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Walden Bello - 2004
Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines and president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. A retired professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, he is currently a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based analysis and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author of 15 books, the most recent of which is The Food Wars.
Global Civil Society Meets Amidst Crisis of Empire (January 2004)
For the thousands of representatives of global civil society who will be gathering in Mumbai for the World Social Forum on January 16-22, Washington is the world's number one problem. Yet what a difference a year makes! The US they confront today is not quite the same cocksure superpower of yesterday.
When George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast on May 1st last year to mark the end of the war in Iraq, Washington seemed to be at the zenith of its power, with many commentators calling it, with a mixture of awe and disgust, the "New Rome". The carrier landing, as Canadian scholar Anthony Wallace points out, was a celebration of power-a spectacle that was masterfully choreographed along the lines of the American sci-fi thriller Independence Day and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. In the opening scene of Triumph, Adolf Hitler is pictured approaching from the air the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg in 1934. President Bush began his big spectacle on board the Abraham Lincoln by touching down on the vessel's deck in a S-3B Viking jet. Emblazoned on the windshield of the aircraft were the words "Commander in Chief". The US president then emerged in full fighter garb, invoking the imagery of the dramatic concluding scenes in Independence Day. In those scenes, an American president leads a global coalition from the cockpit of a small jet fighter. The aim of this US-led operation is to defend the planet from the attack of outer-space aliens. But fortune is fickle, particularly in wartime. Less than six months later, in mid-September, the US, along with the European Union, lost the "Battle of Cancun", as the fifth Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization collapsed in that Mexican tourist town. A key architect of the successful effort to thwart Washington and Brussels' plan to impose their agenda on the developing world was the newly formed Group of 20, led by Brazil, India, South Africa, and China. That the G20 dared to challenge Washington was not unrelated to the fact that by September, the legitimacy of the invasion was in tatters owing to the collapse of the weapons-of- mass-destruction rationale for waging the war; Bush's loyal ally, Tony Blair, was fighting for his political life; and US forces in Iraq were being subjected to something akin to the ancient torture known as "Death by a Thousand Cuts". Power is partly a function of perception, and the inflation of US power right after the Iraq invasion was followed by an even more rapid deflation in the next few months. With its image transformed into that of a flailing Gulliver lashing out ineffectively at unseen Lilliputians in Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq, other candidates for "regime change" such as Pyongyang, Damascus, and Teheran saw Washington's missives as increasingly hollow. Washington was not unaware of the rapid erosion, in the eyes of the world, of its capacity to coerce: by late October, in fact, George W. Bush was talking, Bill Clinton-like, about giving a "security pledge" to North Korea, the aggressive isolation of which had been one of the hallmarks of this first year in office. Unable to call for a higher troop commitment without triggering the perception of being trapped in a war without a foreseeable ending, Washington was desperate. By the time of the Cancun ministerial, the message coming out of Washington was: "We want to get out of Iraq, but not with our tail between our legs. We need UN cover, some semblance of a multinational security force to leave behind, and some semblance of a functioning government". US authorities hailed the passing on October 17 of a watered-down UN Security Council resolution authorizing a multinational force under US leadership, but most observers saw few non-US occupation troops and little non-US funding for reconstruction resulting from its vague provisions. To many governments, it was reminiscent of "peace with honor", Richard Nixon's exit strategy from Vietnam, and few were willing to become ensnared in a lost cause. When Washington announced an accelerated withdrawal plan a few weeks later in response to increasingly effective guerrilla attacks, the impression stuck that, indeed, the Bush administration was after a Vietnam-style exit. By the third week of October, 104 US occupation soldiers had been killed since Bush's May 1st declaration ending the war-with the average death rate hitting one a day in the first three weeks of the month. In November, also known as Washington's cruelest month, some 74 US combatants were killed in action, over 30 of them in three helicopters brought down by Iraqi fire. By the end of 2003, some 325 US troops had been killed in combat since the invasion of Iraq in March, 210 of them since Bush's Nuremberg-style descent from the skies. The capture of Saddam Hussein in mid-December simply served to confirm that Saddam was not in control of what was clearly a people's resistance since guerrilla attacks continued unabated. And as 2004 commences, the question is no longer whether the Iraqi resistance would stage their equivalent of a Tet Offensive but when. The Dynamics of Overextension The Iraq quagmire and the collapse of the Cancun ministerial of the WTO were just two manifestations of that fatal disease of empires: over-extension. There were other critical indicators, among them:
- the failure to consolidate a dependent regime in Afghanistan where the writ of the Karzai government only extends to the outskirts of Kabul;
Imperial Dilemma Against such challenges to its hegemony, the US's absolute superiority in nuclear and conventional warfare capability counts for little, in much the same way that a sledgehammer is useless in swatting flies. To intervene, invade, and enforce an occupation, ground forces will continue to be the decisive element, but there is no way the US public, most of whom no longer see the Iraq invasion as worth its price in US casualties, will tolerate a significant expansion in ground troop commitments beyond the 168,000 serving in Iraq and the Gulf states and some 47,000 deployed to Afghanistan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the Balkans. One option is to return to the gunboat diplomacy of the Clinton era, to what Boston University's Andrew Bacevich describes as the calibrated application of airpower without ground force commitments "to punish, draw lines, signal, and negotiate". The Bush people, however, rail against such an option, and for good reason: whether it was Bill Clinton's fusillade of cruise missiles against Osama bin Laden's reported hideouts in Afghanistan and Sudan or President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Operation Rolling Thunder against North Vietnam in 1964, air strikes are very limited in their impact against a determined foe. But then neither does the ground troop option fare any better, leading to the question: is the US in a no-win situation? The problem is that the Bush people have unlearned a vital lesson of imperial management: that, as Bacevich puts it, "Governing any empire is a political, economic, and military undertaking; but it is a moral one as well". If the Roman Empire lasted 700 years, says UCLA's Michael Mann, it is because the Romans figured out that the solution to the problem of overextension was not the deployment of more and more legions but the extension of citizenship first to local elites, then to all freemen. For much of the post-World War II period, in fact, the dominant bipartisan faction of the US political elite exhibited the Roman realization that a "moral vision" was central to imperial management. That was a world forged mainly by alliance-building, undergirded by multilateral mechanisms such as the United Nations, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and resting on the belief that, as Frances Fitzgerald put it, "electoral democracy combined with private ownership and civil liberties, was what the United States had to offer the Third World". National Security Memorandum 68, the defining document of the Cold War, was not simply a national security strategy; it was an ideological vision that spoke of a "long twilight struggle" against communism for the loyalties of the peoples and countries throughout the world. This cannot be said of the current administration's National Security Strategy document which speaks in narrow terms of the American mission mainly as one of defending the American way of life from its enemies abroad and arrogates the right to strike against even potential threats in pursuit of American interests. Even when the reigning neoconservatives speak about extending democracy to the Middle East, they cannot dispel the impression that they see democracy in the light of realpolitik - as a mechanism to destroy Arab unity in order to assure the existence of Israel and guarantee US access to oil. A Return to Multilateralism Can a more sophisticated administration undo the damage to US imperial management wrought by the Bush presidency by bringing back mutilateralism and a "moral" dimension to empire? Perhaps, but even this approach may be anachronistic. For history does not stand still. It will be difficult for a reinvigorated US-led coalition politics to douse the wildfire of Islamic fundamentalist reaction that will eventually bring down or seriously erode the staying power of US allies like the Saudi and Gulf elites. Going back to the Cold War era promise of extending democracy is unlikely to work with disenchanted people who have seen US-supported elite-controlled democracies in places like Pakistan and the Philippines become obstacles to economic and social equality. To revert to the Clinton era of promising prosperity via accelerated globalization won't work either since the overwhelming evidence is that, as even the World Bank admits, poverty and inequality increased globally in the 1990s - the decade of accelerated globalization. As for economic multilateralism, financier George Soros' appeal for a reform of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO to promote a more equitable form of globalization may seem sound, but it is unlikely to draw the support of the dominant US business interests which, after all, torpedoed the WTO talks with their aggressive protectionist posture on agriculture, intellectual property rights, and steel tariffs, and their gangbuster attitudes towards other economies in the areas of investment rights, capital mobility, and the export of genetically modified products. Armed with the ideological smokescreen of free trade, the US corporate establishment is, in fact, likely to become even more protectionist and mercantilist in the era of global stagnation, deflation, and diminishing profits that the world has entered. Challlenges And the future? Militarily, there is no doubt that Washington will retain absolute superiority in gross indices of military might such as nuclear warheads, conventional weaponry, and aircraft carriers, but the ability to transform military power into effective intervention will decline as the "Iraq syndrome" takes hold. The break-up of the Atlantic Alliance is irreversible, with the conflict over Iraq merely accelerating the disruptive dynamics of differences building since the 1990s in practically all dimensions of international relations. Europe will most likely move towards creating a European Defense Force independent of NATO, though it will not challenge US strategic superiority. Politically, however, Europe will increasingly slip out of the US orbit and present an alternative pole - pursuing regional self-interest via a liberal, diplomacy-oriented, and multilateral approach. In terms of economic strength, the US will remain the dominant power over the next two decades, but it is likely to slip as the source of its hegemony-the global framework for transnational capitalist cooperation to which the WTO is central-is eroded. Bilateral or regional trade arrangements are likely to proliferate, but the most dynamic ones may not be those integrating weak economies with one superpower like the US or EU but regional economic arrangements among developing countries-or, in the parlance of development economics, "South-South cooperation". Formations, such as Mercosur in Latin America, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the G20, will increasingly reflect the key lessons that developing countries have learned over the last 25 years of destabilizing globalization: that trade policy must be subordinated to development, that technology must be liberated from stringent intellectual property rules, that capital controls are necessary, that development demands not less but more state intervention. And, above all, that the weak must hang together, or they will hang separately. Among the developing countries, China is, of course, in a category by itself. Indeed, China is one of the winners of the Bush era. It has managed to be on the side of everybody on key economic and political conflicts and thus on the side of nobody but China. As the US has become ensnared in wars without end, China has deftly maneuvered to stay free of entangling commitments to pursue rapid economic growth, technological deepening, and political stability. Democratization, of course, remains an urgent need, but the unraveling of China owing to its slow progress-which many China watchers love to predict to sell their books-is not likely to happen. The other big winner of the last few years is what the New York Times called the world's "second superpower "after the US. This is global civil society, a force whose most dynamic expression is the World Social Forum that is meeting in Mumbai. This rapidly expanding trans-border network that spans the South and the North is the main force for peace, democracy, fair trade, justice, human rights, and sustainable development. Governments as disparate as Beijing and Washington deride its claims. Corporations hate it. And multilateral agencies find themselves compelled to adopt its language of "rights". But its increasing ability to delegitimize power and cut into corporate bottom lines is a fact of international relations that they will have to live with. A decreased US capacity to control global events, the rise of regional economic blocks as the multilateral system declines, rising assertiveness among developing countries, and the emergence of global civil society as an increasingly powerful check on states and corporations-these trends are likely to accelerate in the next few years. History is cunning and mischievous, often playing an outrageous game of bringing about precisely the opposite than what its actors intend. "Full spectrum dominance" by the United States in the 21st century has been the avowed objective of the neoconservatives that came to power with George Bush. Paradoxically, pursuit of this objective by the current administration has accelerated the erosion of US hegemony-a process that might have been slowed down by a more skilled imperial elite. The crowds in Mumbai will undoubtedly continue to regard the US as a mortal threat to global peace and justice, but they will also be cheered by the increasing difficulties of an arrogant empire that fails to see that decline is inevitable and that the challenge is not to resist the process but to manage it deftly. How Iraq has Worsened Washington's Strategic Dilemma (2 April 2004)
It is more than a year since the US invaded Iraq. Yet what a difference a year makes! The US we confront today is not quite the same cocksure superpower of yesterday.
When George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast on May 1st last year to mark the end of the war in Iraq, Washington seemed to be at the zenith of its power, with many commentators calling it, with a mixture of awe and disgust, the "New Rome". The carrier landing, as Canadian scholar Anthony Wallace points out, was a celebration of power—a spectacle that was masterfully choreographed along the lines of the American sci-fi thriller "Independence Day" and Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will". In the opening scene of Triumph, Adolf Hitler is pictured approaching from the air the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg in 1934. President Bush began his big spectacle on board the Abraham Lincoln by touching down on the vessel's deck in a S-3B Viking jet. Emblazoned on the windshield of the aircraft were the words "Commander in Chief". The US president then emerged in full fighter garb, invoking the imagery of the dramatic concluding scenes in Independence Day. In those scenes, an American president leads a global coalition from the cockpit of a small jet fighter. The aim of this US-led operation is to defend the planet from the attack of outer-space aliens. But fortune is fickle, particularly in wartime. Today, Bush and his advisers must be wishing they had not staged the May 1st photo spectacle. Less than six months later, in mid-September, the US, along with the European Union, lost the "Battle of Cancun", as the fifth Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization collapsed in that Mexican tourist town. A key architect of the successful effort to thwart Washington and Brussels' plan to impose their agenda on the developing world was the newly formed Group of 20, led by Brazil, India, South Africa, and China. economy. That the G-20 dared to challenge Washington was not unrelated to the fact that by September, the legitimacy of the invasion of was in tatters internationally owing to the collapse of the weapons-of- mass-destruction rationale for waging the war; Bush's loyal ally, Tony Blair, was fighting for his political life; and US forces in Iraq were being subjected to something akin to the ancient torture known as "Death by a Thousand Cuts". Power is partly a function of perception, and the inflation of US power right after the Iraq invasion was followed by an even more rapid deflation in the next few months. With its image transformed into that of a flailing Gulliver lashing out ineffectively at unseen Lilliputians in Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq, other candidates for "regime change" such as Pyongyang, Damascus, and Teheran saw Washington's missives as increasingly hollow. Washington was not unaware of the rapid erosion of its capacity to coerce in the eyes of the world: by late October, in fact, George W. Bush was talking, Bill Clinton-like, about giving a "security pledge" to North Korea, the aggressive isolation of which had been one of the hallmarks of this first year in office. Unable to call for a higher troop commitment without triggering the perception of being trapped in a war without a foreseeable ending, Washington was desperate. By the time of the Cancun ministerial, the message coming out of Washington was: "We want to get out of Iraq, but not with our tail between our legs. We need UN cover, some semblance of a multinational security force to leave behind, and some semblance of a functioning government". US authorities hailed the passing on October 17 of a watered-down UN Security Council resolution authorizing a multinational force under US leadership, but most observers saw few non-US occupation troops and little non-US funding for reconstruction resulting from its vague provisions. To many governments, it was all too reminiscent of "peace with honor", Richard Nixon's exit strategy from Vietnam, and few were willing to become ensnared in a lost cause. When Washington announced an accelerated withdrawal plan a few weeks later in response to increasingly effective guerrilla attacks, the impression stuck that, indeed, the Bush administration was after a Vietnam-style exit. By the third week of October, 104 US occupation soldiers had been killed since Bush's May 1st declaration ending the war — with the average death rate hitting one a day in the first three weeks of the month. In November, also known as Washington's cruelest month, some 74 US combatants were killed in action, over 30 of them while riding three helicopters brought down by Iraqi fire. By the end of 2003, some 325 US troops had been killed in combat since the invasion of Iraq in March, 210 of them since Bush's Nuremberg-style descent from the skies. As of March 24, 2004 some 289 soldiers had been killed since May 1, 2003, bringing the total US dead to 586. The capture of Saddam Hussein in mid-December simply served to confirm that Saddam was not in control of what was clearly a people's resistance since guerrilla attacks continued unabated. And as we enter the fourth month of 2004, the question is no longer whether the Iraqi resistance would stage their equivalent of a Tet Offensive but when. The Dynamics of Overextension The Iraq quagmire and the collapse of the Cancun ministerial of the WTO were, just two manifestations of that fatal disease of empires: over-extension. There were other critical indicators, among them:
- the failure to consolidate a dependent regime in Afghanistan where the writ of the Karzai government only extends to the outskirts of Kabul;
Imperial Dilemma Against such challenges to its hegemony, the US's absolute superiority in nuclear and conventional warfare capability counts for little, in much the same way that a sledgehammer is useless in swatting flies. To intervene, invade, and enforce an occupation, ground forces will continue to be the decisive element, but there is no way the US public, most of whom no longer see the Iraq invasion as worth its price in US casualties, will tolerate a significant expansion in ground troop commitments beyond the 168,000 serving in Iraq and the Gulf states and some 47,000 deployed to Afghanistan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the Balkans. What is clear now is that the US military is currently badly stretched. As James Fallows notes in the latest issue of the Atlantic, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that "the entire US military is either in Iraq, returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go". 40 per cent of the troops deployed to Iraq this year will not be professional soldiers but members of the National Guard or Reserves, who signed up on the understanding that they were only going to be part-time warriors. I am sure that most of them did not expect to be deployed for months on end to a very dangerous place. One option is to return to the gunboat diplomacy of the Clinton era, to what Boston University's Andrew Bacevich describes as the calibrated application of airpower without ground force commitments "to punish, draw lines, signal, and negotiate". The Bush people, however, rail against such an option, and for good reason: whether it was Bill Clinton's fusillade of cruise missiles against Osama bin Laden's reported hideouts in Afghanistan and the Sudan or President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Operation Rolling Thunder against North Vietnam in 1964, air strikes are very limited in their impact against a determined foe. But then neither does the ground troop option fare any better, leading to the question: is the US in a no-win situation? The problem is that the Bush people have unlearned a vital lesson of imperial management: that, as Bacevich puts it, "Governing any empire is a political, economic, and military undertaking; but it is a moral one as well". If the Roman Empire lasted 700 years, says UCLA's Michael Mann, it is because the Romans figured out that the solution to the problem of overextension was not the deployment of more and more legions but the extension of citizenship first to local elites, then to all freemen. For much of the post-World War II period, in fact, the dominant bipartisan faction of the US political elite exhibited the Roman realization that a "moral vision" was central to imperial management. That was a world forged mainly by alliance-building, undergirded by multilateral mechanisms such as the United Nations, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and resting on the belief that, as Frances Fitzgerald put it, "electoral democracy combined with private ownership and civil liberties, was what the United States had to offer the Third World". National Security Memorandum 68, the defining document of the Cold War, was not simply a national security strategy; it was an ideological vision that spoke of a "long twilight struggle" against communism for the loyalties of the peoples and countries throughout the world. This cannot be said of the current administration's National Security Strategy document which speaks in narrow terms of the American mission mainly as one of defending the American way of life from its enemies abroad and arrogates the right to strike against even potential threats in pursuit of American interests. Even when the reigning neoconservatives speak about extending democracy to the Middle East, they cannot dispel the impression that they see democracy in the light of realpolitik - as a mechanism to destroy Arab unity in order to assure the existence of Israel and guarantee US access to oil. A Return to Multilateralism? Can a more sophisticated administration undo the damage to US imperial management wrought by the Bush presidency by bringing back mutilateralism and a "moral" dimension to empire? Perhaps, but even this approach may be anachronistic. For history does not stand still. It will be difficult for a reinvigorated US-led coalition politics to douse the wildfire of Islamic fundamentalist reaction that will eventually bring down or seriously erode the staying power of US allies like the Saudi and Gulf elites. Going back to the Cold War era promise of extending democracy is unlikely to work with disenchanted people who have seen US-supported elite-controlled democracies in places like Pakistan and the Philippines become obstacles to economic and social equality. To revert to the Clinton era of promising prosperity via accelerated globalization won't work either since the overwhelming evidence is that, as even the World Bank admits, poverty and inequality increased globally in the 1990's, which was a decade of accelerated globalization. As for economic multilateralism, financier George Soros' appeal for a reform of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO to promote a more equitable form of globalization may seem sound, but it is unlikely to draw the support of the dominant US business interests which, after all, torpedoed the WTO talks with their aggressive protectionist posture on agriculture, intellectual property rights, and steel tariffs, and their gangbuster attitudes towards other economies in the areas of investment rights, capital mobility, and the export of genetically modified products. Armed with the ideological smokescreen of free trade, the US corporate establishment is, in fact, likely to become even more protectionist and mercantilist in the era of global stagnation, deflation, and diminishing profits that the world has entered. Challengers And the future? Militarily, there is no doubt that Washington will retain absolute superiority in gross indices of military might such as nuclear warheads, conventional weaponry, and aircraft carriers, but the ability to transform military power into effective intervention will decline as the "Iraq syndrome" takes hold. The break-up of the Atlantic Alliance is irreversible, with the conflict over Iraq merely accelerating the disruptive dynamics of differences building since the 1990's in practically all dimensions of international relations. Europe will most likely move towards creating a European Defense Force independent of NATO, though it will not challenge US strategic superiority. Politically, however, Europe will increasingly slip out of the US orbit and present an alternative pole-pursuing regional self-interest via a liberal, diplomacy-oriented, and multilateral approach. In terms of economic strength, the US will remain the dominant power over the next two decades, but it is likely to slip as the source of its hegemony-the global framework for transnational capitalist cooperation to which the WTO is central - is eroded. Bilateral or regional trade arrangements are likely to proliferate, but the most dynamic ones may not be those integrating weak economies with one superpower like the US or EU but regional economic arrangements among developing countries — or, in the parlance of development economics, "South-South cooperation". Such formations as Mercosur in Latin America, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Group of 21, will increasingly reflect the key lessons that developing countries have learned over the last 25 years of destabilizing globalization: that trade policy must be subordinated to development, that technology must be liberated from stringent intellectual property rules, that capital controls are necessary, that development demands not less but more state intervention. And, above all, that the weak must hang together or they will hang separately. Among the developing countries, China is, of course, in a category by itself. Indeed, China is one of the winners of the Bush era. It has managed to be on the side of everybody on key economic and political conflicts and thus on the side of nobody but China. As the US has become ensnared in wars without end, China has deftly maneuvered to stay free of entangling commitments to pursue rapid economic growth, technological deepening, and political stability. Democratization, of course, remains an urgent need, but the unraveling of China owing to its slow progress - which many China watchers love to predict to sell their books - is not likely to happen. The other big winner of the last few years is what the New York Times called the world's second superpower after the US. This is global civil society, a force whose most dynamic expression is the World Social Forum that is meeting in Mumbai. This rapidly expanding trans-border network that spans the North and the South is the main force for peace, democracy, fair trade, justice, human rights, and sustainable development. Governments as disparate as Beijing and Washington deride its claims. Corporations hate it. And multilateral agencies find themselves compelled to adopt its language of "rights". But its increasing ability to delegitimize power and cut into corporate bottom lines is a fact of international relations that they will have to live with. A decreased US capacity to control global events, the rise of regional economic blocks as the multilateral system declines, rising assertiveness among developing countries, and the emergence of global civil society as an increasingly powerful check on states and corporations — these trends are likely to accelerate in the next few years. History is cunning and mischievous, often playing an outrageous game of bringing about precisely the opposite than what its actors intend. "Full spectrum dominance" by the United States in the 21st century has been the avowed objective of the neoconservatives that came to power with George Bush. Paradoxically, pursuit of this panacea by the current administration has accelerated the erosion of US hegemony — a process that might have been slowed down by a more skilled imperial elite. Falluja and the Forging of the New Iraq (18 April 2004)
A defiant slogan repeated by residents of Falluja over the last year was that their city would be "the graveyard of the Americans." The last two weeks has seen that chant become a reality, with most of the 88 US combat deaths falling in the intense fighting around Falluja. But there is a bigger sense in which the slogan is true: Falluja has become the graveyard of US policy in Iraq.
Falluja: a Strategic Dilemma The battle for the city is not yet over, but the Iraqi resistance has already won it. Irregular fighters fueled mainly by spirit and courage were able to fight the elite of America's colonial legions-the US Marines-to a standstill on the outer neighborhoods of Falluja. Moreover, so frustrated were the Americans that, in their trademark fashion of technology-intensive warfare, they unleashed firepower indiscriminately, leading to the deaths of some 600 people, mainly women and children, according to eyewitness accounts. Captured graphically by Arab television, these two developments have created both inspiration and deep anger that is likely to be translated into thousands of new recruits for the already burgeoning resistance. The Americans are now confronted with an unenviable dilemma: they stick to the ceasefire and admit they can't handle Falluja, or they go in and take it at a terrible cost both to the civilian population and to themselves. There is no doubt the heavily armed Marines can pacify Falluja, but the costs are likely to make that victory a Pyrrhic one. As if one battlefield blunder did not suffice, the US sent a 2500-man force to Najaf to arrest the radical cleric Muqtad al-Sadr. Again, even before the battle has begun, they have created a fine mess for themselves. The threat of an American assault has merely brought over more Shiites, including the widely respected Ayatollah Sistani to the defense of al-Sadr. If the Americans do not attack, they will be seen by the Iraqis as being scared of taking on al-Sadr. If they attack, then they will have to engage in the same sort of high-casualty, close-quarters combat cum indiscriminate firepower that can only deliver the same outcome as an assault on Falluja: tactical victory, strategic defeat. The Making of a Quagmire The last few days have left us with indelible images that will forever underline the quicksand that is US policy in Iraq. There are the marines blaring speakers at Falluja insurgents taunting them for hiding behind women and children, when the reality is that women and children are part of the Iraqi resistance. There is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cursing telecasts by Al Arabiya and Al Jezeerah claiming there are 600 women and children dead when even CNN has admitted that a high proportion of the dead and wounded in Falluja were indeed women and children. Then there is George W. Bush vowing not to "cut and run" but not offering any way out of the impasse except the application of more of the military force with which the Americans have ruled Iraq in the last year. To some analysts, the problem lies in the miscalculations of Rumsfeld. The man, in this view, simply underestimated what it would take to have a successful military occupation of Iraq. Rumsfeld thought 160,000 troops would suffice to invade and occupy Iraq. The result, according to James Fallows in the latest issue of the Atlantic, is that "it is only a slight exaggeration to say that today the entire US military is either in Iraq, returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go." 40 per cent of the troops deployed to Iraq this year will not be professional soldiers but members of the National Guard or Reserves, who signed up on the understanding that they were only going to be weekend warriors. To many it now seems that the estimates of military professionals like Gen. Anthony Zinni, who said that it would take 500,000 troops to secure Iraq, were more on the mark. But even Zinni's figure-the high-water mark of the US troop presence in Vietnam-may now been outstripped by the wildfire speed of the insurgency racing through rural and urban Iraq. To other observers, it has been the ineptitude of Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, that has created the crisis. In this view, Bremer made three big mistakes of a political nature, all during his first month in office: removing top-ranking Ba'ath Party figures, some 30,000 of them, from office; dissolving the Iraqi Army, thus throwing a quarter of a million Iraqis out of work; and making a handover of power indefinite and dependent on the writing of a constitution under military occupation. Add to these his recent closing of a Shiite newspaper critical of the occupation and his ordering the arrest of an aide of Muqtad al-Sadr-moves that, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein contends, were calculated to draw al-Sadr into open confrontation in order to crush him. Inept, Rumsfeld and Bremer have certainly been, but their military and political blunders were inevitable consequences of the collective delusion of George Bush and the reigning neoconservatives at the White House. One element of this delusion was the belief that the Iraqis hated Saddam so much that they would tolerate an indefinite political and military occupation that had the license to blunder at will. A second element was persisting in the illusion that that it was mainly "remnants" of the Saddam Hussein regime that were behind the spreading insurgency when everybody else in Baghdad realized the resistance had grassroots backing. A third was that the Shiite-Sunni divide was so deep that their coming together for a common enterprise against the US on a nationalist and religious platform was impossible. In other words, it was the Americans themselves who spun their own web of false fundamental assumptions that entrapped them. The Bushites are hopelessly out of touch with reality. But so are others in Washington's hegemonic conservative circles. An influential conservative critic of the administration's policy, Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek's international editions, for instance, has this to offer as the way out: "The US must bribe, cajole, and coopt various Sunni leaders to separate the insurgents from the local population...[T]he tribal sheiks, former low-level Baathists, and regional leaders must be courted assiduously. In addition, money must start flowing into Iraqi hands." Nationalism and Islam: Fuel of the Resistance The truth is, the neoconservative scenario of quick invasion, pacification of the population with chocolates and cash, installation of a puppet "democracy" dominated by Washington's proteges, then withdrawal to distant military bastions while an American-trained army and police force took over security in the cities was dead on arrival. For all its many fractures, the cross-ethnic appeal of nationalism and Islam is strong in Iraq. This was brought home to me by two incidents when I visited Iraq along with a parliamentary delegation shortly before the American bombing. When we asked a class at Baghdad University what they thought of the coming invasion, a young woman answered firmly that had George Bush studied his history, he would have known that the Americans would face the same fate as the countless armies that had invaded and pillaged Mesopotamia for the last 4,000 years. Leaving Baghdad, we were convinced that the young men and women we talked to were not the kind that would submit easily to foreign occupation. Two days later, at the Syrian border, hours before the American bombing, we encountered a group of Mujaheddin heading in the opposite direction, full of energy and enthusiasm to take on the Americans. They were from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine, and Syria, and they were the cutting edge of droves of Islamic volunteers that would stream into Iraq over the next few months to participate in what they welcomed as the decisive battle with the Americans. As the invasion began, many of us predicted that the American invasion would face an urban resistance that would be difficult to pacify in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country. Famously, Scott Ritter, the former UN arms inspector, said that the Americans would be forced to exit Iraq like Napoleon from Russia, their ranks harried by partisans. We were wrong, of course, since there was little popular resistance to the entry of the Americans to Baghdad. But we were eventually proved right. Our mistake lay in underestimating the time it would take to transform the population from an unorganized, submissive mass under Saddam to a force empowered by nationalism and Islam. Bush and Bremer constantly talk about their dream of a "new Iraq." Ironically, the new post-Saddam Iraq is being forged in a common struggle against a hated occupation. Steep Learning Curve The Americans thought they could coerce and buy the Iraqis into submission. They failed to reckon with one thing: spirit. Of course, spirit is not enough, and what we have seen over the last year is a movement traveling on a steep learning curve from clumsy and amateurish acts of resistance to a sophisticated repertoire combining the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit-and-run tactics, stand-your-ground firefights, and ground missile attacks. Unfortunately, these tactics have also included strategically planned car bombings and kidnappings that have harmed civilians along with Coalition combatants and mercenaries. Unfortunately, too, in the resistance's daring effort to sap the will of the enemy by carrying the battle to the latter's territory, it has included missions that deliberately target civilians, like the Madrid subway bombing that killed hundreds of innocents. Such acts are unjustified and deeply deplorable, but to those quick to condemn, one must point out that the indiscriminate killing of some10,000 Iraqi civilians by US troops in the first year of the occupation and the current targeting of civilians in the siege of Falluja are on the same moral plane as these methods of the Iraqi and Islamic resistance. Indeed, the "American way of war" has always involved the killing and punishing of the civilian population. The bombing of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Operation Phoenix in Vietnam-all had the strategic objective of winning wars via the deliberate targeting of civilians. So, please, no moralizing about the West's "civilized warfare" and Islamic "barbarism." The Loyal Opposition Problem The resistance is on the ascendant in Iraq, but the balance of forces continues to be on the American side. The Iraq war has developed into a multi-front war, with the struggle for public opinion in the United States being one of the key battles. Here, there has been no decisive break so far. The liberals are hopeless. At a time that they should be calling for a fundamental reexamination of US policy and pushing withdrawal as an option, their line, as the liberal Financial Times columnist Gerard Baker, expresses it, is, "Whether or not you believe Iraq was a real threat under Saddam Hussein, you cannot deny that a US defeat there will make it one now." It does not help to point out to Baker and others that this is a non-sequitur. For the liberals are not responding to logic but to baiting from the same frothing right wing that, three decades ago, predicted chaos, massacre, and civil war should the US withdraw from Vietnam. For presidential contender John Kerry and the Democrats, the alternative is stabilization via greater participation by the United Nations and the US' European allies, which, of course, hardly distinguishes them from George Bush, who is desperate to bring in the UN and more troops from the Coalition of the Willing to relieve US troops in frontline positions. One of the reasons Democratic leaders do not call for withdrawal is their fear that this could harm them in the November elections-despite the fact that, according to the Pew Research Center, 44 per cent of Americans now say that troops should be brought home as soon as possible, up from 32 per cent last September. But an even more fundamental reason is that they agree with Baker's position that while the invasion of Iraq may not have been justified, a unilateral withdrawal cannot be allowed since this would strike an incalculable blow to American prestige and leadership. Where is the Peace Movement? The paralysis that has gripped the Democrats on Iraq can only be broken by one thing: a strong anti-war movement such as that which took to the streets daily and in the thousands before and after the Tet Offensive in 1968. So far that has not materialized, though disillusion with US policy in Iraq has spread to more than half of the US population. Indeed, at the very time that it is needed by developments in Iraq, the international peace movement has had trouble getting in gear. The demonstrations on March 20 of this year were significantly smaller than the Feb.10 marches last year, when tens of millions marched throughout the world against the projected invasion of Iraq. The kind of international mass pressure that makes an impact on policymakers-the daily staging of demonstration after demonstration in the hundreds of thousands in city after city-is simply not in evidence, at least not yet. Which raises the question: Was the New York Times premature in calling international civil society the world's "second greatest superpower" in the wake of the Feb. 10 demonstrations? All this indicates that the dramatic April events in Iraq do not yet add up to an Iraqi equivalent of the Tet events in Vietnam in 1968. At most, they are a dress rehearsal. Domestic opposition to the war in the US has yet to escalate to a critical mass. Without this domestic challenge from below, the Bush administration will most likely continue to send in more troops to the Iraq meat-grinder in pursuit of an elusive military solution that would turn the conflict into a long-drawn war of attrition until the level of casualties finally ends public tolerance in the US for a policy headed nowhere but more body bags. Iraq and the Global Equation Paradoxically enough, while the rise of the Iraqi resistance has not yet altered the correlation of forces within Iraq, it has contributed mightily to transforming the global equation in the last 12 months. It has discouraged a militarily overextended Washington from carrying out efforts at regime change in other countries, like Syria, North Korea, and Iran. It has deflected the attention and resources needed by the Washington for a successful occupation of Afghanistan. It has prevented the US from focusing on its backyard, thus allowing the consolidation of anti-free-market and anti-US governments in Latin America, such as those of Norberto Kirchner in Argentina, Luis Inacio da Silva or Lula in Brazil, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It has deepened the rift in the political, military, and cultural alliance known as the Atlantic Alliance, which served as a potent instrument of Washington's global hegemony during and immediately after the Cold War. Without the example of the defiant challenge posed by the Iraqi resistance, the developing countries might not have gotten their act together to sink the World Trade Organization ministerial in Cancun last September and the US plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami in November. Anti-hegemonic movements the world over, in short, owe the Iraqi resistance a great deal for exacerbating the American empire's crisis of overextension. Yet its face is not pretty, and many on the progressive movement in the United States and the West hesitate to embrace it as an ally. This is probably one of the key obstacles to the emergence of a sustained peace movement in the US and internationally-that the organizing efforts of progressives have been incapacitated by their own qualms about the Iraqi resistance. But there has never been any pretty movement for national liberation or independence. Many Western progressives were also repelled by some of the methods of the Mau Mau in Kenya, the FLN in Algeria, the NLF in Vietnam, and the Irish Republican Movement. National liberation movements, however, are not asking for ideological or political support. All they seek is international pressure for the withdrawal of an illegitimate occupying power so that internal forces can have the space to forge a truly national government. Surely on this limited program progressives throughout the world and the Iraqi resistance can unite. Sexual Abuse, Lies, and Videotape Sink America’s Iraq Expedition (10 May 2004)
The scandal now shaking the Bush administration over Iraq is testimony to the truth in the saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words." There are, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warns, more pictures to come, and according to reliable sources, they include photos and videos showing the murder and rape by US troops of Iraqi male and female detainees. In fact, some websites have already displayed photos of US troops gang-raping an Iraqi woman and forcing another to perform oral sex on a soldier.
The investigative report of abuses at Abu Ghraib concentration camp by US Major General Antonio Taguba speaks of "extremely graphic photographic evidence," some of which cover the following acts: forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture; positioning a naked detainee with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; a male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; using unmuzzled military working dogs to frighten and bite detainees; and "sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and possibly a broomstick." Systematic Lawlessness American officials take pains to stress that these abuses are the work of a few bad eggs and that they do not stem from US policy. Really? According to human rights organizations, some 10,000 Iraqis were killed over the last year, most of them civilians from arbitrary and indiscriminate firing, and very few US troops, if any, were ever investigated and prosecuted. Rumsfeld has himself often said that the captives in America’s "war against terror" do not enjoy the protection of the Geneva Conventions. Even more important, the invasion of Iraq was unauthorized by the United Nations Security Council and thus in violation of international law. With their leaders acting unilaterally and illegally, the army jailers of Abu Ghraib had very good role models in their treatment of Iraqis. Where they were different from Bush and his top lieutenants is that they were not hypocritical. Washington speaks about "liberating" the Iraqis while devastating them and their land with invasion and occupation. The Abu Ghraib jailers dispensed with the moral cant and treated the Iraqis without civilized restraints. All they knew was the prisoners were the enemy, and enemies have no rights. The fact that they were brazen enough to take digital photos of their depredations indicates that they did not feel they were doing anything wrong. As the Taguba report reveals, many soldiers regarded abuse of detainees as standard operating procedure (SOP), while others said there was no SOP at all. Formula for Defeat The combination of the people’s uprising in Falluja and other cities and the total collapse of any legitimacy to the invasion and occupation triggered by the photos have turned the tables on the US in Iraq. With the US population rapidly turning against the war, Bush and his associates are now desperate for an exit strategy that will preserve some modicum of US influence in Baghdad. They are not likely to find one, and so we are faced with a replay of the last years of the Vietnam War, where the American presence drags on until the troops are finally and definitively evicted. Defeat in Iraq will come but it will be protracted. The Iraq debacle is likely to make future US interventions more difficult owing to their unpopularity with US public. It may even push the US into a new isolationist phase, looking inward and refusing to be engaged internationally. That will be good for the rest of the world, which has been destabilized too long by this lawless superpower. The Abu Ghraib horror show provides the perfect excuse for members of the US’ Coalition of the Willing to withdraw their troops from Iraq. But saying no to Washington will take moral courage, and that, unfortunately, is something that is in short supply among the ruling regimes in London, Rome, Tokyo, Seoul, and Manila. With the US Army on Trial, Can "Fragging" be far Behind? (18 May 2004)
The Abu Ghraib horror show has angered the Arab world and shamed most Americans. Yet, in the short term, it is its impact on the US Army that is most threatening to the Bush administration’s Iraq expedition.
All of those accused of sexual abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison are from the Army. Ironically, this is the service whose leaders were most reluctant about the planned Iraq intervention. In the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, told a committee of the US Congress that at least 200,000 troops would be necessary to invade and pacify Iraq. He was publicly contradicted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who projected that the number of troops needed to garrison Iraq would go down to 30,000 by the end of the summer of 2003. With a strategy relying on precision bombing and airpower to blow Saddam’s Republican Guards to smithereens, Rumsfeld felt confident that the Army would essentially be left with mopping-up operations and a largely peaceable occupation. Paying the Price Now, to pay for the massive miscalculation of Rumsfeld and the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, the Army is the service that is being called upon to provide more troops for the Iraq meat-grinder. Some 135,000 troops remained in Iraq as of March 2004, and with the rise in the resistance in April, some 20,000 soldiers scheduled to go home had their tours of duty extended till June 2004. With the active-duty army reduced by the military reforms of the Clinton and Bush administrations, the army leadership has had to draw on the Reserves and the National Guard to garrison Iraq. Already, nearly 40 per cent of the US military contingent in Iraq, says James Fallows, come from the Reserves and National Guard, also popularly referred to as "weekend warriors" since they usually hold down civilian jobs. One result is a morale problem since, as former Bush administration anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke asserts, the extended service has disrupted "the lives of tens of thousands who counted on their civilian jobs to pay mortgages and other family expenses." Now with the unfolding Abu Ghraib scandal, it seems to many in the Army that their service is being groomed to be the fall guy for the debacle that is clearly in the making in Iraq. Replaying Vietnam? A replay of what happened to the Army during the Vietnam War now seems to be a very real possibility. The debilitating impact of that war on the Army was seared in the memory of its officers much more than those of the other services, like the Navy, Air Force, or Marines. As one key Air Force advocate of the fashionable strategy of precision bombing told author David Halberstam, their respective experiences in Vietnam spelled the difference between receptiveness to military intervention among officers in the Air Force and Army: "[He] believed that he and others in the Air Force had been less damaged by Vietnam than the army. Certainly, he and his peers who had flown there...had been frustrated by what they felt were appalling rules of engagement, and they had often taken fire from places along the Ho Chi Minh Trail that were outside the zone of returnable fire. But the burden of combat for the air force had been carried out by an elite officer corps. There had been no widespread smoking of dope or fragging of officers as he believed there had been in the army. Morale had never deteriorated within his service. They had lost men and overcome bitter frustrations, but somehow it had not gone as deep or as corrosively into the bloodstream of the air force as it had in the army, he thought. Many of the army people, he felt, had returned from the war deeply hurt, almost emotionally wounded, as if there were an element of personal humiliation in what had happened that greatly affected the army’s views of succeeding crises." The lessons the Army leadership learned in Vietnam and the determination never to let the Army unravel again came to be personified by Gen. Colin Powell, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the senior Bush administration and the first nine months of the Clinton presidency. Powell was distrustful of civilian politicians who, as in Vietnam, did not fully appreciate the massive implications of military decisions that seemed like "a piece of cake." Powell and his team at the Pentagon, according to Halberstam, "were not only unalterably opposed to any seemingly quick and easy flexing of American military might, a flash of airpower or sea power in places where it was convenient, they were also nervous about assuming any simple humanitarian role that might be poorly thought out, too open-ended, and might somehow draw the country into an unwanted combat commitment." The Powell Doctrine This stance was codified as the "Powell Doctrine," which, stated simply, declared that interventions had to be massive, with clear objectives, with significant public support, and with a well defined exit strategy. Otherwise, nothing doing. It was not that the spirit of the doctrine was not interventionist. It was. But it was presented as "smart" interventionism in contrast to the open-ended interventionism of the past. As is well known, despite the fact that he came out as one of the first Gulf War’s best known heroes, Powell opposed the plan to attack Saddam Hussein, preferring to draw a line around Saudi Arabia that the Iraqis would cross at their peril. He was so opposed to intervention in the Balkans during the Clinton administration that a frustrated Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations, said, "What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?" Albright and Clinton came to regard the Powell Doctrine as a sledgehammer that was inappropriate for the interventions needed for the post-Cold War era. What was needed, they felt, was something more flexible, a strategy that was tied to a greater reliance on "smart weapons" and smaller ground troop deployments. The tension between cautious Army or ex-Army men and civilian advocates of force—"civilian militarists," in Chalmers Johnson’s felicitous term- has, if anything, increased under the Bush administration. For even more than the Clinton people, the Pentagon’s civilian elite under Bush—derisively called "chicken hawks" by the generals—worship precision weapons and airpower. Asked about his relations with the neoconservatives who dominate the Pentagon’s policy staff, Powell, now secretary of state, is reported to have said, "I won’t let the bastards drive me from office." Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state and also an Army veteran, told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that his consistent advice to Powell in late 2003 whenever there was an issue with the White House on the Middle East was, "Tell these people to fuck themselves." And Ret. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, former chief of the Central Command, had this to say of Douglas Feith, the neoconservative undersecretary for policy at the Pentagon: "I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day." Trying to Head off Disaster As the Bush administration, fueled by Rumsfeld, Feith, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, moved closer to invading Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, the friction between the Pentagon civilians and the Army and its prominent veterans increased. The planned deployment violated all these key tenets of the Powell Doctrine. The objective was open-ended. The force of 150,000 was too small. There was little planning for the occupation. There was no exit strategy. There was little appreciation for the urban insurgency to follow. Warned Ret. Gen. Joseph Hoar, another former chief of the Central Command: "In urban warfare, you could run through battalions a day at a time...All our advantages of command and control, technology—all those things are, in part, given up and you are working with corporals and sergeants and young men fighting street to street." Those were prescient words but Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were not listening. In a last ditch effort to convince Bush not to go into what he saw as a disastrous war, Powell was said by Woodward to have had the following conversation with Bush: "You know that you’re going to be owning this place? Powell said, reminding Bush of what he had told him at their August 5 dinner. An invasion would mean assuming the hopes, aspirations, and all the troubles of Iraq. Powell wasn’t sure whether Bush had fully understood the meaning and consequences of full ownership." By the time US troops reached Baghdad, it was clear that the force committed to Iraq was too small, as American soldiers were helpless to prevent the widespread looting of government buildings, including the National Museum, where antiquities of great value were stored. What Powell’s team had feared unfolded in the next few months, as the urban insurgency spread. As Army veteran Armitage saw it, "The Army, in particular, was stretched too thin...fighting three wars—Afghanistan still, Iraq, and the global war on terrorism..." An Explosion Waiting to Happen In the campaign of 2000, the Bush people faulted the Clinton administration for overextending the Army on peacekeeping expeditions, resulting in battalions engaged in these missions failing inspections because they had not been able to keep up with training proficiency and testing. By those measures, Richard Clarke charges, "the Bush administration has now far more badly damaged the United States Army." Neoconservative writers playing journalist in Iraq, such as Max Boot, author of the Savage Wars of Peace, exacerbated Army morale problems by filing stories back in the United States comparing the "smart" Marines to the "stupid" Army, which were widely picked up. In one notable passage, he wrote, "In the Sunni Triangle, US Army patrols are often met with sullen stares. In central Iraq, smiles and thumbs up [for the Marines] are commonplace. Little kids are especially enthusiastic. I felt like the queen of England waving regally at Iraqis as we drove by in our three-Humvee convoy." With Washington refusing to acknowledge they were too few to make a difference, with their own side dumping on them, and with the Iraqi resistance blasting them day by day, morale was sinking fast in the Army, even before Abu Ghraib. But the troops knew where the problem lay, and it was at the top, with officers trying to curry favor with their civilian bosses in Washington. As one soldier wrote to New Yorker contributor George Packer: "The reason why morale sucks is because of the senior leadership, the brigade and division commanders, and probably the generals at the Pentagon and Central Command too, all of whom seem to be insulated from what is going on at the ground level. Either that or they are unwilling to hear the truth of things or (and this is most likely), they do know what is going on, but they want to get promoted so badly that they’re willing to screw over soldiers by being unwilling to face the problem of morale, so they continue pushing the soldiers to do more with less because Rummy [Rumsfeld] wants them to get us out of here quickly. These people are like serious alcoholics unwilling to admit there is even a problem." Abu Ghraib was an explosion waiting to happen. An overstretched army plagued by poor training and absolutely unprepared for dealing with a civilian population that it has conquered is the image that emerges from the report on prison abuse at Abu Ghraib by Maj. General Antonio Taguba. For one, the Abu Ghraib facility was severely "understrength," with only a battalion to manage a population of between 6000 to 7000 detainees. Indeed, one passage could serve as a microcosm for the US Army’s condition in Iraq: "Reserve Component units do not have an individual replacement system to mitigate medical or other losses. Over time, the 800th MP Brigade clearly suffered from personnel shortages through release from activity duty (REFRAD) actions, medical evacuation, and demobilization. In addition to being severely undermanned, the quality of life for Soldiers assigned to Abu Ghraib...was extremely poor. There was no DFAC, PX, barbershop, or MWR facilities. There were numerous mortar attacks, random rifle and RPG attacks, and a serious threat to Soldiers and detainees in the facility. The prison complex was also severely overcrowded and the Brigade lacked adequate resources and personnel to resolve logistical problems." The apparent game plan of the Bush people is to limit those charged, disciplined, and punished in connection with the Abu Ghraib abuses to a few enlisted men and women and maybe a handful of officers. The abuse will be attributed to these few bad eggs and will not be regarded as "systemic." Certainly, guilt will be prevented from reaching up the chain of command and to the civilian leadership that planned the whole criminal invasion that spawned the conditions that led to the abuses in the first place. The only problem with this strategy is that while it might save the high military and civilian command, it will unravel morale even further at the lower levels. In Vietnam, some enlisted men took to "fragging" or killing their officers with grenades when they no longer saw any sense in being told to risk their lives in a war that had lost its legitimacy and its meaning or when they were simply angry at their superiors. There were over 200 recorded fragging incidents in Vietnam. So far, in Iraq, there has been only one reported, by a soldier who rolled three grenades toward his officers in Camp, Pennsylvania, Kuwait, on March 23, 2003. There could be more we don’t know about. There will certainly be more if the Pentagon succeeds in having enlisted men and women take the entire blame for Abu Ghraib and soldiers encounter more and more resistance to what many of them now see as a senseless war. What Colin Powell and his generation of Vietnam-era junior officers have tried so hard to avoid—the unraveling of the morale of the US Army a second time-is upon them. Surely, many of them must be dying to have Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in their crosshairs. But if it is any consolation to them, what Bush extolled as "the mighty US Army" in a recent speech will not be the first conquering legion to fall apart on Mesopotamian soil. Ronald Reagan: a View from the Global South (10 June 2004)
One thing you can say about Ronald Reagan: he knew when to cut and run. When a suicide bomber took the lives of 241 US marines in Lebanon in 1983, he withdrew the US intervention force without batting an eyelash, keen to avoid what he and his advisers feared was a morass that could compromise the US strategically. His stubborn ideological successor at the White House could take a few lessons from him on when to retreat.
The Lebanon withdrawal, however, is the one positive element that this writer sees in the Reagan record. His strategic policy was scary: to get Washington to achieve decisive nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union and prepare it for the possibility of a "limited nuclear war" with the Soviets. Détente was abandoned and the number of potential targets in the Soviet Union was raised from 25,000 to an astounding 50,000 sites by his nuclear war planners. It was actually in the Third World, however, that Reagan waged war, and he did it with the gusto of a playground bully where and when he could get away with it. Early on, he invaded minuscule Grenada and ousted its left-leaning government, with his diplomats manufacturing a "request" for intervention from the little known Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). Also brazen in its violation of international law was his mining of Nicaragua's harbors and his financing and arming of mercenaries—the "contras"—to try to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Then there was the 1986 bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi—an effort to murder Muammar Khaddafy via the use of "surgical" airpower that, instead, ended up killing, the Libyan strongman's daughter and scores of innocent Libyan civilians. Upon news of Reagan's election, the right wing in El Salvador celebrated with firecrackers. They were not to be disappointed. Neither was Ferdinand Marcos, to whom Reagan's emissary George H.W. Bush offered the following toast in Manila in a 1981 visit: "We love you, sir...We love your adherence to democratic rights and processes." It took tremendous pressure on the part of State Department pragmatists like then Undersecretary Michael Armacost to get Reagan to abandon Marcos during the People's Power Uprising in 1986. But while giving in to political realities, Reagan made sure to ensconce his good friend Ferdinand comfortably in exile in Hawaii. Reagan and his ideological partner Margaret Thatcher initiated the neoliberal free-market revolution that ended the post-war compromise between management and labor in the North and swept away development-oriented policies in the global South. It is said that Reagan did not believe in income redistribution. He did, so long as it was in favor of the rich. In the North, anti-union policies, indiscriminate layoffs, tight budgets, and social security cuts gutted the income of the working masses. The statistics are telling: Between 1979 and 1989 in the US, the hourly wages of 80 per cent of the work force declined, with the wage of the typical (or median) worker falling by nearly 5 per cent in real terms. By the end of the Republican era in 1992, the bottom 60 per cent of the population had the lowest share, and the top 20 per cent the highest share, of total income ever recorded. And indeed, among the top 20 per cent, wealth gains were concentrated among the top one per cent, which captured 53 per cent of the total income growth among all families. Reagan's Treasury Department took advantage of third world countries' massive indebtedness to US commercial banks to push them to adopt radical programs of trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization that were administered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank under the rubric of "structural adjustment." For most of the developing world, the 1980's came to be known as the "Lost Decade." In Latin America, owing to structural adjustment, the number of people living in poverty rose from 130 million in 1980 to 180 million by the beginning of the 1990s. In most countries, the burden of adjustment policies fell disproportionately on low-income and middle-income groups while the top five per cent of the population in most countries retained or increased its income share. By the beginning of the nineties, the top 20 per cent of the continent's population was earning 20 times that earned by the poorest 20 per cent. In Africa, structural adjustment was one of the key factors that led to an astonishing drop in per capita income by over two per cent per year in the 1980s, so that at the end of the decade, per capita income had plunged to its level at the time of independence in the 1960s and some 200 of the region's 690 million people were classified as poor by the World Bank. Surveying the devastated landscape created by free-market programs, the World Bank's chief economist for Africa admitted: "We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains so slow in coming." Even key US allies in the Cold War felt the Reagan sting. Demanding more liberal terms for the entry of US goods and investments into the "Newly Industrializing Countries" (NICs) of East Asia, a Reagan subordinate warned: "Although the NICs may be regarded as tigers because they are strong, ferocious traders, the analogy has a darker side. Tigers live in the jungle and by the law of the jungle. They are a shrinking population." Trade warfare was waged against South Korea, so that in the space of four years, the US' massive trade deficit with that country was turned into a trade surplus. Washington also forced Tokyo to drastically raise the value of the yen relative to the dollar, to reduce imports from Japan and increase exports there; this was one of the factors that eventually led to that country's long recession in the 1990s. If I were asked what epitaph I would write for Ronald Reagan, it would be "Here lies a man who was good for the upper 20 per cent of his fellow Americans and his rich and powerful buddies elsewhere, but bad for the rest of us." Oh yes, Reagan gave this left-wing exile political asylum in the US in 1985, but that, I have been assured, was the result of a bureaucratic foul-up. But, thank you anyway, Mr. Reagan, and do rest in peace. D-Day for the WTO (28 July 2004)
In the ten months since the collapse of the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Cancun in September last year, there have been warnings aplenty, directed at the developing countries, that if they did not cooperate, the multilateral trading system would be eroded beyond repair.
The last chance for saving the multilateral system, they were told, was swift approval of a post-Cancun framework for trade negotiations that would, among other things, be geared to making trade an instrument of development. Two influential blocs of developing countries, the Group of 20 and Group of 90, were skeptical but were nonetheless open to the possibility that the WTO hierarchy would break with tradition and produce a negotiating document that would respect their interests. They were right to remain skeptical. The so-called "July Framework" issued by the head of the WTO General Council over a week ago is so unbalanced in favor of the interests of the United States and the European Union that one wonders where these governments have been since the unraveling of the trade body’s ministerial in Seattle in 1999. In the most contentious area, agriculture, the framework amounts to nothing other than an intricate exercise to accommodate influential agro-trade interests in Brussels and Washington. For the latter, the July Framework proposes an enlarged "Blue Box" that would house much of the $100 billion in subsidies appropriated for farming interests by the US Farm Bill of 2002. For the EU, the document proposes protection from substantive tariff for so-called "sensitive products," meaning agricultural commodities that make up to 20-40 per cent of its tariff lines. Meanwhile, nothing concrete is offered to meet the developing countries’ demands for market access restrictions that would preserve their food security and protect their small farmers from unfair competition. These concerns are left to "future negotiations." Perhaps the most blatant example of double standards is the text’s postponing to future negotiations the West African cotton producing countries’ demand for an end to the scandalous $2.8 billion in cotton subsidies by the US, which has caused much hardship among West African farmers by triggering the collapse of the price of cotton globally. The bias against the interests of developing countries goes beyond agriculture. The July Framework’s proposal in the area of industrial commodities simply resurrects the so-called "Derbez Text" that was roundly rejected in Cancun. With its proposal of steep cuts in many of their manufacturing tariff lines, developing countries have denounced the July text as nothing but a prescription for their de-industrialization. The Framework also unilaterally brings back for negotiation the issue of "trade facilitation," one of the so-called "New Issues" that the Doha Ministerial in 1991 agreed could not be negotiated unless there was explicit consensus among all members. Also infuriating is its mentioning its intention to address the global South’s central issues—implementation of onerous WTO rules and the principle "special and differential treatment" for developing countries —without offering any specific proposals but leaving these, as in agriculture, to "future negotiations." Not surprisingly, India, one of the central developing country actors in the WTO, formally rejected the July Framework as a basis of negotiations very soon after it appeared. Many other governments have also expressed opposition, as have many civil society organizations such as Third World Network, Public Citizen, Council of Canadians, Focus on the Global South, and other groups belonging to the influential Our World is not for Sale Network. The developing countries have waited nearly 10 years for the trade superpowers that dominate the WTO to show sensitivity to their efforts to change global trade from being an instrument of their domination to serving as a mechanism to advance their economic development. For this patience, they have been rewarded with a succession of anti-development negotiating frameworks and texts culminating in the July Framework. Thus, as they deliberate on the text during the last days of this month, developing country governments should consider the fact that rejecting the July text may no longer suffice. It is time they actively explore or create other trade mechanisms or frameworks to make development and trade complementary. Development is a goal that can no longer be pursued within a WTO paradigm. G20 Leaders Succumb to Divide-and-Rule Tactics (10 August 2004)
The July Framework Document is a major triumph for the big trade superpowers, particularly the United States. As for the developing world, the situation is more complex, with most countries losing but some claiming that they have made gains. Among the few claiming to be in the win column are Brazil and India, which are acknowledged as the leaders of the G20 and two of the Five Interested Parties (FIPS) that played the leading role in drafting the agriculture text.
Attention needs to be paid to the dynamics of the July framework negotiations since they were a departure from traditional North-South trade negotiations and may set patterns for things to come. General Council Supplants the Ministerial Institutionally, among the innovations is that the General Council has now become de facto the supreme institution for WTO decision-making. What the July meeting came up with was effectively a ministerial declaration without a ministerial meeting. Two ministerial collapses-Seattle and Cancun-underlined to the WTO secretariat and the trade superpowers the unwieldiness of the ministerial as an arena for decision-making. It attracted NGOs and popular protests. It drew ministers, many of whom were not professional negotiators but political people determined to stand up for their country’s interests. It brought the press in large numbers, thus making decision-making more transparent despite the wishes of negotiators accustomed to exclusive "green rooms." Only some 40 trade ministers were present in Geneva for the July GC meeting, with many representatives of countries that played a key role at the Cancun ministerial, such as Kenya and Nigeria, absent. Obviously, with some 100 ministers of WTO member countries absent, a great many governments failed to fully grasp the significance of the meeting. As for global civil society, which had played such a critical role in the outcome in Cancun, it was, for the most part, complacent, failing to appreciate how quickly the trading powers could rebound from their state of disarray. Very few NGOs had people in Geneva during the critical days in July. Dealing with the G20 Yet, this was not simply the old-style manipulative behavior of the trade superpowers and the WTO secretariat ofthe pre-Cancun period. The post-Cancun situation made this impossible. Cancun marked the emergence of the G20 as a key player in trade negotiations. As Ambassador Clodualdo Huguenuy of Brazil put it during the debate at the World Social Forum in Mumbai last January, "The G20 broke the monopoly over trade negotiations by the EU and the US." The US, however, failed to appreciate the change situation immediately. Coming out of the Cancun summit, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick signalled a more aggressive, more unilateralist approach in trade negotiations when he said that the US would thereafter put its emphasis on concluding bilateral agreements with "can do" countries, implying that it would expend less effort in negotiations within the WTO. Washington also launched a frontal assault on the G20, successfully detaching El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica, and Guatemala from the body in a few weeks’ time. As for other developing countries, the G20 was a phenomenon that was received positively. Yet there were apprehensions among them that the most influential members of the G20 were agro-exporters like Brazil and that the main focus of the group was ending the EU and US’ massive subsidy systems and bringing down tariff barriers to market access in these prosperous markets. Many countries, including Indonesia, were worried that the G20 governments were much less concerned with protecting developing country markets and smallholder agriculture from low-priced imports. Hence, the G33 continued to put forward proposals for protected "special products" and "special safeguard mechanisms." Other countries felt the G20 focus on agriculture was inadequate as a strategy for defending developing country interests. This led to the formation of the G90 (composed of the Africa Group, ACP [African Caribbean and Pacificcountries]and the Least Developed Countries) which united around the effort to block the "New Issues" of investment, government procurement, competition and trade facilitation from coming under the jurisdiction of the WTO. Nevertheless, the G20’s formation did electrify the ranks of developing countries, and many governments were inspired by Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim’s promise in his Cancun speech that the aim of the G20 was to"bring it [the world trading system] closer to the needs and aspirations of those who have been at its margins-indeed the vast majority-those who have not had the chance to reap the fruit of their toils. It is high time to change this reality.'' By the spring of 2004, however, Washington’s dual strategy—pursuing bilateral agreements and destroying the G20-was running into trouble. The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that it wanted failed to materialize in the ministerial summit in Miami in November 2003, and it also began to realize that bilateral agreements could complement but never substitute for a comprehensive, multilateral free trade framework to promote corporate trade interests. At the same time, the G20, despite the initial defections, held firm. Shifting Gear To get the WTO restarted, Washington, working closely with Brussels, shifted gears. Instead of trying to destroy or undermine the G20, they moved to make its leaders, Brazil and India, a central part of the negotiations in agriculture, which was the key obstacle to any further moves at liberalization. Thus was formed in early April the informal grouping called the Five Interested Parties (FIPS), composed of the US, EU, Australia, Brazil, and India. It was in close consultation with this grouping that WTO Agriculture Committee Chairman Tim Groser produced the proposed agriculture text of the July Framework. A shift in strategy was also evident towards other countries and formations. In the spring, USTR Zoellick began visiting a number of strategic developing countries. Instead of spurning invitations to the G90 meeting in Mauritus in mid-July, the EU and the US sent high level delegates, including Zoellick. There, confrontational language gave way to rhetorical efforts to get the developing countries not only to come to a compromise on agriculture but also to get talks moving on bringing down non-agricultural tariffs, starting talks on trade facilitation, and getting the negotiations on services underway. But perhaps the strongest message that the developing countries heard from the trade superpowers was this was the last chance to get the multilateral system moving—the implication being that they would be held responsible if the late July General Council talks did not get off the ground. The US-EU drive to restart the WTO succeeded brilliantly. The US and the EU were the main beneficiaries of the agreement to cut non-agricultural tariffs, with the highest tariff rates being subjected to the deepest cuts; indeed, Zoellick went back to the US trumpeting the claim that the accord on NAMA (Non-agricultural Market Access) was a massive victory for US corporations since it was but the beginning of a process that would reduce industrial and manufacturing tariffs to zero. Both the EU and the US scored a victory by getting the developing countries to agree to begin talks on trade facilitation, one of the "new issues" that the developing countries rejected in Cancun. But it was the US that scored the biggest gain, getting as it did, in addition to the foregoing, an expanded "Blue Box" in which to house a considerable portion of the subsidies to its farmers legislated under the US Farm Bill of 2002. Part of Washington’s success stemmed from a wily negotiating strategy. For instance, to get its new expanded Blue Box, Washington distracted the developing countries attention by putting forward its demand that they reduce their de minimis domestic supports, that is, the allowable rate of subsidization of their production. Thrown on the defensive, these countries spent much energy justifying their subsidies, so that they were only too relieved when the US stepped back to compromise on the issue in return for their agreeing to the expansion of the Blue Box. Similarly, just before the General Council meeting, the EU suddenly brought in the category of "sensitive products" to protect some 20-40 per cent of its products from significant tariff cuts. Worried that the EU might put blocks to their demand for protecting products essential to their food security, the developing country negotiators acquiesced. Neutralizing Brazil and India But the key to the victorious US strategy was bringing Brazil and India into the core group of the negotiations, then acceding to these countries’ core demands in order to detach them from the rest of the developing countries. India’s key concern was to avoid the so-called "Swiss Formula" for cutting tariffs that would require it to bring down its agricultural tariffs substantially, something on which it saw eye to eye with the European Union. According to one developing country negotiator, India’s main focus for the General Council was protecting its tariffs and it was not going to push hard on the issue of eliminating agricultural subsidies so as not to endanger the EU’s support for its position on tariffs. (The Indian government’s position on subsidies had been watered down by its informal alliance with the EU on the tariff issue after the Doha Ministerial before the EU abandoned the Indians to align themselves to a common position with the US in the period leading up to Cancun.) Both the EU and India were comfortable with a "Uruguay Round" approach to tariff cuts as they regarded their average tariff level as high enough for them to stomach another round of cuts. There were developing countries, however, with much lower tariff averages, for which even a Uruguay Round approach would be too drastic, for example Honduras, Sri Lanka, Indonesia. On the other hand, removing agricultural subsidies was Brazil’s concern, and here it got its way. The final text affirmed the phase-out of export subsidies as well as certain categories of export credits. The big winner with the phase-out of subsidies is said to be Brazil, with some estimates placing its gains as some $10 billion. According to Amorim, the July decision marked the "beginning of the end" of export subsidies. Yet, the Brazilian "gains" are not secure unless locked in by the modalities of the negotiations. A specific end-date for the elimination of export subsidies will only be clinched in the next phase of discussions. Moreover, even when elimination has supposedly taken place, the EU has after all been known to replace export subsidies with indirect export subsidies by way of direct payments to farmers under the Green Box. This is also the intention of the current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform. Furthermore, the framework leaves untouched the Green Box, which houses up to 70 per cent of US’ total subsidies. Even the most optimistic analysts cannot say for certain that overall levels of support from the two agricultural giants will be brought down. In fact, it is predicted that subsidy levels will be maintained if not increased. Nevertheless, for now, Brazilian agribusiness is very happy. Indeed, it was the pressure of Brazilian agribusiness that allegedly forced Celso Amorim to hang-on to the subsidy issue at the expense of a strong defense of developing country interests in other areas. Having gained nothing from failed negotiations on the FTAA and an EU-Mercosur trade pact, Brazilian agro-exporters were hungry for a successful WTO agreement that would enable them to hike their exports to the EU and US. Among those that were left disadvantaged from India and Brazil placing their specific interests in command were:
- the majority of developing countries whose markets will continue to be flooded by dumped products from the US and EU. For the South as a whole, the opportunity to correct the distortions in agriculture trade legitimized in the Uruguay Round has been lost
Dilemma It was not that lndia and Brazil were not sensitive to the demands of other developing countries. In fact, they were given high marks for consulting the different developing country groupings. It was simply that by becoming central actors in the elaboration of the proposed framework,they had painted themselves into an impossible situation. And the more meeting their own interests began to diverge from a strategy of promoting the interests of the bulk of the developing countries, the more they trumpeted the claim that the July Framework Document was a victory for the South. It is testimony to the prestige of India and Brazil among other countries in the South that up till today, many developing countries do not realize how badly they lost in Geneva. Lessons Learned The trade superpowers learned from the debacle in Cancun. The shift from a confrontational strategy to one of cooptation and subtle divide-and-rule was able to rip apart the superficial "Third World unity" that came out of Cancun. The centerpiece of the strategy was to bring in the leaders of the G20, India and Brazil, into the center of the negotiations and play to their specific interests. They fell for the trap. Moreover, having become central players as members of the exclusive Five Interested Parties, their ability to repudiate large parts of a text that they had been consulted on prior to its release to the General Council was limited. That would have invited the onus of being responsible for the "collapse" of the Doha Round and the multilateral trading system. During and after Cancun, the G20 was seen in some circles as representing a major power shift in the global trading order. Some even saw the G20 as the dynamo for a reinvigorated "New International Economic Order." The reality is that the G20, and in particular Brazil and India, have been accommodated into the ranks of the key global trading powers, but it is increasingly becoming clear that the price for this has been their diluting the strength of the negotiating position of the South. More than ever, the South needs leadership, one that is willing to take risks for the whole and rejects the temptation to settle for small and maybe illusory gains for one’s country. Many had expected the leaders of the G20 to fill this role. In the first decisive post-Cancun encounter, the latter have not lived up to expectations. Globalisation in Asia and China: Assessing Costs and Benefits (September 2004)
In this article, I would like to look at selected aspects of globalisation in Asia, discuss the economic and social implications globally for Asia and the world of the industrial development of China, and offer some suggestions on where to bring the ASEAN-China relationship.
The 1990's were hailed as the decade of globalisation. Yet the 1990's, it is now well established, were a period of economic stagnation and rising poverty for vast parts of the developing world. As noted by the UNDP's Human Development Report 2003, during the 1990's, the number of extremely poor people throughout the world increased by 28 million. More specifically, average per capita income growth was less than 3 per cent in 125 developing and transition economies, and in 54 of them average per capita income fell. Region-wise, the number of poor increased in Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, the Arab states, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of becoming a great new frontier for exploitation, Central and Eastern Europe exacerbated the problem, with the number of people living in poverty tripling to 100 million in the 1990s. In the North, stagnation and rising unemployment were the rule in Japan and Europe. In the US, the nine-year boom did not arrest worsening income distribution. Corporate profits stopped growing after 1997, and when the boom finally ended in the bust of 2001, rising unemployment and rising poverty became central features of the world's most globalised economy. But while the impact of globalisation may be dismal in other parts of the world, Asia seems to be the exception. Globalisation is associated with the rise of China, which is projected by some to be on the way of surpassing the US in terms of size by the middle of this century. But is Asia, indeed, the exception? The Asian Financial Crisis First of all, it must not be forgotten that the most dramatic economic crisis of the era of globalisation occurred in Asia. This was the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The Asian financial crisis was but one of about eight crises that had been brought about the by liberalization of financial flows since the 1970's. But it was the most drastic and far reaching, with its shock waves felt in Russia and Latin America. What brought about the crisis is now undisputed. No longer do we hear the explanation that we often heard before-that it was created by corrupt crony capitalism in which a culture of non-transparency hid bad business decisions. Even Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary of Bill Clinton who was one of the central players during the crisis, now admits that the problem in great part stemmed from the uncontrolled and unregulated movement of speculative capital that was unleashed by the partisans of capital account liberalization. Attracted by high interest rates in economies that followed policies of capital account liberalization prescribed by the IMF and the US Treasury Department, a net inflow of $100 billion was experienced by the economies of East and Southeast Asia between 1994 and 1997. That money went mainly to speculation in real estate and the stock market. When the oversupply of funds in these sectors started to create dislocations in the rest of the economy, speculative capital began to exit, and the exit turned into a panic as foreign exchange speculators like hedge fund operators took advantage of the rush for the exits make a profit. Some $100 billion left these markets in a few short weeks in the summer of 1997, bringing down the economies with them. 1998-2000 were years of stagnation for most of these economies. In a few short weeks, over one million people in Thailand and some 22 million in Indonesia fell below the poverty line. Recovery took place, but most of the countries lost their dynamism, and recovery was more sustained in those countries, such as Malaysia and Thailand, that undertook programs disapproved by the IMF, such as capital controls and expansionary fiscal policies. But for the most part, the so-called "Asian miracle" over in those countries with which it was most associated: Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Victims of their own Strategy Capital account liberalization and financial speculation felled these economies. But they were already in trouble even before events of 1997. The main driver of their growth had been export-oriented manufacturing, or industrialization pursued via the manufacture of commodities using cheap labor. In Southeast Asia, the process had been driven by Japanese capital, which exported some $15 billion to the region in the period 1985-1991 as the appreciation of the yen forced on Japan by Washington made manufacturing in Japan less competitive, forcing the keiretsu or Japanese conglomerates shifted their manufacturing operations to Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and China. But the massive inflow of investment started to taper off by the mid-1990's. Even as capital-account liberalization was undermining these economies by making them prey to the volatile movements of speculative capital, the dependence of their industrial and manufacturing sectors on direct foreign investment became a source of weakness and crisis as the wage differentials between them and China became more and more pronounced in the mid-1990's. By the late nineties and early years of this century, direct foreign investment into these economies as a proportion of total foreign direct investment was greatly reduced, while China's share shot up. By 2002, China in fact was attracting $45 billion a year, a figure second only to that for the United States. But not only were the Asian economies, in fact, losing out in terms of foreign investment. They were losing markets to China and, indeed, they were losing their own markets to extraordinarily cheap imports or smuggled goods from China. The pioneers of the strategy of foreign capital-driven, low-wage-based, export-oriented growth had become victims of their own strategy. Considerations on China So we come to China. When it comes to representing the success of globalisation, China and India are often trotted out. Owing to our greater familiarity with the Chinese case, the following remarks will be confined to China. There are a number of considerations that nuance the commonly accepted picture of China benefiting from globalisation. First of all, if benefiting from globalisation is identified with the adoption of free-market policies, then contrary to the impression painted by neoliberal economists, China did not follow the kind of anti-state policies that were prescribed to and created such disasters in many developing countries. Latin America went the free market route beginning in the 1980's and ended up in crisis and stagnation by the 1990's. East Asian and Southeast Asian countries liberalized their capital account in the early nineties, and this led to the end of the Asian miracle in 1997. In contrast, China kept itself immune from the damaging gyrations of speculative capital by maintaining strong capital controls. The state is the leading force in the economy, not only as a policymaker but also as a productive unit owning or managing multitudes of enterprises. China's market has been one huge protected market, and only recently, with China's entry into the WTO, is it opening up, cautiously. The point is that if free market policies are said to be the key to economic success in the era of globalisation, then certainly China is no exemplar of such policies. Secondly, China's growth has been impressive but it has created tremendous internal contradictions and pressures. Growth has been concentrated in the coastal regions, with the Western and Northwestern provinces being left behind. Despite the fact that 123 million people have been lifted out of poverty by China's growth, inequality has shot up. As one analyst notes, China is already troubled by problems arising from perceived inequities between the new classes of "haves" and "have nots." These problems exist at macro (regional) and micro (neighborhood) levels. Efforts to meet WTO requirements could worsen geographic and urban/rural frictions, widen an already growing gulf between rich and poor, and generally make China more ungovernable. WTO-mandated reforms will almost certainly worsen existing problems with massive unemployment, increases in uncontrolled migrant populations, major public safety and public health issues, and rapid degradation of social welfare infrastructure. Moreover, as China has become more and more central to global growth, so have the implications of its economic and social contradictions become more global in their implications. Third, the accepted picture is that of China's growth stimulating growth in other economies. But there is also another side to this: China's growth also threatens to add pressures for global stagnation and deflation, which have emerged as the main trends in the global economy. Let us digress for the time being and focus on the crisis of overcapacity at the global level before returning to China. Global Overcapacity and China The context of developments in China is tremendous global industrial capacity all around. By the 1990's, the indicators were stark. The US computer industry's capacity was rising at 40 per cent annually, far above projected increases in demand. The world auto industry was selling just 74 per cent of the 70.1 million cars it builds each year. So much investment took place in global telecommunications infrastructure that traffic carried over fiber-optic networks was reported to be only 2.5 per cent of capacity. In steel, excess capacity was estimated nears 20 per cent. Former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch claimed that "there was excess capacity in almost every industry." Indeed, by the end of the 1990's, the gap between capacity and sales was, according to the Economist, was the largest since the Great Depression. In the US economy, as noted above, profits stopped growing after 1997, and this was one of the factors leading firms to a wave of mergers, the main purpose of which was the elimination of competition. The most prominent of these were the Daimler Benz-Chrysler-Mitsubishi union, the Renault takeover of Nissan, the Mobil-Exxon merger, the BP-Amoco-Arco deal, and the blockbuster "Star Alliance" in the airline industry. In 2000, global merger and alliance deals, James Crotty points out, were worth $3.5 trillion, about six times their value in 1994. The $1.1 trillion worth of cross-border mergers in 2000 was thirteen times the figure for 1991, signifying a "merger and alliance wave of historic proportions." A major reason for the continuing overcapacity stemmed from the dynamics of the neoliberal policies that were generalized in the 1980s and 1990s. The process was, however, one fraught with crisis, both in the North and the South, for liberating capital from the constraints of states that had imposed a compromise between labor and capital, and between global capital and national elites, meant, in the context of international competition, bringing down wages-which meant, in turn, choking off the engine of effective demand that capital needed to reproduce itself. As even as structural adjustment limited global demand, the neoliberal policies of opening up national markets and removing restrictions on the movement of investment and capital meant intensified competition for this limited global market. The so-called "core industries," such as automobile and steel, that had massive investments sunk in plant, machinery, and infrastructure were already burdened with excess capacity in the late eighties, yet they were forced to invest even more in global plant to take advantage of the so-called "economies of scale" to reduce their unit costs and thus cut back on their losses. The important thing became holding on or expanding market share in a stagnant global market. Let us at this point return to China. Tremendous new capacity is being added in China, but it is not mean to fill expanded domestic purchasing power but to serve an already weakly growing global market where there is already tremendous overcapacity. The problem is that China's strategy of growth seems to be based less on increasing domestic demand than on dominating world markets. Moreover, US, European, and Japanese TNCs move to China, less to exploit a domestic market but to make it a global manufacturing base. As one account notes, though China's population is 1.3 billion, 700 million-or over half-live in the countryside, earning an average of only $285 a year. These "minuscule wages have slowed China's transition to a consumption-driven economy along the lines of that of the US." Not surprisingly, as one analysis puts it, "China is producing so fast that it may be impossible for the population to absorb it all. Already there are price wars in industries like autos, mobile phone, and auto parts. Excess capacity first. Price wars next. Then a drop in investments. China's growth could slow sharply next year, damaging the mainland itself and neighboring countries increasingly dependent on China. And it could hurt manufacturers worldwide if those excess goods get exported." In cars, for instance, local and foreign manufacturers now have the capacity to produce 2.7 million cars, one million more than Chinese consumers are projected to absorb. And excess capacity could grow to 2.3 million cars by 2005. Globalisation in Asia. A Balance Sheet So far, we have advanced the following points regarding the process of globalisation in Asia. First of all, it is not true that the impact of globalisation on Asia has been largely beneficial. Certainly, the experience of Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, all of whom went through the cauldron of the Asian financial crisis and all of whom are now victims of the foreign-capital-intensive, low-wage, export-oriented strategy that they pioneered, suggests a more ambiguous outcome. Second, the picture about China being a beneficiary of globalisation is too simple. Tremendous inequalities, among regions, among classes, between countryside and city, are driving forward the process of Chinese high-speed growth in directions that may result in greater, rather than less, instability, with all sorts of consequences for the rest of Asia and the world. Third, we must also nuance the picture of China's growth serving as a stimulus to the global economy. In fact, since China's strategy and that of the TNC's is not to hitch investment and growth to significantly expanding local demand but to serve as the low-wage manufacturing base for the global market, massive investment in China is significantly adding to the global problem of overcapacity, stagnation, falling prices, and falling profits. China in my view is in fact less of a savior and more of a problem for the global economy. Beyond Corporate-driven Globalisation The picture we have drawn so far sees China as benefiting from corporate-driven globalisation only if it maintains its low-wage advantage. The same TNCs that once invested in Southeast Asia have moved to China and are prepared to move once more if China loses its competitive edge in labor costs. This may be difficult to imagine at this point, but it cannot be warded off indefinitely if one continues to be dependent on a low-wage, export-oriented, foreign-capital dependent strategy of development. For Southeast Asia and China, the challenge is to adopt development strategies that do not make them hostages to the calculations of transnational firms. What could be the elements of such development strategies? First of all, a key element is to base growth on the expansion of domestic demand rather than export markets. Instead of depressing wages, this would mean raising wages and moving towards greater equality in income distribution. This means both Southeast Asia and China must cease to be low-wage manufacturing bases but expanding markets stimulating domestic industry. Second, neither Southeast Asia nor China can continue on the path of high-speed growth without continuing to incur the tremendous ecological devastation that has accompanied this strategy. Growth rates need to be significantly moderated, and this is only possible if there are policies that promote the equitable sharing of a more moderate expansion of the economy. A strategy of sustainable development would also put agriculture back into the center of the development process, which would mean moving away from the policies of liberalization and benign neglect that are currently dominant. Third, if China has any key lesson for Southeast Asia, it is the importance of strong state leadership of the development process. 10 years of deregulation and privatization need to be reversed throughout the region. A state capable of disciplining foreign capital and using it to achieve national priorities is more essential than ever. Fourth, for Southeast Asia, in light of the competition posed by China, the EU, and the United States at a global level, it is important to be serious about regional integration. To expect to survive as national economies without becoming part of a larger economic bloc coordinating policies in trade, finance, technology, investment, and development is becoming increasingly unrealistic in a world where big economic blocs become the key players. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), in short, must become a reality, and this can only be done through a combination of political will and a democratization of the process of regional integration. Fifth, moving towards domestic-market oriented sustainable development strategies will necessitate a more congenial system of world economic governance. The domination of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization has been one of the major blocks to the adoption of alternative development strategies. Indeed, the IMF and the World Bank have been the strongest promoters of export-oriented manufacturing as strategy for development, while the World Trade Organization protects the north's technological monopoly and subsidized agriculture. A more pluralistic system of world economic governance-where the power the current central institutions is reduced and that of other actors, like the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), is increased-is necessary to create the space for developing countries or developing country blocs to adopt strategies of their choice. Finally, it must be noted that South-South cooperation would be a tremendous step forward in the adoption and generalization of alternative development strategies. The recent formation of the Group of 20, the mainstays of which are Brazil, China, India, and South Africa, is, from this point of view, a very positive development. The G20 has broken up the EU-US monopoly on trade negotiations. But it has the potential to do much more in terms of transforming the system of global relations of economic power. With shared trade and investment strategies within a paradigm that focuses on the inclusion instead of exclusion of the vast millions of the developing world into the development process, the G20, working with the other developing countries, can play a key role in reversing the immiserizing effects of globalisation on most of the world's population. The Republican Right's Challenge to the Global Anti-War Movement (8 November 2004)
There continues to be credible allegations of fraud, particularly in the vote count in the state of Ohio, but most of the United States, including the Democratic Party, has recognized that George W. Bush has been reelected to the presidency with a 3.5 million margin of victory over John Kerry.
Hegemonic Bloc? The terrible truth, however, is that the Republican victory, while not lopsided, was solid. Another phase of the political revolution begun by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the 2004 elections confirmed that the center of gravity of US politics lies not on the center-right but on the extreme right. Now, it remains true that the country is divided almost evenly, and bitterly so. But it is the Republican Right that has managed to provide a compelling vision for its base and to fashion and implement a strategy to win power at all levels of the electoral arena, in civil society, and in the media. While liberals and progressives have floundered, the Radical Right has united under an utterly simple vision the different components of its base: the South and Southwest, the majority of white males, the upper and middle classes that have benefited from the neoliberal economic revolution, Corporate America, and Christian fundamentalists. This vision is essentially a subliminal one, and it is that of a country weakened from within by an alliance of pro-big government liberals, promiscuous gays and lesbians, and illegal immigrants, and besieged from without by hateful Third World hordes and effete Europeans jealous of America¹s prosperity and power. There are, indeed, two Americas, but one is confused and disorganized while the other exudes a confidence and arrogance that only superior strategy and organization can bestow. The Radical Right has managed, with its vision of a return to an imagined community - a pristine white Christian small-town America circa 1950 - to construct what the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci called a "hegemonic bloc." And this bloc is poised to continue its reign for the next 25 years. The future of democracy, economic rights, individual rights, and minority rights seems bleak in the US, but it is perhaps only through a second shock therapy - the first being Regan's victory in 1980 - that progressive America will finally confront what it will take to turn the tide: an all-sided battle for ideological and organizational hegemony in which it must expect no quarter and it must give none, where it can no longer afford to make mistakes. Crisis of the Empire But while America marches rightward, it fails to drag the rest of the world along with it. Indeed, most of the rest of the world is headed in the opposite direction. Nothing illustrated this more than the fact that in the very week Bush was reelected, a coalition of left parties came to power in Uruguay, Hugo Chavez, Washington's new nemesis in Latin America, swept state elections in Venezuela, and Hungary served notice it was withdrawing its 300 troops from Iraq. Although the American Right is consolidating its hold domestically, it cannot halt the unraveling of Washington's hegemony globally. The principal cause of what we have called the crisis of overextension, or the mismatch between goals and resources owing to imperial ambition, is the massive miscalculation of invading Iraq. This crisis is likely to continue, if not accelerate, in Bush's second term. The key manifestations of the imperial dilemma stand out starkly:
Iraq: Crucible of Global Resistance Iraq, of course, is the main source of the empire's unraveling. The Iraqi people's resistance has not only frustrated a US colonial takeover of their country. Equally important, it has shown a new generation of anti-imperialists all over the world for whom Vietnam is ancient history that it is possible to fight the empire to a stalemate and eventually to victory. It is unlikely, however, that the Bush administration will acknowledge the handwriting on the wall any time soon. It will assault the city of Fallujah with the desperate illusion that this will destroy the operational center of the insurgency. Fallujah, however, is not an operational center but a symbolic center that has already played its role, and its "fall" is not going to stop the spread and deepening of a decentralized resistance movement throughout Iraq. Moreover, the Fallujah insurgents are likely to retreat after giving battle, trading, as in Samara, a conventional defense of a city for a guerrilla presence that harasses and pins down the US army and its Iraqi mercenaries. With 55 cities and towns already classified as no-go zones for US troops, the Bush administration will soon realize that retaking and occupying urban centers en masse simply will not work. There are some 130,000 US troops in Iraq today. Simply to fight the guerrillas to a stalemate, one would need at least 500,000 troops for the level of resistance that one finds in Iraq today. That will not be possible unless Bush brings back the draft, and this will surely produce the civil disorder that would threaten the current Republican hegemony. Washington's alternative will be to withdraw to and dig in behind superfortified bases and sally forth periodically to show the flag. While this would mean de facto defeat for the US, it will also mean that the Iraqi people¹s resistance will not have de jure territorial control from which to declare sovereignty and begin the process of coming up with a truly national government. Challenges to the Movement Supporting the Iraqi people¹s struggle to create the sovereign space to create a national government of their choice continues to be one of the two overriding priorities of the global anti-war movement. The other is ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and trampling of the Palestinian people's rights. At a moment marked by the conjunction of a resurgent Right in the US and a continuing crisis of empire globally, what will it take to advance this goal? First of all, the movement has to graduate beyond spontaneity and arrive at a new level of transborder coordination, one that goes beyond synchronizing annual days of protest against the war. The critical mass to affect the outcome of the war will not be attained without a rolling wave of global protests similar to that which marked the anti-Vietnam war mobilizations from 1968 to 1972-one that puts millions of people in a constant state of activism. Coordination, moreover, will mean coordinating not only mass demonstrations but also civil disobedience, work on the global media, day-to-day lobbying of officials, and political education. More effective coordination and, yes, professionalization of the anti-war work must not, however, be achieved at the expense of the participatory processes that are the trademark of our movement. Second, in terms of tactics, new forms of protests must be engaged in. Sanctions and boycotts are methods that must be brought into play. At the Mumbai WSF earlier this year, Arundhati Roy suggested starting with one or two US firms benefiting directly from the war such as Halliburton and Bechtel and mobilizing to close down their operations worldwide. It is time to take her suggestion seriously, not only with respect to US firms but also with Israeli firms and products. Moreover, the level of militance must be raised, with more and more civil disobedience and non-violent disruptions of business as usual encouraged. We must tell Washington and its allies that there can be no business as usual so long as the war continues. The kind of debate taking place in Britain, whether to push peaceful demonstrations or civil disobedience, is fruitless, since both are essential and must be combined in an innovative and effective ways. In the US, activists can draw on the immensely powerful tradition of disobedience to unjust law that motivated people such as the abolitionists, Henry David Thoreau, the Quakers, and the Berrigan Brothers. Indeed, this kind of resistance might be the key in stopping not only the imperial drive but also the rush to restrict political liberties and democracy. At no other time than today, when the electoral option is gone, is it more necessary to resist the imperial writ nonviolently by invoking a higher law. Third, it is clear that Great Britain and Italy‹Britain especially‹are the principal supports of Bush's war policy outside the United States. Bush constantly resorts to invoking these governments to legitimize the US adventure. What happens in Italy, in turn, affects what happens in Britain. Both countries have solid anti-war majorities that must now be converted into a powerful force to disrupt business as usual in these countries ruled by governments complicit in the American war. Both countries have the hallowed tradition of the general strike that, combined with massive civil disobedience, can significantly raise the costs to their government of their support for Washington. When asked why the demonstrations of March 20, 2004 drew significantly fewer people than those of February 2003, many activists in Britain and Italy respond: because people felt their actions were not able to prevent the US from going to war anyway. That sort of defeatism and demoralization can only be countered not by lowering the demands on people but by upping them, by asking them to put their bodies on the line through acts of nonviolent civil resistance. Fourth, with the Middle East being the strategic battleground of the next few decades, it will be essential to forge links between the global peace movement and the Arab world. The governments of the Middle East are notoriously supine when it comes to the US, so that, as in Europe, it is forging the ties of solidarity among civil movements that must be main thrust of this effort. This will actually be a courageous and controversial step since some of the strongest anti-US movements in the Middle East have been labeled "terrorist" or "terrorist sympathizers" by the US and some European governments. What is important is not to let US-imposed definitions stand in the way of people reaching out to one another to see if there is a basis for working together. Likewise, it is critical for the Palestinian movement and the Israeli anti-Zionist and peace movements to get beyond the labels imposed by governments and find ways of cooperating to end the Israeli occupation. Process has a way of bringing people together from seemingly non-reconcilable political positions. In this regard, the Beirut Anti-War Assembly that took place in mid-September 2004, with strong representation from the global peace movement and social movements from all over the Arab world, was a significant step in this direction. As it enters its second term, the Bush agenda remains the same: global domination. Our response is the same: global resistance. There is only one thing that can frustrate the empire's dark aims in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere: militant solidarity among world's peoples. Making that solidarity real and powerful and ultimately triumphant is the challenge before us. Progressives Bounce Back as Liberals Continue to Unravel in the US (29 November 2004)
For some people on the left in the US, the Bush reelection was a speed bump, something that slows you down but doesn’t stop you. Shortly before President George W. Bush’s trip to Santiago, Chile, to attend the APEC Summit, some 20,000 activists gathered outside the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia on Nov. 21, demanding that the institution, now renamed "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation," be shut down. 20 people were arrested for civil disobedience while protesters listened to actress Susan Sarandon, actor Martin Sheen, and other speakers denounce the military school for training students to engage in human rights violations.
Well, not a big bounce, but a significant one nevertheless in the context of the liberals’ continuing to unravel in the wake of Bush’s electoral victory. Even as the shocking sight of a US marine shooting a wounded, defenseless Iraqi prisoner flashed on television screens globally, the New York Times ran a front page story on Sunday, November 21, depicting the marines as a band of brothers courageously taking Fallujah block by block from faceless Iraqi insurgents. "In Falluja, Young Marines Saw the Savagery of an Urban War," by Dexter Filkins, is in the genre of macho war reporting by generations of civilian writers awed by the mystique of the elite of America’s colonial legions. When a marine is hit by fire from fighters defending their city from the invading troops, Filkins recounts, with reverence, how "the marines' near mystical commandment against leaving a comrade behind seized the group. one after another, the young marines dashed into the minaret, into darkness and into gunfire, and wound their way up the stairs." Simply change the place names and the account can easily be that of the "leathernecks" taking pillbox after pillbox from tenacious "Japs" in Guadalcanal in 1943. This genre of journalism is akin to what Edward Said called "orientalist writing." Places, events, and people may change but the categories or episodes remain eternal: Marines land, marines encounter heavy resistance, marines work their way forward inch by bloody inch, marines sacrifice themselves for their comrades, marines finally overcome, and the band plays Semper Fidelis in honor of the fallen heroes, who are awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. Another glorious episode that reminds us that compared to the Army, the marines are no ordinary mortals. As for the enemy, its role is to fight bitterly and savagely in order to bring out the best in the marines. With literature like this, who needs propaganda? But Filkins is not alone. Thomas Friedman, the Times’ foreign policy columnist, is also eager to show that he is one of the guys. In fact, so eager that he has replaced his intellectual faculty and moral compass with the gut feel of the "grunts." In a column titled "Postcards from Iraq," Friedman writes, "Readers regularly ask me when I will throw the towel on Iraq. I will be guided by the US Army and Marine grunts on the ground. They see Iraq close up. Most of those you talk to are so uncynical-so convinced that we are doing good and doing right, even though they too are unsure it will work. When a majority of those grunts tell us that they are no longer willing to risk their lives to go out and fix the sewers in Sadr City or teach democracy at a local school, then you can stick a fork in this one. But so far, we ain't there yet. The troops are still pretty positive. So let's thank God for what's in our drinking water, hope that maybe some of it washes over Iraq and pay attention to the grunts. They'll tell us if it's time to go or stay." The Times’ editorial board seems determined to compete with Filkins and Friedman in compromising journalistic integrity. Like defeated presidential candidate John Kerry, the venerable Times does not believe that it was right for the US to invade Iraq. But instead of following this logic to its inescapable conclusion ethically, which would be to call for a withdrawal of US troops, the Times, like Kerry, calls for an increase in troop levels. In an editorial dated November 22, the Times demands that 20,000 to 40,000 more troops be sent to Iraq. This will require "a significant, permanent increase in the regular army," though not, it assures us, a draft. The Times is unapologetic about the rationale for this recommendation, which is to secure Falluja and drive "the insurgents out of other strongholds." That the insurgents are on the right side on this one, that they are simply fighting to end an occupation that the Times had earlier condemned as an unjust war waged on false pretexts by the Bush administration never seems to enter the equation. No wonder many voters otherwise disenchanted with the war did not go with Kerry and the Times: Bush came across as morally and politically consistent and clear, while Kerry and the Times projected—and continue to project-moral and political confusion. In calling for 40,000 more troops, the Times is not only displaying moral inconsistency; it is also being appallingly naive. one is talking about a national liberation movement that, albeit decentralized, has made some 55 cities and communities throughout the country "no go" zones for US troops. At the start of the war, then Army Secretary Gen. Eric Shinseki said one would need at least 200,00 troops to invade and pacify Iraq. Today, simply to fight a burgeoning guerrilla movement to a stalemate would probably require at least 500,000 troops. That is simply impossible without a draft. The Times’ strategy amounts to throwing good money after bad, and if only for pragmatic reasons based on the national interest (which is always a far more powerful incentive than principle to US policymakers), it should be advising Bush to cut his losses and run, like Ronald Reagan did from Lebanon after 241 marines were killed by a suicide bomber in October 1983. The Times may find it hard to muster the courage to justify withdrawal as morally correct, but it can still counsel Bush that retreat in this case makes sense and that it is not dishonorable. Liberal democrats are scrambling in the wake of Bush’s victory to recast themselves as a loyal opposition, but this enterprise comes through as desperate, unprincipled, and confused. The Democratic, liberal establishment, of which the Times is one of the chief pillars, may be in the final phase of a political unraveling that began with the Vietnam War four decades ago. Liberals have long ceased to provide a viable vision and moral compass for US foreign policy. Progressives must aggressively fill this role, and standing firm on the demand of unconditional withdrawal from Iraq is the place to start. |