Crawling from the Wreckage

by Gwynne Dyer

Such plain talk is not “blaming the victim.” It is recognizing realities, which is the first step towards addressing them. And where the despairing poor of South Africa should be addressing their anger is not at helpless Zimbabweans but at their president, who let this human catastrophe happen.

  Mbeki finally left power, in the most humiliating of circumstances, in late 2009. The man who took his place, after the 2009 election, was the same man Mbeki had spent the previous few years trying to have jailed on corruption charges: Jacob Zuma. It is not yet clear what he is going to do about South Africa’s borders.

  Canada has only one disputed frontier, in the Arctic. But the dispute is not with the Russians, as Prime Minister Harper likes to pretend; it is with the Americans. Worse yet (for those with dreams of the Canadian North as a new source of wealth) the Northwest Passage will never be a useful commercial route regardless of whether Canada controls it or not.

  September 15, 2009

  THE NORTHERN PASSAGES

  Early next week two German-owned container ships will arrive in Rotterdam from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, having taken only one month to make the voyage. That’s much faster than usual—but then, they didn’t take the usual route down through the South China Sea, past Singapore, round the bottom of India, through the Suez Canal (pay toll here), across the Mediterranean and up the west coast of Europe. They just went around the top of Russia.

  It’s the first-ever commercial transit through the Northeast Passage by non-Russian ships, and it shortens the sea trip between East Asia and Europe by almost a third. The melting of the Arctic sea ice made it possible, although for the moment it’s only possible for a couple of months at the end of the summer melt season, when the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover shrinks dramatically. But it is a sign of things to come.

  The voyage is more evidence that climate change is well underway and will strike the Arctic region hard. But it also shows that all the recent fuss about the Northwest Passage is irrelevant.

  The Northwest Passage, another potential shortcut between Europe and East Asia, goes through the Canadian Arctic archipelago. Although icebreakers have traversed it from time to time, no ordinary commercial ship has ever carried cargo through it. But when the Russians put on their little propaganda show at the North Pole two years ago, the Canadian government had kittens.

  In 2007, Artur Chilingarov, a Russian scientist famous for his work in the polar regions and Arctic adviser to then-president Vladimir Putin, took a mini-sub to the North Pole and planted a Russian flag on the seabed. Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, immediately flew to Iqaluit in the high Arctic and responded with a rabble-rousing speech.

  “Canada has a choice when it comes to defending our sovereignty in the Arctic,” he said. “We either use it or lose it. And make no mistake: this government intends to use it.” He then announced a program to build six to eight armed Arctic patrol vessels to assert Canadian control over the Northwest Passage and a deepwater naval base on Baffin Island to support them.

  “I don’t know why the Canadians reacted as they did,” Chilingarov told me a few months later in Moscow, and on the face of it, he had a case. After all, Russia has no claims over any land or water that might conceivably belong to Canada, and Canada makes no claim on the North Pole. But Chilingarov actually understood the game that Harper was playing quite well.

  Canada’s dispute over sovereignty of the Northwest Passage is actually with the United States, not Russia. The Russians have absolutely no interest in the Northwest Passage, since they have their own rival, the Northeast Passage (which they call the Northern Sea Route). Still, the U.S. has long maintained that the Northwest Passage could be very useful if it were ice-free, so Washington insists that it is an international waterway which Canada has no right to control.

  Canada disputes that position, pointing out that all six potential routes for a commercially viable Northwest Passage wind between islands that are close together and indisputably Canadian. But Ottawa has never asserted military control over the Northwest Passage until now, because to do so would risk an awkward confrontation with the United States. However, if you can pretend that you are building those warships and that naval base to hold the wicked Russians at bay, not to defy the Americans …

  That is Harper’s game, and he now visits the high north every summer to reassert Canada’s sovereignty claims. In the end, however, it will make no difference, as the Northwest Passage will never become a major shipping route. The Northeast Passage is just too much easier.

  The problem for Canada is that all the routes for a Northwest Passage involve shallow and/or narrow straits between various islands in the country’s Arctic archipelago, and the prevailing winds and currents in the Arctic Ocean tend to push whatever loose sea ice there is into those straits. It is unlikely that cargo ships that are not double-hulled and strengthened against ice will ever get insurance for the passage at an affordable price.

  On the other hand, the Northeast Passage is mostly open water (once the ice retreats from the Russian coast), and there is already a major infrastructure of ports and nuclear-powered ice-breakers in the region. If the distances are roughly comparable, shippers will prefer the Northeast Passage every time—and the distances are comparable.

  Just look at the Arctic Ocean on a globe, rather than in the familiar flat-Earth Mercator projection. It is instantly obvious that the distance is the same whether shipping between Europe and East Asia crosses the Arctic Ocean by running along the Russia’s Arctic coast (the North east Passage) or weaving between Canada’s Arctic islands (the North west Passage). The same is true for cargo travelling between Europe and the west coast of North America, and the consequence is that the Northwest Passage will never become commercially viable.

  21.

  IRAQ II

  By mid-2006, the war in Iraq was rarely front-page news. It was actually the worst time of all for the Iraqis, with the Sunni-Shia civil war killing many thousands each month and creating refugees in the millions, but for most North Americans, it had become just a familiar noise in the background, like bad plumbing. For the families who actually had sons and daughters there it was very different, but they were mostly working-class Americans who were blinded by “patriotism” and unused to protest.

  That’s really why Bush and Blair got away with it, despite some amazing displays of ignorance.

  May 26, 2006

  MISSING THE POINT

  U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, giving their umpteenth joint press conference at the White House on Thursday, showed the amateurs how to deal with the media. Wry, humble, funny, rueful, always upbeat—they were a polished double act that could have put a positive spin on the Black Death. Iraq has allegedly “turned the corner” again after five months of bitter deadlock. A new government has taken office in Baghdad that only lacks a defence minister and an interior minister, and Bush and Blair were there to sell it as a success.

  The press always likes to have its tummy tickled, so all the questions were basically friendly. The answers to the last question, however, were very revealing. A journalist recalled that both men have admitted to missteps and mistakes in Iraq, and asked them which ones they regretted most.

  President Bush did public penance for his macho remarks about the emerging Iraq resistance movement—“bring ‘em on”—back in the hyper-confident “Mission Accomplished” days of 2003. It was charming, vintage Bush: “I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know.” And he avowed that “the biggest mistake that’s happened so far, at least from [in terms of] our country’s involvement in Iraq, is Abu Ghraib.”

  Tony Blair aimed for a more reflective tone: “I think that probably … we could have done de-Baathification in a more differentiated manner than we did … But the biggest reason why Iraq has been difficult is the determination by our opponents to defeat us.”

  Now there’s a novel concept: our opponents are d
etermined to defeat us. No wonder that Blair added: “Maybe in retrospect, when we look back, it should have been very obvious to us.” But the resentful whine in Blair’s voice was entirely genuine: how was he to know they would fight back? Maybe he could have done de-Baathification a bit better, but apart from that, it’s not his fault.

  Tony Blair is a fairly bright man, and George W. Bush is not as dim as he seems, so how can they be so obtuse about Iraq? De-Baathification, re-Baathification, retro-Baathification—nothing can change the basic fact that the Baath Party that had ruled Iraq since the 1960s was deeply nationalist and profoundly hostile to the United States (because it is Israel’s closest ally) and to Britain (because it is the former imperial ruler of Iraq).

  Fire all the Baathists, and they will go underground and join the resistance. Leave them in their jobs, and they will be a fifth column of spies and saboteurs for the resistance. Likewise for the empty debate about whether U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer made a fatal mistake by disbanding the entire Iraqi army in the spring of 2003. Disband the army, and several hundred thousand trained men will take their skills and their weapons and join the resistance. Leave the existing army in place and its officers will sell the foreign-occupation troops out to the resistance at every opportunity, while awaiting the right moment for a national uprising against the foreigners.

  The original decision to invade Iraq was the fatal mistake; the rest is just consequences. Iraq’s government was crueller and less loved than most regimes in the Arab world, but the United States and Britain would be facing the same kind of resistance movement today if they had invaded Morocco, Egypt or Yemen in 2003. There is no country of over two million people in the Arab world where an invading American army would not soon be confronted by the kind of resistance it is facing in Iraq.

  History matters, and for Arabs all recent history is bad. Britain lured the Arabs into revolt against their Turkish overlords in the First World War with a promise of independence, then carved them up into the familiar Middle Eastern states of the present and bound them all in colonial servitude. It also promised Jews a national homeland in Palestine, the state of Israel—which America has unstintingly supported, regardless of Israel’s policies towards its Arab neighbours, for over forty years. Why would any Arab country welcome an invasion by the United States and Britain?

  The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was doomed from the first, and Bush and Blair had dozens of experts on call who could have told them why. Either they didn’t listen, or they chose not to ask.

  By early 2007, it was clear that the United States was on its way out of Iraq as fast as possible, so the major objective for most of the players became saving face and avoiding blame. All those wasted deaths had to be somebody else’s fault.

  February 26, 2007

  BLAME THE IRAQIS

  As the people who talked the United States into the Iraq War try to talk their way out of the blame for the mess they made, one dominant theme has emerged: blame the Iraqis. Our intentions were good; we did our best to help; but the Iraqis are vicious, incompetent ingrates who would prefer to kill one another rather than seize the freedom we brought them. It’s not our fault that it turned out so badly.

  And it has turned out rather badly, hasn’t it? President George W. Bush will go no further than to say that he is “disappointed by the pace of success,” and his British sidekick, Prime Minister Tony Blair, still insists, “We will beat them [the Iraqi resistance] when we realize that it’s not our fault that they’re doing this.” But practically everybody else in the U.S. and Britain knows that the invasion of Iraq was a huge disaster.

  Somebody must be to blame, and it cannot be us, so it must be those brutal, stupid Iraqis. There was no surprise last November when arch neo-conservative Richard Perle, ex-chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, said that he had “underestimated the depravity” in Iraq. He has a lot of blame to shift, so he would say that, wouldn’t he?

  It was no surprise, either, when right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, once an eager supporter of the war, elaborated on the same theme less than a month ago: “Thousands of brave American soldiers have died trying to counter, put down and prevent civil strife. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shias kill Shias and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on [America] is simply perverse … Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.”

  Brazen, self-serving distortions of the truth by people who have a lot of explaining to do, are not in the least bit surprising, because if the ghastly mess in Iraq wasn’t the fault of Iraqis, then it would have to be the fault of Americans. Perle and Krauthammer would figure quite prominently among the Americans in question.

  But what is one to make of Gary Trudeau peddling the same line in his comic strip Doonesbury? The strip runs daily in 1,400 newspapers around the world, and often serves as the vehicle for political or social commentary from a liberal perspective. It never supported the invasion of Iraq, but this Monday’s strip was a classic exercise in stereotyping and blame-shifting.

  An American colonel, planning the day’s operation in the streets of Baghdad, notices that his Iraq army opposite number has not shown up yet and sends a soldier to find him. Cut to the Iraqi army officer: still behind his desk, coffee cup in hand, ashtray full of cigarettes. He says to the young American soldier: “It’s not in my book. Are you sure it’s today?” The U.S. solder wearily replies “Yes, sir. You’ll recall we fight every day.”

  Unravelling the message doesn’t take a Marshall MacLuhan: U.S. troops are carrying the burden of the war while lazy, cowardly Iraqis shun their duty. They don’t deserve us.

  The strip the weekend before last was even more blatant in blaming the failure on the Iraqis. An American soldier gets behind the wheel of a Humvee and says “Ready to do this, partner?” to the same Iraqi officer, sitting beside him in the front seat. The Iraqi officer is asleep.

  As they approach the target house, the Iraqi officer, now awake, says “I know this house. The owner is Sunni scum.” “Well, intel wants us to capture the guy alive,” says the American. “That will not be possible. I am sworn to revenge,” replies the Iraqi.

  “Why,” asks the American. “What’d he ever do to you?”

  “A member of his family killed a member of mine,” replies the Iraqi officer, cigarette dangling from his lips. “What? When did this happen?” asks the shocked American.

  “1387,” replies the Iraqi officer. “What is the MATTER with you people?” screams the American.

  Get the message? These Ay-rabs are not only lazy, they are so savage that they harbour murderous grudges over six centuries; even Americans cannot bring these people to their senses; let’s get the hell out of here; it isn’t our fault that it all went wrong.

  Getting out of Iraq is the least bad thing the United States can do now, and the sooner the better. If Americans must manufacture racist fantasies about the victims in order to salve their pride on the way out, then so be it. But it is a shameful, childish lie.

  So, if they are on their way out, what happens next? I wrote the following piece three years ago but I don’t think I would change a word of it today.

  June 23, 2007

  THE MIDDLE EAST AFTER IRAQ

  The war in Iraq is clearly lost, both on the ground and in the court of American public opinion, and the pullout will probably begin about ten minutes after the new U.S. president is inaugurated in January 2009. That’s only eighteen months from now, so it’s time to think about what happens next.

  The American withdrawal will not stop with Iraq. Iran is going to be the new great power in the region, and the little Arab oil sheikhdoms on the opposite side of the Gulf will probably close down the U.S. bases on their soil in order to keep Iran sweet. There will be no Iranian troops in Iraq, however, and Iran lacks the military capability for adventures in t
he further reaches of the Arab world even if it had the desire.

  After Iraq, there will be huge resistance in the United States to any more military commitments in the Middle East, so for the first time in forty years the status quo in the region will not be backed by a U.S. military guarantee. Beyond forecasts of civil war in Iraq, however, there has been little effort to discern what the Middle East will actually look like after the U.S. troops go home.

  There is already a civil war in Iraq, and it might even get worse for a time after American troops leave, but these things always sputter out in the end. There will still be an Iraqi state, plus or minus Kurdistan, and regardless of whether or not the central government in Baghdad exercises real control over the Sunni-majority areas between Baghdad, Mosul and the Syrian border.

  The Sunni Arab parts of Iraq have been turned into a training ground for Islamist extremists from all parts of the Arab world by the American invasion. Once the American troops are gone, however, the action will soon move elsewhere, for the U.S. defeat in Iraq has dramatically raised the prestige of Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world and beyond.

  The real price of America’s Middle Eastern adventure will be paid not in Iraq itself, but in the Arab states that still have secular and/or pro-Western regimes. The main (and generally outlawed) political opposition in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria and half a dozen others has been Islamist revolutionaries for many years already, and now some of them are going to win.

  It’s not possible to predict which Arab states will fall under Islamist control, and they certainly aren’t all going to: the pipe dream of a world-spanning Islamic empire remains precisely that. But it will be astonishing if one or more of the existing Arab regimes does not fall to an Islamist revolution in the next few years.