Subject: Why we still need to be anti-imperialists, by Jean Bricmont
[fwd]
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 16:34:56 +0200
From: hde_tollenaere
Why we still need to be anti-imperialists
by Jean Bricmont [Belgian philosopher]
Why we still need to be anti-imperialists...
It seems evident, from the attitude of the capitalist
world to Soviet Russia, of the Entente to the
Central Empires, and of England to Ireland and
India, that there is no depth of cruelty, perfidy or
brutality from which the present holders of power
will shrink when they feel themselves threatened.
If, in order to oust them, nothing short of
religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are
the prime sources of the resultant evil - To make
the transition with a minimum of bloodshed, with a
maximum of preservation of whatever has value in our
existing civilization is a difficult problem - I
wish I could think that its solution would be
facilitated by some slight degree of moderation and
humane feeling on the part of those who enjoy unjust
privileges in the world as it is.
Bertrand Russell
During recent years, there has been a rebirth of a
global challenge to the existing socio-economic
order, challenge that had almost completely
disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This
movement is still weak, both materially and
ideologically. I want to argue here that one of its
weaknesses is that insufficient attention is paid to
the military aspects of the uneven relations that
are criticized at the economic level. This
weakness is itself in part due to the ideological
framework within which the discourse about human
rights takes place.
I shall first review briefly an historical precedent to
the present "war on terrorism", namely the Cold
War. I shall argue that the way it is presented,
also within most of the left, reflects the
ideological prejudices of the dominant powers. Then,
I'll discuss some frequent delusions in the left
about power, war and human rights. Some of this part
will be polemical; but it is a fact that the recent
wars, specially the Kosovo one, were supported to a
surprising extent by liberals and leftists and
that the opposition to them by "revolutionaries" or
"radicals" has been extraordinarily weak . In the
concluding section, I shall try to make some
constructive suggestions.
1.The cold war as reality and as fiction.
At the beginning of the Cold War, George Kennan, who
was then heading the State Department policy
planning staff, outlined what was to be the
effective guidelines of U.S. policy in the coming
years:
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3%
of its population... In this situation, we cannot
fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our
real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern
of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity... We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of
altruism and world-benefaction...We should cease to
talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as
human rights, the raising of living standards and
democratization. The day is not far off when we are
going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better .
The way this " pattern of relationships" has been set
up was essentially to "kill hope", as William Blum
puts it . Namely, destroy any hope of an independent
development that would allow the Third World to
"divert" its natural and human resources towards the
need of the poor majority of its population. This
can also be called the "rotten apple" theory . Any
country, specially a poor one, that manages to escape
from the global domination system poses the "threat
of the good example": it might be imitated by
others, more important countries. That is why countries
that are by themselves economically marginal, like
Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua or even tiny Grenada have
to be dealt with in one of two ways: either by
imposing, through subversion and warfare, a government
favorable to Western interests or by destroying
them sufficiently so that any alternative
development path that they might follow will be too
harsh to be attractive.
It might be added that this has been the strategy of
the powerful for a long time, including vis-a-vis
the Paris Commune, the Russian revolution
or the Spanish one. Neither the phenomenon of
"Leninism" nor similar tendencies among Third World
nationalists can possibly be understood if one
fails to take into account the fact that their
authoritarianism derives in large part from a
desire to avoid the fate of the Paris Commune and of
other more democratic attempts at social change or
simply to try to preserve a minimal form of national
independence in the face of formidable threats.
That the Leninist path also led to failure does not
imply that the problem it tried to solve does not
exist.
It would take too long to review here the long series
of coups, invasions, support for brutal
dictatorships, and boycotts/sanctions made by the
United States during the so-called Cold War. But
it is worthwhile to give some examples of what one
may call the mentality of the planners, i.e. of
intellectuals, bureaucrats, lawyers working for the US
government or its allies or strongly supporting tem,
especially when we hear that, at the beginning of
its war against Afghanistan, the United States
ordered Pakistan to close its borders with
Afghanistan, through which most food aid was
passing, or when we are told, in regard to the
forthcoming war with Iraq, that defeat for the
United States is not an option.
Consider first the following advice, given during the
Vietnam war, in 1966, and which can be found in
Pentagon Papers :
Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not
only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion
abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk
of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union.
Destruction of locks and dams, however -- if handled
right -- might (perhaps after the next Pause) offer
promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does
not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice,
it leads after time to widespread starvation (more
than a million?) unless food is provided -- which we
could offer "at the conference table".
And the now universally famous Samuel Huntington wrote
around that time that the Vietcong is "a powerful
force which cannot be dislodged from its
constituency so long as the constituency continues to
exist." And to solve that problem, he was urging
the "direct application of mechanical and
conventional power... on such a massive scale as to
produce a massive migration from countryside to
city" . This idea was adopted as the "forced
urbanization" policy.
Turning to war in Afghanistan, we learn that:
Indeed, the war has been a near-perfect laboratory,
according to Michael Vickers, a military analyst at
the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,
a defense think tank. Vickers, a former Army officer
and CIA operative, said the success came because the
al Qaeda network and the Taliban government
sheltering it were overmatched opponents. "When
great powers fight smaller wars -- precursor wars in
between the old military world and the new military
world -- you can experiment more because there's
no doubt you're going to win," he said. "You
experiment, and there is real feedback. You don't
get that very much in the military." "This was a new
way of war, a new operational concept," Vickers
said. "And it was a pretty significant innovation,
because we got fairly rapid regime change with it.
This wasn't on the shelf. This was the way we planned
to overthrow governments."
In a recently released pamphlet of the British Foreign
Policy Centre, Robert Cooper, an advisor of Tony
Blair who represented the British government at the
Bonn talks that produced the interim Hamid Karzai
administration in Afghanistan, calls for a "defensive
imperialism" and for Western countries to deal
with "old-fashioned states outside the postmodern
continent of Europe with the rougher methods of an
earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception,
whatever is necessary to deal with those who still
live in the nineteenth century..."
Finally, here is the advice about Palestine given by a
prominent US lawyer:
"Israel should announce an immediate unilateral
cessation in retaliation against terrorist attacks.
This moratorium would be in effect for a short
period, say four or five days, to give the Palestinian
leadership an opportunity to respond to the new
policy. It would also make it clear to the world
that Israel is taking an important step in ending what
has become a cycle of violence.
Following the end of the moratorium, Israel would
institute the following new policy if Palestinian
terrorism were to resume. It will announce precisely
what it will do in response to the next act of
terrorism. For example, it could announce the first
act of terrorism following the moratorium will
result in the destruction of a small village which has
been used as a base for terrorist operations. The
residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then
troops will come in and bulldoze all of the
buildings.
The response will be automatic. The order will have
been given in advance of the terrorist attacks and
there will be no discretion. The point is to make
the automatic destruction of the village the fault of
the Palestinian terrorists who had advance
warnings of the specific consequences of their
action. The soldiers would simply be acting as the
means for carrying out a previously announced
policy of retaliation against a designated target.
Further acts of terrorism would trigger further
destruction of specifically named locations. The
"waiting list" targets would be made public and
circulated throughout the Palestinian-controlled
areas."
What is truly frightening about those cynical and
aggressive statements (and the many similar ones
that could be quoted) is that they come from people
advising or praising governments that enjoy an almost
complete monopoly of weapons of mass destruction,
are supported by the major world news media and
control fairly obedient domestic populations.
It is also important to refute the standard excuse for
support of regimes of terror given by
pro-intervention intellectuals, namely that all this
was the result of "excesses" in the otherwise
noble pursuit of "fighting communism". Had this been
the case, why not support reformist regimes as an
effective bulwark against truly communist ones? Arbenz,
Mossadegh, Lumumba, Allende or Goulart were in no
sense communists. Nor were the Arab and African
nationalists that the United States opposed either in
their struggle against Zionism or against Apartheid.
Also, why continue similar "excesses", such as years
of bombing Iraq, long after the collapse of the
Soviet Union? Observe also that, contrary to what is
commonly said, the United States did not entirely
"lose" the Vietnam War. It did indeed fail to
achieve its maximal objective of imposing its own
client regime in South Vietnam. But, through
massive bombings and defoliation, it did manage to
destroy the material basis of any successful
alternative development able to serve as a model.
However, the partial defeat in Vietnam and the horrors
of that war led many people to question the
legitimacy of U.S. domination over the world. A
counteroffensive was needed to recover the initiative
at the level of rhetoric and image. The instrument
for this was the human rights ideology proclaimed by
President Carter (1976-1980). The basic tenet of
this ideology can be stated quite simply: since
human and democratic rights are better respected,
in general, in the West than in other countries, it
is our right, indeed our duty, to intervene, if
necessary by military means, in order to enforce the
respect for those rights abroad. The basic fallacy
of this ideology should be obvious: the fact that a
particular society is internally democratic in no
way implies that it will have an altruistic attitude
towards the rest of the world. To take an extreme case,
consider Israel; there is no doubt that it is
internally more democratic towards its own
citizens, at least the Jewish ones, than most Arab
states.
But that does not imply, to put it mildly, that it can
be relied upon to defend the human rights of Arabs
in Palestine, Lebanon or elsewhere. Likewise, the
Greek cities were democratic for their citizens, and
used slave labor. Similar remarks can be made about
European colonialism, which, incidentally, was
also often justified in the name of "human rights" .
For the Vietnamese bombed by the United States or
the Iraqis dying from the embargo, the fact that the
United States is a "free country" with a "free
press" does them little good so long as the press
remains silent and the population reacts with simple
patriotism or indifference. The U.S. press did
finally criticize the Vietnam war when the elite
concluded that the war had became too costly to
the United States. That contrasts with the media
silence over the slow extermination of the Iraqis,
which costs nothing in terms of U.S. casualties or
political protest at home.
The human rights ideology, as used by the United States
and its Western supporters, rests on an extremely
selective reading of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Only the sections on Civil and
Political Rights are referred to, and even these are
interpreted according to double standards . Take
Article 14 that grants the right to seek asylum
abroad from persecution. Its implementation is
extraordinarily politicized by the United States:
out of more that 24,000 Haitians intercepted by U.S.
forces from 1981 through 1990, 11 were granted
asylum, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000
Cubans. Or consider Article 13, granting the right to
leave any country, including one's own. During the
Cold War, the United States refused to grant
passports to U.S. citizens such as the famous singer
Paul Robeson, who had the effrontery to be both
black and communist.
This right to leave was however constantly invoked with
great passion against the refusal by the Soviet
Union to allow Jews to emigrate. But the end of
Article 13, which adds "and to return to his country"
is ignored. No wonder; the day after the Universal
Declaration was ratified, the United Nations passed
Resolution 194, which affirms the right of Palestinians
to return to their homes (or to receive
compensations).
The declaration also contains Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, including a right to health care,
social security and adequate standard of living
(Article 25). Whatever one thinks of those rights, they
are part of the Declaration and have the same
status for the signatories as any other part of the
Universal Declaration. Nevertheless, the President
Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, could call them a "letter to Santa
Claus" without provoking much reaction. (This is in
itself an interesting example of 'relativism' -
just think of the reactions in the West if some
Third World leader called the first part a "letter to
Santa Claus").
In the West, the Civil Rights part of the Universal
Declaration is held to have absolute priority over
the Economic and Social parts. In case this seems an
obvious priority, imagine being one of those two or
three billion people (about half of mankind) who
have to survive on more or less two dollars a day.
How would you weigh Cuban efforts to maintain public
health, education and availability of basic
necessities for the poor in comparison to the
limitations imposed on civil liberties? These efforts
continued long after Cuba was no longer being
'subsidized' by the Soviet Union -- and while it was
suffering from a very severe embargo as well as from
numerous acts of sabotage caused by the single
superpower, forcing the Cuban government to divert
resources to defense, counter-spying, etc.
Considering the relationship of forces, if Cuba
introduced liberal democracy as demanded by the
United States, one could expect the Cuban emigre-lobby
in the United States, backed by Washington, to
bribe politicians, finance media and subvert the new
"democratic process" to ensure the takeover by a
pro-U.S. regime that would adopt neo-liberal
"reforms" putting an end to the existing social
benefits. This does not mean that socio-economic
rights should be used to justify the abandonment of
civil liberties. All such rights should be part of a
just society. But given the world relationship of
forces, the constant exclusive emphasis on
political rights by the rich countries must be seen as
self-serving and therefore not a valid promotion of
universal values.
The following comments, taken from the Jesuit
Salvadorian journal 'Processo', illustrate nicely
the double standards of the U.S. human rights
discourse: If Lech Walesa had been doing his organizing
work in El Salvador, he would have already entered
into the ranks of the disappeared - at the hand of
'heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes'; or
have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on
his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a
politician in our country, he would have been
assassinated like Hector Oqueli [the social democratic
leader assassinated in Guatemala, by Salvadorian death
squads, according to the Guatemalan government]. If
Andrei Sakharov had worked here in favour of human
rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert
Anaya [one of the many murdered leaders of the
independent Salvadorian Human Rights Commission CDHES].
If Ota-Sik or Vaclav Havel had been carrying out their
intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have been
found one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a
university campus with their heads destroyed by the
bullets of an elite army battalion.
Another striking example of double standards was
attested by no less than Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
recipient of the highest award bestowed by
International League for the Rights of Man. In 1975,
the newly independent ex-Portuguese colony of East
Timor was invaded by Indonesia, a regional client of
the United States, which supplied most of its weapons.
The United Nations failed to come to the aid of
the East Timorese, thanks to Moynihan, who was
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time and
who proudly recalled in his memoirs:
The Department of State desired that the United Nations
prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it
undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried
it forward with no inconsiderable success.
Moynihan even cited figures showing that the Indonesian
invasion killed "10 percent of the population,
almost the proportion of casualties experienced by
the Soviet Union during the Second World War." Along
with Huntington and several U.S. theologians,
Moynihan is one of the 60 signers of the "letter
from America" sent to European newspapers exalting the
U.S. assault on Afghanistan as part of a "Just War".
The human rights policy also signaled a change of
operational tactics. During the Vietnam war period,
there was much talk about "nation building",
meaning building strong anticommunist states in the
Third World.
The United States drew the lesson from Vietnam that it
was easier to destroy an unfriendly state that to
build a friendly one. The Islamic fundamentalists in
Afghanistan, the contras and the Miskitos Indians in
Nicaragua, Savimbi in Angola, the UCK in Kosovo, most
of the separatist forces in the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia (and probably now in China), have been
supported by the United States in what one might call
an enterprise of state deconstruction. This has
the added advantage of provoking less opposition
among liberals and leftists, given the latter's
prejudice in favor of whoever appears to be the
underdog, whether guerrillas versus a regular army,
traditional societies versus a modern state, or
ethnic minorities versus democratic majorities.
In the end, the Cold War was quite similar to the
present "war on terrorism": a continuation of
centuries of domination by the advanced industrial
powers of the rest of the world, ensuring popular
support at home thanks to a clever and scary
rhetoric. Of course, there was a real conflict, as
there is now. But, then as now, the relationship of
forces was enormously unequal, the response
totally disproportionate to the actual dangers, and
the real goals, although concealed, not hard to figure
out.
2. Good and Bad Arguments
Perhaps the most striking success of our ideological
system is the extent to which its assumptions are
shared by critics on the left, even honest ones. To
take one example, consider the widely shared
expectation that a "peace dividend" would follow the
demise of the Warsaw Pact. This was about as
realistic as expecting Genghis Khan to stop half way
through his conquests. In reality, the victors (NATO
and the United States) immediately started to
expand and seek fresh justifications for their
aggressive military posture. This mirage, as well as
similar confusions concerning later operations
against Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan, show that
we urgently need to clarify our thinking about the
basis of our objections to Western aggression, and
to its apologists. This is necessary even, or
especially, when aggressive interventions are
successful, and when the declared targets are
individuals such as Saddam Hussein, Milosevic or bin
Laden who, leftists are persuaded, are not "our kind of
guys".
The reincarnations of Hitler
The main argument used by the pro-war party to
intimidate its opponents is extraordinarily
simple: we are always confronted by the latest form
of fascism. Saddam is Hitler, Milosevic is Hitler,
bin Laden is Hitler, as were Nasser or Arafat before
them. We (the West) should therefore intervene to
liberate poor and oppressed people -- Kosovar Albanians
or Afghan women, considered more or less the
present-day equivalent of the Jews in Nazi-dominated
Europe . Left alone, our governments and public opinion
are too selfish, uninformed and indifferent to
human suffering. Therefore, the role of
intellectuals is to arouse public opinion and to put
pressure on the governments so that they dare commit
themselves more actively to the defense of our
values. Note in passing that, for many of those
intellectuals, whom one might call the humanitarian
warriors , doing business is morally dubious (it may
lead to all kinds of compromises with dictatorships)
while waging war, or at the very least imposing
trade sanctions, is the really noble thing to do.
For classical liberals, it was the other way
around: wars were seen to strengthen states, their
armies, police and bureaucracies, while commerce
promoted human exchanges and better mutual
understanding. Note also that the fact that the United
States usually refuses to negotiate with its
enemies (e.g., imposition of unacceptable conditions
on the Serbs in Rambouillet, refusal even to
consider legal extradition proceedings for bin Laden)
is not an effective argument against such
intellectuals. Their view is that we should seize
every opportunity to wage wars that can topple
dictatorships and brutal regimes, in order to spread
democracy and respect for human rights. Nor is
there any point in complaining about the "collateral
damage" of Western aggressions. The humanitarian
warriors can always cite the "greater good" obtained
by imposing liberal regimes. For them, the great good
fortune of our time is that overwhelming military
force is in the hand of powers, like the United
States, committed to the defense of liberal values. The
only problem is the reluctance of the general
public, sometimes influenced by the left, to let
their governments commit themselves even more actively
to that just struggle. That is why, as Christopher
Hitchens put it, Osama bin Laden "saved us". By
provoking the United States, he forced its leaders
into a fight that, otherwise, they might not have had
the guts to lead. We can be sure that whatever
countries will be targeted by the United States in
the future, the humanitarian warriors will applaud,
even if no evidence whatsoever links them to
"terrorism". Such countries are likely to qualify
as brutal dictatorships, and such he main targets of
the Western "defenders of human rights".
Munich for ever
The inevitable companion of the "new Hitlers" discourse
is stigmatization of critics as the new Chamberlains
and Daladiers playing into their hands. This is
done without recalling what "Munich" was all about.
There was a part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland,
with a predominantly German population that wanted
to be part of Germany; its annexation by Germany was
accepted at Munich by Britain and France. That sent
a message to the main rising power of the time that
international law didn't matter and that it could do
as it pleased. And it is now understood, rightly, that
this was sending the wrong signal to Hitler. But
what about the right of self-determination of the
Sudeten? What would our pro-intervention left have
said at that time? The case of Kosovo quickly comes to
mind. There, a majority of the population wanted
to be detached from Yugoslavia and become part of
what one might call Natoland. And the major power of
our time used that opportunity to brush aside
international law. Future historians may well
identify the aggression against Yugoslavia as a major
turning point in a new form of imperial reconquest
of the world. And who were the real Chamberlains at
that time may have to be reevaluated. As noted above,
the fact that the United States is not at all
similar to Nazi Germany internally implies less than
what is usually supposed for the fate of the people
on the wrong side of the guns.
Before indicating how I think one should respond to the
apologists for "just" wars, I will discuss a certain
number of arguments frequently used by people who
oppose Western aggressions but that should be avoided
as counterproductive.
(1 of 2 - follows)
[fwd]
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 16:34:56 +0200
From: hde_tollenaere
Why we still need to be anti-imperialists
by Jean Bricmont [Belgian philosopher]
Why we still need to be anti-imperialists...
It seems evident, from the attitude of the capitalist
world to Soviet Russia, of the Entente to the
Central Empires, and of England to Ireland and
India, that there is no depth of cruelty, perfidy or
brutality from which the present holders of power
will shrink when they feel themselves threatened.
If, in order to oust them, nothing short of
religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are
the prime sources of the resultant evil - To make
the transition with a minimum of bloodshed, with a
maximum of preservation of whatever has value in our
existing civilization is a difficult problem - I
wish I could think that its solution would be
facilitated by some slight degree of moderation and
humane feeling on the part of those who enjoy unjust
privileges in the world as it is.
Bertrand Russell
During recent years, there has been a rebirth of a
global challenge to the existing socio-economic
order, challenge that had almost completely
disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This
movement is still weak, both materially and
ideologically. I want to argue here that one of its
weaknesses is that insufficient attention is paid to
the military aspects of the uneven relations that
are criticized at the economic level. This
weakness is itself in part due to the ideological
framework within which the discourse about human
rights takes place.
I shall first review briefly an historical precedent to
the present "war on terrorism", namely the Cold
War. I shall argue that the way it is presented,
also within most of the left, reflects the
ideological prejudices of the dominant powers. Then,
I'll discuss some frequent delusions in the left
about power, war and human rights. Some of this part
will be polemical; but it is a fact that the recent
wars, specially the Kosovo one, were supported to a
surprising extent by liberals and leftists and
that the opposition to them by "revolutionaries" or
"radicals" has been extraordinarily weak . In the
concluding section, I shall try to make some
constructive suggestions.
1.The cold war as reality and as fiction.
At the beginning of the Cold War, George Kennan, who
was then heading the State Department policy
planning staff, outlined what was to be the
effective guidelines of U.S. policy in the coming
years:
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3%
of its population... In this situation, we cannot
fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our
real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern
of relationships which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity... We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of
altruism and world-benefaction...We should cease to
talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as
human rights, the raising of living standards and
democratization. The day is not far off when we are
going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans,
the better .
The way this " pattern of relationships" has been set
up was essentially to "kill hope", as William Blum
puts it . Namely, destroy any hope of an independent
development that would allow the Third World to
"divert" its natural and human resources towards the
need of the poor majority of its population. This
can also be called the "rotten apple" theory . Any
country, specially a poor one, that manages to escape
from the global domination system poses the "threat
of the good example": it might be imitated by
others, more important countries. That is why countries
that are by themselves economically marginal, like
Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua or even tiny Grenada have
to be dealt with in one of two ways: either by
imposing, through subversion and warfare, a government
favorable to Western interests or by destroying
them sufficiently so that any alternative
development path that they might follow will be too
harsh to be attractive.
It might be added that this has been the strategy of
the powerful for a long time, including vis-a-vis
the Paris Commune, the Russian revolution
or the Spanish one. Neither the phenomenon of
"Leninism" nor similar tendencies among Third World
nationalists can possibly be understood if one
fails to take into account the fact that their
authoritarianism derives in large part from a
desire to avoid the fate of the Paris Commune and of
other more democratic attempts at social change or
simply to try to preserve a minimal form of national
independence in the face of formidable threats.
That the Leninist path also led to failure does not
imply that the problem it tried to solve does not
exist.
It would take too long to review here the long series
of coups, invasions, support for brutal
dictatorships, and boycotts/sanctions made by the
United States during the so-called Cold War. But
it is worthwhile to give some examples of what one
may call the mentality of the planners, i.e. of
intellectuals, bureaucrats, lawyers working for the US
government or its allies or strongly supporting tem,
especially when we hear that, at the beginning of
its war against Afghanistan, the United States
ordered Pakistan to close its borders with
Afghanistan, through which most food aid was
passing, or when we are told, in regard to the
forthcoming war with Iraq, that defeat for the
United States is not an option.
Consider first the following advice, given during the
Vietnam war, in 1966, and which can be found in
Pentagon Papers :
Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not
only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion
abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk
of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union.
Destruction of locks and dams, however -- if handled
right -- might (perhaps after the next Pause) offer
promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does
not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice,
it leads after time to widespread starvation (more
than a million?) unless food is provided -- which we
could offer "at the conference table".
And the now universally famous Samuel Huntington wrote
around that time that the Vietcong is "a powerful
force which cannot be dislodged from its
constituency so long as the constituency continues to
exist." And to solve that problem, he was urging
the "direct application of mechanical and
conventional power... on such a massive scale as to
produce a massive migration from countryside to
city" . This idea was adopted as the "forced
urbanization" policy.
Turning to war in Afghanistan, we learn that:
Indeed, the war has been a near-perfect laboratory,
according to Michael Vickers, a military analyst at
the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,
a defense think tank. Vickers, a former Army officer
and CIA operative, said the success came because the
al Qaeda network and the Taliban government
sheltering it were overmatched opponents. "When
great powers fight smaller wars -- precursor wars in
between the old military world and the new military
world -- you can experiment more because there's
no doubt you're going to win," he said. "You
experiment, and there is real feedback. You don't
get that very much in the military." "This was a new
way of war, a new operational concept," Vickers
said. "And it was a pretty significant innovation,
because we got fairly rapid regime change with it.
This wasn't on the shelf. This was the way we planned
to overthrow governments."
In a recently released pamphlet of the British Foreign
Policy Centre, Robert Cooper, an advisor of Tony
Blair who represented the British government at the
Bonn talks that produced the interim Hamid Karzai
administration in Afghanistan, calls for a "defensive
imperialism" and for Western countries to deal
with "old-fashioned states outside the postmodern
continent of Europe with the rougher methods of an
earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception,
whatever is necessary to deal with those who still
live in the nineteenth century..."
Finally, here is the advice about Palestine given by a
prominent US lawyer:
"Israel should announce an immediate unilateral
cessation in retaliation against terrorist attacks.
This moratorium would be in effect for a short
period, say four or five days, to give the Palestinian
leadership an opportunity to respond to the new
policy. It would also make it clear to the world
that Israel is taking an important step in ending what
has become a cycle of violence.
Following the end of the moratorium, Israel would
institute the following new policy if Palestinian
terrorism were to resume. It will announce precisely
what it will do in response to the next act of
terrorism. For example, it could announce the first
act of terrorism following the moratorium will
result in the destruction of a small village which has
been used as a base for terrorist operations. The
residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then
troops will come in and bulldoze all of the
buildings.
The response will be automatic. The order will have
been given in advance of the terrorist attacks and
there will be no discretion. The point is to make
the automatic destruction of the village the fault of
the Palestinian terrorists who had advance
warnings of the specific consequences of their
action. The soldiers would simply be acting as the
means for carrying out a previously announced
policy of retaliation against a designated target.
Further acts of terrorism would trigger further
destruction of specifically named locations. The
"waiting list" targets would be made public and
circulated throughout the Palestinian-controlled
areas."
What is truly frightening about those cynical and
aggressive statements (and the many similar ones
that could be quoted) is that they come from people
advising or praising governments that enjoy an almost
complete monopoly of weapons of mass destruction,
are supported by the major world news media and
control fairly obedient domestic populations.
It is also important to refute the standard excuse for
support of regimes of terror given by
pro-intervention intellectuals, namely that all this
was the result of "excesses" in the otherwise
noble pursuit of "fighting communism". Had this been
the case, why not support reformist regimes as an
effective bulwark against truly communist ones? Arbenz,
Mossadegh, Lumumba, Allende or Goulart were in no
sense communists. Nor were the Arab and African
nationalists that the United States opposed either in
their struggle against Zionism or against Apartheid.
Also, why continue similar "excesses", such as years
of bombing Iraq, long after the collapse of the
Soviet Union? Observe also that, contrary to what is
commonly said, the United States did not entirely
"lose" the Vietnam War. It did indeed fail to
achieve its maximal objective of imposing its own
client regime in South Vietnam. But, through
massive bombings and defoliation, it did manage to
destroy the material basis of any successful
alternative development able to serve as a model.
However, the partial defeat in Vietnam and the horrors
of that war led many people to question the
legitimacy of U.S. domination over the world. A
counteroffensive was needed to recover the initiative
at the level of rhetoric and image. The instrument
for this was the human rights ideology proclaimed by
President Carter (1976-1980). The basic tenet of
this ideology can be stated quite simply: since
human and democratic rights are better respected,
in general, in the West than in other countries, it
is our right, indeed our duty, to intervene, if
necessary by military means, in order to enforce the
respect for those rights abroad. The basic fallacy
of this ideology should be obvious: the fact that a
particular society is internally democratic in no
way implies that it will have an altruistic attitude
towards the rest of the world. To take an extreme case,
consider Israel; there is no doubt that it is
internally more democratic towards its own
citizens, at least the Jewish ones, than most Arab
states.
But that does not imply, to put it mildly, that it can
be relied upon to defend the human rights of Arabs
in Palestine, Lebanon or elsewhere. Likewise, the
Greek cities were democratic for their citizens, and
used slave labor. Similar remarks can be made about
European colonialism, which, incidentally, was
also often justified in the name of "human rights" .
For the Vietnamese bombed by the United States or
the Iraqis dying from the embargo, the fact that the
United States is a "free country" with a "free
press" does them little good so long as the press
remains silent and the population reacts with simple
patriotism or indifference. The U.S. press did
finally criticize the Vietnam war when the elite
concluded that the war had became too costly to
the United States. That contrasts with the media
silence over the slow extermination of the Iraqis,
which costs nothing in terms of U.S. casualties or
political protest at home.
The human rights ideology, as used by the United States
and its Western supporters, rests on an extremely
selective reading of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Only the sections on Civil and
Political Rights are referred to, and even these are
interpreted according to double standards . Take
Article 14 that grants the right to seek asylum
abroad from persecution. Its implementation is
extraordinarily politicized by the United States:
out of more that 24,000 Haitians intercepted by U.S.
forces from 1981 through 1990, 11 were granted
asylum, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000
Cubans. Or consider Article 13, granting the right to
leave any country, including one's own. During the
Cold War, the United States refused to grant
passports to U.S. citizens such as the famous singer
Paul Robeson, who had the effrontery to be both
black and communist.
This right to leave was however constantly invoked with
great passion against the refusal by the Soviet
Union to allow Jews to emigrate. But the end of
Article 13, which adds "and to return to his country"
is ignored. No wonder; the day after the Universal
Declaration was ratified, the United Nations passed
Resolution 194, which affirms the right of Palestinians
to return to their homes (or to receive
compensations).
The declaration also contains Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, including a right to health care,
social security and adequate standard of living
(Article 25). Whatever one thinks of those rights, they
are part of the Declaration and have the same
status for the signatories as any other part of the
Universal Declaration. Nevertheless, the President
Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, could call them a "letter to Santa
Claus" without provoking much reaction. (This is in
itself an interesting example of 'relativism' -
just think of the reactions in the West if some
Third World leader called the first part a "letter to
Santa Claus").
In the West, the Civil Rights part of the Universal
Declaration is held to have absolute priority over
the Economic and Social parts. In case this seems an
obvious priority, imagine being one of those two or
three billion people (about half of mankind) who
have to survive on more or less two dollars a day.
How would you weigh Cuban efforts to maintain public
health, education and availability of basic
necessities for the poor in comparison to the
limitations imposed on civil liberties? These efforts
continued long after Cuba was no longer being
'subsidized' by the Soviet Union -- and while it was
suffering from a very severe embargo as well as from
numerous acts of sabotage caused by the single
superpower, forcing the Cuban government to divert
resources to defense, counter-spying, etc.
Considering the relationship of forces, if Cuba
introduced liberal democracy as demanded by the
United States, one could expect the Cuban emigre-lobby
in the United States, backed by Washington, to
bribe politicians, finance media and subvert the new
"democratic process" to ensure the takeover by a
pro-U.S. regime that would adopt neo-liberal
"reforms" putting an end to the existing social
benefits. This does not mean that socio-economic
rights should be used to justify the abandonment of
civil liberties. All such rights should be part of a
just society. But given the world relationship of
forces, the constant exclusive emphasis on
political rights by the rich countries must be seen as
self-serving and therefore not a valid promotion of
universal values.
The following comments, taken from the Jesuit
Salvadorian journal 'Processo', illustrate nicely
the double standards of the U.S. human rights
discourse: If Lech Walesa had been doing his organizing
work in El Salvador, he would have already entered
into the ranks of the disappeared - at the hand of
'heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes'; or
have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on
his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a
politician in our country, he would have been
assassinated like Hector Oqueli [the social democratic
leader assassinated in Guatemala, by Salvadorian death
squads, according to the Guatemalan government]. If
Andrei Sakharov had worked here in favour of human
rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert
Anaya [one of the many murdered leaders of the
independent Salvadorian Human Rights Commission CDHES].
If Ota-Sik or Vaclav Havel had been carrying out their
intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have been
found one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a
university campus with their heads destroyed by the
bullets of an elite army battalion.
Another striking example of double standards was
attested by no less than Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
recipient of the highest award bestowed by
International League for the Rights of Man. In 1975,
the newly independent ex-Portuguese colony of East
Timor was invaded by Indonesia, a regional client of
the United States, which supplied most of its weapons.
The United Nations failed to come to the aid of
the East Timorese, thanks to Moynihan, who was
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time and
who proudly recalled in his memoirs:
The Department of State desired that the United Nations
prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it
undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried
it forward with no inconsiderable success.
Moynihan even cited figures showing that the Indonesian
invasion killed "10 percent of the population,
almost the proportion of casualties experienced by
the Soviet Union during the Second World War." Along
with Huntington and several U.S. theologians,
Moynihan is one of the 60 signers of the "letter
from America" sent to European newspapers exalting the
U.S. assault on Afghanistan as part of a "Just War".
The human rights policy also signaled a change of
operational tactics. During the Vietnam war period,
there was much talk about "nation building",
meaning building strong anticommunist states in the
Third World.
The United States drew the lesson from Vietnam that it
was easier to destroy an unfriendly state that to
build a friendly one. The Islamic fundamentalists in
Afghanistan, the contras and the Miskitos Indians in
Nicaragua, Savimbi in Angola, the UCK in Kosovo, most
of the separatist forces in the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia (and probably now in China), have been
supported by the United States in what one might call
an enterprise of state deconstruction. This has
the added advantage of provoking less opposition
among liberals and leftists, given the latter's
prejudice in favor of whoever appears to be the
underdog, whether guerrillas versus a regular army,
traditional societies versus a modern state, or
ethnic minorities versus democratic majorities.
In the end, the Cold War was quite similar to the
present "war on terrorism": a continuation of
centuries of domination by the advanced industrial
powers of the rest of the world, ensuring popular
support at home thanks to a clever and scary
rhetoric. Of course, there was a real conflict, as
there is now. But, then as now, the relationship of
forces was enormously unequal, the response
totally disproportionate to the actual dangers, and
the real goals, although concealed, not hard to figure
out.
2. Good and Bad Arguments
Perhaps the most striking success of our ideological
system is the extent to which its assumptions are
shared by critics on the left, even honest ones. To
take one example, consider the widely shared
expectation that a "peace dividend" would follow the
demise of the Warsaw Pact. This was about as
realistic as expecting Genghis Khan to stop half way
through his conquests. In reality, the victors (NATO
and the United States) immediately started to
expand and seek fresh justifications for their
aggressive military posture. This mirage, as well as
similar confusions concerning later operations
against Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan, show that
we urgently need to clarify our thinking about the
basis of our objections to Western aggression, and
to its apologists. This is necessary even, or
especially, when aggressive interventions are
successful, and when the declared targets are
individuals such as Saddam Hussein, Milosevic or bin
Laden who, leftists are persuaded, are not "our kind of
guys".
The reincarnations of Hitler
The main argument used by the pro-war party to
intimidate its opponents is extraordinarily
simple: we are always confronted by the latest form
of fascism. Saddam is Hitler, Milosevic is Hitler,
bin Laden is Hitler, as were Nasser or Arafat before
them. We (the West) should therefore intervene to
liberate poor and oppressed people -- Kosovar Albanians
or Afghan women, considered more or less the
present-day equivalent of the Jews in Nazi-dominated
Europe . Left alone, our governments and public opinion
are too selfish, uninformed and indifferent to
human suffering. Therefore, the role of
intellectuals is to arouse public opinion and to put
pressure on the governments so that they dare commit
themselves more actively to the defense of our
values. Note in passing that, for many of those
intellectuals, whom one might call the humanitarian
warriors , doing business is morally dubious (it may
lead to all kinds of compromises with dictatorships)
while waging war, or at the very least imposing
trade sanctions, is the really noble thing to do.
For classical liberals, it was the other way
around: wars were seen to strengthen states, their
armies, police and bureaucracies, while commerce
promoted human exchanges and better mutual
understanding. Note also that the fact that the United
States usually refuses to negotiate with its
enemies (e.g., imposition of unacceptable conditions
on the Serbs in Rambouillet, refusal even to
consider legal extradition proceedings for bin Laden)
is not an effective argument against such
intellectuals. Their view is that we should seize
every opportunity to wage wars that can topple
dictatorships and brutal regimes, in order to spread
democracy and respect for human rights. Nor is
there any point in complaining about the "collateral
damage" of Western aggressions. The humanitarian
warriors can always cite the "greater good" obtained
by imposing liberal regimes. For them, the great good
fortune of our time is that overwhelming military
force is in the hand of powers, like the United
States, committed to the defense of liberal values. The
only problem is the reluctance of the general
public, sometimes influenced by the left, to let
their governments commit themselves even more actively
to that just struggle. That is why, as Christopher
Hitchens put it, Osama bin Laden "saved us". By
provoking the United States, he forced its leaders
into a fight that, otherwise, they might not have had
the guts to lead. We can be sure that whatever
countries will be targeted by the United States in
the future, the humanitarian warriors will applaud,
even if no evidence whatsoever links them to
"terrorism". Such countries are likely to qualify
as brutal dictatorships, and such he main targets of
the Western "defenders of human rights".
Munich for ever
The inevitable companion of the "new Hitlers" discourse
is stigmatization of critics as the new Chamberlains
and Daladiers playing into their hands. This is
done without recalling what "Munich" was all about.
There was a part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland,
with a predominantly German population that wanted
to be part of Germany; its annexation by Germany was
accepted at Munich by Britain and France. That sent
a message to the main rising power of the time that
international law didn't matter and that it could do
as it pleased. And it is now understood, rightly, that
this was sending the wrong signal to Hitler. But
what about the right of self-determination of the
Sudeten? What would our pro-intervention left have
said at that time? The case of Kosovo quickly comes to
mind. There, a majority of the population wanted
to be detached from Yugoslavia and become part of
what one might call Natoland. And the major power of
our time used that opportunity to brush aside
international law. Future historians may well
identify the aggression against Yugoslavia as a major
turning point in a new form of imperial reconquest
of the world. And who were the real Chamberlains at
that time may have to be reevaluated. As noted above,
the fact that the United States is not at all
similar to Nazi Germany internally implies less than
what is usually supposed for the fate of the people
on the wrong side of the guns.
Before indicating how I think one should respond to the
apologists for "just" wars, I will discuss a certain
number of arguments frequently used by people who
oppose Western aggressions but that should be avoided
as counterproductive.
(1 of 2 - follows)