Empire against Iraq
L'Empire contra l'Irak (The Empire against Iraq), Paris: Le Monde diplomatique Manière de voir 67, January -- February 2003
L'Empire contra l'Irak, a collection of documents published in the manière de voir (way of seeing) series by the French monthly Le Monde diplomatique, brings together pieces by mostly French journalists and academics on the background to the Iraq crisis. Many of these have already appeared in the paper itself, having been updated for the present publication. The "empire" of the title is the one based in Washington, and the way of seeing that the publication recommends is one that places the current crisis over Iraq against a background of ever-growing US power.
Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde diplomatique, writes in his introduction to the collection that "the international order founded in 1945 following the Second World War and governed by the United Nations has come to an end. Unlike the situation that the world saw during the 1990s following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, Washington has now taken on a position as 'global leader'". Ramonet and the other writers represented are critical of this global leadership, believing it to be characterised by arrogance and greed.
The collection is divided into four parts, containing articles on American foreign policy, the foreign policies of other states, notably European, in reaction to that of the US, the current situation in Asia and the situation in Iraq, respectively. Ramonet sets the tone for the whole when he writes that the new "national security strategy" announced by the US administration in September 2002, which introduced the concept of "defensive war", is none other than that "applied by Adolf Hitler in 1941 against the Soviet Union".
Furthermore, Ramonet says, "the small clique of extreme- right hawks surrounding the US president, among them fundamentalists, ultra-conservatives and pro-Israeli Christian and Jewish fanatics (Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith. JD Crouch, John Bolton, etc) have used the psychological trauma caused by the [September 2001] attacks with colossal cynicism to ... launch a general attack against anything that could hold up the US from becoming the first world empire in history."
"In the atmosphere of intimidation that reigns in this pre- war period....many of the rulers of European countries have adopted an attitude of servile submission towards the American empire." The US, Ramonet says, having gained control of Iraqi oil as a result of a war on Iraq, will be able to turn its attention to Saudi Arabia, which "could be dismantled and an independent princedom set up in the oil-rich province of Hassa under American protection". After that, the US will be able to "carry out another attack, in a different way, against Iran, a country already described by Bush as a member of the 'axis of evil', and in this way the US would gain control of the Caspian Sea and its enormous reserves of oil".
Ramonet suggests that Europe oppose all this by using its "double veto" ("France, the United Kingdom") at the UN Security Council and by blocking attempts by Washington to use NATO as a "military instrument ... for its imperial expansion".
Among the articles in the collection's first part, "the New American Situation", is a piece by Michael Klare, Les vrais desseins de M George W Bush ("George Bush's Real Intentions"). Klare argues that the war on terrorism, announced by President Bush following the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, is only the most public part of US foreign policy, to which should be added the US's desire to modernise its armed forces, making them effectively unchallengeable, and to acquire further control over oil supplies. He quotes US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the 2003 US defence budget of $379 billion, a staggering sum and up $45 billion on 2002: "We need rapidly deployable and totally integrated armed forces capable of arriving rapidly on distant battlefields and of cooperating with our naval and air forces to hit our enemies rapidly, precisely and in a devastating manner." And he quotes from a report produced by the US National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Vice-President Richard Cheney, in May 2001 that concluded that the US will need to import 60 per cent more oil in 2020 than it does today, much of which will come from the Middle East.
"Whatever the initial intentions of the American leaders were," Klare writes, "the administration's three international security objectives -- improvement of military capacity, search for new sources of oil and the war on terrorism -- have now fused in a single strategic objective: war for American domination."
The second part of the collection, entitled "Resistance and Vassals", contains pieces by Daniel Lazare on opposition in the US to the war on Iraq, by Gilbert Achcar on the improbable alliance of Washington, Moscow and Peking in the war on terrorism, by John Brown (not his real name?), a "European civil servant" writing on threats to individual freedoms contained in European, and especially British, anti-terrorism legislation, and Anne-Cécile Robert on "The Strange Foreign Policy of the European Union", which, she says, has shown itself to be unable to produce any foreign policy worth the name beyond various joint humanitarian missions.
For Brown, the anti-terrorist legislation recently introduced in Europe, taking British legislation as a model, is to be condemned since "in putting the accent on [attempted] subversion of the political order" rather than on actual damage caused it could be used to condemn "anti-capitalist action" as terrorism. For Achcar, while the "limits of European foreign policy have been effectively shown by the present habit of European leaders to respond individually to American requests", with the "reservations expressed by Berlin and Paris on the one hand and the support given to Bush by Blair, Berlusconi and Aznar on the other", the US has been notably successful in its efforts to outmanoeuvre the current leadership in Moscow, heir to the largest parts of the former Soviet Union.
"The biggest risk taken by Mr Putin," Achcar says, "has been to see the US install a military presence over the long term in Afghanistan and in Central Asia, considerably reinforcing its weight in the strategic and oil-related 'great game' that is taking place in this part of the former Soviet Union." For Robert, "American domination [of Europe] has advantages for certain countries of the European Union... The American 'umbrella' neutralises and balances the foreign policies of the most active states (particularly the UK, France, Spain and Germany). Most European member states have no foreign policy tradition, and others are officially neutral, including Finland, Austria and Ireland."
In the third and fourth parts, the authors turn their attention to Central and South Asia and to Iraq. Faleh A Jabar looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the Iraqi regime, suggesting that the Ba'th Party system in Iraq has always relied upon four strengths, "totalitarian ideology, a single party, the control of the economy (so-called socialism) and the control of the media and the army", but that it has needed to play a complex game of patronage among Iraq's different tribes and clans since the 1991 military defeat and the economic collapse that followed.
Isam Al-Khafaji examines scenarios for Iraq post-Saddam, arguing that "American interests [following the Gulf War] in 1991 were better served by limited changes....and that popular revolt could have had undesirable consequences." For these reasons, Al-Khafaji writes, a decision was taken not to support the uprising in Iraq that the then President Bush (senior) had called for, allowing the Baghdad regime to kill at least 60,000 Iraqis. Following a second war on Iraq the same considerations will apply, with the US likely to support a "limited scenario" for change, drawing on existing structures and putting the emphasis on stability rather than wholesale change. Al-Khafaji identifies two main opposition groups, both based outside Iraq. The Iraqi National Accord is made up of ex-members of the regime and calls for limited change, and the Iraqi National Congress is made up of "individuals who owe their social, economic and political influence to the pre-republican system in Iraq (before the fall of the monarchy in 1958)". The Iraqi National Congress desires to "de-Ba'thify" the country, dismantling the regime.
This second option, modelled on what took place in Germany and Japan after 1945, will require considerably more investment on the part of the US and will require American forces to remain in Iraq for a long period in order to set up the new institutions. As Alain Gresh points out in his concluding piece, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, "the Americans will be confronted by the same dilemma that faced the British colonial power after the First World War: either rule the country directly and risk the opposition of all sections of the population, or rule indirectly and then have to manoeuvre among different political groups, deal with tribal and religious issues, and recuperate members of the Ba'th Party system."
L'Empire contra l'Irak concludes with an information section giving useful Internet links on Iraq.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 20 - 26 February 2003 (Issue No. 626)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/626/bo11.htm