Opinion
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Building a world empire - I
By Achin Vanaik
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What is extraordinary is not that the U.S. should seek to selectively define who the terrorists are, and what terrorism is... But that this has met with so little resistance.
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THE U.S. has killed civilians and soldiers in Afghanistan in their thousands although none was responsible for the September 11 events. It has bombed one of the poorest countries in the world with some of the most indiscriminate weapons short of nuclear arms - Daisy Cutters and cluster bombs. It has caused hundreds of thousands of people to become refugees. It has helped replace one unlamented and ruthless regime with another lamentable and ruthless one. The nature and composition of the interim government has been decided behind the scenes by the U.S. and not by the U.N., which has simply been suborned to play whatever role (it may or may not raise some of kind of multinational force) the U.S. assigns to it. Yet there are still so many in India and elsewhere who, even after all reservations, qualifications and fears are expressed, would claim the U.S. war on Afghanistan was a `just war'! We need to begin therefore by nailing this deceit.
Washington cited Article 51 of the U.N. Charter to invoke the right of self-defence to wage its supposedly just war but never followed through on this since that would require Security Council clearance before any military action, regular reporting, etc., which the U.S. Government had no time for whatsoever. Even in self-defence, Article 51 does not allow a state to wage war on an individual or group like Osama bin Laden or Al- Qaeda but only on other states whose official forces have attacked across one's borders. The U.S. assault on Afghanistan therefore, had no warrant in international law. But most supporters of the U.S. action took the view that given the scale of the September 11 attacks, Washington was correct in designating them an act of war and therefore in going ahead with its assault on Afghanistan on the grounds which the U.S. itself announced within 24 hours of September 11 - that the U.S. Government would make no distinction between the country that harboured the presumed culprits and the culprits themselves.
In the face of the numerous post facto justifications now being given, such as the welcome fall of the Taliban, the cornering of Osama and the destruction of the Al-Qaeda cells in Afghanistan, it may take time to gather the full measure of what the U.S. has been able to get away with. But the enormous global implications of this remarkable deception will soon enough sink in. It should be noted that the U.S. Government never submitted to the international public its full evidence regarding the accused culprits - a cell or cells of the Al- Qaeda network. This was for two main reasons. First, to have done so before launching the war would have pushed the public discourse onto the terrain of assessing the quality of evidence so submitted before undertaking military action. To what extent was Osama directly culpable or merely an inspirational figure for the perpetrators? Was the Taliban regime merely harbouring the culprits or was it actually colluding with them in carrying out those assaults? Second, to have gone in this direction would have set extremely uncomfortable precedents that would have greatly restrained the U.S. Government's freedom of action to tackle ``global terrorism'' in the future, and therefore had to be avoided at all costs.
Herein lies the crucial point that most defenders of the U.S. `just war' on Afghanistan have completely missed. The U.S. Government did not try to make out a case for why its war on Afghanistan was a just one, according to Article 51, or why it had to wage a war of self-defence. That kind of special pleading was left to the sympathetic intelligentsia, from strategic experts to media pundits to make, whether in the U.S., Western Europe or anywhere else, including India. Within 24 hours of September 11, the U.S. Government declared a war, not on Afghanistan, but on ``global terrorism''. Similarly, it invoked not a specific right of self-defence against the culprits of the September 11 attacks and the country that might be harbouring them, but a more general right of self-defence to conduct a much wider ``war on global terrorism'' for which it immediately declared an ``eight to ten year programme''. In short, it quickly seized the opportunity provided by those events to justify a war (in self-defence, no less) that would, in principle, brook no restraints of geography, weapons, forms, targets, scale or time other than those decided by the U.S. itself.
It is this general right to wage a war on global terrorism that the U.S. has claimed is a just war. It is because this war is supposed to be just, that the war on Afghanistan becomes automatically a just one for Washington. Thus the U.S. has reserved the right to use all economic, cultural, diplomatic and military mechanisms to conduct this war against whomsoever it deems a danger. Being a war, it does not have to wait for some terrorist action to take place against it before retaliating, but, as in all wars, can carry out surprise, pre-emptive, and repeated, attacks against any designated `enemy'. Being a global war, the U.S. can, in its self-defence, target any entity anywhere - individual, group or country - for assault, especially since no distinction is to be drawn between suspected culprits and countries deemed to harbour them.
What is extraordinary is not that the U.S., itself responsible for innumerable terrorist crimes the world over (for which it remains unpunished and unrepentant), should seek to selectively define on a global scale who the terrorists are, and what terrorism is. Nor that this rogue state par excellence (which has the worst record of flouting all global norms and laws) should once again defy all international laws in constructing and demanding the right to carry out such a project. But that this planned project has met with so little resistance or criticism from elites and governments that are instead all too desperate to keep on the good side of the U.S. Those who have fallen over themselves to find rationalisations for why the U.S. was right to do what it did in Afghanistan have only helped strengthen the ongoing American drive to establish global domination, the likes of which has never been seen before.
Once the obfuscation provided by the label ``a just war'' is removed, then the real character of the U.S. assault on Afghanistan becomes crystal clear. It has been a response to one kind of terrorism with another kind! This has been the U.S.' ``terrorist war of revenge and imperial expansion''. The U.S. Government in its foreign policy behaviour has never given serious weight to public opinion in other countries. This has always been a minor and secondary consideration. But pernicious behaviour abroad by the American state has always co-existed with a vibrant internal democracy.
Moulding internal public opinion to go along with, and even better, strongly endorse, foreign policy ambitions has always been a major concern of the U.S. ``security establishment''. The most important long-term political-ideological gain from the September 11 events and their aftermath has been the ability of this establishment to bring about a new domestic legitimisation for carrying on its project of steady imperial expansion in the guise of combating global terrorism in the name of self-defence.
One has to admire the speed and skill with which the new code words to rationalise this larger project were put in place - self-defence, global terrorism, just war, international campaign, etc. One would also have to be astonished at how unwilling or unable elites and states elsewhere have been to understand, let alone criticise, the U.S. larger game plan were it not for the realisation that such elites and states are easily blinded from recognising this reality by virtue of their obsessive narrow preoccupations with the pursuit of `national interests'. For, if the overpowering impulse of American pursuit of national interest today is world domination, the overpowering impulse of national interest `guardians' elsewhere is accommodation to American power on the best terms available. We need to grasp fully the scale and depth of this American power today.
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