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Saddamized

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Twenty-five years ago my family and I were taking shelter in the so-called “sealed room” in our home just west of Jerusalem. So did the dogs, who quickly caught on and knew the routine as well as any of us. Outside, the Middle East was witnessing the largest conventional war fought anywhere in the world since 1945.

It all started in July 1990 when the then US ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, gave Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein the go ahead in Kuwait. Or so, at any rate, he understood whatever it was that she had told him. Such misunderstandings are by no means uncommon in history. Think, for example, of the British failure to warn Germany in 1914 that any invasion of Belgium would lead to war between the two countries. Or of Hitler’s failure to understand that, in guaranteeing the integrity of Poland against outside aggression. Britain and France, after years of appeasement, were finally getting serious. Or of Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser failing to grasp Israel’s intentions after he had remilitarized the Sinai Peninsula and closed the Straits of Tiran back in May 1967.

To repeat, the outcome was the largest conventional war since 1945. On one side was the Iraqi Army. Quantitatively it was very impressive force; some estimates put the total number of troops at Saddam’s disposal at over a million. If true, that would have made them the fifth largest on earth, right behind the USSR (which, to remind those of you who have forgotten, was still intact), the US, China, and India. Against them were arrayed almost a million men (and, yes, for God’s sake, a few women too) of various nations of whom the US accounted for about seventy percent.

m60a1_rise_era_069_of_104As it turned out, Saddam’s forces were no match for their opponents. First, the Coalition used its overwhelming advantage in the air to knock out Iraq’s airfields, communication system, and anti-aircraft defenses. Next it went on to pulverize much of its infrastructure, and paralyze or smash its armed forces. Finally, even as the US Marines mounted a diversionary attack on Kuwait, General Schwarzkopf launched a massive ground operation (“Hail Mary”), outflanking the Iraqi army from the west and forcing it to withdraw. The entire ground campaign only lasted 96 hours and cost the Coalition very few casualties. At that point President Bush, Sr., declared the objective had been achieved and forced the Iraqis to sue for terms.

No sooner had the war ended than post-action analysis got under way. In Washington DC, in London, in Paris, in Tel Aviv, and—it is said—in Damascus as well, what impressed most observers was the new technologies the Americans put to use. Including satellite reconnaissance, JSTARS (Joint Surveillance and Target Attack System), stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, precision-guided munitions, anti-missile defenses (which proved more or less useless), the most powerful tanks ever deployed on a battlefield, and the vast command, control, and communications network in history up to that point. For a number of years there was much talk about “lifting the fog of war” and a “revolution in military affairs.” Even a historical transition from war to something known as “hyperwar.” New technology, it was claimed, would cause future wars to look like the last one. Get in, fire your load, and get out; easily, smoothly, and with very few casualties.

Following the defeat in Vietnam, America had become cautious and reluctant to go to war. Now its leaders, both civilian and military, were overtaken by hubris. They claimed, and no doubt sincerely believed, that theirs were the best trained, best organized, best equipped and best led forces in history. What they forgot was that the forces in question had been used against a conventional army; albeit one that was vastly inferior, qualitatively speaking.

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Nemesis was quick to assert itself. I well remember how, early in 1993, I was sitting in the office of a senior US Marine Corps general. As we discussed the forthcoming operation in Somalia, I told him that, in my opinion, it there would be difficult to carry out and might very well end in failure. In response he looked at me as if I were a Neanderthal who had escaped from some museum. When the campaign began it proved to all the world the utter inability of the US, by then the world’s sole remaining Superpower, to impose its will on some ill-fed (they were actually known as “Skinnies”), ill-clad, ill-trained, ill-equipped, ill-everything, local militias.

In 2001 the invasion of Afghanistan brought those with eyes to see a similar lesson. To no avail. Ignoring both the facts and the critics who pointed them out, two years later President Bush Jr. ordered his forces into Iraq. The ensuing campaign turned out to be anything but quick and easy. Instead it led to a long war that resulted in over 4,000 American dead a well as tens of thousands injured, many of them very badly. All without producing anything remotely resembling a victory.

In 1991, President Bush Sr.’s decision not to pursue the fleeing Iraqis 500 kilometers to Baghdad and topple Saddam gave rise to much criticism. Now it turned out that, compared to his son who did go to Baghdad and did topple Saddam, the elder Bush had been a pure genius. So bad was the defeat that, when trouble broke out in Libya and Syria in 2011, neither the US nor any of its allies any longer had what it takes to send in any ground forces at all.

In 1991, twenty-five years ago, the Americans and their allies knew where to stop. In 2003 they did not. Overconfident and blind to their own limitations, they opened the gates of hell, unleashing thousands upon thousands of devils inside.

Now, unfortunately, it is the turn of the rest of the world to be Saddamized.

The Monster II

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What went wrong? During the middle ages the Arabs developed a brilliant civilization, or so we are told. Next, at some time during the fifteenth century, things began going wrong. The Arabs missed the invention of print (only in 1775 did the Ottomans, who at that time ruled over most Arabs, allow the first printing shop to be established. They missed humanism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. They missed the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. They missed the French and American Revolutions along with the principles of democracy and human rights; and they also missed the industrial revolution.

As so often, backwardness meant military weakness and invited invasion. By 1919 there was not one Arab country left that was not under European occupation with all the attendant bloodshed, destruction, and humiliation. The process of liberation started in the 1930s and lasted into the 1960s. Many of the regimes that now took power were republican and secular. They promised to catch up with the modern world, usually by adopting some version of “Arab socialism.” Algeria, Tunisia, Libya (after 1969), Egypt, Syria and Iraq all took this approach. The situation in the monarchies (Morocco, Saudi, Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf countries) was more problematic. The need to assert themselves in the world drove them, too, toward modernization. However, they were less able to cut loose from their traditions, since doing so would compromise the basis on which their regimes were built.

Either way, modernization failed. To this day there is no Arab Hyundai, no Arab Toyota or Alibaba. The reasons for this—political instability, extreme poverty, or the kind of oil-based riches that makes it easier to import whatever is needed rather than produce it locally—vary. With the failure to modernize the economy came the kind of regime in which corruption is an integral part of government. The rule of law is unknown, the secret police commits any crime it wants, and whatever elections are held are a farce. Not even the much overrated “Arab Spring” has changed these facts.

Some Arab leaders, notably the Saudis, distinguished themselves by their conservatism and bigotry. Others, notably Libya’s Muammar Khadafy, mixed their brutish despotism with a kind of clownishness. The Arab states’ attempts to assert themselves by force of arms were regularly defeated by Israel, which most Arabs see as a Western stooge, and by the West itself, as in 1991. By the turn of the millennium, so bad had things become that prefacing anything with the word “Arab” automatically marked it as second, third and even fourth rate. The only exception, apparently, is being an “Arab” horse.

It was against this background that Daesh, IS as it is known in the West, emerged. The organization originated in Iraq during the U.S occupation when Sunni groups, resenting the loss of the privileges they had enjoyed under Saddam Hussein, broke away from Al Qaeda and started fighting both the Americans and the Shiite majority. From there it spread into Syria where civil war broke out in 2011 and where it joined other militias fighting the regime of Basher Assad before again turning its attention to Iraq. It feeds on a century of near constant humiliation both at the hands of foreigners and at those of various Arab rulers. That accounts for its evident ability to attract volunteers from practically all Arab countries as well as the Arab minorities in the West.

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Some of these people are highly educated. Yet they do not condemn the atrocities for which Daesh has become infamous. To the contrary, they see them as one more reason why it deserves their support. Here, they feel, is one organization prepared to adopt real Islam. It will burn its bridges and go to the end of the world fighting both the hated, corrupt Arab governments—whether republican or monarchical—and the overbearing West. The position of the Arab governments is more problematic. Syria and Iraq barely have any governments left. The rulers of the Gulf States, Qatar in particular, dislike Daesh but are trying to buy them off. The Hashemite monarchy stands in mortal fear of it, and with good reason. Egypt’s military rulers, seeing links between Daesh and the Islamic opposition to their regimes, share the same attitude.

Most interesting is the position of the Saudis. A reborn Caliphate is hardly in the interest of the Saudi royal house whose ancestors used to be governed, albeit very loosely, by the Caliphs in Constantinople. They also dislike the atrocities which are giving Sharia a bad name in the U.S whose support they need against Iran and, perhaps one day, their own people. Yet some Saudis see a parallel between Daesh and themselves before, following the discovery of oil, they were subjected to Western influences. Should the house founded by Ibn Saud during the 1930s be overthrown, this view may well prevail.

Thus the entire, geo-politically critically important, area from the Mediterranean coast and the Persian Gulf stands in danger of being engulfed by a whole series of interrelated wars. So far Sunnis, Shiites, and, here and there, the small Christian minority in the various countries have done the bulk of the killing and the dying. Outside powers are, however, taking a hand. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran are all more or less heavily involved. So are Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon. As so often the U.S plays, or is trying to play, a critical role. It is mobilizing a broad coalition of allies—including several Arab ones—and bombing, or threatening to bomb, everything in sight.

And the outcome? Nobody knows. Daesh may or may not defeat Assad and set up some other government in Syria. It may or may not succeed in overrunning Iraq. Jordan, Israel and Lebanon may or may not become even more heavily involved than they already are. Ditto in respect to the Saudis, the Gulf States, the Turks and the Iranians. All we know is that Daesh is but one of several similar and competing organizations all of which want to establish a new Caliphate. It can also be safely said that air strikes will do little to contain the fighting. The one certainty is that a great many people will die and whatever political order exists will be destroyed before another can take its place, if it can.

As the process unfolds, far from giving birth to a new pan-Arab politico-religious order, it may well bring about the Arab world’s terminal decline. The question is, will we allow them to take the rest of us down with them?