John Roughan: As crowds greet Americans, where are the women?

Where were the women? As television brought the scenes of jubilation in Shi'ite districts of Baghdad you might have noticed there were no women. In the painless computer games of America the great battle of good and evil is between democracy and dictators. In the real world there are other things going on.

Long ago I did an undergraduate paper in Middle Eastern politics. It was a few years before Saddam Hussein came to power and I don't recall him featuring in the course. But the Ba'ath Party he was to dominate certainly did.

It was already governing Iraq and Syria and it represented the great hope of something we fondly called "modernism" for that part of the world where most of the population still lived by Islamic rites and restrictions.

The Ba'athists might not have been liberal democrats but they called themselves socialist and stood for "development" which meant, above all, mass education. We were taught to forgive the one-party state. Enlightened elites could not submit themselves to the votes of a religious electorate we decided, and looked forward to the day all that education would kick in.

I wasn't entirely convinced. Democracy, I believe, is always the best policy, although it is best to be under no delusions about what it is likely to deliver. In any case, that was 30 years ago. Little did we know that Islam had such life left in it.

Much later I met a few Middle Eastern people, thanks mainly to a press jaunt sponsored by the United States Government. When you drew them out the women talked of the growing pressure they were facing to wear the veil and the fearsome legal rights a husband could hold over them.

In attitude they were of course a minority. You sensed the terrible odds they faced but also the central place of Islam in their identity and the dilemma of keeping its oppressive elements at bay.

I never heard the hosts engage them about any of this. There is a lack of curiosity in Americans that becomes frightening in a country of now boundless imperial confidence.

The mainly Shia population of Iraq might not be as theocratic as their Iranian neighbours but, ominously, a celebrating Basra resident told a reporter on Wednesday: "The US can leave now. This is our revolution."

In a book published last year, The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World (Allen and Unwin), American journalist Mark Hertsgaard lamented his countrymen's want of curiosity.

Noting that before he became President George W. Bush had travelled abroad only three times in his life, he observes that in this respect Bush is truly representative of his fellow citizens "only 14 per cent of whom have passports".

He says: "Americans not only don't know much about the rest of the world, we don't care. Or at least, we didn't care before the terrible events of September 11."

I fear they now care even less. They cared little whether the second country they attacked had anything to do with September 11. The American logic, as far as I have been able to fathom it, seemed to be: "Who did this to us? People who hate us. Who hates us? Saddam Hussein, obviously."

Hertsgaard explains it this way: "One minute we were enjoying the most privileged way of life in history. The next, terrorists had destroyed totemic symbols of our civilisation ... "

The natural American response was to "shoot first, ask questions later," he says.

"And the shooting went unexpectedly well in Afghanistan. The Taleban were routed, Afghanistan was liberated and Osama bin Laden, as Bush boasted in December 2001, 'went from controlling a country three months ago to now maybe controlling a cave'."

In retrospect it was a mistake to back the attack on Afghanistan uncritically. Amid the worldwide outrage at September 11 few cared that the case against al Qaeda was circumstantial. It was convincing enough.

But few realised that within the Bush Administration there were people who had long wanted to use American power against any regime they didn't like, or which didn't like America.

Once again they are getting applause for removing an obnoxious government with comparative ease. Saddam Hussein may be a polar opposite of the Taleban in the great political contest of the Islamic world, but he is no less objectionable in Western eyes.

In Middle Eastern eyes, it all depends. Once again American forces have been greeted as liberators at last by grateful crowds (though women were more conspicuous at Kabul). Once again the reception was probably more partisan than we realise.

Osama Bin Laden is the true winner so far. His strike of September 11 has turned America into an enraged power lashing out blindly against threats real or imagined in a policy it calls pre-emptive.

The madness will either deliver Iraq to Islamic democracy, if we believe the Bush rhetoric, or impose a puppet government that will be a great recruiting drive for al Qaeda.

The US, meanwhile, discovers yet again that it can have its way by waging war at relatively little pain to itself. In The American Prospect last month columnist Paul Starr distinguished today's war from the total wars of the 20th century.

In the US this month there has been no mass mobilisation, no draft, no rationing. Wars usually bring tax increases but the Bush Administration is offering greater tax cuts.

Starr wrote: "Instead of total war we have the promise of easy war - easy in the sacrifices it demands of us, easy on our consciences, easy on our pocketbooks. Easy, that is, if all goes well.

"Perhaps that is why Americans are so ready to go to war."

Herald Feature: Iraq war