Dan Eaton, Jakarta – Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, issued some of its harshest criticism of Washington's Iraq policy on Monday, saying the US occupation had not met objectives and was becoming a debacle.
Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda also said the war in Iraq served as a wake-up call for Southeast Asia to get its own house in order to prevent similar events in the region.
"It is possible the forces of the old regime in Iraq, aided by foreign fighters infiltrated into the country, will continue to wage a prolonged guerrilla campaign," said Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda.
"There is the dreadful prospect of the balkanisation of Iraq with boundaries drawn on ethnic and sectarian lines," he also said in a speech to a security conference.
"The various rival factions in Iraq today could be sucked by that power vacuum into a new and terrible round of internecine violence – a civil war." He said that those developments would pose a threat to the entire Middle East, and the situation had heightened the grievances in the Muslim world and damaged the United Nations.
If the various trends continue, "that would make the war in Iraq a debacle to the cause of security and peace." The United States has tried hard to make strategically located and 80-percent Muslim Indonesia an ally in Washington's war on terrorism.
After a halting start, it has had some success in getting the world's fourth most populous country on board in regional efforts, but both the intervention in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq has brought widespread Indonesian criticism.
Wirajuda's comments on Monday were some of the strongest from the government since Baghdad fell to US-led forces.
If weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq "because they do not exist, then an entire country has been leveled to the ground for no good reason," Wirajuda said.
After Wirajuda's talk, Ralph Boyce, US ambassador to Indonesia, told Reuters: "It's a little early to declare the Iraq situation a failure. We are only a few months into this effort.
"Also the idea that the whole country was levelled to the ground I have to push back. I don't know a war in human history that made more of an effort to avoid civilian and infrastructure damage, even enemy force casualties, so the post-war rebuilding would not be impeded," Boyce said.
Wirajuda said it was essential ASEAN – the area covered by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations that Indonesia now chairs – becomes a region at peace with itself and neighbours. "If we can achieve that, we have largely insured that what happened in Iraq this year will never happen in Southeast Asia."