Reuters

March 9, 2003

Alistair Lyon, Middle East Diplomatic Correspondent Dubai,

Iraqis have long lived in terror of Saddam Hussein. Now they and their Arab, Turkish and Iranian neighbours also fear the instability and bloodshed that may accompany his removal by a U.S.-led invasion to disarm Iraq.

With military action apparently imminent, some fear the consequences of a decisive American victory as much as a messy conclusion to such a war, and wonder if they could be next on a U.S. hit list of potential threats.

"Along with Turkey and Iran, all the Arab states dread a chaotic outcome to war on Iraq, yet they have mixed feelings about a decisive U.S. victory too," a paper published by London's Royal Institute of International Affairs said.

"Governments across the region know that their populations are likely to see such an outcome as blatant U.S. imperialism, a grab for oil and a plot to protect Israel," it said.

President George W. Bush, who says a war will serve the cause of peace, has vowed to end Saddam's "brutal dictatorship" in favour of a just government, possibly a democratic one.

The Iraqi people, not Washington, must determine the form of Iraq's new government, Bush said this month. "Yet we will ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another."

He said the United States would provide security against any who tried to spread chaos, settle scores or threaten Iraq's territorial integrity. "And we will seek to protect Iraq's natural resources from sabotage by a dying regime, and ensure they are used for the benefit of Iraq's own people."

His promises addressed some, but by no means all, of the worries of Iraq's neighbours about a post-Saddam era.

UNNERVED BY BUSH

Some are concerned they too might one day qualify as targets of Bush's policy of pre-empting potential threats, by force if necessary."Iraq is not the centre of the Bush doctrine, it's the start of it," said Toby Dodge, a British expert on Iraq.

"Many countries have a stake in Saddam being toppled, but they also see themselves as threatened by the Americans. Who will be next on list? Syria? Iran? Saudi Arabia?" said Amir Ali Nourbaksh of the Tehran-based Atieh Bahar consultancy.

Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani argues that keeping U.S. forces in the region after an invasion of Iraq would destabilise the whole Middle East and upset oil markets.

"Definitely, Americans will be buried in Iraq if they go in. If Saddam's government fails to repel them, the Iraqi nation will do so after Saddam has been removed," he said on Friday.

Does the United States have the will, ability and commitment to fulfil Bush's assurances about ensuring Iraq's territorial unity and transition to stable government after an invasion?

Can it achieve the more ambitious goals of U.S. hawks who say Iraq can be a beacon of democracy, inspiring change across the Middle East, creating new prospects for Arab-Israeli peace?

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, like many who see Israel's occupation of Arab lands and its weapons of mass destruction as a graver threat than Iraq, has his doubts.

"An occupation of Iraq is not simple. How are 250,000 troops going to maintain order in a country like that?" he asked.

"If you get chaos in Iraq, how will democracy flower in Iraq? If you achieve victory and there is somebody occupying Baghdad...just imagine what the reaction could be in the Arab and Muslim world to that fact alone," he said this month.

SCORES TO SETTLE

Bush says he has "no quarrel with anybody other than Saddam and his group of killers who have destroyed a society".

But over the years Saddam has forced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqis into complicity with his Baathist rule and the violent methods it has used to remain in power.

"In the immediate aftermath of an invasion, unless it is firmly controlled, there will be a lot of violence," said Sami Zubaida, a British-based academic of Iraqi origin. "There are scores to settle by people who have been tortured, lost relatives or been systematically humiliated by the regime."

Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia fear that a struggle between non-Arab Kurds in the north, majority Shi'ite Muslims in the south and the long-dominant Sunni Muslim minority in the centre might fragment their neighbour -- though other fault lines in Iraq's complex society could spark conflict within, as well as between, these far from coherent groups.

Turkey has already threatened to intervene to prevent Iraqi Kurds from seeking more autonomy. And Iran might feel obliged to help its Iraqi Shi'ite co-religionists, a nightmare scenario for Saudi Arabia which has its own restive Shi'ite minority.

Whatever the outcome of a U.S.-led war on Iraq, it will reshape regional power balances and alliances and might prompt Washington to rethink its security strategy in the Gulf.

The United States, in its quest to secure a regular flow of reasonably priced oil, relied until the 1979 Islamic revolution on Iran and Saudi Arabia as its two main allies in the area.

In the 1980s it ensured that Saddam's secular Iraq did not lose its war with Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, but switched to "dual containment" of the two countries after the 1991 Gulf War.

SHIFTING BALANCES

James Russell, a Pentagon scholar at the Naval Postgraduate School, questions whether a strong, united Iraq will still be needed as a counterweight to a much-reduced threat from Iran, now preoccupied with its own internal power struggles.

In an article for the Middle East Review of International Affairs, Russell says that, while the United States must assert its commitment to Iraq's unity to "attract political support for regime change", it might be better to let it disintegrate.

Allowing Iraq to break up could actually help prevent the emergence of another dictator with ambitions to develop weapons of mass destruction and threaten his neighbours, he suggests.

Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi scholar close to the opposition Iraqi National Congress, believes his country cannot be healed simply by removing Saddam and his inner circle, but has no illusions about the difficulties of dismantling the Baathist legacy.

"Almost any post-Baathist future in Iraq is going to be like walking a tightrope, balancing the legitimate grievances of all those who have suffered against the knowledge that, if everyone is held accountable who is in fact guilty, the country will also be torn apart," Makiya prophesied in an introduction to a 1998 edition of his influential book "Republic of Fear".

"Iraq after Saddam is going to be a country in which justice is both the first thing that everybody wants and the most difficult thing for anyone to deliver."

© 2003 All Rights Reserved. Atieh Bahar Consulting.