| |
|
On 9/11 2001, the
Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on 11/9 1989, the Berlin
Wall fell. 11/9 announced the "happy 90s," the Francis Fukuyama
dream of the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy
has in principle won, that the search is over, that the advent of
a global liberal world community lurks round the corner, that the
obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are just empirical
and contingent, local pockets of resistance where the leaders did
not yet grasp that their time is over; in contrast to it, 9/11 is
the main symbol of the end of the Clintonite happy 90s, of the forthcoming
era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, between Israel and
the West Bank, around the European Union, on the US-Mexican border.
The prospect of a new global crisis is looming: economic collapses,
military and other catastrophes, emergency states...
And when politicians start to directly justify their decisions in
ethical terms, one can be sure that ethics is mobilized to cover up
such dark threatening horizons. It is the very inflation of abstract
ethical rhetorics in George W. Bush's recent public statements (of
the "Does the world have the courage to act against the Evil
or not?" type) which manifests the utter ETHICAL misery of the
US position - the function of ethical reference is here purely mystifying,
it merely serves to mask the true political stakes, which are not
difficult to discern. In their recent The War Over Iraq, William Kristol
and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote: "The mission begins in Baghdad,
but it does not end there. /.../ We stand at the cusp of a new historical
era. /.../ This is a decisive moment. /.../ It is so clearly about
more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle
East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United
States intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot
but agree with it: it is effectively the future of international community
which is at stake now - the new rules which will regulate it, what
the new world order will be. What is going on now is the next logical
step of the US dismissal of the Hague court.
|
The first permanent global war crimes court started
to work on July 1, 2002 in The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide,
crimes against humanity and war crimes. Anyone, from a head of state
to an ordinary citizen, will be liable to ICC prosecution for human
rights violations, including systematic murder, torture, rape and
sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan put it: "There must be a recognition
that we are all members of one human family. We have to create new
institutions. This is one of them. This is another step forward in
humanity's slow march toward civilization." However, while human
rights groups have hailed the court's creation as the biggest milestone
for international justice since top Nazis were tried by an international
military tribunal in Nuremberg after World War Two, the court faces
stiff opposition from the United States, Russia and China. The United
States says the court would infringe on national sovereignty and could
lead to politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers
working outside U.S. borders, and the U.S. Congress is even weighing
legislation authorizing U.S. forces to invade The Hague where the
court will be based, in the event prosecutors grab a U.S. national.
The noteworthy paradox here is that the US thus rejected the jurisdiction
of a tribunal which was constituted with the full support (and votes)
of the US themselves! Why, then, should Milosevic, who now sits in
the Hague, not be given the right to claim that, since the US reject
the legality of the international jurisdiction of the Hague tribunal,
the same argumentation should hold also for him? And the same goes
for Croatia: the US are now exerting tremendous pressure onto the
Croat government to deliver to the Hague court a couple of its generals
accused of war crimes during the struggles in Bosnia - the reaction
is, of course, how can they ask this of US when THEY do not recognize
the legitimacy of the Hague court? Or are the US citizens effectively
"more equal than others"? If one simply universalizes the
underlying principles of the Bush-doctrine, does India not have a
full right to attack Pakistan? It does directly support and harbor
anti-Indian terror in Kashmir, and it possesses (nuclear) weapons
of mass destruction. Not to mention the right of China to attack Taiwan,
and so on, with unpredictable consequences...
|
Are we aware that we are in the midst of a "silent
revolution," in the course of which the unwritten rules which
determine the most elementary international logic are changing? The
US scold Gerhardt Schroeder, a democratically elected leader, for
maintaining a stance supported by a large majority of the population,
plus, according to the polls in the mid-February, around 59% of the
US population itself (who oppose strike against Iraq without the UN
support). In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94% of the people
are opposed to allowing the US troops' presence for the war against
Iraq - where is democracy here? Every old Leftist remembers Marx's
reply, in The Communist Manifesto, to the critics who reproached the
Communists that they aim at undermining family, property, etc.: it
is the capitalist order itself whose economic dynamics is destroying
the traditional family order (incidentally, a fact more true today
than in Marx's time), as well as expropriating the large majority
of the population. In the same vein, is it not that precisely those
who pose today as global defenders of democracy are effectively undermining
it? In a perverse rhetorical twist, when the pro-war leaders are confronted
with the brutal fact that their politics is out of tune with the majority
of their population, they take recourse to the commonplace wisdom
that "a true leader leads, he does not follow" - and this
from leaders otherwise obsessed with opinion polls...
The true dangers are the long-term ones. In what resides perhaps the
greatest danger of the prospect of the American occupation of Iraq?
The present regime in Iraq is ultimately a secular nationalist one,
out of touch with the Muslim fundamentalist populism - it is obvious
that Saddam only superficially flirts with the pan-Arab Muslim sentiment.
As his past clearly demonstrates, he is a pragmatic ruler striving
for power, and shifting alliances when it fits his purposes - first
against Iran to grab their oil fields, then against Kuwait for the
same reason, bringing against himself a pan-Arab coalition allied
to the US - what Saddam is not is a fundamentalist obsessed with the
"big Satan," ready to blow the world apart just to get him.
However, what can emerge as the result of the US occupation is precisely
a truly fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, directly linked
to such movements in other Arab countries or countries with Muslim
presence.
|
One can surmise that the US are well aware that
the era of Saddam and his non-fundamentalist regime is coming to an
end in Iraq, and that the attack on Iraq is probably conceived as
a much more radical preemptive strike - not against Saddam, but against
the main contender for Saddam's political successor, a truly fundamentalist
Islamic regime. Yes in this way, the vicious cycle of the American
intervention gets only more complex: the danger is that the very American
intervention will contribute to the emergence of what America most
fears, a large united anti-American Muslim front. It is the first
case of the direct American occupation of a large and key Arab country
- how could this not generate universal hatred in reaction? One can
already imagine thousands of young people dreaming of becoming suicide
bombers, and how that will force the US government to impose a permanent
high alert emergency state... However, at this point, one cannot resist
a slightly paranoid temptation: what if the people around Bush KNOW
this, what if this "collateral damage" is the true aim of
the entire operation? What if the TRUE target of the "war on
terror" is the American society itself, i.e., the disciplining
of its emancipatory excesses?
|
On March 5 2003, on "Buchanan & Press"
news show on NBC, they showed on the TV screen the photo of the recently
captured Khalid Shakh Mohammed, the "third man of al-Qaeda"
- a mean face with moustaches, in an unspecified nightgown prison-dress,
half opened and with something like bruises half-discernible (hints
that he was already tortured?) -, while Pat Buchanan's fast voice
was asking: "Should this man who knows all the names all the
detailed plans for the future terrorist attacks on the US, be tortured,
so that we get all this out of him?" The horror of it was that
the photo, with its details, already suggested the answer - no wonder
the response of other commentators and viewers' calls was an overwhelming
"Yes!" - which makes one nostalgic of the good old days
of the colonial war in Algeria when the torture practiced by the French
Army was a dirty secret... Effectively, was this not a pretty close
realization of what Orwell imagined in 1984, in his vision of "hate
sessions," where the citizens are shown photos of the traitors
and supposed to boo and yell at them. And the story goes on: a day
later, on another Fox TV show, a commentator claimed that one is allowed
to do with this prisoner whatever, not only deprive him of sleep,
but break his fingers, etc.etc., because he is "a piece of human
garbage with no rights whatsoever." THIS is the true catastrophe:
that such public statements are today possible.
We should therefore be very attentive not to fight false battles:
the debates on how bad Saddam is, even on how much the war will cost,
etc., are false debates. The focus should be on what effectively goes
on in our societies, on what kind of society is emerging HERE as the
result of the "war on terror." Instead of talking about
hidden conspirative agendas, one should shift the focus onto what
is going on, onto what kind of changes are taking place here and now.
The ultimate result of the war will be a change in OUR political order.
|
The true danger can be best exemplified by the
actual role of the populist Right in Europe: to introduce certain
topics (the foreign threat, the necessity to limit immigration, etc.)
which were then silently taken over not only by the conservative parties,
but even by the de facto politics of the "Socialist" governments.
Today, the need to "regulate" the status of immigrants,
etc., is part of the mainstream consensus: as the story goes, le Pen
did address and exploit real problems which bother people. One is
almost tempted to say that, if there were no le Pen in France, he
should have been invented: he is a perfect person whom one loves to
hate, the hatred for whom guarantees the wide liberal "democratic
pact," the pathetic identification with democratic values of
tolerance and respect for diversity - however, after shouting "Horrible!
How dark and uncivilized! Wholly unacceptable! A threat to our basic
democratic values!", the outraged liberals proceed to act like
"le Pen with a human face," to do the same thing in a more
"civilized" way, along the lines of "But the racist
populists are manipulating legitimate worries of ordinary people,
so we do have to take some measures!"............. |
updated
January 2004
