Global Policy Forum

By Andre Fontaine

The Anglo-Saxon press likes to title certain articles in the imperative. It sometimes happens that the author hits the nail on the head. Such was the case for a Fareed Zakaria editorial that appeared in Newsweek, December 10, 2001, three months after the attack on the World Trade Center. "Let Iraq Wait, Finish Al Qaeda," the columnist demanded.

Why did George Bush ignore this warning that many others must also have directed his way? No official explanation has been furnished, but we know that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other advisors had not waited for September 11 to heartily recommend armed intervention in Iraq, a way of eliminating one of the first "Gangster States", and that they didn't lose a minute after the collapse of the twin towers to relaunch this project.

We also know that a number of Iraqi exiles swore up and down that Saddam's subjects were sick of him and that they would welcome the liberators, added to which, the luxury and the personality cult with which he surrounded himself made him an easier target than the Spartan Bin Laden.

We can imagine that the White House resident, feeling the need to hang an authentic Western movie bandit short and high to avenge the crime committed in Manhattan, should find it convenient to follow the trail of the Iraqi president rather than giving priority in a pre-electoral period to the search for the Osama needle in the Islamist haystack. Moreover, invading Iraq was a way to persuade the whole earth to take seriously a president who was not just a little proud to finish the work begun by his father, who, after encouraging the Iraqis to rise up against the dictator after his defeat in the Gulf War, did nothing to come to the aid of the Shi'ites or the Kurds who took up arms.

It does George W. no good to be infallible; he must be chewing his fingernails now for having chosen, to use the phrase coined by the American General Bradley in the nineteen fifties, "the wrong war in the wrong place against the wrong enemy." Far from reducing the threat from Islamist terrorism, the intervention in Iraq has put the coalition that spontaneously grew up around the United States after September 11 to a rough test.

Baghdad: A Power without Power

Far from being greeted with flowers, Americans are being killed practically every day. They are pouring billions of dollars into the conflict. The provisional government they've put in place in Baghdad is considered by most of its nationals as more of an instrument of the occupier than an emanation of their, Iraqi, will. The Shi'ite Grand Ayatollah's intervention has certainly allowed the White House to avoid in extremis a political disaster in Nadjaf, but it has shown the limits of Baghdad's real "power".

It is no longer a question of making Mesopotamia the region's laboratory for democracy. The insecurity that reigns around the wells and the oil pipelines contributes to what is coming to look like a third oil shock with potentially catastrophic effects.

If only Saddam's fall had been effective in the fight against Al-Qaeda! Yet it's the opposite that's occurred: the brigand who reigned in Baghdad was a miscreant whose former prestige owed much to his opposition to Iranian fundamentalism: there was no question of his ever collaborating with an ascetic fundamentalist like Bin Laden. It's the coalition's intervention in Iraq that, given the inability to truly control Iraq's often deserted borders, opened those borders to God's crazies, who are peerless in staging the most dreadful attacks, including the televised decapitations of hostages.

The great international mobilization against terrorism which sees Russia, China, and many Muslim countries -including Khadafi's Libya - collaborating with Washington, has certainly prevented many dramas. At this date, there has been no repeat in the United States of the Twin Towers attack. There have, however, been many spectacular attacks, in Madrid, and also in the Philippines, in Malaysia, in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, and elsewhere. And no one knows when the killers will strike the next time. The only certainty is that they will strike again and that even Bin Laden's capture won't change much.

He and his lieutenants are neither Robin Hood nor Ravachol. Up to now, terrorism has had a more or less artisanal quality. They have enormous resources at their disposition: between the drug traffic in Afghanistan and the subsidies from a certain number of Saudi so-called "charitable' organizations, they add up to billions of dollars. Thousands of fighters have been through their training camps. A number of them have done advanced studies and know how to pilot a plane. The most sophisticated weapons hold no secrets for them. Is that also true for nuclear weapons? Experts disagree on that point.

In sum, it's clear they have infinite patience, that they can prepare their operations months, if not years, in advance, that they know how to create diversions, how to disappear and leave no trace, all this in the name of a vision of history that makes the West guilty of having invaded and pillaged Dar-al-Islam, the Prophet's land, from Jerusalem to Medina, from Falluja and Najaf, guilty of having violated, and in any case surrounded, its holy places. Guilty also of sinking complacently into a depravity ever more indecent by the day.

It goes without saying that the majority of Muslims don't recognize themselves in this fanaticism, but also that there will never be an end to it until this planet's princes attack its sources of finance, until they better help the leaders in Kabul put an end to the reign of the warlords and drug traffickers, until they quickly give the Iraqis the feeling that they're the bosses in their own house, press the Israelis and the Palestinians to recover the path to that peace that seemed so close until an extremist - who was not an Arab - assassinated Israeli prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. People will say it's an immense, a too immense program, but God knows what the future holds for us without it.