| Native Americans of the 21st century might disavow this politically-incorrect description of the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants who colonised their ancestral lands. |
| On the other hand, the unfortunate citizens of Iraq might well add some untranslateable Arabic epithets to the above. The last year has seen them at the receiving end of words and deeds "made with squint eyes and forked tongues". Iraq has seen the mass destruction of "harmless creatures", normal human beings, who wanted to be left in peace to get on with their lives. |
| It started with some nonsense about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). When WMDs were nowhere to be found, there were absurd innuendoes about a nexus between the fundamentalist Al Qaida and the brutally-secular Baathists. Then the US changed tack to suggest that the invasion had nothing to do with WMDs; it was trying to bring democracy to a nation groaning under the yoke of a mad dictator. |
| A year later, it's rearming former Baathist minions of that supposedly-mad dictator to quash popular uprisings. Its own human rights image is tainted, perhaps irrecoverably, due to graphic depictions of torture inflicted by its own armed forces. Not to mention women and children killed in its urban "pacifying" operations and people held for years without trial at Guantanamo. |
| Iraq is worse off than before. It has seen more death and suffering in the last 12 months than in the last 10 years. It is now in a state of apparently permanent conflict, with various Shia and Sunni factions carving out areas of influence in between taking potshots at occupiers. |
| There is a de facto Kurdish republic, which will never be officially recognised by its American sponsors for fear of terminally offending the Turks. The governing council is led by a man who spent the last 40 years floating around the First World with credit card fraud charges following in his wake. |
| The world is also worse off. The oil industry is in turmoil. The threat of random terrorism has risen even in erstwhile havens of peace like Thailand. Afghanistan remains a forgotten but volatile conflict, the Israel-Palestine equation has become grimmer and much of the European Union will steer clear of any future American diplomatic initiative on general principle. |
| What's sad is that, in the window between September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq, the US held a unique position of moral stature and influence. It was the recipient of global sympathy as the victim of that outrage; it was respected as a haven of free speech and democracy; and of course, it was the dominant nation in terms of both military might and economic size. It could have leveraged all that to solve the Palestine problem; it could have armtwisted various Arab regimes into granting more freedom to their own people, it could even have played honest broker in Kashmir. |
| Instead of any of the above, the US traded in those trumps for the lunatic Iraq misadventure. Of course, this was a miscalculation "" nobody in their right minds would have aimed for this outcome. But what did the Bush administration hope for? That is something that will forever remain a mystery. |
| The next year could see renewed military pressure in an attempt to stamp out insurgency. It could also mean simple disassociation from the mess. The latter is a last resort because of Iraq's oil-reserves, which would fall into unknown hands. |
| But whatever the US does now and after the November elections, it behoves pragmatists to assume one thing: oil supplies will remain uncertain for another year at least "" that's the minimum it would take to stabilise Iraq. High oil price equals high inflation equals higher interest rate equals lower consumption spending equals lower growth rates. Does it mean goodbye to India's dream of sustainable 8 per cent growth? |
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