The bombing is over, for a while at least, and we can reflect on the West's up-and-down relationship with Iraq during that troubled country's 77-year existence. T E Lawrence's Faisal was the first King of Iraq, but almost immediately the British had to help him put down a rebellion. ironically, the RAF, which has just finished bombing Iraq, is almost the same age as the country and was first seen in action there in 1922. In 1941 Iraq briefly featured as the enemy during the pro-Axis Sharif Ali rising, but for 15 years thereafter, under Faisal II and his prime minister Nuri-es-Said, was a Western cynosure. Since 1958 Iraq has been a dubious quantity in Western eyes, except that in 1980-88, during his long war with Iran, the present bogeyman, Saddam Hussein, was sustained by the West and supplied with armaments.
The West, then, has always taken an ambivalent view of its own creation, Iraq. But this is nothing alongside the schizoid perspective London and Washington use in their dealings with the wider Islamic world. Since it is believed that the conflict most likely to replace the Cold War is that between the west and Islamic fundamentalism, it is surprising that Western policy should be so incoherent. Instead of a rational global policy, there is opportunism, cynicism, cowardice, and apprehension. The only rationale that can be discerned is a muddled form of self-interest.
We are often told the Foreign Office is fundamentally pro-Arab, but what one sees on a day-to-day basis, in the media and particularly in the utterances of the Blair Government, is a slavish endorsement of the crudest American prejudices. The US hierarchy of imperatives places oil and Israel ahead of a coherent policy towards Islam. It is prepared to defend the palaeolithic society of Kuwait on behalf of ''democracy'' but showed no real interest when Iran and Iraq were tearing each other apart in 1980-88 and is indifferent to the bloodletting in Algeria.
Washington excelled itself in the 1980s, first embroiling itself in a bitter dispute with Ayatollah Khomeini over the Shah, then supporting Saddam in his war against Iran, and finally negating its earlier actions by using the profits from arms sales to Tehran to finance the ''dirty war'' by the Contras in Nicaragua.
Where oil interests and the Israeli factor are not involved, Washington is even prepared to turn a blind eye to Islamic genocide against its own Christian co-religionists, as with Indonesia in East Timor. But let oil or Israel obtrude, and the situation is very different. Washington's complaisance towards Israel remains a puzzle. One could understand why, in the depths of the Cold War, America wanted to maintain as a client a garrison state to control the oil-producing Middle-East, but where is the overriding US national interest nowadays in condoning Israeli intransigence? The huge numbers of Jews in New York State are often cited as a political expedient, but New York is not the United States and, besides, the huge numbers of chicanos in California have not inclined Washington towards a notably pro-Mexican profile.
Yet the most puzzling aspect of the West's divided response to Islam is in its consistent preference for Islamic fundamentalism in any clash with Slav nationalism. The west cheered on and armed to the teeth the Mujahidin in Afghanistan when they fought the Soviet Union to a standstill after 1979 - even though the Soviets launched their unwise invasion of Afghanistan purely as a panic response to Nato's 1979 decision to station Cruise missiles on European soil - but now express dismay of Afghan fundamentalism in the form of Taleban.
Yet if there had been no Western weaponry there would no Taleban now. As for Chechnya, when Yeltsin invaded there in 1994, the Western media, led by the BBC, excelled themselves. Not ''rebels'' or ''guerrillas'' but ''Chechen fighters'' was the preferred cant phrase of our fearless foreign correspondents. I wonder what the response would have been to ''Irish fighters'' for the IRA? As to the reality of the brave Chechen fighters, four luckless Telecom employees
testify more eloquently than a pack of BBC bien pensants.
Similar intellectual dishonesty was evident after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. For decades we had it dinned into us by Establishment opinion formers that Churchill and his wartime representative Sir Fitzroy Maclean were duped by Tito into recognising his Marxist regime and that we should instead have supported Mihaijovic and his Serbian chetniks in the Second World War. Suddenly we got a chance to support the aspirations of Greater Serbia and what was the response? A myopic, knee-jerk reaction that in any conflict involving Serbia, the opposition, be they Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, or Kosovans, must be right. It is the West's unfailing preference for Muslims over Slavs that so incenses Russia over the bombing of Iraq; Moscow rightly detects monstrous humbug.
So there we have Western policy so called. In the hierarchy of interests, oil ranks first, Israel second, and Islam third, but still ahead of the Slavs. Some say that the West fears Islamic militancy, as it does not fear the bankrupt paper tiger Russia, and this explains the complaisance. Certainly Islam is not afraid to strike back to defend its interests. Just imagine the reaction if Peter Tatchell and Outrage tried their Canterbury Cathedral shenanigans in a mosque.
So maybe fear of fundamentalism is the answer, explaining the West's cowardly posture in the Rushdie affair. But until someone can ''integrate'' both the fear and the self-interest, the West seems likely to blunder along, making policy towards Islam on the wing, sometimes literally so, as during the same 72 hours last week.
Share