Baddies and Goodies
Editorial
Stabroek News
January 15, 2003
Just a week ago on Tuesday, 7th January British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a major foreign policy address. The occasion was a meeting of all Britain's Ambassadors and High Commissioners. There had been a lot of advance publicity, the spin being to the effect that he would admonish the Americans to widen their agenda beyond terrorism and the preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction to include the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and global poverty. In practice his speech was mainly a defence of his posture as a faithful ally of President Bush, especially on the issue of a war with Iraq.
Blair was responding to growing uneasiness in his own country and at a time when he was in the throes of a foreign policy debacle, namely the collapse of his initiative to hold in London a meeting of the Quartet (the US, the EU, Russia and the UN) on the reform of the Palestinian Authority. Israel, as a reprisal measure to the latest suicide bombings, had decided not to permit any senior Palestine official to attend the London conference. A request by the UK government to reconsider this decision had been rejected out of hand by Israeli Foreign Minister Netanyahu. The Israelis could do this because they know they have the tacit support of the Bush administration.
While Tony Blair is clearly right in calling for the widening of the US agenda it is surely not just a matter of widening but even more of deepening of perspective.
The current US approach is to divide the world between good and evil, goodies and baddies, light and darkness. This perspective is almost as old as the US itself. It may derive from the country's puritan origins but in practice it is modified or tempered by who is in the White House and the kind of Cabinet he puts together. It is also profoundly shaped by events. In this connection the September 11 events have given a powerful thrust to the Manichean vision of the Bush White House. "If you are not with us you are against us" and talk of an "axis of evil" and "shadowy networks of individuals" and the accompanying military doctrine for the maintenance in perpetuity of incontestable military power and its pre-emptive use.
One powerful effect of this vision of the world is that you don't negotiate with evil; you bomb it out of existence or into grovelling submission. The consequent analysis is inevitably simplistic and leaves little room for discussion or diplomacy. It also tacitly excludes from the agenda of its concerns most of the ills which mark the human condition, persistent poverty and disease and environmental degradation.
It is a doctrine which is fraught with danger for the international order because of the sheer scale of US military might and economic power. But it is also leading the US into quagmires of its own making as for example Afghanistan. At first the military doctrine as applied to Afghanistan seemed to work. The Taliban were ousted from power by an awesome bombing campaign; such fighting as was done on the ground was undertaken by the Northern Alliance. What is the situation now? President Hamid Karzai has an uncertain hold on power which may in fact be limited to the capital city of Kabul. Only good luck has enabled him to escape assassination. The US has been unwilling to provide military personnel for security beyond Kabul. Promised funds for reconstruction have been slow in coming. Attacks on coalition forces occur from time to time. At first the attacks were blamed on the Taliban as surely no people would attack their liberators. Now it is more often acknowledged that the attacks came from warlords and factions. It is not often admitted that the Taliban, while imposing a harsh and cruel regime, had driven off the warlords and brought order of a kind for the first time in decades to the country.
The US stance is leaving Afghanistan to fall back into the disorder of a failed state. A doctrine which divides the world into good and evil is good for fighting wars but provides no impetus for reconstruction and peace.
Turning to the probable war with Iraq, the US has been repeatedly warned of the turbulence and disorder which may erupt in several Arab states of the Middle East. Iraq is a patchwork of tribes and disparate regions put together in colonial times. It is more than likely that in the short run only an authoritarian regime can hold it together. Despite current commitments the Kurds, responding to ancient memories and aspirations, will seek with the Kurdish minorities in Syria, Turkey and Iran to build a new state, thereby destabilising that whole region. It is predictable that the Arab street will explode everywhere threatening existing regimes and probably bringing down at least one, the Kingdom of Jordan. Particularly foreboding were the hurried visits undertaken by the Prime Minister of Turkey to Syria, Egypt and Jordan reportedly to coordinate action towards averting a war with Iraq. The western media have played down these visits, perhaps because they do not know what to make of them. After all, while Turkey is an Islamic country, it is not an Arab state, it is a secular democracy and a long-standing member of NATO. Moreover, Turkey must be aware that any identification with Arab causes will not enhance its prospects for admission to the European Union. Turkish behaviour (now being followed by Greece, the new chairman of the EU) is thus another important signal of the complexity of a situation in which the Bush administration proposes to intervene with the simplistic use of overwhelming military might. Will the US, even in view of its dominant interest in Iraqi oil, stick around long enough to put the pieces back together?
In Iran, another state in the so-called "axis of evil", a titanic struggle is in progress between the people especially the youths against a priestly hierarchy seeking to maintain systems of closure. Despite assurances to the contrary by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),Iran is being accused by White House officials of building installations to produce nuclear bombs. Such pressure can only serve to strengthen the hold of the small group in Iran intent on maintaining a closed society.
Finally one comes to the third member-state of the "axis of evil", the small hermit kingdom, North Korea whose leadership has recently defied the US and the rest of the world. They have publicly admitted their preparations to build nuclear bombs and probably already have a small arsenal; they have expelled the UN weapons inspectors. They have announced their withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the intention to resume missile testing . Moreover they already export scud missiles, their buyers include Iraq and most recently Yemen. Yet Mr Bush has surprisingly ruled out the military option.
It is worth recalling that it was not North Korea which first broke the Agreement concluded with the Clinton administration in 1994 in which Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea undertook to abandon its nuclear ambitions. In return it was agreed to build for North Korea, two "light water" power stations for energy generation. Until the power stations were ready it was agreed that the US would supply oil. All the evidence is that the US deliberately delayed the construction of the stations with work beginning after eight years, only very recently. Now the oil supplies have been stopped.
It was the Bush administration which re-started the conflict, breaking off talks with Pyongyang shortly after it took office and pressuring South Korea to discontinue its "sunshine" policy of openness to and cooperation with the North. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pyongyang lost its primary source of economic assistance. In consequence eight million of its population of twenty-three million now live on the edge of hunger.
The apparent intention was to remove the regime through ensuring the collapse of the economy, an unlikely occurrence as the curious deificiation of the North Korean leader appears to dampen dissent.
The situation in Pyongyang is of the gravest concern to China. China views askance the US military installations which now exist next door in every former Soviet Republic. A strike on Pyongyang will bring US military might to its doorstep. Moreover further deterioration could push thousands of North Korean refugees across the border into China.
But it is South Korea that has most at stake. North Korea's conduct is perceived by Seoul as likely to lead to nuclear conflict on the Peninsula; the US government has maintained for fifty years a permanent highly-armed but very vulnerable garrison of 37,000 men in the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.
It is also a relevant factor that there has emerged in South Korea a powerful anti-American movement. To appreciate the significance of this development one must recall that South Korea owes its very existence and security to US military intervention and that its soaring industrial development derives in large measure from US capital, technology and markets. The immediate cause of the eruption of hostility to the US was the crushing to death of two schoolgirls by a US military vehicle and the subsequent exoneration of the US soldiers. However it has snowballed into a powerful national movement which responds to deep nationalist feelings for reunification. There is also the deeply held belief that the US is mismanaging the situation in the North. The movement decisively influenced the South Korean elections in December leading to the unexpected victory of the Presidential candidate who favoured cooperation with Pyongyang.
It is against this background that Seoul undertook a major diplomatic offensive with China, Russia and Japan which has now led to the wholly surprising US diplomatic climb-down, leading to agreement to hold talks with Pyongyang.
In short, for the time being, there is in Washington in the case of North Korea a perception of complexity in place of good and evil analysis.
To sum up, the current US administration is imbued with a quasi-religious doctrine which divides the world into areas of light and darkness, kingdoms of good and empires of evil, a doctrine which bodes ill for international order. Tony Blair in his self-appointed task of empowering the US administration should try to move his American colleagues not only into a wider agenda but into deeper analysis so that there could be a return to the foreign policy and diplomatic approaches through which, instead of resort to war, international order is built and maintained.
