Robert Jensen
School of Journalism
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712
work: (512) 471-1990
fax: (512) 471-7979
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
copyright Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan 2002
Sentient Times, October/November 2002, pp. 8-9. Also posted at ZNet, Counterpunch and Common Dreams web site, September 13, 2002.
by Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan
In the age of American empire, this is what diplomacy looks like:
After months of open expressions of contempt for international law and disregard for the opinions of other nations (allies and enemies alike), the U.S. president deigned to appear before the United Nations on September 12. In the hectoring tones of an annoyed parent scolding a fussy child, George Bush explained that he would be happy to go to war with the endorsement of the Security Council but that he does not consider such endorsement necessary. The United Nations can have a role, the president conceded, but if it makes the wrong decision it will be “irrelevant.”
For this cynical maneuver, the emperor was applauded, at home and abroad. For this abandonment of any real commitment to multilateralism, all praised Bush the New Multilateralist.
The implications of this are frightening, long term and short, but at least now it’s all out in the open. The approval of the U.N. Security Council and Congress will be easier to secure after Bush’s pious posturing.
World leaders, apparently desperate to save some scrap of dignity in the face of the president’s condescension, suggested that this blatant rejection of any role for the United Nations beyond the cosmetic was a “positive” step (Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik) that showed how Bush had recognized the “central role” of the United Nations (French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin).
Meanwhile, back in the homeland, politicians rushed to the
microphones to pronounce the speech “brilliant” (Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat)
and “a powerful and
convincing indictment of Saddam Hussein and the grave threat he poses” (Sen.
Joseph Lieberman, another Democrat). The fact that Bush offered no new evidence
or arguments in the course of “making his case” seemed to matter little to
Lieberman, or anyone else.
Perhaps
the most telling moment in the speech came when Bush said he wanted the United
Nations to be “effective, and respectful, and successful.” A text posted by
the Associated Press almost immediately after Bush delivered the speech (from an
advance copy provided by the White House, one assumes) used the word
“respected” instead of “respectful.” Did Bush intend to say that he
hoped the U.N. would be respected? Or did he want to tell the U.N. that its
effectiveness and success depended on being respectful (to Bush and the United
States, one assumes)? Was it a Freudian slip, or a conscious choice?
Perhaps
it does not matter, for the rest of the speech was unambiguous: The empire has
served notice that the world’s governing body can either act in accord with
the empire’s wishes, or step back and watch the empire do its work.
The
work, of course, is the bloody work of war against Iraq.
In the
coming days, U.S. diplomats will hammer out a Security Council resolution that
gives Iraq some specified amount of time (probably no more than a few weeks) to
open up to unlimited weapons inspection of unprecedented intrusiveness or face
military action. If Iraq refuses, the war will come sooner. If it accepts
inspections, the war will be later, after the United States finds a new pretext.
But Bush -- along with Cheney and others in the administration -- has made it
clear the war will come, inspections or not.
Bush’s
case against Saddam Hussein is based on the Iraqi leader’s disregard for U.N.
Security Council resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm and respect human rights.
It certainly is true that the Iraqi regime has long denied basic political and
human rights to its citizens (including when Hussein was a valued U.S. ally in
the 1980s). And while there is no clear evidence about the current state of
Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, it is plausible that Iraq has attempted to
reconstitute some of those programs.
Although
much of the administration’s rhetoric is overwrought -- sometimes bordering on
the hysterical in claims that Saddam is on his way to a nuclear strike against
the United States -- there is no doubt the Iraqi regime is a menace, to its own
people today and possibly to the region in the future.
Bush
pointed out that Hussein has used chemical weapons in the war against Iran and
on Kurdish citizens in Halabja, but failed to point out that at that time he was
a U.S. ally; Hussein has been bold enough to use such weapons only when he had
the United States to protect him from serious international sanction, as U.S.
officials at the time did.
Hussein’s
Iraq has refused to fully comply with Security Council resolutions, but it is
hardly alone in this. It is not a secret that Israel stands in violation of
Security Council resolutions, among them SCR 242 calling for withdrawal from the
West Bank and Gaza. Thirty-five years later, the United States’ response to
that violation remains massive economic and military aid that allows Israel to
remain defiant.
As a
permanent member of the Security Council, the United States has the right to
veto resolutions it doesn’t like. Though the United States’ illegal invasion
of Panama in 1989 drew condemnations around the world, no Security Council
resolution would be passed calling on the United States to withdraw, hence no
need for the United States to violate such a resolution.
The
question has never been whether Saddam is a nice guy, but rather how to deal
with his regime. The U.S. strategy to date -- under Bush I, Clinton and Bush II
-- has been to offer disincentives rather than incentives.
Beginning
under the first President Bush and continuing in the Clinton years, U.S.
demanded Iraqi compliance with weapons inspections but also said that even if
inspections certified that Iraq to be clean of weapons of mass destruction, the
economic sanctions might well stay in place “in perpetuity.” In other words,
the message to Hussein was: Comply with the rules, but your punishment will
never end.
Finally,
after manipulating the inspections process to provoke a confrontation by
demanding the right to inspect sensitive sites, inspectors were pulled out on
U.S. orders -- not evicted by Iraq -- in December 1998 right before the United
States launched cruise missile strikes on Iraq. Not surprisingly, Iraq has not
been eager to allow inspectors to return, especially after it was revealed that
what Iraq had long contended was true -- the United States had used inspectors
to spy on the Iraqi regime.
Bush I
and Clinton had always talked “regime change,” but after 9/11/01 Bush II
upped the ante by stating openly that such change likely would come through a
U.S. war. The United States continued to demand inspections while at the same
time saying that even a completely clean inspections report would not deter the
United States from direct intervention to topple Hussein. In other words: Comply
with the rules, but we will bomb you anyway.
Saddam
Hussein is a thug, but even a thug can see the obvious. It is clear that Hussein
is most concerned with his own survival, and to date the United States has given
him every reason to continue on a path of defiance. If you are told the most
powerful nation in the world will wage war on you no matter what you do, what
incentive is there for anything less than defiance and preparation for war?
At this
point, perhaps the only thing that Bush and Hussein have in common -- besides a
shared contempt for the United Nations -- is a desire for war. One can assume
Hussein sees no other path open for himself at this point.
The
reason that Bush -- and with him a certain stratum of elites in the United
States -- might want war is equally clear: Iraq has the second largest proven
oil reserves in the world, just behind Saudi Arabia. After putting up with
Hussein for more than a decade after the Gulf War, the time seems ripe to
American hawks to go further than mere “containment.” Bringing down Hussein
and replacing him with a compliant leader along the lines of Hamid Karzai (the
United States’ hand-picked puppet in Afghanistan) will allow indefinite
military occupation and further solidify U.S. control well into the future.
Shoehorning
such a war on Iraq into the rubric of the “war on terrorism” makes such a
war easier to sell to a U.S. public frightened by the reality of terrorism and
the rhetoric of the Bush administration. The
rest of the world (perhaps with the exception of Tony Blair) is not taken in by
such rhetoric, but to the Washington crowd the rest of the world is not of great
concern. Old ideas about building coalitions are unattractive when the officials
of the empire believe they can go it alone; as Donald
Rumsfeld has put it, “The mission must determine the coalition. The
coalition must not determine the mission.” Other
nations may express concerns, but in the end, force carries the day.
Bush said that the United States “has no quarrel with the Iraqi people, who have suffered for too long.” The problem is that he has no quarrel with them and also no concern for their fate. Assuming that Hussein is not going to simply pack up and leave quietly when U.S. forces arrive, it is sensible to assume there will be a war of some duration and that the U.S. military will use its preferred tactics -- high-altitude bombing to “soften up” areas before ground troops go in, which guarantees high levels of civilian casualties; the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster bombs; and the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure such as electrical-power generation and water facilities. Whether the military will discover Iraqi underground bunkers that can only be reached with “bunker buster” tactical nuclear warheads is unknown.
An attack on Iraq will have nothing to do with stopping terrorism. It will have nothing to do with the liberation of the Iraqi people. And it will be only marginally concerned with weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, this will be a war to extend and deepen U.S. control over the energy-rich Middle East, the single most important source of strategic power in an industrial world that runs on oil.
Bush and others in his administration have made it
clear for some time that they desperately want this war. Many in the antiwar
movement have felt desperately alone in the quest to stop the war.
After Bush’s U.N. appearance, it is clear that,
in some sense, we are alone. Other nations have signaled they will not take
risks to derail the empire. U.S. politicians have shown they will not take the
lead to challenge an imperial president.
The burden of stopping this war of empire rests
where it always has, on the shoulders of the citizens of the empire who are
willing to organize against it.
---------------
Robert Jensen, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas
at Austin, is the author of Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream. He
can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Rahul Mahajan, Green Party
candidate for governor of Texas, is the author of The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism. He can be reached at rahul@tao.ca.
Other articles are available at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/home.htm and
http://www.rahulmahajan.com. Both are members of the Nowar
Collective.
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