Can the clock be turned back?
New revelations concerning Bush's plans to go to war against Iraq lead Mohamed Sid-Ahmed to raise critical questions on the future of America's Middle East policies
It appears that George W Bush began talking of invading Iraq within days of taking office, that is, long before the dramatic events of 11 September 2001. The revelation was made a few days ago by a former member of his cabinet, Paul O'Neill, who was dismissed from his post as treasury secretary in December 2002 because of a disagreement with the president over tax cuts. According to O'Neill, the removal of Saddam was high on Bush's agenda ever since he moved into the White House three years ago. Speaking on CBS, he said that "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go."
Bush and his allies have repeatedly maintained that it was Saddam's illegal stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction that prompted their decision to launch the war on Iraq. But the war began and ended, and most of Iraq's top leadership, including Saddam himself, are now in custody and yet no WMDs have been discovered.
Ron Suskind, author of the recently published book, "The Price of Loyalty", which deals with the first two years of the Bush administration, said that O'Neill had provided him with documents showing that during the first 100 days of the Bush presidency his staff had already begun studying options for a military intervention in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. The documents also cover plans for the post-war situation, including peace-keeping, war crime trials and the future of Iraqi oil. In an interview with Time magazine, O'Neill said that in his 23 months as a cabinet member, he had never seen anything he would characterise as evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
It is interesting to speculate whether events would have followed the same course if there had been no 9/11. Bush is quoted as telling members of his administration that they were not required to investigate whether the US should launch a war against Iraq or not, but merely to come forward with credible arguments that would justify going to war. There could have been no better pretext for taking out a man painted as an arch-terrorist than the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which gave the US justification for the implementation of a plan it had prepared beforehand.
Washington described 9/11 as a critical turning point in contemporary history, because it cast light on extremely dangerous terrorist networks, such as Al-Qa'eda, whose threat had not been sufficiently appraised by western intelligence. Actually, 9/11 was no less critical an event than Japan's surprise attack on the US navy in Pearl Harbour during World War II. It was this attack which removed any qualms the then US President Harry Truman may have had about dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagazaki.
In the light of O'Neill's relations, it is clear that a war was going to be launched against Iraq in any case, with or without 9/11. This means that 9/11 was not a historical turning point as Bush described it. It is now also clear that Iraq was not in possession of nuclear weapons that could have been deployed within one year. As to its supposed arsenal of biological weapons, these turned out to be still at the planning stage, that is, they posed no clear and present danger justifying the invasion of a sovereign state.
The Bush administration came up with a whole new theory to give itself the unilateral right to launch preemptive wars in the absence of hard evidence justifying such a course, in anticipation of a potential threat. The logic behind these "anticipatory wars", as they are now called, is that the danger represented by weapons of mass destruction is such that it overrides all other considerations, such as state sovereignty, international consensus, etc.
Thus any state suspected of harbouring weapons of mass destruction is now fair prey. It is no longer necessary to have concrete and irrefutable evidence that a given state is actually harbouring such weapons before going to war against it. Under the doctrine of anticipatory wars, it is enough to allege that the state in question might be in possession of WMDs to justify military intervention. So far, all the evidence points to the complete absence of WMDs in Iraq. While they may have existed in the past, it is clear that they have since been destroyed. In other words, the war was waged under false pretences, on the strength of unfounded allegations, not hard evidence.
But even as the threat posed by Iraq was grossly inflated to justify war, every effort was made to come up with hard "evidence" of Iraqi wrongdoing. However, attempts to establish a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qa'eda came to nothing, while claims that he had purchased uranium from Niger backfired in a scandal involving an American diplomat and his wife, who was exposed as a CIA operative. Another scandal which erupted because of the discrepancies between the official versions of events and the actual facts is the suicide of British weapons expert David Kelly after he was named as the source of a BBC story that the British prime minister had "sexed up" intelligence on Iraq. The latest scandal is, of course, O'Neill's public rebuttal of the Bush administration's case for war.
How to face the fact that an arbitrary decision to go to war can be taken by the president of the most powerful state on earth? O'Neill described Bush's leadership as that of a "blind man in a room full of deaf people"! Now that a unipolar world system has replaced the former bipolar world system, the other great powers have only one of two options in face of US supremacy: either to oppose the US openly, but while remaining careful not to overstep given limits (which is the line Chirac has been following) or to embrace the US line wholeheartedly in public (as Blair has done) while expressing any reservations they may have in private.
This leads us to the question: in the context of unipolarity, can the line be corrected if ever mistakes are made? Is it possible to turn the clock back and unleash forces of a global nature capable of counter- balancing America's devastating superiority? Or is national sovereignty condemned to gradually disappear, if only because the conditions required to uphold sovereignty are no longer secured by a global organisation, such as the United Nations, but by the sole remaining superpower, the United States? We should not forget that the US launched its war against Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council.
There is no doubt that to change the present situation, a gigantic effort is required as well as the ability to promote a global movement similar to the huge demonstrations that broke out all over the world in protest against the war on Iraq. But what is especially important is to generate such a movement inside the US itself which, whether we like it or not, will revolve around the US presidential elections in November this year. America has powerful conservative forces, but it also has powerful democratic traditions, and the interaction between the two trends is bound to acquire still greater momentum.
