Iraq, four years after that toppled statue

purported Iraqi WMD cast legitimate aspersions over US rectitude. Four years down the bloodied road, Iraq lies in a shambles and in this period, while official estimates refer to over 3,200 US personnel killed and 65,000 Iraqis (a ratio of 1: 20), independent studies suggest that the Iraqi death toll has crossed 60,000 with more than two million displaced. In a like fashion, the official cost of the war to the US is estimated to be $500 billion while other figures aver it is closer to one trillion. And for the hapless Iraqis,the fiscal and human cost remain incalculable.

However it is not just Iraq that is affected by Saddam’s toppling. The extended region from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia to Turkey is now animated by different degrees of internal turbulence. And the South Asian region which has now admitted Afghanistan as its new member cannot be impervious to the events in Iraq and take indignant solace in berating Bush’s blunder. While there is little dissent that the March 2003 military action against Iraq was a huge mistake, the alternative is not binary — that the US must immediately withdraw and redress the original transgression.

The toppling of the Saddam statue in April 2003 was equivalent to opening a Pandora’s box in a volatile West Asia. Many socio-political and intra-Islamic contestations that had remained embedded for centuries came to the fore with unanticipated virulence. Complex regional strategic cultures that owed allegiance to ethnicity and tribe which were fettered during the colonial era and cynically managed in the Cold War decades are now unshackled. At the core is a radical Islamist ideology which has become more potent and determined in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War and the signs were unmistakable in the events leading up to 9/11.

The decade of the 1990s was punctuated by the abortive terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, a more deadly strike on US embassies in East Africa and finally on a US warship in the Persian Gulf. An ideology of violence predicated on the distortion of Islamic tenets spread insidiously across the crescent from West Asia through Afghanistan-Pakistan to Indonesia and was remarkably successful in attracting converts. One of its many victims,Tawfik Hamid, who has since rejected this ideology, now recounts: “As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by Al-Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological rootlets of Islamism, the tap root has a name — Salafism, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.”

Note that this is a real-life recall from a South East Asian Muslim citizen, where levels of tolerance, impoverishment and the contact with modernity is very different when compared to the South Asian experience. And in recent months, the pattern of medieval Islamist ideology challenging the writ of the state is more than evident along the Pak-Afghan border where the resurgence of the Taliban is manifest in myriad ways.

The existential challenge was conveyed in unambiguous terms in Islamabad where militant youth — young men and women — wearing the certitude of Islam on their sleeve challenged the writ of the military regime in the heart of the Pakistani state. Is this angry South Asian constituency emboldened by the events in distant Iraq? The answer, alas, is yes. The death of every hapless Iraqi, whether by US action or internecine Shia-Sunni hatred, nurtures a non-linear negative emotion in the collective Muslim psyche, which can then be manipulated as the Hamid experience tells us.

Thus the South Asian societal ozone layer, while still largely insulated from the fall-out of Iraq and not yet directly affected, is a stake-holder in the future trajectory of Iraq and the choices made by its principal interlocutors.

Metaphorically toppling the Bush statue is not a policy option.

The writer is a security analyst