Thought in a time of war
What is at stake, argues Anouar Abdel-Malik, is nothing less than a continued Arab existence
What should we think during times of war? There is, after all, a third world war going on. Its flames were kindled following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the bipolar order and it was officially declared -- for an indefinite period of time and against a nebulous enemy called "terrorism" -- following 11 September. That was the date when the unsuspecting awoke from their slumber and began to pray that the Third World War might be "postponed" until the day of the attack on Iraq.
We meek and simple-minded folk are still living with the dream of world peace and a global order founded on international legitimacy, the international community, the inhabitants of the single village in which, they say, we are gathered together in a spirit of blissful communion. Gone are those tattered, outmoded notions such as nationhood, culture and civilisation which have sewn discord between people. How, then, should we approach this new world?
Perhaps we should start by reading a few lines by that intrepid commentator Thomas Friedman, who issued a letter on the "civilisational war" to "leaders of the Muslim world from George W Bush". Tellingly, it appeared beneath the headline "Muslims must defuse the holy bomb" Yes, that's right, "holy bomb". And it closes with a blatant threat:
"Friends, unless you have a war within your civilisation, there is going to be a war between our civilisations. We're just one more 9/11 away from that. So let's dedicate this next year to fighting intolerance within so we can preserve our relations between." (International Herald Tribune, 28 November 2002)
"Civilisational war? What's gotten into you?" ask the fainthearted in this part of the world. "Are we in a state of war or on the brink of war? Can what you and those of your colleagues who rally around Huntington call civilisations clash and conflict? Aren't clashes and conflicts the preserve of nations and political movements?"
But the threat is on the table. Is there some cultural- civilisational dimension to political, military and economic conflicts? If so then conflicts must express themselves through new ideas or through a new formula for the dialectical relationship between ideas, but just so long as people do not live by bread alone.
From theorising to reality is a connection that cannot be ignored, as long as we and those around us are living in this reality. The world is seething in political, military, economic and ideological conflicts, from Colombia to Korea, from Palestine to Nigeria, from Iraq to the Philippines, from Afghanistan and Chechnya to Zimbabwe, Venezuela and the Indian subcontinent.
We are, indisputably, at the beginnings of the Third World War which many people have yet to realise has so far been against a spectre or, as I have frequently said, against the future, against a new multi-civilisational, multi-cultural and truly effective multi-polar world. Nevertheless, against this backdrop we still accept a range of terms and concepts that prove how far behind or, at best, how out of the picture we are.
Transparency? In this age of military, intelligence and technological penetration?
Then there is that odd creature the Quartet -- the US, the EU, Russia and the UN -- claiming to be the arbiter that will bring a solution to the massacre of Palestinians, as though the world revolves in the orbit of NATO and its acolytes. Where are those powers that are entirely dependent for their oil on the Middle East, notably China, Japan, Korea, the countries of southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent? The Quartet assures them that it is working for a settlement -- shorthand for accepting the status quo now that Zionist crimes have incarcerated the Palestinian people in a prison of degradation and torture -- so they can just sit back and relax, far away from the confrontation, the fight for self-determination and the call to Intifada while the Quartet strums the sweet settlement sonata on its roadmap to nowhere.
Are we not in the age of "international legitimacy" upon which is founded the "global order" and in which framework the peoples and nations of the international community live in the spirit of brotherhood? Once again men of thought and action on the opposite bank, where stands the coterie of dominant imperial powers, light the way in no uncertain terms. Here we have the Australian Minister of Defence, Senator Robert Hill, in a memorial oration to the University of Adelaide, on 28 November 2002, saying, "The clear view of the United States, set out in its National Security Strategy statement in September, is that there is an 'option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security'. The document says the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively to 'forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries'."
Hill continues, "Such clear statements by America reflect the view that the concept of 'imminent threat' must be adapted to the 'capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries'. In short, international law cannot sit still."
The minister went on to cite precedents in the use of preemptive action, ostensibly for the purposes of self-defence: the bombing raids against Libya launched by the Reagan administration in response to the attack on a discotheque in Berlin that killed an American soldier, the US imposition of a maritime quarantine on Cuba in 1962 and the Israeli attack on a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.
This is a sampling of the ideas of the Australian minister of defence only days before Prime Minister John Howard announced that Australia was ready to undertake preemptive actions in its Asian environment if necessary. The prime minister's declaration was roundly condemned by all Asian countries, including the staunchest of the US's allies in the Philippines.
In fact the Australian prime minister and minister of defence have echoed the ideas of that major architect of US strategic thinking, Richard Perle, who asks: "Who says the United Nations is better than NATO?" In a speech during the Trilateral debate in Prague in late November 2002, Perle also asked: "Does the addition of members of the UN like China, for example, or Syria, add legitimacy to what otherwise might be the collective policy of countries that share our values?" Equally contentiously he states: "I hear it said that the UN is imperfect but it's the only one we've got. It seems to me that if you've got a fire extinguisher that you know won't work you don't approach a fire with it because it's the only one you've got.... Why is the UN a greater source of legitimacy than NATO? NATO has every capacity to become a legitimising international institution with respect to the use of force because it is composed of liberal democracies... Why shouldn't NATO be as legitimate as the UN, which happens to contain a lot of dictatorships?"
Not all agree. To the prominent liberal commentator William Pfaff, NATO is a "past success" while the "EU is the future". He explains: "NATO is a one-dimensional organisation. It offers solidarity and promises military security. The mandate of the EU is the political transformation of European society." Western Europe has lived under NATO since 1948, while socialist Europe, along with the South, were cast as the enemy. Now the two Europes are drawing together. If they could agree to exchange expertise and military, intelligence and logistic support the new Europe could draw away from NATO, especially now that NATO has become "a toolbox from which units useful for given jobs can be plucked" to serve the interests of US policy in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East.
Such opinions suggest that the world could be at a new threshold in the history of "international legitimacy" and the "international community". This threshold represents widespread conviction in the need to reformulate the global order, if only in the legal and diplomatic realms. In this regard, it is heartening to consider the following commentary on the composition of the Security Council that appeared in the Herald Tribune last November:
"A separate seat for Britain in the inner group of the UN Security Council is equivalent to giving two votes out of the five to the United States. There is no presence from Africa, Asia, the Far East, or South America. This attempt to run the affairs of the world in the 21st century on the basis of the world of 1945 is grotesque.
"An inner group of the Security Council consisting of a representative of the European Union, and -- in addition to the United States, China and Russia -- Egypt (a Muslim country and one of the key states of the Middle East), India (with a population only slightly less than that of China), Brazil (with a population half the size of the whole of South America) and Japan (the world's second largest economy) would be more realistic. And enlarging the inner group of a body of 191 from five to eight would hardly be extravagant.
"Of course the wiseacres will say that such a reform is not practicable politics. But the vast majority of the 191 UN members have the solution in their own hands. They could revolt, decamp from New York to say Singapore and set up a United Nations of the 21st century. If they do this the diehards of the West will soon tire of talking to each other in an empty hall in New York and come and join them."
This author of this innovative outlook was Roy Denman, former representative of the European Commission in Washington. Although a representative of that privileged circle at the heart of that privileged camp in the world of western privilege, he has come to realise that the order they call "global" is, in effect, a distribution of prerogatives among the four powers that emerged victorious from World War II and that grudgingly agreed to take China on board in the mid-1960s. Meanwhile the rest of the world -- most of Europe and Asia, and all of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America -- remain outside the decision-making power enjoyed by the five permanent members of the Security Council. Tangible evidence of their status relative to others could be seen in the distribution of the report on Iraq: the full 12,000 page version went to the permanent members whereas the remaining 10 were provided the abridged 2000-page version.
What does all this have to do with the focal question posed at the outset of this article: What should we think in a time of war? Ideologies, in peace and in war, in all times and places, express a perspective on the relationship between tangible and contradictory realities in society and its hopes and aspirations. An ideology is always a set of ideas and concepts that enables us to get a handle on what's going on within.
In times of war, as Churchill said during World War II, "words are like a smoke screen". That is to say the use of ideas and concepts in times of war differs, to a certain extent, from their use in times of peace. Peace is always relative. I stress "to a certain extent" because ideas and concepts in peace time reflect the conflicting interests and perspectives of diverse social and national forces. They thus possess, per force, a significant element of ambiguity and, hence, deception, or at least they only reveal a part of the picture. On the other hand the manipulation of concepts and terms, the two components of ideologies, can sometimes offer in peace time a scope for stability, if only relative, and coexistence with diverse trends which the stability of the historical movement can contain.
For example, there is nothing wrong with keeping the myth of the UN and the legitimacy of Security Council resolutions alive in times of peace, since its resolutions can have no more than a minor detrimental effect on regional and global causes and crises. Nor is there a problem with sustaining the principle of the permanent membership of a handful of Security Council members, as is the case today, or working to gradually expand permanent membership in the manner envisioned by Roy Denman. However, peace is no more than a mirage in our Middle East. The ongoing massacre of the Palestinian people, day and night, confirms that the Zionist state is resolute in its determination to tear up all existing agreements and impose its will on the region through force and intimidation. Similarly, Security Council resolution 1441 grants the dominant powers the tools to invade Iraq and to concoct justifications that will bring war, regardless of the nature of Security Council deliberations in its next session.
In this climate, especially now that the Soviet Union, which had long championed the Arab world, is no longer, Arab states must, at the very least, be able to participate effectively in the Security Council. The critical circumstances we are facing, together with the historical legacy of Arab civilisation and the political, strategic, cultural and demographic weight of the Arab world, make it imperative that the Arab world nominate the central Arab nation for permanent membership of the expanded Security Council. Simultaneously, it has become imperative for the government and people of Egypt to accept the responsibility of performing this role, boldly and vigorously, hand in hand with other rising powers in our new world. I stress boldly and vigorously, for acquiescing to marginalisation and exclusion is a manifestation of a behaviour and mentality imposed by a black phase in the history of Egypt following October 1973. In this phase, especially following Camp David in 1978, the catchphrase was that "America holds 99 per cent of the cards." It was as though the broader world, and even the rising East, could not be accommodated within Egyptian political and intellectual action in a manner concomitant to our responsibilities and hopes.
Herein, precisely, emerges the challenge of formulating Egyptian and Arab ideology in a time of war. Its components: the specificity of Egypt and the Arab world in their contemporary phase, the establishment of an economic structure capable of realising social and human development immune to the deception of middlemen, resuscitating a spirit of national culture and revival from its nihilistic stupor, creating a united national front, the unity of men of thought and men of arms and enhancing intelligent organic bonds between the people and the state. These and other elements can all be embraced under the banner: "Lift up your head, brother!" And as we lift our heads, we must bear in mind that our immediate task in countering the current hegemony is to reaffirm our will and our national and Arab national identity if we want to continue to exist.
