My impression is that many Arabs today feel that what has been taking place in Iraq over the last two months is little short of a catastrophe. True, Saddam Hussein's regime was a despicable one in every way and it deserved to be removed. Also true is the sense of anger many feel at how outlandishly cruel and despotic that regime was, and how dreadful has been the suffering of Iraq's people. There seems little doubt that far too many other governments and individuals connived to keep Saddam Hussein in power, looking the other way as they went about their business as usual. Nevertheless, the only thing that gave the US license to bomb the country and destroy its government was neither a moral right nor a rational argument but sheer military power. Having for years supported Ba'athist Iraq and Saddam Hussein himself, the US and Britain arrogated to themselves the right to negate their own complicity in his despotism, and then to state that they were liberating Iraq from his hated tyranny. And what now seems to be emerging in the country both during and after the illegal Anglo-American war against the people and civilization that is the essence of Iraq represents a very grave threat to the Arab people as a whole.

It is of the utmost importance that we recall in the first instance that, despite their many divisions and disputes, the Arabs are in fact a people, not a collection of random countries passively available for outside intervention and rule. There is a clear line of imperial continuity that begins with Ottoman rule over the Arabs in the 16th century until our own time. After the Ottomans in World War One came the British and the French, and after them, in the period following World War Two, came America and Israel. One of the most insidiously influential strands of thought in recent American and Israeli Orientalism, and evident in American and Israeli policy since the late 1940s, is a virulent, extremely deep-seated hostility to Arab nationalism and a political will to oppose and fight it in every possible way. The basic premise of Arab nationalism in the broad sense is that, with all their diversity and pluralism of substance and style, the people whose language and culture are Arab and Muslim (call them the Arab-speaking peoples, as Albert Hourani did in his last book) constitute a nation and not just a collection of states scattered between North Africa and the western boundaries of Iran. Any independent articulation of that premise was openly attacked, as in the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war the stated purpose of which was to topple a specific regime but the real goal of which was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli and American campaign against Abdel-Nasser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a powerful independent political force, the American goal today is to redraw the map of the Arab world to suit American, and not Arab, interests. US policy thrives on Arab fragmentation, collective inaction, and military and economic weakness.

One would have to be foolish to argue that the nationalism and doctrinaire separateness of individual Arab states, whether the state is Egypt, Syria, Kuwait or Jordan, is a better thing, a more useful political actuality than some scheme of inter-Arab cooperation in economic, political and cultural spheres. Certainly I see no need for total integration, but any form of useful cooperation and planning would be better than the disgraceful summits that have disfigured our national life, say, during the Iraq crisis. Every Arab asks the question, as does every foreigner: why do the Arabs never pool their resources to fight for the causes which officially, at least, they claim to support, and which, in the case of the Palestinians, their people actively, indeed passionately believe in?

I will not spend time arguing that everything that has been done to promote Arab nationalism can be excused for its abuses, its short-sightedness, its wastefulness, repression and folly. The record is not a good one. But I do want to state categorically that, since the early 20th century, the Arabs have never been able to achieve their collective independence as a whole or in part exactly because of the designs on the strategic and cultural importance of their lands by outside powers. Today, no Arab state is free to dispose of its resources as it wishes, nor to take positions that represent that individual state's interests, especially if those interests seem to threaten US policies. In the more than 50 years since America assumed world dominance, and more so after the end of the Cold War, it has run its Middle Eastern policy based on two principles, and two principles alone: the defense of Israel and the free flow of Arab oil, both of which involved direct opposition to Arab nationalism. In all significant ways, with few exceptions, American policy has been contemptuous of and openly hostile to the aspirations of the Arab people, although with surprising success since Nasser's demise it has had few challengers among the Arab rulers who have gone along with everything required of them.