7 - 13 February 2002
Issue No.572
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 February 2002 Issue No.572 |
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Cracks in the western alliance?
After following President Bush's State of the Union address and the ensuing debate in the World Economic Forum, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed wonders just how solid the western alliance really is
President Bush's State of the Union address last week was a rousing call to arms that prompted members of Congress to rise to their feet and applaud him repeatedly. Delivered with a great deal of self-confidence, it has been described as visionary, eloquent and focused, and was generally well received by the American public. But many, even among Americans, have expressed reservations on the substance of the speech.
Critics point out that it ignored many of the problems bedeviling American society, such as the rampant domestic violence which claims 10 times as many victims every year as those killed in the 11 September attacks, the drug problem and the implications of the Enron debacle. Furthermore, it made no reference to human rights or international law and no mention that the US is willing to help alleviate world poverty, AIDS, and health and sanitation problems for the world's underprivileged. The word "democracy" was totally absent. Also absent was any mention of, let alone expression of gratitude toward, important allies in America's war on terror -- including NATO.
Then there is the way the speech totally identified US interests with those of the world, the clear message it conveyed that American values are universal. What threatens the world is what threatens America; what is bad for the US is bad for the world. This missionary or imperialist aspect of Bush's speech was also present in the idea of "American justice": "Our armed forces have delivered a message now clear to every enemy of the United States: even 7,000 miles away, across oceans and continents, on mountain tops and in caves, you will not escape the justice of this nation." This means that wherever the United States foreign policy leadership chooses to see an enemy, the US will enforce its justice. This can only mean that US justice overrules international justice. It is the US that defines the threat, the priorities and the means. As for those who do not share Bush's perception of the world, he warns, "if they do not act, America will." The world is thereby informed; it is not consulted.
In fact, the American president's vision of the world as it came across in the speech is simple, not to say simplistic. It is made up of evil people and good people, as in a Western, and it is the US that decides who is who. Bush's references to an "axis of evil" made up of "rogue" states such as North Korea, Iraq and Iran, was eerily reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's designation of the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire.
Bush sees the American nation in an almost Biblical sense, as a chosen people, chosen to do good, chosen by history ("History has called America and our allies to action") and by God ("God is near"). Like Israel, Bush draws his inspiration from the Holy Book. In both cases, the frame of reference is fundamentalism, whether Christian or Jewish.
The strongly militaristic tone of Bush's speech led some to refer to it as the "State of War" address. He proudly told the world that the US spends $30 million a day on the war and that its military budget will approach $400 billion, that is, 50 per cent of all military spending in the world. According to the director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace, Jan Oberg, the US's military expenditures are around 10 times higher -- and its military technological capability is thus perhaps 20 times greater -- than all its designated enemies and rogue states put together. Why should someone so powerful be so obsessed with being threatened? Bush's call for sustained mobilisation and his administration's demand for new military spending is seen by some as a paranoid response to 11 September, an opportunistic exploitation of the traumatic events of that day for other purposes. Is the spectre of terrorism being used to activate the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had the courage to mention as a problem -- in the hope that this eventually could reduce unemployment and help overcome the recession?
Under Bush, America's defence budget has witnessed its greatest increase in two decades. The US will now be spending more on defence than the rest of the world combined. At the same time, the Bush administration is refusing to increase foreign aid from 0.2 per cent to 0.7 per cent of GDP. The US does not plan, as it did after World War II, to initiate anything similar to the Marshal Plan to eradicate the breeding grounds of terrorism. Bush is only resorting to the stick, not the carrot.
Ignoring the need for drastic changes in the world system threatens to have catastrophic effects in the foreseeable future. By 2025, 60 per cent of the world's population will be living in urban areas. In 2000, the proportion was 47 per cent. Some 2,000 mega-cities will each contain over 10 million people living in squalid conditions, with infrastructures originally built to sustain an average of two million. Already 1.4 billion people lack access to safe water and the number is expected to increase as water shortages become more acute. And, as Arnaud de Borchgrave notes, with half the world's population below the age of 25, and most of these young people living in far from ideal conditions with little or no prospect of improving their lives, the stage is being set for a bipolar confrontation between the young poor and the old rich -- which can only increase the threat of terrorism. This is all the more true now that a new generation of university-educated, computer-literate terrorists have arisen, with their hand on a mouse as well as a finger on a trigger.
Immediately after Bush's delivery of his State of the Union address, New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel played host to the 31st World Economic Forum (WEF), traditionally held in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. Two thousand five hundred participants attended this year's meeting. Leaders of one thousand "foremost companies" around the world paid about $25,000 each in annual dues and about $6,000 per participant to attend the meeting. Many had the air of money and power, but there were also Third World diplomats, women business executives, clergy, academics and journalists.
Over the years, the Forum has been the venue for important decisions. In 1992, South African President De Klerk met in Davos with Nelson Mandela -- their first joint appearance outside South Africa. In 1994, Yasser Arafat -- now blocked by Israeli tanks from attending -- signed an agreement with Shimon Peres in Davos.
It was decided to shift the venue from Davos to New York when the Swiss authorities warned they could not guarantee the security of participants under the present circumstances. New York was chosen to give a sense of immediacy to a debate of which the central theme was whether it was possible to overcome terrorism without a serious effort to eradicate the reasons that produce it. This approach was in stark contrast with Bush's State of the Union address, which expressed a clear will to increase military spending drastically while not increasing economic assistance to fight poverty in various parts of the underdeveloped world.
In an interview with the Herald Tribune, World Bank President James Wolfensohn warned against the dangers of not offering radical assistance to the poor countries. Three months earlier, in a joint panel discussion with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, he had proposed that such assistance should increase from its present modest level to $100 billion annually. He argued that offering substantial economic assistance to combat poverty is not only a moral obligation but also serves the interests of the political and financial elites taking part in the Forum, because it is a guarantee against the proliferation of terrorism in future. As he put it: "You cannot win the war against terrorism unless you win the peace." However, both Congress and the White House categorically rejected the proposal. Professor Samuel Huntington, not known for any sympathy towards Wolfensohn's ideas, was chosen to chair the panel scheduled to discuss the root causes of terrorism.
Actually, the president of the World Bank was not talking in his personal capacity only. He was expressing the viewpoint of an important trend within the western alliance itself, clearly opposed by the US president. Objections were made to President Bush's statement that other countries should be informed, not consulted, on key international issues, including, and perhaps even particularly, when such decisions concern the so-called "rogue" states. Which brings us to the question: Can cracks in the western alliance be avoided if Bush sticks to the views he expressed in his State of the Union address?
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