Pakistan and Afghanistan After the Peace Jirga

Never very attentive to the subtleties of professional intelligence gathering, the war cabal in Washington DC has premised much of its global enterprise on embellishing and embroidering findings to support predetermined courses of action. There was little they could do though, with the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released mid-July, except to evade the substance of the argument and narrow their focus to certain conclusions.

The NIE, which is a periodic summation of the most authoritative findings of U.S. intelligence agencies, had several inconvenient truths to tell. It told for instance, of how the extremist group Al Qaeda had, despite all the pressure exerted by the U.S. military machine, “protected or regenerated key elements” of its capability in the relatively sheltered environment of the Waziristan region in Pakistan. It observed too that Al Qaeda had achieved significant success in its effort to “recruit and indoctrinate operatives” willing to strike on U.S. territory, in part through an Iraqi affiliate.

U.S. President George Bush, sinking rapidly into a mire of approval ratings in the lower twenties, picked up the possibility of another attack on home soil and expectedly flaunted it as sufficient reason for the country to support him. Even if he managed yet again to fan aflame deep-seated insecurities, few seemed to believe that he had the political imagination or the credibility, to address the issue.

The NIE set off feverish activity on another front, provoking calls by politicians, both minor and major, for aggressive new military action. Barack Obama, a candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, insisted that the U.S. should be at liberty to act in the Waziristan region if “actionable intelligence” existed and Pakistan failed to do what was necessary.

Obama’s was among the more reasoned responses to the NIE. Days later, the Republican Tommy Tancredo, also a candidate for presidential nomination, had a much more drastic solution to propose. “If it is up to me”, he said, “we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland… would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina”.

As the Bush administration sought desperately to distance itself from these vituperations, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., the former general Mahmud Ali Durrani, was engaged in a fire-fighting operation of his own. Variously describing the findings of the NIE as “absolutely incorrect” and “an absolute fallacy”, Durrani reminded his U.S. hosts that they had no option but to rely on Pakistan to bring peace to Afghanistan. Unilateral action by U.S. forces often resulted in unacceptable levels of “collateral damage”, with few of the legitimate military objectives being met. Pakistan could not afford to sustain these levels of civilian deaths. Besides, it had the concern too, that U.S. intelligence very often was “faulty”, “inaccurate” and tended not to be “timely” either.

These locutions could have been a coded reference to the frequent missile strikes in Waziristan and other border regions of Pakistan, which have inflicted casualties in the scores. Two such attacks occurred in June, though the bloodiest so far, was the October 2006 strike on a madrasa, which killed around 80 students. Eager to dispel any notion of its territorial sovereignty being breached, Pakistan has been stepping up to take the responsibility for these attacks. The October attack, it has claimed, was targeted at Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman Al-Zawahari, who had planned a visit to the area and then changed his mind.

Pakistan’s claims have fooled none, since the operations have had the fingerprints of the U.S. all over them. Far from neutralising terrorism, the U.S. combat strategy of using massive airpower, is creating a fertile breeding ground for insurgents, in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to recent media reports, the civilian casualties inflicted by U.S. and allied forces in the southern Afghanistan province of Helmand, are now running well in excess of those caused by the Taliban.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai has repeatedly called for greater care and circumspection by the U.S. military. But “overwhelming force” remains the operational philosophy of U.S. forces, a doctrine underwritten by a lack of accountability that stems directly from the demonisation of Afghan civilians in both the official discourse and the media. Also of material consequence, is Karzai’s rather limited cachet at home, and his dependence on U.S. approval for continuing in office.

Karzai’s problems are in large measure, similar to those his counterpart in Pakistan faces. Indeed, the more that he and General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan are seen to be standing with the U.S. and the more they are paid homage by Bush for their steadfast commitment, the greater the political damage they suffer.

The symmetry of their political predicaments has not induced any sense of mutual understanding between the two. Pakistan is deeply committed to the Pashtu interests in Afghanistan, which it fears, would boil over into its own restive tribal territories if denied a legitimate place across the Durand line. But the regime in Kabul is too dependent on the Dari-Farsi segment of Afghan society, represented by the Panjsher valley contingent of erstwhile mujahedin, who claim the authority of their late commander Ahmad Shah Masood, not to mention the Herath provincial chieftain, Mohammad Ismail Khan. Karzai’s government moreover, is obliged to make peace with sundry other warlords who retain enormous potential for mischief.

With all these accommodations made, there has been no credible way for the Karzai regime to grant the Pashtu tribes of the south and east the share in power they assume would be their due.

Even if the complexities of the situation on the ground were alien to Bush’s understanding, he has been aware of the frosty relations between the two men he acknowledges as key allies. September last, he invited both presidents to Washington DC, for a three-way meeting. The idea of a “peace jirga” involving Pakistan and Afghanistan was born then, on Karzai’s initiative. By all accounts, Musharraf was lukewarm, but acceded to the proposal under U.S. pressure.

The idea of adapting the jirga, or traditional assembly of Pashtu tribes to the cause of building bridges between two neighbouring States, each facing problems of internal turmoil and external tutelage, was a novel one. But it continued to encounter Pakistan’s indifference. Since very little has officially been said about the matter, the reasons can only be guessed at.

It is not difficult to see that the process of tribal consultations across borders runs contrary to the centralising tendency of a state dominated by the military. To be of any consequence, these consultations must be accompanied by a commitment that cross-border solidarities, of tribe or ethnicity or language, would be given significant room, setting up a force potentially antithetical to the centralising state. With the persistent trouble it has faced in Baluchistan now compounded by the turmoil in Waziristan, there is ample reason for Islamabad to worry about yielding greater room for tribal communities to determine the contours of relations with Afghanistan. Aside from the insecurity engendered by recent experience, the process would also necessitate a dilution of the concept of “strategic depth” – a doctrine that military administrations in Pakistan have in particular been committed to, as an antidote to the sense of siege the state has suffered from the moment of its birth.

In the days before the jirga, three heavyweight leaders of Islamic political parties in Pakistan – Fazlur Rahman, Samiul Haq and Qazi Hussain Ahmad – all of Pashtu extraction, decided to stay away. The tribal chiefs of Waziristan soon followed suit. Before setting off for Kabul, Pakistan delegates were extensively briefed by senior officials of both the federal government in Islamabad and the provincial government in Peshawar. Public expectations were low. And the delegates were reportedly instructed that they were under no circumstances to yield the moral ground. Any attempt to place the blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan, would have to be firmly rebuffed.

Musharraf opted out of attending the jirga, sending Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz instead and staying back amidst frenetic speculation about his intent to declare a state of emergency. The mounting speculation only died down when the Pakistan president disavowed the idea, amidst expressions of disapproval from Washington.

The month preceding, since the siege of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad was broken by heavy-handed military methods, had been traumatic for the Musharraf regime. Moderate and enlightened opinion in Pakistan, which he had been counting on for support, was turning progressively more cynical at his intent to stay in office and retain his status as army chief. People increasingly were tilting to the belief that the Lal Masjid militants were marionettes that Musharraf had self-servingly put into play, to create a climate of fear and bolster his claims to another term as Pakistan’s uniformed president. The armed confrontation that followed only proved that he was not quite in control of the forces that he chose to unleash.

The Lal Masjid confrontation was followed in short order, by a public repudiation by tribal chiefs in Waziristan, of the peace agreement that Musharraf had forged with them in September 2006. This effectively turned the clock back four years, to the military operations that Musharraf had begun in the region in the turbulent summer of 2002, when India and Pakistan were mobilising forces for what both sides vowed, would be a decisive battle, and the U.S. was pressuring the Pakistan leader into doing its bidding as a price for its continuing neutrality.

The Pakistan army took heavy casualties in the operation and the peace agreement of September 2006 was perhaps a clear admission of defeat.

It was yet another admission of defeat when Musharraf shortly after the Lal Masjid conflagration, met with the exiled former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto in Abu Dhabi and reportedly agreed terms for her return prior to the next elections to the Pakistan National Assembly. But like a puppet master who had become himself an unwitting puppet, jerked around by unseen strings, Musharraf shortly afterwards denied any such deal. Another phase of public speculation ensued about Bhutto being indeed on her way back. And in the interim, the Sindh High Court admitted a petition calling for the annulment of the presidential decree (or deal) under which another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharief, was exiled.

To climax this tale of painful reversals by a beleaguered head of state, Musharraf shortly afterwards decided that he would accept Karzai’s invitation to address the closing session of the jirga in Kabul. From Washington, a spokesman of the State Department put out the statement that the Bush administration was “pleased” at the decision.

In the hours before the Pakistan president’s arrival, the jirga had been debating, beyond the florid speeches and the routine expressions of good intent, how best to operationalise a credible truce in the border region between the two countries. Curiously, according to a report put out by the Afghan news agency, Pajhwok, the Pakistan delegates at one stage tabled a proposal that two Indian consulates – of the four that this country has opened in Afghanistan – be shut down. Pakistan has for long argued that India’s decision to open four consulates in Afghanistan goes beyond a concern for good-neighbourly relations and has more to do with hegemonic ambitions. Indian consulates at Jalalabad and Kandahar, Pakistan argued, needed to be shut down, since these had become cockpits of intrigue, instrumental in fomenting tribal unrest in Balochistan and Waziristan.

The Afghan delegates protested that these demands were in breach of agreed rules of non-interference. And when Musharraf appeared before the closing session of the jirga, he came with a virtual mea culpa. In breach of the rules he had framed for Pakistan’s delegates, the president of Pakistan, with his Afghan counterpart nodding vigorously in agreement, read out the following lines from a prepared text: “There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistan soil. The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side.”

How this admission will influence the global U.S. crusade, is still a matter for debate. The Kabul peace jirga, expectedly, earned little coverage in the Indian media, which was busy celebrating the nuclear deal with the U.S. -- or the “123 agreement” -- another project in India’s continuing festival of concord with the global hegemon. But in the midst of all the chatter at the jirga, there were views expressed in Kabul, that salvation for the region lay in nothing less than the withdrawal of all alien forces. It was a demand that the dominant political parties in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan soon afterwards amplified. Client regimes of the U.S. in the region though, are yet to hear that demand. That condemns them perhaps to drifting further away from popular sentiment in their countries, with the possible consequence that inter-state violence could escalate in the months ahead.

Good Palestinian, Bad Palestinian

Unprecedented pressures have built up in recent weeks on the beleaguered Palestinian people, fuelling a heightened sense of despair. Participants in the Palestinian struggle for a national home and identity are convinced that never in the nearly six decades since the “catastrophe” of 1948, have things seemed as dark and gloomy. This applies as much to the communities that have been scattered widely across Arab lands by Israeli ethnic cleansing, as to those that have been corralled into desperately squalid and congested urban spaces in the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, which have enjoyed tacit immunity and a high degree of administrative autonomy under a four-decades old agreement, were attacked by the Lebanese army in May, ostensibly to track down and eliminate certain “extremist” elements within. These punitive raids enjoyed the ostentatious support of the U.S., which made a special point of shipping arms and equipment deemed essential for the operations to the Lebanese army.

Mid-June, the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, acting by all accounts to preempt a move to void national elections and oust it from power, carried out a swift, surgical strike within the Gaza strip to efface all traces of Fatah, its principal rival for influence. This brought to an end the diarchic situation within the occupied Palestinian territories, under which Hamas controlled the government but was compelled to work under the irksome tutelage of the Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas.

The Hamas takeover was the unexpected denouement to a global campaign launched by Israel and its U.S. patrons to isolate the Palestinian people living under military occupation for close to four decades. In the pressure-cooker like atmosphere that resulted from a complete denial of contact with the outside world, the Zionist state expected that the more amenable elements within Fatah would feel emboldened to confront and defeat the militant nationalists within Hamas.

Even if the Hamas takeover of the Gaza strip was unexpected, it has presented ardent expansionists within Israel with something akin to an opportunity. The parting of ways between Hamas and Fatah, and their sequestration respectively, within the Gaza and the West bank, now affords Israel the opportunity to continue with its brutal military rampage through the Gaza. This has been a signature activity of its campaign to suppress the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000. Now that the good Palestinians in the West Bank have been separated from the bad Palestinians of Gaza, even the faint murmurs of protest that were heard will presumably be silenced.

The havoc wrought on Gaza by periodic Israeli military incursions punctuate the slow haemorrhage that has been caused by a year-and-a-half of economic siege – not to mention 40 years of military occupation. Since the Hamas takeover, Israel’s closure of all land crossings into and out of Gaza has if anything, become even more comprehensive. An estimated two-thirds of Gaza’s population is now living in dire poverty. The essentials of life have become increasingly scarce, not least because one of Israel’s first military actions since Hamas’ electoral triumph, destroyed the Gaza’s sole power station.

Seemingly to underline its belief that the good can quite easily be sundered from the bad Palestinians through the coarse application of the lure of lucre, Israel has ordered that Palestinian tax revenues -- illegally withheld for years together – can now be released to the Fatah authorities in the West Bank.

There is an unbroken thread connecting these developments with the Israeli effort to undermine any credible leadership emerging within the Palestinian society, so that it can persist with the foundational myths of the Zionist state. The myth has itself undergone mutations over the years but its fundamental premise is the denial of the humanity of the victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing. The victims then are compelled to bear the burden of blame for their misfortunes.

When Hamas won a landslide victory in the January 2006 Palestinian national elections – universally certified as free and fair -- Israel with the active encouragement of the U.S., contrived a way of delegitimising the outcome. It was not sufficient that Hamas win a mandate from the Palestinian people, it also needed to recognise the state of Israel, renounce violence and publicly proclaim that it would honour all the preceding agreements that had been concluded between Israel and the Palestinian authority.

It was an irony of this demarche placed upon the Palestinians, one that passed largely unremarked, that Israel has never acknowledged their existence as a people. When a qualified and hesitant recognition came with the Oslo accord of 1994, it was only to recruit them as accomplices in the task of policing the occupation of their own lands.

This was an endeavour that had little chance of success so long as Yasser Arafat remained the symbolic head of the Palestinian people. Mahmoud Abbas though was a far more pliable figure: the memorandum of understanding he concluded with Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Beilin in 1994 as the basis for the peace accord, has rightly earned notoriety as a shameful document of surrender.

Though Arafat refused to instigate the Palestinian civil war that Israel dearly wanted, the structures of patronage that he created flourished during the years of pretended peace negotiations. They have persisted well into the Palestinian intifada and the breakdown of all dialogue. Hamas’ landslide election victory last year was a popular insurrection by against a conniving Fatah leadership that had since Arafat’s death, functioned unabashedly as a corrupt clique intent on pursuing its own interests at the cost of the larger struggle. In seeking retribution, Israel has imposed a collective punishment upon the Palestinians much more severe than anything seen till now, which is likely to enormously compound its own formidable record of crimes against humanity.

Supreme Court Blocks Mandal II: An opportunity, not a threat

The Supreme Court on March 29, imposed an interim stay on the application of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admissions) Act of 2006, throwing well-advanced admission procedures in these institutions into considerable disarray. In introducing legislation for reservation of seats for “socially and educationally backward classes”, the court held that the Government had been inattentive to material realities.

It is a curiosity of India’s policy on reservations, that its legislative foundations are rather thin. Mandal II, or the move to reserve seats in higher educational institutions run by the Central Government, was indeed the first occasion that a law was enacted, rather than the customary “Government Order” on reservations. That this first attempt by Parliament has encountered a judicial roadblock, is a bitter blow to the political establishment in Delhi. Coming in a sequence of several other such rulings by the court, this has led to much resentful murmurs about the judiciary as an institution becoming an impediment to social justice.

Yet with all the argumentation that has been produced in making the case for reservations, there has been little attention devoted to its actual track-record as an element of social policy. Indeed, as a well known media commentator recently observed, for all the importance of reservations in India, the best work on the efficacy of this manner of undoing the disadvantages of history, have come from scholars overseas. In India, reservations are simply not a matter where cool logic and rational argument can be applied.

If for a moment though, the passions and partisanship were to be kept aside, certain key findings on reservations would seem relevant. It has been found, as it would be intuitively obvious, that students benefiting from reservations generally under-perform in relation to those who gain their admission through the “open category”. Their rates of graduation also tend to be lower. On this account, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they would probably perform less well than the open category candidates who risk being displaced by the reserved quotas. Outside the university setting though, once the candidates have graduated and entered the workforce, there is no reason to believe that their performance is any less efficient or useful to society. Reservations in other words, contribute to the democratisation of decision making in society. They also engender significant benefits in sectors where people-orientation is necessary, since the individuals performing these tasks are likely to be more understanding and empathetic towards the disadvantaged.

It has also been found that over time, there has been a convergence in the qualifying requirements: the gap at entry level between the beneficiaries of reservations and the open category candidates has been narrowing over time. But there is little to suggest that the beneficiaries are being drawn from a broad-based section of the target groups. In fact, the better off among the backward classes have gained and continue to gain disproportionately from reservations.

If these fairly well established findings were to be factored in, a number of fine adjustments would suggest themselves in policy. Unfortunately, none of these issues seems to have come up for discussion in either the legislative or the judicial forums. The basis on which the Supreme Court issued its interim order was the numerical imprecision of the Central Government’s estimate that the “other backward classes” number 52 percent of India’s population.

The court relied upon a recent survey by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), which estimated that OBCs number 41 percent of the population. It did not go into the nuances of this issue, since the NSSO used a rather different methodology of estimation, merely asking the respondent whether or not he belonged to a backward class. The 52 percent estimate in contrast, is based on an official list maintained by the Central Government and extrapolations of population growth from the 1931 census, the last occasion when castes were enumerated.

The material point uncovered by the NSSO survey has been lost in this quibble. The OBCs, whatever their number, still continue to suffer enormous social disadvantages, registering numbers well below the average on virtually all welfare indicators.

Despite these realities, a feeling still persists that the process of identification of backward classes suffers certain serious infirmities. This is a conceptual vacuum in which varieties of high-voltage pressure politics have flourished. Since the Mandal Commission report became part of official policy in 1993, backwardness has become an appellation that various social groups have been willing to fight for. A case in point would be the Jats of Rajasthan, who despite winning on average 40 percent of all seats in state-wide elections, began agitating for the tag of backwardness in 1999. Ashok Gehlot, then the chief minister of the state and himself a member of a notified backward community, had little time for this demand and paid the price, with the Jats mobilising state-wide to inflict a severe drubbing on the Congress. Soon afterwards, empowered bodies at both state and national levels, conceded the Jat demand.

It could be asked whether a community that is able to mobilise so powerfully and articulate its case with quite this kind of energy, can be described as backward under any criterion. The issue it turned out, was not their relative deprivation in relation to society as a whole, but in relation to the politically dominant Rajput community. This is an issue that stretches back to the 1920s when the Jats first began mobilising against Rajput dominance in all spheres of activity. Some part of this battle was fought on the terrain of land reforms and tenancy legislation. Another chapter in that battle came after independence, when the Jats managed to use the new panchayati raj institutions to shore up their social power. When the Mandal recommendations were implemented, reservations became another weapon in this battle of attrition. In the process, reservations stood diminished, it became a weapon of political contestation between two powerful communities, rather than an instrument of promoting the general social welfare.

Another category of problem relates to the equity of reservations within particular categories. OBCs are a broad and heterogeneous grouping and unless sub-quotas or certain criteria of exclusion are specified, there is little likelihood that the agreed quantum of reservations would be shared out equitably. This is a problem that is already evident in the realm of Scheduled Castes reservations. It is a firmly established fact that certain castes within the SC category – like the Jatavs of north India and the Mahars of Maharashtra – have been over the generations, gainers from reservations to a degree that goes beyond their share within the SC population. This has led to a demand by others, such as the Valmikis of north India, for a sub-category within SC reservations. Needless to say, admitting such a demand would prove immensely challenging in an administrative sense, and politically, it could quite possibly be promoting the infinite fragmentation of society.

Informed observers believe though, that there are ways around these difficulties. But that would require above all, that the formulaic approach to reservations be abandoned in favour of more subtlety and sensitivity. If the Supreme Court order is viewed in this light, rather than an occasion for plotting acts of institutional vengeance or one-up-manship, that would be an unequivocal gain for the cause of social justice.

Wolfowitz's fatal attractions

The scandal surrounding Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank, and a female companion who he secured a cosy billet in the U.S. State Department for, is one among many sordid dramas being played out in Washington DC. The unifying theme of it all could be called the implosion of the Bush administration.

It is an index of the precipitous fall in public esteem of the U.S. president and all those associated with his signature campaign – the war in Iraq – that Bush’s ringing endorsement of Wolfowitz was, like a similar testimonial handed out a few days before to his embattled Attorney-General, read as sure sign that the World Bank president’s political demise was nigh.

Wolfowitz came to the World Bank with a formidable reputation as a strategic hawk, the original author of the infamous doctrine of the “New American Century”. When his name was announced early in Bush’s second term, editorial comment even in sympathetic quarters held that an uncompromising proponent of “hard power” may not be the most effective steward of the foremost agency of “soft power”.

But for those of more sober judgment, what seemed germane was Wolfowitz’s distinguished record of delusional thinking. He had few credentials in the development domain, except the monumentally misconceived forecast made in the second week of the invasion of Iraq, that “we’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon”. For sheer idiocy, this must rank close to the prediction made by his neo-conservative confrere Richard Perle in September 2003, that a grand square in Baghdad could well be named after Bush within a year.

Robert McNamara was the analogy that sprang to mind when Bush chose to place one of the principal architects of the Iraq tragedy at the helm of the World Bank. It was an inexact comparison, since McNamara had with Vietnam’s Tet offensive in 1968, realised his folly. And as World Bank president for 13 years, McNamara brought in many of the values of the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s civil rights agenda and its “war on poverty”. Though his approach, when not distinctly quixotic, was U.S. foreign policy by other means, McNamara is widely credited with bringing poverty front and centre and vastly expanding the lending of the institution.

In contrast, Wolfowitz brought the Manichean worldview of the Bush administration with its sharply etched distinctions of good and evil, its refusal to admit error and its propensity to dissemble for any cause deemed worthwhile. Unlike McNamara again, Wolfowitz had few credentials as a manager or institutional leader. Indeed, it transpires, his approach towards leadership, best expressed during a visit to Iraq in July 2003, was different only in its shades from that of a gang-lord. With the sheen of “victory” yet to wear off, he pronounced then, that leadership was not about “lecturing and posturing and demanding, but demonstrating that your friends will be protected and taken care of, that your enemies will be punished, and that those who refuse to support you will regret having done so”.

It is now known that soon after the September 11 attacks on the U.S., Wolfowitz had shocked moderate elements in the Bush cabinet with his unseemly eagerness to attack Iraq. But if this frenzy was confined at least then within the inner cabals of the Bush White House, there was little that was secret about the response he favoured. The U.S., he proclaimed, needed to go beyond “capturing people and holding them accountable”: it would necessarily have to start “removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism”.

It was the statement of an obsessive ideologue, which had the U.S. Secretary of State, a distinguished soldier who knew what war was about, scrambling to undo the potential for damage around the world.

For a while it seemed likely that European shareholders, whose voting power in the World Bank has increased over the years, would turn down Wolfowitz’s nomination. But the European Union and its main powers proved disinclined to do battle then, since a global division of spoils was at stake. A challenge to U.S. hegemony over the World Bank would have threatened the E.U.’s customary prerogative to name the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Besides, the E.U. was also then manoeuvring to place a partisan in its cause, Pascal Lamy, at the head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Details of the generous package of benefits that Wolfowitz personally worked out for his female companion were intimated to the World Bank board soon after they became operative. But the board chose to sleep over it, only to rouse itself into a simulated sense of outrage when an internal audit reported that the deal was out of line with rules. Wolfowitz had by then managed to tick off just about every significant shareholder in the institution with his crusade against corruption, rightly seen as an effort to bend the rules of the World Bank to the U.S.’s militarist agenda.

That the Wolfowitz scandal has not been resolved over two weeks, despite all the feints and manoeuvres of its principals, suggests that the ongoing shift in the global power balance, is yet too slow to produce the summary justice warranted for a man who bears constructive responsibility for some of the worst war crimes of the new millennium. Like the Bush administration itself, it is indubitable though, that Wolfowitz is soon going, deservedly, to be consigned to the garbage dump of history.

The Media and Communalism: Changing scenarios, unchanging predilections

The media function in society was for long studied almost exclusively in terms of a “transmission” model, which emphasised the autonomy of the institution and the anonymity of its audience. Its central focus was the influence exerted by the media on social perceptions, through a process of “indoctrination”.

The passage of years has brought in a more sensitive approach, which concerns itself not with the transmission of a message that is passively absorbed by a mass of recipients, but with the meanings attached to the message at the point of reception. In this sense, the modern sociology of the media tends to view it as an apparatus, or more so, a process, of creating shared meanings that an audience can identify with, that equip them with the vocabulary and the empirical knowledge to engage in a public conversation. The media is not just about answering a community’s needs for information; it is as much about constituting that community.

To the extent that “communities” are defined by negative association, the media would reflect, sometimes subtly though often rather crudely, the perceptions of “otherness” without which communal boundaries would remain uncomfortably fluid. But there are also sections of the media that claim to represent a “national” perspective, untainted by narrow pulls of community loyalty. Penetrating the subtleties of the “national” media discourse is often a challenge, since it succeeds in most cases, in disguising communal predilections in the pretence of a larger solidarity.

Several of these features emerge from a comparison between two crucial reference points in India’s recent history, when the communal virus was rampant. The first is the period between 1990 and 1992, when the country was convulsed by the conflict over the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. If the media in most parts of the country was guilty of not opposing the communal adventurism of the Hindutva forces with sufficient passion or principle, the media in the Hindi speaking region was engaged actively in abetting them. This is no subjective judgment, since it was the firmly established view of the Press Council of India, which in 1990 went into the news coverage and editorial comment of four of the largest Hindi language dailies and passed severe strictures against all of them.

Moving forward from those dark days to 2002 and the communal carnage of Gujarat, another pattern of media conduct is evident. With the exception of the Gujarati press – where a clear tilt was evident towards blaming the victims, towards lurid exaggeration and incitement to violence – the rest of the press nation-wide, both in English and the bhasha, earned wide credit for their unflinching portrayal of the brutalities of Gujarat. Indeed, the pressure was severe enough for the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, to lash out at the media for creating what he called “secular riots”. If it could elicit this manner of a response from the man widely identified as the architect of the carnage, then the media must have been doing something right.

There had evidently been a significant cultural change in the media over the preceding twelve years, especially in the Hindi language press. The crucial factor here could well be the tremendous growth in the reach of the Hindi press since the days of Ayodhya. One estimate puts the total number of readers of Hindi dailies in 1990 at around 7.8 million. By the year 2001, it was over 21 million. Today, the two leading newspapers in Hindi alone, are estimated to have a total readership of 40 million. This quantitative explosion has led to significant qualitative changes.

The need to bring larger numbers of readers on board, for one thing, has induced Hindi newspapers to go beyond traditional notions of audience taste and take in cross-community interests. There is a theory in the sociology of the media, which likens the daily ritual of reading a newspaper to the erstwhile practice of prayer, a mass ceremony which individuals in their social isolation pursue, without direct knowledge of others who are similarly engaged. But the implicit knowledge that others too are going through that mass ceremony serves as a form of social solidarity. In this sense, the growth of the Hindi language press in the 1990s may be both the cause and consequence of these emerging new forms of communal solidarity.

At the same time, there are other forms of social exclusions, other kinds of particularities, that are unstated premises of media functioning. It is not necessary to go any further than the news coverage and editorial comment on the Rajinder Sachar committee report on the status of India’s Muslims, to grasp the processes through which this works.

The presentation of the Sachar report in Parliament, coincided with an outbreak of violence in Maharashtra over the vandalisation of a statue of Dr B.R. Ambedkar in Uttar Pradesh. The country’s largest English-language newspaper, The Times of India (ToI) confined the Sachar report to the news digest section, occupying about 3 column-centimetres on the first page. Considerably more attention was devoted to the violence of the Dalit protests in Maharashtra, with the picture of a train that had been set afire between Mumbai and Pune getting marquee space on the front page.

Both the Sachar committee and the Dalit protests earned significant space in the inner pages of the ToI that day, with the latter enjoying by far the greater prominence. What the ToI chose to put front and centre in its coverage of Sachar was the government’s uncertain resolve about introducing reservations in education and employment for the minorities. Thus the issue of the institutionalised discrimination suffered by the Muslim minority was transformed in the ToI discourse into a concern over keeping India’s enclaves of modernity secure from the ingress of the underprivileged.

Where the Dalit protests in Maharashtra were concerned, perceptive media critics have pointed out that the consistent refrain of the mainstream press, in both English and the bhasha, was the inherent violence of the Dalit agitators and the ease with which they could be provoked into serious acts of depredation. There were oblique references to the Khairlanji massacre of September 29 in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra -- in which four members of a Dalit family, a mother and three children, including a visually challenged young man, were killed -- as a contributory factor in the upwelling of Dalit rage. But no effort was in evidence to make amends for a shocking record of media neglect of the egregious crime. Indeed, the record of the media since the massacre was to underplay it, to not see in it the unrelenting social prejudice and persecution that Dalits suffer, but to cast it as a regrettable case of moral vigilantism carried to excess. And it speaks eloquently of the blinkers that the media willingly dons on account of ownership pressures and the social conditioning of its staff, that it took a Dalit-owned newspaper in Maharashtra to investigate and bring the crime to light after weeks of arduous effort.

Similar acts of wilful social blindness were in evidence in the media’s approach to the Sachar committee findings. There could be various alibis offered for the relative inattention with which the report was received by the media. It could well be argued that the social and educational handicaps of the Muslim community are not exactly a news flash. Again, those familiar with the dynamics of competition in the newspaper business, might ascribe the relative neglect of the Sachar committee to another factor. The Indian Express (IE), had as the media jargon has it, “scooped” the main findings of the Sachar committee well over a month before its report was formally presented. The IE coverage appeared in a compact series of articles on the front page, through the last week of October. The newspaper then chose to pronounce its final editorial verdict on the issue by urging the political leadership to acknowledge the undeniable verity, that economic growth was the way out of social backwardness. In effect, the IE succeeded in submerging the complexity of the Sachar committee’s findings in a simplistic nostrum much favoured in today’s neo-liberal climate.

While the IE was constructing this narrative of discrimination on its news pages and paying obeisance to the virtues of globalisation editorially, a quite different picture of willing thraldom to superstition and a stubborn refusal to adopt modernity, was being assembled in another quarter of the print media. Between October 24 and 29, the ToI carried no fewer than 6 articles – of which two were on the frontpage and one on the editorial page – on the case of Imrana, the young woman who had been raped by her father-in-law and stigmatised by the Muslim clergy for her temerity in seeking to bring the criminal to account.

On October 25, the ToI ran a story on Imrana on page one, right alongside another one on the confusion within the Muslim community about when precisely the Eid festivities were to be observed. This latter story led off with a description of the subjectivity underlying the identification of the precise date and the tension that this set up with modern notions of objectivity.

The Imrana story and the accompanying article on Eid enjoyed roughly the same priority in terms of space allocation and placement. But these stories were topped off by a large photograph, occupying marquee space on the front page, which showed the touring Pakistani cricket team offering Eid prayers at their port of call in Chandigarh. The picture was rather boldly captioned “Champions of the faith?”

With this rather bizarre juxtaposition of stories and visuals, the ToI managed within about a third of the space on its front page, to reinforce several stereotypes about the Muslim community, not least among these being their supposedly extra-territorial loyalties.

Yet the ToI could not remain oblivious to the news emerging from another quarter on the findings of the Sachar report. On November 4, it ran an editorial on the main findings of the committee. It began by deprecating the policy of reservations as a “blunt instrument” that failed to address the roots of the problem. Instead, other forms of “positive discrimination” could be thought of, including building “quality schools” and “providing healthcare” in “backward districts” that have high settlement densities of Muslims, dalits or tribals. Government contracts again, could be preferentially allocated to these disadvantaged social groups, to “facilitate their participation in the modern economy”. In turn, the ToI chose to place a special onus on the “Muslim leadership” to “encourage the community to take to modern education in larger numbers”.

Article 350A of the Constitution mandates precisely this manner of positive discrimination in favour of minority communities where State investments in education are concerned. Backward area development policies adopted by the central government, not to mention various states, have also sought, without overtly assuming the colours of a class or community-based approach, to direct attention preferentially towards regions of economic stagnancy. The ToI has shown admirable percipience in waking up to the reality that backward areas are in most parts of the country, also predominantly populated by people who would fall within the broad rubric of “backward classes”. But this realisation is not informed by any effort to understand why backward area development policies have also proved fairly ineffective in redressing disparities, indeed, why they have proven an even blunter instrument than reservations.

On November 8, the ToI carried an article on Islamic schools or madarsas, on its editorial page. Titled “Beyond Terror”, the article argued that the debate on these institutions had remained for too long confined to the issue of terrorism, but because the Muslim community was under pressure in times of global concern over the issue, it had responded with a spirited defence of these institutions and the learning they imparted, as uniquely imbued with a moral and spiritual sensibility. This attitude in turn simply evaded the reality that the madarsas have a tendency to “promote a narrow, insular mindset”. And as long as security concerns remained the principal impulse behind the debate, there was little chance that matters of immense import to the “welfare of millions of children studying in madarsas” would be addressed.

Though not formally released at the time this article was published, many of the key findings of the Sachar committee were in the public domain by then. On the issue of madarsas, the conclusions were fairly clear: fewer than 4 percent of Muslim children in the school-going age group attended these institutions; at an all-India level, their number is not the “millions” as the commentator in the ToI suggested, but just marginally over one million. Far from being an institution of choice, madarsas were “often the last recourse of Muslims especially those who lack the economic resources to bear the costs of schooling”. And for all the odium heaped on them, madarsas had very often been found to “have indeed provided schooling to Muslim children where the State (had) failed them”.

Granted, the commentator in the ToI could not possibly have reflected all these findings in their complexity since they were yet to be made public in an official sense. But to admit that gaps exist in the level of public information is one thing, to leapfrog into realms of conjecture, quite another. A few inconvenient facts could not evidently, stand in the way of constructing what seemed a compelling narrative of social backwardness by choice among the Mulsim community.

It was mid-November by the time the ToI returned on its news pages, to the theme of the Sachar committee. On November 17, it reported that the committee’s recommendations had put the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, in a “fix”. The following day, it frontpaged a report arguing that the committee’s recommendation that the Muslim share in several vital sectors be increased, would in effect “give rise to the demand for a community quota leading to a fullscale political confrontation”. Having begun its coverage of the Sachar report by viewing it through the prism of the reservations issue, the ToI undoubtedly saw no reason to change course when more details were available.

To look at the media today is to look at a complex, dynamic and evolving scenario, to consider a quantitative explosion that has not quite been accompanied by a corresponding qualitative change. While the media can be relied upon to raise its voice against overt and violent attacks on minority communities, its resolve in dealing with systemic discrimination that is less visible, is not quite so clear. Some of the rougher edges that were evident in the early-1990s may well have been ironed out. That was the time that the Muslim minority was portrayed as the legatees of the numerous abuses that India’s culture and civilisation had suffered in the past. Today, they are portrayed as an impediment to the glittering promises of modernity that lie in the future for India.

Getting connected at the SAARC Summit

Among the ceremonial events that marked the opening of the 14th SAARC Summit in Delhi early April, was the flagging-off of a car rally. Beginning two weeks earlier in Bangladesh, the rally had briefly halted in Delhi en route to covering all the member countries (then seven) of the regional grouping, in the space of a month. It was a rather literal-minded effort to underline the Summit’s ostensible theme of ‘connectivity’. But even as the cars went their way, proudly emblazoned with the emblems of generous Indian corporate sponsors, nine forlorn youths from Maharashtra were making their way back from the Wagah border. They had cycled 2000 kilometres over a few weeks, in the expectation of visiting Lahore on a peace-and-goodwill mission – only to have their visa applications rejected at the last moment.

Is ‘connectivity’ about a coming together of the people of Southasia? Or is it merely a means of creating greater opportunities for Indian business? Certainly, as the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, addressed his summit partners shortly after assuming the SAARC chair from Bangladesh, he seemed to be advocating connectivity in its widest possible sense – a confluence not merely of “physical, economic” attributes, but also “of the mind”. Southasia as a region, he said, has traditionally only flourished when it has been connected within itself and to the rest of the world.

Prime Minister Singh was reprising a much-favoured theme: the endeavour of making borders irrelevant, and giving the people of the region the wherewithal to move freely across the vast populated expanses of Southasia, searching out and utilising every opportunity available for both their own betterment and the larger social good. This is undoubtedly a noble vision, yet it overlooks a significant point. As the cyclists from Maharashtra found, they probably do not enjoy the same privileges of cross-border mobility as the owner of a car. While connectivity within Southasia could become a right theoretically enjoyed by all, it may practically remain the preserve of a mere handful.

To give him due credit, what the Indian prime minister envisages is a situation in which the freedom to travel becomes a reality for a broad cross-section of the people of Southasia. And thus, he promised that India would soon announce a unilateral liberalisation of visa rules and procedures for students, academics, journalists, as well as individuals traveling for medical treatment. India would also provide duty-free and quota-free access for imports from SAARC member countries that happen to be classified among the “least developed” – excluding Pakistan from the party. The sensitive list of commodities, where the new rules would not apply, would, the prime minister assured, be pared down and soon made public. No time frame was specified for these decisions being made and operationalised, though the history of SAARC as a regional grouping is strewn with promises made in the effulgence of a summit, only to be forgotten just as rapidly.

It was little surprise that the assembled dignitaries were underwhelmed by Prime Minister Singh’s announcement. As former Indian Foreign Secretary Muchkund Dubey has commented, trade liberalisation in Southasia has been “flawed” from the start – and this has been a conscious “political choice” on all sides. A key aspect of all such agreements is the ‘negative list’, which specifies the product lines where free trade does not apply. As yet, no Southasian country, least of all the region’s largest, has shown the generosity or courage to prune this list to a meaningful level. In the inchoately formed and contentiously interpreted South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), India’s negative list is four times larger than the most recent offer it has made to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Regional tokenism
When it is not of purely symbolic value, the fact is that ‘duty free’ access could also be a means of increasing opportunities for Indian business. India’s free trade agreement (FTA) with Sri Lanka, which came into effect in 2000, has been an umbrella under which shrewd businessmen have managed to arbitrage customs-duty differentials on third-country imports. Sri Lanka, for instance, allows duty-free imports of copper scrap and Indian businessmen have been sharp enough to spot the opportunities this affords for investing in copper smelters in Sri Lanka, for re-export to India. A similar process has been underway in the vegetable-oils market. Value addition in Sri Lanka from these exports, which account for the bulk of its trade with India, is minimal. The principal upshot has been that a few Indian businessmen have managed to enrich themselves. How Sri Lankan business groups have fared in the same sectors, remains a matter that is yet to be documented.

On the other hand, India could be using the promise of duty-free access for the region’s least-developed member countries as a means of leveraging greater trade openings within Southasia, with an eye towards emerging as a major investor in regional light industry, transport and telecom. This is likely to encounter competition from China, which perhaps could underline its own investment ambitions with a greater infusion of funds. Moreover, as long as the smaller countries in Southasia remain locked in a low-level equilibrium of poverty and slow growth, the opportunities for such investments are not likely to be particularly large in the near future.

As home to the largest concentration of the world’s poor, Southasia needs to reconsider how well the process of trade liberalisation truly aids in increasing social welfare. There is at least an equal risk that liberalisation within the region could become a zero-sum game, with each country trying to out-compete the other in lowering wage levels– in other words, in using poverty as a source of competitive advantage. Trade liberalisation has all too often been seen exclusively in terms of a charter of rights for business. What Southasia needs in order to escape from its grinding poverty is a social charter, one that will secure at least the barest entitlements to subsistence for its people.

Of all the pronouncements made in the Summit’s Delhi Declaration of 4 April, two may have a direct bearing on mass welfare. First is the SAARC Development Fund, which has now been ordered operationalised in full conformity with the charter of the association. Second is the SAARC Food Bank, which is intended to “supplement national efforts to provide food security to the people of the region”. Scepticism would not be out of place with regard to either of these endeavours, especially since India’s management of its food economy over the past decade and a half of globalisation has been little short of chaotic. In short order, the depleted warehouses of the early 1990s were swamped with an over-abundance of food, which was subsequently disposed of by exporting at prices lower than those reserved for India’s poor. Since the severe drought of 2002, the pace of stock depletion has accelerated, and the last two years have seen grain imports of unprecedented magnitude.

When the efforts of national governments have been so disastrously askew, there seems little reason to believe that trans-national efforts at cooperation will fare much better. Anybody viewing the financial allocations that have been made would be justified in concluding that these programmes are but the barest tokenism. They would serve little purpose other than sustaining the somnolent SAARC bureaucracy through another year. Of course, if a much needed fillip is also imparted to the various track-two efforts that have rather ineffectively sought to energise ‘regionalism’ thus far, that would be an outcome to celebrate, even if it is unintended.

A regional institution
This does not mean that the Delhi Summit was a complete fiasco. As Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said, it was the smoothest and least contentious such gathering in many years. This despite SAARC’s new member, Afghanistan, having provided a rather colourful prelude, in President Hamid Karzai’s trenchant attack on Pakistan just before his arrival in Delhi. In remarks to The New York Times, published to much consternation just when the committee of SAARC foreign ministers was in session, President Karzai accused Pakistan of harbouring a “colonial” mentality, and being intent on transforming Afghanistan into a satellite state.

Landing in Delhi, President Karzai would have undoubtedly been comforted by the thought that most of the member countries in SAARC were undergoing transitions, though with varying degrees of tension and trauma. Indeed, aside perhaps, from Bhutan and the Maldives (the two smallest members) and India (which is too big to feel the pain of its million mutinies too acutely), every other SAARC member state might witness a change in the character of its ruling arrangement before the next summit. This raises some interesting questions about just how far the decisions made in Delhi will stand the test of changing times.

Yet for all the cynicism that customarily shrouds the SAARC organisation, there was at least one decision made during the Summit that was welcomed across a broad spectrum. If all goes according to plan, a Southasian University could soon be a part of the academic landscape of the region. Its central campus would be in India, with satellites and perhaps entire faculties being located in other countries. An intergovernmental steering committee has now been tasked with drawing up the charter of the university.

Considering the record of earlier initiatives in the realm of education (for instance, the little-known SAARC fellowships programme), there is reason to believe that things may not indeed pan out quite as well as the more optimistic observers believe. Presumably, with the Southasian University’s location having been broadly settled, any residual uncertainties on this count would be an internal matter of India’s. There are believed to be two contending opinions within the Indian government, the first of which seeks to convert an existing campus – such as the Viswabharati at Shantiniketan, West Bengal – into a Southasian institution; while the second favours an entirely new establishment, based in all probability in Delhi. Quite apart from these decisions, there is immense potential for discord between the member nations when the charter of the new centre of learning is drawn up.

With the extravagance of hope continually bumping up against the recognition of reality, some scholars believe that the best course for the new university to follow would be to go to the heart of the most contentious subjects that divide the Subcontinent: history, comparative religion, contemporary politics, international affairs and the like. Southasia is a region divided as much by conflicting readings of history as by competing ambitions of national elites. And for reasons of history and sheer geopolitical clout, India has assumed for itself the mantle of representing the civilisational ethos of the region, in a manner that neighbouring states find insensitive, if not hegemonic.

The groves of academia may well afford a congenial environment in which an alternative vision could be constructed – one that provides room for all Southasians to participate, and respects their particularities. Though optimism is at a premium after the indifferent performance of SAARC over the first 22 years of its existence, there is still room presumably, for the occasional extravagance of the imagination.

India Global and the Leveraged Buyout

Puzzlement has been the most prominent among the public reactions to the mega-deals that have seen Indian companies aggressively pursue global players and buy them up. Money that once seemed beyond the ambitions of the country – money that could cover India’s entire defence budget and substantially bridge the fiscal deficit, that most intractable problem of the economy, -- suddenly seemed within easy reach of India’s corporate houses. And a country that once seemed the poor relative in a world where investor interest was the ultimate benediction, seemed to have turned the tables. From desperately seeking foreign investment, India had transformed itself into the source for much foreign investment.

Business pundits and the media though, suffered none of the confusion of the general public, certifying the recent deals as an unequivocal signal that India had arrived on the world stage. Yet for all the euphoria in evidence in these quarters, the response of the stockmarkets was if anything, curiously contrary. Shares in Tata Steel fell sharply the day it announced that it had tied up a mammoth $ 12 billion deal to take over the Anglo-Dutch steel conglomerate, Corus. And the Birla-owned Hindalco was buffeted by similar shareholder scepticism immediately after its announcement that it would take over the Canadian aluminium major Novelis, in a deal costing $ 6 billion.

If the stockmarket were to be considered a reliable barometer of business prudence, then the verdict on corporate India’s two most recent mega-deals has been fairly unequivocal. They have come at too high a price. The Tata and Birla acquisitions in this respect, closely mirror last year’s takeover of the European steel manufacturer Arcelor by the Lakshmi Mittal group. After much competitive haggling which compelled Mittal to successively hike up his bid, he finally had to settle for a merger plan that confined his shareholding to a distinct minority.

By acquiring Corus, Tata Steel has emerged as the world’s fifth largest steel manufacturer in terms of capacity. On annual sales revenue computations, it would be catapulted to the mid-200s in rankings in the Fortune 500 global list. This would put it well ahead of Reliance Industries and Indianoil in the global list of Indian corporations.

Yet with all this, the adverse reaction of the stockmarket needs to be considered, because Tata’s acquisition has, after a host of modestly sized deals, brought the practice of massively leveraged buyouts to the Indian corporate landscape. Modes of financing the $ 12 billion (or Rs 53,000 crore) deal still remain secret.

The initial offer made by Tata was for a takeover valued at $ 8.8 billion. At this level, the plan was to invest $ 3.5 billion as equity from Tata and raise the rest through debt. The calculation, simply, was that the increased debt of $ 5.3 billion (or roughly Rs 23,000 crore) could be serviced through the cash flows that the Corus acquisition would bring.

Intense competition from a Brazilian steel company forced the Tatas to increase their offer in stages. Financing a deal finally concluded at an immensely higher cost, could now require certain extraordinary recourses. Apart from the money that the Tatas can summon from the coffers of their cash-rich companies, a sell-off in the business group’s principal revenue source, the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), now seems inevitable. And even when this option has been pushed to the limits of its feasibility, Tata Steel would need to raise fresh capital through a public issue of shares.

With all that, the debt that the company would need to take onto its balance sheet is immense – estimates range from Rs 11,000 crore to Rs 15,000 crore. Tata Steel seems to have gambled enormously on the future, on the strength of about five years of sustained growth in sales, when internal accruals were sufficient to finance expansion. The company’s debt, roughly matched with equity in 2003-4, rapidly fell in the years afterwards. With the Corus acquisition, debt is likely to spiral to a level several times higher than equity, even as the shareholding pattern becomes more widely based.

Most details of the Tata Steel deal remain obscure at the moment and shareholder sentiment tends to view the company’s international foray as ambition carried to excess. Market analysts concur with the short-term forecast but counsel that the long-term investor should keep faith. The acquisition of steel capacity in Europe, it is argued, will significantly augment Tata’s long-term commercial synergies. The company will gain access to a lucrative market while optimally leveraging access to low-cost raw material and labour. It could supply highly competitive crude steel, utilising capacity in Europe to generate value addition that would significantly improve overall profitability.

All this would be reassuring if Tata Steel had the functioning capacity to optimally utilise Corus facilities. That is quite far from being the case, since Tata’s greenfield projects in Chattisgarh and Orissa will not be going onstream till well after 2012.

With the manifold rise in its level of debt, can Tata Steel negotiate this zone of uncertainty? The many uncertainties in the global environment make this a question more conveniently evaded than addressed. Real estate, automobiles and a limited number of other boom sectors have been a major engine of growth for the global economy over the last half-decade. But these sectors, which picked up the slack from the collapse of the “dot-com” bubble, are themselves approaching a major shakedown. If there is a generalised downturn in the global economy, Tata Steel’s fortunes – which have effectively been gambled on an ambitious acquisition in Europe – could well plummet.

Similar concerns surround the Hindalco takeover of Novelis – effectively a case of David not defeating, but buying over Goliath – since the company that has been bought up had on last reckoning, sales revenues ten times larger than its buyer. As with the Tata takeover of Corus, Birla’s acquisition of Novelis was followed by serious questions of how the corporate debt that had been bought up would be dealt with.

Few market analysts on Dalal Street expected the Novelis deal. On studying its details, still fewer could understand its rationale. Hindalco has, aside from the borrowing it has engaged in for the purchase of Novelis, also inherited a significant burden of debt that Novelis has in its own recklessness acquired. And this has been happening at a time when the global market in aluminium was not quite buoyant, indeed, showing positive signs of meltdown.

The clinching argument in these circumstances would be that international banks are unlikely to bet unwisely. If they have advanced serious money to the Tata and Birla groups, the underlying business propositions must be sound.

At the risk of seeming inconsiderate, it should be borne in mind that these very banks also lent with gay abandon to all of Latin America in the 1970s, thus creating the conditions for the debt bomb explosion of the 1980s. So too, did these banks lend with few reservations to the U.S. corporate sector through the 1980s. Seduced by the boom in share prices, they paid little attention to the economic fundamentals, thus setting the stage for the asset value meltdown of the 1990s, which pushed the U.S. economy into a recession that only the “dot-com” bubble retrieved it from.

If the Tata and Birla global conquests are a prelude to similar enactments in future, that is sufficient reason why Indians should be wary of media-induced euphoria and debt-financed illusions of a “global Indian takeover”.

Delusion and denial: Bush's final gamble

January 21, 2007

It could well be the epitaph for the ruinous presidency of George Bush the second, that he disdained reality. The attitude was rather neatly expressed as far back as 2002, by a senior official within the administration, who had occasion to upbraid a journalist who had stepped beyond the strict norms of criticism laid down by the White House. The trouble he said, is that there were just too many journalists who were grounded in the “reality-based community” and suffered the delusion that the world could be understood through the “judicious” study of “discernible” facts. That, though, was simply not the way things worked. Like it or not, the U.S. was an empire that created its own reality. As lesser beings went to work in “judiciously” examining new realities, the empire would move on, creating yet more novel facts. Circumstances had created two distinct groups of people. On one side were “history’s actors” and on the other stood those whose lot it would be to “study” what destiny’s chosen few did.[1]

Facts, though have proved difficult to dislodge in Iraq, even for the masters of the global empire. And as the world has watched in disbelief, Bush has continued to proudly create his own reality. If the electoral debacle he faced in November had awoken Bush to a situation that looked perilously like ignominy, the world could have drawn some reassurance and indeed, allowed some latitude for a slow learner -- one who responds to political adversity, even if he remains wilfully oblivious to the horrors inflicted on remote corners of the globe.

Quite apart from the electoral hiding, Bush was also given an indulgent but stern lecture in geopolitical complexities by a group of seniors in the business, including a man who served his father loyally through election campaigns and wars. Just a month after Bush had in the reckless abandon of the midterm elections campaign, come up with a blithe prediction of imminent victory, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) co-chaired by James A. Baker, Secretary of State under George Bush the first, turned in its considered opinion that the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating”. Rather than make a bad situation worse, Baker and his associates strongly urged a scaling back of the U.S. military profile to a less conspicuous training role. A withdrawal of U.S. forces, the ISG proposed, could be initiated at the same time, accompanied by “new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region”.

The ISG recommendations were in important respects, proffered in defiance of Bush’s own wishes.[2] Though derived from a common-sense reading of the situation, the proposal for initiating “constructive” diplomatic engagements with Iran and Syria, breached an explicitly stated prohibition of the Bush cabal. Again, the linkage that the ISG drew between the continuing denial of Palestinian rights and the turmoil in the region, broke perhaps the most sacred taboo of U.S. politics.[3]

On January 10, Bush announced what he imagined, would be a grand new vision for victory. Despite polls recording public disapproval running at over 60 percent, he ordered an additional 20,000 combat troops into Iraq. This new force level would in his estimation, pacify Baghdad, which in turn would restore a semblance of order to the whole country. This gamble with the lives of U.S. troops came with admonitions that the Iraqi government would be held to strict standards of performance. The government headed by Nuri Al-Maliki of the Da’wa Al-Islamiyya -- a Shi’a denominational party, which shares power with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), another party grounded in the same constituency -- has now been enjoined to bring on board the estranged people of the Sunni Muslim faith, to end the ostracism of individuals associated with the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party, to restore order to the oil industry, in part by assuring all sections of their rightful shares, and to take necessary steps to disarm the riotous proliferation of militias.

The aim of the higher U.S. force level, working with Iraqi personnel in the rough ratio of one to two-and-a-half, would be to “clear, secure and build” each quarter of the chaotic Iraqi capital city. Just to underline its serious intent and good faith, the U.S. has committed an augmented flow of aid to Iraq: an allocation of over a billion dollars for the restoration of that country’s thoroughly eroded civilian infrastructure.

This may seem like a small burden for the U.S. to bear. Following the authoritative pronouncement by the U.N. that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, it would be evident that war reparations are no act of goodwill, but a legal imperative the U.S. is obliged to bear.[4] And a billion dollars as special dispensation for a country that once was the envy of the region for the quality of its social services, is small recompense for the damage inflicted on its civilian infrastructure by U.S. vengefulness, beginning with the 1991 war of destruction and the punishing regime of sanctions that followed.

Yet, assuming the security machinery is in place, are the political underpinnings right? Or has Iraq reached the stage where, to paraphrase Martin Luther King’s magnificent rebellion against the Vietnam war in 1967, “there is nothing to build on – save bitterness”? In a radio broadcast shortly after a visit to Baghdad in June 2006, Bush assured the U.S. that Maliki was a leader who could be trusted: “His top priority is securing Baghdad, so Coalition and Iraqi forces have launched Operation Together Forward, a joint effort to restore security and the rule of law to high-risk areas of the city. To help the Prime Minister improve security, we will continue embedding coalition transition teams in Iraqi army and police units….”[5]

Operation Together Forward got off to a rocky start, was reassessed and launched afresh as a Hollywood style sequel titled “Together Forward II”.[6] Soon afterwards, it was abandoned, since Maliki seemed uninterested in keeping his side of the bargain. Early-November, Stephen Hadley, National Security Advisor to the U.S. President, filed a top secret report based on an extended series of interactions, offering a rather dubious assessment of the Iraqi Prime Minister’s intentions: “Despite Maliki’s reassuring words, repeated reports from our commanders on the ground contributed to our concerns about Maliki’s government. Reports of non-delivery of services to Sunni areas, intervention by the prime minister’s office to stop military action against Shi’a targets and to encourage them against Sunni ones, removal of Iraq’s most effective commanders on a sectarian basis and efforts to ensure Shi’a majorities in all ministries… all suggest a campaign to consolidate Shi’a power in Baghdad”.[7]

This assessment of Maliki’s intentions did not prevent the U.S. from being an accessory in the sordid execution of former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, as the year drew to an end. It seemed at first glance, a rather bizarre decision to make a public spectacle of the hanging, though on deeper consideration, those who retained some faith in the Iraqi political dispensation ordained by the U.S., may have been willing to accept it as a well-intended effort to establish that a page had been turned in a nation’s tortured history.

The plot though, went awry when the man expected to play the part of the criminal, failed to follow the script. The authorised video showed a man walking to the gallows with preternatural composure and listening attentively to his hangmen’s instructions. With Saddam going to his death like a warrior rather than a criminal, the masters of the occupation were left to cope with the popular backlash. There was initially, a deep sense of cultural offence caused by the execution of a member of the faith on the day that Sunni Muslims were beginning their religious observance of Eid ul-Adha. And even before this deliberate insult could be forgotten, a video recorded on mobile phone was posted on the internet, providing a far more authentic view of the event than the muted images broadcast over Iraq’s official TV. With his hangmen chortling in delight at the plight they had reduced a former head of state to, Saddam is shown in this video, responding with calm and cordial sarcasm. The impact was devastating. As a commentator in the Guardian wrote, the scornful reproaches that Saddam delivered to his hangmen could well be “his epitaph, exemplifying his defiance and condemning his lynching party”. “Saddam's killers have achieved the impossible,” the article concluded: “they have made us feel sympathy for him… There may not have been dignity in the dying, but there was courage.”[8]

As the import of the unauthorised video began to sink in, the organisers of the lynch mob began their salvage operation. Bush authorised senior officials to go public about their efforts to defer the execution till after the Eid observance, so that serious doubts about legal process could be assuaged. The appeals process, they said, had been concluded in less than a month and may have been hurried through to enable Maliki to fulfil a vow that Saddam would not live to see the new year. Moreover, not one member of Iraq’s presidential troika had signed the death warrant and Maliki had decided, without clear sanction, to dispense with the constitutional requirement for all three signatures.

Maliki’s damage control sought to deflect global outrage over the ghoulish images by blaming the messenger. But the arrest of two prison guards for the unauthorised video persuaded nobody. The public prosecutor who officiated over the execution, was already on record with the information that one of the two witnesses making cellphone recordings of the execution, was Mowaffak Al-Rubaie, the National Security Adviser in the Iraqi Prime Minister’s office. Rubaie himself was quick to come out with a furious denial,[9] but the suspicion that a senior official in Maliki’s administration may have been the source of the grisly images, was not easily dispelled.

As a puppet regime’s actions turned into an international public relations disaster, U.S. officials – anxious to avoid renewed obloquy – went public with their perception that Maliki “never fully explained his urgency in carrying out the death sentence”.[10] The final explanation proffered by the U.S. – that it was unwilling to stand in the way of a sovereign decision – was little less than laughable for an occupying power that was in the process of significantly augmenting force levels on sovereign Iraqi territory, despite opposition from the Iraqi government.

Since the elections of December 2005 – conducted under extremely contentious circumstances – every action and utterance of the U.S. has betrayed a complete disregard for the prized virtue of national sovereignty. To begin with, the choice of Maliki as Prime Minister was the outcome of strenuous exertions by the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. The first two names on the list fielded by the United Iraq Alliance – comprised in the main of the Da’wa and SCIRI – were Abdelaziz Al-Hakim and Ibrahim Al-Jaafari.

Hakim’s decades-long proximity to Iran was a major concern of the U.S. The Badr Brigade, armed wing of SCIRI, had fought alongside Iran in the eight-year long war against Iraq. But as a senior Shi’a cleric, Hakim in a sense, disqualified himself from the mundane tasks of wielding temporal administrative authority. Jaafari, who should then have been the logical choice, was voted down by the U.S. on the grounds that he was all through a long period of exile in Iran, known to have acquired an unseemly proximity to the clerical regime in Teheran. Maliki’s choice as prime minister, after much acrimony, was seen as a declaration of independence from Iran. Having spent most of his exile in Syria rather than Iran, Maliki was seen to owe his primary fealty to the spirit of Arab nationalism, rather than a wider denominational solidarity of the Shi’a.[11] Being the first choice of neither the Da’wa nor SCIRI, Maliki was by the circumstances of his choice, made hostage to forces loyal to the radical Shi’a cleric, Muqtada Al-Sadr.

By late-2006, the U.S. was exploring ways of bringing Hakim and moderate Sunni political formations in line with Maliki, thereby freeing him in part from his irksome bondage to the Sadr flock. This strategy was entirely consistent with the line of action urged by Stephen Hadley in his November memo to the U.S. president. But Washington’s task is to square an impossible circle. The Sadr militia is relatively autonomous of Iran, but has twice demonstrated its willingness to frontally engage U.S. forces in combat. Hakim is a more conciliatory figure in the context of Iraqi politics, but whatever Washington’s aims in Iraq, they do not include transforming the country into a satellite of Iran. To achieve even a modicum of political order and spare itself the humiliation of a tumultuous retreat reminiscent of Vietnam, the U.S. needs at the very least, to neutralise the militias, starting with Sadr’s Jaish Al-Mahdi. And that job it is realising to its utter dismay, cannot be accomplished without talking terms with Hakim.

As in the past, when it spurned opportunities for political engagement and rushed in with shows of force, the U.S. has responded to this conundrum by raising its military profile in the Gulf. An aircraft carrier battle-group has set sail to join the one already cruising off Iranian territorial waters. And within Iraq, the U.S. military has on two occasions within a month, overruled objections from Iraqi authorities to take Iranian diplomats and their aides into custody.

Those looking for the ultimate Vietnam parallel have it here. In 1969, just a month after his inauguration as U.S. president, Richard Nixon began under the influence of national security adviser Henry Kissinger, to secretly broaden the barbaric aerial war then underway against Vietnam. Bombing Cambodia was considered a necessary military response to the prolonged stalemate in Vietnam – where the U.S. was evidently losing strategically even as it won every tactical engagement. As documented by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who has provided the sharpest insights into the deeply paranoiac mood of the Nixon administration: “The bombing became a turning point not only in the war but also in the mentality of the White House. The secret of that bombing - and hundreds of later missions - would be kept for five years. Eventually, the secret became more important to the White House than the bombing…”.[12]

Far from engaging Iran and Syria in talks, the Bush administration has taken the option that comes naturally to it. This shift of focus since the ISG report was submitted – from the possibility of cooperation to the certainty of confrontation – was entirely foretold. Initial responses from Bush were dismissive of the potential rewards of diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria. And the Israeli government for its part, chipped in with loud disclaimers about any connection between the turmoil in Iraq and the wider issue of justice for the Palestinians.[13] British Prime Minister Tony Blair meanwhile, executed a trademark political pirouette: he initially welcomed the ISG recommendation to engage all the states in the region,[14] but realising soon enough that he had stepped out of line of the U.S. diktat, began an arduous effort to make amends.[15]

Blair’s rather shifty approach represents the very real tensions that have begun to surface, which have even unsettled the self-righteous complacence of the Saudi Arabian ruling family. Saudi King Abdullah in November summoned U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney to Riyadh, to lecture him on the need for greater urgency over the multiple crises in the region. He is also reported to have told Cheney that the Saudis would be obliged to fill any vacuum that may be caused by a precipitate U.S. withdrawal.[16] This undertaking came in the shape of a vow to fund and arm the Sunni militias in Iraq. By early-January, the Saudi regime had by some accounts, raised the stakes, vowing to send its armed forces into Iraq to counter the growing power of the Shi’a militias.[17]

The alarms sounding within Saudi ruling circles offer compelling evidence that the wheel of history has turned full circle. If Iraq’s declaration of war against Iran in 1980 was tragedy, then the Saudi dynasty’s call to arms against the same adversary is history repeating itself as farce. For Iraq, Shi’a militancy was a constant internal threat all through the 1970s. Imam Khomeini, the spiritual guide of the Shi’a faith in Iran, was for much of this decade, living in the Iraqi city of Najaf, a silent but powerful influence on denominational politics in his country of exile. As Vice President then – and the principal architect of the modernisation programme that unleashed violent forces of tribal and sectarian revanchism – Saddam was relentless in his attitude towards this brand of politics, spearheaded in the main by the Hakim and Sadr clerical dynasties. “What we must do”, he argued, “is to oppose the institutionalisation of religion in the state and society… Let us return to the roots of our religion, glorifying them – but not introduce it into politics”.[18]

The Hakim clan was the first to face the ruthless determination of Saddam’s modernisation drive. By 1979, Shi’a resentment at their exclusion from political power had fused with the dislocations of modernisation. Though Saddam's reforms through the 1970s had targeted the Shi’a population for special benefits, aspirations for a share in political power remained unfulfilled. The secularisation programmes of the 1970s - including the state takeover of the revenues of religious institutions and the land reforms that terminated traditional tribal forms of control - had moreover, created a disgruntled elite among the Shi’a, who responded with expected fervour to the appeal of the Islamic revolution in Iran.

In June 1980, an assassination attempt on Saddam’s close associate Tariq Aziz brought forth another crackdown. This time the Sadr dynasty bore the brunt of the regime’s fury. But with an unrelenting chorus from Teheran calling for the overthrow of Saddam’s apostate regime and the continual harassment of the Da’wa, then rightly regarded by much of the world as a terrorist group, Iraq was reluctantly pushed towards war.[19]

Quite in contrast to the version currently afloat, Saddam was no manic dictator driven by uncontrollable impulses into gratuitous acts of warfare. The war against Iran, rather, was launched after much deliberation and with the explicit approval of other Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia. Indeed, a 1981 memorandum from the then U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, recently come to light, speaks of the Saudis being the conduit through which the U.S. tacitly signalled its consent for Iraq’s declaration of war.[20] There was never any serious doubt that Iraq was waging war not merely for its own security, but for all the Arab states in the Gulf. As a recent expert assessment puts it: “The war was not Iraq’s private business… but rather a defence of the eastern flank of the Arab world against fundamentalist Iran. While the Gulf states were not asked to pay with rivers of blood for the protection of their own security, since Iraq did that on their behalf, they could not expect to take a ‘free ride’..”[21]

For Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates of the Gulf, the U.S. forces are now the last remaining fortification against Iran. Strategic thinkers have in recent times begun to talk of an epic confrontation in the region that will pit Shi’a against Sunni, sparing no sovereign territory. Abdullah, the Hashemite ruler of Jordan, recently warned in his turn, that the Arab world now faces the imminent prospect of three civil wars – in Iraq, Lebanon and the occupied territories of Palestine.

Yet it is unclear that the shorthand description of the axis of estrangement, as a split between Sunni and Shi’a is really accurate. It serves the western audience’s need for easy comprehension, but is certainly untrue of the Palestinian territories. Hamas radicals and Fatah collaborationists, belong to the same religious denomination. It is also untrue of Lebanon, where the Maronite Christian leader, Michel Aoun, a former general in the national army and head of one of the contending governments in the country in the late-1980s, has quite decisively sworn his allegiance to Hezbollah, the party of the Lebanese Shi’a. Though best remembered for his opposition to growing Syrian influence in his country in the 1980s, Aoun’s record as a Lebanese patriot committed to harmony between all confessional groupings in the country’s complex political mosaic, is beyond question.

The confrontation that is brewing in the West Asian theatre rather, is all about the political formations and the regimes that have played along with the U.S.-Israeli plan to recast the political geography of the region and those that have opposed it. It is a fight against colonialism of a particularly unreconstructed variety. And it is a struggle to reaffirm the broad cross-border solidarities that have long been undermined by U.S.-Israeli stratagems and the collusion of the oil emirates. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was designed to extinguish for all time, the threat that these solidarities represented to Israel’s regional pre-eminence. Its final outcome may well be the opposite.

[1] “Reality based community” is a phrase taken from the journalist Ron Suskind’s account of an encounter with a senior official from the Bush administration (See “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, The New York Times, Magazine, October 17, 2004).

[2] “Bush, After Talk With Iraq Panel, Says He’s Open to Change, but ...”, The New York Times, November 14, 2006.

[3] James A. Baker, Lee H. Hamilton, et al, The Iraq Study Group report, Vintage Books, New York, December 2006. The essential points are in the executive summary between pages xiii and xviii.

[4] See this writer’s “Iraq: The Descent into Chaos, And a case for war reparations”, EPW, September 25, 2004; available at: http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2004&leaf=09&filename=7718&filetype=html.

[5] From the U.S. President’s website, at the following URL: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060617.html

[6] “The president’s last throw”, The Economist, January 13, 2007, pp 22-4, provides details of how Operation Together Forward rapidly degenerated into an unfettered round of sectarian bloodletting. Also see Frank Rich, “Dying to Save the GOP Congress”, The New York Times, October 29, 2006, for the following assessment of the security operations launched in June: “As we’ve learned from Operation Together Forward, when Iraqis do stand up, violence goes up. And when American and British troops stand down, murderous sectarian militias, some of them allied with that ‘unity’ government, fill the vacuum, taking over entire cities like Amara and Balad in broad daylight”.

[7] The document was published in full in The New York Times dated November 29, 2006, headlined “Text of U.S. Security Advisor’s Iraq memo”.

[8] Stephen Moss, “Was Saddam’s death dignified?”, The Guardian, January 2, 2007; available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1981195,00.html.

[9] The New York Times posted on its website a story which reported, early hours of January 3, as follows: “… one of the officials who attended the hanging, a prosecutor at the trial that condemned Mr. Hussein to death, said that one of two men he had seen holding a cellphone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein’s last moments — up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor — was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki’s national security adviser. Attempts to reach Mr. Rubaie were unsuccessful. The prosecutor, Munkith Al-Faroun, said the other man holding a cellphone above his head was also an official, but he could not recall his name”. These references were omitted in a later version posted on the website, but were retained in the print edition of the newspaper. See “Iraq to examine abusive conduct toward Hussein”, The New York Times, January 3, 2007, available at: http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0913FA3C540C708CDDA80894DF404482 (link requires subscription). If another account provided by Munkith Al-Faroun, this time to the BBC, were to be considered, it would become virtually impossible to dispel the suspicion that shrouds Mowaffak Al-Rubaie. This eyewitness account records him saying as follows: “Fourteen people were present, … including me who was there for the prosecution and the judge, who represented the court… I don't know the names of the officials who attended the execution except Dr Mowaffak Al Rubaie - I'd seen him on television”. If Rubaie was the only person that Faroun recognised in the gathering, then it stands to reason that he could not have misidentified him as one among the two Iraqi government officials recording the event on video-enabled cellphone. (See: Mahdi Abdelhadi, “Witness tells of Saddam’s last moments”, available at this writing at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6257077.stm).

[10] “Iraq to examine abusive conduct toward Hussein”, The New York Times, January 3, 2007, available at: http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0913FA3C540C708CDDA80894DF404482

[11] See: David Ignatius, “In Iraq’s Choice, a Chance for Unity”, The Washington Post, April 26, 2006, page A25.

[12] Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power, Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Summit Books, 1983, p 53.

[13] The New York Times, December 8, 2006, “Israeli Leader Rejects Link Between Iraq and Mideast Woes”.

[14] “Bush-Blair split over report’s key proposals, President rejects talks with Iran and Syria”, The Guardian, December 8, 2006.

[15] “Iran fury at Blair 'tirade of allegations'”, The Times, London, December 28, 2006; available at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2520628,00.html.

[16] “If US leaves Iraq we will arm Sunni militias, Saudis say”, The Guardian, December 14, 2006.

[17] These reports were carried by a number of news channels, such as Al Jazeera. See: http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/conspiracy_theory/fullstory.asp?id=362

[18] Quoted in Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, A Political Biography, Brassey’s, 1991, page 142.

[19] The path to war is retraced with admirable clarity in Karsh and Rautsi, op. cit., chapter 6.

[20] The “talking points” memo filed by Alexander Haig is marked “top secret” and reports a series of fruitful diplomatic engagements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This document is available in facsimile at the website of the investigative journalist Robert Parry: www.consortiumnews.com. It is at the moment of writing, accessible through the archives of the website http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile5.html.

[21] Michael T. Klare in Andrew J. Bacevic and Efraim Inbar (editors), The Gulf War of 1991 Reconsidered, Frank Cass, 2003, p 14.

After Saddam, Nobody left to blame

With Saddam out of the way, the U.S. will have nobody left to blame for the looming catastrophe in West Asia

Sukumar Muralidharan

There is a personality trait that George Bush, president of the U.S.A., has never been able to shake off. As governor of the state of Texas, he won great eminence as the most prolific executioner in the U.S., sparing nobody who had been convicted under the state’s infamously lax judicial processes from an experience of the after-life. This quirk has lived with him since and is so strongly manifest at times that it could well be a pathological condition requiring professional assistance.

Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq who for all of a quarter-century, survived the adversities of war, neighbourly hostility, and the most brutal regime of economic sanctions ever devised, was on November 5, 2006, sentenced to die on the gallows. The date of the verdict was chosen with deliberate attention to the midterm elections to the U.S. Congress on November 7. It was in media parlance, designed to dominate the “news cycle” before the balloting began, to enable Bush to gather a rich harvest of votes from a U.S. populace grateful for the imminent demise of a dictator.

The U.S. electorate though, proved cussedly ungrateful and Bush went down to ignominious defeat. Shortly afterwards, the boy-president was administered a stern rebuke from a group of elders in the business of international geopolitics, who told him that quite contrary to his blithe predictions of imminent victory just weeks before, the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating”. The Iraq Study Group co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker, who has loyally served Bush senior through election campaigns and wars, also reprimanded junior for his reckless, go-it-alone strategy, strongly urging him to bring major players in the region, like Iran and Syria, into the endeavour of pacifying Iraq.

Bush’s response was not to heed the advice of elders, but to fall back once again on the gratuitous excitement afforded by the spectacle of a judicial murder. On December 30, after an appeals process that failed to meet the most rudimentary standards of judicial fairness, Saddam Hussein was hanged in a dank and dinghy chamber in Baghdad. The Eid Al-Adha observance was just beginning for the Sunni Muslim faith and the timing of the execution was a deliberate cultural affront, confected by the U.S. masters and a narrow clique within Iraq’s Shi’a community, intent on revenge for real and imagined indignities suffered under Saddam.

Even those who retained some residual faith in the bonafides of the Iraqi government, thought the decision to make a public spectacle of a hanging rather bizarre, though in the final instance, they were willing to grudgingly accept it as a well-intended effort to establish that a page had been turned in a nation’s tortured history.

The plot though, went awry when the man expected to play the part of the criminal brought to justice, refused to play by the script. The official video released soon after the hanging, showed a man who went to his death with the dignity of a warrior. And a cellphone video recording – put into circulation on the internet shortly afterwards with the suspected complicity of the Iraqi government – gave a new definition to the term “gallows humour”. It showed the deposed president cordially engaging his hangmen in mutual insults as he stood with a noose around his neck, unequivocally emerging with the advantage in the exchanges, until the trapdoor opened up under him.

As the import of the unauthorised video began to sink in, the Bush administration authorised senior officials to go public about its efforts to defer the execution till after the Eid observance, so that questions about legal process could be answered. And as a puppet regime’s actions turned into an international public relations disaster, U.S. officials – anxious to avoid renewed obloquy – went public with their perception that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki “never fully explained his urgency in carrying out the death sentence”. But the U.S. had ostensibly been reluctant to stand in the way of a sovereign decision by the Iraqi government to put the former president out of the way.

Less than a fortnight afterwards, Bush returned to form after that brief interlude of concern for Iraqi sovereignty. In defiance of the popular mood in the U.S. and the explicit objections of the Iraqi government, he ordered another 20,000 U.S. troops into Iraq in a final gambit to save his war enterprise from an ignominy greater than Vietnam.

The new U.S. force deployments would be tasked with securing Baghdad, in league with police and army personnel to be mobilised by the Iraqi government. No catchy name has yet been coined for the new phase in the evolving disaster. But Bush’s final throw of the dice strongly brings to mind his bravado from just months before, when he announced “Operation Together Forward”, a military campaign undertaken in association with Iraqi forces, to finally clear Baghdad of all its irksome insurgents.

Then as now, Bush had a trophy to display in gratification of his most sordid instincts. He had for long put down all the troubles in Iraq to the Al Qaeda operation ostensibly headed by the Jordanian born Ayman Al-Zawahari. Following Zawahari’s elimination in June 2006, Bush made a hugely hyped visit to Baghdad to link hands with Maliki and celebrate the new trophy he had added to his ample collection. In a radio address following his return home, Bush assured the U.S. public that Maliki was a leader who could be trusted to act in the best interests of Iraq. By “embedding” military teams in “Iraqi army and police units”, he announced, the U.S. would assist in the final transition to peace and harmony by “improving” command and control and “rooting out” corruption.

Operation Together Forward got off to a rocky start and was quickly returned to the drawing board for serious reassessment. It was then relaunched and abandoned soon afterwards, since Maliki seemed uninterested in keeping his side of the bargain. Rather, his main priority seemed to be to save the Shi’a militias, especially the Jaish-Al Mahdi led by his clerical patron, Muqtada Al-Sadr, from the intrusive attentions of the U.S. military force.

This much indeed was recorded by Stephen Hadley, National Security Advisor to the U.S. President, in a top secret report filed early in November, after an extended series of interactions with Maliki. But the U.S. has no other horse to back in Iraq. And if it wants to return a semblance of order to the country, it needs necessarily to recruit the goodwill of neighbouring states like Iran and Syria.

Needless to say, this is an admission of failure that is completely contrary to Bush’s fundamental instincts. And he has responded to the looming certainty of defeat the only way he knows – by escalating the threats against Iraq’s neighbours. Thus has it come to pass, that much like the catastrophe of Vietnam, which spilled over national boundaries to embrace Cambodia and Laos in its malevolence, Iraq too seems on the verge of sparking off a full-fledged regional war. And this conflagration will, if anything, be infinitely more traumatic, not merely for West Asia but for the whole world.