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The decline of the American
Century
By K Gajendra Singh
"When there is a general change of
conditions, it is as if the entire creation had been
changed and the whole world been altered." - Ibn Khaldun
"History is but glorification of murderers and
robbers." - Karl Popper
BUCHAREST - It is
the afternoon sun that dazzles onlookers though it is
past its prime. That sums up the height of US power
before last September 11. If the US nuclear bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki without fear of retaliation was
the acme of the American Century, then the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, symbols of
economic and military might, could be termed the
beginning of the end of the American Century.
US
President George W Bush's spontaneous call for a
"crusade" and "Infinite Justice" neatly expressed the
reality better than the later slogans, "war on
terrorism" and "Enduring Freedom". At least the Muslim
masses all over the world now watching daily brutalities
inflicted on innocent Palestinians and their persecution
since the occupation of their land, illegal bombings of
Iraq and now a threat of unjustified war without any
casus belli are convinced that there is a Western
crusade that calls for a jihad. Many even believe that
the September 11 attacks were a Zionist conspiracy. To
many, Osama bin Laden is a hero, as Che Guevara is to
leftists. Al-Qaeda is popular among many Muslims, who
are against the stationing of US troops on sacred Saudi
Arabian soil. They despise oppressive US-supported
regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf and
elsewhere.
After having thoughtlessly helped
create the monster of Islamic fundamentalism, the United
States has now succeeded in arousing it, ranging the
might of Islamic people and their faith against itself.
Earlier, the poor and the deprived could find solace and
action in communist and leftist ideologies and programs,
but after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, many in
the Islamic world have taken to extreme religious
movements.
For the first time in history, war
has been brought to US territory, making it dar ul
harab (the house of war). Even a normal air accident
now shatters the jangled nerves and morale of New
Yorkers. Apart from bearding the Western lion in its
den, inflicting direct and collateral economic damage
that may amount to as much as US$95 billion, September
11 globalized the feeling of insecurity and terror from
which the United States had felt immune. Without much of
a spiritual anchor, frightened New Yorkers indulged in
"terror sex" for comfort. Ten months on, erotic parties
are still the staple diet of the middle classes.
University of Washington sociology professor Dr Pepper
Schwartz says, "In times of upheaval and terror, people
look for confirmation of life, and there is no more
obvious antidote to death than sex. It happened between
British women and American GIs during World War II, it
happened in Korea and Vietnam." Industries such as
tourism, hospitality, travel and leisure, which hike up
gross domestic products (GDPs) in the West, have been
hit and will not recover easily.
The US spends a
staggering amount of money to defend itself. But the
innovative guerrilla air attacks that stunned the US
pierced forever the myth of homeland inviolability.
Those who live in glass houses cannot be immune from
stones. The tens of billions of dollars spent by the US
government on agencies such as the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) could not protect Americans. And there is no
guarantee that they can in the future. Apart from
killing ill-trained Taliban and bombing to death
thousands of innocent civilians, the combined special
forces of the United States, United Kingdom and other
allies have not been able to catch the main leaders of
al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Rather, a war scare is being
created in order to pour trillions of dollars into
national missile defense (NMD) and other defense
projects, which will only fatten the pockets of the
military-industrial complex and the corporate interests
behind it.
Assassins
In some ways the
Saudis and Egyptians who carried out the September 11
attacks are descendents of the Assassins who emerged in
the 10th century against the tyrannical caliphs, the
military and civil rulers in the Middle East. These
suicide terrorists even frightened the supreme Mongol
warlord far away in Karakorum. He sent his brother
Hulagu to destroy their bases in Iran's mountain
stronghold of Alamut near the Caspian Sea. Later, the
13th century Mamluk sultan, Baybars, destroyed their
bases in Syria. Stories of martyred Assassins entering a
paradise of beautiful women in gardens full of flowers
and fruit trees with streams of water, honey and wine
were products of fertile European imagination, a
misconception that still persists in the West. Their
real motivation was religious fervor and obedience to
their sheikh's cause. The Assassins learned languages,
the art of fighting, even posed as Sufis, waited for
years, even decades, for the opportunity to knife the
target and die happily. (1)
Throughout history,
there have always been asymmetrical wars, with the only
recourse of the weak to sacrifice his life against a
powerful tyrant. Among Muslims, Caliph Ali's son Imam
Hussein, his forces outnumbered, is revered for his
sacrifice at Kerbala for his principles. Today, nations
send their soldiers to die for country or corporate
interests in exchange for Purple Hearts and
Distinguished Service Medals.
The sorry results
of subcontracting the hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban to
Afghans and Pakistanis, instead of sending Rambos and
James Bonds, is there for all to see. There are plenty
of black-humor stories of these Rambos' and 007s'
adventures in real life. Faced with an unknown and
invisible enemy in hostile terrain, many US operatives
have returned home unbalanced and unhinged. Yet, there
have been few US casualties. As Richard Cohen of the
Washington Post commented last January, "a virtually
nonexistent US casualty rate is either a signal
achievement or a debacle in the making. It [the US] was
terrified of losing lives. It would fire off a missile
on occasion or send bombers screeching overhead, but it
would not put men on the ground. To him [bin Laden], the
USA was a paper tiger. You name the place - Lebanon,
Iraq, Iran, Somalia - the United States had failed to
finish the job. By reducing the cost of war to almost
nil, the United States may have set the stage for yet
more terrorism and bloodshed."
Cohen concluded:
"America's war aims may well be compromised by America's
reluctance to 'take casualties'." Bin Laden and his
followers can survive on beans, but Western forces must
have bottled water.
The technique of Mao
Zedong's rural guerrillas of disappearing into the
countryside when attacked, like fish in water, helped
the North Vietnamese humiliate the United States in the
1960s and '70s. Similarly in the 4th century BC, when
Alexander, sweeping everything in his wake, reached Oxus
(near Bokhara), a delegation from the horse-riding
Scythian nomads of the steppes up north warned him
against further advance. The nomads, Alexander was told,
unlike the Achemenian emperor and others, would not
stand up and fight. They would disappear in the steppes
and attack when least expected. Just like the
3rd-millennium Assassins who struck on September 11.
Evolution of mercantile and corporate
interests
Magicians and priests ruled in early
history. As tribes got better organized, power was
shared and then transferred to warriors and kings, with
priests and wise men as advisers. From the mercantilism
of Genoa and Venice, if not of the Phoenicians or
Miletians, merchants emerged as new power brokers in
Europe. Ever since Charles Darwin's theory of evolution,
Westerners, particularly Anglo-Saxons, have put almost
total faith in the survival-of-the-fittest rule. With
Cartesian thinking, apart from colonialism, imperialism
and cultural orientalism, the West also evolved divisive
nationalism, Marxism, capitalism, ideological
totalitarianism - and now globalism, under the garb of
economic deregulation and integration, creating a system
akin to capitulation, granting sovereign power to
foreign interests and expatriates. Capitulations
undermined the Ottoman empire. China was one of
capitulation's greatest victims. (2)
With the
United States replacing Europe as the new focus of
Western power, it believes there is nothing superior to
human knowledge. In Greek philosophy, from which Western
civilization derives, the idea of unwritten laws exists
- which "live always and forever, and no man knows from
where they have arisen". Western belief in an external
moral universe to which men owe obedience has been
changed to a rational secular alternative. The late
English social historian, philosopher, and essayist
Isaiah Berlin's advice that "solutions to the central
problems existed, that one could discover them and, with
sufficient selfless effort, realize them on Earth" has
been lost. Popular religious belief in the West still
remains strong, but since the mid-20 century its elites
have become secularized with radical autonomy and
absolute freedom to do whatever one chooses - alone in
the universe. There is general belief in the US that
everyone has a price and can be bought. Happiness is a
function of more cars, more white goods and higher gross
national product (GNP). But the world is not made like
that.
The American Century
The
American Century began in the early 20th century when
European economic and military power, with Great Britain
first among equals, started declining and was
transferred to the American subcontinent - from the City
of London to Wall Street. World War I announced the
arrival of the new guy on the block, the United States,
but it was not yet numero uno. That happened in
World War II, when the stamp of brutal power was heard
around the world as the United States dropped two
nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a time when
no other world power had such a weapon.
By now
there is enough evidence to believe that US authorities
let Pearl Harbor happen. US president Franklin
Roosevelt's son and confidant, talking of people
"scorched and boiled and baked to death", said that the
atomic bombing should continue "until we have destroyed
about half the Japanese civilian population". General
Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan
Project, hastily reassured congressmen that radiation
caused no "undue suffering" and that "in fact, they say
it is a very pleasant way to die". In 1946 a US
strategic bombing survey concluded that "Japan would
have surrendered even if atomic bombs had not been
dropped".
While the power of military
preponderance remained with the United States, the
Soviet Union arrived as a challenger with its own
nuclear bomb in 1950s. The Cuban face-off in 1962
between the two nuclear powers was a US victory on
points, and soon the two sides, the capitalist world led
by US and the Soviet Union, reached a nuclear stalemate,
appropriately named MAD (mutual assured
destruction).
What has been described as the Cold
War was almost like a simulated nuclear war, in which
the two sides invested most of their economic strength.
The USSR, a lesser economic power, lost the war by the
end of the 1980s. Historically, however, prolonged wars
between two well-matched enemies affect both adversely.
It was the exhaustion caused by the prolonged wars
between the Byzantine and the Sasanian empires, as well
as plagues and famines, that allowed Islam, the new
military power from the deserts of Arabia, so easily and
quickly to carve an empire that stretched from the
Atlantic to China. So after its Cold War victory, aided
by a naive Mikhail Gorbachev and consolidated with the
help of Boris Yeltsin and his coterie, it became
apparent very soon that the capitalist system led by the
US had started shuddering.
Whither
capitalism?
By August-September 1998, the very
bastions of capitalism were reduced to utter panic and
incoherence after the collapse of the East and Southeast
Asian economies, the decimation of the Russian ruble and
the threatened fall of the Brazilian economy.
On
September 8, 1998, the Washington Post under the
headline "Rethink capitalism", wrote: "What is
frightening about the world's current economic troubles
is a sense that rules we thought we understood don't
seem to apply now. Until a few months ago, we thought we
knew what a developing country had to do to join the
ranks of the wealthy. We thought we knew how a communist
country could transform itself into a capitalist one.
The general understanding was that as the world became
more connected, it also would become more prosperous.
Now, with Russia and much of Asia having crashed, with
Eastern Europe and Latin America imperiled and with much
of Africa going backward, the certainties of only a year
ago seem far from certain."
Other headlines
around the same time were "Global capitalism, once
triumphant, is in full retreat" (Robert J Samuelson in
Newsweek) and "In Russia, the liberal Western model has
failed" (Martin Malia in the International Herald
Tribune). There were similar articles in the Council of
Foreign Relations' magazine Foreign Affairs and other
journals.
The situation remains confused.
Perhaps, figuratively speaking, the introduction of
computers, the Internet and globalization has brought
about a concept akin to the theory of relativity in
human economic phenomena and decision-making, over
simple erstwhile "Newtonian" economics. Hence it is not
easy to comprehend econometrics and tabulate it as
before.
By the end of the 20th century US
corporate interests had acquired almost full control of
world finance and power. The nominees of the armaments,
energy and other sectors become presidents who promote
their interests at home and abroad. Corporate interests
bid for their candidate and the highest bidder gets his
man in the White House. But even with a blind opening
bid of nearly US$65 million, only legal jiggery-pokery,
possible only in the US, could get George W Bush into
the White House. This was despite the fact that the
United States has perhaps one of the best judicial
systems, in spite of the excesses of ambulance chasers
and alimony and palimony lawyers.
While the
American people were confused, scared and panicky after
September 11, the Bush administration did not miss the
chance to enrich its masters. As US economist Paul
Krugman pointed out at the end of last year, the US
Congress voted $15 billion in aid to airline companies
but nothing for laid-off airline workers. Also there was
almost nothing for the unemployed but $25 billion in
retroactive corporate tax cuts, mostly to highly
profitable companies.
Abroad, the charade of
globalization, a distorted version of capitalism,
enforces rapid capital movements for quick profits with
no accountability, leaving weak national economies in
disarray and shattered. It has played havoc around the
world. The weapons used are the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the United Nations, the
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) and now the World Trade Organization (WTO). The
movement against the WTO, led by Western citizens, is
getting stronger as shown in Seattle, Naples and
elsewhere and, instead of being a celebration of a rich
man's club giving orders to the developing world and its
proletariat and serfs, it now has to meet in remote
fortress-like places. But it has been overtaken by
September 11, with the club members hiding behind the
slogan of patriotism and the war against terror.
US leadership and lessons from
history
An astute analyst blamed the US debacle
in Vietnam on a lack of moral and integrated leadership.
The war was run like a managerial enterprise. There was
no holistic or long-term planning. Leaders from the
corporate and legal professions, sometimes ruthless and
insensitive academics such as Henry Kissinger and
Madeleine Albright, came in for a few years to manage
Washington.
If a president gets a second term,
he wants his name carved in history. Bill Clinton's rush
for a solution exacerbated the situation between Israel
and Palestine. Of course in the corporate world if
things go wrong, one can close the company and retire
with handsome benefits or start a new one. Until
recently mighty Enron, now unraveled, was even
threatening sanctions against India. The history of
capitalist and corporate America is like that of any
empire built by a line of brilliant rulers, say the
Ottoman or Moghul empires. When dishonest grand viziers
took over, the empires declined and fell. After Henry
Ford and others built their empires, professional
managers took over. But with the fraud and cheating by
professional managers in Enron, WorldCom etc, America is
slated for decline.
In history, when societies
become rich and flabby they are reluctant to engage in
bloody fights. The desert Arabs whose swords carved an
empire became soft after lapping up luxuries from the
conquered Byzantine and Persian empires.
By the
mid-9th century the caliphs started recruiting Turkish
nomad slaves from Central Asia for fighting. It was only
a matter of time before the slaves took over and
upgraded the minor office of sultan to the protector of
hapless Arab caliphs. With the route to Turkish slaves
blocked by Persians, the Ottomans recruited non-Muslim
Christian Slav boys from the Balkans as "new soldiers"
or Janissaries (Turkish yeniceri). The best among
them ran the empire, but after a few centuries they
became a law unto themselves. Soon the Janissaries were
terrorizing not their Christian enemies in Europe but
their own sultans, overthrowing and even killing some.
They had to be destroyed, but it led to decline and fall
of the Ottoman Empire. (3)
It is said that the
secretive Shi'a sect of the Alawites, who allegedly
believe in transmigration of soul, form about 12 percent
of the Syrian population. While the majority Syrian
Sunnis controlled trade, industry and politics,
downtrodden Alawites became foot soldiers, slowly
progressing through the ranks to become middle-level and
senior military officers. Soon there were enough and,
led by General Hafiz Assad, they took over Syria, which
they still rule. When in the mid-1980s Sunnis killed
nearly 100 Alawite officers in Hama, Assad's
half-brother was sent there. He butchered more than
30,000 Sunnis, creating a new Hama Rule: "Rule or die".
US and European leaders are reluctant to risk
soldiers in conflicts and wars, even for human
intelligence. Fear of body bags - and what they would do
to their popularity - sends shivers down their spines.
Hence the use of missiles and stealth bombers. (Rambos
and James Bonds are for celluloid.) On the other side
are Muslims like those who stunned the United States
last September 11, determined to die for their cause.
They are more dangerous than the machinelike robot
killers from the West's special forces; even more than
the cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE) who carry cyanide pills, giving them the easy
option of avoiding torture if caught.
Both
George W Bush and his predecessor as US
commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, avoided military
service in Vietnam - much like the Arab caliphs. When
the draft became unpopular among whites, it was
abolished; now more blacks join the US armed forces.
They may not repeat what Alawites have done in Syria or
the slaves in Islamic history, but this nevertheless has
future ramifications for the white US political elite
and polity.
The United States - an imperial
power
Once only foreign leftists used to speak of
US imperialism; now an increasing number of American
commentators, from right to left, even from academe,
proudly use terms such as "Pax Americana" and describe
the United States as a latter-day empire - with a duty
to protect and, if necessary, rule the world. This
sentiment emerged after the quick US "victory" over the
Taliban (who in fact had just disappeared like Mao's
fish).
The war against terrorism has from the
beginning taken a distinctly racist coloration,
anti-Muslim and anti-Arab. US collusion in the
subsequent brutal Israeli aggression - all in the name
of race and ethnicity - has only served to reinforce
this. The new US willingness and threat to intervene in
the developing world wherever and whenever it sees fit
speaks not only of the fact that it is the sole
superpower but also that it is now prepared to act like
an imperial power.
Yes, the United States has
the brute strength to destroy the world. Like a dinosaur
that could consume all smaller animals, powerful US
corporate interests consume smaller nations for their
energy or other resources. But the dinosaur became
extinct, some say because of climate change brought on
by asteroids hitting the planet. With wasteful,
anti-environmental destruction of the Earth's resources
for corporate gains, we are fast heading toward
extinction even without aid of any asteroids.
Through so-called globalization and agencies
such as the IMF, the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and now the WTO,
what is being sought is not free trade and universal
prosperity but a politically distorted adaptation of the
classical trade theory owed to Adam Smith and David
Ricardo and their followers. Such narrow tunnel vision,
apart from increasing misery everywhere, also spreads
environmental degradation, overlooking an ethical and
holistic long-term view for the international community
as a whole. It is not like the leadership or vision
shown for those times by Roman, Ottoman or Moghul
emperors.
Gore Vidal wrote: "Historians often
look to the Roman Empire to find analogies with the
United States. They flatter us. We live not under the
Pax Americana; but the Pax Frigida. It should not look
to Rome for comparison but rather to the most serene
Venetian Republic, a pedestrian state devoted to wealth,
comfort, trade, and keeping the peace, especially after
inheriting the wreck of the Byzantine Empire, as we have
inherited the wreck of the British Empire. Venice was
not inspiring but it worked ... under that
sanctimoniousness so characteristic of the American
selling something, our governors know that we are
fighting not for 'the free world' but to hold on to an
economic empire not safe or pleasant to let go. The Arab
world - or as a salesman would say, 'territory' - is
almost ours, and we must persevere in landing that
account. It will be a big one some day."
Inequities of the current economic
order
The current international finance
architecture is founded on the US dollar as the dominant
reserve currency, accounting for 68 percent of global
currency reserves, up from 51 percent a decade ago. Yet
in 2000, the US share of global exports ($781.1 billion
out of a world total of $6.2 trillion) was only 12.3
percent and its share of global imports ($1.257 trillion
out of a world total of $6.65 trillion) was 18.9
percent.
Ever since 1971, when US president
Richard Nixon arbitrarily took the dollar off the gold
standard ($35 per ounce) in force since the Bretton
Woods Conference at the end of World War II, the dollar
has become the global monetary instrument that the
United States, and only the United States, can produce
by fiat, despite record US current-account deficits and
the US as the leading debtor nation. The US national
debt as of April 4 was $6.021 trillion against a GDP of
$9 trillion.
India has to maintain ample
foreign-exchange reserves, which have now reached $60
billion. Most of this must be kept in low-interest US
securities, which US companies like Enron can then
invest in India and force governments to guarantee 15
percent returns. Thus US companies earn billions of
dollars by investing Indian savings in India.
One of the casus belli for the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait was the latter's insistence that Iraq
must return $10 billion granted by Kuwait to fight Iran.
Kuwait finally ended up paying more than $50 billion (as
did the Saudis). The US, meanwhile, collected a cool
$150 billion or more for basically protecting its own
interests.
Globalization, much heralded since
the early 1990s as a panacea has turned out to be a
glib-ization of the economic and social problems of the
masses wallowing in misery in developing countries. In
the former socialist countries, so-called shock therapy
has reduced millions to penury. The middle classes have
been decimated while wealth and power are concentrated
in the hands of a few, ironically mostly former
communist leaders or apparatchiks or their friends.
Western media rarely write about it. Nearly $200 billion
has been transferred from former socialist countries to
the banks and other institutions in the West and become
a national debt. No wonder a current joke in Moscow is:
"What the communists said about communism was all wrong
but what they said about capitalism is all true."
Quite obviously the concentration of wealth in
the hands of a few wealthy people has resulted from
deliberate policy choices made by the governments of the
advanced economies - chiefly the US - pretending to act
in good faith but really in their national interests, in
particular the interests of the financial and corporate
communities in their political constituencies.
Even the very concept of capitalism as a panacea
for all problems and countries has been questioned,
rightly, even in the West, after the collapse of
economies in East and Southeast Asia, followed by the
crisis in Brazil. They had followed all the rules
prescribed by the IMF and other Western institutions.
In 1998, during the gravest global economic
crisis in a half-century, there was a furor when a
strong-willed Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad,
to protect his people from the likes of US financier
George Soros, defied the conventional wisdom of the
international financial community by curbing the free
flow of hot money that had played such havoc with the
economies of Southeast Asia. He brought in strict
short-term capital control measures, made the ringgit
non-convertible, and set up agencies for corporate debt
restructuring, asset management and refinancing.
Malaysia's recovery was almost as dramatic as it was
full-blooded. Only then was he grudgingly praised.
India escaped the ill effects of globalization
because of less opening up to the world economy and
because of a maze of regulations that act as a
bottleneck, helped by vociferous leftist opinion and a
free parliament. It might still cushion India in the
future in spite of vested interests who promote
liberalization and privatization because, without full
transparency, they can make a fast buck.
Transparency
If developing countries
must have "transparency", so should developed nations.
Most corrupt deals in the energy, raw-materials and
commodities sectors are controlled by corporate
interests and their servants in high decision-making
positions. The kickbacks taken by former senior US
officials from energy deals in the new Central Asian
republics or by others in Angola or Congo and money
given to the dictators runs into billions of dollars,
which has further impoverished these poor nations. What
about transparency about deposits in the numbered
accounts of those such as Mobutu Sese Seko (reputedly $5
billion), Ferdinand Marcos and other rulers of Africa
and Asia in Swiss banks? Where does this money go? The
UN could use it for development.
Most African
dictators are creatures of multinational organizations
and diamond dealers and the cause of ethnic fighting,
mayhem, genocide and unashamed exploitation. The whole
system is designed to exploit the poorest of the poor.
Surprisingly enough, countries that take the lead in
campaigning for human rights seldom worry about how
respected members of the rich men's club have no qualms
about profiting from money stolen from poor countries.
They provide tax havens and safe places for hiding
illicit gains for criminals, drug smugglers and mafia
dons. Why should the UN or others not look at the
facilities provided by such banks and difficulties
created by their legal systems against transparency?
The leaders and people of the United States
delude themselves that other people are envious. Yes,
they admire US dynamism and the rule of law and
democracy, but these apply only inside the US. But the
rage is against injustice perpetrated by naked US
financial clout backed by coercive military power all
over the world.
The US: A law unto
itself
Bush's threat of war against Iraq for
defying international law is absurd. Since coming into
office, he has torn up more international treaties and
disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the
world in past 20 years.
The list is familiar,
including but not limited to the withdrawal from the
Kyoto Protocol on global warming, failure to ratify the
Rio Pact on biodiversity, withdrawal from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the pursuit of
National Missile Defense. It appears ready to violate
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It opposed the ban on land
mines and has sought to immobilize the UN convention
against torture so that it could keep foreign observers
out of its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay and hide its
treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners. It has sabotaged the
small-arms treaty and is opposed to new provisions of
the biological-warfare convention. It experiments with
biological weapons of its own and has refused
chemical-weapons inspectors full access to its
laboratories. It is opposed to the International
Criminal Court and is coercing other countries to sign
separate agreements not to charge US citizens. It has
permitted CIA hit squads to recommence covert operations
of the kind that included, in the past, the
assassination of foreign heads of state. Even its threat
to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN
Security Council is a defiance of international law.
The Bush administration's foreign policy has
undermined the fragile structure of international law
and conventions built up during the past three
centuries, to which the United States made important
contributions. Former president Billy Carter, a
respected elder statesman frequently invited as an
observer to elections, wrote in the Washington Post on
September 6 that, "formerly admired almost universally
as the pre-eminent champion of human rights, our country
has become the foremost target of respected
international organizations concerned about these basic
principles of democratic life". He added that statements
on Israel by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
indicate "a radical departure from policies of every
administration since 1967, always based on the
withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories and a
genuine peace between Israelis and their neighbors".
Even before last September 11, the US was kept
out of the UN Commission on Human Rights and other
bodies. At the recent sustainable-development conference
in South Africa, ignored by Bush, US Secretary of State
Colin Powell was booed and heckled.
Promoter
of democracy, or of energy interests?
The United
States supports dictatorships. It funds media and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in countries such
as India to attack government policies that do not
follow US dictates. Forget about US-friendly regimes in
the Middle East and the Gulf. What about support to
Pakistan and many other dictatorships in East and
Southeast Asia?
In Afghanistan, breaking all
loya jirga traditions, the US got Hamid Karzai
installed as president and has used such people as the
late Abdul Haq, the recently assassinated Haji Abdul
Qadir, and other warlords and narcotics barons. Instead
of chasing al-Qaeda or the Taliban, such people use CIA
funds to establish themselves in power and restart
heroin labs closed down by the Taliban. For the
suffering Afghans, it is back to chaos and insecurity,
as the attempt to assassinate Karzai in Kandahar and
many bombs and explosions in Kabul show US bungling and
incompetence.
Until 1998, the United States and
its allies Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and
Pakistan fully supported the Taliban and supplied them
funds. Unocal, which spent millions of dollars on
geological surveys on a projected pipeline from Central
Asia to South Asia, courted the Taliban, whose leading
officials were negotiating in Texas in 1998. It was only
after the maverick Taliban decided to favor an Argentine
rival that John Maresca, vice president of Unocal,
testifying before the US Congress, said that there would
be no pipeline until the Taliban were gone and a more
friendly government was established.
Look how
the energy interests are trying to rule the United
States and the rest of the world. Zalmay Khalilzad, whom
the Bush administration appointed as its envoy to
Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, was a Unocal
consultant, as was, according to some reports, Karzai
himself. (Pushtuns call Karzai "America's Babrak
Karmal", a reference to the Soviet-backed president who
ruled Afghanistan from 1979-86.) It is well known that
the Bush family acquired its wealth through oil; former
president George Bush Sr still works with the Carlyle
Group that specializes in huge oil investments abroad.
His son's commerce secretary, Dale Evans, was chairman
and chief executive officer of an oil company. National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was on the board of
Chevron before going to Washington. (The oil company
even named a giant tanker after her, although the ship
has reportedly been quietly renamed the Altair Voyager.)
Dick Cheney, before becoming vice president, worked for
the giant oil conglomerate Halliburton.
Cynicism and hypocrisy
Who established
the nurseries of terrorism? Who left behind billions of
dollars' worth of arms in Afghanistan from which the
region around it continues to suffer? The chickens have
started to come home to roost.
One of the most
damning revelations from Britain's Scott inquiry into
the arms-to-Iraq affair during the Iran-Iraq War was the
Conservative government of the day's secret decision to
supply Saddam Hussein with even more weapons-related
equipment after the March 1988 Halabja gas bombings,
killing an estimated 5,000 civilians Kurds as punishment
for "collaboration" with Iranians. The weapons were
produced with German-supplied chemicals. Whitehall also
turned a blind eye to exports to Baghdad of equipment
that could produce chemical and nuclear weapons. (4)
This cynicism and hypocrisy was matched only by the US,
which reportedly approved export of virus cultures and a
$1 billion contract to design and build a petrochemical
plant the Iraqis planned to use to produce mustard gas.
"The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not
a matter of deep strategic concern," Walter Lang, a
former senior US defense intelligence officer, recently
told the New York Times.
Dangers from
within
The knee-jerk US reaction and quick-fix
measures after the September 11 attacks have changed the
very basics of US society, its function, transparency
and freedoms. Thousands of its loyal citizens and
students of Middle East origin and others are being
scrutinized, harassed and imprisoned without charge,
sometimes for no reason except for their origins. It has
alienated loyal citizens of Middle East and South Asian
descent, many in key positions.
There is talk of
military tribunals, something with which the US has a
despicable record. During World War II, thousands of US
citizens from Japan and Germany were interned.
Continuation of similar policies in the 21st century
might transform the US from being a melting pot of
nations to a "meltdown" of its cohesion, unity and
polity.
The United States is an idea barely more
than 200 years old that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants
dominate. There are still questions about what happened
to its first Catholic president John F Kennedy and some
of his family members. The US is a fragile nation, never
tested fully at home. Its internal security and unity
are fragile. It has yet to recover from its Vietnam
trauma.
African-American Walter Mosley, Bill
Clinton's favorite novelist, recently said: "Most black
people in America were not surprised by September 11. I
haven't met one black person who was surprised. Like
everyone else, they were shocked by the magnitude of it,
and appalled by the deaths, but they weren't surprised
by the hate and anger that produced it. Black Americans
are very aware of the attitude of America towards people
who are different, people whose beliefs are different,
people of a different color. We live with that attitude
every single day. We know how hated America is."
The danger to the US "way of life and stability"
could come from within, from black American Muslims who
now number 3 million to 5 million. Black Americans are
now joining the armed forces in large numbers after the
compulsory military draft was abolished.
The
black community and Muslims remember many historic
wrongs done to them. Of the 2 million Americans in
prisons, two-thirds are non-white. Many feel oppressed
by the white power structure and sentencing disparities,
which too often fall most harshly on minorities. Islam
offers brotherhood, dignity, and a sense of pride and
solidarity, especially for non-whites. But many,
alienated and disfranchised, are prime targets for
radical Islamists who preach a religion of violence, of
overcoming oppression by jihad. Many black Americans
have experienced maltreatment and dehumanization.
Conversion to Islam increased after September 11, even
among Hispanics.
While Muslims in the Arab world
and elsewhere are enraged by the killings of innocent
Palestinians and the deaths of half a million Iraqi
children because of the US-led embargo, do we know how
many bin Laden admirers exist among the black American
community? Recent examples such as Ali Mohammed, an
ex-US Army sergeant who pleaded guilty to plotting with
bin Laden to kill Americans, may be just a speck on the
tip of the iceberg. Islam has an old tradition of
asymmetrical wars. Al-Qaeda cells could soften the
Christian West as Turkmen horsemen did the Byzantine
Empire.
Never have so few annoyed so many. On
Iraq and most other international issues only British
Prime Minister Tony Blair (reflecting a 19th-century
"bomb the natives" mentality) supports Bush. Most
British citizens do not support the policy. For acting
as lackeys, the British get a disproportionate number of
jobs in the UN and other multilateral organizations to
act as a stalking horse for the US.
The UK has a
big Muslim population, which sends volunteers and huge
sums of money to support terrorism in the South Asian
subcontinent and elsewhere. Many are al-Qaeda members
involved in the murder of American journalist Daniel
Pearl in Pakistan and other terror-related and hijacking
activities. Other European countries such as Germany and
France have big Muslim populations of many millions from
Turkey and North Africa, mostly on the margins of the
society and fertile ground for recruitment. Besides
Chechnya and other places in the Caucasus, Russia has a
large Muslim population. There is a well-spread-out and
long-term danger all over the Christian world.
Who needs a regime change?
A respected
non-partisan US think-tank, the Council on Foreign
Relations, in a recent report to the White House looked
at international opinion polls and concluded: "Around
the world, from Western Europe to the Far East, many see
the United States as arrogant, hypocritical,
self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and contemptuous of
others." This cannot be changed by creating brand equity
or through marketing techniques.
In spite of
past US brutalities - slavery, racial discrimination,
colonization, the dust and haze raised at Hiroshima of
Nagasaki, the decimation of native Americans,
terrorization of Africans, Japanese and Vietnamese,
illegal bombing of Iraqis, and daily brutal killings of
Palestinians by guns, helicopters and F-16s, the
September 11 attacks brought universal sympathy. But
there are also a lot of crocodile tears. Almost all
major countries - Russia, China, Europe except the
lackey UK - have been browbeaten and humiliated by the
United States.
After the fall of the Berlin
Wall, one misses Pravda and Izvestia, not that they
propounded truth (Russian pravda) but they were a
check on the so-called free Western media, which were
careful and comparatively honest. Now, without any
restraints, the brainwashing monopoly of Western
propaganda is wreaking havoc around the world, specially
in the United States, whether it was the 1990-91 Gulf
War, the bombing of Yugoslavia, Jammu and Kashmir, and
now Iraq.
If the American public were told that
an attack on Iraq would not be like the 1990-91 computer
game and might cause many thousands of casualties (given
the low US threshold last tested in Mogadishu), that
Arabs might destroy oilfields which bring prosperity to
oil companies and cheap gas to their cars, and that US
nationals might even be attacked in Muslim countries,
Bush's popularity would plummet immediately.
What is needed is not regime change or so-called
"US-ushered democracy" in Iraq (as in Afghanistan), in a
region of Hama Rule "rule or die". Saudi Arabia is ruled
by an incongruous alliance of luxury-loving princes and
Wahhabis, who enforce medieval punishments at home and
promote fanaticism abroad, yet Washington does not
demand regime change there. Another repressive
US-supported regime in Egypt continues to provide
recruits for al-Qaeda. Opening a Pandora's box in the
Middle East would release bottled-up historical forces
with unpredictable results, like Ayatollah Khomeini
after the ouster of the Shah of Iran, who had been
supported by the CIA through its Iranian counterpart,
SAVAK (Sazamane Etelaat Va Amniate Kechvar, or Iranian
Security and Intelligence Service).
The United
States, with 2 percent of the world's population,
controls 30 percent of world resources. And US corporate
interests, forming perhaps 2 percent of this 2 percent
population, control these massive resources. They want
to control the world without accountability, not even to
the American people.
Paul Krugman recently
pointed out in the New York Times how Alan Greenspan,
chairman of the US Federal Reserve, revered by the
market more than the Oracle of Delphi in ancient times,
disclaimed any responsibility for the immense market
bubble. In September 1996, he had recognized "that there
is a stock-market bubble problem at this point". And a
solution: "We do have the possibility of ... increasing
margin requirements. I guarantee that if you want to get
rid of the bubble, that will do it."
"Yet,"
wrote Krugman, "he never did increase margin
requirements, that is, require investors to put up more
cash when buying stocks. Indeed, aside from giving one
speech about irrational exuberance, followed by a small
rise in the Fed funds rate, Greenspan did nothing at
all."
Perhaps it is in the United States itself
where its ill-informed and misinformed people need not
just a regime change but a system change. Where energy
and military-industry corporate interests have hijacked
power from the people to pursue their narrow objectives.
Where corporate chiefs enjoy coercive powers even the
Communist Party chiefs in the former Soviet Union would
have envied. Where blacks, Hispanics and the poor cannot
freely choose a president (as in Florida, where only by
not counting their votes did George Bush become the
president).
The United States needs a regime and
a system under which people can question, without being
labeled unpatriotic or enemies, failures of a system
that could not and cannot protect them. Where, unlike
the second nuclear bomb in Nagasaki, a repeat of
September 11 can be avoided. There were enough concrete
warnings - the bombing of the World Trade Center in
1993, the attack on the US Navy warship Cole in the
harbor at Aden, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, a residence for American GIs, and
the bombing of two US embassies in Africa.
Members of the EU, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and the OECD should persuade the US to have
a dialogue with the Organization of Islamic Conference
(OIC). With all its failings, it is the only
organization where all Muslim countries have come
together for the first time since the 10th century, when
an Umayyad emir in Cordoba broke away from the Shi'a
Fatimids' caliph in Baghdad. Ironically the OIC came
into being after the 1969 fire in al-Aqsa Mosque in
Israeli-controlled Jerusalem.
In this perpetual
crusade vs jihad, Hindus, Buddhists, followers of
Confucius and others must speak up and counsel peace. It
is misguided intolerance bred by "my God is the only
God", followed by "my true and only ideology" such as
fascism, Nazism, communism, capitalism or globalism,
which has been used to impoverish and butcher hundreds
of millions over the millennia, about 80 million in the
20th century alone. The followers of Buddha, Tao,
Confucius, Mahavira, Shamanism and Hinduism never forced
their beliefs or ideologies on others.
Notes
1. "Assassin" derives from the
Arabic hashshashin, "hashish users"; it was
alleged that they killed political enemies under the
influence of the drug.
2. Capitulation, in the
history of international law, was any treaty whereby one
state permitted another to exercise extraterritorial
jurisdiction over its own nationals within the former
state's boundaries. The term is to be distinguished from
the military term "capitulation", an agreement for
surrender. There was no element of surrender in the
early capitulations made by European rulers with the
powerful Turkish sultans, who were motivated by a desire
to avoid the burden of administering justice to foreign
merchants. Later capitulations, which in the case of
China and other Asian states resulted from military
pressure by European states, came to be regarded as
humiliating derogations from the sovereignty and
equality of these states.
3. The end of the
Janissaries came in June 1826 in the so-called
Auspicious Incident. On learning of the formation of a
new, Westernized Ottoman armed force, the Janissaries
revolted. Sultan Mahmud II declared war on the rebels
and, on their refusal to surrender, blasted their
barracks with cannons. Most of the Janissaries were
killed, and those who were taken prisoner were executed.
4. The Inquiry into the Export of Defence
Equipment and Dual-Use Goods to Iraq and Related
Prosecutions was set up in November 1992 to establish
whether all parts of the British government were
following agreed policy on defense exports to Iraq. The
inquiry led by Sir Richard Scott, now Lord Scott,
followed the collapse of the trial of Matrix Churchill,
a firm suspected of breaching export control guidelines.
The Report of the Inquiry by Sir Richard Scott was
published in February 1996.
K Gajendra
Singh, Indian ambassador (retired), served as
ambassador to Turkey from August 1992 to April 1996.
Prior to that, he served terms as ambassador to Jordan,
Romania and Senegal. He is now chairman of the
Foundation of Indo-Turkic Studies.
(©2002
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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