'Neither their war nor their peace'

Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq

Tariq Ali [London, Verso, 2003; Pp. 214]

Reviewed by: Sally Bland

From: the Jordan Times (used w/permission).

THOUGH PACKED with information and dealing with a very current topic, Tariq Ali's just published book, `Bush in Babylon', is not journalistic coverage. It is a much more ambitious project, which attests to the author's commitment to genuine liberation and democracy for the peoples of the world.

Delivering incisive analysis of a range of interrelated issues, Ali puts the most recent US-engineered war on Iraq in the context of imperialist policy, world politics and contemporary Arab history.

The book traces the political history of Iraq from the time of the 1958 revolution onwards, focusing on the origins and development of the Communist and Baath parties respectively, and on the Iraqi people's long history of resistance to domination.

Many parallels are drawn between the situation in Iraq and that in Palestine, between the British colonisation of Iraq and of India, between US intervention in the Middle East and in Latin America, Asia and Yugoslavia.

Few escape the author's scathing critique. While Ali puts the onus on the US and UK governments for their totally unjustified aggression against the Iraqi people and virtual devastation of the country, he also highlights the weaknesses in the Arab political system that allowed such foreign intervention to happen. As a corollary to this, a coherent and interesting explanation is offered for why decolonisation in the region ended in the rise of military regimes rather than democratic, representative governments.

In terms of intellectual honesty and courageous critique - eloquently stating truths that many do not want to hear - this book deserves to be ranked alongside the writing of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.

Ali contends that the 2003 war on Iraq - "an ominous opening for the twenty-first century" - was not first and foremost about oil. "If the war had just been about oil, there was nothing to prevent a rapprochement with Saddam Hussein, who would have dealt just as happily with US companies as he did with the French and the Russians." (p. 152)

While there were many reasons for Iraq to be targeted, not least US receptiveness to the views of the Israeli military, the crux of the matter was expanding the US empire. Ali quotes David Frum, Bush's former speech writer, who argued that "an American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe the Romans". (p. 154)

The author takes this a step farther, putting the war in global context: "The American Empire was using its huge military arsenal to teach the South a lesson in the North's power to intimidate and control it." (p. 160)

In view of this, the author believes the only possible stance to adopt is the slogan raised in a San Francisco anti-war demonstration last spring: "Neither their war nor their peace."

But there are also limits to the empire, Ali reminds us, citing "an astonishing statistic: for every single day that this (British) empire existed there was a corresponding act of rebellion by its subjects against its rule. It is something that the new Empire loyalists might ponder as the situation in Iraq unfolds, and US casualties slowly mount". (p. 50)

This is a book that gives voice to the real Iraqi opposition, not the hand-picked clique that was catapulted to fame by American and British tanks. Ali rounds out his political analysis with extracts from Iraqi poets, such as Saadi Youssef and Mudhaffar Al Nawab, and mentions the views of other principled opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime, some of whom he has known personally. (It is telling that thousands of these exiles seem to have been barred from returning to "liberated" Iraq.)

Above all, Ali points to the future that will be drawn by the new generation of Iraqis who are growing up under occupation, with the US army resorting to basically the same methods as the Israeli army uses in Palestine.

"These children, now forced to spend their formative years under a foreign occupation, will be the ones who will organise a new Intifada in the not too distant future." (p. 17)