Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University
http://fbc.binghamton.edu/commentr.htm
Commentary No. 105 - Jan. 15, 2003
The simple answer is no, because the U.S. hawks won't take anything the Iraqis say or do as an acceptable reason to call off the war dogs. I feel we are in the midst of the novel by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada), a story of death as a social ritual. The United States is going to war with Iraq primarily in order to go to war with Iraq. It is for this reason that nothing that the inspectors say, nothing that the other members of the Security Council (including Great Britain) say, certainly nothing that Saddam Hussein may say will make any difference.
The war with Iraq was publicly requested during the last years of the Clinton administration in a statement of some 20 hawks, including Cheney and Rumsfeld. We now know that within days of the Sept. 11 attack, President Bush gave his imprimatur to such a war. All the rest has been pretense and maneuvering. The open defiance of the United States by North Korea in the last three months, and the evasive response to this defiance by the U.S. government, provide further evidence that the real issue is not Iraq's non-compliance with various UN resolutions.
So, why do Bush and the hawks feel that a war is essential? They reason in the following way. The United States is not doing so well these days. In the words of some analysts, the U.S. is in hegemonic decline. Its economy is in an uncertain state. Most of all, it cannot be sure that it will outcompete western Europe and Japan/East Asia in the decades to come. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has lost the major political argument it had to persuade western Europe and Japan to follow all its political initiatives. All it has left is an extremely strong military.
Madeleine Albright, when she was Secretary of State, became at one point furious at the reticence of some of the high-ranking military to endorse her view of what should be done in the Balkans, and is reported to have said, "What is the point of having the strongest military in the world, if we can never use it?" The hawks make that viewpoint the centerpiece of their analysis. They believe that the U.S. has the strongest military in the world, that the U.S. can win any military encounter it undertakes, and that U.S. prestige and power in the world-system can only be restored by a show of force. The point of the force is not to achieve regime change in Iraq (probably a minor benefit, considering what might replace the current regime). The point of using the force is to intimidate the allies of the United States, so that they stop their carping, their criticisms, and fall back into line, meekly as the schoolchildren they are considered to be by the hawks.
The Bush administration has not been divided between unilateralists and multilateralists. They are all unilateralists. Those we call "multilateralists" are simply those who have argued that the U.S. can get its position formally adopted by others (the U.N., NATO), and that, if such resolutions are adopted, the policy is that much easier to implement. The "multilateralists" have always said that, if they fail to get the votes in the U.N. or elsewhere that they need, the U.S. can always go it alone. And the so-called "unilateralists" have bought this line because of the reserve clause. The only difference between the two groups is their estimate of how likely it is to get others to support the U.S. line. What we have therefore is a multilateralism that takes the form: the U.S. is multilateral to the degree that others adopt the U.S. unilateral position; if not, not.
The basic problem is that the hawks really believe their own analysis. They believe that once the war in Iraq is won (and they tend to think this will be done relatively easily), everyone else will fall into line, that the whole Middle East will be reconfigured to the desires of the U.S. hawks, that Europe will shut up, and that North Korea and Iran will tremble and therefore renounce all aspirations to weaponry. The whole world is yelling at the U.S. that the situation is far more complicated than that, that a U.S. military invasion of Iraq will probably make the world situation worse, and that they are reaping the whirlwind. They do not listen, because they do not believe that this is so. They are impressed with the power of the bully. It is called hybris.
The folly of this war that has been so abundantly foretold is that, in addition to causing untold and essentially unnecessary suffering for all sorts of people (and not only in Iraq), it will actually weaken the geopolitical position of the United States and diminish the legitimacy of any of its future positions on the world political scene. We are living in a truly chaotic world, and U.S. pretensions to an impossible "imperium" amount to increasing the speed of an automobile going downhill with brakes that are no longer functioning properly. It is suicidal, and not least for the United States itself.
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