Alongwith the war, the language of war. In an occasional series, Britain’s GUARDIAN has promised to decode the military jargon. The day after the US strikes began in Baghdad, it willed the demise of that old, chilling euphemism: ‘collateral damage’. ‘‘No longer will military spokesmen be able to stand on a podium, far from a war zone, and dismiss innocent deaths in abstract terms, as they did in 1999 when US warplanes fired on a convoy of ethnic Albanians, believing they were Serb forces.’’ Of course, the paper conceded, the change of language does not herald a change in the military tactics. The world must now prepare for ‘‘unavoidable civilian deaths’’, caused by ‘‘smart’’ bombs meant to hit only military targets. On March 20, the NEW YORK TIMES headline read: ‘‘Watching Intently as a War is Born 6,000 Miles Away’’. Taking a cue from GUARDIAN, some may ask: can a war that will bring so much death, be said to be ‘born’? Fighting the ‘World Street’ In the US media, war was an end to the waiting. President Bush has ended the ‘‘anxious guessing game’’ in world capitals, said the NYT. For some, Bush’s deployment of the doctrine of pre-emption as the war of pre-emption was a moment to recall Candidate Bush. Who, ironically, spoke of the need for a ‘‘humble’’ approach to the world when he ran for President. Amid the calls to rally behind the flag, a keen sense of America’s isolation. Influential columnist Thomas Friedman, who has regularly reiterated his support for ‘‘regime change’’ in Iraq, lamented a war declared on the ruins of diplomacy. In cowboy imagery Bush is partial to, Friedman wrote: ‘‘We’re riding into Baghdad pretty much alone and hoping to round up a posse after we get there. I hope we do, because it may be the only way we can get out with ourselves, and the town, in one piece’.’’ The Bush team, he said, has pursued a ‘‘narrow, ideological and bullying foreign policy’’; it did not work hard enough towards a diplomatic solution. So, ‘‘here we are, going to war. in the face of opposition, not so much from ‘the Arab street’, but from ‘the World Street’.’’ Should Britain unite or not? In Britain, calls to unite, and an assertion of the right to remain divided on Iraq. The nation must unite, wrote the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and hostilities must call a halt to the debate about the rights and wrongs of war. Crude calls for unity are out of place, retorted the GUARDIAN. Supporters of military action must accept that the divisions in public opinion are lasting ones, and that ‘‘it is perfectly possible to be patriotic and to oppose war at the same time’’. It pointed out that the 130 Labour MPs who voted for the rebel amendment on Tuesday’s debate on Iraq, formed the largest Commons revolt within a governing party in modern British history. The FINANCIAL TIMES moved on to the ‘‘fog of post-war’’. Would things go according to the plan of the self-styled ‘‘democratic imperialists’’ in the Bush administration, it asked, who wish to use control of Iraq to remake the Middle East? Or will events be scripted by the ‘‘realists’’, who want to accomplish a finite set of tasks and get out before US forces get sucked into ‘‘another Lebanon or Yugoslavia’’? Making a case against war In Egypt’s AL AHRAM WEEKLY, political scientist Hassan Nafaa tore into the case for war argued by Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami. Recently in FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Ajami wrote that the war against Iraq is necessary because the conflict between Arab despots and their people has become America’s problem. Therefore, the US must cast aside its revulsion for ‘nation-building’, topple Saddam, and transform Iraq into a model of a democratic, pluralistic society. ‘‘Even supposing that the American experience could overcome all its historical defects and attain a degree of maturity that render its value system worth emulating’’ wrote Nafaa, the history of traditional colonialism offers a ‘‘succinct and bleak lesson’’ in the ‘‘practicalities of aggressive civilising missions’’. For decades, even centuries, colonial powers subjected people by force of arms, not by the strength of the banners of enlightenment and modernisation. Colonialism gave rise to societies that were economically, politically and socially distorted and unstable, said Nafaa, and obstructed prospects of a domestically generated democratic transformation.
