Here’s the strange thing: During the Cold War, Americans were fed a constant diet of global analysis (much of it junk, of course). There were two “camps” and the world was seen as a distinctly over-connected place in which the smallest spark of civil strife in any wayward corner of the planet might strike fear in the hearts of Washington or the Kremlin and so launch a global struggle of potentially apocalyptic dimensions.
Now, at a moment when there is only one “camp,” whose plans encompass every part of the globe, the world we take in every day seems largely broken down into bits and pieces. You can read the papers — American papers, at least — for days and hardly see two, no less three countries appear in the same article. Nothing it seems is connected. This is not true of writing elsewhere and so we must turn abroad to find journalists and analysts trying to fit the world into some discernible pattern or set of patterns as this year ends.
Below, Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times on-line sweeps us from the Middle East through that increasingly crucial area of conflict, bases, oil, and strategy, that “intersection of the Chinese, Indian, Slavic and Arab worlds,” Southwest Asia. He speculates thoughtfully on, among other matters, whether Iran is the real target of the Iraqi war to come, the nature of a weakened Russia’s strategic moves in what used to be its geopolitical “backyard,” the nature and dangers of American strategic plans in the area, and whether from all of the above a U.S.-Russian-Chinese-Indian “Axis of the World” might emerge. (I defy any of you, by the way, to find a piece in an American paper that even mentions Teheran and Beijing in nearby paragraphs.)
Then Nina Bachkatov of Le Monde Diplomatique offers us the Russian view of more or less the same area, hardly less sweepingly or intelligently
Finally, here’s a quote on a possible war in Iraq from an interview with our President printed in the new US News and World Report under the rubric “plain speaking”: “And it’s very important for the American people to know my sentiments about military engagement, that I will use our military as a last resort and our first resort, and I understand the consequences of military action.” Maybe this sort of thing is numbing our journalistic brains. Tom
Iraq first, then Southwest Asia
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
December 25, 2002PARIS – An Islamic scholar born in Egypt tells Asia Times Online that as soon as US Secretary of State Colin Powell, a living portrait of moderation, pronounced the deadly magic words “material breach”, the Arab world had to swallow its bitter impotence and admit that war against Iraq was practically inevitable.
PARIS – An Islamic scholar born in Egypt tells Asia Times Online that as soon as US Secretary of State Colin Powell, a living portrait of moderation, pronounced the deadly magic words “material breach”, the Arab world had to swallow its bitter impotence and admit that war against Iraq was practically inevitable.
The whole world knows Saddam Hussein is indefensible: he tortures and kills opponents, has used chemical weapons against Iran and Iraqi Kurds, has produced biological weapons and tried to obtain nuclear weapons – even before the Gulf War, when the US and the UK generously supplied him with armaments, radioactive material and advanced military technology. But what concerns the Arab world is less the fate of Saddam than the exponential suffering of the Iraqi civilian population in case of war.
To read more Escobar click here
Russia’s free ticket
By Nina Bachkatov
Le Monde Diplomatique
December 2002RUSSIAN president Vladimir Putin’s decision to take part
in the international coalition against terrorism after
the 11 September attacks in the United States was the
start of a global chess game. A year on, particularly
after the Moscow hostage-taking this October, the
challenge for Putin is to hold on to the advantage he has
gained. Putin, by abandoning cold war psychology, has
managed both to make Russia an international player
again, and a source of alternative solutions.Consider the way he worked with France to amend the text
of the United Nations resolution on disarming Iraq. It is
no coincidence that this co-operation developed outside
the European Union framework. Relations between Brussels
and Moscow are strained both by the EU’s concern to
preserve the transatlantic relationship (“we are all
Americans now”) and logjams in the EU’s internal
bureaucracy.