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THE
CLASH OF BARBARISMS: SEPTEMBER 11 by Gilbert Achcar All material copyright © 2002 by Monthly Review Press |
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November 2002 |
Introduction: On September 11, 1990, George Herbert Walker Bush, forty-first president of the United States, delivered a historic speech to Congress meeting in joint session. The Iraqi army had invaded Kuwait six weeks earlier. Four days after the invasion, the president had ordered the deployment of U.S. forces on Saudi territory; this was the start of Operation Desert Shield. The stakes in the presidential appearance before Congress were high. George Bush saw it as his task to succeed where his predecessor Ronald Reagan, whose vice president he had been from 1981 to 1989, had failed. Despite Reagan’s continual efforts and to his great regret, he had not been able to cure the America’s “Vietnam syndrome.” The country had continued to be deeply marked by the paralyzing trauma, acquired as it had sunk into the quagmire of the “dirtiest” war in its history. Reagan’s main foreign operation had ended in a total fiasco in this respect: the result was the addition of a “Beirut syndrome” to the Vietnam syndrome, thanks to the first suicide attacks to directly hit the U.S. These attacks occurred in 1983, eighteen years before the assaults on New York and Washington. After 63 people were killed on April 18 in an attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut, an additional 242 marines, serving in the multinational force stationed in Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion, perished on October 23 when the apartment building they were using as a barracks collapsed.1 In his autobiography, Reagan tells how “our experience in Lebanon led to the adoption by the administration of a set of principles to guide America in the application of military force abroad.”2 Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of defense, formulated the new doctrine in a famous speech in November 1984. The fifth of the six principles he laid out reads as follows: “Before the U.S. commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress. . . . We cannot fight a battle with the Congress at home while asking our troops to win a war overseas.”3 George H. W. Bush kept scrupulously to this principle. The first military operation carried out on the watch of this former CIA director was carefully prepared by means of an intense media campaign against former CIA agent and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega (who admittedly was an excellent candidate for demonization). To hammer in the message thoroughly, the operation launched during the night of December 19–20, 1989—ten years after Soviet troops began their invasion of Afghanistan, ten months after they completed their retreat from the devastated country—was baptized “Just Cause.” The experiment was a success for Washington, although kidnapping General Noriega cost (according to a conservative estimate) 300 deaths, 3,000 wounded, and 15,000 displaced persons among Panamanian civilians, without counting military casualties.4 Nonetheless, the experiment was not decisive. In the eyes of U.S. public opinion the operation was more like a police raid on a brutal tyrant-cum-drug trafficker than a war. It could not be considered a reliable indicator of the degree to which the Vietnam syndrome was persisting. The invasion of Kuwait a few months later, on August 2, 1990, by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s troops constituted an ideal opportunity to try to overcome U.S. inhibitions about waging war. President Bush understood immediately the great benefit he could reap from a military action that was so legitimate in terms of international law: the first military action in the history of the United Nations to receive active or passive approval from all five permanent members of the Security Council and the great majority of the General Assembly. Bush still had to convince domestic public opinion as well, and above all Congress, whose two houses he expected to pass a resolution approving his action in the Gulf.5 These were the high stakes of his speech on September 11, 1990. The president resorted to two quite different kinds of arguments in his speech: “idealist” arguments and “realist” arguments, to use the terms consecrated by international relations theory. It was as if two speechwriters with two different sensibilities had divided up the task of drafting the contrasting passages of the president’s speech. Addressing first the “idealists,” well represented among congressional Democrats, Bush launched into a grandiloquent flight of oratory on a theme that has since become famous—the “new world order:” We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times . . . a new world order can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.6 Then Bush turned to the “realists,” who rate “the national interest” higher than any other consideration and judge that U.S. world supremacy is part of any sound understanding of the U.S. national interest. For their benefit Bush explained what was at stake economically and in terms of U.S. hegemony: Vital economic interests are at risk as well. Iraq itself controls some 10 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Iraq plus Kuwait controls twice that. An Iraq permitted to swallow Kuwait would have the economic and military power, as well as the arrogance, to intimidate and coerce its neighbors—neighbors who control the lion’s share of the world’s remaining oil reserves. We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless. And we won’t. Recent events have surely proven that there is no substitute for American leadership. In the face of tyranny, let no one doubt American credibility and reliability.7 While conceding that the end of the Cold War—at a moment when Germany was about to achieve formal reunification—made it possible to lower the U.S. military budget from the peak reached under Reagan, Bush added that he would nonetheless “never accept” a military budget that compromised “our vital margin of safety”: The world is still dangerous. Surely that is now clear. Stability is not secure. American interests are far-reaching. Interdependence has increased. The consequences of regional instability can be global. This is no time to risk America’s capacity to protect her vital interests.8 When two such discourses, the most lyrical idealism and the most prosaic realism, are welded together into a single discourse, one can hardly doubt that Realpolitik has won out. Rectitude and sincerity are “idealist” virtues whereas deceit and hypocrisy are constituent elements of Machiavellian virtù: [W]e see from recent experience that those princes have accomplished most who paid little heed to keeping their promises, but who knew how craftily to manipulate the minds of men. In the end, they won out over those who tried to act honestly. . . . A certain prince of our time, whom it’s just as well not to name, preaches nothing but peace and mutual trust, yet he is the determined enemy of both. . . .9 * * * If we reread his speech attentively, however, George H. W. Bush did not commit himself to anything in the “idealist” part of it. He limited himself to describing what was possible in 1990—but only possible—without promising to make it happen. The world was in fact “ at a unique and extraordinary moment” then, with “a rare opportunity to move toward a historic period of cooperation.” A “new world order” could have been the outcome of the end of the Cold War: “a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.” It could have been an era in which “the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony,” while “the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle” and “the strong respect the rights of the weak.” These were remarkable words: they recognized the existence of a link between, on the one hand, a decreased “threat of terror” and progress toward peace, and on the other hand the creation of conditions of prosperity for every single part of the world, the reign of international law, and respect by the strong for the rights of the weak. Considered from this point of view, the events of September 11, 2001, can be legitimately interpreted by contrast as the deepest point so far in a descent into terrorism that is the corollary of the widening gap, in the course of the eleven intervening years, between reality and the conditions for global peace and justice described in Bush’s speech of September 11, 1990. In a world in which inequality is increasing inexorably, inside each society as well as among nations, in which the law of the jungle and the principle of “might makes right” reign supreme, the barbarism on one side inevitably engenders barbarism on the other. “The threat of terror,” in all its diverse forms, ends up weighing heavily on everyone. The clash of these twin barbarisms will not usher in a world at peace. Far from canceling each other out, they reinforce each other, in a spiral of reciprocal escalation tending toward paroxysm according to the Clausewitzian mechanism of going to extremes: “[A]s one side dictates the law to the other, there arises a sort of reciprocal action, which logically must lead to an extreme.”10 There could be no better one-sentence description of what is commonly called “the infernal cycle of violence,” at a moment when the two clans locked in this planetary vendetta proclaim in chorus that they will not shrink from any means in their war of mutual annihilation. Notes This work had to be written at high speed as a response to events as they were unfolding. Drafted under time pressure—as an expansion of a long article bearing the same title and dated December 9, 2001, published in the French review ContreTemps—it benefited from warm encouragement and in some cases help or comments from many friends, including Birgit Althaler, Samir Amin, Daniel Bensaïd, Sebastian Budgen, Peter Drucker, Wilfried Dubois, Peter Gowan, Se-kyun Kim, Sandra Kleinlercher, and Charles-André Udry. André Versaille, the Belgian director of the French-language publisher Complexe (Brussels), not only saw the project through to a successful conclusion but also acted as a well-informed reader, providing very valuable assistance through his comments and suggestions. Nevertheless, none of the people mentioned should be held accountable for the positions put forward in this book, for which I as author am solely responsible. This English edition is the unaltered translation of the French book finalized in March 2002. Only a few minor remarks were added to three footnotes referring to the English translation of a book by Gilles Kepel. In the course of preparing it, it was a real pleasure to work with Andrew Nash, Martin Paddio, and all the other very warm staff members and collaborators at Monthly Review Press. Peter Drucker did an excellent job of translating the book in such a short time. Working with him often went beyond clarifying words or sentences and became an enriching exchange over the substance of the book. Christopher Beck kindly read the English manuscript and made useful suggestions. Thanks also to Charlie Post and César Ayala for their help in finding citations in English.
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