AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Artículo en “The Economist” del 15-5-03

After the Saudi bombs, the main job is still to get Iraq right

“CASE proven—war does not eradicate terrorism.” So said a London newspaper after suicide bombers, presumed to be from al-Qaeda, killed scores of civilians in their beds in Riyadh this week. Many people who opposed the invasion of Iraq will be tempted to agree. Wasn't one argument against the war that deposing Saddam Hussein would add to the rage that feeds Muslim terrorism? Much the same was said after the bombings in Bali last October. They were held up as evidence that America had achieved nothing by removing the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that George Bush's obsession with Iraq had diverted attention from the war against terror.

The limits of foreign policy

Such arguments are misconceived, to say the least. It would be a comfort to believe that Islamic terrorism rises and falls with each twist and turn of American foreign policy. If so, America would need only to adjust its policy for the terrorism to stop. But its causes are more complicated than that. Here and there (Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya) it stems from a Muslim struggle against non-Muslim rule. Often (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria) it arises from the desire of Muslims to throw off their own governments because they are seen as corrupt, repressive or insufficiently pious. And sometimes (al-Qaeda) this local struggle mingles with the idea that Islam is locked in perennial jihad against the unbelievers. Muslims who think this way, says Bernard Lewis, one of Islam's foremost interpreters in the West, will see any American president as the successor of a long line of rulers, from the Byzantine and Holy Roman emperors to Queen Victoria, who have obstructed the divinely ordained spread of the true faith.  

Violent hearts captured by this sort of worldview will not be dissuaded by this or that adjustment in foreign policy. Mr bin Laden's 1998 declaration of war against “Crusaders and Jews” came at a time of relative optimism in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. This week's bombs came less than a month after America said it would remove most of its forces from Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda will continue its attacks even if America pushes hard for peace in Palestine (see article), and it would not have stopped its attacks even if America had decided against invading Iraq. As for Afghanistan, there is every indication that the loss of its safe haven has indeed disrupted al-Qaeda's ability to operate. Many of its top men have been killed or captured. The fact that it has nonetheless struck so hard in Saudi Arabia shows only that the war against terrorism will never produce a single, decisive moment of victory.

In one way, Mr Bush himself has been guilty of promoting the illusion that it might. He found it convenient before invading Iraq to exaggerate—some say to fabricate—a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. This was the weakest part of the case for an invasion. The strong case was the threat Saddam would have posed with chemical, biological or one day nuclear weapons. His refusal for a dozen years to comply with Security Council demands to prove that he no longer had such weapons and was no longer seeking them was ample justification for the war. In fairness, Mr Bush added another: the dictator's brutal treatment of his own people. This week's discovery of yet another mass grave, containing up to 11,000 executed civilians, ought to give pause to those (including The Economist) who would have been content to leave Saddam in power if he had complied with his disarmament obligations. But having portrayed the Iraq war as part and parcel of the war on al-Qaeda, Mr Bush has only himself to blame if the Saudi bombs are seized upon as evidence that the war has failed.

What next? The Saudi bombs do not show that America is losing the peace in the Middle East. But, of course, it may lose the peace. Whatever the reasons for its war, victory in Iraq has given America an opportunity to build an exemplary democracy and to stabilise the wider region. Neither of these jobs was ever going to be easy. The implosion of a three-decades-old dictatorship could not fail to leave a mess. The ruling party has been abolished at the stroke of a pen, leaving chaos behind it. Contrary to the forebodings of those who say that Arabs cannot be democrats, the appetite for democracy looks strong. Many Shia clerics, including those returning from Iran, endorse the idea of elections, albeit with an Islamic flavour. But democracy of any sort requires order, and the occupying powers have so far been slow to provide either order or the necessities of civilised life, such as electricity and clean water.

The power of example

Even allowing for the scale of the task, it is becoming plain that America and Britain planned less well for the post-war transition than for the fighting. Now they have introduced a resolution in the Security Council under which they and not the United Nations will have final control as the country moves towards democracy. That might be justifiable, if it were a case of sacrificing some international legitimacy for greater efficiency. The danger—unless the new transition team Mr Bush has sent to Iraq to replace his first lot does much better—is that the occupation will come to look neither efficient nor legitimate. At the very least, given the continuing suspicion of their motives, America and Britain ought to let the UN monitor the hunt for Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction—the prime cause of war—and check the authenticity of any finds.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of getting Iraq's transition right. There are plenty of other ways for America to win Muslim hearts and minds. The superpower could be less uncritically supportive of autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia's. It should work harder for Mr Bush's two-state solution in Palestine. But the power of its own example in Iraq may well count for more. Iraq has the human and raw material it needs to become a prosperous liberal democracy. Guiding it there, and then leaving it in peace, is not enough to make America safe from continuing attacks by implacable jihadis of the al-Qaeda sort. But the mere existence of a democratic Iraq would help to persuade millions of Muslims that the alternative to a secular dictatorship does not have to be an Islamic dictatorship—or any sort of dictatorship at all.