U.S. Move Upsets Asia
By R.C. Longworth
Chicago Tribune senior correspondent
Published September 22, 2002
When the first President George Bush launched the gulf war in 1991, most Arab and Muslim nations lined up with Washington in a broad and surprisingly enthusiastic coalition to defeat Iraq.
It won't happen again.
The noise from Asia now is the sound of Muslim nations, many of them friends and clients of the United States, scrambling to keep the second President Bush from starting another war in Iraq and dodging U.S. attempts to involve them in the fight.
If the UN Security Council gives Washington the go-to-war resolution it so badly wants, many Muslim nations will swallow hard and vote for it, to preserve the semblance of good relations with the U.S. But they won't be happy about it.
The reason is not anti-Americanism or admiration of Saddam Hussein. Instead, it's pure self-preservation--the fear that an American attack on Iraq will ignite uprisings across the Muslim world that could sweep their governments from power.
To the war hawks in Washington, this is fine. To warnings that a war in Iraq would destabilize the Middle East, they respond that the problem in that area now is too much stability. If the existing governments were thrown out, they say, this would open the door for new governments espousing democracy, a market economy and American-style values.
This is not only probably wrong, it's flippant, a silly and thoughtless proposal to heave a rock into a hornet's nest just to see what will happen.
Asians say the results are utterly unpredictable, highly dangerous and will reverberate for years. The United States and the world must be prepared to live not only with the immediate consequences but, as an Asian expert told a recent conference in Chicago, "with the consequences of the consequences."
The conference, sponsored by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, brought government officials and academics from around the world to Chicago to spend three days talking about the international scene one year after Sept. 11. If terrorism was the scheduled topic, most of the experts--like most Americans these days--wanted to talk about Iraq and the possibility of an American attack.
Almost none thought it was a good idea. But it was the eloquence and deep concern of the delegates from Asia, from Egypt to Malaysia and Japan, that made the deepest impression.
The first President Bush was able to enlist most Arab and other Muslim nations into his gulf war coalition because Hussein had invaded another Arab nation, Kuwait, and was seen by them all to be in the wrong. Clearly, if he could invade Kuwait and get away with it, no other neighbor, including Saudi Arabia, was safe.
Neighbors don't see threat
From Asians' perspective, the situation today is totally different. Hussein, deterred in 1991, poses no perceived threat to his neighbors. The enemy today is not seen as Saddam Hussein's Iraq but George Bush's America. America's support of Israel, its embargo on Iraq and its threat of war on an Arab nation are considered a bigger threat to peace and decency than a dictator whose rap sheet includes the gassing of his own citizens.
Amazingly, to much of the world, the Bush administration has yielded the high moral ground to Hussein.
There is no indication that Bush's more hawkish advisers care about this, which is part of the problem. They should care, because the United States is about to start a war in a part of the world where it may find itself surrounded by enemies--lots of them.
The speakers at the conference made it clear that most governments around the world, including the Muslim regimes of the Middle East and Asia, desperately want good relations with the United States. The U.S. is so powerful, its economy so strong, its military so dominant, that no nation will court Washington's anger if it can help it.
But if these governments fear the United States, they fear their own people more. It is assumed that any American attack on Iraq will be seen as an assault on all Muslims, not just Iraq, and will touch off mass demonstrations and probably riots from Morocco to Indonesia.
Even governments that oppose the U.S. attack will be hard-pressed to contain this mass fury. Those seen as America's allies will be in even greater danger.
"If the United States makes an unsubstantiated attack on Iraq, any coalition will crumble," one Asian said. (Like all conference participants, he can't be quoted by name.) "God help Muslim moderates like us who must deal with the rage of our own people."
This, of course, is why all the Muslim nations pressured Hussein to open his country to UN weapons inspectors. None relished the thought of a nuclear Iraq, but they leaned on Hussein mostly to remove an American excuse to attack.
When Hussein agreed to inspections "without conditions," a huge sigh of relief went up from the Middle East. The sign turned into a groan when the White House dismissed the gesture as a "tactic."
To Muslim eyes, their governments had done a big favor, for the U.S. and the UN, and had been told that it meant nothing. If they needed any convincing that the United States is determined to make war, this American reaction provided it.
The consequences
Much of the potential fallout from a war in Iraq has been widely discussed--an Iraqi chemical attack on Israel, an Israeli counterattack (possibly nuclear) on Iraq, the redisintegration of Afghanistan, a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq to prevent an independent Kurdish state there. There's also the prospect of an American armed presence in Iraq, costing billions, for decades to come: after all, we still have troops in Germany and Japan, 47 years after World War II, and both are stable, democratic, friendly nations.
Less discussed are other consequences. The governments of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia would be even bets to be overthrown. Turmoil in Saudi Arabia would send oil prices through the roof--to $100 per barrel, according to one expert at the conference--which would cripple the economies of every oil-importing industrial nation, especially ours.
An American attack on Iraq, with or without UN approval, would instantly radicalize young Muslims, creating a lot of Al Qaedas and fledgling Osama bin Ladens. Pakistan, so vital to the U.S. operation in Afghanistan, would wobble. So would Islamic Azerbaijan, the next big oil power, and the despotic Islamic republics in the former Soviet Central Asia.
Governments in Islamic Malaysia and Indonesia already oppose any attack: The Indonesian government is far from steady and is plagued by a radical Islamic movement.
Many African countries, including the two biggest--Nigeria and Sudan--are either Muslim or have substantial Muslim populations. Even the stability of Hindu India depends on its Muslim minority, which is the biggest single Muslim population in the world.
The White House may expect bad governments in Middle Eastern countries to be replaced by Islamic parliamentary democrats. More likely, they'll be replaced by worse governments.
"What is extremely worrying," said one Asian, "is the assumption that if you get rid of bad governments, you're going to get better governments. Instead, you'll get the rise of the mullahs."
Few doubt that the mighty U.S. forces can whip Iraq and possibly kill Hussein. But this victory, however loudly cheered by Americans, would be seen as a humiliation by Muslims everywhere.
As one expert said, "The humiliation of the Islamic world by the rest of the world is the soil for terrorism. Terrorists aren't crazy--just humiliated."
Chance to avoid war
Most of Hussein's neighbors share Washington's view of him as a devious con man. But they've learned to live with him and see no reason why Washington can't. The Iraqi leader's concession on inspectors, whether sincere or not, was seen by most of them as a heaven-sent opportunity to avoid a war that almost no one else wants.
Bush's instant dismissal of this concession has left most Muslims convinced that the president isn't really much worried by Iraqi chemical and biological weaponry or its nuclear program. Instead, they feel, the administration's sole aim is to get rid of Hussein himself, no matter what concessions he makes.
No one knows for sure the inside story on the administration's obsession with Hussein. Most often, it's put down to Bush's desire to finish the job his father started. More likely it's the result of pressure from administration hawks like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who was campaigning back in the mid-1990s for a pre-emptive strike on Iraq.
Whatever its genesis, the attack, when it comes, will be seen by much of the world not as a "regime change"--the administration's sanitized euphemism for war--but as an unprovoked coup, and by a billion Muslims as a personal humiliation.
What is described by the White House as a surgical and limited military strike to rid the world of a particularly obnoxious dictator could easily end up as a clash of civilizations, with the United States despised by Muslims everywhere and the dictator himself extolled as a martyr.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
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