Pax Americana

By Mike Gould, a communication consultant based in the Netherlands

We live in a time of simplistic polarized views, whereas global politics may never have been more complex. Of particular difficulty for the West since the end of the Cold War has been the transition from a bipolar to a unipolar world. Stability – which is what everyone seems to want –now depends on an inflammable cocktail of volatile political and economic factors, including unpredictable actions by ‘fundamentalists’.

Many people accept that a rich diversity of viewpoints is essential to a clear understanding of the world and its complexity. Glowering at them across a wide chasm of misunderstanding are those whose approach is simple, fundamentalist, and often Machiavellian. Among the latter I include the ‘usual suspects’ – by whom I refer not only to terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, but also to elements in (and behind) the current U.S. administration, not to mention people in the Sharon government. Exacerbating this situation is an inherently unstable economic system, in which there are extreme swings in confidence, plus speculation and uncontrolled flows of capital.

The current U.S. approach to Iraq, which has everything to do with political and economic domination – not WMDs or democracy – contributes to this instability. I believe the US is attempting to create a Pax Americana analogous to British policy in the 19th century. After the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. could easily have brought about regime change. Instead, after hypocritically calling on the Iraqi opposition groups to rise up, they deliberately allowed Iraqi army helicopters to brutally crush the rebellion. Simultaneously, they denied soldiers who had turned against Saddam access to their weapons. (I was in northern Iraq in 1991 and heard directly from Kurds how they felt betrayed. A year later I worked on a major report – coordinated by Harvard Law School – about the effects of sanctions, which revealed early on how these were damaging Iraq’s population and strengthening its leaders).

This is not to say that Saddam Hussein’s regime is not tyrannical and should not be removed. Of course it should – and, if the U.S. had allowed, it could have been: the right way, by the Iraqis themselves in 1991. For the Ba’ath regime is a particularly brutal one. I would like to see it replaced by a federal government that allows freedom and human rights to all of Iraq’s diverse population. But we should never forget that, as in the rest of the Middle East, the borders of this artificial country were created by the colonial powers – in this case by the British, who deliberately provided virtually no outlet to the sea. The resulting tensions were partially responsible for the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, which claimed well over a million lives.

I’m therefore convinced that the prime motivation for US policy in the current crisis is geopolitical. It’s closely related to an attempt to maintain the status quo in international oil markets, and particularly to prevent OPEC using the euro as an oil currency transaction standard[1]. It appears that the U.S. will enforce its hegemony by applying superior military force.

This should not come as a surprise. As long ago as 1948, George Kennan, then a strategic planner in the U.S. State Department, wrote: “The U.S. has 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 that will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease to talk about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of 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 hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

Representing the previous global power, Winston Churchill wrote a decade earlier in a similar vein: “We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance. We have engrossed to ourselves […] an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”

Things are not always what they seem. Churchill was the first politician to order chemical weapons to be used against a civilian population. The time: 1920; the place: Iraq. Of course, later the U.S. used the most potent WMD – nuclear weapons – against civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (mainly as a show of power intended as a warning to the Russians). This was when the war in Japan was all but over – just as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is now all but contained (admittedly through the application of force by America).

Bush and Blair keep referring to ‘this thing having a long history’, but few people challenge them on the West’s involvement in that history. As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of these matters knows, a significant role in creating this particular monster was played by the U.S. (just as the U.S. helped build up the Afghan Mujehaddin against the Soviets). The U.S. and U.K. also strongly supported the Iraqis at the time when they were using chemical weapons against the Iranians. In fact, along with France and Russia, they supplied Iraq with most of its WMDs.

In “War on Iraq”, William Rivers Pitt and senior weapons inspector Scott Ritter explain how 90-95% of these were destroyed between 1991 and 1998. The U.S. position on weapons of mass destruction is a sham – it has more to do with global ambitions and internal political considerations than with facts on the ground. The same goes for talk about democracy, which is purely for U.S. internal consumption. Democracy would mean a Shiite government with close ties to Iran – and we all know that’s not going to happen.

There is a serious risk that the war will throw the region into chaos. Ironically, this is probably what Bin Laden most fervently wants, giving him and his followers a valuable opportunity to exploit unrest on the streets. Sharon, too, may try to use it as an opportunity to ‘transfer’ (read: ethnically cleanse) Palestinians to Jordan or Lebanon.

The consequences of black and white approaches to politics – whether by Moslem, Jewish or Christian fundamentalists – are incalculable. At best, regional instability will ensue, and international institutions will be undermined. At worst, there will be new international terrorist outrages, which will inevitably bring further threats to democracy – including the possibility that our own unconsidered responses may contribute to destroying the very freedoms we claim to defend.

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