Militarism
is a Greater Threat
than Terrorism
By
Farhang Jahanpour
PhD, University of Cambridge
July 3, 2003
If Usama bin Laden is still alive - and the
indications are that he is - he must be feeling very
pleased with himself, because his terrible terrorist
activities are beginning to bear fruit, and his main aim
of polarising the world and creating a clash of
civilisations is on the point of fruition. His call to
the Muslims of the world "you are either with the
faithful believers or with the infidels", seems to have
been echoed by President Bush's insistence that "you are
either with us or with the terrorists."
Last summer I visited the United States after many
years. I was very pleased to find that the Americans have
regained their composure after the dreadful events of
11th September and that they are the same positive,
optimistic, friendly and hospitable people that they have
always been. At the same time, I found some signs of
hardening of attitude among some politicians and opinion
formers that I found rather disturbing. I will refer to
some of the unfortunate developments that have taken
place during the past couple of years that go against
American values of democracy, human rights, the rule of
law, and that everyone is presumed innocent until proved
guilty.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks in New York and
Washington many Americans who had nurtured a feeling of
indifference towards Islam became very interested to
learn about Islam and the Middle East. Books on Islam
sold like hot cakes, and even the Koran became a best
seller. This was a positive sign of strength and
inquisitiveness and showed that Americans wanted to learn
about the cause of what had happened. However, after a
few months, there was a perceptible change of emphasis.
At first, many students and others began asking: "Why do
they hate us so much?" There was a substantive and
healthy discussion about what it is about the nature of
the American presence in the world that creates a
situation in which movements like al-Qaeda can thrive and
prosper. That was a very promising sign.
But shortly afterwards that discussion got
short-circuited. A few months after 9/11 the tone of that
discussion switched, and it became: "What's wrong with
the Islamic world that it failed to produce democracy,
science, education, its own enlightenment, and created
societies that breed terror?" Although this is a valid
question to ask, it should not completely overshadow the
earlier question. In fact, a situation arose when if
anybody tried to find the reasons for those barbaric
events he or she was accused of trying to justify them.
There was at times a concerted attack on those who
thought it could be useful to bring at least a minimal
degree of historical reference to bear on the event.
There was Donald Kagan at Yale, dismissing his
colleague Professor Paul Kennedy as "a classic case of
blaming the victim," because the latter had asked his
students to try to imagine what resentments they might
harbour if America were small and the world dominated by
a unified Arab-Muslim state. There was Andrew Sullivan,
warning on his Web site that while the American heartland
was ready for war, the "decadent left in its enclaves on
the coasts" could well mount "what amounts to a fifth
column." On a single page of a single issue of The Weekly
Standard that October Susan Sontag was accused of
"unusual stupidity," of "moral vacuity," and of "sheer
tastelessness"&emdash;all for suggesting that "a few
shreds of historical awareness might help us understand
what has just happened, and what may continue to happen."
All she was pointing out was that events have histories,
political life has consequences, and the people who led
America politically and intellectually had been guilty of
trying to infantilise its citizens if they continued to
pretend otherwise. Inquiry into the nature of the enemy
that people in the United States and elsewhere faced was
to be interpreted as sympathy for that enemy.
It was partly due to the rage created in American as
the result of the events of 9/11 that won the support of
the Americans for their government's invasion of
Afghanistan and Iraq. The nation seemed to need revenge.
It wanted to see American forces fight street by street
and house by house in Kabul and Baghdad to reassure them
that America was still a super-power capable of
inflicting terrible revenge on America's enemies. The
false association of Saddam Husayn with the al-Qaeda,
cleverly manipulated by President Bush and other American
leaders, persuaded many Americans to extend "the war
against terrorism to Iraq". Within days after the
September 11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz began calling for
unilateral military action against Iraq, claiming that
Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network could not have pulled
off the assaults without Saddam Hussein's assistance.
That propaganda proved very effective and made a majority
of Americans link Saddam Hussein's regime with Al Qaeda.
In an October 2002 poll by the Pew Research Center for
People and the Press, "66 percent believed
[Saddam] was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on
the United States."
The allegation that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
could pose an imminent danger to the world and that
Saddam Husayn's regime had been connected with al Qaeda
provided the main argument for going to war. In an
excellent article in New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof
shows the falsity of both claims. He quotes a person from
the Defence Intelligence Agency who was privy to all the
intelligence there bluntly declaring: "The American
people were manipulated". The same article also quotes
Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years
in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of
Intelligence and Research, saying "
the
administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on
both things." Yet although no weapons of mass destruction
has been found despite intensive search and although
Saddam Hussein's connection to Al Qaeda has been
disproved, there is no apology by the leaders who dragged
us into a calamitous war on false premises.
War is the greatest scourge of our time and the
greatest violation of human rights. In many ways, the
twentieth century was the worst century in human history
in terms of people who were killed as the result of
local, regional and international wars, most of them
fought in the name of good causes, such as freedom,
democracy, socialism, etc. It was the age of mass killing
on an unprecedented scale. It was the century of
technological barbarism and mechanised butchery. It is
estimated that more than 170 million people were
slaughtered in various wars during that century. While
many people were hoping that the end of the Cold War
would produce peace dividends and would usher in a period
of calm and security, the world seems to be faced with a
series of unending wars.
A great American peace activist and Catholic priest,
Phil Berrigan, who died on 6th December 2002, spent 11 of
his 79 years in prison for his protests against war. In
reviewing Sr. Rosalie Bertell's book, Planet Earth:
The Latest Weapon of War, Berrigan ended with these
words:
"The military as an instrument of mass killing is a
waste institution - humans, energy, oil, metals,
scientific and technical skills, money - it consumes all
and restores nothing to the resources of the planet. Any
faithful or sane scrutiny would conclude that it must be
dismantled. It kills, threatens and wastes - it is the
BIG LIE institutionalised. Its veneer and untouchability
gives new meaning to the demonic. Is anybody out there
listening?"
Nearly all scholarly works on the First Gulf War agree
that as many as 200,000 Iraqi conscripts were killed in
Kuwait as the result of the blanket bombing and mass
burial with bulldozers, even when some of the soldiers
were still alive. According to UN figures, a further 1.5
million Iraqis -mainly children - also died as the result
of the US/UN sanctions. Yet as though all that suffering
was not enough, the Iraqis were subjected to another
brutal assault, killing some 5,000 innocent Iraqi
civilians and thousands of soldiers and doing enormous
damage to the country's infrastructure that will take a
long time to repair. An entire nation has been savaged
and humiliated, and more than two months after the end of
the war there is still very little security, widespread
chaos, scarce water and electricity, and the whole fabric
of the society has been irreparably damaged. The war was
launched without UN mandate and indeed in contravention
of earlier Security Council resolutions.
Paragraph 14 of Resolution 687 that called for the
disarmament of Iraq, also calls for the eventual
establishment in the Middle East of a zone free from
weapons of mass destruction. The non-implementation of
that provision, particularly in the case of Israel,
reflects an international double standard. While UN
inspectors spent eight years inspecting various sites in
Iraq and, according to their own report, destroying at
least 95 percent of those weapons nothing has been done
to implement the main provision of that resolution about
turning the Middle East into a zone free from weapons of
mass destruction.
Shortly before the First Gulf War, the American
Secretary of State James Baker assured all the Arab
countries that took part in the coalition against Iraq
that as soon as Saddam Husayn was forced out of Kuwait,
America would find an equitable solution to the
Arab-Israeli conflict. After the war President Bush
senior reiterated that promise. Twelve years later, the
Palestinians are in an even worse situation than they
have ever been. Yet, on the eve of another attack on
Iraq, once again the Arabs were promised a "road map" for
the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although the
road map was accepted immediately and unconditionally by
the Palestinians, the Israelis reluctantly accepted it by
calling for 14 changes in the contents of the road map,
thus making a mockery of the whole enterprise. Indeed the
day when Ariel Sharon returned from his summit meeting in
Jordan with President Bush and the Palestinian Prime
Minister Mahmud Abbas Israeli forces were sent to Gaza
where two Palestinians were killed. This shows a complete
disregard of international community's desire for peace
in the Middle East. The attacks and counter-attacks have
continued ever since, yet instead of putting pressure on
Israel to implement the provisions of the road map,
American officials have started making threats against
Iran and Syria.
The reason why America manages to get away with all
this is due to the fact that America is a super-power and
believes that she has no need to observe international
regulations and abide by UN resolutions. Although many
Americans are loath to have their country referred to as
an empire, the fact is that the US constitutes an empire
in all but name. Today, we have the age of American
imperium. In the history of our planet, never before has
there been a power so apparently massive as the United
States is at the moment. Her stock market is worth more
than the rest of the world's bourses put together. Her
spending on military force is greater than the combined
weight of the next nine largest powers. Her military
exports exceed the total military export of the next
biggest five arms exporters put together. Her GDP
accounts for about 20 percent of the global GDP (as
opposed to the British GDP accounting for about 8 percent
of the world GDP at the height of the British Empire).
Her language is the nearest thing to a global tongue, and
the dollar is the nearest thing to a global currency.
Out of some 191 countries in the UN, American forces
are stationed in 130 of them. America is having a massive
presence in Taiwan, Japan and Thailand in the Far East;
right up to Afghanistan and Pakistan in South West Asia;
to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan in
Central Asia; to Georgia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus;
to Oman, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and now Iraq in
the Persian Gulf; to Turkey, Eastern Europe, Germany, and
Britain in Europe; right up to Latin America. American
fleets are encircling the world and there is a major
fleet in every ocean of the world. No previous imperium,
from the Ancient Greeks and Persians to the present time,
has been so dominant. After the fall of the Ottoman and
European Empires, and in our own time the fall of the
Soviet Empire, America is the sole remaining empire or
the only Super-Power or Hyper-Power in the world.
Great powers have great responsibilities. Even despite
its enormous power and reach, the United States cannot
remain a super-power without the help and co-operation of
allies. Yet the United States has adopted a unilateralist
policy in the world. The United States is multilateral
when it suits it, unilateral when it wants to be. It
enforces a new division of labour in which America does
the fighting, the French, British and Germans do the
police patrols in the border zones, the Dutch, Swiss and
Scandinavians provide the humanitarian aid, and the Arabs
and the Japanese provide the funds. President George W
Bush has either withdrawn from or expressed his
opposition to implementing a number of key global arms
control, economic and environmental agreements.
These include:
- The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
- The Biological Weapons Convention. In November
2001, John Bolton &emdash; the U.S. State Department's
Under Secretary for Arms Control and International
Security &emdash; announced that the United States
considered the Biological Weapons Convention to be
dead. Then, in May 2002, he condemned the current
Chemical Weapons Convention as inefficient.
- The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
- The international criminal court
- The land mine treaty
- The Kyoto Protocol on environmental control
- Anti racism conference in Durban. America was the
only country that walked out of the conference because
of the criticism of Israeli policies by some other
countries.
- US calls for free trade, but it pays heavy
subsidies to its farmers and imposes heavy duties on
foreign imports, including steel. It also unilaterally
imposes sanctions on countries that it disagrees with,
and often on those that call for the recognition of
the rights of the Palestinians. In the Middle East
alone, US has imposed unilateral sanctions on Iran,
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Sudan.
- Some 700 prisoners are languishing in cells in
Guantanamo Bay. They are classified neither as
ordinary criminals to go through the usual judicial
process, or as prisoners of war to be dealt with
according to Geneva Conventions and released after the
end of hostilities. A new category of crime, "illegal
combatants", has been created for them. Many of them
have been tortured in order to extract confessions. It
has not been fashionable for some time to assign
oracular qualities to Orwell's novel, 1984. Yet the
book has much to say to our fractured, post-9/11 era
on the centenary of the birth of its author. In
Orwell's dystopia, "practices which had been long
abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years --
imprisonment without trial ... public executions,
torture to extract confessions ... not only became
common again, but were tolerated and even defended by
people who considered themselves enlightened and
progressive." These social changes, Orwell wrote,
began with a "general hardening of outlook."
- After 9/11 a large number of people from the
Middle East and other Islamic countries were arrested
and have been detained ever since, without any charges
levelled against them, without having access to
lawyers and even without their families being informed
about where and why they are being detained. Since the
detention of Americans of Japanese descent after Pearl
Harbour attacks, this is the first time that the
United States has resorted to such mass detention of
American citizens belonging to foreign ethnic
backgrounds.
- Last year the US passed a law requiring the
nationals from more than 20 Islamic countries to
register with the police. When a number of American
residents from Iran, Pakistan and some Arab countries
went to INS offices to register, they were arrested
for minor immigration offences and some have even been
expelled. Some 2,000 US residents were taken to
detention centres despite the fact that they had
voluntarily gone to INS offices to register. About
1,200 of them are still being detained according to
government sources.
- Many former nationals of Middle East and other
Islamic countries who possess Canadian or European
passports have had to undergo the humiliating process
of being fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated
at US airports. All these are being done in a country
of immigrants that prided itself in its open-door
policy and lack of discrimination.
- US calls for non-proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, but it ignores the universally
acknowledged Israeli possession of a few hundred
nuclear weapons, and even chemical and biological
weapons. The United States opposed Indian and
Pakistani nuclear programs, but changed its mind about
those countries after 9/11. It lifted sanctions on
Pakistan and even lavished a great deal of material
assistance on that country. It adopted different
approaches to North Korea and Iraq and now Iran. North
Korea has openly admitted that it is pursuing a
nuclear weapons program, but US calls for the
resolution of that problem through peaceful means and
by negotiation. Yet although Iran has signed the IAEA
protocol and has declared that it would pursue a
transparent policy in its nuclear programme, the
United States is pursuing a warlike policy against it
as did against Iraq.
- US insists that UN resolutions must be observed,
but she ignores - indeed supports and sponsors - the
biggest violator of UN resolutions, namely Israel.
Since 1967 there have been dozens of UN resolutions
calling on Israel to withdraw from occupied
territories, to stop colonising and building
settlements in the occupied territories, to respect
the lives of the refugees and the people under its
occupation, yet Israel has turned a deaf ear to every
single of those resolutions, often with American
backing and frequent use of American veto in support
of Israel.
- US officials stress the inadmissibility of the
occupation of other countries, but Israel has occupied
Palestinian and Syrian lands since 1967. When Iraq
occupied Kuwait and the Iraqi government tried to
negotiate a withdrawal, saying that it would withdraw
from Kuwait if Israel also undertook to withdraw from
the occupied Palestinian territories, President Bush
senior said that UN resolutions had to be implemented
fully and no negotiations could be permitted. Yet in
the case of Israel, not only the US does not force
Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, it
even does not call on Israel to engage in meaningful
negotiations with the Palestinians or the Syrians.
These are a few examples of what can be called "the
arrogance of power." The dual nemeses of empires in the
20th century were nationalism, the desire of peoples to
rule themselves free of alien domination; and narcissism,
the incurable delusion of imperial rulers that the
''lesser breeds'' aspired only to be versions of
themselves. Both nationalism and narcissism have
threatened the American reassertion of global power since
Sept. 11. The growing anti-American feeling is not due to
the existence of freedom or democracy in the United
States. It is due to the American domination of most of
the Middle East, often with the help of corrupt and
dictatorial rulers that the US has helped keep in power.
There is also a growing universal resentment of the
American assumption that their version of democracy and
human rights and their way of life are the only
acceptable standards that had to be blindly followed by
everybody else.
In his massive work, The Study of History,
discussing the rise and fall of many great empires in the
past, Arnold Toynbee enumerates five factors that led to
the undoing of former empires and that might pose a
threat to the continued domination of the Western
civilisations. These were:
1. Wars and militarism. Most empires have been
weakened as the result of their policy of militarism and
engaging in continuous wars. American military
capabilities are enormous but they are not limitless.
During the First Gulf War, most of the cost of the war
estimated at over 60 billion dollars was borne by Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Japan and Germany. However, this
time it is unlikely that many countries would volunteer
to bear the cost of the American war on Iraq or of the
post-war reconstruction. The anticipated solution has
been to use Iraq's oil resources to pay for the
occupation, but such a policy is bound to give rise to
intense anger among the Iraqis and other Arab nations.
American officials repeatedly asserted prior to the war
that Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people and that they
would have full control over it. Yet, already one hears
reports about the need to privatise the Iraqi oil and
sell it to Western oil companies in order to pay for the
reconstruction of Iraq. Of course, Western and
particularly American companies will have the lion share
of the contracts.
2. Excessive pride and misconceived nationalism. Most
former empires became too proud as the result of their
power and tried to impose their will upon others. Their
pride eventually resulted in their fall. At the height of
the Roman, Islamic and British empires many proud rulers
believed that their empire was eternal, and that the sun
would not set on their dominions. There are many signs of
excessive nationalism among certain sections of US
leaders, especially among the rightwing conservative
elements who believe that America has a God-given right
to impose its will on other countries.
3. Social and economic differences. One of the causes
of the downfall of former empires was a growing gap
between the rich and the poor. At the moment, the gap
between the rich and the poor seems to be growing. On the
one hand, there is a small minority of people who live in
excessive luxury, while a quarter of human race can
barely survive. According to the World Bank, over 1.2
billion people today live on less than one dollar a day,
and nearly half of the entire world population earns less
than 2 dollars a day. Bernard Wasow of the Century
Foundation has calculated that between 1965 and 1997, the
poorest 10 percent of the world's population increased
its share of world income from 0.3 percent to 0.5
percent, while the richest 10 percent meanwhile expanded
its share from 50.6 percent to 59.6 percent.
Even in the United States itself, the gap between the
rich and the poor is growing. On the one hand, there are
some multi-billionaires whose wealth exceeds the wealth
of some nations, and on the other hand, more than 40
million Americans live beneath the poverty line and do
not even have medical insurance.
During recent times the gap between rich and poor
countries has grown alarmingly. In 1800, the difference
in incomes between the richest and poorest countries was
about 3 to 1; in 1900 it was about 10 to 1. Today, the
United States and other rich countries enjoy incomes
about 100 times greater than the people in the poorest
countries do. This scale of inequality is not only unjust
to the poorer countries, it is even dangerous for the
richer countries.
4. Environmental problems. In their headlong rush
towards greater and greater consumption and development
most empires over-used and over-spent their natural
resources, and that eventually contributed to their
impoverishment and their fall. The present level of
consumption in the United States cannot be sustained, and
it definitely cannot be copied elsewhere. About four
percent of human race is consuming a quarter of world's
energy resources and is producing more than a quarter of
world pollution. The exhaustion of the greater part of US
domestic oil resources is one of the reasons for American
desire to occupy and control Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil
resources. However, even those resources are finite and
sooner or later they will run out.
5. The clash between mind and heart, between intellect
and intuition. One reason for the downfall of most former
empires has been excessive attachment either to
materialism or to religious fanaticism. Unless we can
restore a balance between our rationality and our
spirituality the world is doomed. The present world is
suffering from excessive materialism on the one hand, and
excessive religious dogmatism and fundamentalism on the
other. In fact, although these two seem to constitute
opposite polls, in reality, they are the two sides of the
same coin. The main problem of the contemporary world is
fundamentalism - religious, secular, political and social
fundamentalism. The battle today is not between various
religions and ideologies, but between fundamentalist and
moderate people, and between radicals and liberals in all
cultures.
At the beginning of the first volume of The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776,
Edward Gibbon remarked that empires endure only so long
as their rulers take care not to overextend their
borders. But the ''vanity or ignorance'' of the Romans,
Gibbon went on, led them to ''despise and sometimes to
forget the outlying countries that had been left in the
enjoyment of a barbarous independence.'' As a result, the
proud Romans were lulled into making the fatal mistake of
''confounding the Roman monarchy with the globe of the
earth.'' Let us make sure that we do not make the same
mistake and do not overstep our mark.
Although terrorism poses a real threat to the world
today and has to be fought and contained, the greater
threat is militarism and the desire for world domination.
The battle against terrorism requires not only military
means but also a campaign to win hearts and minds. We are
faced not only with a battle with bullets and missiles,
but we are also engaged in a battle of ideas. Unless we
can win the battle of ideas, no amount of military
superiority can protect us from those who feel desperate
enough to kill themselves in order to do some damage to
us. Indeed, any military campaign that is regarded as
cruel and unjust will only produce a breeding ground for
more terrorists. Dr. Martin Luther King said that the
options for humanity were "non-violence, or
non-existence." He went on to say: "The chain of evil -
hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be
broken, or we shall be plunged into the abyss of
annihilation."
Some 2,500 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu
expressed the dangers of wishing to dominate the world
most eloquently. The words read as fresh today (as
translated by Witter Bynner):
"Those who would take over the earth
And shape it to their will
Never, I notice, succeed.
The earth is like a vessel so sacred
That at the mere approach of the profane
It is marred
And when they reach out their fingers it is gone.
For a time in the world some force themselves ahead
And some are left behind,
For a time in the world some make a great noise
And some are held silent,
For a time in the world some are puffed fat
And some are kept hungry,
For a time in the world some push aboard
And some are tipped out:
At no time in the world will a man who is sane
Over-reach himself,
Over-spend himself,
Over-rate himself."
Farhang Jahanpour received his PhD from the
University of Cambridge in Oriental Studies. He was
formerly professor and Dean of the Faculty of Languages
at the University of Isfahan, Iran and has also taught at
the Universities of Cambridge, Reading and Oxford after
which Dr Jahanpour worked for 18 years as the Editor for
Middle East and North Africa for the BBC. He has edited
and written an introduction to Nuzhat Nama-ye
'Ala'i, an eleventh century encyclopaedia of natural
sciences, history and literature and has translated
Arnold Toynbee's Civilization on Trial, in
addition to publishing the Directory of Iranian
Officials. His articles have appeared in numerous
academic journals. At present, Dr Jahanpour is writing a
book about the modernist movement in Iran.
©
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