At this point, we’re all stretching for ways to explain this new world of ours. It’s the first time in historical memory that a single imperial power — or call it what you will — has stood alone and unopposed by any balancing imperial power or group of national powers. We face an awestruck, frightened, puzzled world wondering where the “balance” of the balance of powers might be in the 21st century. The world, it might be said, looks on, curious, aghast, even in places where it might be least expected as in Southern Italy about which Marie Cocco wrote recently in the Newsday (Europeans Are Baffled By Bush’s America):
“Travel to Europe and you are struck by a discomfiting oddity. America sits
astride the world, but we are distinctly apart from it.“The big story in the papers last week was not the analysis of how the
American military triumphed or the crowning of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld as champion of the internecine struggle for supremacy within the
Bush administration. It was the looting of Baghdad’s cultural treasures, a
horror that strikes people as shameful. Italy, after all, was invaded by the
American military as it liberated Europe during World War II. No one then
dared allow a second sacking of Rome.“Still it can be said we are not hated. We are utterly incomprehensible.”
Such emotions, such reactions, are everywhere but (if polls are to be believed) here, and for the men of the Bush administration all that matters, it seems, is “here.” But that may be deceptive. Self-presentation also seems remarkably important to them — or rather, controlling how the world defines what exactly we are doing. This administration urgently wants to occupy the definitional center of things, to be able to call prisoners in Guantanamo whatever we decide they should be called, to label regimes anywhere on earth whatever we care to label them, and then, of course, to proceed from those definitions, unhindered, in any way that suits us.
When others interfere, it causes a kind of apoplexy — as with the French and Germans in the run-up to war, as with UN secretary general Kofi Annan, who has previously been seen as something of an American creature, when he has the absolute temerity to identify us not as “liberators” in Iraq, but as that country’s “occupier” and to try to hold us to certain international rules of behavior that go with such a definition. As the Guardian has reported in a recent piece, Garner plays down shia demonstrations,
“In other developments, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, today called on the US-led coalition to respect international law as the “occupying power” in Iraq, drawing immediate ire from US officials who resist the label “occupier” and say coalition forces are respecting the rules.
“The big story in the papers last week was not the analysis of how the
American military triumphed or the crowning of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld as champion of the internecine struggle for supremacy within the
Bush administration. It was the looting of Baghdad’s cultural treasures, a
horror that strikes people as shameful. Italy, after all, was invaded by the
American military as it liberated Europe during World War II. No one then
dared allow a second sacking of Rome.
“Still it can be said we are not hated. We are utterly incomprehensible.”
Such emotions, such reactions, are everywhere but (if polls are to be believed) here, and for the men of the Bush administration all that matters, it seems, is “here.” But that may be deceptive. Self-presentation also seems remarkably important to them — or rather, controlling how the world defines what exactly we are doing. This administration urgently wants to occupy the definitional center of things, to be able to call prisoners in Guantanamo whatever we decide they should be called, to label regimes anywhere on earth whatever we care to label them, and then, of course, to proceed from those definitions, unhindered, in any way that suits us.
When others interfere, it causes a kind of apoplexy — as with the French and Germans in the run-up to war, as with UN secretary general Kofi Annan, who has previously been seen as something of an American creature, when he has the absolute temerity to identify us not as “liberators” in Iraq, but as that country’s “occupier” and to try to hold us to certain international rules of behavior that go with such a definition. As the Guardian has reported in a recent piece, Garner plays down shia demonstrations,
“In other developments, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, today called on the US-led coalition to respect international law as the “occupying power” in Iraq, drawing immediate ire from US officials who resist the label “occupier” and say coalition forces are respecting the rules.
“US officials, however, reacted angrily, saying they had not yet established whether the coalition that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime was the occupying power under international law, but that coalition forces were nevertheless abiding by international conventions.
“‘We’ve not only made that clear by our words – we’ve made it clear from day one of this conflict through our actions,'” US envoy Kevin Moley told reporters. ‘We find it – at best – odd that the secretary general chose to bring this to our attention.'”
Even if it’s not stated, the Bush guys went into Iraq with historical analogies dancing in their heads — all those books on Winston Churchill, World War II, and the occupations of Japan and Germany, not to speak undoubtedly of the glorious liberation of Paris. Of course, our liberationist dreams for Iraq went hand in hand with oil’n’bases plans for nailing, as a former Texas president of ours used to say, “the coonskin to the wall.”
Paul Rogers, the thoughtful geopolitical analyst for www.openDemocracy.net, considers our “permanency” as occupiers, not liberators, in a piece included below. In the meantime, interesting writers continue to reach for provocative analogies to explain in part (or offer warnings about) our present Iraqi adventures. I offer three from the last week that I found particularly intriguing: Charles Glass, former ABC news Beirut Bureau chief and hostage of Hezbollah, suggests in a Guardian piece an analogy between Iraq today and U.S. policy in Lebanon (1982-85); Dilip Hiro in a New York Times op-ed suggests some comparisons between Iraq today and Iran on the eve of the Khoheimi fundamentalist revolution of 1979.
And finally, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of a new book on the history of defeat, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery, most intriguingly of all considers the photo of the victorious American commanders shot in one of Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad in another Times op-ed; and, after considering previous moments of “surrender,” suggests not an analogy at all, but the possibility that we’ve entered a world beyond such analogies. What happens to your victory, after all, when you make your way into your enemy’s capital and no one is there to surrender? That’s one eerie definition of a unilateral world. Tom
Permanent occupation?
By Paul Rogers
OpenDemocracy
April 24, 2003If the prime intention were to ensure a completely independent and democratic Iraq, then the signs would include the early and substantial involvement of the UN and other intergovernmental organisations in reconstruction and in the democratic transition, the rapid withdrawal of military forces and their replacement by an international stabilisation force, and the absence of any intention to maintain a long-term US military presence in the country.
The early indications are that none of this will happen. Instead, all the immediate signs point to long-term US control. Notably, the search for chemical and biological weapons has been taken out of the hands of the UN inspectors, even though the UN mandate is still in force.
To read more Rogers click here
The lessons of Lebanon
Let’s not forget the mess the US made last time it tried ‘nation building’ in the Middle East
By Charles Glass
Thursday April 24, 2003
The GuardianPeople cheered when the US marines marched into the capital. At last someone would restore order, remove the thugs and murderers from the streets, and force an end to the chaos. Then a new government arrested and tortured dissidents. The US ordered the dissidents’ outside backers, Syria and Iran, to stay away.
Britain joined the US in policing the streets. With Washington supporting the government and training its army, the opposition strategy meant removing the Americans and the British. Syria and Iran helped the rebels. American soldiers shot and killed Shi’ite Muslims. American and British planes bombed their neighbourhoods. Soon, the American embassy and the marine headquarters were rubble. American and British civilians were taken hostage and displayed on television. Then, the American warships sailed away and took the marines with them. The experiment in nation-building was over.This has already happened. The time: August 1982 to February 1985. The place: Lebanon….
Charles Glass covered the recent war in Iraq for ABC News. He was ABC News Beirut bureau chief from 1983-85 and was held hostage by Hizbullah in Lebanon in 1987.
Why the Mullahs Love a Revolution
By Dilip Hiro
The New York Times
April 23, 2003The Bush team’s vision for a postwar Iraq was founded on the dreams of exiles and defectors, who promised that Iraqis would shower American troops with flowers. Now, with the crowds shouting, “No to America; no to Saddam,” and most Iraqis already referring to the American “occupation,” the Bush administration seems puzzled.
The truth is that the exiles had been in the West so long that they knew little of the reality inside Iraq; the defectors, in search of a haven from the cruel regime, told the eager Americans anything they wanted to hear. Now that these illusions have been shattered, American policy makers might do better to consider the history of the region. In particular, the dogged nationalism of the Iraqis that forced imperial Britain’s departure in 1932; and, more recently, the events in 1979 after the downfall of the secular regime of the shah of Iran.
Dilip Hiro is author of “Iran Under the Ayatollahs” and “Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm.”
The Loneliest Victors
By Wolfgang Schivelbusch
The New York Times
April 22, 2003In the modern history of the West, armed conflicts between states have been concluded by the convening of the adversaries to sign documents of armistice, surrender and peace. Although these ceremonies formally marked the submission of the vanquished, they usually proceeded in gentlemanly ways. Witness defeated France’s representative, Talleyrand, at the Vienna Peace Conference in 1815, mingling with the victorious allies as equal among equals.
Victors and vanquished not only shared the same cultural, philosophical and moral values, but the former seemed almost eager to go out of their way not to damage the latter’s self-esteem, an attitude that was at once ethical and practical, since in the constant warfare that agitated “Old Europe” for centuries, today’s victor was always conscious of how easily he might become tomorrow’s loser. empty-handed. You cannot eat your enemy and have him, too.Wolfgang Schivelbusch is author, most recently, of “The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery.”