Ian Boyne, Contributor
"This is what really worries me. Emotions have overwhelmed rationality with the United States."
Egyptian University Professor trained at the US Johns Hopkins University in an interview with The Washington Post.
MANY JAMAICANS and others around the world are opposed to a war with Iraq simply out of a dread of how a war would affect their way of life. Many are motivated by a general envy and resentment toward the powerful, others are the usual America bashers with assorted grievances against the only superpower remaining, and still others have a moral aversion to war.
But a number of the rabid proponents of a unilateral pre-emptive strike against Iraq are similarly impelled by emotions and gut reactions, rather than the iron law of reason which, as the Arab Professor interviewed by The Washington Post indicates, would show that there are pragmatic and rational reasons for the US to choose the multilateral, containment route to reining in Saddam Hussein rather than the slash and burn approach. The costs of a victory to the US would be too high and the victory which would be guaranteed militarily would be a pyrrhic one. Let's look at how the US would lose the war with Iraq if it takes unilateral action and bypasses the United Nations.
As study after study and scholarly article after scholarly article have pointed out, US military victory over Saddam Hussein and the installing of a successor would be seen as occupation on Arab soil and would be deeply resented and opposed by the Arab region. The Washington Post of Wednesday, February 26 carried an eye-opening article, "Old Arab Friends Turn Away from US", in which a number of pro-American Arabs expressed their embarrassment and dismay at the willingness of the US to take out Saddam Hussein and destroy innocent civilian lives. Anger at the United States in the Middle East is greater than at any time since the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1967, the paper says.
"With the bitterness of betrayal, Said Naggar looks out at a region on the brink of war and sees the wreckage of ideals he cherished and principles he proclaimed," the article says. Significantly, Naggar is quoted as saying, "I feel we have been deceived about the nature and character of the United States of America". Naggar is a World Bank veteran who likes to quote the American Declaration of Independence and his library, says the writer, is stacked with the writings of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, "all the great founders", in the words of Naggar himself. In 1991 he founded the New Civic Forum in Egypt to promote the ideals of America.
Says the Washington Post: "A generation of Arabs wooed by the United States and persuaded by its principles has become among the most vociferous critics of America's world view. Within its ranks are affluent businessmen with ties to the West, US educated intellectuals and liberal activists. Their ire is directed not at US culture, but at preparations for a war they believe has left them voiceless, discredited and isolated in a landscape almost universally opposed to US policy". Imagine that landscape if the US were to arrogantly and unilaterally attack the Iraq without United Nations and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) backing.
America has gone as far as saying it would not rule out the use of nuclear weapons in a war with Iraq. But, says George Perkovich, vice-president for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the March/April issue of the leading international relations journal, Foreign Affairs: "American use of nuclear weapons against Iraq (or Iran) would inflame Muslim hatred around the world, add fuel to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mobilise massive European protests against US hegemony all major strategic costs to the United States."
In a tightly argued, compelling article in the September/October 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs, ("America's Imperial Ambition"), the Peter F Krough Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice at Georgetown University, G. John Ikenberry, who wrote After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars, shows the heavy costs the US would pay for the Bush Doctrine which asserts the right to unilateral, pre-emptive attack. He does an excellent job of representing the strategic thinking and vision of the hawks in the Bush Administration, but he surgically assesses their tactics and philosophy in a section on "Imperial dangers".
"Unchecked US power, shorn of legitimacy and disentangled from the post-war norms and institutions of the international order, will usher in a more hostile international system, making it harder to achieve American's interests... The United States argues that to wait until all the evidence is in or until authoritative international bodies support action, is to wait too long... Moreover, and quite paradoxically, overwhelming conventional military might combined with a policy of pre-emptive strikes, could lead hostile states to accelerate programmes to acquire their only possible deterrent to the United States: WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)."
Inkenberry says that the US would succeed in removing Saddam Hussein but the policy is unsustainable in the long run and especially against stronger states. It's the same point made with amplification in the March 3 edition of The Nation, "The Case Against Going to War".
Significantly, too, America risks its vitally important relationship with its European allies. Despite the vehement, revolting attacks against the French and the Germans by the right-wing media, Europe is important to America. And the Europeans have been seeing that the Bush Administration has been less than co-operative with the international community and seems to be intoxicated by its unipolar status. American power is, indeed, enormous and breathtaking.
US ARROGANCE
American military spending is bigger than the military budgets of the next 15-20 Europeans states-combined, standing at approximately US$400 billion and some say it is moving toward $500 billion annually. The US has overwhelming nuclear superiority, the world's dominant air force, the only true blue water navy and spends more than three times the next six powers combined in military research and development (R and D). And it does this with less than five per cent of GDP. The US economy is twice as large as its nearest rival, Japan.
"Previous leading states in the modern era were either great commercial and naval powers or great military powers on land, never both," says the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs in an article on "American Primacy in Perspective".
"There has never been any system of sovereign states that contained one state with this degree of dominance," the article further states. The pro-American British scholar, Timothy Garton, echoing the views of many no doubt, writes in the April 9, 2002 New York Times that. "America has too much power for anyone's good, including its own." The US failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on the environment which was strongly endorsed by the Europeans and incidentally by a majority of Americans show the scant regard for international and particularly European opinion, polls indicate.
Failure too to ratify the International Criminal Court and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Biological Weapons Convention which are supported overwhelmingly by the American people solidifies the widespread European perception of an arrogant disregard for dialogue and consensus by Washington. The willingness to go to war unilaterally is likely to be seen as a last straw by the key European allies. The self-righteous and doctrinaire Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said "It's less important to have unanimity than it is to be making the right decisions and doing the right thing, even though at the outset it may be lonesome." The French have always lacked guts anyway, the right-wing Americans sneeringly say, and "we know" the Germans have harboured resentments "against us."
Inkenberry, however, in the Foreign Affairs article shows that the unilateralist posture is foolhardy.
"In the fight on terrorism, the United States needs co-operation from European and Asian countries on intelligence, law enforcement and logistics realising US objectives depends even more on a continuous stream of amicable working relations with major states around the world. The secret to the United States long, brilliant run as the world's leading state was its ability and willingness to exercise power within alliance and multinational frameworks which made its power and agenda more acceptable to allies and other key states around the world. This achievement has now been put at risk by the Administration's new thinking."
Concludes Ikenberry: "An American policy that leaves the United States alone to decide which states are threats and how best to deny them weapons of mass destruction will lead to a diminishment of multilateral mechanisms most important of which is the non-proliferation regime."
Many people are unaware that that the United States, which never fails to pronounce moralistically on foreign policy, signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which pledged "the total elimination of nuclear weapons", even by the United States itself. As recent as May 2000 the US and the other powers which have nuclear weapons reaffirmed their "unequivocal undertaking" to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Now Bush Administration officials are quoted as scoffing at the matter of nuclear disarmament though they have signed to it. So they are insisting that Saddam Hussein honours obligations to the international community yet they have the right to flout their own obligations. A privilege of the unipolar status?
UNILATERALISM MAY INCREASE TENSION
A unilateral war with Iraq will leave deep scars on the European psyche and might lead to the European nations' deciding that it's about time they get some military might of their own to counterbalance the United States. A US pre-emptive strike against Iraq might heighten great power politics and tensions, which were easing in the post-Cold War era.
The United States is now playing with fire with its Bush Doctrine, and while it is a foregone conclusion that it can squash the Saddam Hussein regime and slaughter tens of thousands of Iraqis in the name of liberation, the price of that victory will be exceedingly high and will take a long time to be paid.
One of the most incisive and thought-provoking articles on US-European relations to appear in recent times is Robert Kagan's lengthy, "Power and Weakness" in the June-July issue of the scholarly journal, Policy Review.
"Consider the qualities that make up European strategic culture: the emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy and commercial ties, on international law over the use of force, on seduction over coercion on multilateralism over unilateralism."
Insightfully, Kagan shows how European history in the last century showed the "miracles" which can take place through consensus-building, co-operation and negotiation as once bitter enemies for example, the French and the Germans have buried their differences.
"The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe's mission civilisatrice. The Europeans have a new mission born of their own discovery of perpetual peace America's power and its willingness to exercise that power unilaterally if necessary represents a threat to Europe's new sense of mission... Leading politicians and officials in Europe worry more about how the United States might handle the problem of Iraq than they worry about Iraq itself or Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction."
This is why many Europeans actually see Gorge Bush as a greater threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein himself.
America risks losing Europe, and the Arab world key strategic areas by going it alone in dealing with Iraq. The United States has more to lose in this war than a backward, weakened already terrorised Iraq.
