[LCM Articles] What Next? Reflections for the Children of the Lebanon (Al-Hayat)

[Loai Naamani]

What Next? Reflections for the Children of the Lebanon


Anthony Barnett     Al-Hayat     - 04/09/06


Nearly five years after the 'Axis of Evil' speech, the thing that continues
to annoy is how President Bush, Prime Minister Blair and now Israeli
spokesmen, claim to be the ones who are opposing terrorism. Anyone who does
not support them, they suggest, is soft and permissive of bin Laden and
copy-cat gangs of violent fundamentalists.

If I had a great deal of money, I would take Bush and Blair to court for
aiding and abetting terrorism. They were warned that their so-called 'War on
Terrorism' would make things worse. And it has. It makes them fellow
perpetrators of the current disasters.

Indeed, when I learnt at the start of the recent conflict that an Israeli
general had said on television that it would turn back the clock twenty
years on the Lebanon, I thought this guy is threatening collective
punishment on an entire nation for a guerrilla incident. It is the kind of
outrageous thing retired generals say. I was confident he would be
officially repudiated and told to zip his mouth. But no, it turns out he was
Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the Chief of Staff directly in charge of the
campaign that aerially bombed power stations, water plants and factories.
One definition of terrorism is precisely that it attempts to deliver
collective punishment.

The word "disproportionate" is code for a deep revulsion over such behaviour
- behaviour that makes it seem that Israel believes it has the right to
impose on any society which touches or challenges it what it has already
imposed upon Palestine.

No great wisdom is needed to see that such a strategy dooms all sides to
destruction, perhaps within a generation. Opposition to it, to Bush, Blair,
Halutz and their approach of "making war on terror", stems from a confidence
that there is a better, more effective and lasting way of frustrating
terrorism, a way that also protects human rights, democracy and justice from
their hands. It is an opposition shared by large numbers in the established
democracies, in many of them a clear majority. Most people around the world
have been wiser than the occupants of the White House and 10 Downing Street.
This is an important democratic resource to hold onto in the coming months
and maybe years.


II

The masters of the West are not only fighting terrorism the wrong way, they
are screwing up on their own terms. The invasion of Iraq was misconceived,
but having done it, it would have been far better if the US had at least
succeeded, as it might have, in helping Iraq become the democracy that its
people wanted at the time. Instead, it turned itself into an occupying
force, apparently trusting no one.

The New York Times ran a telling article on 16 August. It said that a
classified report by the US Defense Intelligence Agency recorded that  the
number of  explosive devices in Iraq had risen from 1,454 in January to
2,625 in July (of which 1,666 exploded and 959 were discovered before they
went off). The number of Americans killed dropped from 42 to 38, thanks to
better armor. This may have encouraged an impression that the only story in
Iraq today is a "slide towards civil war". But in fact 70 percent of the
explosions were directed against the American-led military force. The number
of Americans wounded "soared, to 518 in July from 287 in January".  But the
most important part of the story was not the US military's assessment of the
growing reach and effectiveness of its opponents. It is worth quoting the
paragraphs in full - they came quietly at the end:

".some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush
administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that
Iraq's democratically elected government might not survive.
"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are
considering alternatives other than democracy," said one military affairs
expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and
agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.
"Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect," the expert
said, "but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from
democracy."
What does mean it, to "plan" for democracy not "surviving". The mixture of
active and passive should arouse suspicion. If the White House is
"considering alternatives" to democracy,  could it be something on the lines
of "Better our dictator than their's"? But wasn't this the very reason why
the US supported Saddam Hussein against Iran in the first place, when Donald
Rumsfeld went to meet and shake the bad man's hand in 1983? Democracy was
the last but also the best reason for the invasion. If Iraq's elected
government is replaced by an alternative at the instigation of the White
House then America's defeat will be complete.


III

America has been defeated - not just the Rumsfeld strategy, or President
Bush. His successor will not be able to pick up the phone and say "Hey, it
was them not me, let's move on" and expect a return to the status quo ante
bellum of US hegemony. America itself, its state and its system of
government is undergoing a defeat. The more it denies this, the greater the
danger to us all.

It is a moral defeat, from Guantanamo to the Manichaean unilateralism of
good against evil. It is a constitutional defeat for a system that permitted
Bush to steal an election and whose courts are only slowly establishing
fundamental rights but doing so under a barrage from the right. It is a
democratic defeat because the politics which permitted it is based on a
financially suborned, gerrymandered, often uncheckable, low-turnout voting
system that threatens to reduce suffrage in the USA to government of the
rich, by the rich, for the rich - while it invades countries abroad in the
name of democratic self-rule. It is a defeat for its media that misleads and
misjudges. A defeat for its political class which as a whole has lost the
capacity to oppose. And soon, from all accounts, America is also about to
suffer an economic defeat on a global scale. Above all, perhaps, it is a
defeat for American intelligence in every sense of that word.
 

IV

Have we been here before? The Defeat of America is the title of a book of
essays written in the early seventies by the distinguished American
historian Henry Steele Commager. In it he wrote, "Why do we find it so hard
to accept this elementary lesson of history, that some wars are so deeply
immoral that they must be lost, that the war in Vietnam is one of these wars
and that those who resist it are the truest patriots?"

We should beware of simplistic comparisons. 'Vietnam' was more an epoch than
an episode, longer even than the ten years of maximum conflict from 1965-75.
With hindsight it also includes Watergate, the opening to China, the US
bombing of Cambodia, the frustration of Nixon and Kissinger's war plan in
Vietnam itself, and then Nixon's ejection from office in the face of certain
impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanours against the United States, as
he set out to subvert an election and then covered up his role, as part of
his and Kissinger's attempt to create an imperial Presidency. 

Already at least two major differences can be seen between that war and
Iraq. In Vietnam America's defeat meant there was a worthy and deserved
victor - the Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh's communists. They were promptly
punished for their triumph, by Pol Pot's attacks and above all by the
Chinese (whose doomed and stultifying one-party system they still share).
Nonetheless, they were the leaders of the original national and
anti-colonial revolution. They had no quarrel with the United States and
launched no attack upon it. In Iraq by contrast there is no opposition that
can attract support. It is a defeat that brings only further defeat.

Second, in its defeat America could celebrate itself. As Commager puts it in
his conclusion, the Constitution was "vindicated". The courts stood firm.
The press, the so-called fourth estate, held up its head with pride as it
exposed Nixon against ferocious pressure and did not blink. Opposition to
the war removed President Johnson. The system itself removed Nixon. A
renewal of the American political system as a democracy took place in the
wake of the disastrous engagement in Indochina.
 
This domestic achievement was undone. America's liberal triumph in the Cold
War masked the roll-back of the liberal gains made thanks to the
constitution in the aftermath of Vietnam. In the quarter century from the US
forced evacuation of Saigon in 1975 to the presidential election of 2000,
the US media was suborned, its commitment to basic objectivity undone. A
relentless effort to impeach Clinton for denying a sexual liaison under oath
had as its real target the constitution itself. The triviality of the issue
showed that the Republicans accepted only the technicality and not the
gravity of the charges against Nixon. A constitutional system designed to
provide impartial protection was hollowed out and made an instrument for
partisanship (nominations to the Supreme Court being a perfect example).

The way was thus prepared for the Bush/Cheney attempt to recreate the
imperial Presidency that had proved beyond Nixon's reach.


V

9/11 offered them the opportunity. They took it extremely well. The
important thing about 9/11 is what happened on 9/12. It was less the attack
that will come to define what the burning towers stand for, than what was
then made it.

The rest of world said, "We are all Americans".

What we meant was we had all been bombed and attacked and lost innocents and
we identified with and supported Americans against this appalling assault.
(Paradoxically, even those who callously cheered at 9/11 did so because they
welcomed Yankee imperialism being humiliated and hurt like them.) There was
a profound and justified sense of a need for solidarity. Geopolitically, the
international system as a whole backed the invasion of Afghanistan for
harbouring Osama bin Laden.

It was a never-to-be-repeated opportunity for the United States to create
around itself an alliance of sympathy. We can be sure such an alliance would
have dealt effectively with terrorism on the basis of shared judicial
procedures, bringing the rule of law to the world in a new fashion, as well
as further isolating and soon undermining regimes like those of Saddam.

The generous reaching out to the United States was also challenge. Implicit
in the offer was that America accept that it is a country like other
countries, each special, each capable of being hurt, in need of alliances,
having to participate in relationships it could not simply dictate. What a
fantastic moment, what a wonderful opportunity.

Thanks to Bush and Cheney the USA told the rest of the world to fuck off.

(Only Tony Blair then stepped forward to say "fuck me".)

Bush and Cheney declared war and assumed war-time powers. They threw
alliances to the wind, they formulated a new national security doctrine
authorising preventative attack, they mobilised their military against a
global 'axis of evil', they asserted that if you were not with them you were
with the terrorists, they initiated illegal bugging and interception within
America on a scale even Nixon could hardly have dreamt of.
 
Why did they do this? To fight terrorism, when every serious expert warned
that an invasion of Iraq was just what bin Laden wanted? To secure control
of oil supplies? To spread democracy (from the creators of Guantanamo and
Abu Graib)? Looking back over the arguments about America's international
strategy over the last five years and its supposed Neo-Conservative nature,
perhaps the explanation is that they did not care about or take any serious
interest at all in the rest of the world.

Cheney and Rumsfeld were recruited as young men into Nixon's 1969 White
House. They surely dreamt of revenge for Watergate. 9/11 offered a wonderful
opportunity for just this, and they unleashed an assault upon the political
and constitutional system which had made Watergate possible. This would
explain the sense of coup which accompanied Bush's declaration of "war" and
the "cabal" like nature of the group that implemented it. More important, it
would mean that the motives driving America's post-9/11 foreign policy have
been fundamentally domestic, using policy towards the rest of the world as a
means of achieving ends within the United States.

The verbiage of neo-conservatism provided a useful cover but was never the
'doctrine' of Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld. This was an illusion of
intellectuals occupationally prone to the narcissistic belief that their
words matter even for those who seldom read. Bush and his assistants did not
seek to rule America in order to shape the world. When, thanks to 9/11, they
declared a world-shaping policy, they did so in order to rule America all
the better.

As domestic policy the Bush/Cheney strategy proved itself a brilliant
success. It had already mobilised the money, built the churches and fixed
the media. With these assets in hand they used 9/11 to appeal to a deep
aspect of American nationalism that they understood and felt at home with
(and whose history and nature has been brilliantly dissected by Anatol
Lieven). Politicians who have the capacity to mobilize and reshape a
nationalism are genuine leaders - at home. This was where they were smart,
not stupid, and how they came to be more than just a cabal.


VI

And abroad? "What you call unilateralism I call leadership", John Bolton
once said, before he became UN Ambassador to the United Nations. The White
House creates reality. It declares victory in advance - because this is what
works with its voters. Which is why the only event to significantly damage
Bush has been Hurricane Katrina, whose reality outspun the President's team.

Israel has been an example, perhaps even an inspiration to them in the
creation of realities. The influence of the Israeli lobby in the United
States, now reinforced by Rapture evangelism and its fantastical,
apocalyptic obsession with the Holy Land, is said to exercise too great an
influence in Washington. But perhaps what has really hypnotised American
leaders since 1967 is Israel's success. This mainstreams with America's
'winner takes all' political culture. Israel's failure to create the reality
it desired in the Lebanon is therefore especially dangerous for it as the US
is not the best ally for those who really need it.
 
In Hizbullah Israel has finally created an enemy worthy of itself.  The war
it has just waged against it in the Lebanon proved not to be a continuation
of the others Israel has fought since 1948. For all the pan-Arab talk, these
were, Fred Halliday has pointed out, comparatively local engagements. Now,
he argues, two great regional forces are redefining the Middle East, both
born in 1979. In February that year the Iranian revolution lit the torch of
Shia fundamentalism, in October the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan initiated
the US arming of Sunni mujahadin, of whom the most notable was Osama bin
Laden. Today, both currents have condensed onto Israel's conquest of
Palestine, and the conflict over Israel's borders really has become
regional.

Therefore, Israel has to make a deal if it is to flourish as more than a
besieged outpost . One reason, it can now be seen, is technical. The
Katyusha rockets that Hizbullah fired at Israel were old-fashioned, kinetic
devices stuffed with ball-bearings that belong to the analogue age. Soon an
inexpensive global positioning system will be replacing some of those
passive metal balls. Sooner or later do-it-yourself drones, with
contour-hugging devices to get under radar, will be constructed, easily
capable of making a long-range, one-way journey, even from a suburb of Amman
or Cairo. Fear will return to Tel Aviv undermining its commercial life. What
is a wall? It is a defensive barrier designed for explosives to be flown
over.

But only a culture and a human network, not technology, assembles, hides,
and fires such devices. Previously, defeating Israel meant shouting Allah
Akbar, while firing an AK-47 into the air, wasting ordinance, risking
wounding your own people and giving Israel intelligence. Now it is now cool
to be Hiz, to wear heavy-duty spectacles, speak slowly, not show off and
never be photographed.

There is only one way to 'defeat' such a movement. In so far as its
grievances are genuine, these must be addressed. It must be welcomed
(whatever the gritting of teeth) into a legitimate representative process
where it can be held to account for the authority it exercises. In this way
it also becomes itself and ceases to be a puppet of others.

How is this possible if, as with Hizbullah, it is committed to the
annihilation of Israel? Well, only when there is a secure Palestinian state
with a leadership that insists on a ceasefire and tells its allies not to
fire on Tel Aviv because it desires peace not war. A Palestine that looks
forward and sees a life for itself as a country is the precondition for
politically isolating and then disarming those who want to wipe Israel of
the map. Without this Israel will never be secure. Hence the unbelievable
folly of spurning a Hamas offer of a ceasefire when it won the elections in
Palestine, the starting point for such a process.


VII

In this era of international petitions, what should a global patriot call
for? There are two immediate conflicts. One is against the terrorist
networks inspired by al-Qaida. They need to be arrested and they can be. It
is not a war, but nor is it a conflict that can be lost if that means
terrorists immolating themselves with nuclear devices. The second is the
'war on terror'. This should be abandoned. It is making terrorism worse by
playing their game.

At the heart of this "war" is the centre of the so-called axis-of-evil,
Iran, now the most likely candidate for further escalation by the
Bush/Cheney White House as it continues to try and "define reality" for its
domestic purposes. Nothing is more likely to undermine the fundamentalists
of Tehran than diplomatic recognition, trade and tourism. They may be able
to do the enrichment of uranium but they can't do the enrichment of their
own people.

Will the reality-shock of this year's Lebanon war make the leaders of Israel
and America see sense? I'm told not. That it is too late. Israel's
conclusion after Lebanon is that it has to stay in the West Bank and further
impose itself unilaterally, is merely a gloomy confirmation that all is
lost. For the settlements are a misnamed, they not a fixed point. They
either grow or shrink. To keep them is to expand them, and to expand them is
to further the illegal and inhuman expropriation of Palestine.  It means the
parties to the conflict will never be able to find it in themselves to
engage in the agreements and mutual recognition they need. In which case the
outcome will eventually be nuclear war over Jerusalem while the Chinese and
Indians rub their hands in disbelief.

I refuse to believe this.

But what is the alternative, what other direction is there that can set in
motion a different momentum? In an important and deeply responsible critique
of the Bush foreign policy, to be published at the end of September, Anatol
Lieven and John Hulsman call for an inclusive regional conference over Iraq
(with America dropping its childish refusal to talk directly with Iran) and
for Israel and Palestine to be given accession status for full membership of
the European Union. To the latter suggestion we should now add the Lebanon
as well.

The European Union is a machinery for creating peace where there was war.
This was its initial impulse with respect to France and Germany. The
Northern Ireland peace agreement was made possible and underpinned by the
fact that both the UK and the Irish Republic were in the Union. Europe has a
responsibility towards all three small countries on the Eastern
Mediterranean. None, it could be said, are fully viable on their own, but
the EU is also purpose built to protect vulnerable small states. Membership
would provide the secular framework necessary for religious societies to
live in peace with each other. It would secure full political and human
rights in them all in a way that would be credible and legitimate. The EU's
critics often argue that it purpose is to become a 'super-state' that
threatens the nations its encompasses. In fact the Union has rescued its
member nation states from fratricide and permits their revival in a context
of shared sovereignty and peace. Given what we have just witnessed we are
entitled to ask, if not this what next?

Dedicated to Saqi Books and Dar al Saqi whose warehouse in South Beirut was
twice hit by bombs, 23 August 2006

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