A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (114 page)

I had met Bush several times at conferences and had made an official visit to see him in Washington, DC. I had also written to him many times and he was gracious enough to reply personally. I thought I should write to him to warn him against invading Iraq, especially since I knew how strongly Muslims would feel about the invasion. They may not have liked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but they would all feel very strongly against an American invasion of Iraq. I also knew something about terrorism and what drives the terrorists. Malaysia had dealt with its terrorists from 1948 to 1990. I had sat on the National Security Council since I first became a Minister in Tun Razak Hussein’s time. I was very familiar with terrorist behaviour and I knew of the psychological war that we successfully waged against them. I believed I knew the mentality of the people who mount terror attacks. They may seem crazy and they may appear to have a death wish—but they are moved by very strong feelings. We can deal effectively with them only if we understand those feelings. We may not find them rational initially, but it is only after you begin to understand these emotions that you can begin to counter terror effectively. Malaysia did not rely entirely on the gun. The bigger battle that we fought was the one for the hearts and minds of the people, including the terrorists. In the end, we prevailed.

I was very sure that a US invasion of Iraq would not contribute to the fight against terrorism and would in fact cost the world infinitely more. So I wrote to Bush and Tony Blair, to Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. I appealed to them not to invade Iraq as doing so would only increase terror attacks and multiply the number of people willing to sacrifice their lives. But the president of the most powerful nation in the world was not about to listen to a leader of a small developing country. He did not reply to my letter. Instead, he announced his intention to invade Iraq. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told me Britain would try to persuade the Americans not to take that action but, as we now know, it was the British who were persuaded by the Americans to be belligerent.

People must realise that modern war is about killing people indiscriminately and on a massive scale. It is not about soldiers fighting soldiers on battlefields. Killing people is a crime in any society. Ordinarily, even in less advanced societies, killers are severely punished, often with death. Yet mass killings of people, combatants and non-combatants, authorised in their own brutal interests by the great state powers, is praised, honoured and rewarded. The Americans and the British people are as much against everyday murder as anyone else, yet they were willing to accept the massive “collateral” killings caused by war. What kind of people are these? Granted, their people had been killed by terrorists, but the people who would be affected by their agenda of retribution were not terrorists or even related to terrorists. Civilised people do not kill the families, the friends or the fellow citizens of murderers, and certainly not people not even remotely connected to the murderers. What kind of a society would we have if the family and friends of a murderer or murderers could be killed in vicarious retribution?

They only dared to form their “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq because of their overwhelmingly superior strength. Yet they are really cowards because they pick on people who cannot match their military might. The US detention centres at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which held terrorism suspects and subjected them to brutal torture, exposed the worst in them. The verdict of the world on their savage brutality and inhumanity is unanimous.

For the loss of some 3,000 combatants, 600,000 Iraqis, mainly innocent civilians, have been killed. God alone knows how many hundred thousands more have been wounded, disabled and traumatised for life; how many lives have been shattered and ruined. And all for what? It seems to me that the Iraq of today is worse off than the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. But the thirst for blood has not been satisfied. The Americans and the British still harbour the idea of extending the war to Syria, which is said to be harbouring terrorists, and Iran, which is supposedly developing a nuclear bomb.

A survey among the British people and other Europeans found that they regarded the United States as a greater threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea. No sensible person believes their country is in danger of being invaded by Iran or North Korea. Even the Japanese cannot seriously think that North Korea will attack Japan with one or two nuclear bombs. The North Koreans know that were they to use nuclear or even conventional weapons against Japan, the US would drop so many nuclear warheads on their country that their people would all be killed and North Korea would be made uninhabitable.

The only country that has used and can use nuclear weapons is the United States. It has probably more than 10,000 nuclear warheads and it has the means to deliver them anywhere in the world, to destroy any country. Their invasion of Iraq is proof that they can be foolish and irresponsible. Therein lies the danger. In fact, they have been using nuclear weapons in the form of depleted uranium. And they are developing so-called “safe” nuclear weapons so they can get around the world’s objection to nuclear warfare. America’s leaders have learnt nothing from their defeat in Vietnam. They still think that military might must prevail and win them their battles, gain them their objectives and cow the whole world. They should know that though battles may be won, the war could still be lost, especially in these modern times.

I am no expert in war, just as I am not an expert in finance or economics. Perhaps not being an expert is an advantage as you don’t get trapped by conventional thinking and its ideas of what is proper and what is not, what is suitable and what is nonsensical. There are advantages to thinking outside the box. I may not have fought in one but I have gone through many wars in my lifetime: World War II, the Pacific War, the armed insurrection in Malaysia, the war in Palestine, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the war against Afghanistan by the USSR and then by the US, and then the post-9/11 war against Afghanistan and Iraq. I have also lived through the era of the many wars of independence waged by the colonies against the European imperialists. From all these, and from the unwillingness of evenly matched countries to take on each other, I have drawn certain conclusions.

Wars of conquest, I believe, are no longer possible. A conquered people will refuse to stay that way or allow their conquerors to remain their overlords for any worthwhile period. Their governments may surrender and be forced to submit to the victorious invaders but the people will not follow suit. Sooner rather than later, they will rise and fight to throw off the yoke of the overlord. In their struggle to liberate themselves, the people are prepared to sacrifice everything and will fight with whatever weapons they can lay their hands on. They will attack not just at home in their own countries but throughout the world. They will kill the citizens of the country which rules over them, even if in the process many more of their own people are killed. They may be killed themselves or captured and tortured, but others would be willing to take their places and carry on the fight.

Such people are labelled terrorists but they think of themselves as freedom fighters. They consider their own deeds glorious and their fellow citizens regard them as heroes and martyrs. Against them, all the powerful weapons and sophisticated technology of modern warfare are of no avail. Even if the conquerors were to raze the whole country, they would not win. The survivors, exiled in other countries, would remember and their hatred would be so strong that, given half a chance, they would kill the enemy or the enemy’s children and grandchildren. That hatred would be for eternity.

In other words, in today’s world the most powerful nations, equipped with the most sophisticated weapons, cannot invade, conquer and prevail over even the weakest nation, at least not for very long. The Vietnam War provided a graphic illustration of this when one American field commander claimed that he had, with all his technological superiority, destroyed a certain village in order to save it from capture. In his mind he had prevented it from being held by the enemy. What he failed to recognise was that by doing so, he did not save the village. He lost it and his own country’s moral credibility.

Modern wars are not going to be about fully equipped armies, navies and air forces facing each other, fighting set-piece battles on a grand scale. Modern wars will eventually become guerrilla wars in which ill-equipped people harass their adversary, snipe and kill, and mount “terror” attacks to undermine peace and stability. The more violent the conquest, the greater the violence employed by the conquered. Ultimately it is a war about credibility, a moral contest that the invaders must eventually lose; a war in which, if they persist, they must surrender whatever may be left of their international reputation and legitimacy. That was what happened in Vietnam. The might of America was defeated by pyjama-clad Vietnamese guerrillas armed mostly with handguns.

This is a truth upon which the rich and powerful countries and their leaders should reflect. To them I say: you are wasting your money developing ever more sophisticated killing machines. You may be attacked and killed anywhere in the world by explosives, handguns or even knives by the people you have oppressed and angered. So, reflect on the cost of your security.

You need armies of people to oversee visitors to your country, to check the cargo ships and the airplanes coming in and to stop the hijacking of civilian aircraft. But every time you have to ground planes or search for suspected terrorists, you deter businessmen, not terrorists, from visiting your country. You have to spend billions on research to develop devices to improve your security, only to find your enemies have discovered ways to get around your sophisticated devices and costly security measures. World trade and businesses have already been adversely affected by the terrorist attacks you have engendered and by the futile measures you have adopted to punish and counter them. Worst of all, there can be no end to all this. You cannot sign a treaty with “terrorists”.

For the small, weak countries that the big powers wish to dominate, the cost of defending themselves is a minute fraction of the cost borne by their potential attackers. What they need most to do is to develop the necessary skills and capacity for a prolonged guerrilla war against the invaders. However great the human commitment involved, that will not cost them much in material terms. They may maintain relatively small conventional military forces at quite minimal cost. Knowing their own country, they would be able to hide their trained guerrillas and train non-military personnel in guerrilla warfare.

Vietnam defeated the US not by having the most powerful weapons or the biggest armed forces. It defeated America by digging hundreds of miles of underground tunnels at strategic locations, enabling their guerrilla force to appear and disappear at will.
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 There was no way the US forces could protect themselves. The Vietnamese had the most important resources: local knowledge and intelligence, together with political will born of necessity and elemental human pride. That is a formidable, in fact unstoppable, combination. At My Lai
[2]
 the US became so rattled that its enraged forces decided to kill everyone. That only made the Vietnamese angrier, more determined, and more ready to kill or be killed. And it did much damage to the moral integrity of the US.
 

The US now admits that invading Iraq was a mistake, but the real mistake is its idea of military invincibility. It may have been true in the past but it is an anachronism today. War is no longer an option for the powerful, and preparing for war does not guarantee peace. Yet ethnic Europeans love a good fight and a test of strength.

When the Cold War ended, the Europeans, led by the US, could not endure even a brief interlude of peace. They soon looked around for a new enemy. With his simplistic idea of “The Clash of Civilisations”—of an inescapable antagonism between Western (or ethnic European) civilisation and Islamic civilisation—Samuel P. Huntington
[3]
 helped them find one.
 

During the Cold War the United States made full use of Muslim antipathy towards atheistic communism to gain their cooperation in expelling the USSR from Afghanistan. It was then that Al-Qaeda was promoted and equipped by the US. The US similarly encouraged Saddam to attack Iran, whose revolutionary regime regarded the US as Satan. But after the Soviets were expelled from Afghanistan and the Iraqi attack against Iran failed, the US turned against its former allies. Afghanistan was attacked and invaded because it played host to Osama. Iraq was then invaded, first because of its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and then because the US decided that its former ally, Saddam Hussein, was a dictator. Both reasons are spurious. The urge to make war is too strong, especially war against the weak.

The mistake of the US is to think of Al-Qaeda as an organisation which can be defeated militarily. But Al-Qaeda is a resistance movement, one that probably consists of many groups acting independently. Such groups have emerged in Malaysia and Indonesia—the Al-Maunah and the Gerakan Militan Malaysia in this country, and the Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia. Their leaders and members may be identified and arrested but others will emerge to take their places.

Such people are not engaged in a war against the US because they are poor and uneducated. Their motivation is more precise and specific. Among Muslims worldwide there is a deep hatred and anger that Israel was created upon Palestinian Arab land. This anger has deepened since the Israelis occupied most of remaining Palestine after 1967, establishing numerous settlements, controlling the movement of people in and out of Palestine as well as through it, and denying the existence of the Palestinian State and people. More recently, when the Palestinians held elections and Hamas defeated Fatah, the US and Israel refused to recognise Hamas as the elected Palestinian Authority. Taxes collected by Israel which were due to the Palestinian Authority were withheld from the elected Palestinian Authority to prevent the new administration set up by Hamas from functioning.