WELCOME TO IWPR'S IRAQI CRISIS REPORT, No 2

WELCOME TO IWPR'S IRAQI CRISIS REPORT, No. 02, March 6, 2003

NEWS REVIEW: WEST AND ARABS DIVIDED AS REGION DRIFTS TO WAR Mobilisation gathers pace, as jockeying over disarmament and diplomacy continue. By Julie Flint.

REPORT: FEAR ON THE FRONT LINE Kurds in northern Iraq are once again at risk from conflict, but hope for a change of regime in Baghdad. By Chnoor Meho in Erbil, northern Iraq.

COMMENT: THE NEW HIROSHIMA A Baghdad diarist is indeed "shocked" by US war plans to dominate Iraq. By Nuha al-Radi in Beirut.

ANALYSIS: END OF THE PARTY Regime change is not enough - a sustained programme of de-Ba'athification is essential to rid Iraq of the influence of the ruling party and its functionaries. By Ali A. Allawi in London.

ANALYSIS: UNEASY NEIGHBOURS For different reasons, the Gulf states find reasons to worry about the grand designs of both Saddam Hussein and George Bush. By Mohammed Mashmoushi in Dubai.

COMMENT: THE WEST'S HUMANITARIAN CHARADE Bush and Blair's claim that war would be for the sake of the Iraqi people is belied by past experiences in Afghanistan and elsewhere. By Ali Abunimah in Chicago.

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NEWS WRAP: WEST AND ARABS DIVIDED AS REGION DRIFTS TO WAR

Mobilisation gathers pace, as jockeying over disarmament and diplomacy continue.

By Julie Flint in Beirut

Despite fresh setbacks to its attempts to gain support for war on Iraq, and fresh gestures by President Saddam Hussein towards dismantling his weapons of mass destruction, the United States' military build-up in the Middle East continued: dozens of warships and 600 strike aircraft now in the Gulf area, almost 300,000 troops massing in the Gulf and near Iraq and, according to senior US defence officials, increased bombing of Iraqi military targets within the "no-fly zones" over northern and southern Iraq.

Iraq's defences are being ground down, Arab commentators say, for a war that now appears inevitable.

As fears of American occupation and post-war anarchy deepen among Arabs, the Arab world witnessed a seismic and unprecedented shift: led by the United Arab Emirates, the Gulf states called on Saddam Hussein to leave the country he has ruled so cruelly for three generations, in order to save the entire region from "devastation".

The call, at an 11th-hour Arab summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, did not win the support of the non-Gulf Arabs. In a climate of deepening anti-Americanism, most Arab states fear not only a backlash from their own people but, more importantly, setting a precedent that could destabilise their own, deeply unpopular, undemocratic regimes.

But if the Arabs had a bad week - more disunited than ever as one of their own faced violent occupation - so did the United States and Britain as they tried to convince the United Nations that Saddam Hussein poses such a threat that he must be removed without further ado.

France, Germany and Russia warned that they would block any new UN resolution seeking to authorise the use of force against Iraq. The Turkish parliament rejected a resolution to allow as many as 62,000 American combat troops to be deployed on its territory for a possible invasion of Iraq. In the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, a new leadership of US-supported exiles immediately stumbled as the only Sunni Muslim in the group, a former foreign minister parachuted in under US pressure, refused to participate.

Eighty-year-old Adnan Pachachi said he had not been consulted about his inclusion. He said he had serious doubts about the legitimacy and representative nature of the group, which he predicted would be "an advisory group attached to a US military administration". He declared that an Iraq freed from Saddam requires a transitional Iraqi administration - not military rule.

"Most Iraqis reject the imposition of a government from outside," Pachachi wrote in The Financial Times. "A vast majority inside the country, which has borne the brunt of Mr. Hussein's oppression, must and can be consulted before any authority is installed in Baghdad."

Accusations - in the Arab world and in the West - that Washington and London are using disarmament as a pretext for regime change grew after chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix hailed the destruction of a number of banned al-Samoud II missiles as "a significant piece of real disarmament". Washington dismissed the scrapping of the missiles as part of "Saddam's game of deception". US Secretary of State Colin Powell went further, asserting that efforts to hide existing weapons, and develop new ones, were continuing.

Julie Flint, a long-time correspondent from the Middle East and a former IWPR trustee, is coordinating editor of the Iraqi Crisis Report.

REPORT: FEAR ON THE FRONT LINE

Kurds in northern Iraq are once again at risk from conflict, but hope for a change of regime in Baghdad.

By Chnoor Meho in Erbil, northern Iraq

Television and radio here are broadcasting announcements offering amnesty to any of Saddam Hussein's supporters if they defect. All professional people - doctors, nurses, police, firemen and fighters - are on 24-hour call. When we go out, the only topic of conversation is the war: "What's the latest information?"

Kurds are very, very apprehensive about the prospect of war. The children are terrified, even though they have no personal experience of Saddam's cruelty, of his terrible chemical attacks. Kurdish media have been telling us to line our rooms with plastic sheeting and keep a large tank of clean drinking water in the house. We bought crates and crates of bottled water and we tried to buy gas masks, but there were none left - not even for the children.

There is no more plastic sheeting.

Erbil market is like a graveyard. People are only shopping for the daily essentials - bread, milk, chicken, things like that. All other shops have closed because they have no customers.

We are scared that what has happened before will happen again, that the nightmares will come back. We are scared that Saddam will use the war as excuse to attack us again.

Everyone has rucksacks packed with a little clothing and food in case we have to leave in a hurry. In the past we ran to Iran for safety. But this time we will head to the mountains, hoping that the Iraqi army will not reach us there. Those who can afford to have already rented rooms in villages in the mountains.

Over many decades, we Kurds have been betrayed by both America and the United Kingdom. After the Gulf war of 1991, the United States left us like a flock of sheep with a wolf walking in our midst. When Saddam sent his tanks into Erbil in 1996, under the eyes of American planes, America did nothing. Again Kurds died.

This time we are hoping that the Americans will finally get rid of Saddam. We pray that any attack will be so quick that Saddam has no time for atrocities.

We have no other option. Kurdistan is liberated, but it is poor. For the moment we are safe and we have some freedom. There is no more torture, harassment or abuse unless you live near the border with Saddam's Iraq, from where Iraqi soldiers still cross into the liberated area to raid villages. But we are desperately poor. When I married in 1989, we were rich. We had two good incomes, a good house and good car. My husband was a primary school teacher. Today he is unemployed and earns what little he can driving a taxi.

At the moment our family is caring for a guest - our 76-year-old neighbour. She is one of many Kurds who will have difficulty caring for themselves if we are attacked again. Her husband, a primary school inspector, died last year. For a while she had a small pension. But this has stopped now because the regional government does not have the funds for this type of luxury.

When the American-backed opposition was meeting here last week, Turkey closed its border with northern Iraq. We don't really know what went on at the meeting, but we do know that the closure of the border had a dramatic effect on the prices of oil and gas. They rocketed.

The Kurds see none of the proceeds from the oil that Saddam is allowed to sell. Without the help of my sister in Britain, who sends us $100 to $200 a month, we could not survive. We will worship anyone who saves us from Saddam. They will be our saviours.

I have lived in fear all my life. It is our dream to see Saddam and his barbaric regime go. Nobody wants war. We will pay a big price. But we see no other way.

Chnoor Meho is a mother of four and teaches in a secondary school in Erbil. She asked that her name be changed for her own protection.

COMMENT: THE NEW HIROSHIMA

A Baghdad diarist is indeed "shocked" by US war plans to dominate Iraq.

By Nuha al-Radi in Beirut

With a heavy heart I open my e-mail a number of times a day to read endless opinions for and against the war. But since I received "Is Baghdad the new Hiroshima?" a few days ago I am dazed and haunted.

According to CBS News, my correspondent tells me, the Pentagon's war plan is based upon the "rapid dominance" theory of one Harlan Ullman, formerly "head of extended planning" in the US Navy and, during his tenure at the National War College, a teacher of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Ullman's theory calls for "800 cruise missiles in the first two days of the war . . . one every four minutes, day and night, for 48 hours."

The missiles "will destroy everything that makes life in Baghdad liveable," Ullman told CBS reporter David Martin. "We want them to quit; we want them not to fight. . . . You take the city down. . . . You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima - not taking days or weeks, but in minutes."

"Shock and awe", Ullman calls it. Shock there will be. Awe less likely, as so many will be dead by then.

The disgraceful Arabs, who have never learned the meaning of "unity" or "initiative", met in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last week. All they produced, apart from a slanging match between Libya and Saudi Arabia, was a statement saying no Arab country should help with the war against Iraq. Yet most of them already have US forces stationed on their territory ready for battle. Does that give the US and Britain the right to occupy Iraq, to be the new colonial masters?

The US is waiting for the UN to give it permission to attack, but gives all indications of being ready to do it without permission. The UN, for its part, maintains a shameful silence as Israel invades Palestinian areas, demolishes, kills pregnant women and children and razes houses with people still inside - all this from behind the safety shield of missiles and armed vehicles. This silence is unlikely to change when the US attacks Iraq. The shock-and-awe tactic will mean there are no body bags to send home to America. Iraqi dead will be called "collateral damage" again and quickly forgotten.

Yet North Korea is allowed to go into nuclear production. The gentle North Korean people are to be dialogued with. No double standards here!

I talked to my 85-year-old mother in Baghdad a few days ago. Everyone there is going about his or her normal business, quite used to war tension by now. They seem quite fatalistic.

My neighbour was going to Baghdad and I asked my mother what I could send her. "Nuts, please," she said. So I sent nuts - and chocolates and water purification tabs - and I told her: "In case war starts, please move to my house in the orchard. It's so much safer than yours on the river . . ."

The river is always bombed, because of the bridges. And it acts like a tunnel. It carries so much noise - huge reverberations flow down it.

Another of today's e-mails says that US Marines have confirmed they have already shipped toxic riot control agents, CS gas, pepper spray and calmative gases - like those used in the Moscow theatre episode, when scores of people died? Meanwhile, in Iraq, the UN is dismantling and blowing up all Iraq's weapons. No double standards here!

The world is crying "no to war" but Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair are single-minded and the B-52 bombers have already started arriving in Britain. I've been under those bombers in Gulf War I. The earth shakes even before they drop their lethal payloads.

The United Arab Emirates have suggested that Saddam step down to avoid war, but it doesn't look as if anything will satisfy the United States now except full control of Iraq. And the US will be there to stay. Like Israel in the occupied territories, it will put down roots. What's the difference between one occupying force and another? The US occupies Iraq to spare the world from terror, having convinced 65 per cent of Americans that al-Qaeda and Iraq are allies; Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza to spare itself from terror.

As fast as Iraqi missiles are being destroyed, so the US and Britain increase their bombing of the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. Getting rid of Iraqi defences: getting ready for the invasion which I think has already started.

Nuha al-Radi is an Iraqi artist and author of the best-selling Baghdad Diaries, which she began to write in Baghdad during the last Iraq war. She now lives in Beirut.

ANALYSIS: END OF THE PARTY

Regime change is not enough - a sustained programme of de-Ba'athification is essential to rid Iraq of the influence of the ruling party and its functionaries.

By Ali A. Allawi in London

Iraq turned into a gigantic prison camp under the Ba'ath party of Saddam Hussein. Yet this Saddamist state could not have evolved without the active - and willing - participation of tens of thousand of Iraqis.

In the post-Saddam period, therefore, the entire system of authoritarian, corrupt rule must be dismantled in a process of de-Ba'athification whose overarching objective must be to re-educate a people who have been subjected to a 30 years of hate, invective, bigotry, chauvinism, racism, militarism and vainglory. Nothing short of a formal and complete programme of de-Ba'athification will suffice to redress the regime's crimes and give some restitution to its victims. Purging a few individuals cannot be the end of it.

Yet the Iraqi opposition has only recently addressed, in an urgent way, the need to uproot the structure of Ba'athist control in Iraq. Wherever the issue was confronted, opinion tended to divide into three camps.

The first camp - broadly represented by an alliance of ex-Ba'athis, Arab nationalists, and recent military and civilian converts to the opposition's cause - has focused exclusively on Saddam and his immediate entourage. This camp says the Ba'ath itself has been corrupted and co-opted by the regime and argues that it would be foolish to alienate two million or so Ba'athists who could be an important prop to any new government.

It sees the Ba'ath as, at worst, a well-meaning group of modernizers betrayed by a megalomaniac and absolves the party and its institutions of any culpability in the regime's crimes. Those who are deemed blameworthy, they say, are unlikely to exceed 50 individuals. Assigning wider blame, it is argued, could unleash uncontrolled revenge killings that would blight the country's future.

This camp would seek to win the Ba'ath over with promises of an exclusive focus of retribution on Saddam and his immediate entourage. The party itself might be allowed to continue functioning.

The second camp does not deviate significantly from the premises of the first except to widen the scope of culpability to cover leading figures of the regime including key ministers, governors, military and security personnel and similar luminaries. It appears to believe that some form of public airing of injustices would be necessary and that the Ba'ath would need major modifications to its charter and objectives if it is to be allowed to function.

It would adopt a pragmatic approach of cooperating with rank-and-file Ba'athists after liberation, stressing the need to maintain a functioning administration. It is probable that no more than several hundred individuals would be targeted for indictment.

The third camp, which up to now has not articulated its position clearly, starts from the premise that the entire Ba'athist experience in Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster. It believes the Ba'ath is directly responsible for providing the ways and means by which the regime inflicted its catastrophes on the Iraqi people, their neighbours and the world community. It holds the Ba'ath responsible for providing the ideology and the machinery that turned Iraq into an aggressive, totalitarian and genocidal state and argues that democratisation is simply not possible unless the entire Ba'athist apparatus is uprooted.

The history of nations that have experienced similar traumas to Iraq's in dealing with the remnants of their totalitarian past has been varied. Although there is no single example that can be used as a model for Iraq, the nearest would be de-Nazification. Both Nazi Germany and Ba'athist Iraq were totalitarian states that ruled through pervasive security systems and engaged in external wars of aggression. De-Nazification was a programme fraught with problems and half-solutions and was ultimately abandoned, truncated, in the early 1950s. But there are nevertheless important lessons to be drawn from it.

A post-Saddam administration should legislate for a National De-Ba'athification Council that would have divisions covering provinces, cities and towns as well as key institutions like the educational and judicial systems, government-owned economic and commercial enterprises, the oil industry and so on.

The council would have a number of key objectives: identifying and classifying the culprits; assigning degrees of culpability with appropriate legal and administrative measures; removing such persons from any responsible political, administrative, educational or juridical body; reinstating those who were dismissed for political reasons during the Ba'athist rule; creating safeguards to identify and block the appointment or promotion of any figure with Ba'athist sympathies and loyalties; ensuring that Ba'athist ideology does not seep into the public realm in any guise and that key state institutions are protected constitutionally from Ba'athist encroachments.

The Ba'ath has an estimated base of two million people. About 50,000 people are cadres who function as leaders, motivators, teachers and watchdogs. The party is divided hierarchically in a cellular structure - from halaqas, or neighbourhood cells of 2 to 7 people, to firqas in factories and offices, schools and urban quarters; shubas in city districts, large towns and rural districts; fir'as at the provincial level; and the Regional Command, which unites all fir'as and reports to an inactive, pan-Arab, National Command.

Under de-Ba'athification rules, all Regional Command members, branches and shuba members should be automatically disbarred. Every Ba'ath party cadre or supporter should be asked to complete a detailed questionnaire, corroborated by at least two witnesses, about his activities under the Ba'ath. He should then submit to a detailed interview which would classify him according to degrees of culpability defined following Allied classification of Nazi party members - from holding office in the Ba'ath and related organisations to giving substantial moral, political or material support to the party, its officials or leaders.

Prominent members of the professional and commercial classes who benefited from the Ba'ath party and its programmes, directly and indirectly, should also be "de-Ba'athified".

Those deemed culpable of supporting Ba'athism in whatever guise would be classified into four classes. Class I offenders, who committed or approved of crimes directly, would be stripped of office and indicted for trial. Class II, who aided or abetted crimes, would be stripped of office but tried on lesser offences.

Class III, who knew of crimes which they could have prevented or who benefited from crimes, would be suspended from office and obliged to undertake remedial educational programmes as a prelude to possible reinstatement. Against Class IV offenders, who were merely followers, no charges would be raised.

Related to de-Ba'athification is the treatment of the assets and properties amassed by the party, its stalwarts and agents both domestically and abroad. During the dying days of the Soviet empire, huge amounts of wealth were spirited away and contributed, significantly, to the criminalization of politics in the immediate post-Soviet era. The identifiable assets of the Ba'ath should be sequestered at once and a rigorous policy pursued to recover illicitly-gained wealth - or at least to neutralise its pernicious effects.

To this end, a National Audit and Asset Recovery office would make a full inventory of the assets of the Ba'ath and its henchmen, whether held directly or through nominees; trace the theft of assets throughout Saddam's rule and prepare legal cases to retrieve them; ensure that no tainted funding reaches parliamentary candidates, political parties or the media; identify institutions and countries that would be black-listed for harbouring the money of these criminals and take retaliatory measures.

Estimates of the funds that have been stolen by the Ba'ath party and its leaders amount to tens of billions of dollars. This wealth has been amassed over decades of unaccountable and untrammelled access to public funds by Ba'athists who have had the best advice from "respectable" intermediaries - banks, international lawyers and accountants - well-versed in camouflage, subterfuge and money-laundering. A great part of the stolen funds may not be recoverable. But the experience of countries like Nigeria and the Philippines indicates that a substantial amount can be recovered if the process is legally-founded, persistent and methodical.

Ali A. Allawi is an Iraqi economist and investment banker in London.

ANALYSIS: UNEASY NEIGHBOURS

For different reasons, the Gulf states find reasons to worry about the grand designs of both Saddam Hussein and George Bush.

By Mohammed Mashmoushi in Dubai

Since the beginning of this latest, greatest confrontation between Iraq and the United States, the states of the Arab Gulf have displayed mixed feelings towards both protagonists - to President Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and to the United States, whose president, George W. Bush, has made clear that he will seek to reshape the entire Arab world, by one means or another, after he has finished with Saddam.

Few in the Gulf like Saddam, his Ba'athist rule or his oppression. They also blame him for the US bases that have mushroomed across the Gulf area since 1990 as a direct result of his disastrous occupation of Kuwait.

But few in the Gulf like President Bush - not only because of his hawkish policy against Iraq but also because of the free hand he has given Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to continue his vengeful military campaign against the Palestinian people for the past two years. In the Gulf view, Sharon and his entourage of right-wing parties would not have triumphed in Israel's recent elections without Bush's support for their hard-line anti-Palestinian policies.

Kuwait, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia, acknowledge openly that it was only the international coalition assembled by Bush the father that saved them from being gobbled up by Saddam's ambitions in 1990. Despite this, however, they still favour a no-war solution that would rescue them from both evils: from living next door to Saddam on one hand, and from having a fellow Arab state occupied by foreign troops on the other.

Last weekend, in an initiative presented to the Arab summit held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the United Arab Emirates took a first step - unprecedented in the Arab world - to try to avert a war against Iraq and the repercussions it would have throughout the Gulf region. The UAE initiative envisages Saddam Hussein leaving Baghdad with his family, close aides and senior army officers. It proposes putting Iraq in the hands of an international protectorate composed of both the United Nations and the Arab League.

The initiative united the Gulf states in throwing off their ambivalence towards Saddam, but was not discussed officially at the summit because of the fears of other Arab countries that interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq would give others an excuse to interfere in theirs. In the end, the summit limited itself to calling on Arabs "not to take any part in any military offensive against Iraq".

But the Gulf states were not deterred. UAE Information Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zaid told reporters after the summit that the initiative remained "the last choice for Arabs if they truly want to rescue Iraq and the Arab world from a devastating war." The foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council who met in Qatar after the summit included the initiative in their agenda. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain endorsed it openly.

With the exception of Saudi Arabia, which takes into consideration a public opinion that generally supports Osama bin Laden's radical anti-Americanism, the Gulf council, as a group, looks more sympathetically on US preparations for war - not in hope of war but of increasing pressure on Saddam to step down. Taking into account Saddam's refusal to relinquish power voluntarily, this anti-war, anti-Saddam axis, with its post-1991 "security arrangements" with the United States, Britain and France, may eventually turn out to participate explicitly in a US-led war on Iraq by continuing to lend facilities to the US military.

For the Gulf states, as for all Arab states, there is only one happy outcome to the current crisis: that Saddam cooperates fully with the weapons inspectors and that President Bush abandons what Arabs see as his strategic ambition to control all the oil reserves between the Caspian Sea and the Gulf.

In its improbability, this matches the task European countries like France, Germany and Belgium have set themselves: to try to avert war against Iraq by convincing the US administration that another Security Council resolution is needed - but only after the weapons inspectors have been given more time to finish their job.

For the Gulf Arabs, as for continental Europeans, the immediate problem is not only the arrogance of Saddam Hussein but also the arrogance of the leader of the world's last remaining superpower: President Bush. Today, as Saddam Hussein destroys his missiles, the imperial strategy of the US administration, clearly voiced by the hawks in Washington, counts more than rogue regimes like the one in Iraq.

Mohammed Mashmoushi, a Beirut-based political analyst and veteran deputy editor-in-chief of Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper, writes for the Gulf daily al-Bayan.

COMMENT: THE WEST'S HUMANITARIAN CHARADE

Bush and Blair's claim that war would be for the sake of the Iraqi people is belied by past experiences in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

By Ali Abunimah in Chicago

Having spectacularly failed to convince the world that Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction present an imminent danger, supporters of American war plans have turned to moral and humanitarian arguments. According to this logic, international action to remove him is justified because Saddam Hussein is such a brutal tyrant.

In Kabul, meanwhile, it is reported that Afghans listen "with astonishment" as Americans portray their country's experience since the overthrow of the Taleban as a "success". Amid the mounting problems faced by Afghanistan, there is said to be "a deep concern in Kabul that the international community is losing interest even though the task of repairing the wreckage of war has just begun."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who vowed the international community "will not walk away from Afghanistan," is now selling the same snake oil to raise support for an attack on Iraq.

Let us, for the sake of argument, accept the premises and good intentions of Blair's position. Is there any evidence that US-led action would lead to an improvement for the people of Iraq? The record from recent "humanitarian" US military interventions in Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo - much smaller countries and less complex situations than Iraq - suggests Afghanistan's dismal experience is the norm, not the exception.

In December 1992, the first President George Bush sent 28,000 troops to Somalia on a humanitarian mission to help distribute US food. US forces met resistance and engaged in heavy fighting, killing thousands of Somalis. A decade after Bush declared "we will not fail", Somalia today does not even have a functioning government.

In a September 2002 brief, the World Bank said more than half a million people there faced severe food shortages, a situation scarcely better than in 1992.

In September 1994, President Bill Clinton sent a 15,000-strong invasion force to Haiti. As the troops were on their way, Haiti's military rulers stepped down under an ultimatum. Clinton sent the troops in anyway as the advance guard of a US-led international force whose mandate was "to begin the task of restoring democratic government" to "stop the brutal atrocities" and "to uphold the reliability of commitments we make to others".

Today Haiti remains torn by political violence, instability and severe human rights abuses. In 2001, the financial situation became so bad that the United States and the European Union cut off financial aid to the Haitian government.

In 1999, the United States led NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. The attack, whose declared goal was to save Kosovo Albanians from ex-President Slobodan Milosevic, was preceded by claims that tens of thousands were killed by his forces.

Today Kosovo is not a democracy. Foreign occupation forces remain and the province is governed by the UN Mission in Kosovo, whose performance is criticised by many local and international organisations. According to the World Bank, 75 percent of Kosovo's budget comes from foreign donors and this share is increasing. Prospects for a viable and independent Kosovo are dim.

A short distance away in Bosnia, peace has been guaranteed since the mid-1990s by the presence of large international forces, including US troops. But despite all the efforts of the international community, a stable and multicultural democracy is nowhere in sight. Rather, the international presence has frozen the status quo, which includes the continued exile of millions of Bosnian Moslem, Serb and Croat refugees forced from their homes in the early 1990s.

Better than active fighting and the horrors of the Yugoslav wars, but hardly an inspiring success for post-war reconstruction.

These experiences show that ardent promises made to gain support for a military intervention quickly gave way to apathy by Western governments, media and the public, behind which long-standing problems continue to fester unseen.

Even if the United States were motivated by sincere intentions to bring democracy to Iraq, recent history serves as a warning. To this poor record, and America's historic support for the most undemocratic regimes in the world - including Israel's military dictatorship over the Palestinians and undemocratic regimes in Turkey and Saudi Arabia - must now be added a third factor. The hawks who have hijacked American foreign policy have stated that their goal is to create a unipolar world ruled by the United States. They are driven by a zeal to reorganise the Middle East in the interests of the United States and Israel. Only the naive will believe emancipation for the people of Iraq or anywhere else in the region fits into these schemes.

Ali Abunimah is a Chicago-based Palestinian-Jordanian analyst, media critic and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada. This article originally appeared in Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper.

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IRAQI CRISIS REPORT No. 02