Bush's Big Stick

With Vice President Dick Cheney describing the presidential election result as "a broad, nationwide victory," secured on the platform of an unapologetically hard-line foreign policy, the world should expect more of the same from President George W. Bush and his administration in the "war on terror" he declared on Sept. 12, 2001.

Specifically, this means Bush, Cheney, and their coterie of neoconservative ideologues will continue to visualize the ill-defined war on terrorism in purely military terms, and deploy the Pentagon as their primary instrument to win it. What this has undoubtedly translates into is: one, the already initiated assault on Falluja in Iraq to destroy a bastion of insurgents resisting the occupation of their country; and two, ratcheting up pressure on Iran under the rubric of "countering Tehran's nuclear arms ambitions."

The assault on Fallujah – and the intended confrontation with Iran – is taking place in a context in which anti-American feeling, already rife in the Muslim world, is rising yet again in the wake of a recent report from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. It concluded that some 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died between March 2003 (when the Bush administration with its British allies invaded Iraq) and September 2004; that the largest number of these deaths were caused by the unleashed air power of the invading and then occupying armies; and that women and children had suffered most.

In other words, the invaders may have managed to kill up to a third as many Iraqis in a year-and-a-half as President Saddam Hussein did in his 24-year dictatorial rule. This comparison led the Riyadh-based, pro-government Saudi Gazette to ask rhetorically, "If this is a war on terror, then who are the terrorists and who are the terrorized?"

The net result of Washington's escalating confrontation with Muslim countries and peoples under various guises will only be to widen further the gulf that already exists between the United States and Muslims in general, paving the way for a much-dreaded "clash of civilizations" that never need have happened.

Attacking the Fly on the Horse

The Bush administration is attacking Falluja despite warnings from Ghazi al Yawar, Interim President of Iraq, Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al Faidhi of the Association of Muslim Scholars, which represents 3,000 mosques; despite the string of bombs that killed at least 34 in Samarra on Saturday, a northern city recently "retaken" from the insurgents and now plagued by fighting between the local police and the American-trained Iraqi National Guard.

"I completely disagree with people who see a need to decide [Fallujah] through military action," Interim President Yawar said. "The coalition's handling of this crisis is wrong. It is like someone firing bullets at his horse's head because a fly landed on it; the horse died and the fly went away."

In his letter to the American, British, and Iraqi governments on Oct. 31, Kofi Annan insisted that the escalation in violence that the taking of Fallujah represented would be "very disruptive for Iraq's political transition" and would also put civilian lives at risk. He added that he wanted the UN to help prepare for elections in Iraq in January, but feared that a further rise in violence could disrupt the process. "I have in mind not only the risk of increased insurgent violence, but also reports of major military offensives being planned by the multinational force in key localities such as Fallujah," he wrote.

Shaikh al Faidhi, on the other hand, was not so diplomatic. "If the U.S. invades Fallujah or any other city in Iraq, all the clerics in Iraq will call for a boycott of the election," he stated. Even if the phrase "all the clerics" were to be qualified with "Sunni Arab," that would still mean one-fifth of the Iraqi population concentrated in the country's crucial areas.