Arnaud de Borchgrave
Tuesday, April 15, 2003

It was an easy shot for the Islamist fundamentalists running two of Pakistan's four provinces and for Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. military stood idly by, they charge, as thousands of looters spent two days unmolested inside the museum, picking clean 28 galleries, even managing to pry open huge steel doors barring access to vaults crammed with priceless gold and silver antiquities.

Billions of dollars worth of art was carted away with impunity. Larger statues and vases were broken into smaller less cumbersome pieces to be carted away.

The chaos and anarchy that would befall any city without a police deterrent on the streets and without enough U.S. troops to maintain law and order in a sprawling capital of 4.5 million the size of Los Angeles have been manna for anti-U.S. agitation.

The imperialist American-Israeli plot, goes the new refrain on Arab and Muslim airwaves, is to dismember Iraq into rival tribal and ethnic factions.

Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi and Dubai satellite networks have focused on Washington's plan to replace Saddam Hussein by Ahmad Chalabi, a former Iraqi citizen who heads the Iraqi National Congress, and who was sentenced to 22 years hard labor in Jordan for embezzlement and bank fraud.

"Could all this really be taken seriously as an improvement over the Saddam regime?" asked Egypt's Al Ahram. The horrors of Saddam's torture chambers are conveniently overlooked.

The rapidity of America's military campaign and the total collapse of Saddam's Republican Guard divisions and Fedayeen units, and the absence of the white-clad kamikaze volunteers shown strutting on parade before the war, stunned the Arab streets. Sucking on water pipes while watching Al Jazeera's 24/7 war coverage held more interest than demonstrating against the U.S.

There is a growing realization in Arab ranks that the mighty Iraqi army against America's military juggernaut was as plausible as a midget with oversize boxing gloves trying to land a punch on the world's heavyweight champion.

There is a mixture of awe and fear as Arab audiences read that the U.S. flew 35,000 air sorties, dropped 17,000 precision-guided bombs, 8,500 unguided ones, fired some 800 Tomahawk and 100 CALM cruise missiles, or some $3 billion in air-dropped ordnance (not including the British contribution) -- all against a third rate army in a third world country without an air force and with a military that was one third of the strength it was during the Gulf War 12 years ago. Without so much as airborne intelligence assets, the Iraqi army was without a brain. It was also blind for combat beyond visual range.

It all added up to a powerful argument in favor of asymmetric warfare. No nation on earth can challenge the United States with conventional warfare, just as no nation in the Middle East can challenge Israel. The most obvious retaliatory course for the Arab world's countless extremists is to exacerbate post-Saddam tensions in Iraq. The assassination of an anti-Saddam Shiia imam who had been flown in two days before by U.S. clandestine services was an indication of how the settling of accounts will be exploited.

The strategy of the jihadis, or Islamic martyrdom candidates, is to turn an American army of liberation into an easier target -- an army of occupation. Winning the war was the easy part. To rebuild governing institutions after the torching of many government buildings and records (by the anti-Saddam populace, but also by regime agents trying to make sure the U.S. doesn't win the peace), rearm local police who once did the regime's bidding, and get a shattered country on the road to a viable democracy, all under the alert eye of television cameras ready to pounce on the slightest misstep, is mission almost impossible.

Finding the evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and of the terrorist links between Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda and the Saddam regime, which together produced the rationale for Operation Iraqi Freedom, will be helpful for the plethora of Bush Administration memoirs to come.

But of more immediate value for post-war reconstruction are the billions of dollars stashed abroad by Saddam, his two sons, and other privileged Tikritis.

Copyright 2003 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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