Published in Maclean's Magazine, March 24, 2003 (edition date: March 31) London Even before the war machines thundered into action in Iraq, a process of regime change on a global scale -- the shifting and fracturing and overthrow of the accepted world order -- had been underway for months. The hawks of the Bush administration, armed with their doctrine of unilateral supremacy, have left behind a debris field of diplomatic disruption, complete with their own figurative ground zero, this one in mid-town Manhattan, just a few miles north of its tragic forerunner downtown. For although the United Nations headquarters still stands, behind its stark, monolithic facade the building's inhabitants must now pick up the pieces of a once-cohesive alliance. The U.N. failed to act, the U.S. President charged, but America wouldn't. It's a clear, simple statement, but like most doctrinal contentions it's essentially misleading: the U.N., in fact, failed only to act within a timeframe dictated by the Bush administration. A majority of nations on the Security Council resisted the American agenda -- and made the President's day. "The Bush administration wanted war from the start," says Steven Livingston, senior research fellow at the University of Washington's Center for American Politics and Public Policy. "This is now just a political culture on steroids. The administration has concluded, perhaps correctly, that when a nation spends more than a billion dollars a day on defense -- a budget that equals the defense budgets of more than the next dozen national defense budgets combined -- that nation doesn't have to worry about diplomacy. Or as President Bush put it after 9/11, "you are either for us or against us." Which goes double now that guns are doing the talking. Domestically, the White House and Pentagon have sold their war plan effectively enough to leave critics typecast as dissenters or protesters; the tactic that evolved in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks of mischaracterizing as unpatriotic points of view contrary to the administration's is still a winning one. Meanwhile abroad, having bulldozed into Iraq over enemies and former friends alike, the U.S. administration intends to reshape the landscape in its own image. While the President talks of humanitarian assistance, specialists in strategic studies say Washington's plans for rebuilding Iraq are based on far more practical and self-serving objectives. Prof. Paul Rogers, of Britain's University of Bradford Department of Peace Studies, told Macleans: "The bottom line essentially is that this is not about short term profit from oil reserves, but long term control of what is really the world's absolute key energy source. The gulf is now so important that it would be simply unacceptable to the kind of people controlling the Bush administration not to have control of the area." That view is shared by many of the world's leading authorities on the politics of oil. Former Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani points to the Bush administration's musings about privatizing Iraq's oil industry as proof that the gift of American-style democracy will cost Iraqis a good share of control over their most valuable raw resource. And not just for a few years, according to Prof. Rogers. "I would expect that once the war is over", he says, "there may well be a US military occupation, though they will endeavor to withdraw as quickly as they reasonably can. But what will certainly be left behind is two or three very sizeable permanent American military bases, one on the Kirkuk commercial axis, one near Baghdad, and one near Basra. So you'll have a client regime in Baghdad which is backed up by a permanent U.S. military presence, where you have the 5th fleet in the Gulf and a series of bases right up to the Turkish border." This scenario appears to be confirmed by the sweeping reconstruction goals detailed in the blueprint distributed to prospective U.S. contractors by the United States Agency for International Development. Entitled "Vision for Post-Conflict Iraq", the plan provides for nothing less, say its critics, than the creation of a U.S. satellite state. Under the supervision of the State and Treasury departments, a "vetted Iraqi financial leadership team" will be moved into post-war Baghdad to revamp Iraq's finance ministry and develop a new central bank. An 18 month target has been set on privatization of the country's state-owned companies. Coupled with a complete overhaul of infrastructure (USAID has been instructed to ensure that half the roads in Iraq are upgraded to top specifications within a year) the scheme would see Saddam's clunker of a police state transformed into an engine of American-style free-market growth. All of this has obvious appeal to ideologues in Washington: the interim American military administration will have granted political and economic deliverance for the oppressed people of Iraq, generously draped in the stars and stripes. It's a misconception, says Prof. Rogers, which illustrates the dangerous naiveté of the American approach. "All of this will drive the Iranians to near paranoia, and certainly impel them to get weapons of mass destruction as soon as they can. And of course its an absolute gift in recruiting terms to organizations such as al Qaeda and their affiliates, because it will be proving what they've been claiming all along, that the United States really is in the business of controlling Gulf oil." That's an understatement, according to spokesmen for Islamic groups. Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, which condemns the U.S.-led campaign as "undermining the United Nations and the rule of law", says: "I think the Bush administration's true agenda is the recolonization and the remapping of the Middle East. They can't see that they're playing into the hands of the very extremist elements that are waiting for excuses such as this -- the invasion by an enormous power of a very small country. Certainly the prestige and influence the United States enjoyed will be dashed in the eyes of the world community, because they were once accepted as a power that respected the U.N., that co-operated with the U.N." Ibrahim Hooper of the Washington D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, claims: "We're being taken to war by a small, ideologically-driven group in America whose primary interest lies in benefiting a foreign nation, namely Israel. Democracy elsewhere in the world is fine as long as it does what America wants. Let's face it -- the average Palestinian's life is a thousand times worse than the average Iraqi's. Your average Palestinian half the time can't even leave his home, get medical care or food, and yet we're going to liberate Iraq, and fund Israel ?" Indeed history will likely not view favorably the Israeli sub-texts of the Bush administration's adventure in Iraq. Just days before launching the assault, the U.S. president pledged yet again to deliver his long-delayed "roadmap for peace" between Israel the Palestinians. Critics slammed the promise as an empty public relations gesture aimed at enabling the embattled Tony Blair to contain rebellion in the British parliament. Not so, replied the White House; the roadmap has a clear and attainable destination. Yet when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched a pre-emptive strike against the U.S. peace plan, by insisting that references to Palestinian independence be struck from the text, George W. Bush and his team simply looked the other way, towards Baghdad. Emboldened, Sharon announced that he'll extend the "security fence", now under construction by Israel, along the length of the West Bank, effectively encircling Palestinian territory. Sharon's opponents claim this is a shameless attempt to establish a de-facto border, while encroaching on some of the West Bank's best agricultural land and taking control of the Palestinian's border with Jordan. So much for American even-handedness, say Muslim spokesmen. European statesmen, too, decry the Bush administration's readiness to make war in Muslim lands while giving peace in Israel little more than lip service. It's the kind of accusation finding growing support among Europeans as a whole, according to a new poll by Washington's Pew Research Center. Only 14% of Spaniards and 34% of Italians view the US positively; in Italy, the U.S. had a 70% favourable rating just a year ago. These figures were reported before the bombs began to fall near Baghdad; few international affairs specialists expect America's approval ratings to do anything but continue their precipitous decline. Says the University of Washington's Prof. Livingston, no-one should expect the growing hostility of the international community to convince President Bush to alter his course. "He has framed this war in the name of humanitarianism, removing dictators, righting moral injustices, even when the rest of the world, with a handful of exceptions, thinks he is wrong. This rhetoric is anchored in central themes of American political culture, such as American exceptionalism, or the revolutionary era references to 'a city on the hill', a nation free and uncorrupted by the vices and petty concerns of the European powers. This (the Iraq campaign) may be about oil and regional hegemony of the US and a key ally or two, but the ideational framework is classic American idealism of setting the world right -- even if it doesn't agree. Clearly much of the world doesn't. But that spells trouble, too, for countries such as Canada, and even France. Anti-Americanism, particularly within Muslim communities around the world, has a way of spilling over into all western democracies. A deeply resented America, one that provokes ever more poisonous outpourings of anti-western passions -- this, too, is a nation crying out for reconstruction. Not for the first time, the U.N. will have to regroup and find a way to bring back into the fold a rogue power, a nation neck-deep in trouble after flagrantly repudiating the U.N.'s good offices. President Bush is right: time is running out for Saddam Hussein. But the backlash from this war could toll the bell, too, for the current occupant of the Oval office. |