Fall of Saddam is not everything

As we watch the televised images of a defiant Saddam Hussain and of U.S. tanks stuck in the mud on the road to Baghdad, we might want to keep in mind this sobering thought: the military battle now raging in Iraq is merely a small slice of an even larger, longer and more unpredictable political war.

Several very different campaigns are unfolding within the framework of President Bush's worldwide war on terror. Along-side a series of military operations, from Afghanistan to Iraq, there is a diplomatic front, an economic front, a propaganda front and a homeland security front. The most fateful war of all may be the one that is being waged for the hearts and minds of 250 million Arabs. After all, it is the Arab world that has supplied both the ideologists and the foot soldiers in the most formidable challenge to the United States since communism collapsed.

The risk that the U.S. could win a military victory in Iraq yet lose the broader political war was driven home to me during a reporting tour to the Middle East and Europe just before American missiles began falling on Baghdad. My travels took me from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, home of both the U.S. Central Command and the Al Jazeera television network, to Nato headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, and, finally, to Serbia, the target of a series of U.S. military interventions in the Balkans in the '90s, culminating in the 1999 Kosovo war.

Powerful nation

Everywhere I went, people (including some U.S. soldiers and diplomats, speaking privately) expanded on much the same theme: Never before in history has there been a country as powerful as the U.S. - militarily, economically, politically. But Ameri-can power has also spawned fear of American dominance, which can take the form of outright delight whenever the world's sole superpower suffers a setback. "America has become a bully on a rampage," a prominent Saudi lawyer whose degree comes from an Ivy League university, told me in Riyadh. "It's a comment on how dismal we feel that we applaud anyone who puts up resistance to the imperial American project, whether it is Saddam Hussain or Kim Jong Il."

The lawyer went on to say that he did not know which to fear more: an American triumph in Iraq or a defeat. Too easy a victory, he asserted, would only encourage conservatives in the U.S. to take on new "imperial projects": Iran, North Korea, possibly Saudi Arabia itself. But a prolonged, bloody campaign would inflame supporters of Saudi-born terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

Militarily, American power is so overwhelming that nobody will take it on, at least not on America's terms. Instead, enemies look for points of vulnerability. The catastrophic terrorism pioneered by bin Laden - using civilian planes as missiles against the symbols of American economic and military power - is one example of such "asymmetric warfare". Another is Saddam's decision to resort to guerrilla tactics to slow the U.S. advance in Iraq, from the arming of paramilitary groups to phony surrenders to preparations for a street-by-street defence of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. While we may denounce such tactics as illegal, many in the Arab world see them as a logical response by the weak to the strong.

Bush administration officials are acutely aware of the importance of winning Arab hearts and minds, which is why they have imposed restrictive rules of engagement on U.S. troops. From the American point of view, the manner in which victory is achieved - and how it is perceived in the Arab world - is almost as important as victory itself.

That means sparing civilian infrastructure where possible and hitting only "regime targets". It would be a simple matter to eliminate Iraqi resistance by flattening Baghdad or Basra. Some armchair strategists are calling for the U.S. military to stop fighting with "one hand behind its back". But that would defeat the war's larger political purpose, which is to convince Iraqis that the American invaders are "liberators, not occupiers".

Convincing Arab television viewers that this is a humanitarian war may be mission impossible. War is undiscriminating by its very nature, particularly when pro-Saddam militiamen are interspersed with the civilian population.

Civilians always get hurt, even in an age of precision targeting, as happened when errant bombs fell on Baghdad market places, killing dozens of civilians. Res-ponsibility for the bombs has not been fixed, but in the Arab world, America is getting the blame. Before the global information age, such occurrences would have been isolated tragedies. These days, the images are transmitted all over the world instantaneously, magnifying their impact many times over and fuelling already strong anti-American sentiments.

Entirely different things

Sometimes, the same image can mean entirely different things to different audiences. When Am-erican viewers saw news footage of U.S. missiles raining down on Baghdad, they largely accepted the official Pentagon explanation that the destroyed buildings were all associated with Saddam's oppressive regime. Arab viewers tuning into the satellite television station Al Jazeera, were given an impression of a city in flames, and of indiscriminate death and destruction.

When I visited Al Jazeera's newsroom in Qatar, the editor-in-chief, Ibrahim Hilal, made it clear that he would focus extensive attention on the suffering of Iraqi civilians. He predicted that as many as 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians would be killed in the war, and half a million wounded.

"Emotions are the most important part of the story," he told me. "Our job is to show the human side of the war." The Bush administration can't seem to make up its mind about Al Jazeera - denouncing it on the one hand for bias and sensationalism while on the other hand, trying to woo it with access and exclusive interviews with Secretary of State Colin Powell and other officials. An embedded Al Jazeera reporter is travelling with the U.S. Marines.

Virtually everybody I talked to, including U.S. diplomats, said that the Bush administration has failed dismally in its ongoing public diplomacy efforts aimed at the Arab world. The State Depart-ment's "shared values" campaign - which consisted of buying air time on Arab TV stations showcasing the lives of Arab Americans - was an expensive flop.

Many countries refused to air the ads, which they described as propaganda. According to the Zogby International polling firm, the proportion of Saudis with an "unfavourable opinion" of America has risen from 87 per cent to 97 per cent over the past year. Few Saudis believe that the U.S. has invaded Iraq to install democracy there, so they conclude that there must be some other explanation, such as grabbing the country's oil wealth or helping Israel. "How can you talk of democracy in Iraq when you were in cahoots with Saddam a few years ago?" asked Khaled Maeena, editor of Arab News, an English-language newspaper based in Jiddah. "It's hypocrisy."

It is hard to overstate how much Arab attitudes toward America have been coloured by the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Saturation coverage of Palestinian suffering by Al Jazeera and other pan-Arab TV stations has fed a sense of grievance against Washington, widely seen as Israel's principal international patron. "U