LONG-DISTANCE ARABS
By AMIR TAHERI
April 10, 2003 -- THE Don't-Touch-Saddam lobby had prophesied that Baghdad would become Stalingrad 1942. Yesterday, Baghdad became Paris after liberation in 1944.
It was a day of song and dance and jubilation in a capital liberated from more than four decades of brutal tyranny.
It was a day in which the accumulated angers and frustrations of almost two generations were released. In just hours the villainous icons, created over a quarter of a century, that symbolized a despicable regime, had been smashed into oblivion.
The people of Baghdad showed the world that they recognized liberators when they saw them. Their cries of Shukran Ya Bush ("Thank You, Bush") confounded the Hate-America International that had insisted that Iraqis did not wish to be liberated - and if they were, they'd hate the U.S. even more for it.
Here is the first lesson to draw from the liberation of Baghdad: Iraqis, and Arabs in general, are no different from other human beings. They, too, prefer to live in freedom and dignity. They, too, are grateful to those who come to their aid in their hour of need. They, too, reject the disease of anti-Americanism that prevents so many otherwise sane people from acknowledging that the United States can be a force for the good.
* BUT not all Arabs are jubilant. Many are, in fact, extremely unhappy.
The unhappy Arabs are not Iraqis. They are people far from the scene of the conflict who wish to appear heroic at the expense of others. They wanted the Iraqis to die in large numbers so that they could compose poems - like the silly one by the Parisian versifier Adonis - in their praise, and to pen incendiary columns inciting them to "martyrdom."
The "long-distance Arabs" wanted a Vietnam, forgetting that at least 4 million Vietnamese died and their nation still ended up with a brutal, corrupt Communist regime.
Failing a "Vietnam in Iraq," the "long distance Arabs" prayed for a "Stalingrad in Baghdad." Much of the Arab media went hysterical about imaginary battles in which resisting Iraqis supposedly inflicted massive losses on "the invaders." They forecast a war that was to last "for years, if not until the end of time."
Thank God, none of that happened.
The Iraqis proved wiser than some of their Arab brethren had assumed. They knew that fighting and dying to prolong the rule of their oppressor would represent an acute case of sadomasochism.
The Iraqi army, which suffered from Saddam Hussein's savagery as much as other Iraqi institutions, decided not to fight from the start. The regular army's units did not become involved in a single engagement, above company level, against the U.S.-led coalition forces. Iraq's elite IV Army Corps, based in the southeast, evaporated within days, clearly because its commanders and men did not want to fight for Saddam Hussein.
When it became clear that Iraq's army was intelligent enough not to fight in defence of its oppressor, the "long distance Arabs" began urging civilian Iraqis to go and get killed in large numbers in the forlorn hope of keeping Saddam in power. The fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden (or whoever pretends to be him) issued a statement calling on Iraqis to commit suicide, presumably so that he could have chuckle in his grotto. The shaikh of Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo and Hussein Fadlallah, the Hezbollah spiritual chief in Lebanon, issued fatwas (edicts) for jihad, which they mistakenly take to mean "holy war" - and then went to bed, leaving the rest to Iraqi "candidates for martyrdom."
Needless to say, the Iraqi people ignored them.
Fortunately, Iraq has its own religious, political and intellectual leaders and needs no advice from the "long distance Arabs" who have always looked for heroism on the cheap.
The Iraqis did not wish to suffer the same fate as Palestinians - that is to say, to die in large numbers for many decades so that other Arabs, safe in their homes, would feel good about themselves.
The Iraqis know that had the Palestinians not listened to their Arab brethren they would already have a state in more than 80 percent of the mandate of Palestine as decided by the United Nations' Security Council in 1947. The Iraqis know that each time the Palestinians became "heroic" to please their Arab brethren they lost even more.
These days, the Arab media are full of stories and articles about how the Arabs feel humiliated by what happened in Iraq, how they are frustrated, how they hate America for having liberated the people of Iraq from their oppressor and how they hope that the Europeans (presumably led by Jacques Chirac), will ride to the rescue to preserve a little bit of Saddam's legacy with the help of the United Nations.
Failing that, the "long distance Arabs" hope for a new situation in which the self-styled champions of pan-Arabism and/or pan-Islamism will cast the U.S.-led coalition in the role of "colonizers" while the Iraqi people will take up arms in a "national liberation" movement to provide countless occasions for new pompous poems, brave articles and courageous TV appearances.
Thank God, the people of Iraq, determined not to get carried away by Arab hyperbole, are sure to ignore such nonsense.
Do the "long-distance Arabs" feel humiliated? So what? They should take a walk.
If they want heroism, they had better look for it in their own neck of the woods, pay for it with their own blood and organize their own dance of death.
Today, Iraq is free and, despite its legitimate concerns about the future, cautiously happy.
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