Quote of the day:
“Sounding a frustrated tone, [Kurdish leader Massoud] Barzani said it was ‘very disappointing’ to hear that General Garner was going. Nevertheless, Mr. Barzani said “major mistakes have been made” under General Garner in the military and civilian management of postwar Iraq ‘and if we continue in this confusion, this wonderful victory we have achieved will turn into a quagmire.'” (Patrick E. Tyler, Iraqi Leaders Voice Concerns on U.S. Shuffle)
Before I turn to what was to be my subject of the day, American-European relations of the moment, a few comments on events in the Middle East. As the quote of the day indicates, you evidently don’t have to be an antiwar American for Vietnam images to come to mind in postwar Iraq. Of course, anyone who brought up the dreaded “quaqmire” image during the brief wartime moment before the dash to Baghdad and the collapse of Saddam’s army has been roundly mocked in the media. But history has this funny way of coming back to bite you. Has anybody even considered, in “quagmire” terms, how long exactly the United States military is going to have to be in Iraq, given that the Iraqi military has dissolved? (Has anybody been following the “progress” of Afghanistan’s new national army?) It’s hard to imagine an unarmed “Costa Rica” in the Persian Gulf region these days.
And talking about quagmires — with Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar of the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein as well as his two cloned children of evil unbelievably still on the loose, or so it seems — there were those devastating bombings in Riyadh last night on the eve of the arrival of Secretary of State Powell. It’s startlingly improbable to imagine that this was not the work of Al Qaeda (whatever that designation may actually refer to these days). I say this in part because one thing that’s struck me about Al Qaeda’s brand of terrorism is, as with the Riyadh bombings, how modern it is, how up to the moment — how tied, that is, to imagery, to the news, to the drama of the well-staged event. As was completely clear from 9/11, Al Qaeda’s leadership had seen and been influenced by the same action movies we’ve all seen, and as is clear from the present bombings, they clearly are tuned in to CNN. We may be talking about an organization with medieval-sounding goals, but they are a media-savvy, publicity-conscious, image-soaked group of terrorists. They don’t really strike that often, but they do so with the panache of successful Hollywood producers — and as in some nightmare movie they do seem capable, act by act, of piling up the bodies before the cameras.
According to Saudi dissident, Saad al-Fagih in a piece in today’s Guardian (The war that Bin Laden is winning), whose writing clearly preceded the bombings, in propaganda terms, Bin Laden is not doing at all badly. Though the Bush administration now claims to be withdrawing its military from Saudi Arabia (as Bin Laden once demanded), this is largely a matter of form, not reality, and in the meantime the legitimacy of the Saudi regime has been badly shaken. One of these days, the neocons in Washington (like Bin Laden) may get another part of their wish list with the fall of this Saudi regime, and then watch out. He writes in part:
“The US invasion of Iraq has been a gift to Bin Laden. He had argued that Muslim countries are the main target He argued that most Arab leaders, and especially the Saudis, would side with the US against their fellow Arabs – as it has turned out. He argued that Ba’athism and Arab nationalism do not work and that only Islam and jihad can deliver for the Muslims and Arabs. The collapse of the Saddam regime has strengthened that argument.
“The course of the conflict also bore out Bin Laden’s view that only “asymmetrical warfare” can be effective against such highly advanced military power. US ruthlessness in killing civilians, destroying infrastructure and the encouragement it gave to the destruction of valuable heritage and public records has also bolstered the al-Qaida message. The same goes for US public support for the invasion of Iraq, because Bin Laden has said his problem is with all Americans”
“The course of the conflict also bore out Bin Laden’s view that only “asymmetrical warfare” can be effective against such highly advanced military power. US ruthlessness in killing civilians, destroying infrastructure and the encouragement it gave to the destruction of valuable heritage and public records has also bolstered the al-Qaida message. The same goes for US public support for the invasion of Iraq, because Bin Laden has said his problem is with all Americans”
In the meantime, a continent away, the Bush administration, as part of its drive to militarize everything global and put all foreign policy into a military frame, has taken to trying to turn NATO into a weapon with which to beat “old Europe” into submission. The admission of seven nations of the “new (Eastern) Europe” is seen in Washington as an opportunity both to make that Cold War alliance an integral part of America’s “nation-building” (read empire-building) efforts in the Middle East and especially the former SSRs of Central Asia), and a way to keep Old Europe under control. Already, as Mark Berniker tells us ( NATO’s eastward push into Eurasia) in the Asia Times, Bruce Jackson, chairman of the nongovernmental US-NATO Committee,
“who has met with a number of top officials in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, has said it is possible some, or all of these three countries could be extended membership to NATO in the future.
“On the other side of Georgia’s border, NATO also has regional military exercises planned for Armenia in May as part of a plan being called “Cooperative Best Effort 2003″. The exercises will involve military units from 17 different countries over a 10-day period as part of NATO’s ‘Partnership for Peace’ program. And there is a new lobby group in Washington created to advance the NATO-Georgian alliance, called the Georgia-Caucasus Council of the United States which it says is ‘working to bolster the Georgian democracy and economy through strengthened ties to the US and inclusion in NATO.'”
There are, in fact, two pan-European organizations — NATO, a military alliance, and the European Union, an alliance of democracies. Washington wants to expand and so control the military alliance, making it an arm of imperial foreign policy, and in the process diminishing the democratic one. The urges of Old Europe and the Russians are rather different and they are now talking about setting up a separate European Union armed forces. Below Eric Margolis, columnist for the Toronto Sun, and Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect magazine consider European and American responses of the moment. (By the way, a Canadian reader informs me that I mistakenly called the Toronto Star a “conservative” paper the other day when I meant — or should have meant — the Toronto Sun.) Tom
Working for the Yankee dollar
Some old commies – America’s new best friends – will do anything for a buck
By Eric Margolis, Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
May 11, 2003PARIS — Bush administration officials have been touring the Continent this past week, blasting and threatening nations like France, Germany and Turkey that opposed the Iraq war, or dishing out great wads of cash to countries at Europe’s unfashionable eastern end that supported the Anglo-American invasion.
The threadbare nations of East Europe, notably Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, were quick to jump on George Bush’s invade-Iraq bandwagon, offering Washington their services in exchange for hundreds of millions in aid, loans, cheap arms and political support. They were also showing deep gratitude for America’s lifting of Russia’s yoke over East Europe.
Poland contributed 200 soldiers to the invasion force, for which they got a cool $90 million US and their very own occupation zone in Iraq’s north, thus aiding Washington’s pretense that conquered Iraq was somehow akin to four-power occupied Germany at the end of World War II.
To read more Margolis click here
Union Army
Why we should welcome an EU rapid deployment force
By Harold Meyerson
The American Prospect
May 9, 2003Europe wants an army. Tony Blair wants a European rapid deployment force that can work through NATO in concert with the United States to build “one polar power” that spans the Atlantic. Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and the leaders of Belgium, Greece and Luxembourg — the continent’s leading critics of the war with Iraq — want a rapid deployment force to be the military arm of a distinct European Union (EU) foreign and security policy. They want to get that force up and running by next year, and to establish a headquarters for the command in Belgium.
But Belgium, as the Bush administration has noted with some asperity, is already home to the headquarters of NATO. To both the State and Defense departments, the idea of plunking an alternative to NATO just down the block from our own alliance must seem more devilish French mischief.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of the Prospect.