India and the War on Iraq:
A Few Thoughts on the Demise of the Civilisational Ethos

[Originally published in Humanscape 11, no. 1 (January 2004), pp. 25-27].
One brutal and inescapable truth must have become transparent to every conscientious inhabitant of the globe with the "conclusion" of the American military engagement in Iraq. The United States now exercises overlordship over the rest of the world in nearly all domains of life, and it is determined to exercise its power, if necessary in the teeth of worldwide opposition, not merely to safeguard its own interests, which for any nation-state must be a reasonable aspiration, but to ensure that its overwhelming superiority as a military and economic power remains wholly undiminished and that American notions about what constitutes "success", in personal and political life alike, continue to receive the approbation of the entire world. No country in history has ever sought as complete a domination over the minds of men and women as that which the United States seeks to achieve, and that too in the name of freedom, liberty, happiness, and all the other virtues with which Americans believe themselves to be uniquely blessed. Many well-meaning Americans opposed to the war appear to think that the cabal of hawks who wield power in Washington have betrayed the ideals of the American republic, and some appear to find comfort in the thought that these despots of the lunatic right, many energized by the moralizing fervor of evangelical Christianity, cannot hold power in perpetuity. But little do they realize that one American president after another has always insisted that God takes a special interest in the destiny of the United States, and is intolerant of all competing visions of the good and just life. It was the particular shortcoming of totalitarian, despotic, and colonial regimes that, though their conception of human fulfillment was dismal and the machinery of state oppression was spectacularly vigilant, they were unable to prevent their victims from dreaming their dreams. The Americans, more patient and enthusiastic students of psychology, addressed this problem head-on. The "American Dream" has never been only about owning one's own house and car, or having the freedom to amass guiltlessly a massive fortune or move from one place to another with abandon: it is a dream that obviates any desire or need to dream any more.

Long before the present war commenced, opponents and political commentators were asking, 'Who next after Iraq?' The hostilities had barely ceased before ominous warnings began to be sounded against Syria, a state which the US has long since been inclined to view as friendly to Islamic terrorists. The obvious question, from the standpoint of Indians and even Indians in the diaspora, is what consequences the war might have on South Asia, and on the relations between India and Pakistan. During the months that the US was furnishing the groundwork for the conflict and the United Nations was debating the case for a UN-sanctioned war against Iraq, Pakistan, as a non-permanent member of the Security Council, never lost any of the ample opportunities it had of gaining the ear of the world in reiterating its opposition to what it describes as India's brutal occupation of Kashmir. Whatever may happen anywhere else in the world, in Pakistan the default position requires unquestioning fealty to the idea that Muslim-dominated Kashmir can never be a part of India. Pakistan's singular foreign policy mission is to keep alive the issue of Kashmir before the world and appear as a champion of Kashmiri self-determination, a laudable objective notwithstanding the fact that minorities have fared much worse in Pakistan than they have in most other countries. At the critical moment when Pakistan was being pressurized into supporting the United States, while common Pakistanis were staging vocal demonstrations in opposition to an illegal war upon another Islamic nation, Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations was attempting to deflect attention away from Pakistan's position on Iraq to the conflict in Kashmir. There might have been more than mere unease at the thought that Pakistan, for all the goodwill it has earned as a front-line ally of the US in the war against terrorism, may before long be an object of American wrath.

Certainly in India and its diaspora, supporters of militant Hinduism, who unequivocally declared their enthusiasm for the war on Iraq, were jubilant at the example set by the United States in its willingness to subdue a Muslim nation, and forthright announced that if the US wished to be consistent in its application of foreign policy, Pakistan, as the "hotbed" of international terrorism, deserved to be subjected to the same punishment meted out to Iraq. Thus, to take one example, Parsuram Maharaj, one of the leaders of Trinidad's Sanatan Dharma Mahasabha, concludes his piece on "The Right of Defeating Iraq" with the plea that "the American and UK forces upon completion of the Iraq occupation must seriously consider moving also against the terrorist states of Iran, Syria, Pakistan and North Korea." Indeed, taking encouragement from American unilateralism, senior officials in the Indian government noted that they were similarly entitled to take punitive and unilateral action against a two-bit terrorist state such as Pakistan.

For most commentators, naked political considerations rise to the fore in assessing the repercussions that the war on Iraq might have on the Indian subcontinent. The new U.S.-India Institute for Strategic Policy set up in Washington in the wake of the war furnishes some clues that the US and India, whatever their differences, are likely to find common cause in their desire to curb the growing economic and military power of China. Before Indians exult in the importance that the United States appears to be attaching to enhanced relations with India, it behooves them to recall that in politics there are no enduring friends or foes, and whatever the pretensions of the US that it is a force for "good" in this world, it has shown itself eminently capable of using other nations in the advancement of its own interests. One Pakistani general, recalling the manner in which Pakistan was abandoned by the US once the Soviet Union was compelled to withdraw from Afghanistan, stated that the US had treated Pakistan as a used condom that is flushed down the drain. But it is for far more than mere political considerations that Indians should be wary of the triumph of American arms. It is not enough to shudder at the thought that, acting from sheer arrogance and hubris, in defiance of world opinion, the United States can take it upon itself to demolish another nation in an act of naked and barbaric aggression, and even promise other supposed "rogue states" and would-be recalcitrant nations that the same misfortune awaits them. What is truly alarming is that in this act of aggression one can witness the flowering of the genocidal intent that has animated the United States since its very inception as a nation-state that drove native American tribes into extinction and was founded on slave labor.
Though many supporters of the war, in and outside the American administration, have been keen on characterizing protestors as naive and unwilling to face up to the demonic nature of Saddam Hussein's regime, no one opposing the war did so on the grounds that Saddam Hussein represented the aspirations of the Iraqi people. That Saddam was a cruel despot and an absolutely despicable person is not in doubt. Americans themselves insisted that Iraq is far more than Saddam Hussein, but the expression of this sentiment by Americans would be comical if it were not so menacing. Having homogenized their own culture to an unprecedented degree, the Americans discovered multiculturalism a couple of decades ago, and ever since have been peddling this jejune idea to the rest of the world. The "liberation" of Iraq has been justified with the argument that Saddam Hussein suppressed his own subjects, most particularly Kurds and Shias, but behind this noise it is not difficult to detect the idea, which commentators such as Max Boot and Bernard Lewis have not been loathe to express, that Iraq has come to represent the cruel weight of Arab tradition. Multicultural America has, ironically, arrogated to itself the mission to pluralize older cultures and make them aware of their "diversity", a thought as preposterous as it is sickening. Few among the thousands of articles published on Iraq in American newspapers and journals have mentioned, for example, the fact that for well over 2,500 years the Jews were comfortably settled in Iraq, constituting the oldest diaspora in Jewish history, and that full-scale persecution of Jews largely commenced in the late 1930s and 1940s after Germany had shown the way. Throughout the nineteenth century, as Jews were hounded in Europe, and cast aside as Christ-killers in the United States, they flourished amidst a tolerant society in Iraq.

Considering that Americans, whose worldwide reputation for parochialism is a fact of life, have generally learnt both their geography and history at war, an activity in which they are habitually engaged, one can be certain that the vast bulk of the young soldiers who crossed the bridges over the Tigris and the Euphrates were singularly unaware that human civilization arose at the banks of these great rivers. Fewer must be the American soldiers who know of Baghdad as the city that animated the imagination of every child and adult familiar with the Thousand and One Nights. Baghdad was for centuries a city of immense learning, and the Mongols who sacked the city earned notoriety as ferocious barbarians. Should we think of the Americans, who openly allowed the National Museum, the National Library, the National Archives, and the Islamic Library of Qurans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments, to be plundered, ransacked, and burn, as otherwise? The building housing the Petroleum Ministry was immediately secured, but it has been stated that troops could not be spared to safeguard the cultural inheritance, not merely of the Arabs, but of human civilization. No conspiracy theory is required to entertain the speculation that American collectors who find the restrictions on export of antiquities in place in countries such as Iraq, Iran, and India prohibitive and violative of the principles of "free trade" must be secretly rejoicing that the invisible hand guiding markets has once again asserted its presence. Or is there in these acts of desecration the sign of something much more ominous, such as the American penchant for beginning with a clean slate? Closure and erasure are the twin towers of American hegemony.

As Indians (and others) ponder over the significance of the war on Iraq, they must commence with the sobering thought that complex and ancient civilizations have no safeguards and just as little purchasing power in the modern world. Indians might justifiably trumpet the antiquity of their civilization, the greatness of its achievements in philosophy, grammar, literature, mathematics, and other domains of cultural and intellectual life, but the antiquity, complexity, plurality, and ecumenism of Indian civilization furnish, as the present war has demonstrated, no assurance of survival against the crusading ambitions of a nation-state whose goodness is more productive of disease, devastation, destruction, and death than the wickedness of despots. The ideologues of Hindutva who rejoice in the humbling of Islam will, one hopes, move to an awareness that in the humbling of Iraq is the humbling of the very idea of human civilization. As Americans go about looking for weapons of mass destruction, the world should be wary of how Americans have themselves become weapons of mass destruction.