The fantasy of democracy

For democracy, read fantasy. Iraq is getting so nasty for our great leaders these days that anything - and anyone - is going to be thrown to the dogs to save them.

The BBC, the CIA, British intelligence - any journalist that dares to point out the lies that led us to war - get pelted with more lies. The moment we suggest that Iraq never was fertile soil for western democracy, we get accused of being racists. Do we think the Arabs are incapable of producing democracy, we are asked? Do we think they are subhuman?

This kind of tosh comes from the same family of abuse as that which labels all and every criticism of Israel anti-Semitic.

If we even remind the world that the cabal of neo-conservative, pro-Israeli proselytisers, Messers Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Kristol, et al, helped to propel President Bush and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld into this war with grotesquely inaccurate prophecies of a new Middle East of democratic, pro-Israeli Arab states, we are told that we are racist even to mention their names.

So let's just remember what the neo-cons were advocating back in the golden autumn of 2002 when Tony was squaring up with George to destroy the Hitler of Baghdad.

They were going to re-shape the map of the Middle East and bring democracy to the region. The dictators would fall or come onside - thus the importance of persuading the world now that the preposterous Qadhafi is a "statesman" (thank you, Jack Straw) for giving up his own infantile nuclear ambitions - and democracy would blossom from the Nile to the Euphrates.

The Arabs wanted democracy. They would seize it. We would be loved, welcomed, praised, embraced for bringing this much sought-after commodity to the region. Of course, the neo-cons got it wrong.

The latest contribution to the defence of these men came from David Brooks in The New York Times. "In truth," he writes, "the people labelled 'neo-cons'... don't actually have much contact with one another...

There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy, but I've been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office... All evidence suggests that Bush formed his conclusions independently."

It's good of the "senior" officials to let us know this - let alone the unconsciously hilarious aside that Mr Bush reaches conclusions on his own. Brooks even tries to erase the word "neo-conservative" from the narrative of the Iraq war with the absurd line that "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish'".

For now, the mere use of the phrase "neo-conservative" can be anti-Semitic: Brooks actually ends his article by announcing that "anti-Semitism is resurgent".

If that's the best critics can be threatened with, then Messers Wolfowitz, Perle and the rest are on the run. They didn't say democracy would work. They didn't influence President Bush. They didn't have the power.

They hardly talked to him. Neo-conservatives? Who? But it was the neo-cons who were, along with Israel itself, among the most fervent advocates of an Iraqi invasion.

They had seized upon a devastating and all-too-true fact of life in most of the Middle East: that Arab states are largely squalid, corrupt, brutal dictatorships. No surprise there. We created most of these dictators.

We kicked off with kings and princes and, if they didn't exercise sufficient control over the masses, then we supported a wretched bunch of generals and colonels, most of whom wore a variety of British military uniforms with eagles instead of crowns on their hat badges.

Thus, King Farouq was supplanted, indirectly, by Colonel Nasser (and by General Sadat and Air Force General Mubarak), King Idris by Colonel Qadhafi - the British foreign office loved the young Qadhafi - and King Faisal's post-First World War monarchy in Iraq was replaced, eventually, by the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein.

So we never wanted the Arabs to have democracy. When the Egyptians tried this in the 1930s and looked like booting out Farouq, the British clapped the opposition into prison.

We westerners drew the borders of most of the Arab nations, created their states and propped up their obedient leaders - bombing them, of course, if they nationalized the Suez Canal, helped the IRA or invaded Kuwait. But the neo-cons and Mr Bush, and then, inevitably, Mr Blair, wanted them to have democracy.

Now there are a lot of Arabs who would like a bit of this precious substance called democracy. Indeed, when they emigrate to the West and settle down with US or British or French or any other Western passport, they show the same aptitude as ourselves for "democracy".

The Iraqis of Dearborn, Michigan, are like any other Americans, and they vote - largely Democrat - and play and work like any other freedom-loving US citizens. So there's nothing genetic about the Arab world's inability to seize democracy.

The problem is not the people. The problem is the environment, the make-up of the patriarchal society and, most important of all, the artificial states which we created for them.

They do not and cannot produce democracy. The dictators we paid and armed and stroked ruled by torture and by tribe. Faced with nations which they in many cases did not believe in, the Arab peoples had confidence only in their tribes.

The kings were tribal - the Hashemites come from the north-east of what we now call Saudi Arabia - and the dictators were tribal. Saddam, as all the world is told repeatedly, was a Tikriti. And these ruthless men held power through a network of tribal and sectarian alliances.

When we bashed into their country, of course we told the Iraqis we were going to give them democracy. They would have free elections. I remember the first time I realized how dishonest this promise was. It was when Paul Bremer, America's failed proconsul in Iraq, stopped talking about democracy and started referring to "representative government," which is not the same thing at all.

That was when folk like Daniel Pipes, a right-wing cousin of those neo-cons we can no longer mention, started advocating not "democracy" for Iraq but a "democratically-minded autocrat".

Bremer says there can be no elections before the June "handover" of "sovereignty" - in itself a lie because the "handover" will give the mythical "sovereignty" of Iraq to a group of Iraqis chosen by the Americans and the British.

They will - prayers are now called for - later hold the democratic elections we falsely promised the Iraqi people and which the Iraqi Shias are now vociferously demanding.

And even if these elections are ever held, most Iraqis will vote according to tribe and religion. That is how their political system has worked for almost a hundred years and that is how the American-selected "interim council" works today.

And so here we go again. No weapons of mass destruction. No links between Saddam and September 11. No democracy. Blame the press. Blame the BBC. Blame the spooks. But don't blame Messers Bush and Blair.

And don't blame the American neo-conservatives who helped to push the US into this disaster. They don't even exist. And if you say they did, you know what you're going to be called. -(c) The Independent

No scarves on the left bank

France always represented to me a country which excelled in good life. Throughout the twentieth century, writers have demonstrated with unfailing relish, how its capital played host to millionaires and paupers, artists and artisans, poets and philosophers, thieves and entertainers.

But more importantly, Paris always offered sanctuary to people of all shades of political and religious opinion, and tolerated every eccentricity known to man. It is for this reason that Jacques Chirac's recent recommendation to ban on ostentatious religious symbols in state schools, has come as a rude shock.

No more will French students see Muslim head scarves, Jewish skull caps, Christian crosses, Sikh turbans and Buddhist saffron robes. France has gone secular, with a vengeance, and today stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from states like Iran and Saudi Arabia. But in the process, the country appears to have lost some of its exotic flavour, and its reputation for being a bastion of liberalism and democracy.

Though the French claim to have valid reasons for sticking to their secular moorings, the ban is seen largely as an attack on the 3.7 million Muslims who form the largest minority in the country.

If one walks into a classroom in a state school in Paris, one is accosted by the sight of boys and girls in the outlandish clothes and peculiar hair styles that teenagers are accustomed to all over the western world.

But for some curious reason, President Jaques Chirac feels that the sight of a head scarf or a skull cap or a turban in various colours of the rainbow, challenges and threatens the secularity of republican France.

Pockets of the press in the United Kingdom and indeed elsewhere, have questioned this move and have pointed to many more years of continued confrontation between the French state and the Muslims.

Some see it as intelligent defeatism. Others as an attempt to efface their own personality. The Guardian put it rather nicely when its correspondent stated that "it seems preposterous that the clothing of schoolgirls should become an issue of such symbolic weight, that for 14 years it has been the touchstone of a debate about the French constitution, about what it is to be French and how France should integrate its Muslim minority."

Jewish and Islamic scholars in the United States are equally concerned and cannot understand why so much political, intellectual and emotional energy has been spent on this issue, to the exclusion of factors like integration and the fact that the highest rates of unemployment can be found in the Muslim community.

But some of them have recognized that the roots of France's secularism lie in the struggle against the overweening power of the Catholic church, and that the secularist tradition in France has its own coherent logic.

After all, the French government hasn't yet been able to tackle the issue of belonging and identity in the Muslim minority with its profoundly social faith. Is the girl in the head scarf French or Muslim? Or can she be both? The point is, does it really matter?

Jacques Chirac's action has saddened many people, both inside and outside France, especially those with fond memories of the country. I don't think there has ever been or ever will be a city quite like Paris.

I can never forget her boulevards and trees, her pavement cafes and restaurants, her naughty cabarets and neon fluorescence, her newspaper kiosks and pissoirs, her art galleries and boat rides under the bridges, her Montmarte artists and provincial whores, her haute couture and earthy scents, her musical comedy policemen and accordionists in World War II uniforms.

There were quaint cinemas and theatres, and of course ballet and opera. But for students like myself who had hopped over from England between terms at the university, and were trying to stretch a meagre budget, entertainment meant spending an evening in a left bank coffee house where politics and religion were discussed in an atmosphere of creative ecstasy.

The coffee house was essentially a meeting place. The air was so thick with Gauloise smoke that you could cut it with a knife. Sustenance was provided by long sticks of French bread and cheese and one's thirst was quenched by the juice of the serine grape.

Cinema critics praised the virtues of classics like Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis and Rene Clair's Sous les toits de Paris, without having seen either film, and debunked the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, probably because they were German. But the place was warm and friendly and after a few visits one got to identify the Trotskyites and the Stalinists, the freeloaders and members of the bourgeoisie who were slumming.

The queers and the girls who were moonlighting in the evenings, were the only ones who owned black Citroens. There were a few students who received an allowance from well to do parents, which made them natural candidates for Marxism! But the majority of the students who patronized the coffee houses, were existentialists.

Black was the existentialist uniform, and Sartre was the high priest of the Latin Quarter. He was more important than the Pope, at least to the people of the Left Bank.

It was in one of these cafes where I had the honour of sharing the same bowl of brown sugar with Simone de Beauvior, and where I became acquainted with the various catchwords of the existentialist philosophy.

I can still remember them as if they were uttered yesterday - Angst, the abyss, immediacy, the turning back to a situation, man first is, then he is this or that, and so on. A liberal philosophy produced by a liberal mind.

In those days in Paris one hardly ever saw Muslim women in hijab or head scarves, or Sikhs driving cabs, though Jews in long black coats, their hair in ringlets under skull caps, were very much in evidence. But no Frenchman ever felt that secularism was in any danger or that the constitution was about to be undermined.

One hopes that the French parliament takes its time while deliberating on the issue, before endorsing the recommendations of an official commission. Otherwise it will lose much of the respect it had earned, not just from the Arab world, but from the Muslim world as a whole, for the stand it took against the Anglo-American position on Iraq.

The impact of sanctions

If it is time to review the procedures that persuaded President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction then it is surely time overdue to examine the impact of sanctions.

The assumption seems to be that they are a good thing, a softening up of the enemy before war in some cases, as with Iraq and Serbia, and even an alternative to war in others, as with Iran, Libya and Cuba. But, frankly, we are in a muddle about the worth of sanctions. They didn't appear to work with Saddam Hussein.

After Iraq President Woodrow Wilson, when trying to sell America the League of Nations, argued that sanctions were better than war: "A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender.

Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly, remedy and there will be no need for force". Yet, seemingly paradoxically, Wilson was the one who opposed the allies' post World War 1 sanctions on a defeated Germany, maintaining rightly that such harsh and extreme treatment - including exorbitant reparations - would backfire, producing unemployment, bitterness and resentment.

Some observers picking up this argument take it further - sanctions against Mussolini clearly didn't work after Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. But we now know that Mussolini confided to Hitler that if oil had been included in the embargo he would have had to withdraw in a week. This seems to make sense: if rhetoric is strong but action is weak, they can make things worse.

Emperor Haile Selassie bitterly complained that sanctions seemed to have encouraged Italy to use poison gas to hasten the conquest. But if the sanctions are as strong as the rhetoric they may be effective, as with South Africa in the end, albeit after many years. This seems to be the case today with Libya.

Still, this doesn't make a watertight case. We can now see clearly with Iraq the ambiguity of sanctions. On the one hand they clearly made it very difficult for Saddam Hussein to import the materials he needed to continue with his work on weapons of mass destruction or to rebuild his military after his first defeat.

On the other hand they helped solidify public opinion behind him because of the heavy toll they took on ordinary people- one estimate by UNICEF claims that half a million children died unnecessary deaths as a result.

Serbia is another case in point. The wars in the former Yugoslavia are rooted in large part in the economic crisis of 1979-1989 when the country was scissored between its need to repay its big foreign debt and its attempt after Tito's death to create a market economy.

Unemployment, hyperinflation and a drastic fall in living standards, combined with bitter conflicts over federal and republican budgets, were the catalyst for political disintegration. Economic sanctions merely worsened the problems that helped trigger the civil wars.

Sanctions required the Serbian government to reimpose state monopolies. Sanctions also gave new life to the police and army, whose numbers before had been reduced. President Slobodan Milosevic's personal authority was enhanced because it was he who could determine which enterprises received subsidies, which workers would be unemployed and which pensions would be paid.

Imposing sanctions is one disputed tool. Removing them is another. Clearly with Libya, Muammar Qadhafi's decision to compensate the victims of the air crashes his regime had engineered and to give up research on nuclear weapons was motivated by an unambiguous carrot - the removal of sanctions and the fulsome recognition of his regime if he keeps his side of the bargain.

In contrast, Saddam Hussein was never offered a carrot. Through both Republican and Democratic administrations the U.S. was quite firm - it demanded the demise of Saddam Hussein before sanctions would be lifted. At the same time the Americans and the British insisted on keeping the sanctions screw tight, even making it difficult for medicines and equipment to be shipped to Iraqi hospitals.- Copyright

Accelerating the peace process

For the last few months Indo-Pakistan relations have been on the upswing, a welcome departure from the intense hostility that has characterized their relationship since independence.

Only as recent as Dec 2001, the nuclear-armed protagonists faced the grim prospect of fighting another war when India amassed a significant portion of its million-sized army on the 1800-mile Indo-Pakistan border for ten months, in response to a militant attack on its parliament.

This radical shift, reflects the growing realization in both countries that if they are to remain relevant to the dynamic world the deeply rooted mutual hostility that shaped their respective national ethos has to make way for a more constructive engagement.

Kashmir dispute, nonetheless, remains a major impediment to the normalization of relations between the two countries. Pakistan has, however, realized that it does not have the capability to wrest Kashmir militarily from India and finds the blow back from the militants within the country highly destabilizing for the political and social fabric of the country. Besides, Pakistan was losing in terms of its economic and social development.

India, too, knows that its policy of military occupation and ruthless oppression of the Kashmiris has been a miserable failure and reflects adversely on its human rights and democratic credibility.

Stonewalling dialogue with Pakistan and repeating the mantra of cross-border terrorism made little sense especially after President Musharraf made a major shift in strategic intent by effectively reining in the militants and taking breath-taking measures to reach out to India at personal risk.

The surge of goodwill and popular support for peace among politicians, businessmen and common people for each other's country has also influenced the thinking of the two governments.

The role of major powers, particularly of the US, has been extremely helpful as well, in bringing the two sides closer. Future role of the US in sustaining the peace process would remain crucial.

Nonetheless, like all path-breaking peace processes, this one faces virulent opposition from some influential quarters. There is a deep distrust and legacy of hatred that also has to be overcome.

Positions on Kashmir have remained deeply entrenched with both sides parroting their maximalist positions for decades. Islamabad has been harping on the implementation of the UN resolutions, and New Delhi insisting that Kashmir is an integral part of India.

Kashmir over the years has not only remained the core issue between the two neighbours, but the ideological fault-line and from Pakistan's perspective a test case of India's hegemonic intentions.

Additionally, both governments in India and Pakistan rely on parties that have been supporting militancy and extremism. BJP's very important component has always been the RSS, a rabid militant entity.

Even as BJP launches the current election campaign it appears to be leaning heavily on Hindu zealots and trading on religious nationalism for increasing its vote bank.

Equally disturbing is India's doggedness to proceed with the construction of the barbed fence on its side of the Line of Control in Kashmir instead of seeking soft and open borders.

Similarly, in Pakistan there is a small but influential segment within the military and the civil society that would like India to remain bogged down in the Kashmir quagmire.

Indeed, there is increasing dissatisfaction among the militant groups for cutting them to size. The military, which is the dominant power in Pakistan's politics along with their erstwhile allies, the religious parties, draw their strength essentially from elements that are opposed to reconciliation with India.

Although of late a perceptible change in their thinking regarding the benefits of peace seem to be taking place. It is also encouraging that in both countries the rightist and religious parties in order to widen their electoral base are modifying their policies to benefit from the peace dividend.

Despite this, to maintain the current momentum of peace, both governments will have to deal firmly with their own ultra reactionary elements and vested groups.

President Musharraf has demonstrated great flexibility in his thinking and seems willing to take Pakistan in the direction of a compromise solution of Kashmir, if India were to offer reciprocal concessions.

New Delhi's response on this issue has been ambivalent so far. Prime minister Vajpayee, recently indicated the desirability to engage with Pakistan on Kashmir in a serious and sustained manner, but, on the other hand, is pursuing an internal solution by manipulating and coercing the Hurriyat which is the political wing of the main opposition parties.

What gives hope are the unprecedented developments since the last two months. Both countries are moving forward towards rapprochement in a well coordinated and closely calibrated fashion.

Not over stretching to undermine the fragile foundation of their relationship yet keeping the momentum and inspiring mutual confidence as they go along. Leadership on both sides is taking public positions signalling flexibility and significant shift from the past.

The challenge lies in transforming this peace initiative into a peace process. Given political will, the forthcoming secretary level talks scheduled from February 16 to 18, can provide that opportunity. Besides setting the tone the two sides will have to agree to a common agenda and establish the framework for future negotiations.

It is expected that both countries will agree to a composite dialogue covering peace and security, terrorism, economic and commercial interaction, moving toward free trade area by 2006, to which both countries are already committed.

Expansion of trade, opening of visa regime to facilitate people to people contact and cultural exchanges are areas in which progress could be achieved. Success in seizing economic opportunities will help them to move from confrontation to cooperation.

Revival of cultural affinities and common approaches on issues of WTO, global disarmament and common concern on issues of Afghanistan and access to resources of central Asia can influence rapprochement.

Prime minister Vajpayee during his recent visit to Pakistan for the Saarc meeting talked openly about wanting to work with Pakistan to solve the Kashmir dispute. Nonetheless, due to the complexity of the issue, progress on it is likely to be slowest.

Substantive talks on Kashmir are unlikely to start till well after the Indian elections. With the ceasefire in effect on the LoC in Kashmir and appreciable drop in insurgency India will have to reciprocate by engaging in substantive talks on Kashmir, otherwise it will be difficult for President Musharraf to sustain the peace process.

The leadership of both countries will also have to book beyond the immediate problems and work for the common good of the people who are eager to have security, rule of law, prosperity, education, health facilities and honest good governance. Only by overcoming their differences will they be able to actualize their full potential.

The writer is a retired lieutenant-general of the Pakistan army.