A WAR FOR CIVILISATION

Mark Steyn says that the only way to deal

with the Middle East is to destabilise it, starting with Iraq

New Hampshire WAR with Iraq looms and not everyone is happy about it. 'I think the principle of "first things first" does apply.' says Al Gore, 'and has to be followed if we are to have any chance of success.' By this he means that, instead of Saddam's removal, Afghanistan's stability 'needs to be assured first'. In Britain, those two old pantomime dames, Ted Heath and Denis Healey, are pursing their lips and hoisting their bosoms, not for the first time. Wisely, Lord Healey is not being quite as specific in his predictions of doom as he was in 1991, when he confidently asserted that war with Saddam would 'push up the price of oil to $65 a barrel for about a year, produce a collapse in the American banking system . . , and produce a world recession'. Meanwhile, the Continentals are all hot for Unmovic. I assumed Unmovic was the new and even more obstinate Serb strongman, but apparently it's the latest inspections regime — the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission — that Saddam's suddenly all eager to invite in. Now why do you think that might be?

Of course, his vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, wants an assurance from the UN that its inspections won't be 'intrusive', and no doubt they'd be happy to go along. Give Saddam a quick glide with the electronic wand, no need for a full cavity search, it's all just for show anyway. That the old butcher is developing weapons of mass destruction is not in doubt. The only question is whether or not he'll use them — or, more to the point, use them on anybody we give a toss about. The Eurosophists reckon he won't. Washington would rather make sure he can't.

Beyond that, the President isn't really interested in making a case. Those who want to do so on his behalf draw attention to a pre-11 September meeting in Prague between Saddam's man and Mohammed Atta. Others say that, if the new Bush Doctrine of 'pre-emption' means anything, Saddam's the obvious place to start. But I prefer to look at it this way: What's the real long-term war aim of the United States? I'd say it's this — to bring the Middle East within the civilised world. How do you do that? Tricky, but this we can say for certain: you'll never be able to manage it

with the present crowd Saddam, the Ayatollahs, the House of Saud, Boy Assad, Mubarak, Yasser. When Arnr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warns the BBC that a US invasion of Iraq would 'threaten the whole stability of the Middle East', he's missing the point: that's the reason it's such a great idea. Suppose we buy in to Moussa's pitch and place stability above all other considerations. We get another 25 years of the Ayatollahs, another 35 years of the PLO and llamas, another 40 years of the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, another 80 years of Saudi Wahabbism. What kind of Middle East are we likely to have at the end of all that? The region's in the state it's in because, uniquely in the non-democratic world, it's too stable. It's the stability of the cesspit.

So if you want to destabilise the entire region, where's the best place to start? Answer: the regime that represents the height of the stability junkies' folly. It was the fetishisation of stability that led to Bush Sr, Colin Powell and co. leaving the Saddamites in power 11 years ago. In Britain, Joe Biden is known, if at all, as the only man in America crazy enough to try to become president by plagiarising Neil Kinnock (the stuff about being the only Kinnock, Cr, Biden, in a thousand generations to go to college). But in America he is, believe it or not, still a powerful Democratic senator and these days just about every ten minutes somewhere on your radio or TV dial you can hear him retelling a pompous little anecdote in which he explains how he's warned Bush against taking out Saddam. 'Mr President,' he claims to have said, 'there is a reason your father stopped and did not go to Baghdad. The reason he stopped is he didn't want to stay for five years.'

And your point is... ? By my arithmetic, that means we'd have been out in 1996. Sounds a good deal to me. Instead, it's late summer 2002 and we're still ineffectually bombing Iraq every week while somehow managing to get blamed for systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids — or two million or whatever it's up to by now — through UN sanctions, though funnily enough UN sanctions don't seem to have so tightened Saddam's purse strings that he can't find 25,000 bucks to give to the family of each Palestinian suicide bomber. More than that, he's still here. And, simply by being still here, he's what passes for a success story in the Arab world. He's living proof to the boneheads on the 'Arab street' that you can be violently anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-everything, and get away with it. Today, French flights are once again landing at Saddam Hussein International Airport in Baghdad. With every year he survives, the will to constrain him diminishes and his legend throughout the region increases.

So Saddam has to go. He will fall quickly, as quickly as the Taleban fell. The disparity between poorly trained and scared Iraqi troops and the American forces will be greater even than 11 years ago, and without the hand-tying multilateralism of a Stanley Gibbons collect-the-set coalition. What happens then is harder to predict. I doubt whether any coherent post-Saddam administration can come from the disaffected freaks, creeps and losers assembled by the realpolitik set in London the other week and launched as the 'Iraqi National Movement'. But, as Al Gore would say, first things first: it's not strictly necessary for a new regime in Iraq to be better than its predecessor, only different, That sends the important message that whose fingernails you rip out in the dungeon of the presidential palace is your affair, but start monkeying with us and you've written your last romantic novel, moustache boy. That's the immediate and critical US aim.

Nonetheless, whoever succeeds Saddam will almost certainly be an improvement. That's to say, he will, at worst, be a post-11 September General Musharraf — a nonderanged dictator who'll stick the anthrax programme on the back burner, attend to more pressing economic matters, and thereby set in motion a chain of events, state by state. Just to run through a few:

Saudi Arabia: I don't believe those stories in the British press about the Kingdom being on the verge of collapse. In fact, I'd say they most likely came from Crown Prince Abdullah himself, desperate to stave off the invasion of Iraq. His ludicrous 'Palestinian peace plan' served as a grand diversion this spring and he's hoping this latest wheeze will see him through to New Year.

One reason why the House of Saud wants Saddam to stick around is because the first thing a new Iraqi regime will do, liberated from UN constraints on oil exports, is start pumping an extra couple million gallons a day. It's a small point but one worth noting that, by keeping Saddam in power but restricting his ability to sell oil, the West to a certain extent punishes itself. A new regime in Baghdad, whether democratic or not, means more oil, which means cheaper prices at the pump, which means more pressure on the House of Saud, whose underpants get tightened a notch with every per barrel dollar drop. Thus, Saddam's removal could be seriously crushing.

There are no good guys in Saudi Arabia — the choice is between those who are openly pro-al-Qa'eda and those who are quietly buying them off — but the less money they're getting from oil, the less they have to fund Islamist recruitment in Europe, South Asia and North America; and the more internal dissension there is in the kingdom, the more likely their excitable young men are to wage the jihad at home rather than abroad.

Jordan: there are rumours doing the rounds in Washington that King Abdullah has been more or less bought by Saddam, and pretty cheaply, too. This is in the grand tradition of King Hussein's decision to stick with his Iraqi 'brother' during the last Gulf War, when even the Syrians signed up with the Americans. It's obvious that the longer Saddam stays in power the more Jordan will be corrupted, and eventually we'll wind up with one more fetid Arab sewer state. The Hashemite Kingdom is already an important route for Iraqi sanctions-busting, and Saddam would quite like to use it as a military highway, too. Of all the hardline anti-Jew rejectionist regimes in the Middle East. the Saddamites are the only ones anxious to send their troops into combat against Israel. All that's restraining them is the Arab countries they'd have to pass through en route. Every year Saddam stays in power increases the chance he'll turn Jordan into a de facto colony and thruway to the battlefield.

I'm not a Hashemite romantic: when you actually sit down and try and work out why Jordan gets such a good press, it seems to boil down mainly to the royal family's taste in hot-looking Westernised women. But, if their good points remain kinda mysterious, it's nevertheless the case that they've got fewer bad points than any of their neighbours. The problem is they've been beached by history in a chronically vulnerable state. So it would be nice to be able to give them a chance to reclaim their destiny. The best solution for Saudi Arabia would be to dismember it, share the coastal regions between the friendlier Gulf emirs, take over the oil fields and give the Muslim holy sites to Jordan. If King Abdullah's really in bed with Saddam, too bad: there's always his

uncle, Prince Hassan. But getting Saddam off the Hashemite windpipe will be the first step in letting the most reformable Arab regime start reforming.

Iran: as I write this, the original Islamist nutters are firing on their hapless citizens in Tehran. Esfahan, Ghazvin and other Iranian cities. The popular demonstrations are to mark the 96th anniversary of the constitutional monarchy and, so far as one can tell from the patchy reports, it sounds more like Hungary 1956 than Czechoslovakia 1989. But there are some interesting details. Protesters report that the regime's riot police are speaking Arabic. That confirms rumours that the mullahs have hired Saudis, Iraqis and others to do the heavy work of shooting civilians. The likelihood that a young pro-Western population will be cowed by Arab outsiders decreases significantly after Saddam's gone: they'll no longer be the crack troops of the regional superpower but only the despised remnants of a loser regime.

The Palestinian Authority: the Palestinian people are perhaps the best testament to the defects of stability. They've been kept in an artificially stable environment for half a century: the faux 'refugee camps' of Jenin and the like, which are effectively UN-supervised terrorist-training facilities now populated by three generations of 'refugees' who've never lived in the places they're supposed to be refugees from. •The millions of displaced persons in postwar Europe or India at partition should thank God they never caught the eye of the UN. All-out war to the death would be preferable, regardless of who won. Either the Arabs would get their way and push the Jews into the sea or the Arabs would be decisively beaten once and for all. But neither scenario would have led to the remorseless descent into depravity that the Palestinians have accomplished in their UN-mandated limbo. The death-cult psychosis doesn't exist in isolation: it's armed by Iran, bankrolled by Iraq, and philosophically sustained by Saudi Islamism. It will not survive the liquidation of its state patrons. This is good news for any Palestinians interested in actual life.

None of the above will happen without a massive humiliating military defeat of the Arab world's Number One loonitoon. Shortly thereafter, the Ayatollahs and or man Yasser will be gone, and the House of Saud, Junior Assad and Mubarak will follow. Think I'm crazy? Look at the map the last time we went to war with Saddam. In 1991, Afghanistan was still communist, as were the Central Asian republics; Pakistan was under the corrupt Sharif regime; and the newly united Yemen was on its way to civil war. Eleven years later, General Musharraf is trying his hardest to be Washington's new best friend, and American forces are in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and even Georgia. The Middle East's eastern and northern borders have quietly become an American sphere of influence. The regimes on the ground are of varying degrees of unattractiveness, but none of 'em is causing the West any trouble. That's the way Araby will look in a couple of years. It starts in Baghdad, and soon.