| |
Why the US can go it
alone
By Stephen Blank
As the
countdown to war with Iraq accelerates, both sides'
positions and rationales for and against this war have
sharpened. It is clear that one thing that particularly
troubles opponents of this war is that for the United
States it is a war of choice, that is, in the Bush
administration's rhetoric, a preventive war.
While nobody outside it has been able to discern
compelling evidence of a threat to the US from Iraq or
substantive ties to al-Qaeda, that has not deflected
President George W Bush from his determination to go to
war. As he says, he does not have to ask permission to
defend America.
But his opponents see no threat
to America to begin with and fear what may happen if the
doctrine of preventive war against states (not
terrorists which is a different issue altogether) is
unleashed on the world. Russia, India and even Japanese
and Taiwanese officials have occasionally now invoked
this doctrine and created the possibility of future
crises in Asia.
All this is highly troubling and
it might have been avoidable if the administration’s
rationale was simply that Saddam Hussein continues to
defy the United Nations and if the UN cannot act to
enforce its resolutions then we are indeed in a
Hobbesian universe. Although this argument has now been
made, it is a distant second to the official rationales
for the war. And this is unfortunate, because this
argument might have eliminated much of the opposition to
the war and, more important, because it exposes the
fallacies of the European opposition to this war.
Many reasons are adduced as to why European
governments and populations oppose this war. First of
all they seemingly perceive no threat from terrorists or
Iraq. Such an assertion flies in the face of reality
given the large number of police actions against
al-Qaeda in Europe since September 11, 2001.
But
this flight from reality is in line with a pervasive
European mentality that prefers Europe to be a large
Switzerland and has abdicated the responsibility to act
to provide hard security in the world. This failure
applies as much to Europe's own troubled southeast as it
does to the Middle East. In this respect the
determination to see no evil in Iraq represents a
straight line from the inability to formulate coherent
policies to the breakup of Yugoslavia and those wars.
A second argument is that the real threat to the
world or at least regional peace is the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the tacit, and even
often openly voiced, assumption is that Israel has to
make concessions to the Palestinians.
This
argument is in essence a repetition of the propaganda
that has systematically emanated from Arab capitals for
years as a pretext for Arab states' refusal to face up
to their own responsibilities and to cover for their
failure to deal with the issue of Israel's existence. It
also overlooks certain basic facts, namely that the
Ariel Sharon government owes its existence to Yasser
Arafat's continuing and deliberate resort to terrorism
that every day disproves the notion that a Palestinian
state can be a reliable partner for anyone in the Middle
East.
This resort to terrorism as deliberate
strategy is also aligned to and part of a larger and
systematic policy emanating from every Arab capital
reeking of incessant anti-Semitic incitement to kill
Jews. European officials, particularly in France and
Belgium, evidently want to pretend these facts don't
exist. One European Union staffer told this writer that
this anti-Semitic incitement should not be taken
seriously.
Therefore, it is hardly surprising
that the EU is regarded with widespread and open
derision, if not contempt, in Israel. Its impotence and
the willingness of its members to put Israel in the dock
- for example, Brussels' indictment of Sharon and not
Arafat - also shows the partiality and unreliability of
the EU in the Middle East. Not surprisingly, it is often
dismissed, or its members are, as being if not
anti-Semitic, then at least willing to be indifferent to
anti-Semitism.
EU leaders also remain oblivious
to the fact that every dollar they send to Arafat
supports terrorism and that one of the Palestinians'
biggest supporters is Saddam Hussein. If it is true that
terrorism survives as long as the money train survives,
taking out Saddam would put enormous financial and other
pressure on Arafat to make those moves needed to achieve
a negotiated settlement. Or it would force the
Palestinians to act in this direction and replace the
leadership that has led them back into the desert.
But this shortcoming is of a piece with the
Europeans' second argument that actually doing something
about the Middle East - that is, removing Saddam - would
only encourage more European Muslims to become
terrorists. It is noteworthy that this argument has
absolutely no traction in the United States, with 8
million Muslims. What it does show is the absolute
inability of European governments to conceive of viable
programs and policies to integrate their large Muslim
populations or to provide economic growth and
opportunity for them.
It is well known to
experts that the EU's Mediterranean program, originated
in Barcelona in 1995, has been a virtual charade and
that the EU has done little or nothing to face up to the
serious economic problems in the Middle East and the
Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). Brussels'
inability to deal honestly with Turkey, the most secular
and progressive Muslim state, is also well known. And
the many failures to come to terms with the
socio-economic realities of the Middle East indicate as
well the increasing sclerosis of the EU's economic model
and policies, a sclerosis that more and more observers
are pointing to in public.
More broadly, the
EU's paralysis with regard to its Muslim populations and
neighbors bespeaks its unwillingness to act with regard
to Saddam. Exactly what does it or its members propose
to do with a dictator who has defied the UN for 12 years
and started two wars against his neighbors, thus
threatening international stability? In a word, nothing.
There is no vision for the UN to establish
sovereignty over Iraq - an answer that would have
obviated this crisis from the start. Nor is there any
vision for the Middle East except business as usual. In
France's, Germany's and Russia's case this translates
into the pursuit of ever more contracts for oil and
covert sales of embargoed dual-use or military items,
violations that are continuing right up to the present,
as shown by the sale of French airplane parts to Iraq.
Worse yet, the unwillingness to use the power of
international authority, the fear that action will
produce a kind of domestic fifth column, the
obliviousness to anti-Semitism, and the refusal to let
the most powerful player act constructively by helping
to shape that action rather than by opposing it all
point back to an earlier time.
The last time
France, Germany and Russia lined up against Britain and
the United States was 1940. Although the power equations
are vastly changed, this lineup suggests that the
resemblance between the arguments today for doing
nothing and the arguments for appeasement then is no
accident. The arguments for doing nothing resemble those
arguments of the 1930s exactly in the ways cited above
and they provide no vision for international order,
since not one of the main opponents of unfettered US
action would dare to have the UN inspect their actions.
Thus France, Germany and Russia have abdicated
the responsibility of working with allies in order to
pursue constructive policies. Instead France, based on a
bizarrely unsustainable vision of France and Jacques
Chirac leading a European pole, and Germany, based on
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's more personal motives of
getting re-elected and proclaiming an independent German
foreign policy, now offer competing visions of a return
to international anarchy.
Europe's argument is
simple. It says make sure that nobody can do anything
outside Europe to guarantee international security, but
secure Europe under the pretensions of the EU so that it
can live in blissful complacency even as threats to its
security multiply and its economic model withers. But
throughout the entire cycle of political action to
achieve these goals, US power must be hamstrung or
mortgaged to the cynical pretensions of French
leadership.
Washington, for its part, convinced
of its rectitude and of being under threat, and
determined to be the supreme power, wants to be able to
determine on its own how to confront those threats. At
the same time it feels deeply that the responsibility
for maintaining international order falls to it because
clearly nobody else will perform that mission.
Not only are these views incompatible with each
other, they also are incompatible with international
security. But if we have to choose one it would be the
US one. Ultimately, America's democratic constitution
will restrain it, as will its alliance structures, as is
already the case in Korea. But if we were to embrace the
unsustainable and all too familiar Franco-German view of
appeasement masquerading as strength, we will soon see
in both Europe and the Middle East the fruits of
appeasement. Nor will they be better the second time
around than they were in 1939.
Stephen
Blank is an analyst of international security
affairs residing in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
