Give US A Reason...

The war in Iraq is all but over. American armour occupies the centre of Baghdad. Saddam Hussein's giant statue in a central square has been pulled down. Some Iraqis have begun to express their hatred of him openly. Elsewhere, notably in Basra and other smaller towns in southern Iraq, a few others have also thanked the Americans and British for 'liberating' them. None of this comes as a surprise. It had become clear from fairly early on in the conflict that most of the Iraqi army, with the exception of a few elite units, had no stomach for a fight. This was not because the soldiers detested their leaders but because, as in Afghanistan, they knew that with no air cover, and with their communication lines blown away, they were utterly powerless before the aerial bombing, the precision-guided munitions and the depleted uranium artillery shells of the invaders.

It was their officers' awareness of this all-pervasive hopelessness that made them launch virtually the whole of Iraq's armour into suicidal forays out of Basra and Baghdad to engage the enemy. The officers knew the alternative was to watch the men abandon their tanks and uniforms, disappear into the civilian population. It took a great deal of courage for the field commanders to embark upon an offensive they knew was bound to fail, and would almost certainly cost them their lives. In the event, few of them even saw the enemy, for once out in the open they became fair game for the coalition's warplanes. It was the battle of Longewala all over again. By April 8, fewer than 19 of Iraq's 800 tanks remained intact.

The hopelessness was even more noticeable in Baghdad, where the regular army left their positions and melted away, giving the Americans a virtually free ride into the city. What resistance the US faced came from irregulars armed with Kalashnikovs and RPG rocket launchers—weapons that hardly made a dent on the armour of the US tanks and armoured personnel carriers. That too took a great deal of courage, and will most likely also go unacknowledged.

By the same token, it was never a secret that most Iraqi Shias and Kurds opposed Saddam, who had ruthlessly suppressed even the shadow of separatism among them. Thus, once the regime crumbled, it was only to be expected that some expressed their long suppressed anger openly.

What came as a surprise was what the Iraqi regime did not do. First and most important, it did not use a single chemical or biological weapon. Was this because it had been intimidated by America's veiled threats that it would respond with a nuclear attack? Or had Iraq been telling the truth all along, that these weapons did not exist? The American threat could hardly have been decisive. Saddam, in any case, did not have anything to lose and could easily have gambled on the possibility that the Americans were bluffing. Also, a more pertinent fact is that the Americans have not found a single chemical or biological weapon anywhere so far. If the Iraqis had these, and had they even contemplated using them, some at least would have been found in the mountains of weaponry that the Americans and British have captured. The only suspicious substance that they found, and triumphantly displayed, turned out to be a pesticide.

One cannot rule out the possibility that the Americans will still find some research facilities or mobile laboratories. But the stocks of weapons of mass destruction and the production facilities, about whose existence George Bush, Tony Blair and Colin Powell told the world over and over again, seem to have been figments of their fevered imaginations. This invasion was therefore launched, thousands of lives taken, and thousands of families destroyed, on the basis of what was at best a paranoid supposition and at worst an outright lie.

But wait a minute! Did the US and UK not put forward another justification for the war? Was not Saddam in cahoots with Al Qaeda? In the very nature of things, this allegation is likely to prove much harder to prove or disprove, but what is known beyond doubt is that Ansar-ul-Islam, the only organisation in Iraq with known links to Al Qaeda, had its base in the northern Kurdish area (which had been out of Baghdad's control for the past 12 years). What is more, one had only to listen closely to the chants of the Shia crowd in Saddam City, filmed by bbc and cnn, to know that what they were celebrating was the end of his curbs on their freedom of religious expression and worship. Saddam's regime, in short, was precisely the kind that was anathema to Al Qaeda.

The growing realisation in London and Washington that the conquest of Iraq could expose the hollowness of their pretexts for invading it may be one reason why they are scrambling so hard to find yet another moral justification for the war. The new candidate seems to be 'liberation from despotic rule and the restoration of democracy'. That may be why the 'embedded' media gave such relentless coverage to the pulling down of Saddam's statues, and to 'coalition' soldiers fraternising with civilians. That may also be why several anchors described the developing anarchy in Iraq—the looting of government offices, grain and medical stores and electronics shops—as the onset of freedom.

Coming from a country that has for fifty years systematically preferred the company of dictatorships to democracies, this justification is a shade precious. But if the world even tacitly admits its validity, it will complete the destruction of the Westphalian international order, and open a Pandora's box of violence that may have no end.