerns of old-age diseases by then running down into his body, and because of the difficulty to change his living pattern after the age of seventy, which the U.S. war not in a position to understand when invaded Iraq, that patrol shot him dead inside his car. Those were easy orders under the pretext of a ‘new legitimacy’ and a pre-emptive strike to kill whoever not respecting the orders; that banned the crossing of the street leading to his home, the street that he used to pass for over forty years.

Hence, U.S. President Barack Obama, in any reform project, has to address this unbalanced joint between that veteran doctor and respecting his own living pattern he had lost on one hand, and on the other, the pattern imposed by the highest upon the lowest, which has become the norm that everyone in Iraq has to pursue. He should also see to it that the neoconservatives’ viewpoint in their decision-making process to change the Middle East structure and its political culture has now extended to dominate the details of the Iraqi non-political lives, which itself resulted in the new Iraqi mass’ internal and external displacement and migration. That was the price paid by the whole people of Iraq and not by a political regime that was pre-planned to change and demolish.

The story of Dr Naji, who was shot dead by the Americans—no one even has apologised for shedding his blood or sent condolences to his family or acknowledged the error that ended his life for no reason—is the very brief summary of the dilemma faced by Barack Obama or those who may succeed him to remove the legacy of George W. Bush, the biggest warmonger in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This dilemma is the main reason beyond the widespread antagonism among the Arabs and the Muslims against the United States that the U.S. administration is now considering how to change it.

This task is so difficult and complex to be carried out only by the mere revealing of the goodwill and positive statements and an open statement addressing the Muslim world as Obama did, in Cairo University, in the summer of 2009. That is why no answer was given to the question: Has Washington dropped any of its current or future schemes to force Naji Abdul Rahman and other millions to line up behind its story, viewpoint, and justifications in launching its war affairs inside Iraq or any other country?

At this point, where the node and the solution are concentrated, the lost power, which the United States needs to be accepted by the world, will be generated. Thus the United States can shift from being hated or mistrusted to being reliable. This question has never had the United States clearly answer yet. When Washington answers such a question, it will realise with certainty from humanistic perspective and get clear-cut knowledge about how much its real power and its power sources are. Yet this is not a duty required by a democratic or a republican administration ruling from the White House, but it is rather an urgent need to work in detail on what has been spoilt within the context of the philosophy of the U.S. relations with others, especially those who are at the bottom states of poverty, backwardness, and war.

The new relation that can transfer the United States to security and safety is embodied in the fact that if lining ups are inevitable, the Americans then have to line up with the smaller and weaker nations and people within a common framework towards the request for peace, development, and democracy.

I know this contradicts with the thought of the war mongers in changing the Middle East, and as the Israeli (Haaretz) correspondent in Washington, Ari Shavit, put it on the first week of the Baghdad occupation, a group of twenty-five to thirty of the neoconservatives had been planning to launch a war a year before it burst out, and they were all Jews, mostly from the elite intellectuals, including Wolfowitz, Richard Bell, Dag Pitt, Elliott Abrams, Caruatheimer Charles, Bill Kristol. Kristol, as reported by the Israeli newspaper an example of neoconservative, was in his forties—notable editor at the rightist (Weekly Standard) when the war flared up. He told the Israeli correspondent, ‘This is a war aiming at changing the region’s political culture as a whole. And the only way to stop people like Saddam and Osama bin Laden is by spreading out democracy and be prepared to use force in order to consolidate a new world order, thereby creating a new Middle East.’ He acknowledged the existence of a dispute between the neoconservatives and the administration of George W. Bush vis-à-vis the stand towards Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but he said, ‘All these dirty dictatorial regimes will eventually disappear, and the choice will be between extreme Islam, secular fascism, and democracy.’

*     *     *

In less than two decades after the fall and dismantling of the Soviet Union, the United States, at a fast pace, rose on the line to show up force and of fill in the gap left by the Soviets through the only military gate. The American political and media machines were unable to benefit from the departure of its historical, intellectual, and military adversaries so as to provide adequately human and intellectual alternatives for the set up of a philosophy of international peace, neutrally sponsored by the greatest world power.

Hence, in 1991, the Gulf War in Kuwait brought a large number of Americans to the Arabian Gulf, thus heralding the beginning of a new deployment towards changing the parameters of the entire region through reorganising the political regimes in accordance with certain classifications immediately very well understood. These classifications are divided as absolute, likely or unlikely, and impossible loyalties. There has been a historic opportunity for the Americans to work on reintroducing a new aspect with new features required to persuade others of their being peaceful and developmental and cooperative alternative for the era of bipolarity and cold war. Twenty years would have been enough to establish that American verdict, if any U.S. administration had initiated, and before the whole region could start in less than two decades to express their fidget, thereby recalling the bipolarity stage as being the preserving of the international and regional balance, even within the bloodiest conflicts like the Iraq-Iran war, which no one could have predicted its regional and international results, had it erupted during the unipolar era.

The logic of subjugating the others by military force is by no means the easiest and fastest way, but the results in the long run are the worst and would generate that ‘antagonism’ against the United States, disguised sometime by religious or national mask. The United States today is desperately in need of rewriting its philosophy as being a state as well as huge universal project.

It is unfair for the United States itself to encumber all its developed, formative achievement by decisions taken by administrations of those who come through the White House and get absolute power for the mobilisation of armies for wars. The result is that with each missile launched by a U.S. aircraft, regardless of the target identity, the gap widens more and more between United States and the Arab and Islamic world, which will always remain the difficult and urgent attracting point for the U.S. decision and to an unknown extent.

There is a common language within the regional circles of the Middle East countries, with their ongoing ‘cold’ war for decades—over a vast area, stretching from Iran to Syria and Lebanon via Iraq. Along that long line, Israel remains that sustainable node. This language has always been encrypted and multi-coded, with ambiguity as for those who speak it within countries of common struggle between each other, and not between themselves and Israel, as may it outwardly appear. The major crises, which have been for thirty years vivid between Iraq and Syria, are not less dangerous within all others than has the case been between the Arabs and Israel. Moreover, the scourges of that ferocious eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, have been so great that no Arab war against Israel has ever experienced.

Similarly, the civil war between rival factions within Lebanon, a Middle Eastern country, extended from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s. Despite all this, there has been a number of breakthroughs and understandings within such crises between states that realised the fact that in the end, they are governed by geography, not history.

Dismantling this ‘coexisting and colliding’ language codes, almost agreed upon in the Middle East, cannot be carried over by involving symbols of a stronger language of stronger tone and voice, that is, the U.S. language which seemed to all conflicting parties in the Middle East as a challenging language, even to Israel, the U.S. ally.

It is a phase of imposing a sort of lining up the inferior with the superior, and these superior and inferior are described here in the physical sense of power. When in the U.S. decision-making centres a new philosophy is generated, decision making is different not only from those within the legacy of the last twenty years in particular, or in general, but also from that within the U.S. image since the outset of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948. Only then it will be possible for a starting point to line up according to international understanding, based on the fact that the U.S. role is as unbiased, honest, and fair for the patronage of regional peace as well.

*     *     *

On 23 September 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama, for the first time before the UN General Assembly, called on the United Nations to a new era of multilateral cooperation in order to stand up the challenges of the planet. His predecessor, Bush, had called on the United Nations itself to support his wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq in order to face similar challenges as well. Obama, however, put weight on the common interests of the people and gestured to economy and the right for everyone for life. This is a beginning of a new vision, but it is feared to be temporary and is only in response to internal economic challenges faced by the United States, in addition to other challenges, including lack of funds and equipments for the war in Afghanistan, after it has become clear that Obama would withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq as his only choice left.

Obama said that it is not true that America cannot solve the problems of the world alone. Of course, this is right. But so far, there is nothing concrete to spare the world from problems created by American decision makers, particularly problems dealing with Islam, the most dynamic joint that must be handled by Washington and not be overlooked, as there is no biggest U.S. war as that ongoing against political Islam.

As there are usually only two ways in the face of the enemy: the concealed and the revealed wars, Washington had to choose one of them against the political Islam. However, the selection process is complex, as the new enemy is not the same as that old one; the Soviet Union, which concealed indirect wars, had greatly affected its internal structure and the structure of its allied countries and, consequently, its collapse from within its interior. That made it easier for the Soviets to shift to their national ethnic origin and the consequent intellectual content. The Soviets are either Russians or from Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, or other origins. No one was born Soviet; however, everybody there acquired their characteristics of the socio-political environment. This is not the case in Islam, as a man is born Muslim by dint of his