Who's the real villain? Imran Khan Friday January 24, 2003 The Guardian (extract) How can it be that England is obsessing over the morality of playing cricket in Zimbabwe at precisely the same time that it - along with the United States - is leading the world to the brink of a grossly unjust and potentially catastrophic war against Iraq? Doesn't Mr Blair's acute sensitivity to the plight of the Zimbabwean people look just a little ironic next to his apparent readiness to vaporise thousands of Iraqis? A little rich, even? For the truth is that, while many outside Europe and America would be willing to argue the point over whether Mr Mugabe was a tyrant so brutal that sportsmen should stay away from his country, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks that a war on Iraq makes any sense. George W Bush and Tony Blair can say that Saddam Hussein poses a grave threat to the US and its allies until they are blue in the face, but no one in the Muslim world will ever believe it - in fact, everyone here is convinced that the seemingly inevitable attack on Iraq is being orchestrated at the behest of the powerful Israeli lobby and to secure the Iraqi oilfields. The technology gap between the US and the Muslim states is growing at such a frightening pace that the entire Muslim world put together cannot pose any threat to the US. This impending war will be even more one-sided than the native Americans fighting the US cavalry with bows and arrows. There is little love lost for Saddam among Muslims; the vast majority would love to see the back of this ruthless dictator. But here everyone remembers that, not long ago, Saddam was the US's blue-eyed boy, and his weapons of mass destruction were supplied by the western countries. However, there is tremendous concern for the 22 million Iraqi people who have already gone through terrible suffering. There is also anxiety that after this one-sided war there will be a further polarisation between the west and Islam. Hatred against America will increase, and most of us fear that there will be more terrorist attacks against the US and its citizens. On September 11 the entire Muslim world stood behind the US and extended it full support in the war against terrorism. This support began to evaporate when, just three weeks after 9/11, the unfettered bombing of Afghanistan began. No Afghan was involved in the attacks, and yet more Afghan civilians were killed by American bombs than all those killed in the Twin Towers. And since the attack on Afghanistan, things have gone from bad to worse. On CNN and the BBC, the world watched Taliban prisoners of war being summarily executed. Many of them were Pakistanis: simple country folk who had not even heard of al-Qaida. Other prisoners were whisked away to Guantanamo Bay in chains. They neither had the rights that are accorded to PoWs under the Geneva conventions, nor were they charged in any court of law. Britain was not directly responsible for these abuses, you may say, but I did not hear Mr Blair jumping up to condemn the treatment of men like animals in Guantanamo, or the brutal treatment meted out to other Taliban prisoners by the west's local allies. The Pakistani government bent over backwards to cooperate with the US, despite public anger at the shedding of innocent blood in Afghanistan. Yet Pakistanis are being treated as the enemy. The FBI picks up Pakistani citizens, who disappear for days on end without trace or charges, reducing the sovereign law of Pakistan to mockery and ridicule. Dr Aamir Aziz, one of our top orthopaedic surgeons and known for his philanthropic work, disappeared one day. There was this bizarre, humiliating spectacle where his mother was seen begging the Americans to return her son - all on Pakistan's sovereign soil! In the recent elections in Pakistan, the religious parties made dramatic gains. In the country's 55-year history they had never managed to get more than 10 seats in the National Assembly. This time they got 52. What is more, their support is growing, as seen in the recent by-elections. This trend can be observed in almost the entire Muslim world. An attack on Iraq is going to exacerbate this hatred. And it is this hatred, tinged with a lethal feeling of impotence and humiliation, that drives certain people to inflict as much damage as possible on the strong, even if it means losing their lives in the process. This US arrogance and insensitivity to the feelings of the Islamic world can be traced back to the easy defeat of the Taliban. The hardliners surrounding Bush declared it a great triumph, as if they had overwhelmed some great superpower rather than a medieval militia. Overflowing with confidence, they are now egging on the US - and its allies - to subjugate all its "enemies" with or without the approval of the world community. Iraq may well capitulate even quicker than the ragtag Taliban army did. But what if there is another terrorist attack on US soil? Where and how will the US look for terrorists among 1.3 billion people? Will it start by interning the six million Muslims residing in the US? What happens to a country like Pakistan, with 140 million people, if some fanatics from here conduct terrorist attacks against the US? Will we all face collective punishment like Afghanistan? This is the fear that is sweeping through the Muslim world. Most of all, is it wise for the US and Britain to evoke such hatred against themselves? Given that technology is advancing all the time and a few people could inflict an unprecedented amount of devastation on a civilian population through chemical, biological and even miniature nuclear weapons, is it wise to take this aggressive course? The recent experience of Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya and Sri Lanka shows that when human beings reach a stage where they prefer death to a life of slavery and humiliation, then even the most powerful armies in the world cannot win a clear victory. Most people in the Muslim world believe that September 11 was entirely due to America's blind support for Israel. People do not blow themselves up because they envy the freedoms of others or their way of life. Rather, they want to emulate them. They blow themselves up only when a volcano of hopelessness of ever getting those freedoms and rights for themselves and their children explodes within them. And the best way to defuse that volcano is not to occupy Iraq but to secure a just settlement of the Palestinian issue. Returning to the subject of England and cricket, most people in the Muslim world are totally perplexed by Mr Blair's blind support for Bush. They always believed that Britain, with its enormous experience of dealing with empire and freedom struggles, would have a far more balanced and mature foreign policy. What is the reason for this total subservience to Washington's wishes, they wonder? Can it really be true, as Mr Blair claims, that the only way of preventing an American attack is by holding Mr Bush's hand up to the very brink of war? Let's hope that Mr Blair is right, for if he and Mr Bush drag their countries into a bloody, immoral conflict, Britain will have to take its share of responsibility for the consequences. see full text of original article