Ashamed to be Arab
Ghada Karmi* finds nothing froth in Arab diplomacy
It is very difficult to be an Arab in Britain today. We watch helplessly as the preparations for war on Iraq continue. There are now 27,000 British troops stationed in Kuwait and more are due to join them. The largest British destroyers the military have are deployed in the Gulf and army commanders say they are ready to fight. Britain is America's closest ally and its prime minister has provided unstinting loyalty and support for the US president's drive to war on Iraq. Tony Blair's devotion is so extreme that he risks losing his premiership and his whole political life over this enterprise.
The war he and Bush want to perpetrate will be truly awesome. According to Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, it will be fought in a style not seen before. In the first 48 hours of the war 3,000 precision-guided bombs will fall on Iraq and 500 cruise missiles, more than were used in the whole of the first Gulf War. This so-called "shock and awe" technique is designed to ensure a rapid disablement of the country's defences and morale. Vladimir Slipchenko, senior Russian military expert, anticipates that the US will first destroy all Iraq's key facilities and then wipe out its 500,000 strong army with missile and bombing raids. Nuclear weapons are also slated for possible use. Depleted uranium, which has already caused a tenfold increase in cancer amongst Iraqis, will feature, and the US president has agreed to the use of tactical nuclear weapons as necessary.
In addition, several experimental weapons are to be tested in this war. We do not yet know what their impact will be. But, if the assault goes ahead as planned, Iraq's troops, infrastructure and economy will be annihilated within one month. The humanitarian costs are unimaginable. A joint UN and WHO report in January expected a death toll of up to 260,000 civilians initially with perhaps a million more after the collapse of Iraq's infrastructure due to starvation and disease. The UNHCR anticipates a refugee exodus of at least 600,000 externally and two million internally. This excludes long-term damage to present and future Iraqi society.
Many players are trying to stop this horrific, grossly unequal war from happening. In Britain opinion polls have consistently shown a majority against the war, and parliament and government are severely split. A quarter of Labour MPs voted against the government on 26 February, the largest revolt by MPs ever, and a senior cabinet member, Claire Short, has announced she will resign if Britain fights without UN mandate. Two million people marched in London on 15 February, many of them drawn not from political or activist ranks, but from the heart of ordinary England. The huge Stop the War movement is currently mobilising people for a campaign of civil disobedience in the event of war.
Lest anyone in the Arab world, watching this scenario, feel encouraged to believe that the anti-war battle will be won for them by foreigners, it needs to be clear that the conflict here is not about Iraqis or Arabs. There are issues about local, inter-European and US-EU relations: the way Britain is governed, the meaning of democracy, Tony Blair's performance as prime minister; likewise, concerns about the future of the EU, given the current split, and the future of the Transatlantic alliance. It is an inter-Western debate, in which Arab well-being is a marginal issue.
And the Arabs have acquiesced in this marginalisation. Where they should have been the first to protest, resist and try to prevent this war they are now discounted from the debate. Western anti- war strategies do not include an Arab dimension because the Arab role is seen as either negligible or collusive. By their compliance with American and British war preparations, the Arabs have disqualified themselves from the debate. Instead, anti-war efforts have focussed on persuading Tony Blair to withdraw British support for the US, and everyone is hoping that France or Russia will come to the rescue through their veto in the Security Council.
But matters need never have come to this. Everyone can see that, without the use of Arab bases, American troops could not have mounted the ground invasion of Iraq so crucial to winning the war. If even Turkey's temporary refusal to give them similar rights has caused such problems, how much worse would they have fared without Arab help.
As it is there are some 200,000 American troops now in the Gulf with unfettered access to command and control facilities, full landing rights by sea and air and extensive logistical support. Half of Kuwait is now American occupied and closed to its own citizens. Had these facilities been denied early on the massive military build-up, which makes an American withdrawal now inconceivable, would not have happened. This fact exposes as diplomatic froth the meetings of the Arab League and the ISCO that claimed a unified Arab rejection of aggression against Iraq. The opposition of Arab peoples, on the other hand, is not in doubt, but their protests have neither stopped nor even reduced formal Arab compliance with US military plans.
Arab reaction in Britain is no better. A community of 3-400,000 Arabs here could have mounted a vigorous anti- war effort, in concert with two million British Muslims. Though Arabs have supported anti-war protests here they have initiated none themselves. Small- scale projects like letter-writing to local MPs or forming delegations to protest to members of government have not succeeded, due to poor communal support.
How can one explain this wretched failure? How can any Arab who facilitates the unspeakable carnage planned for Iraq sleep easy at night? The Arab position is truly hard to understand or defend and, as an Arab, it fills me with shame. The tired old clichés that are used to justify this impotent stance -- Arab economic dependence on America and our helplessness against its power -- are not acceptable in the face of this overwhelming catastrophe. If small children in Palestine dare to throw stones at Israeli tanks, daily risking death, can defying US power for the rest of us be so much worse?
* The writer is a Palestinian activist living in London. Her latest book, In Search of Fatima, is published by Verso.
