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The clash of fundamentalisms

IRAQ UNFOLDS IN WAYS thought possible; a stalemate in less than two years that in Vietnam took 12; each held to a single-minded righteousness in their clash of fundamentalisms but framed in a battle for self-respect against a cynical invader.

In Vietnam, the backdrop was the Cold War, a proxy war between the free world and communism; in Iraq, of Islam and Christianity; in both, each sure of his singular righteousness. It does not stop here. Both wars began on false premises, and brought to a stalemate with only one credible aim: how Washington could extricate from the mess with a semblance of honour.

Washington dismissed the fundamentalists - communism and Islam - as beyond the pale, belittling the nationalism that bound them, invaded their countries with no understanding of the ground, and forced into a stalemate in which it force lost its will as the native regained his.

The bloody aerial bombing firmed native resolve against the invader. The first use of it as an apparatus of colonial control was in 1911 when the Italians attacked an isolated oasis outside Tripoli and since, an important tactic in the colonial armoury: Kenya, India, Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, the Philippines, Palestine, Vietnam, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Indochina. In each, the colonial task became the more hazardous and fruitless and, in the end, lost.

In Vietnam, it look a decade for the war to end in stalemate; in Iraq, two years. Washington conducts the war in Iraq with the failed strategy and tactics in Vietnam: to bomb it into submission. It proudly proclaim more bombs dropped in Iraq than Vietnam and World War II, with the threat of more if there is no surrender, but without understanding why this would not work.

I noticed this in my years in Vietnam as a reporter in the 1960s and 1970s. One learns to live with the bombing, frightened and in mortal fear as one is, but with the population, a resolve to confront and expel the invaders in time becomes a nationalist end. The invaders believe, as in Iraq, that the natives are there as cannon fodder.

Naive Americans

The Americans I found as naive today as then, not knowing what they wrought. The natives infiltrated the system that the Vietcong in Vietnam and, no doubt, the Iraqi fighters, and attack at will.

One example will suffice. One man I was friendly with in Saigon was, I knew as our friendship developed, a CIA operative. It was our practice, in 1967, to dine at a Chinese restaurant in Saigon near our hotel a couple of times a week, and as we walked to our lodgings before curfew fell at midnight, buy up the packets of groundnuts sold by Vietnamese boys and girls. One day, as we munched the nuts, my friend stopped, as if he had seen a ghost, rushed across the road where his office was. I did not see him for a month. He did not explain his bizarre behaviour, nor did I ask: I assumed it had to do with his work, and if he could, he would in time tell me.

He never did until years later when he was posted to the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. The war in Vietnam had ended. I asked him about the Saigon incident. The paper that wrapped the peanuts was a page from a highly classified report he had written a few days earlier. He rushed to his office to find it in disarray, and for the first time noted a tunnel beneath his footrest which led to an open sewer across the road. It would be no different in Iraq. When Washington has to rule in the name of quislings, the natives it engages do so to feed their families, the chinks in the colonial armour spread. When that is framed in proconsular arrogance, the more so.

War news is not to inform but to lie, what is and is not becomes blurred in the telling, trapping even the tellers. Overwhelming force destroys cities and people with equal abandon, with all statistics of damage and death. More Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War than is admitted, possibly as many as six million.

One does not know, no one keeps records in the best of times, certainly not in war. But this is assuaged, in psywar, by resorting to definite numbers: not about 5,000 dead but 4,326. Both are false, but it is the latter figure that becomes, in time, the accepted truth. It is not, of course. But when killing fields are reduced to statistical irrelevance, does it matter?

Options unclear

The United States and its satraps bit off more than they could chew; and rush through a cynical programme of elections to pull their troops out. It is unclear of its options, has no clear idea of what is in store, and hope others would rescue it from its morass and its military deaths.

It went into the war with inadequate troops with no plan to fend for the peace or to leave, and sinks inexorably into an Arabian quagmire. It exploited religious and racial tensions amongst the Sunnis, the Shias, the Kurds, the Turkomans and all it got them is a recipe for a civil war. Even the plans for elections is as half-baked as the plans for invasion.

It now believes it can force the election with more aerial bombing, but so it would be impossible to hold one. To this end, Najaf was bombed in August, Samarra in September, Sadr City in October, Fallujah in November, Mosul in December, with Kirkuk possibly in January. The elections will be as scheduled on Jan 30, Washington's quisling, Ayad Allawi, insists.

Washington commentators insist it can be held in chaos; after all, President Lincoln was elected president amidst a civil war, why cannot Iraq? As usual, the thinking is skewed: The civil war was 80 years after American independence, when elections had to be held to prove its case for the Union to survive. But elections in Iraq is not for democracy to take root but so Washington can withdraw its troops, for its narrow political interests at home, not so Iraq begin its slow painful return to the normalcy Washington destroyed.

What is so cynical about this desire for elections is that every recent one - in the United States, Malaysia, Ukraine, to name a few - is mired in controversy, divides more than it unites the country and people. Elections have become a means to entrench those in office. The kerfuffle in Ukraine began with the exit polls which gave victory to the loser, and could well cause it to secede.

In the United States, the exit polls in Ohio gave the Democrat candidate, Senator John Kerry, victory but it was President Bush who won there. That is, through some arcane metaphysical reasoning, all right in the United States but not in Ukraine! But we are told that in Iraq it would all come out well. That thinking is as skewed as the decision to go to war against terror there.

[This is my regular column, Chiaroscuro, in malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) today, 02 December 2004.]

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com