Memories of the Gulf War slaughter of Mutla Ridge will be fresh in the minds
Memories of the Gulf War slaughter of Mutla Ridge will be fresh in the minds of the armoured commanders, and the infantry will be cut off in virtually all directions. A retreat into Iran or the Kurdish populated north is out of the question, so too any rush south towards Kuwait. That leaves Jordan and Saudi Arabia, neither of which will want to see an influx of fleeing Iraqi divisions. So the option is to surrender or to die.While many of the conscripts will doubtless choose the former option, there is no such certainty about the Republican Guard, not to mention the danger that Saddam will launch at least some weapons of mass destruction in the direction of Israel or at advancing allied forces. The Americans clearly hope that he will be dead – a victim of an assassin’s bullet or a precision bomb -– before that moment arises.
But it is an optimistic calculation that leaves room for catastrophic upset.At the moment there is no clear contender to replace Saddam, though American officials will point out that a similar uncertainty prevailed in Afghanistan prior to the toppling of the Taliban. But Afghanistan does not present the wisest map for the latter day king-makers in the White House. Beset by internal rivalries, the government of Hamid Karzai is in a precarious position and the gunmen of al-Qa’ida and the Taliban are far from vanquished – witness the attack that took place in Kabul’s suburbs this week. There are some respects in which creating a new government in Afghanistan may have been easier, simply because of the proliferation of factions. None had the individual power to confront America and there was never going to be any chance they would come together as allies.Mr Bush has been told he runs the risk of creating massive instability in a region already seething with resentment, and in some countries outright hatred, of the US The risk to the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Jordan is clear. The toppling of an Arab government by a foreign power on their doorsteps will leave the Saudis and others looking impotent in the eyes of their increasingly radicalised populations. It may be that such predictions are overly gloomy, that we will see a short war with few civilian casualties and the replacement of Saddam with a democratic head of state.
The Arab world will protest and burn flags but nothing much else will happen, though many senior foreign policy experts on this side of the Atlantic seem to doubt that.The greatest danger lies in the rapid growth of anti-Western feeling in the Middle East; forces like al-Qa’ida which thrive on resentment of America will strengthen in the event of war. Some American policymakers acknowledge this but believe the risk is worth taking in order to destroy Saddam. The problem for all of us is the hatred we cannot see, which feeds on the rising sense of humiliation in the Arab world and is already recruiting its next generation of killers. The embodiment of that hatred, al-Qa’ida, is waiting for its chance. The challenge is to construct a political way forward that neutralises the hatred without compromising our security.
