DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: Iraq’s regime has fallen, but at the cost of anti-American sentiment.
By: Hank Kalet
The images were remarkable and yet, they seemed so cliché after a while.
The statues of Saddam Hussein tumbling to the ground, the cheering crowds, the children kissing American soldiers.
We’ve seen them before, in Russia and Kosovo and Kuwait and elsewhere, images of people set free from brutal regimes, liberated from oppression. It is the first flush of freedom welling up and pouring out, into the streets, in celebration.
But we must be careful not to read too much into our success in Iraq or in the initial euphoria emanating from Baghdad. The road ahead is long and likely to be messy both in Iraq and around the globe.
I want to be clear, here. I was opposed to this war and remain skeptical that it was right path to take. The military’s success does not temper my skepticism.
Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power, for the sake of the Iraqi people. But an American invasion of a sovereign nation, without real international support and against the apparent wishes of much of the Arab world still seems the height of folly and smacks of the kind of hubris that, in ancient Greek tragedies, would lead the hero to ruin.
My concerns about this war never centered on its military aspects. It seemed pretty obvious to me from the beginning that the American armed forces were too big, too strong and too well-equipped for there to be any doubt about the war’s outcome.
My concerns were these: That it was unnecessary, that it would result in significant loss of military and civilian life on both sides, that it would enflame the Arab world, that it would set a precedent for pre-emptive action opening up a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences and that would lead us down the road toward empire and away from democracy.
They remain my concerns, even as it appears this war is ending. Let’s take these concerns one by one.
First, was this war was unnecessary? I still don’t think it was, meaning the loss of life on both sides can only be described as a travesty. The United Nations was well on its way to ensuring that Saddam Hussein was defanged and that his military arsenal was stripped of its most dangerous weapons. There have been no weapons of mass destruction discovered nothing verifiable at this point, anyway. And the weakness of his armed forces was evident in the relatively limited resistance American and British forces faced. Basically, Saddam Hussein posed very little danger to the rest of the world.
As for removing Saddam Hussein and his repressive Ba’ath Party from power, I take the same position as that of an exiled Iraqi interviewed by NBC News on April 9. The man who now lives in New York, has family in Iraq and runs his own deli said he was ecstatic that Saddam’s regime was over, but believed that other, more peaceful efforts could have accomplished the same goals. It was not the place of the American military, he said, to impose its will on the Iraqi people.
Two, was the death toll warranted? As I said above, I don’t think so. And what was the death toll? American casualties were kept to a relatively small number, though I suspect that is small comfort to the families who lost loved ones during the war. And there has been no real accounting of Iraqi military or civilian casualties to date.
Three, how has the rest of the Arab world reacted? Aside from a couple of smaller nations, not well.
For instance, there is this from the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram:
"(T)he ruling National Democratic Party finds itself torn between support for Egypt’s long-term strategic relationship with the United States, and an increasingly anti-war mood on the street. The party’s seemingly pro-American stance as the war began quickly became the target of harsh criticism. Public rage went as far as an attempt at vandalizing the party’s downtown headquarters, where protestors bearing large posters of late President Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Palestinian resistance leader Marwan El-Barghouthi gathered on the second day of the war."
And the Arab News, a Saudi Arabian daily, describes the television images of the war in this way:
"Footage of innocent Iraqis being killed; corpses being removed from the rubble of homes destroyed by U.S. bombs; the humiliation of starving Iraqi crowds who came for water and food; citizens being prevented from returning to the cities where their families were.
"All of this led to a strong anti-American sentiment and anger among the public," the paper said.
I know. The so-called "Arab street" has never shown much trust in American foreign policy or American designs on the region. Whether this attitude is warranted or not can be debated.
But, this harsh, anti-American sentiment is something we should be concerned about, especially when it is being expressed in countries we consider allies. Anger like this can easily turn into the kind of fanatical hatred that drives al-Qaida and its supporters, that apparently led 19 Arab hijackers to turn four American airliners into weapons of mass destruction.
Four, will our decision to attack pre-emptively create a precedent that will completely change the international order into one based on the use of force and that equates diplomacy with weakness? What message, after all, does our decision to circumvent a United Nations vote and go in and take care of business send to the world? Might it not encourage nations such as Pakistan to launch pre-emptive strikes against India, or vice versa? And what about Israel and its neighbors, or Russia and Chechnya?
The list is endless and begs the question: Who can prevent such scenarios from happening? The United Nations? Why, given the Bush administration’s willingness to relegate the United Nations to the trash bin of history, should any of these nations listen to what the U.N. has to say?
The United States? That’s a lot to ask of our soldiers, but it may be the road we have set upon though I suspect it’s not one most Americans will be too willing to travel.
This leads me to number five: Are we entering the age of empire? Will our success in Iraq lead us to other military adventures? Will it entice us into believing that we can use our superior military might to remake the world in whatever image we want and for whatever reasons we offer?
That’s a dangerous path, one that could result in endless war (Syria already is being floated by the TV talking heads as the next target), that could stretch our resources even thinner than they currently are stretched and that could result in the tarnishing of our democratic principles. Already, we have granted federal law enforcement an amazing array of powers to snoop on citizens and to incarcerate indefinitely, without charges or any rights, anyone deemed an "enemy combatant," including American citizens. This is the danger of empire, of the permanent war government.
Jonathan Schell, a Nation magazine columnist and author, describes empire as "the embodiment of force" and the "antithesis of democracy and self-determination." In a perceptive, two-part essay in the March and April issues of Harper’ magazine asks the relevant question: "Can a nation that began in rebellion against the greatest empire of its time end by turning itself into a still greater empire?" His answer: "Perhaps it can, but not if it wishes to remain a republic."
And that’s the rub here. Success in Iraq will come with a price that many of us myself included see as too high. The world is not safer because we removed Saddam Hussein from power and it is not even clear that the Middle East is safer. The likelihood of terrorism has not diminished, though our standing in the world may have.
This kind of thinking obviously is not popular at the moment. But once the euphoria surrounding our military successes subsides, I fear we will be left with the consequences of our diplomatic failures.
What will we do then?
Hank Kalet is the managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and the Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].

