Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| In a panic, Bush has opted to blame all the old enemies |
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| Hania |
| 02/08/02 at 14:13:07 |
| [i]Friday 08th February 2002 The rather fabricated certainty of the Bush speech in fact conceals uncertainty about how to proceed after Afghanistan. An extraordinary edifice of theories and assertions about American power, military capacity and ability to pick and discard allies according to need has been erected on the unsteady foundation of success in the Afghan war. This "simplicism" as the French have characterised it, could cost the world dear.[/i] [url]http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,646842,00.html[/url] The 'evil axis' speech masks US uncertainty about what to do next Martin Woollacott Friday February 8, 2002 The Guardian If the governments of North Korea and Iraq could be overthrown, and the internal struggle in Iran ended in favour of the moderates, there are few people who would not heave a great sigh of relief. That would above all be true of citizens of those countries, since the evidence suggests they are desperate for change. Hundreds of calls, emails and faxes supporting President Bush were received from Iran by the Voice of America's Farsi service after his state of the union address. Iran is by far the freest of the three nations Bush put together in an "axis of evil" but, even so, such messages were risky. They are an indication of the hopes of a substantial number of Iranians that the US could somehow tip the balance in their country in the direction either of reform or of a complete change of the system. In North Korea and Iraq there are those so identified with the regime they would fight change and, among the majority, there may be a meld of resentment of both their own governments and of the US and other foreign pkwers. But nobody could seriously maintain that much binds most Iraqis and North Koreans to their rulers but fear, routine and lack of an alternative. Nor can it be disputed that these three countries are seeking, or may already have, weapons of mass destruction, and that the world would be safer if they had governments without such ambitions. Why is it then that the Bush address has been so widely criticised? The answer lies less in the familiar charge of unilateralism - that the US did not consult others before embarking on what some on the American right have welcomed as "a new foreign policy" - than in the suspicion that the thinking behind this speech is not as coherent as it might be, and the intent less serious. This is not a convincing project of military liberation, nor does it offer much else except military high notes. Iran, Iraq and North Korea do not constitute an axis in the sense of the close alliance that the word normally implies. If old enemies Iran and Iraq are nudging together a little more at the moment, it is in response to American threats. That suggests lack of coherence. Whatever may be thought of going to war to get rid of Saddam, it would be foolish to do so while at the same time alienating Iran or, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has argued, without first attending to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Proof of connections with terrorist groups is scanty for North Korea and Iraq, as the CIA again testified recently. For Iran, there is abundant evidence of connections, but nothing definitive on al-Qaida, which was anti-Shi'ite, as was the Taliban. True, there was the recent intercepted shipment of arms to the Palestinians as well as the Iranian effort to establish a sphere of influence in Afghanistan. These undoubtedly are aspects of Iranian foreign policy which the US and Israel dislike, but they are not in themselves terrorist acts. There is a war in the occupied territories in which one side is completely outclassed in terms of weaponry. Trying to redress that balance may be deemed to make matters worse. But, unless you class any and every use of force by any Palestinian as "terrorist", a ludicrous proposition, it is not an action in support of terrorism. Equally, trying to hold sway over the Herat region is an old Persian policy no more objectionable in itself than Pakistan's similar efforts in the eastern zone of Afghanistan. As for the weapons of mass destruction all three of these "axis" powers seek, dangerous though that quest is, the experts tend to agree that the primary motive is regional and that an attack on the US (or Israel) would in any case be a suicidal act. Nor could such regimes ever be sure that handing weapons over to terror groups would be untraceable, before or after use. The consequences of discovery would be as lethal as if they had used the weapons themselves. The fourth arm of the axis, by implication, is the "tens of thousands" of trained al-Qaida men scattered around the world, together with members of other covert groups. Here again there seems to be a skewed perspective. The Afghan camps processed many young men, but only a minority will carry on as activists and their organisation has been hugely disrupted. Of course, there is a real possibility, perhaps a probability, that the damaged remnant could still mount terrible attacks. But what purpose is served by inflating the numbers, and by implying close connections between "axis" states and the al-Qaida network that cannot be demonstrated to exist? The answer almost certainly is that the rather fabricated certainty of the Bush speech in fact conceals uncertainty about how to proceed after Afghanistan. An extraordinary edifice of theories and assertions about American power, military capacity and ability to pick and discard allies according to need has been erected on the unsteady foundation of success in the Afghan war. Unsteady, because the war, like all conflicts, was unique, and because the success was only partial. It did not go according to plan and there was at least one moment when the American military felt it was going very wrong indeed. Yet the Afghan success is now part of the administration's constant projection of its own competence, consistency and effectiveness. Behind this perhaps understandable style, the reality seems to be that the administration is not at all sure what the plan should be. That is not a condemnation. It is not as if there was certainty in London, Paris or Moscow either. But the Bush administration is falling back on what it knows and likes, defining the problem overwhelmingly in military terms, categorising enemies, being brusque with allies and abrasive with everybody else. The proposals for the defence budget and other security programmes underline this narrow approach. The administration now feels it does not need to choose between the rival demands of missile defence, existing conventional weapons programmes and new programmes relevant to the terrorist threat. Now the US can have them all - but at severe cost in terms of social policy spending at home and non-military spending abroad. Joseph Nye, Dean of the School of Government at Harvard, points out in a wise new book that the neglect of soft power abroad was already an American failing. As military spending rose to 16% of the national budget, spending on diplomacy and other civilian international purposes fell from 4% to 1%, while foreign aid also collapsed. "It is difficult," Nye writes, "to be a superpower on the cheap - or through military means alone." The trouble with the state of the union address, in spite of the 30 versions it was supposed to have gone through in composition, is that it is unconvincing as a military proposal and yet neglects other means. Why depend on one arrow alone when you could have a full quiver? · The Paradox of American Power, Joseph S Nye Jr (OUP) |
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