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Beyond
the Drumbeat: Iraq, Preventive War, ‘Old Europe’
By
Arno J. Mayer
Monthly Review
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The letter of support, signed by the leaders of eight European
countries last January, for the Bush administration’s inexorable push for war
with Iraq was both singularly ideological and shortsighted. The list of values
that the signatories claim to share with the United States is altogether
unexceptionable: "democracy, individual freedom, human rights, and the
rule of law." But there is a crying omission: free-market capitalism.
This omission is all the more striking since there is no fathoming the infamous
terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 without bearing in mind that its main
target was the World Trade Center, a prominent symbol and hub of globalizing
capitalism.
It is no less striking that the signatories should still, at this late date,
embrace the hallowed but highly debatable Cold War interpretation of the
presumably indispensable place of the United States in the recent history of
Europe: "Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity, and
farsightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that
devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism."
The facts are that in both world wars Washington was an ally of last resort. In
1914–1918, as in 1941–1945, Europe’s blood sacrifice was immeasurably
greater and more punishing than America’s. To be sure, the Allies might not
have won the day without Uncle Sam’s intervention; perhaps one should recall
that Washington’s contribution was primarily material, financial, and
ideological.
Certainly during the Second World War, the Red Army contributed infinitely more "blood,
sweat, and tears" than the U.S. military to turning the tide of battle
against the Axis powers in Europe. Had the Red Army not broken the back of the
Wehrmacht in 1942–1943, more than likely the American-led landings in Normandy
in June 1944 would have turned into a tragic bloodbath. Moreover, during that
war, unlike the European and Soviet noncombatants who died in the millions, the
United States civilian deaths were infinitesimal by comparison. This anomaly
largely explains the avenging furor of Americans in the wake of September 11,
which ended the self-perceived innocence of U.S. exceptionalism. Protected, as
always, by two oceans, the United States means to keep its own casualties to an
absolute minimum. It may even be said to be looking for, perhaps demanding or
even buying, cannon fodder (and sinews of war and occupation) among both the
cautious governments that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has labeled "Europe"
and the mainly eastern European countries we might call the "new-old
Europe."
Inasmuch as the eight signatories implicitly subscribe to the Bush
administration’s loudly trumpeted and not so novel doctrine of preemptive or
preventive war, they ought to remember that the logic of preventive war played a
central role at two crucial turning points of the Thirty Years’ War of the
twentieth century: in July–August 1914, Kaiser William II and his advisors
precipitated war to forestall the balance of military power turning to the
advantage of the Entente in 1917, when Tsarist Russia was expected to complete
the modernization and preparedness of its armed forces; in the spring of 1941,
Hitler rushed into war against the Soviet Union to avoid having to face Stalin
in the spring of 1942, when the Red Army was expected to complete its
modernization and preparedness. Since this history is as well known to the "new-old"
Europeans—seeking to demonstrate fealty to their new American friends—as
it is to the cautious schismatics of the "old," both Europes
might wish to remind their Washington colleagues that the logic of preventive
war also significantly informed the preparation and timing of Japan’s attack
on Pearl Harbor. And they might want to remind Bush and his strategists that all
three meticulously planned preventive wars had enormous unintended consequences:
Verdun, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima.
It is a truism that the United Nations Security Council, to "maintain
its credibility" must "ensure full compliance with its
resolutions." But that "credibility" surely must require
rectification on another score on which there has been a crying omission or
silence: since at least 1967 the Security Council has closed its eyes to
Israel’s consistent violation, if not disregard, of successive UN resolutions.
Could it be that like the governments of the old-new Europe — particularly the
governments of Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Italy, perhaps in an excess of New
Testament charity, blindly side with Israel against the Palestinians in
atonement for their nefarious role in the Judeocide? Needless to say, for its
own political and geopolitical reasons the United States supports, not to say
imposes, this naked incongruity, if not duplicity.
There is, of course, no denying or minimizing the despotism of Saddam Hussein
and his regime. But America is known to have nurtured such Frankenstein monsters
in the past, and today the world accommodates not a few such despots in the
third world. This raises the question of why America, as it renews Woodrow
Wilson’s mission to "make the world safe for democracy,"
obsessively focuses on Saddam Hussein, portraying him as a crossbreed of Stalin,
Hitler, bin Laden, and Satan. Surely, it is sheer hyperbole to claim, "the
Iraqi regime and its weapons of mass destruction represent a clear threat to
world security." This characterization echoes yesterday’s
demonization of successive Soviet leaders and their regime. Compared to the late
Soviet Russian superpower, which between 1945 and 1989 was contained without
recourse to war, in military and ideological terms Iraq is a pygmy.
If lraq’s economic base were the cultivation of tulips for export, rather than
the world’s second largest oil reserve, the United States would turn a blind
eye to Baghdad’s arsenal of weapons, which is not really all that much out of
the ordinary. Ever since before the outbreak of war in 1914, control of the
Mesopotamian and Arabian oil fields has been a major stake in the diplomacy of
the Great Powers. During and immediately following the First World War, Britain
and France all but divided the greater Middle East’s oil deposits between
themselves, the Sykes-Picot agreement of May 1916 serving as a road map. Created
overnight in the wake of the Great War, Iraq was the big prize, and it went to
Britain. In compensation London yielded nearly one-quarter of the oil production
of Iraq’s Mosul region to France, which secured oil-less Syria. London’s
regional hegemony was bolstered by its continuing control of the Suez Canal and
its mastery of Palestine.
The Great War confirmed that in times of war and peace oil was, in the words of
the then–French Premier Georges Clemenceau, "as necessary as
blood," particularly for imperial Europe and the United States—what
we know as the "first world." After the Second World War, the
United States supplanted Great Britain as the dominant power in the greater
Middle East. The inability of London and Paris to preempt Egypt’s seizure of
the Suez Canal in 1956 not only confirmed their demise as world powers, it
affirmed the consolidation of America’s military and economic hegemony in
Mesopotamia and Arabia. With this region’s oil resources of greater importance
today than ever before, the White House is not about to permit any challenge to
its domination of the Middle East, which is vital to Washington’s imperial
reach, including its leverage over the other economies of the first world as
well as that of China. As part of the new power arrangements, Washington means
to give privileged access to Middle Eastern oil to the United Kingdom, to the
disadvantage of France and Germany which, along with Belgium, the Netherlands,
and Luxembourg are the core of the authentic "New Europe," whose
economy bids fair to one day challenge America’s economic and dollar primacy.
There is a whiff of ideological affinity between and among the members of the
emergent "axis of virtue" that proposes to fight the emergent "axis
of evil," especially since "New Laborite" Tony
Blair’s support is strongest among Britain’s—and
Australia’s(!)—Tories. In point of fact, the White House, perhaps mimicking
the late Soviet Kremlin’s relation to its clients, means to preside over an
aggregation of like-minded governments and submissive regimes (a veritable "fifth
International"), and any country that refuses to fall in line will be
excommunicated—or worse—for siding or fellow-traveling with the enemy. In
this perspective, in the (not too likely?) event that they will stay the course,
for seeking a third way Schroeder’s Germany and Chirac’s France might well
become the functional equivalent of yesteryear’s Yugoslavia (which had been
communist but outside the Warsaw Pact), writ large and strong. Tito redivivus!
At this juncture, Iraq is not an end in itself: for the United States Iraq is a
pawn, a way station in the evolving geopolitics and geo-economics of its
imperial power. But for the genuinely New Europe it is a test and measure of its
growing political and economic autonomy and muscle in the world system.
It is natural for America to try to head off or slow down Europe’s
emancipation by rallying, in particular, the ex–Warsaw Pact countries whose
first debt and loyalty now are to NATO rather than to the European Union. It is
no less natural, however, for this union, which recently bid them welcome, to
demand that they face up to their responsibility and make their oath. (As for
England, perhaps it should not be discouraged from applying to become the
fifty-first state of the American Union.)
Meanwhile Europeans, all too familiar with the wages of war, should remind
Washington that classical cross-border wars, in the mode of von Clausewitz, are
all but a thing of the past. As Israel is learning by experience, a war on
terror(ism) cannot be won by bombing a seat of government, overthrowing a
regime, and dismantling an armory. In thinking and preparing for tomorrow’s
uncharted hybrid warfare, the European Union’s strategic elites ought to
stress the importance of combining a new generation of military weapons and
tactics with a new generation of political, social, and cultural policies
without which the blight of terror will be difficult, if not impossible, to
contain. •
*Arno
J. Mayer is Professor Emeritus of history at Princeton University and author of
numerous works including Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The “Final
Solution” in History (Pantheon Books, 1988) and The Furies: Violence
and Terror in The French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton University
Press, 2000). He dedicates this article to the memory of his editor and friend,
Angus Cameron.
March 2003
Bulatlat.com
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