MGG Pillai Commentary View

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People are the same the world over

THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ vote in a referendum tomorrow (October 15), not knowing what they are voting for. The United States and Britain has given their blessings. But the president and cabinet ministers, secure (so they think) in the Green Zone and not daring to go out, even to the airport, for fear of assassination or ambush, discuss the constituition as if it is the US or Italian or Malaysian. The people do not know what it is about for no politician has discussed it with him. Not even in Baghdad. The referendum tomorrow has no relevance for the future of Iraq. It is surreal, the referendum is conducted to American home requirements, and will produce nothing. The moral will still remains with the Iraqi, who is fed up with seeing his own country invaded by foreigners. The Americans made the biggest mistake of all in refusing the Sunni any role. The constituiton was drawn up by the Shias and the Kurds. Iraq did not have a written constitution. But so does Great Britain. The Sunnis boycotted the election. Sundry Sunni groups are co-opted to write the constituiton, but these groups represent only themselves, if at all. The US is now trying to get Sunni groups not to boycott it. There is no or little coverage of the referendum the past two weeks. Even the invaders know that if the referendum is lost, they cannot withdraw their troops on their own timetable. If the referendum is won, then it is a hard slog to the next target, which is the elections early next year. The Sunnis, who are excluded from drafting the constition, are not likely to take part in it. The invading force, which is what the Americans and all its allies are, is stuck in a quagmire, much like in Vietnam forty years ago but worse. The Sunni Muslim is the dominant religion in the Arab lands. Saddam Hussein, once the CIA's great asset, has now become the Arab's, Iraqi Sunnis and Iraq's hero. He is on trial next week, but here again the invading force made a mistake. He is put on trial during the Ramadan fasting month, again to the American schedule. He has won the victory, whether he is hanged or not. Every miscalculation on him and the Sunnis are to the advantage of both Sunnis and Iraqis.

The US wants to spread its influence in the Middle East. It gains that influence by talking of, for example, democracy at home and corruption at the target country which can take many forms. It bribed the senior advisers of the Shah of Iran with residences in the US and with money, but when the crunch came, even the Shah was not allowed in the United States. Iran is now an Islamic state, Shi'ite, and one of the countries the Americans want to control. It was the time of the Cold War, and it wanted countries on its side in the Great Battle with the hated Soviet Union. So all this was fair game. And it sang its praises by favourable press notices. The conduit was news organisations, mostly Western but Third World as well. The information war was won by the US because it had the most resources. A continuing gripe in the 1960s of US foreign service officers was the growing influence in the region of Agence France Presse, the French news agency. Now that the Cold War is over, its new enemy is Islam. But it and the West uses Cold War officers to fight the battle, and fall flat. The difference is education. The farmers children in the Third World are educated. Those who were educated in the Soviet Union were derided in the Free World and those educated in the best universities of the Free World were given pride of place. But they got education, and they learned to think. Some found that the United States was superior to the others, while others thought that all foreign imperialisms were a menace to their countries. In the Cold War, there was the cushion for either the United States or the Soviet Union of the Non-Aligned bloc. But post-Cold War, there is no cushion. In the Cold War period, a meeting with the Soviet Union and the United States ambassadors at a neutral country can affect the war in Vietnam. Not now. Not yet. The Muslims all over the world are angry. And the enemy to the West comes from every where not just in the Middle East. So the war in Iraq has its effect in southern Thailand or Mindanao. The governments of Thailand and the Philippines have to take up the cudgels to prevent the Islamic insurgency from boiling over.

The problem in Iraq is also globalisation. President Bush and the Western leaders have taken the Christian crusade seriously and promises to drive the Muslim out to the sea. But so has their enemy, Osama bin Laden. So they are in intractible position. Their respective positions are sent throughout the world, and the West does not know either Islam or the messages Osama bin Laden sents to the Muslims. We know that by the Western leaders reassuring the battle is won by elaborate explanations on why Osama bin Laden will lose. But Osama bin Laden's message is simple: Islam is under attack by the hated Christians, and it is the duty of all Muslims to fight it. And the message is distributed by globalisation. If the West thinks the average Muslim is illiterate, so is the average Christian. His explanations of why they are winning is meant for the average Christian or others. But globalisation spreads it around, and the Muslim in the Pacific Island hears of it. The Western system of communication is far superior; it needs it to spread its message, but unwanted messages also go through. In the present battle against Islam, the West fights through proxies throughout the world. And given a twist by the communications giants it controls. The news reporters, many of whom have been found to be their agents, are now in the forefront of that battle. In Iraq, they are targetted by the US military for fear of their reporting what it does not want the outside world to see, hear or read. But the Muslims in power are with the United States, as the Shah of Iran's senior officials were, while those who oppose what is happening in the Middle East are not. As the South Asian eartquake revealed, while President Musharraf and his governemt are with the United States in this war on terror, those in the rural areas destroyed last week had made martyrs of those killed fighting the United States.

But this is a fight between the West, which believes in computerisation, scientific discovery and rejecting nature, and the East, represented by the Muslims, which understands Man, and fights him. The man is the same whether he is in Toulouse or Tal Alaf. The West has forgotten that but not the East. The war is prepared for what the Mahabharata is all about. My late uncle, Thakazi Sivasankara, told me once that all one needs in India to be educated is the Mahabharata. He believed that man repeats himself over millenia, and the holy book shows the way. As would the Bible and the Qu'ran. The people of three great religions know only the three books, for that is drummed into them in their youth. At home or in the religious schools. That gets ingrained into the self as he, if he is fortunate, gets a Western education. Since like globalisation, education is farmed out to the natives, the end result is problematical. That is the difficulty the United States and the West faces in this war on terror. In the Middle East, Western colonisation is taboo as a result of past history. Iraq was so ordered by Britain in the 1920s, by joining the Kurd, Sunni and Shia provinces of the Ottoman Empire more as a rival to France, which had Syria, with its Shia president and Sunni majority. It made the Sunni the dominant force in the country although it was only 20 per cent. Saddam Hussein is successor president to what was the Sunni leadership of the British-controlled Iraq. It has chosen the Sunnis to lead Iraq with a view to gaining influence in the rest of the Middle East. Britain throws all that in linking to the United States and invaded Iraq. And created a mess in Iraq. But history has a habit of repeating itself and those in power in Great Britain is composed of men who are the same the world over.

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