The Brink Of Chaos

The pictures of US soldiers sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad have rightly shocked the world. But none of us can afford the luxury of sanctimonious reproof. If one wants to see human rights violated, one has only to be a fly on the wall of any police station in India, or for that matter most countries of the world, to get an eyeful. Gross human rights violations have accompanied every attempt, throughout history, to put down insurgencies by force. We need to look no further than Kashmir to see that we are as morally culpable. The truth, to quote Lord Acton's immortal phrase, is that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". It is a part of human nature that you have only to give a man (or woman) absolute power over other human beings to bring out the beast in him/her. The US should be judged in this crisis not by what happened, but by what it is doing to make amends and minimise the scope for recurrence.

If there is one country in which the exposure of these sordid deeds has had a salutary impact, it is the United States itself. There it is crystallising doubts about the wisdom of having invaded Iraq, which had been gathering all through April as the Sunni and Shia uprisings gained strength. By May 1, 753 US soldiers had been killed in Iraq and 7-8 times the number injured. Two-thirds of the latter seriously. In all, therefore, over three thousand have been killed or disabled. And 151 of the 753 had been killed in April alone.

But among American intellectuals, this is a lesser cause for anguish. A more pressing case is that the 'occupation' is stripping Americans of their illusions about themselves. The first to be threatened is the belief—perhaps the most deeply cherished of all—that America is the land of the free, and that when it intervenes anywhere militarily, it does so in the cause of freedom. In the wind-up to the Iraq war, Americans—three-quarters of whom had initially been against military, or at any rate unilateral military action—had gradually reconciled themselves, swallowing whole hog the administration's propaganda that they were liberating Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's tyranny. A majority of Americans continued to cling to this belief even after it became clear there was substantial opposition to the US presence and that armed resistance was not dying down. The insurgents, they believed, were remnants of the old regime and criminals aided by foreign fighters.

The uprising in April disabused them of this notion too, and forced them to face the fact that they were in Iraq as a colonial power, and brought into sharp focus why dislike for Americans has skyrocketed all over the world in the past year. The abuse at Abu Ghraib, exposed by a principled US soldier, has made them look like any other colonial power in history, including the one they fought to free themselves from two centuries ago. The longer they stay in Iraq, the dirtier their hands will become. To cap it all, such incidents also help increase the number of recruits to Al Qaeda.

Americans will not be able to live with this image of themselves for very long, for it outrages their most cherished beliefs. So it's no surprise that the Bush administration has begun to respond by remedying some of the catastrophic mistakes it made in its first days in Iraq. The most important has been the formation of an Iraqi brigade, led by an ex-general in the Iraqi army, to take charge of Fallujah. Its entry into Fallujah was greeted by residents as a victory in their fight for freedom. It's also helped defused tensions in Fallujah and minimised the chances of a renewed flare-up. Coalition authorities have also shown considerable sensitivity to Iraqi Shia sentiment in coping with the rebellion led by the young Shia cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

The most serious challenge the US faces now is the transfer of power to an Iraqi government on June 30. As of now, the Coalition Provisional Authority is in a Catch-22 situation. The more the Iraqis regard it as a real transfer of power, the sooner will the resistance, and its attendant violence, die down. But the more the US takes itself out of the scene, the more difficult will a successor government find it to handle the insurgents, including the foreign Islamist fighters that remain. In a worst case scenario, it might find itself unable to organise the elections scheduled for next year, nor provide security to the thousands of Americans working in reconstruction projects all over Iraq.

No one, anywhere in the world, will benefit if Iraq slides into chaos. Even less, if Iraq becomes a haven and recruiting ground for Al Qaeda. The US therefore needs to be helped in the extrication process. One essential step, learned from Fallujah, is to rehabilitate as many members of the old Iraqi administration and armed forces as possible and transfer control in the central region to them. Most Iraqis will see this as a return to de facto, if not de jure, self-rule. A second will be to replace US and British troops with troops from countries like Pakistan, India, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia and Bangladesh to back up the Iraqi administration and security forces, and help organise the elections.

But none of these countries will want to send its troops if Iraqis see them as parts of the same invading army and behave accordingly. Everything will therefore depend upon the extent to which the US transfers genuine power to the UN and the Iraqi government, and is willing to take a back seat in the maintenance of security during the period when elections are held and a constitution is drawn up.