http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=74640
The world in 2004
Jordan Times - 28/12/2004
By Gwynne Dyer
The world has been on hold this year. Interesting and important things have
happened in many countries, and most people have scarcely noticed that
international politics is becalmed - but it is. The normal business of the
planet has pretty much slowed to a halt and we are all gently drifting
downstream together while we wait to see what becomes of the United States -
and, as a result, of the rest of the world, for the US is still a key player
in almost every game. We may be waiting some time.
The war in Iraq is not really very important, because Iraq itself is not all
that important in the global scheme of things, any more than Vietnam was a
generation ago. What matters is the way that this war is shaping America's
relations with the rest of the world, and in that sense Iraq has the
potential to be a far bigger turning point than Vietnam ever could have
been.
Vietnam, like Iraq, was a war undertaken for the wrong reasons and close to
unwinnable from the start, but the Vietnam conflict happened in the middle
of the cold war. No matter how Vietnam had come out, the basic alignments in
the world would not have changed: the rival alliances were practically
carved in stone at the time. Iraq is different, because it is happening in a
world where those alliance confrontations have dissolved and the new norm is
multilateralism: the great powers are supposed to be running the world by
consultation and consensus. But that world is now fundamentally at risk.
Two popular perceptions of what is happening dominate the world at the
moment. One, held mainly by Americans, sees a world beleaguered by such a
huge terrorist threat that all the old rules have to be abandoned. The
United States, they believe, is carrying the main burden of this "war
against terror" while other countries shirk their share of the load.
(Despite all the talk of a fundamental clash of values in the recent US
election, both parties basically held the same view on this issue.)
Most people in other countries, and most of their governments, too, see
terrorism as a much smaller threat. Certain measures need to be taken to
contain it, but it is nowhere near big enough to justify scrapping all the
rules of international behaviour we have painfully built up over the past
half-century.
Many governments also believe (in private) that the Bush administration is
deliberately pumping up the fear of terrorism in order to justify a
unilateral strategy that really aims at establishing American hegemony
worldwide. The popular American belief that the United States has the right
to go anywhere and attack anybody if it feels itself threatened - "we do not
need a permission slip from the UN", as Vice President Dick Cheney
frequently puts it - predates Sept. 11, but it has been greatly strengthened
by the rhetoric of the "war on terror".
Most of the other great powers on the planet are coming to see the United
States as a rogue superpower. (Britain is formally an exception under Prime
Minister Tony Blair, but even in London the concern is palpable at lower
levels of government.) Yet, everybody is deeply reluctant to confront the
United States directly, since that would just hasten the collapse of the
multilateral order they still hope to save. The result has been a lengthy
pause in which most other major powers refuse to approve or assist the
American adventure in Iraq, but avoid any open defiance of American power.
Instead, they are waiting. They waited for American voters to repudiate the
Bush strategy in last month's election (though they were well aware that the
strategy of a Kerry administration would not have been radically different).
They continue to wait for the resistance war in Iraq to grow into a second
Vietnam that will turn the US public against the whole neoconservative
project (but they cannot be sure that that will happen before their own
public opinion loses patience and demands that they move to contain rampant
US power). They half dread the collapse of the US dollar, but half look
forward to it as a blow that might shift American policy.
They are on hold, in other words, and they will stay that way as long as
they possibly can - because the alternative is to start creating alliances
and building up their own military power in order to contain the United
States. Do that, and you have started to lay the foundations for World War
III, so nobody wants to go there.
Nobody should go there. The United States no longer dominates the
international system except in terms of hard military power, and that is an
instrument that often breaks in the hands of American governments because
the US public hates casualties. Sooner or later American voters will rebel
against the human and financial cost of trying to be Globocop. So just wait
it out, and sooner or later normal service will be restored in Washington.
That is the right strategy, and there is at least a couple of years' worth
of patience in other capitals before anybody gives up on it. With luck, that
may be enough.
In the meantime, everybody tries to get on with their lives as if there were
not some potential calamity looming over us all. And though the big picture
is menacing, the fine detail is a bit more encouraging.
The great event in Europe was the "big bang" expansion of the European Union
from 15 to 25 members on May 1. This had originally been intended to close
the candidates' list for a long time while the EU dealt with a new
constitution, spread the use of the euro to the new members, and generally
"deepened" the ties binding the members together, but by May, there were
already three more countries scheduled to join the EU in 2007: Romania,
Bulgaria and Croatia. By year's end, 70 million Turks had also joined the
queue.
It's neither a federation nor an empire, but it's much more than a customs
union; something significant is happening in Europe. In fact, although
Ukraine still has no promises from the EU, the popular hope that it might
eventually become an EU member provided much of the fuel for the
demonstrations in late November and early December that undid a rigged
election, unseated a corrupt post-communist oligarchy, and set the country
on the road to democracy. Something similar, though less dramatic, happened
in Romania in December.
Russia continued its drift back into authoritarian rule, with President
Vladimir Putin winning a second term in March thanks in large part to
terrorist attacks by Chechen fighters in a war that he himself did much to
trigger. He successfully portrays this Chechen independence war to his own
people as part of a generalised "Islamic" assault against the "civilised"
countries, and used the school siege that killed 331 people in Beslan in
September as a pretext to proclaim an interventionist doctrine that mirrors
the US doctrine of "preemptive war". Russia, his advisers announced,
henceforward claims the right to "liquidate all terrorist bases in any part
of the world". (But it couldn't protect its own puppet ruler in Chechnya,
Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in May.).
By contrast, the big Western European countries had a year so tranquil that
even Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's umpteenth miraculous escape
from conviction on corruption charges ranked as big news. But there was one
exception: Spain, where terrorist bombs on commuter trains in Madrid killed
190 people in March. The Spanish (who had opposed their government's support
for the US invasion of Iraq by almost four-to-one) responded by voting the
conservative People's Party government out three days later. The newly
elected Socialist government ordered the 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq home
as soon as it took power in April.
On the peripheries of Europe, long-awaited things almost happened, but
didn't quite. Northern Ireland came very close to a power-sharing agreement
between Protestants and Catholics that would allow the restoration of
self-government in the province, only to fall at the last hurdle - but there
will be no slide back into war. The Basque separatists of ETA, its senior
ranks decimated by a wave of arrests, came close to declaring an end to
violence - only to shy away from it at the last moment with a string of
bombs in Madrid this month. The Greek-Cypriots, offered a UN-brokered deal
on the reunification of their island, overwhelmingly rejected it even as
their Turkish-Cypriot compatriots voted yes.
And in the Netherlands, the spiritual home of liberal tolerance, something
went dreadfully wrong in November. The murder by an Islamist fanatic of
radical Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had made a movie condemning
violence against women in Muslim societies, was a deplorable but isolated
event. The subsequent displays of hostility and outright violence both by
Dutch-born Muslims and by Christian or post-Christian Dutch who used to
preach tolerance were shameful and deeply worrisome - and the further east
you go in Europe, the worse it gets. The continent is still a long way from
the Promised Land. Speaking of which...
The dominant motif in the Middle East during 2004 was the US war in Iraq,
from the repeated sieges of Fallujah, Najaf and Karbala to the disgusting
images from Abu Ghraib prison, but the single great event was the November
death of Yasser Arafat, the embodiment of Palestinian aspirations for the
past forty years. But it was a measure of the success of the US-Israeli
strategy for rendering him irrelevant that his death actually changed very
little in terms of the realities and possibilities of the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
A successor (Mahmoud Abbas) is to be elected chairman of the Palestinian
National Authority on Jan. 9, but the notion that this represents a "fresh
opportunity for peace" in the region is fantasy. The course of events was
set for some time to come by the Israeli-American summit last April, in
which President George Bush declared that "new realities on the ground" make
it "unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status (peace)
negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of
1949". In other words, Israel can keep most of its settlements in the
occupied West Bank - 37 years of American foreign policy scrapped in a
sentence.
This was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's reward for declaring a
unilateral withdrawal from the few indefensible Jewish settlements in the
densely populated Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, the "security fence" that has been
carving its way through the West Bank underlines the new territorial
settlement that is being imposed on the ground. Arafat's death was awkward
for Sharon, who lost his favourite excuse for claiming that there was nobody
to talk to about peace on the Palestinian side, but the main outlines of his
plan for a "unilateral disengagement" are already in place.
As Sharon said himself, "my plan is difficult for the Palestinians, a fatal
blow. There's no Palestinian state in a unilateral move". His senior
adviser, Dov Weisglas, was even blunter, saying that "the significance of
the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process". And with the
opposition Labour Party set to enter Sharon's coalition government early in
the new year, that is where things are likely to remain so long as the
current American hegemony in the Middle East endures.
Elsewhere in the region, Libya's Muammar Qadhafy formally renounced the
nuclear weapons programme that he never really had (allowing the US and
Britain to claim that their invasion of Iraq had scared him out of it), and
Iran was persuaded at the end of November to put its uranium enrichment
programme on hold for the moment. But it will not have escaped Tehran's
notice (or Pyongyang's, or Damascus,' or anybody else's) that the main
reason Iraq got invaded was its failure to develop and deploy weapons of
mass destruction.
Events in Asia unfolded a good deal more smoothly, as they generally do
these days. The surprise victory of Indira Gandhi's Congress Party in
India's May election was followed by an orderly handover by the outgoing
Hindu nationalists of the BJP, although Gandhi, being foreign-born, chose to
make Manmohan Singh prime minister rather than taking the job herself.
Things got nastier afterwards, with the BJP boycotting parliament and the
new government planning to rewrite textbooks that it said had been distorted
by the BJP to emphasise India's Hindu heritage at the expense of its Islamic
history. But the world's biggest democracy continues to get the most
important things right.
China, which lays no claim to being a democracy, had its own orderly
handover of power, with 78-year-old former president Jiang Zemin
relinquishing his last lever of power, his control of the Central Military
Commission, to his successor, President Hu Jintao, at the Communist Party's
Central Committee meeting in September. The main focus of the year, however,
was China-Taiwan relations, which grew more tense with the reelection of
Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian (who narrowly survived an assassination
attempt a day before the vote).
Beijing, which sees Chen as a dangerous radical committed to Taiwan's formal
independence, started talking darkly about war, but US Secretary of State
Colin Powell took some of the heat out of the crisis in October by declaring
in a Hong Kong radio interview that "there is only one China. Taiwan is not
independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty". But Beijing was still alarmed,
and at the end of the year it was planning to pass a new anti-secession law
that would, as the pro-Beijing Hong Kong daily Wen Wei Po put it, "leave
Taiwan independence forces with no ambiguity to exploit".
So much for two-thirds of Asia (as measured by population). In most of the
remaining third, the economic crisis of the late 90s was long past and
prosperity was returning even in Japan, which showed tentative signs of
emerging from its ten-year recession. Indonesia elected a new president in
July - the first ever to be chosen by a direct popular vote - and Malaysia
also became much more democratic when Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi won a
landslide victory in the March election.
The impression that Badawi was quietly repudiating the long period of
authoritarian rule under recently retired ex-prime minister Mahathir Mohamed
grew stronger when he allowed the courts to release Mahathir's former deputy
prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, jailed six years ago on trumped-up sodomy
charges after he challenged Mahathir's economic policies. But there was no
similar sense of glaciers melting in Singapore in August when Lee Hsien
Loong, 52-year-old son of former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who has
dominated the prosperous city-state since 1965, formally took over as the
new prime minister.
In October, hardliners in the Burmese junta removed the closest thing to a
moderate in their midst, Prime Minister Khin Nyunt, in what amounted to a
mini-coup. Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo surprised
absolutely nobody when she declared in August that the country was in a
fiscal crisis. Cambodia changed kings, Thailand blundered into an insurgency
in its Muslim-populated southern provinces, the ceasefire in the long war
between Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and its Sinhalese majority sort of held,
and Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf was still in the saddle at year's
end despite widespread anger that he had broken his promise to give up
command of the army this year.
We never did find out how much Pakistan had aided North Korea's nuclear
weapons programme because Abdul Qadeer Khan, disgraced ex-chief of
Pakistan's own nuclear bomb project, has been pardoned by President
Musharraf for selling nuclear secrets and technology abroad and is still not
available for interview by foreign intelligence agencies. Hamid Karzai won
the much-postponed Afghan presidential election in October, though his power
still does not extend far from Kabul and parliamentary elections have been
postponed until next year. And Australian Prime Minister John Howard,
"America's deputy sheriff" in the region, won a historic fourth term in the
same month.
Africa presented its usual deceptive face to the world - a mini-genocide in
Darfur in Sudan, civil war in Ivory Coast, civil and religious strife in
Nigeria, the threat of renewed war in eastern Congo - as if Africa's main
problem was war. It is not, and it isn't AIDS either. It is poverty, which
is mostly the result of catastrophically bad government. So the important
news from Africa is that there are increasing numbers of good governments,
democratically elected, that serve the whole population rather than some
narrow tribal base. In just the past month there have been two elections, in
Ghana and Mozambique, that returned that kind of government. Things are bad
in Africa, but not without hope.
Which leaves Latin America, the media black hole from which only occasional
news of disasters reaches the outside world. We had the usual ration of that
this year, with excited reports of the not-quite-coup that unseated
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in February and of left-wing
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's near-death experience in the August
referendum on his rule. We hear far less about the miraculous recovery of
the Argentine economy, about the remarkable progress that Brazilian
President Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva has made in shifting resources towards
the poor while building Brazil's influence abroad, and about the South
American Union (optimistically modelled on the European Union) that was
launched in Ayacucho early this month.
One continent at a time, it all makes for a somewhat more hopeful
balance-sheet than the one we usually see. It's the big-picture stuff that
is really worrisome. Oil hit $40 a barrel in May and has stayed above that
price ever since. Climate change is galloping up on us faster than ever
(though at least Russia ratified the Kyoto accord, which finally brings the
treaty into effect). The whole international system that has kept
great-power war at bay for the past six decades is now under challenge. The
pessimists are starting to fear that things are spinning out of control. So,
a sane and happy New Year to us all.
The writer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are
published in 45 countries.
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/TySplB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
--------------------------
Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL
PROTECTED]
--------------------------
Brooks Isoldi, editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.intellnet.org
Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has
not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of
The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT
YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of
intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods,
techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other
intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use
this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,'
you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
