A means and not an end
Anouar Abdel-Malik argues that it is China, and not Iraq, that concerns Washington's hawks
Threats to destroy Iraq, vows to democratise the Arab world through proxy, continue, though the latest installment in this saga could perhaps signify a stall in the countdown to war. Against the background of looming peril, the report to the Security Council by the chairmen of the inspection and monitoring committees has international public opinion and the overwhelming majority of the Security Council up in arms.
Meanwhile, from the vibrant heart of Egypt, President Mubarak, having just returned from France and Germany in order to coordinate positions over a rational formula to salvage peace, invited his discordant Arab brothers to a historic summit in Sharm El- Sheikh to unify their muddled positions. The next step, I believe, is to head to China and Russia to establish the foundations of a global front for political rationalism and peace and to press ahead with building a new multipolar world regardless of Washington's continual banging of the war drums.
What alarms and confuses people in this part of the world is that if the forthcoming war is supposed to target Iraq, how do you explain the largest strategic concentration of forces since World War II in the absence of a tangible threat? And what is the connection between the impending war and a rising global grassroots movement and an international front for a new multipolar world?
The connection is that the current gathering of war clouds and the successive military operations under the banner of the fight against that nebulous spectre called "terrorism", said to infest the entire planet, are part of a plan devised by the hawks in the capital of monopolar hegemony. The aim: to impede the creation of a new multipolar, multicentre world in the interests of the greatest possible justice, cooperation and progress within a framework of universal peace and equality.
Why do we hold that this war is a war against the future? Or, conversely, what does the future hold that drives the US to ignite a series of wars, beginning with Afghanistan, then Iraq and then....?
The world order from Westphalia (1648) to Yalta (1945) established and perpetuated the centrality of the West, pivoting around Europe until 1914 and then around the European-US axis until the end of World War II. Afterwards there arose the bipolar order between the US and the USSR, still an essentially Western duo, but which edged traditional European powers (Britain, France, Germany and Italy) to the margins of contemporary history.
Because of the dynamics of the balance of power between the imperial capitalist and socialist worlds in the bipolar order, Third World national liberation movements and revolutions could progress. And they did, from Cuba to Vietnam, from Suez to Algeria and Korea, from South Africa to the crossing into the Sinai in October 1973. Throughout this period the balance of powers remained essentially unchanged; however, in the 1980s, the foundations of the bipolar order began to teeter and quake as the Warsaw Pact dissolved and then the Soviet Union imploded in 1991.
Suddenly the US found itself the world's sole power. Naturally it would want to get its hands on the spoils of the demise of its former Soviet adversary and to eliminate those vestiges of the bipolar order that were restricting further expansion and domination. Indeed it made many attempts, but failed -- in Cuba, Somalia and several other African countries, and in the ASEAN circle -- even if it did succeed in securing control of its lifelong ally, Israel, over the fate of the Palestinian people and over the political, strategic and economic realms of the Arab regional order. Simultaneously, there came signs of growing friction with Europe, the diminishing status of NATO at the time of the wars to dismantle Yugoslavia, not to mention those paltry "victories" in Panama and a few other subordinate spots.
Then, suddenly, in this climate of decline, the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 detonated the illusion of a monopolar hegemony when, at the levels of official delegates and NGOs, it moved unanimously to condemn the alliance between the US and Israel. What, one might well ask, does all this have to do with the war against Iraq? The Durban conference was a landmark signalling the possibility of a multipolar order as an alternative to American hegemony. Were history to continue to move in that direction, the American dream would vanish.
The 10 years between the end of the bipolar order and Durban (1991-2001) were a workshop for designing the new American strategic outlook. Its architects agreed on one point: the US must prevent the emergence of a second global pole at all costs. They also identified the area around which the composite entities of that potential pole would converge: the Asian- European axis, or Eurasia, extending from Eastern Europe to the Pacific shores of China and Japan -- the historical and, today, the metaphorical, silk route.
While America's strategic think-tanks were at work formulating a new theory for world domination, economists and sociologists began to sound the alarm. On the other side of the Pacific and at the edges of Europe, China (1/5 of the inhabited world) had set into motion a process of breathtaking economic development. With annual growth rates between eight and nine per cent on a land mass of that immense size and population density, this enormous enterprise was being steered by the leadership of the largest communist party in history and heir to the Chinese revolution, led by Mao Zedong, protagonist of that 20th century epic that combined nationalist resurgence with socialism on the fullest and most comprehensive scale.
The experts were aghast. What could such a process mean but the rise of a second global pole, which was strategically and historically out of the question? To their consternation they noticed that China had begun to import oil as of 1999, that its rate of oil imports rose to 12 per cent by 2001-2002, and that this level would most likely increase to 80 per cent by 2015 in order to meet its development needs. Eighty per cent in a country the population of which will soon reach 1.5 billion and whose annual economic growth rate has stabilised at 8 per cent at least.
Not surprisingly, out came a spate of strategic studies on the Chinese phenomenon. Among these are those three hefty volumes devoted to the development of China's strategic forces, the Chinese theory of war and the Chinese strategic outlook compiled and published by the US National Defence College. These works, along with compilations of US-Chinese seminars and an anthology of selections from studies on China's new strategic outlook, are the source of some astounding insights.
Firstly, they indicate that by this year China will have a quantity of long range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and sufficient to deter the US's enormous arsenal of such missiles. Secondly, if China continues at its present rate of growth, its ballistic arsenal could reach parity with that of the US by 2015. Meanwhile, it is in the process of upgrading the Peoples Liberation Army, in general, with the most advanced technology and naval fleet.
Somebody's gotta put a stop, US strategic thinkers are thinking, to the rise in China's strategic power, which is going hand-in-hand with its dynamic economic growth, a coolheaded and judicious foreign policy and a moral influence that is gaining increasing international sway with every passing year.
In this period, the selfsame period in which that self-proclaimed pioneering thinker Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history the US political-strategic establishment published three works of considerable significance. The first is the Fox Committee's report on "China in the 21st Century" to the US Congress (2000), predicting that China will emerge as the second global pole by 2015 and that it will, therefore, become the primary threat to the US in this century. The second, "The Global 2015 Report", appearing in 2001, furnished a detailed analysis of power relations in that year and concluded that China will be the US's major adversary and therefore the enemy par excellence of this century. Soon after this report appeared the tragic events of 11 September blew the situation wide open, or, as many commentators observed, offered the opportunity for "full spectrum dominance", that brainstorm of the team of White House hawks headed by Richard Perl, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney. Later that month Washington came out with its National Security Strategy of the United States of America theory, focussing primarily on the concept of preemptive warfare.
And, indeed, war was not long in the offing. The first campaign began in Afghanistan against Washington's sometime ally, the Taliban movement and its partner, Al-Qa'eda. Its objective? To establish a strategic foothold in Central Asia along the borders of China, Russia, India and Pakistan. Meanwhile, to the south of China, strategic cooperation between Australia and the Philippines intensified in order to secure control over the southern maritime oil route, the US having earlier failed to enlist Indonesia towards this end.
Two major bases, in Central Asia and in Southeast Asia, both looking towards China. But that was not enough. The hawks in the US administration wanted to encircle China with a barricade of steel and fire. Hence the declaration of the "axis of evil", comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, to China's west and east. And, hence, the closer political and strategic alliance between the US and Israel to tighten control over southwest Asia in the name of the fight against "terrorism".
Why Iraq and why now? Its strengths are obvious: the second largest petroleum reserves in the world, an advanced industrial base and a potentially productive agrarian sector, all backed by a highly skilled and technologically advanced workforce. Iraq is also the guardian of the Middle East's eastern gateway, poised to check Israeli expansion to the north and east and, thus, the historical and natural strategic ally of the Nile Valley-Saudi Arabia-Syria circle. Thirdly, it possesses an advanced military capacity which, at one time, the West encouraged it to use to check the Islamic revolution in Iran.
However, that Iraq was strong enough to threaten to destroy half of Israel in the event of an attack against it was sufficient to compel the US to lure it into Kuwait -- the "reward" for fighting Iran, during which bleak years US experts encouraged Baghdad to accumulate weapons of mass destruction to use against the Iranians. Among these experts, incidentally, was Donald Rumsfeld, current secretary of defence and at the helm of the military machine that is now preparing to demolish Iraq, without the slightest military provocation or political justification. This prospect, part of that ongoing chain of criminal actions, has so fired the indignation of the peoples and nations of the world, including such important powers as China, Russia, Germany and France, that it has awakened the Arab conscience at the 25th hour.
Gaining control over two circles of energy -- the oil of the Middle East and the enormous reserves of the Caspian Sea -- is to be the primary vehicle for obstructing China's development and, consequently, its rise to the status of a new global pole at the heart of the multipolar world of the future. Herein resides the determination of the White House hawks to put into effect their theory of national defence. This is what makes war against Iraq inevitable -- as a means, not an end.
Yes, Washington has had to back down, on the surface, from its bid to get the Security Council to sanction its war. This was no minor legal-diplomatic setback. Not only have White House hawks failed to win over their closest allies, with the exception of Britain and Spain, they have succeeded in raising the pitch of opposition to the US's provocative and contemptuous policy in three major western forums: NATO, the EU and the UN Security Council. Now that its quest for international legitimacy has blown up in its face Washington must pause, take stock and approach its plans for war from another angle.
In this regard several possible scenarios have been mooted. One has it that the war against Iraq will have to be deferred for several weeks, or months, because the US cannot go to war in the face of such widespread opposition. Otherwise put, the US will have to sober up, perhaps play at being modest, in deference to diplomatic ethics and political pragmatics, although these analysts maintain that it will still keep a large arsenal in the region in order to sustain the threat.
The second scenario entails a shift in focus: in the current electrified climate crisis flares up between the US and North Korean. Pyongyang declares its intentions, shifts and ducks, takes one step back and two forward, and China and Russia refuse to take up the issue in the Security Council. What issue? Nuclear arms, of course. After all, is it reasonable for them to expect the Security Council to prevent North Korea from possessing the minimum level of nuclear arms when virtually the whole world remains mute to the fact that Israel has the sixth largest nuclear arsenal in the world, pointing at the Arabs?
However, a number of more astute observers believe that war is inevitable, that it will take the form of a surprise attack with no further prelude in the diplomatic arena. Otherwise America's vision of global hegemony will go up in smoke. Otherwise, the monopolar order will collapse and the future will become possible. And this is something the hawks in the White House, so long as they remain in the White House, will not put up with.
