After the war of weapons…

Both US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have tried to project democracy as one of their war aims. None of the sultans, sheikhs and emirs who back the coalition forces have dissented. Yet, which Arab state can boast of a democratically elected government? And the contrast between the stated intention and the actual reality is so jarring that the average Arab simply laughs away anything the American president may say.

A professor in a Jordanian university could not have put it more succinctly: “This is one strange war. The fact is that among the elite in the region there is no sympathy for Saddam. But they have no faith in the declared aims of the United States, and if democracy is actually the ultimate goal, then it cannot be confined only to Iraq. It must be there in all the Arab states.’’

He was right. The problem is that all the regimes in that part of the globe are being pulled every which way. Is secularism, too, a goal to be pursued? If so, the dilemma is that most Arab governments are already being condemned as not Islamic enough by fundamentalist groups; the last thing they can afford to do is to try and ‘‘secularise’’ society.

And if a dose of democracy is what is required, what becomes of their own powers? (Even the so-called republics are little more than glorified monarchies. The son succeeded the father in Syria, and President Mubarak of Egypt is widely reported to be grooming his son to inherit the leadership of his country.) The uncomfortable fact is that whether it is democracy that is used as the yardstick, or secularism, Iraq is far from being the worst in the Arab world.

The lack of democratic outlets has led the Arab street to lionise Saddam Hussein. There is no leader of the opposition to support if you happen to oppose the local regime. This makes the dictator of Baghdad the natural focus of most groups who feel frustrated with their own government. If you exclude Kuwait — which suffered at his hands 12 years ago — and Iran — which is not an Arab state anyway — the Iraqi president would probably win any popularity contest in any country in this part of the world. If only because there is nobody else in the region with any democratic credentials to challenge the dictator.

Since claims of a “war for democracy” fall flat for this reason, the general impression I gathered is that the Arabs consider this a crusade against Islam, with Saddam Hussein cast in the role of a modern Saladin. (There is no small irony in this as Saladin came of Kurdish stock!) Oddly, the Baath Party never used to be identified with Islam as such, being wedded to a radical form of pan-Arabism couple with socialism. But that became untenable after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. (You cannot claim to be a pan-Arabist, and then invade a brother nation. One or the other, but not both!)

It was only then that Saddam Hussein adopted the language of Islamic fundamentalism. (His famous expression, “mother of all battles”, is an excellent illustration of this.) He also changed the Iraqi flag to include the line ‘‘Allah-o-Akbar’’. But these were cosmetic changes, dictated by politics rather than any genuine reformation. Genuine fundamentalists — Osama bin Laden for instance — continue to damn Saddam Hussein as a closet atheist.

There is little love lost for Saddam Hussein among his fellow rulers. But they probably hate him most for being the unwitting agent of change. As President Mubarak put it recently, “If there are foreign influences amongst us, then who is to blame but the man who invited them in by his invasion of Kuwait in 1990!”

But change is in the air, whether or not the Arab states want it. To justify their own rhetoric the Americans will try and push for some limited form of democracy in Iraq. But if it works in Iraq, what excuse will the Arab rulers have for not introducing it in their own nations? That prospect is as great a threat to Arab autocrats as are Saddam Hussein’s hegemonistic ambitions.

Of course, there are some Arabs who don’t think that this war is about democracy or even about religion. They insist it is about nothing but carbon fuels. These are the people who are convinced that the United States wants to control all the oil and gas from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. Very simply then, the average Arab thinks it is fear of Islam or old fashioned greed that is driving the Americans to Baghdad.

For all their expertise in marketing, the Americans and the British are yet to convince anyone in Arabia that they are genuinely concerned about global security and not their own self-interest.

Whatever the initial setback, I remain convinced that the United States will win the war of weapons. But the long term and greater challenge is winning hearts and minds in that region. And that challenge must be faced by the Arab rulers as much as by the American generals.