Palestinian EDDIE ZANANIRI is the general secretary of the Committee of Arab-Australians, the most prominent Arab organisation in the Sydney antiwar movement. He spoke to DICK NICHOLS about US plans for the Middle East and the tasks of the antiwar movement in the aftermath of Iraq's defeat.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has outlined how Washington should take advantage of military victory over Iraq by looking to open negotiations with "moderate" Palestinians. What obstacles, if any, now stand in the way of this and other US designs in the Middle East?
Kissinger has been after the destruction of the PLO since 1974, and the same line is followed by Israel. The aim is to find a way out of giving up territory. The Israelis have time and again rejected the concept of an independent Palestinian state, and I cannot see this attempt to replace the PLO with a more "realistic"leadership as anything other than an avoidance of the Palestinian question altogether.
The second aspect of US policy is to work for a permanent military presence. Any "withdrawal" will not take place in a complete form. The naval presence in the Gulf will be greatly escalated. Large stores of weapons will be left in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian peninsula and other places to facilitate the quick return of US rapid deployment forces.
Thirdly, there is the question of carving up the Arab world. Kissinger often used to speak of splitting Syria, Egypt and Iraq into smaller states. We can see the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the 1975 civil war in Lebanon as experiments. The aim of the latter, besides destroying the PLO, was to see if sectarian-based cantons could be established. Such statelets would be more vulnerable to foreign intervention and patronage and also provide more justification for a Jewish Israel.
Now we are witnessing an attempt to carve up Iraq, firstly by destroying its infrastructure and impoverishing the nation. The bill for reconstruction is $200-250 billion. Add to that $70-75 billion of debts incurred during the Iran-Iraq war and the talk of exacting reparations, and Iraq may well have to find around $350 billion.
Secondly, there are the fundamentalist attacks in south-eastern Iraq and the Kurdish movement in the north. The Kurdish movement has a just cause. What has been unfortunate for the Kurds is that their leaderships have always been only too willing to play the role of pawns to foreign forces instead of the Kurdish cause being related to the Arab cause against foreign domination.
The Americans themselves are in two minds. On the one hand there is the seduction of going back to the "maximum program" of the early '70s. On the other, the Americans are scared this may end up creating other monsters.
Turkey has explicit interests in helping itself to the Kurdish north of Iraq, and this is something that the Kurdish comrades have got to oing now.
In the south-east, Iran has come out openly in support of the fundamentalist uprising; this, too, scares the Americans. So the Americans are still weighing up whether they will accept a carving up of Iraq or block it.
Wouldn't the Western powers like to have an Iraqi army strong enough to prevent any popular uprising, but not strong enough to carry out any repeat of the Kuwait adventure?
That's very accurate. For all their talk about democracy, they are now propping up a number of Saudi-sponsored Iraqi ex-generals along with a number of opposition organisations, unfortunately some on the left.
The US realises that such an alliance cannot last long: Iraqi communists sitting permanently with Muslim fundamentalists, the remnants of an ancient Iraqi aristocracy and dissident generals! The only guarantee for the US is a military leadership strong enough to crack down on the masses, but not so strong as to recreate a powerful Iraq.
The PLO has always had to fight off the attempts of particular Arab regimes to manipulate it. The pressure from the pro-US regimes must now increase greatly.
The PLO has always called for total Arab solidarity, because those elements within the Arab world who were interested in pushing forward the US line would not be able to do it in the context of a united Arab stand.
All Palestinian disasters have occurred at times when Arab solidarity collapsed and we ended up with a "progressive axis" and a "reactionary axis", both trying to undermine the Palestinian people's sovereignty and independence in political decisions.
The Palestinian people are used to paying a heavy price to protect their right to self-determination. No matter how many PLO leaders are murdered or camps are bombed, no-one else can be found to speak on behalf of the Palestinians. It is significant that Elias Freij, well known as a liberal conservative, emerged from a recent Palestinian meeting in the occupied territories to say that if the West wants peace with the Palestinians, it must talk to the PLO.
The Egyptian, Saudi and other regimes put tremendous pressure on the PLO to accept the Shamir plan. This included threats of throwing Palestinian workers out of these countries; in Egypt it took the form of threats to confiscate Palestinian businesses.
But I must also say, having lived through similar periods in the past, that it is also a question of how much pressure these regimes will come under from their own masses.
What does the Kuwaiti opposition have to say about the return by the Kuwaiti regime to the old days? How long can the Egyptians hold out against their own economic crisis and the ignominy of betraying fellow Arabs? Things are heating up between the regimes and their oppositions. If there was another loser in this war, it was the peace movement in the US and the other allied powers. Despite its best efforts, the US was able to launch a war and Bush now boasts about the end of the "Vietnam syndrome".
I don't agree that the peace movement has lost. It was never realistic to expect to block the US intention to go to war at any cost.
The peace movement was successful in bringing up the hidden agenda. The US and Australian administrations were forced to deny that there was such an agenda. "We will withdraw from the Middle East at the first opportunity; we are not for the carving up of Iraq; we are for the settlement of the Palestinian question", they had to say.
This is a much more important time for people to be active than before the war, because the US is about to implement the plan that was the real reason for war.
If the US fails to implement this plan, then the war is negated — not the damage, not the destruction, but at least the aims of the war. It is very important that the peace movement now sifts through the US agenda and adopts positions that will counter its objectives.
To my mind, this means affirmation of the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people; their right to set up their own state in the occupied territories (not in Jordan, not in Lebanon, nor Madagascar); and support for the PLO, which the US will be striving hard, with its local allies, to sideline.