With the American army now at the gates of Baghdad, the nagging question is how did it all come to the undeniable fact that America is basically alone this time in waging this war. Many members of the “Coalition of the Willing” remain anonymous, if one excepts the British contingent and the few Arab countries - Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait – who serve more like military bases from which to launch operations than provide direct combat capability.
America’s historic allies and friends in the region, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have denied the US use of their bases and airspace, which has added insult to injury by making the war more difficult operationally. The denial of access by these two countries may in fact be an indirect cause for the casualties the Coalition forces have suffered in the first three days of operations. Regional members of the 1991 Gulf War coalition, like Syria, now stand firmly in the Iraqi trenches as outright enemies of the US. When all is said and done, there will have to be some reckoning. The war with Iraq has truly changed everything, and when the going got tough for America, tough friends were nowhere to be found. America, know thy enemy!
Other “friends” like France, Germany and Russia, remain bitterly opposed to the war. None of the arguments made by the Americans – disarming Iraq, preemptively striking at potential terrorism, deposing the regime, liberating the Iraqi people, ushering democracy in the region - seem to have resonated. Yet the fact remains that the opponents of the war have offered no serious alternative to the dilemma presented by Iraq other than an indefinite extension of the farce of the past 12 years. These are the same France, Germany, and Russia who could not agree on how to rescue their own Moslem populations in the former Yugoslav provinces of Kosovo and Bosnia from the megalomaniac deliriums of another dictator. Those are the same “New” Europeans who came begging Washington a few years ago for leadership and military power to put down the winds of ethnic and religious hatred blowing in Europe.
Meanwhile the Arab League continues to hold summits of disarray and acrimony, as if to drive beyond any doubt the point that the fiction of a political Arab World is just that, pure fiction! Here we are almost a century after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of colonialism, and the ineptitude of the Arab countries to forge common strategy remains exacerbated only by their denial of reality. Much as they lamentably lost all their past battles – and Palestine to boot - and much as they wholeheartedly burned Lebanon as a Western voodoo doll, the only country that offered them a shade of freedom from their arid self-imposed oppression, the Arabs continue today to throw blame right and left – the Ottomans, the Crusades, the League of Nations Mandate between WWI and WWII, imperialism, colonialism, Israel, Zionism, and even the occasional cursed “isolationist neo-Crusader” Dhimmi minority living in their midst. In their knee-jerk hatred of America and the West, the Arab and Moslem worlds have quickly forgotten that it was the Americans who went to war in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Somalia to rescue beleaguered Moslem nations and peoples. How can they say that America is waging war on Islam?
During the first days of hostilities, I am glued to the television set watching endless footage of dusty winds blowing across desolate stretches of the Iraqi desert, US soldiers wandering like futuristic warrior clones behind their masks and goggles, and smoke billowing above the Arabian nights skyline of Baghdad. This whole thing has an eerie feeling to it, blending images of ancient Mesopotamia and the Abbassid Caliphate of ninth-century Baghdad with modern technological warfare. I wonder how long will the war go on? How many innocent Iraqis will have to die? How many US soldiers will come home in body bags? By what measures and criteria do we judge whether, on balance, war was indeed a better last-ditch option than the antebellum status quo? I have retrospective flashes of my own life in wartime Beirut under months and months of Syrian Army shelling and mayhem. I felt alone then because the world did not care. I feel alone today because the world does not care either, no matter the pitch of the yelling on either side. Opponents of the war claim to have higher moral ground, when in fact they are simply competing with the pro-war crowd for the same war booty. Everyone has a stake in this, and everyone’s ethics is unique. In our own individual ways, each one of us is a lone ranger fighting the bad guys in this war.
As we settle in for the siege of Baghdad, my stake in this war, “my” very own Iraqi war, is a war on the dictatorships in the Arab world that have driven their people to despair. When faced with a choice of another four decades of Hussein or Assad dynasties ruling over every fiber of my being, the war in Iraq suddenly seems like manna from heaven, a window of opportunity, a chance. For once though, I wish I were not so alone.