Iraq War

By Dr. M.K. Teng

If Saddam Hussain had realised that the world was governed by the law laid down by the strong, he could not have survived because of the mere fact that his state was a part of a Muslim international. He would have perhaps came to terms with the Americans a decade earlier. Then the international system was, what it had been devised into in the post second world war era with diplomacy settling down to a high tight bipolar contest between the only polar powers which dominated the world then. Cold War was an era of ideological conflict and in that process, cold war, witnessed a phenomenal rise of a new ideological state or in it--state movement, that of the pan-Islamic internationalism which claimed commitment to the consolidation of a third polar power structure which underlined the theological imperatives of Islam. Saddam was no doubt, a creation of the same phenomenon. The Americans built up pan-Islamic internationalism into a subsidiary front to contain communism much the same way as they propped the Muslim militia which turned into the Taliban and helped Pakistan to assume a tactical strength, which poses threat today to the whole complex of the Asian nations spread to north and south of the Himalayas.

In the post Qasim era of the history of Iraq, Saddam Hussain cleaned the communist elements in Iraq on the holding of the then American regime, for Iraq was crucial to the bipolar balance of power in the Middle East where after the Balkans, the western powers, maintained the greatest vigil. The Bathists among whom Saddam grew, were no friends of the com.. Saddam used the return to power in Iraq 1968 to rise to power himself.

With the end of the cold war, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the rise of the Muslims to the status of a world power, assumed a more aggressive posture. The ideological commitment to Islamic internationalism found a new political expression. The Islamic Revolution, which claimed the unification of the Islamic world on the basis of the theological imperatives of Islam, which the Muslim claimed, they had the divine sanction to enforce not only in the Islamic countries, but also in countries where Muslims were supposedly not governed in accordance with the religion's sanction of Islam. The Islamic Jehad in Afghanistan which had, been shaped by the political processes of the Cold War, assumed fresh international dimensions and overtook the Balkans, the western republics of the erstwhile Soviet Union, and the Muslim states of South and South-East Asia as well as the northern states of India by storm. In Balkans the old state system broke down completely.

However, as the fast disintegrating bipolar  international power-structure settled down to a unipolar power structure the rise of the Muslims to the status of world power lost its reason as well as logic. The Muslim international recognised the contours of conflict between the unipolar power-structure and the Muslim international earlier than the Americans did. Saddam headed the first campaign against the unipolar power structure when he attacked Kuwait. Taliban launched in the second campaign against the unipolar power structure, when they struck the United States on September 11. While the Americans wiped out the Taliban, Saddam Hussain earned a reprieve for almost a decade. In fact, the war against Saddam began the same day, the American armour poured into Afghanistan. Only the turning of the strike varied.

The American invasion of Iraq has ideological dimension. It symbolises the process of the delegimitisation of the Islamic Jehad, which formed a part of the American offensive against communism during the Cold War era.

Americans and the British have the right to choose their instruments and options, so long they have the will and the power to enforce them. That is the inexhorable law of the history of the international relations. No opinion in the world can question the right of the Muslim international to establish its hegemony over the word. And no opinion in the world can question the right of the United States to establish its hegemony in a unipolar world. United Nations was always what it has turned out to be during the cold war, an instrument of bipolar balance of power and after the cold war an instrument of the unipolar balance of power. It was not in any way, different from the league of nations, which was an instrument of a multi-nation balance of power.

The Indian foreign office must shed off its negationist, self-effective and passive diplomacy. During the cold war, its neutralism cost it heavily. The west handed over half of the territory of its northern state of Kashmir to Pakistan. The communist China cut off the most strategic part of its frontier in the north. Indian foreign office must recognise that it is involved in a life and death struggle with the Islamic international. The Indian foreign office must also realise that the American war against the Islamic international is not fought for India or in the Indian national interest. The Indian foreign office must also recognise that China, will always try to balance itself in between the America centered unipolar world and Islamic international, to serve its own national interests. China has its own interests in the Himalayas and the Indian ocean, more than it has in Soviet Central Asia. Iraq is the ground, where India can make a new beginning in its diplomacy.

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