IS Iraq turning into a horrible quagmire for the US ? In spite of putting up a brave face on this question, the US administration cannot but be profoundly concerned. Because, barring an early military victory virtually every single American plan for Iraq has gone awry -- from Jay Garner to Paul Bremer and from Kurdish North to Shiite South. Most of its strategic allies have refused to send troops and bestow legitimacy on Iraq's occupation. In the meantime an armed resistance against 150,000 American and 15,000 British occupation forces in Iraq is steadily building up. A hit and run war inflicting 'thousand cuts' on the enemy -- weak but effective -- is already in the offing. The every other day the occupation forces are targets of phantom opponents which bring their objective in line of snipers' fire or rocket-propelled grenade.

While this war is brewing up in Iraq, the Arabs who are in one way or the other affected by Iraq's occupation appear baffled as to whether the US really can make Iraq a platform for a strategic, economic and cultural re-shaping of the entire Arab world (as well as Iran) or whether this extraordinary neo-

conservative ambition will only provoke what amounts to a second Arab struggle for independence. So, for them the signs of the occupation forces increasingly running into trouble are hardly surprising and have resonated round the region. Earlier, the shock waves of the Arabs' hopelessly ineffectual response to US-British invasion had thrown into sharp relief two competing currents among Arab political class: a relatively new 'democratic' one versus the older panArab nationalist or Islamist ones that dominated Arab politics since independence.

The visions of Iraq by both sides are those of humiliations of the Arabs unparalleled since their crippling defeats by Israel in 1967. Both are sceptical of the US' ostensibly reformist mission and about its professed desire to spread democracy and are conscious of the fact that under the veneer of those noble purposes it has self-serving neoimperial objectives that include its oil and corporate interests and, of course, an enhanced regional dominance. To them it is no more a secret that the occupiers also want to broker peace for a Middle East settlement that would kill Pan-Arab nationalism once for all and plant Israel more firmly at the heart of a new regional order. Both the camps oppose those schemings and want

to 'expel new colonialism' but envisage different route to that end.

According to Lebanese columnist Aboul Nasr, the basic question is whether Iraq should give priority to liberation or building democracy and reconstruction. The democratic camp favours the second course. For 'democrats' it was the lack of democracy which brought the Arabs to their present predicament and for that they blame the nationalists, the holder of power since independence as much as the Americans. "National liberation

regimes", says Reda Helal, the deputy editor of the Al-Ahram, "have trampled the freedom of their people for so long under the pretense of ending colonialism, but they ultimately helped colonialism's return under the excuse of 'liberating' their people" it is a great irony of the politics of Arab nationalism.

It is not without a reason that there is a growing trend in the 'democratic camp to give a chance to the US' official democratising aims at least to succeed. Nonetheless it's an

extremely difficult choice even for the democrats. "I never imagined," says Leila Qadi, a Lebanese researcher, "that I would be looking to those neo-conservative, proIsrael extremists and right-wing Christians to improve our lot, but the fact is that as a result of the US-British venture in Iraq there is a chance for change."

Saddam's ignominious collapse is seen to exemplify the rottenness of not just the nationalist/Islamist regimes such as Syria and Iran, but also of those pro-American ones such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The 'democrats' however do not want the US to do to them what it did to Saddam. "The change must be internal, not US-imposed," says Hanan Hasan, a professor in Damascus University.

The nationalist/Islamist camp, by contrast, believes that the 'liberation' of Iraq should take precedence over 'building on all levels' despite evidence that it was essentially this self-same choice which first led the Arabs astray. Still their priority remains what it always was: national or religious self assertion confronting the US imperialism and Zionism. They want Iraq to be the crucible for a new anti-colonial struggle. Many Arab 'democrats' consider that presumptuous. "The most peculiar thing" says a Kuwaiti commentator," is that some Arabs

are more Iraqi than the Iraqis, urging them to launch a popular liberation war -- this after they suffered from three absurd wars". The democrats argue: even if the 'democratic route' to regaining Arab independence is slower, it will be much less costly and ultimately just as effective as the national-ist/Islamist one. Let the Americans bring us the democracy and in doing so they will by their own hand defeat their other neo-imperial agenda.

The Saudi daily Al-Watan argues that the American requirements cannot be fulfilled by the free choice of any Arab people. What would happen if a freely elected Iraqi parliament wants China, for example, to participate in reconstruction or refuses to become a oilmilch cow or to normalise with Israel? But if under a nationalist/Islamist banner the Iraqis choose 'liberation' above 'building,' this will certainly be a different story. Which way Iraq -and with it the Arab world -- will go remains to be seen.

Much will depend on the Americans themselves. After 35 years of Baathism the Iraqis are weary of conflict and despite the portents of resistance the overall balance of forces still favours the democratic aspirations. But more inept and oppressive the occupiers' rule, the more their neo-imperial or Israel-serving agenda takes precedence over their reformist one, the more liable they are to tip the balance in favour of the nationalist camp. Few Arabs dispute that, so far, the Americans have done badly -- so badly that, in view of Abdul Bari Atwan, editor of the Pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi, they risk provoking "a national awakening and war of attrition that make Vietnam seem like a picnic in comparison".

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.