-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/06/1031115939089.html
Hijacking history September 7 2002 In the 50-degree heat of summer, the Mother of All Battles Mosque is shrouded in a haze. But come closer and what seem like distortions are real - the four outer minarets are of a most peculiar shape, because Saddam Hussein built them to look like Scud missiles against their vertical launch ramps. A firearms expert would appreciate the Kalashnikov lines in the four inner minarets. And a blood specialist might discern that the pages of the Koran displayed in 600 gilt-edged frames have been written in human blood. The President drew 24 litres of "ink" from his own veins so that the best calligrapher in the land could write this unique version of the holy book, which hangs in a double-locked island pavilion on an ornate lake that surrounds the mosque. Thousands pour in for Friday prayers in the air-conditioned comfort of the mosque that Saddam built to commemorate the Gulf Crisis, the conflict that began with his invasion of Kuwait 12 years ago and that he named "the Mother of all Battles". The imam times his sonorous chant, tapping the fingers of his right hand on his left, as the worshippers form up in perfect lines in the carpeted halls of what is as much a temple of war, nationalism and ego as it is a house of God. Amid masses of cool white marble, columns of the darkest green Italian stone race up to support the great dome, the pastel decoration of which glows in the golden light of a giant chandelier. On the back wall, the words "God makes Iraq victorious" are inlaid in white marble on a map of Iraq made from more of the imported Italian stone. The imam stands on a marble staircase, looking to that map of Iraq. And from my vantage point high on a balcony I can see Mohammed Ali Assad, a CNN cameraman. He stands alone in the middle of a congregation that is prone, his camera pointing back to the entrance as though he expects a new arrival. There is a palpable sense that something is about to happen in this region. The coming days will be difficult for the United States. A year after attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and the flight 93 crash in Pennyslvania killed more than 3000 innocent people, grief and shock at the numbing success of the strikes will temper the extent to which many will want to hear a reckoning on the first year of the war on terrorism. They now know that legendary US agencies charged with protecting them were not up to the task. However, despite a short, sharp war in far away Central Asia and an intense, continuing global investigation, they still know relatively little about an enemy that was armed with nothing more than box cutters and credit cards when it struck on a glorious autumn morning. They know that the Saudi-born Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organisation operated from the wilds of Afghanistan, and that they had a sophisticated network of cells around the world, especially in Germany. But the trail has become mired and murky after US-led forces broke the grip on Afghanistan of the Taliban tyrants who gave shelter to bin Laden and his foreign fighters. US special forces are still mopping up in Afghanistan, but it seems that while two prominent members of al-Qaeda have been arrested, none of its senior leaders are among the 600 Taliban fighters that the US spirited off to a special-purpose prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba late last year. At the end of the war, the US had an estimated 1000 al-Qaeda fighters bailed up in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, but most managed to escape. The network and its associates or sympathisers are suspected of a hand in some, if not all, of almost a dozen attacks on Americans and Western interests across the Muslim world since the savage murder in Karachi in January of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Only one person, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been brought before a US court on charges linked to September11. And though several new attacks have been foiled, virtually all of more than 1600 suspects who were rounded up in more than 30 countries in the wake of September11 have been released. Despite early success in a US campaign to freeze the assets of charities and other front organisations, a United Nations task force has concluded that money in the range of tens of millions of dollars is still getting through to al-Qaeda from its financial backers in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. All of this means that any comfort Americans might have taken from the dramatic collapse of the Taliban regime and the dispersal of the al-Qaeda hierarchy should pale against the network's profile one year on. Bin Laden and most of his key lieutenants are almost certainly alive, they are cashed up, they are geared for operating under what might appear to be a fractured command structure and, some intelligence sources say, they still have a sleeper cell in the US that was independent of the September11 operation. They say it is underground, biding its time, and it has plans for another attack. The bin Laden targets were in New York and Washington, but the attacks shook the world. NATO put itself on alert to repel the next such strikes. The UN Security Council condemned the attacks. Offers of help poured in to the White House, and a procession of national leaders went to Washington to give support to the President, and then to New York to see the most amazing buildings that weren't there. George Bush demanded a response from nations - "you're with us, or you're against us". But as the war on terrorism unfolded, things were not always as they seemed, in the investigation or in the policy underpinning of the world's lone superpower. Americans were on a runaway emotional roller-coaster, and their every lurch caused a hardening in the Bush team, in its view of the world and how it believed it should run in the aftermath of September11. Intelligence disclosures told Americans that John Walker Lindh was the treacherous home- grown face of the Taliban who had a hand in the murder of a CIA man in Mazar-e-Sharif in the north of Afghanistan. It was a headline story that stoked American outrage, but when the Lindh case got to court months later, this naive young Californian was charged with nothing more than carrying a gun for the Taliban. When the so-called Dirty Bomber was arrested in Chicago, the US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, cowed Americans with his live-cross warning from Moscow that a radioactive attack had been imminent. It was a beat-up. For months they were told that Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the September11 hijackers, had met Iraqi agents in Prague five months before the attacks and therefore Saddam must have had a hand in September11. But that theory has been scotched. And the anthrax mail-out that killed five and rattled the nation in the weeks after September11 looks like an unrelated home-grown plot that had nothing to do with Arab or Muslim terrorism, bin Laden or Saddam. Before September11, Washington and the new Bush presidency had caused a few brows to furrow in Europe and the rest of the world with what some editorial writers were referring to as "unilateralist" tendencies. But much of that was forgotten as governments around the world presumed that in responding to the al-Qaeda strikes, Bush would use the family blueprint crafted by his father 10 years earlier. That was a genuine coalition in which 28 nations stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush snr to drive Saddam out of Kuwait, giving birth to the term "New World Order". But "New World Order" took on a drastically different meaning as the Bush jnr White House denied the United Nations any significant role in the war on terrorism; as the term "coalition of coalitions" used by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was revealed as the denial of any single forum in which others might attempt to stay the hand of the US; as the liaison staff from NATO were denied admission when they arrived at the US military command bunker in Tampa, Florida; and, as the Afghan war petered out, the US insisted that international peacekeepers would be confined to Kabul because it did not want anyone else's army getting in the way of its pursuit of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. There were few complaints, and certainly not in public. America was the empire on its knees on September11; the greatest military and economic superpower of all time had been scared and humiliated by a man with a straggly beard who wore robes and lived in a cave. In the US criticism was deemed unpatriotic; and abroad it was seen to be insensitive. If Washington thought it should control the counter-attack, no-one was going to argue. The Europeans might mutter about having lived with terrorism for decades, but none of them had had a September11. So only the Americans truly understood the fear of another attack. Several accounts of the inner workings of the White House at the time portray George W. Bush as a president in full control of the issue that would define his administration. He told staff he had found his "mission". But he was haunted by what the terrorists might do next and the weapons they might use. There were two key speeches. On September20, just over a week after the attacks, he spoke brilliantly and, the world thought, inclusively to a joint session of Congress: "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. ... What is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilisation's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom." There was no mention of Iraq. But in January, as The Wall Street Journal reconstructed events, the President called for details of the weapons of mass destruction that terrorists might use and the countries that might provide them. So began the drafting of his "axis-of-evil" State of the Union speech, in which he put Iraq, Iran and North Korea on notice. Between those speeches, according to the Journal, an environment had been created in which key Pentagon officials and members of Vice-President Dick Cheney's staff, who were eager to target Iraq, could push to a susceptible commander-in-chief their case for a "small" war against Iraq, just like they had fought in Afghanistan. The historic echo of the axis-of-evil line caused disquiet in Europe. But what was really alarming was an outbreak of war between factions in the Bush Administration that came to be known as the ascendant "jihadists" - those who wanted to march on Baghdad immediately - and the minority "pragmatists" who wanted time, allies and a mandate for a new military campaign. Their foot soldiers became the reporting staff of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker, as leaks and counter-leaks sketched earnest planning for a ground force of as many as 250,000 US troops being lined up for the battle of Baghdad. And, depending on which side fed the story, they would go with or without the blessing of Congress, with or without a mandate from the UN Security Council, and with or without allies. The President made cute claims that there was no war plan "on my desk" - perhaps it was on a coffee table. But any pretence was abandoned early in June, when Bush set about acquiring the one weapon he did not have, a policy to legitimise a US attack on Iraq. In simple terms, he was about to dump more than half a century of US military doctrine that had been based on a speedy response to aggression without the US being the first to strike. He explained what has become known as his "strike first" policy: "If we wait for threats to fully materialise, we will have waited too long." And Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Adviser, elaborated: "It really means early action of some kind. It means forestalling certain destructive acts against you by an adversary." And when it dawned on the White House that since the Gulf Crisis the whole Iraq debate had been about the right of the world to dispatch inspectors to certify that Baghdad was not developing weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam might thwart the coming war simply by agreeing to a new inspections regime, Rumsfeld declared that inspections were no longer the issue. The objective was getting Saddam, before he got the US. Saddam Hussein has been consistent in his tyranny: aggression, war, murder, genocide. The inconsistency since September11 is that of the US. America's retaliation was initially directed not at any one country, but against terrorists and their supporters in 60 nations. Now it is against one country, Iraq - a twist that has an army of experts and commentators around the globe in fear that the war on terrorism will be robbed of resources, direction and, in time, victory. There are other big questions. If this implacable unilateralism is the US response to September11, how do nations deal with internal and external conflict, because the forum that we all believed was central to any such process - the United Nations - has been rudely sidelined? And if we are not to have muscular international forums, how do we deal with the consequence of Bush's "strike first" policy? If it is legitimate for the US to send an army halfway around the world to deal with a nation that it sees as a threat, what about regional crises? Does China have the right to strike pre- emptively at Taiwan? What about India and Pakistan? The Koreas? What happens in the Middle East? When Arab nations, with the backing of much of Europe, pleaded with Bush to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis before he sent an army into the region to start a fight that has profound implications for them, the White House adopted a Middle East policy that makes the Israeli-Palestinian crisis even more intractable and declared its new tack to be a part of "the peace process". What happens in Chechnya and Aceh? Since September11, the Bush rhetoric has become the framework in which the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, speaks about the Palestinian intifada and Russia's President Vladimir Putin speaks of the Chechen nationalists. The US President seems unable or unwilling to restrain leaders elsewhere who would use his words to give respectability to the suppression of long-standing ethnic or nationalist grievances. In the era of the Bushies, as some irreverent US commentators call today's White House, Nelson Mandela still would be in jail, Gerry Adams would be made to join him, and the founders of the state of Israel would have their assets frozen. Single-handedly, Bush has turned a landscape of global unity in the days after September11 into one of, as he would see it, carping anxiety as friends in all corners of the world - with the singular exception of Australia - baulk at his Iraq crusade. Most of Europe and Asia and virtually the entire Arab world have called on Bush to back off. Even Kuwait and Iran, which have been invaded by Iraq, are against a US attack on Baghdad. The President's only significant supporter is the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who risks a schism in his own ranks over the issue. And the new friends that Bush has co-opted in his campaign, countries like dictatorial Pakistan and autocratic Uzbekistan, have little respect for democracy and freedom. In lighter moments, Palestinians enjoy the black humour of Washington's efforts to enlist Saudi Arabia and Egypt in its campaign to bring them democracy, and Iraqis want to know why are they are to be attacked when 15 of the 19 September11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Washington's response to its isolation as it prepares to go to war is an evangelical claim by Rumsfeld that "leadership in the right direction finds followers and supporters", and old cronies who caused much difficulty, like the Shah of Iran, Zia ul-Haq, Soeharto, Ferdinand Marcos and Mobuto Sese Seko, seem forgotten. There is a reality that makes Washington's management of this crisis all the more difficult to understand. And it is that, in a sense, Rumsfeld is right: if the US does go to war against Iraq, most of the rest of the world will feel obliged or compelled to support it. So why is the White House making it so difficult for them? Why does it not embrace the United Nations and make a virtue of a global endorsement of the battle plan? It needs to be understood that the crisis is not so much about a war against Iraq as about the manner in which the decision to go to war is made. Most nations want to go back to the UN, to draw up an unambiguous weapons inspection regime that would in effect be the line in the sand for Saddam. Winning that debate would require "leadership in the right direction" from Washington. But it would "find followers and supporters" in better numbers than are backing Washington now. The weapons case against Saddam is a persuasive exercise in "what if?" But the "evildoer" case makes him only one among many in Amnesty International's tally of repression around the globe: regular torture, 111 countries; prisoners of conscience, 65; arbitrary arrest, detention and disappearances, 54; extra-judicial executions, 47. A pre-emptive strike against a sovereign nation requires moral, human, tactical and strategic due diligence. To skirt this process would be, in Sir Humphrey-speak, a courageous act. But simply having the courage to do it is not, in itself, enough. The Washington case for "regime change" needs to be a clear statement on why there should be a war, how it should be fought and what is to happen when the fighting stops. Already the US is trying to get out of Afghanistan even as the country remains two bullets away from civil war with Thursday's failed assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai the latest threat to peace. And for all his many faults, the history of Iraq suggests that Saddam could be the Tito of the Middle East. Take him out of the equation and it could require years, billions of dollars and tens of thousands of troops to democratise the country and to stop the region from imploding as the neighbours move in for the kill. And when all of these questions are asked, Americans are hurt again. The military historian Victor Hanson complained: "Our friends act as if they were enemies, our allies pose as neutrals, and our foes claim they are poor victims. In the present lull before the storm, pundits and experts advise us what we cannot do rather than what we can and should, and what we are told is so often not at all what we perceive." AS Bush tries to stare down opposition in the US, the script begs for tragic metaphors: a Texan transplant ends up in the White House by an accident of democracy in the state of Florida, only to be met by the same challenge that confronted his father in the job a decade before him. There is none of Hamlet's indecision, but the challenge for the son in his father's unfinished business as he confronts the man who plotted to assassinate his father is pure Sophocles. Remarkably, the Democrats have left the stage, and it is the Republican establishment forcing the President to have the debate that neither he nor his key advisers wanted. The father remains silent, but a Greek chorus of the best of his old advisers is urging the son to pull back. The strongest challenge has come from Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush snr and still a close friend. Scowcroft, a revered member of the Republican foreign affairs cognoscenti, has demolished the pillars of the Bush jnr case for war. He argues that an attack on Iraq could destroy the war on terrorism; that there is not enough evidence Saddam's weapons pose a threat or that he would share them with terrorists; and, if the President is still determined to confront Saddam, he should first win the support of the UN. James Baker, secretary of state to the father and still a family friend, weighed in with similar cautions. And Norman Schwarzkopf, whose command of Operation Desert Storm made him an international giant, warned it would be a hard war, especially because it might prompt Saddam to use the very weapons Bush wants to deny him. Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger are urging another round of inspections; for the first time in a year public opinion is not as certain as the presidential team. The loneliest figure in the Bush Administration is the Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Only weeks before September11, Powell was arguing that a "smart sanctions" regime could keep Saddam contained. Not a lot has changed in Baghdad since then, but the sheer persistence of the powerful backers of a war against Iraq, like water on a stone, makes it more likely than unlikely. We are caught in a frightening, triangular stand-off. In one corner, the reckless brinkmanship of the Iraqi leader, who in more than a decade has denied his people development worth billions so that he can posture as the defender of the Muslim world. In another, the anger of a US president so bent on avenging the senseless death of thousands of his people in the name of Allah that he chases after anyone who might look like the killer, failing to recognise offers of genuine help and listening only to a tight circle that agrees with him. And in the third corner, without exaggeration, is the rest of an anxious world that wants to have a say in its affairs instead of having to respond to notes sent out from the Oval Office. Those who are trying to avoid this war call for containment, a throwback to the strategies of the Cold War when much of the world divided into two camps and what was thought to go on within the borders of any country was tolerated in the belief that the East-West balance kept an effective lock on it. Those who want the war cry appeasement, harking back to a global lack of will that allowed Adolf Hitler to march the world into World War II. Their equation is simple: Saddam equals Hitler. The year since September11 began for me with the deepest shock and sympathy for the US in all its hurt and humiliation. Those feelings have not gone, but overlaying them 12 months on are frustration and disbelief at the tactical and strategic quagmire the Bush Administration is making for itself. I was in the streets of lower Manhattan that terrible morning and I was here in Baghdad a decade earlier as the US and allied bombers started the Mother of all Battles to force the liberation of Kuwait. The Al Rasheed Hotel became a platform from which to watch as cruise missiles sliced through communications masts, oil refineries and power-station smokestacks. Looking west from the same hotel this week it is apparent that Saddam has not let up in wasting scarce resources at a time of desperate need for his people. Workers will soon remove the scaffolding, for the third time in 10 years, from the imposing headquarters of his Ba'ath party, a building that was bombed by the US in 1991, 1993 and 1998. Silver arches celebrate the brutality of the 1980s Iraq-Iran war, with huge crossed swords adorned with thousands of helmets taken from dead Iranians on the desert battlefields. Directly in front is one of Saddam's grand new palaces, with a bronze bust of the President as big as a bulldozer at each corner of its domed roof. And rising from the gum trees on the river flats, at a cost of hundreds of millions, are another two mosques - the many- domed Arahman Mosque, which should be finished in two years, and the palatial Saddam Mosque on which work will continue for much longer. These two will dwarf the Mother of all Battles Mosque; just, as it seems, the war for which it was named will be dwarfed by the conflict to come. Paul McGeough is a former editor of the Herald and is based in New York as international writer-at-large. His book Manhattan to Baghdad will be published by Allen & Unwin early next year. 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