Where's The Next War?
April 13, 2003
By GWYNNE DYER
A reader's letter published in the Los Angeles Times said it all:
"We have learned two things from the war in Iraq. We have learned
that the Tigris flows through Baghdad, and the Hubris flows through
the White House." Hubris - the belief that you are so clever and so
powerful that you can get away with anything - was certainly the
prevailing state of mind in Washington this past week as the Iraqi
regime collapsed before the U.S. onslaught. So where is the next
war?
There was never any doubt that the United States would win this
war: The U.S. defense budget last year was 250 times bigger than
Iraq's. Resistance was futile, and most of the Iraqi soldiers who
fought and died did so knowing that they were throwing their lives
away in a gesture of defiance.
But the next phase of the drama is already taking shape offstage,
and is likely to be more painful and difficult for the United
States than simply smashing up a Third World army. In the north of
Iraq, the Kurds want to control the mainly Kurdish cities of Mosul
and Kirkuk because the surrounding oilfields would place an
independent Kurdish state on a sound economic footing. Kurdish
fighters have already seized Kirkuk - but Turkey, anxious about the
influence of an independent Kurdistan on their own huge and restive
Kurdish minority, have said that if the Kurds take Mosul and
Kirkuk, they invade.
The United States is trying to limit the damage, promising that the
Kurdish fighters will be replaced by "coalition" troops in Kirkuk
and inviting Turkish army observers to the city, but it won't find
it easy to get the Kurds out. This is their best chance for
independence in the past 80 years, and they would be mad not to try
for it. They have been betrayed by the United States so many times
that they feel they owe it nothing, and they say they would resist
a Turkish invasion whether the United States helps them or not.
There is no sign that Washington has thought this through any
better than it did the request (ultimately rejected by the Turks)
to let U.S. forces use Turkish territory for the invasion of
Iraq.
It gets worse. Any Shiite resistance movement in Iraq is bound to
get support from Iran, and there will soon be U.S. troops all along
the Iran-Iraq border, only a few hours' drive from Iran's main
oilfields. Even if the Bush administration isn't planning another
war before the next election, U.S. attempts to stop infiltration
across the border from Iran could easily lead to a U.S.-Iran war
much sooner than that - and Iran has a relatively united population
three times bigger than Iraq's.
Above all, there is the fact that the United States, abetted by
Britain and Australia, has launched an unprovoked attack on a
sovereign state. That is why most other governments are deeply
worried: The American attack on Iraq could be used as a precedent
to justify an Indian attack on Pakistan or a North Korean attack on
South Korea. The U.S. action in Iraq has fundamentally challenged
the rule of law in the world, which is a problem no matter how
happy most Iraqis are at the moment - and Washington clearly meant
to do just that.
Consider the remarks of former Central Intelligence Agency James
Woolsey, a Bush administration insider who was recently mentioned
in a leaked Pentagon document as one of the possible administrators
of post-war Iraq. Last week in Los Angeles, he described the war in
Iraq as the start of the Fourth World War (the Cold War being the
third), and warned his audience that "this Fourth World War, I
think, will last considerably longer than either the First or
Second World Wars did for us."
The real enemies this time, he explained, were the religious rulers
of Iran, the "fascists" of Iraq and Syria, and the Islamic
extremists of al Qaeda. He made no distinctions between them
(though in real life they have very little in common), and he
promised a long crusade against them. There was no suggestion that
the United States would bother to get legal authority from the
United Nations before attacking the sovereign states on his
list.
"As we move toward a new Middle East over the years and the decades
to come," he said, "we will make a lot of people very nervous. Our
response should be, `Good! We want you nervous. We want you to
realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country
and its allies are on the march.'"
Eventually the American public is likely to rebel against the
continual flow of casualties and the higher taxes that come with
this new role of global vigilante, but in the meantime, it is going
to be a wild ride.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist in London.
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