Posted on 03/24/2003 8:10:57 PM PST by Lessismore
HOW easy will it be for the United States to win peace after the war? Not just in devastated Iraq but also in the comity of nations where, as French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told the United Nations Security Council, the challenge is the choice between two visions of the world.
One is a community of equal partners whose only touchstone is the battered UN. We glimpsed the other when the Soviet collapse inspired then-US president George Bush senior's New World Order. For former president Richard Nixon, the time had come to reset America's geopolitical compass. We have a historic opportunity to change the world, he exulted. Vice-President Dick Cheney, then defence secretary, had already told a Senate committee that the US no longer had any global challenger, except in nuclear weapons. No country is our match in conventional military technology or the ability to apply it, he boasted. There are no significant alliances hostile to our interests.
America's ideology of how the world should be organised, to quote Singapore's ambassador-at-large Professor Tommy Koh, will be rejected if the war drags on and the Iraqis mount a Vietnam-style resistance. Most governments are also wary of a precedent that might encourage preemptive strikes by others. Few tears may be shed for President Saddam Hussein but the old Chinese saying about killing the chicken to scare the monkey explains speculation about the long-term message of eliminating him.
'Shock and awe' obscures these questions now. No other nation can spend US$400 billion (S$706 billion) on defence.
Subtle skills match military and financial might. Professor Noam Chomsky, guru of the American left, tells us that propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. If so, President George W. Bush is a dab hand at it. The ultimate in chutzpah, the Yiddish word for effrontery, used to be the youth who murdered his parents and then begged the court to pity his orphaned state. Now, it is a leader who shrinks from certain defeat at the world's forum, then proclaims that his only mission is to enforce the just demands of the world.
Author and poet Rudyard Kipling spoke of the awesome responsibility that great power carries. His poem Recessional urged humility on imperial Britain with grim reminders of how quickly temporal glory vanishes. In The White Man's Burden, Kipling bluntly told the US, which had just acquired the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam from Spain, that doing good is a thankless task.
Both lessons are again apposite, reiterating the late Senator William Fulbright's warning. In 1966, he wrote about America being at the historical point at which a great nation is in danger of losing its perspective on what exactly is within the realm of its power and what is beyond it. Other great nations, reaching this crucial juncture, had aspired to too much and, by an over-extension of effort, had declined and fallen.
Gradually, but unmistakably, America is showing signs of that arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened and, in some cases, destroyed great nations in the past. In so doing, it is not living up to its capacity and promise as a civilised example for the world; the measure of its falling short is the measure of the patriot's duty of dissent.
America need not fall short of its lofty ideals. The coalition of the willing is a fine phrase that promises consensual leadership. It implies, among other things, respect for weaker nations; loyalty to the UN; and transparent actions. This newspaper's report that a company with which Mr Cheney was associated has been granted a contract in Iraq and is bidding for another reminds us that the first mining concession granted by Laurent Kabila after overthrowing Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 was to little-known American Mineral Fields. It worked out of Hope, Arkansas, a tiny town that was Mr Bill Clinton's home. Not just Caesar's wife but Caesar and his lieutenants must be above suspicion if this second coming of the New World Order is to survive the dust and din of battle.
The writer is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University's School of Communication and Information. He contributed this comment to the Straits Times.
?!
The US does not spend money on defence. We spend it on defense.
The reporter should ask, instead, if the arrogance of the Medieval Islamopoopheads will be their own undoing.
America is not being undone, but the world is being remade.
You mean like the Marine Jose Guiterriz who was killed at Nasiriyah over the weekend and came here from Guatamala. Or how about my wife who is from Peru or my brother-in-law who is serving as a corpsman in the Navy?
We are not the ones treating Congo as a colony. We are not the ones who told Eastern Europe to shut up and think like us.
loyalty to the UN;
No one owes fealty to us, we owe fealty to no one.
and transparent actions.
I'm left wondering what this one means exactly. What actions of ours are not transparent which should be?
This is verging on left wing lame. The man didn't say a word about controlled immigration.
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