| |
ANALYSIS
Democracy pricks imperial
balloon
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - "Turkish support is assured,"
declared deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz
triumphantly after a meeting with top military and
government officials in Ankara in early December.
He was referring, of course, to the US plan to
deploy tens of thousands of troops at bases in
southwestern Turkey from which they would open a second,
northern front in their invasion of Iraq and quickly
secure control of strategic oil fields around Kirkuk,
while racing south to Baghdad and Tikrit.
The
bluff certainty with which Wolfowitz, leader of the
neoconservative faction in the administration of
President George W Bush, declared his confidence was
characteristic of the way in which Washington's hawks
have approached the impending war with Iraq and their
broader imperial ambitions.
And while Wolfowitz
praised Turkish democracy, a senior US diplomat told
reporters who traveled with the delegation to Ankara
that they should not worry that Turkey's constitution
gives the nation's parliament exclusive authority to
approve the deployment of foreign troops on Turkish
soil.
"Most of the US requests likely will be
decided by Turkey's national security council, which
includes the military's politically powerful general
staff, along with senior elected officials," the
Washington Post quoted a "Western diplomat" as saying.
So it came as a rude shock at the weekend when
the Turkish parliament did, after all, reject the US
plan, along with some US$15 billion in economic aid and
approval for tens of thousands of Turkish troops to
enter northern Iraq with US forces to secure Turkish
national interests in the region.
While
officials in Washington are hoping that the Turks will
accede to pressure - exerted by both Washington and
investors who brought down the average share price on
the Turkish stock exchange on Monday by 12 percent - to
arrange a second vote, the setback suggests that
administration hawks who have led the charge for war may
be relying on a whole range of assumptions - about their
power, their tactics, and the way they are perceived by
others, especially in democratic states where
governments must be at least somewhat responsive to
their electorates - that may not correspond to reality.
"The ideologues in Washington think that the
invasion can't go wrong, but their moral certitude is
going to clash with realities on the ground," Raad
al-Kadiri of the Washington-based Petroleum Finance Co
told the Wall Street Journal.
The Turkish vote
may also indicate that the imperial worldview that comes
with such "moral certitude" makes it impossible for
hawks to understand and appreciate the sensitivities of
foreign public opinion, particularly in countries with
democratic institutions.
It was telling that
during the same weekend that the Turks rejected
Washington's military plans, half a world away the
Philippine government was forced to disavow another
Pentagon plan to send 3,000 US troops on a joint
"operation" against Abu Sayyaf, a self-described
Islamist group that specializes in kidnapping in the
predominantly Muslim southern part of the country.
While the government of President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo apparently went along with the
Pentagon's scheme to involve US forces directly in
hostilities, according to a detailed Post account on
Monday, the Pentagon publicly framed the operation in a
way that made clear it would violate a constitutional
ban on combat operations by foreign forces in the
Philippines.
"The Pentagon had failed to grasp
the political and cultural sensitivities in the
Philippines, a former US colony in which nationalist
sentiment led to the closure of two US military bases a
decade ago," the Post explained. The results:
Washington's hopes of stepping up the US military
presence in east Asia - a major strategic goal of the
hawks - have been set back primarily as a result of
public opinion in a democratic state.
Ditto for
South Korea, where Washington's adamant refusal to agree
to bilateral talks with North Korea appears to be adding
to growing popular anger, whose latest expression began
last fall when an American military court acquitted two
of the 37,000 servicemen based in the South for
accidentally crushing two Korean schoolgirls with their
armored personnel carriers.
What could have been
fixed with a straightforward apology by Bush to the
South Korean people and an updating of its Status of
Forces Agreement with Seoul has mushroomed into a much
broader questioning of the future of a 50-year military
alliance that some experts believe may be doomed unless
Washington changes tack urgently. But, seemingly
oblivious to or contemptuous of South Korean public
opinion, the hawks appear to be digging in their heels.
Indeed, the failure to grasp political and
cultural sensitivities of foreign governments,
especially those that have democratic institutions, has,
if anything, been the Achilles heel of the hawks, even
according to its supporters.
"Ministers of
defense should talk less, shouldn't they," Spanish Prime
Minister Jose Maria Aznar told reporters in a reference
to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld after meeting last
week with Bush. Like other European backers of the
administration's Iraq policy, Aznar and his party are
suffering major declines in public opinion polls at home
due to the perception that they are cheerleading a new
imperialism of which Rumsfeld is one of the most visible
and dependably insensitive proponents.
"We don't
like the way we were pushed around by the Americans,"
one of the dozens of Turkish parliamentarians who voted
against his own party in rejecting Washington's
plan,told the Los Angeles Times. "The Americans kept
giving ultimatums and deadlines, asking Turkey to jump
into a barrel of fire'," he said. "They seemed to think
we could be bought off."
Indeed, the Times'
verdict in Turkey was the same as the Post's in Manila.
"As Turks offered explanations Sunday for this stinging
defiance of their strongest ally, tales of American
insensitivity were high on the list."
There is,
of course, an enormous irony in this, if only because
the neoconservatives are trying to persuade the world
that Washington is only trying to spread democracy in
the Islamic world. "The essence of what we believe in -
we in the United States - is that people should be free
to determine their own future," Wolfowitz told Turkish
reporters last July. "Turkey is proof that democracy can
work for Muslims."
But, as Donald Emmerson,
Stanford University political scientist warned in a
Times column in January, "In the end, the greatest and
most enduring challenge to American primacy may come not
from our current or traditional antagonists - but from
democracy itself".
(Inter Press
Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
