US rogue rage a green light for Monsters by Ray Cassin The Age 2:18pm 23rd Mar, 2003   March 23 2003    The Bush doctrine will not make the world safer, for Americans or anyone else, writes Ray Cassin.    The circumstances that would provoke outside military intervention were epitomised by Saddam Hussein's invasion and annexation of Kuwait... He was not allowed to succeed, and an impressive range of forces, both from inside and from outside the region, was mobilised to evict him. But - this is the most telling indication of the new era - he was evicted from Kuwait, not from Iraq, and was allowed to resume his distinctive style of government and many of his policies in that country.    So concluded the historian and orientalist Bernard Lewis in The Middle East (1995). Lewis's "new era", in which outside powers would supposedly refrain from deposing regimes and revising borders as it suited them, didn't last long, did it? Well, historians are not prophets. But one wonders whether Lewis winces when he reads his words now. In the new era, he predicted, "outside powers" would "at the most, act to defend their own interests, that is to say, markets and oil, and the interests of the international community, that is to say, a decent respect for the rules of the United Nations. Otherwise, the peoples and governments of the Middle East, for the first time in two centuries, will determine their own fate".    Lewis is a shrewd observer of the behaviour of peoples and states. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that what "outside powers" regard as their interests might not coincide, and might very well conflict, with the interests of the international community - especially when these latter interests are defined as a decent respect for the rules of the United Nations. In a conflict between these two competing groups of interests, the chances that the governments and peoples of the region might be left to determine their own fate would be decidedly slender.    Although Lewis was writing in thepost-Cold War era, his book is dominated by the assumptions of the post-Second World War era, in which competing national interests were, notionally at least, to be judged in accordance with "a decent respect for the rules of the United Nations". He did not envisage a world in which the superpower would commit itself to a strategic doctrine that shows no decent respect for those rules, and which threatens to make it impossible for them to be applied, even in the faltering way in which they have been applied in the past half-century. He was not alone in this.    Until the Bush doctrine of preventive war became US policy, the view of the world expressed in Lewis's history was the common one, and it is worth recalling how recently this was so, because we should recognise that we now live in revolutionary times. And it is the Bush doctrine, not the existence of rogue states or global terrorist movements, that is making the revolution.    Apologists for the doctrine do not portray it as innovative in itself, but as an innovative response to extraordinary events. But none of the other elements in what is now unfolding in Iraq is either new or unique. Not the fact that Saddam Hussein is a dictator, nor that he is a dictator with torture chambers, nor even that he is a dictator with torture chambers and, quite probably, weapons of mass destruction, too. There are, after all, other dictators in the world with torture chambers and weapons of mass destruction. Some of them, like Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, are even US allies. Yet the US is not demanding, under threat of war, that Pakistan give up its nuclear weapons lest they fall into the hands of terrorists, although that could very well happen if Musharraf is either deposed by the radical Islamists who oppose him or forced to seek an accommodation with them. Nor is the US promising the people of Pakistan that it will liberate them from the grip of Musharraf, who happens to be very useful to US interests.    Some supporters of this war acknowledge the contradictions in the US stance and concede that George Bush and his circle are unlikely champions of human rights. They recognise, too, that the American consumption of Iraqi oil - on average almost 880,000 barrels a day, according to The New York Times - vastly exceeds that of any other country, giving it a commercial interest in securing control of that oil which is proportionately greater than that of any other country, including the ever-maligned France. And they are frankly sceptical of the notion that a two-year US military occupation of Iraq can lay the foundations of a new, democratic Middle East. Yet they support the war anyway because it means there will be one less monster in the world. They like to call this the humanitarian case for war.    The problem with this is not only that plenty of other monsters will survive and may even prosper, if it suits the superpower. It is that accepting the notion of preventive war means collapsing the distinction between a war fought for a just cause, such as defence against the threat of imminent attack, and war fought for a perceived strategic imperative, such as the belief that someone might pose a threat in future. To collapse that distinction is to say that might is right, and that it is all right to behave as rogue states behave.    I don't find the prospect of a world shaped by such a doctrine more appealing than the prospect of a world with one less monster in it. The Bush doctrine, and the unashamed assertion of American empire on which it rests, will not make the world safer, for Americans or anyone else. While pretending with weasel words that they are merely enforcing the UN's resolutions, the superpower and its compliant allies such as Australia have abandoned the attempt to build an international order based on law and embraced one built on force. The monsters of the world couldn't have asked for a stronger act of legitimation. Visit the related web page
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