The Times (London)

March 29, 2003

Focus on human rights offers hope of reconciliation

Chibli Mallat says the Arabs and the West can agree on policies for Iraq

WELCOME to the post-modern war. Even before it started, this war appeared surreal, not least for the idea that the United States and Britain were “liberating Iraq” while refusing to involve any Iraqi in the process of change.

Even after the war ends, French diplomacy will portray the conflict in terms of weapons of mass destruction and legal coherence against US bullying and unilateralism. Arabs will depict it as a colonialist venture, an extension of Israeli policy on the wings of US jets. Americans will waver between an idealist portrayal of a war to end all wars and the fear of a repeat of the Vietnam or Somalia syndrome.

The errors in the battlefield will add their complicating imprint. Developments have clearly confounded expectations, including in Baghdad and Washington.

The drive to Baghdad has been swift and massive, but the southern cities are still very much under the Iraqi Government’s control. While it has them, Baghdad will hesitate to use weapons of mass destruction, lest it fractures the anti-war group.

That is not to mention the equally surreal position of the Turks, itching to take over the Kurdish north but threatened with retaliation from Washington if they move their troops further into Iraqi territory.

More ominously for the region, it is hard to find supporters of the war in the Arab world, except for a number of Iraqis who have worked closely with Washington over the past ten years to change the regime in Baghdad.

Even those hawkish Iraqis have misgivings, however, about the way that the war has been executed so far, and they question their exclusion from participation in the field on the side of the British and American troops. Even they are uneasy about American plans to rule Iraq “directly”, echoing a universal rejection in the Arab world of American or British occupation.

And yet it might have been possible to prevent the surrealism that has engulfed this war and the diffidence with which it is being met. Two simple correctives to a policy for “regime change” in Baghdad were — and remain — needed: instead of “regime change” an emphasis on “ending the dictatorship”; and instead of insisting on weapons of mass destruction, there should have been a simple insistence on the effective protection of human rights throughout Iraq.

It is hard for anyone in the world, including the Arabs sceptical of American intentions, to resist a policy directed at ending a 34-year dictatorship and introducing protection of the basic rights of Iraqis toiling under it, as well as lifting sanctions from which they have been suffering.

These two correctives were put forward by a number of Arab (and Turkish) advocates in a “democratic Iraq initiative”. These ideas were welcomed in places as diverse as Washington and the offices of Amnesty International, as well as gaining support in the Gulf states for the exile of Saddam Hussein to avoid war. But Europe has remained impervious to such ideas.

Is it too late? Calls for ending the hostilities will hardly be heeded now, but tabling a dual proposal in the shape of a ceasefire and the deployment of human rights monitors should surely be hard to oppose for anyone who cares for a better future for Iraq.

Within the larger Arab scene, only the revival of the Middle East peace process and forcing the road map on to the Israeli Government can temper the justified sense of injustice in the region. The idea has been put forward timidly by the British Government, but only an equal Western treatment of the excesses of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, can start to reverse the deep animosity towards the West generally, and towards the United States in particular.

Unless the man at the helm of Israeli extremism is also forced out, the divide between the West and the Arab and Muslim East will deepen.

Coherence is required to redeem the mounting human suffering in Iraq and in the Middle East generally. For that, the request to deploy human rights monitors across Iraq and a meaningful opposition to Israeli intransigence and American double-standards need to bear fruit sooner rather than later.

Chibli Mallat is EU Jean Monnet Professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Lebanon, and the author or editor of some 20 books. The Democratic Iraq Initiative can be followed on www.mallat.com