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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

Did the way American POWs were humiliated, brutalized and killed, has the way the dying regime treated its own citizens, sobered any of America’s other critics? Have American gifts of food, water and medicine, have the victorious army’s $50 rental payments to farmers for parking weapons on their land, while deploying doctors to help the sick, made any difference?

Have those who softpedalled  Saddam’s “old” crimes of gassing Kurds and Iranians, invading Kuwait, bombing Saudis and Israelis, torturing Iraqis, felt ashamed by reports of banned chemical weapons possibly hidden in a girls’ school, of  terrorist training camps uncovered, of Ricin found among terrorists tied to al Qaeda in the North?

Were any anti-Americans silenced by how Saddam fought the war, with “death squads” hiding ammunition in hospitals or mosques, dressing up as women to fight, “recruiting” conscripts at gunpoint -- and shooting those who hesitated in the back of their heads --  or waving a white flag, then firing?

Asymmetrical Warfare

Ours is an age of asymmetrical warfare. The term usually applies to the mismatch between the massive firepower of a Westernized, high-tech army versus the incendiary but limited power of the terrorist.  Western armies can pulverize a population, and rarely do; terrorists can kill and scare but cannot conquer a country despite their deadly ambitions.  The war in Iraq demonstrated a variation on the theme, with the coalition’s  Abrams tanks and B-52 bombers dwarfing the Iraqis AK-47 rifles. As a result, coalition forces counted their casualties one-by-one, the Iraqis counted them by the hundreds.

The conflict was asymmetrical in many other ways as well. For starters, the standards of success differed. Zero tolerance for any coalition missteps coexisted with exaggerations of any Iraqi resistance. Reporters publicized every glitch in the coalition advance, turning a maintenance convoy’s wrong turn into a major defeat that “slowed the momentum” and presaged defeat – three days into the war.

When an American pilot broke his leg, CNN hyped this as “breaking news.” Similarly, one suicide bomber, who murdered four American soldiers at a time when thousands of Iraqis were surrendering or dying, was treated as the start of a wave of terrorism that would create a Vietnam in the desert – after barely two weeks of fighting and few coalition casualties.

These asymmetrical expectations translated into different moral standards as well. The allies laudably took upon themselves the goal of trying to minimize civilian casualties – often at the cost of soldiers’ lives. Even the Pentagon avoided the euphemistic downplaying of tragic deaths as “collateral damage.” Yet, in the first week, amid the relatively surgical bombardment of Baghdad, when an errant missile tragically killed civilians in a market, Kofi Annan started lecturing about “humanitarian” issues – without the good UN Secretary General addressing any of the Saddamistas’ conscious violations of humanitarian standards. 

Double Standards

Somehow, coalition mistakes consistently pricked the conscience of the world more than deliberate Iraqi malevolence.  It seemed that after decades of killing, according to some estimates, as many as one million of his own people, Saddam and his death-squads had a free pass to kill Iraqis or coalition forces, now in the name of Iraqi “resistance.”

Moreover, even as the allies bent over backwards to emphasize that the war was only against Saddam and his regime, not against the Iraqi people, and certainly not against Islam, many Muslims did not feel inhibited about declaring a jihad against America – including an imam in Ottawa. When a Palestinian suicide bomber at a Netanya caf? claimed to be motivated by the war in Iraq rather than the war against Israel, people mindlessly echoed his claim of giving a “gift” to the Iraqi people. What kind of a gift is it to target citizens sipping coffee in another, non-combatant country?

In fact, the conventional wisdom’s bizarre linkage between the Iraqi conflict and the Palestinian conflict also defies logic, and is not “evenhanded” at all.  The coalition attacked Iraq principally because of the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam’s compulsive search for weapons, and the new calculus of Western vulnerability after  September 11. Israel had little to do with it. Yet not only was Palestinian violence in the name of the Iraqi war accepted, so, too, was Saddam Hussein’s logic that Israel could have been a legitimate target and Tony Blair’s logic that after the Iraqi war, the Bush Administration should pressure Israel. There are many compelling reasons to seek a lasting and secure peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Mollifying the British or some fantasy linkage imposed by anti-Western fanatics should not be among them.

The Second-Guessing

There was asymmetry even in the second-guessing. The West was plagued by self-doubt about this war – justifiably. Inherent in democratic political culture is the ability to be self-critical and dissent. These are difficult times, demanding hard choices.  Even with the swift coalition victory, no person of conscience watching the carnage in Iraq could avoid revisiting the question of to fight Saddam or not to fight, balancing the unhappy risks inherent in both choices.

And even while supporting their troops, Americans mourned the losses on both sides, and pressured the army to try to avoid unnecessary casualties.  Those who naively believed that modern war is a cakewalk were sobered. Yet even as anti-war forces warned that the Americans might push Saddam into using weapons of mass destruction he supposedly did not have, the streets of Paris and Montreal, of Berkeley and Islamabad, were not filled with people questioning this dictator whose regime exploited worldwide “peace” protests to remain in power and send loyalists to the slaughter.

“Asymmetry” appears to be a fancy name for a double standard, with Western democracies held to an unrealistically high standard of behavior – yet demonized disproportionately. Underlying this double standard lurks a condescending attitude toward Iraqis in particular and Muslims in general.

In condemning Western states which fight with self-imposed constraints against political entities that emphasize their very lack of restraint we assume that the Western states view each life as precious and that the Iraqis and others do not. Were critics of the war, in their myopic protests and selective indignation, then saying that Muslims or Iraqis do not value human life and that they could not be expected to abide by accepted norms of civilized behavior? If so, then who are the real racists?

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal.