FUNDAMENTAL global issues are clearly at stake in Iraq. Alarm bells ring as international relations disintegrate. The United Nations is sidelined, the European Union divided and Nato fractured. In February 10 million people took to the streets around the world: anti-war protesters, convinced that tragic events had been set in motion, renounced the return of brutality to the political stage and the rise in violence, passion and hatred.
Collective fears produce anxious questions. Why should we wage war on Iraq? Why now? What are the real intentions of the United States? Why are France and Germany so adamant in their opposition? Does this conflict point to a new geopolitical arrangement? Will it change worldwide balances of power?
Many observers believe that the real reasons for this war are secret. People of good will who have paid close attention to US arguments remain sceptical. Having failed to make its case for war, Washington has forcefully presented feeble justifications while causing doubt around the world.
What is the official rationale? In September President George Bush addressed the Security Council, outlining seven charges against Iraq in a document, A Decade of Defiance and Deception. This made three main accusations: Iraq has flouted 16 UN resolutions; it possesses or is seeking ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), nuclear, biological and chemical; it is guilty of human rights violations, including torture, rape and summary executions.
There are four more charges. The US blames Baghdad for abetting terrorism by harbouring Palestinian organisations and sending $25,000 to families of those who carry out suicide attacks on Israel (1). It accuses Iraq of holding prisoners of war, including a US pilot; of confiscating property, including artworks and military material, during its invasion of Kuwait; and of diverting revenues from the UN oil-for-food programme.
These accusations led to a unanimous Security Council vote in November. Resolution 1441 mandated “an enhanced inspection regime with the aim of bringing to full and verified completion the disarmament process”. Considering these disturbing charges, should all countries see Iraq as the world’s number one enemy? Is it the biggest threat to humanity? Do US accusations justify all-out war?
The US and some allies - the United Kingdom, Australia and Spain - say yes. Without the approval of any recognised international body, the US and UK have dispatched some 250,000 troops to the Gulf. This a formidable fighting force with massive powers of destruction. But, backed by substantial international public opinion, Western countries such as France, Germany and Belgium say no. Although they acknowledge the seriousness of the charges, they contend that accusations of flouting UN resolutions, violating human rights and possessing WMD could be levelled against other countries, especially Pakistan and Israel. But since both are close US allies, no one will declare war on them. There is no shortage of dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Equatorial Guinea) that trample on human rights (2). Because they are allies, Washington is silent.
In the eyes of France, Germany and Belgium, the Iraqi regime does not immediately threaten its neighbours because of 12 years of non-stop surveillance, restrictions on its airspace and that devastating embargo. About the endless search for impossible-to-find weapons, many agree with Confucius:"You can’t catch a cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat." They believe that the inspectors from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, led by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), headed by Egyptian disarmament expert Mohammed al-Baradei, are making steady progress, as their reports to the Security Council, in particular at the 7 March meeting, indicate. The goal of disarming Iraq could be achieved without war.
The French president, Jacques Chirac, through his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, has used this sensible reasoning at the UN. In the minds of those opposed to war, Chirac person ifies resistance to overwhelming US firepower. Although we may be overstating the case, Chirac has now achieved a level of international popularity enjoyed by few French leaders before him. Like “General Della Rovere” in Roberto Rossellini’s celebrated film, fate may have thrust him into the role of resistance fighter, but Chirac has taken up the challenge (3). The US has failed to make its case for war. It is vulnerable to France’s potential veto and has already suffered two setbacks in the Security Council. The first was on 4 February, when US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation of evidence against Baghdad flopped; and the second was on 14 February, when Hans Blix delivered a fairly positive report, in which he implied that some of Powell’s evidence was barely cred ible. The same day the French foreign minister made a similar statement: “Ten days ago the US Secretary of State reported the alleged links between al-Qaida and the regime in Baghdad. Given the present state of our research and intelligence, in liaison with our allies, nothing allows us to establish such links.” Establishing links between Osama bin Laden’s network and Saddam Hussein’s regime is a crucial factor that could justify war, particularly to the US public, still in shock after 11 September 2001.
Because there appears to be no demonstrable case for war, many are rallying in opposition. So we must question the real motives of the US, which are threefold. The first stems from a US preoccupation, which became a total obsession
Europe and America: poles apart
After 11 September, with preventing links between rogue states and international terrorists. In 1997 President Bill Clinton’s defence secretary, William Cohen, voiced US fears: “The US faces a heightened prospect that regional aggressors, third-rate armies, terrorist cells and even religious cults will wield disproportionate power by using, or even threatening to use, nuclear, biological or chemical weapons” (4). In a statement in January 1999 Bin Laden indicated that the threat was real: “I do not consider it a crime to try to obtain nuclear, chemical and biological weapons” (5). Last September President Bush acknowledged that such dangers haunted him: “Our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale.” (6)
For Bush this outlaw regime is Iraq. Hence the unprecedented US national security directive of preventive war, issued last September. Former CIA director James Woolsey summed up the Bush doctrine, saying that it was born of the asymmetric battle against terror, and about advanced dissuasion or preventive war. Since terrorists always had the advantage of attacking in secret, he said, the only defence was to find them wherever they were, before they got into a position to mount an attack (7). The US will hardly be seeking UN authorisation for this new mode of warfare. The second, albeit unspoken, motive, is to control the Gulf and its oil resources. More than two thirds of the world’s known reserves are in Gulf states: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. For the developed countries, particularly the US with its vast appetite for oil, the Gulf is critical to assure economic growth and maintain a way of life. The US would immediately interpret any attack on the Gulf states as a threat to its vital interests. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter (later winner of the 2002 Nobel peace prize), outlined in his State of the Union address the US policy in the Gulf: “Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the US, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force” (8).
Placed under British control after the first world war and the dismantling of the Ottoman empire, the Gulf came under growing US influence after the second world war. But two countries resisted US domination: Iran after its Islamic revolution in 1979, and Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Since 11 September 2001, there have been suspicions about Saudi Arabia and its links with militant Islamists and alleged financial support for al-Qaida. The US takes the position that it cannot afford to lose a third pawn on the Gulf chessboard, especially one as important as Saudi Arabia. Hence the temptation to use false pretences to occupy Iraq and regain control of the region.
Aside from military difficulties, it will not be easy for US occupation forces to run Iraq in the post-Saddam era. When he was still lucid, Colin Powell described the intricacies of such an undertaking (9). He said in his autobiography that although the US had condemned Saddam for invading Kuwait, the US had no desire to destroy Iraq. According to Powell, the US’s major rival in the Gulf in the 1980s was Iran, not Iraq; in those years the US needed Iraq to counterbalance Iran. Powell also insisted that Saudi Arabia opposed a Shi’ite rise to power in southern Iraq; Turkey did not want the Kurds in northern Iraq to secede; and the Arab states did not want Iraq to be invaded and then divided into Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish factions; that would have dashed US hopes for stability in the Middle East. Powell concluded that to prevent such scenarios, the US would have had to conquer and occupy a faraway nation of 20 million people, which would have run counter to the wishes of the American people. Yet that is what Bush wants today.
The third, also unspoken, US motive is world supremacy. For years Bush’s rightwing advisers - including the vice-president, Dick Cheney, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board - have hypothesised that the US would become a global imperial power (see United States: inventing demons, page 6). These men held similar positions from 1989 to 1993 in the administration of President George Bush Senior. The cold war was ending: although most strategists favoured a reduced role for US armed forces, they gave preference to restructuring the military, relying on new technologies to re-establish war as a foreign policy tool.
One observer explained: “The Vietnam syndrome was still alive. The military didn’t want to use force unless everyone was in agreement. The stated conditions required virtually a national referendum before force could be used. No declaration of war would have been possible without a catalysing event such as Pearl Harbor” (10). In December 1989 White House hawks, with General Colin Powell’s agreement and without congressional or UN approval, instigated the invasion of Panama, ousting General Manuel Noriega and causing 1,000 deaths. The same men prosecuted the Gulf war, in which US military might left the world thunderstruck.
After returning to the White House in January 2001, Bush’s hawks recognised that 11 September was their long-awaited “catalysing event”. Now nothing restrains them. They used the USA Patriot Act to give the government alarming powers against civil liberties; they promised to exterminate terrorists; they put forward their theory of global war against international terrorism; they conquered Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban; they sent troops to Colombia, Georgia and the Philippines. They then developed the preventive war doctrine and used their propaganda to justify war on Iraq.
The hawks ostensibly agreed that the US should focus its efforts on globalisation’s power centres: the G7, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank. But they have sought incrementally to end US involvement in multilateral organisations. That is why they urged Bush to condemn the Kyoto protocol on global warming; the anti-ballistic missile treaty; the International Criminal Court; the treaty on anti-personnel mines; the biological weapons protocol; the convention on small arms; the treaty banning nuclear weapons; and the Geneva conventions on prisoners of war relevant to the Guantanamo detainees. Their next step could be to reject the authority of the Secur ity Council, jeopardising the UN’s existence. Under the guise of lofty ideals - freedom, democracy, free trade - these rightwing ideologues seek to transform the US into a new military state. They have embraced the ambitions of all empires: reshaping the globe, redrawing frontiers and policing the world’s peoples.
These were the intentions of previous colonialists. They believed, as historians Douglas Porch and John Keegan have argued, that the spread of trade, Christianity, science and efficient Western-style administration would push forward the frontiers of civilisation and reduce zones of conflict. Thanks to imperialism, poverty would turn into prosperity, savages find salvation, superstition become enlightenment, and order arrive in places of confusion and barbarism (11).
Thanks to their distinctive conception of the EU, France and Germany seek to forestall growing US hegemony, and choose to act as a non- belligerent counterweight to the US within the UN (12). As Dominique de Villepin said: “We believe that a multipolar world is needed, that no one power can ensure order throughout the world” (13). The shape of a bipolar world is becoming evident. The second pole could either be the EU (if its member states can overcome their differences), a new Paris-Berlin-Moscow alliance or other formations (Brazil, South Africa, India, Mexico). France and Germany have taken a bold and historic step that could enable Europe to overcome its fears of the past 60 years and reaffirm its political will. They have exposed the pusillanimity of European countries (including the UK, Spain, Italy and Poland) that have been vassal states for far too long.
The US had been making itself comfortable in a unipolar world dominated by its military forces; the war on Iraq was meant to display new US imperial power. But France and Germany have joined together to remind the US that political, ideological, economic and military considerations are crucial to the exercise of power. Globalisation led some to believe that economics and neoliberal ideology were the only essential factors; political and military considerations were relegated to the back burner. That was a mistake. As the world is being formed anew, the US focuses on the military and the media. France and Germany have opted for a political strategy. In their attempt to address global problems, France and Germany bet on perpetual peace. Bush and his entourage of hawks seek perpetual war.
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