Posted on 03/14/2003 11:14:05 PM PST by kattracks
Iraq is the catalyst for the draining of power from the UN, EU and Nato
The pathway to post-Saddam Iraq becomes daily less misty. Before the fighting starts, we should examine how Iraq links to a series of other, more structurally momentous changes, in Britain, in Europe especially and within the global political order. Large as the military action looms, Iraq may not be the most important game afoot.
It wasn't during the scratchy Commons debate but at the prime minister's February 18 press conference when we saw that the die was cast. The body language was eloquent. Broadcast snippets showed a prime minister pushing forward, boats burning behind him, choices made. Assisted by President Chirac's swansong Gaullism, Blair has made the decision that every prime minister since the second world war has sought to avoid; and his decision to stand with America is for positive reasons. Since then, he has hit his stride for the first time since the Iraq crisis burst, moving to the human rights argument, which matters to him most. Can he now seize - does he yet see - the greatest opportunities of his prime ministership opening before him?
Momentous events and decisions, each weighty in its own terms, are tripping over each other. There is a sense of history suddenly speeding up, of a loss of control; and that is not unreasonable. Those feelings found huge, inchoate voice in the street demonstrations about the approaching removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime, together with a bitter rhetoric of resentment about the exercise of American power. That country is now struggling with its reluctant assumption of the heavy cloak of formal imperial rule, which it tried on first in Afghanistan and which the consequences of the fall of Saddam will force it to wear for a longer time.
This time there is no doubt of American understanding of the need to follow through. The Congressional Budget Office published cost estimates for the occupation before Christmas; and there are strong signs that Kofi Annan's staff are actively planning ways to give the UN the takeover role.
But Iraq is simply a subplot within the play, whose major theme is the definitive end of the post-cold war interregnum, and the opening of the American imperial moment. We are at the passing of the age of Middle Earth. All the agents and the institutions of that age will be profoundly affected.
The previous breakpoint of equivalent importance was in the late 1940s. Emerging from the ashes of the destruction of the Third Reich, and led by the US, the victors found collective will to act: and in that time, they engendered the universal declaration of human rights and initiated the three main multi-lateral political adventures of the next half century: the UN, Nato and the EU.
Today, simultaneously, we are seeing the draining of power from all three, and transformation of the residuum. The catalyst to this profound and rapid change has been Iraq. Stirring this volatile mixture in all three cases has been French foreign policy since 1991. Most immediately, the stirring stick has been President Chirac's opportunistic anti-Americanism.
Due principally to French diplomacy, now shackled to Chirac's blunt promise to veto any prospective 18th Iraq resolution, we are closer than ever before to losing the UN. But oddly, of the three, it is the institution which may have greatest potential longevity; for it is protected by the tough realism born of the failure of the League of Nations, so that its structure expresses power politics by committee. Resolution 1441 was a splendid achievement: in its unanimity, in its blueprint for rescuing Iraq from Saddam and in its alignment of the UN with and not against the US. The Franco-German revival of the pre-1441 American request for a more robust inspection regime is an unequivocal misinterpretation of what 1441 asked inspectors to do (which was not to go hunting for hidden weapons). Guided by lawyers, we see that "678-687-1441" is permissive of the use of force.
This being so, however politically desirable, it was folly to go for a second resolution. The Bush people should have told the Blair people that it was in no one's interest to take that road. Blair should have sought a vote of confidence in the Commons - which he would have won - and which at a stroke would have removed the reason to press the Americans to go back to the UN. But they did go for it. Now Bush has said he will force the issue. Chirac has trapped France on the narrow summit of his own rhetoric. So unless quick footwork can sidestep that prospect, and also the unseemly scrabble for the nine votes, the second resolution becomes less about repetition of the "678-687-1441" mandates than precipitating the UN's "Abyssinia moment". The choice is, indeed, transformation or irrelevance. If the US walks away from the UN, it will do so for years. Plainly Mr Annan knows that, even if the baying Labour backbenchers calling totemically for a second resolution do not.
Nato is now passing into the shadows. The spat over defending Turkey was a superficial graze compared with the far deeper wound it sustained after 9/11. The failure to use Nato in Afghanistan maimed its credibility as a military alliance; and ironically the accession of the next wave of militarily weak members, by that act, destroyed what they thought they were joining. It was dead on arrival at Prague. But since nations have permanent interests, and tailor their arrangements accordingly, a functioning successor military alliance has for some time been working quietly inside the dead structure: an "intelligence special relationship" coalition (Australia-Canada-New Zealand-UK-US) with occasional help from others. The French officer's betrayal to Serbia of air tasking orders and Chirac's capriciousness at Pristina during the Kosovo campaign have not been forgotten in Washington.
So if one interpretation of the French stand on the unprecedented Turkish article IV request for help was that it was intended to kill off Nato so that military functions transfer to the EU - the consistent aim, openly at and since Nice in 2000 - it was unnecessary and too late. This was death by many knives: a murder on the Orient Express.
But the biggest miscalculations of the past few weeks have been about the EU. The EU constitutional convention, as now drafted, is straightforwardly federal. Not a word of what the British and other sceptics said was entertained. When Giscard d'Estaing presented the clauses, he did so with a brutal frankness: this is the future and those who do not like it are free to leave. The assumption is that this is a deadly threat - to be cast out into the cold. But is it? For decades there have been two visions of Europe, but only one to the fore.
The publication of the "letter of eight" in support of US action in Iraq and the statement of the eastern European "Vilnius 10" have together suddenly precipitated the colours of that other European vision. It is inclined to free-market philosophy, is English-speaking and not hostile to America. At the sour EU special summit, Chirac's apparently imprudent castigation of the eastern European applicants, with the thinly veiled threat of punishment for their support of the US, served only to precipitate "new Europe" further. Or was it imprudent? There are those who think that Chirac had a devious purpose: to sink enlargement, the British foil to the federal imperative.
Put now to Giscard's choice, for the first time in decades it becomes realistic to think that the British, the Dutch, Iberians, Scandinavians, current applicants - and who else? - may decline the federal invitation and prefer to become Europeans marching to a different drum. This other Europe contains the more dynamic European economies, would go with the grain of expressed public desires, and it is Blair's to lead.
Which leaves Germany hanging. Its dilemmas - in US relations; powerless to direct its economic strategy; teetering towards recession; straitjacketed by the euro in an interest rate a full point too high; and now flung into the European constitutional melting pot - are the most anguished and its future options are the most opaque at this early moment in the general crisis. For make no mistake, the ships of elves and hobbits are sailing from the grey havens as the age of Middle Earth passes.
Gwyn Prins is a professor at the London School of Economics and author of The Heart of War (Routledge)
So now what? Well Nato as functioning entity is dead. The U.S. should announce a complete re-assessment of its political and military alliances. This will scare the pudding out of some. Shift our bases out of Germany and move to Eastern Europe. The Turks jerked us around and they know it. They know we are one of the few friends they can count on as Nato left them high and dry, so look for love & kisses from them. I think as Germany's economy continues to weaken, the greens will lose control but Germany has cut its deal with the devil and if nothing else, lost the trust of the American public and the U.S. military. As to Russia, watch them to team up with France. The U.N. will probably survive as useful idiots often do, but as an effective influence on world events, it must be said that American will not trust it again. Look to Japan to awake to the military-political world around it.
Do you happen to know when the next federal election will be held?
MM
Yeah. Maybe we can kill it the same way the GOP killed Hillarycare...no fingerprints.
I can't believe it either, although this article is dated for tomorrow Sunday, 3/15/03. I thought the "Sunday edition" of The Guardian was called "The Observer", where the The Guardian editorial staff went to town on their leftist/marxist tirades.
Could be this a "web only article" that will never make it to print for millions of Brits to read.
Today is Saturday 3/15/03 which is the date of the article. : )
Thank you for correcting the date, wouldn't be the first time I have been off a day. I went by the post time.(BTW, What's the internet sign for making a total ass of one's self).
Anyway I could "save face" by saying that Saturday papers are the slowest sellers, and that is why this article appeared in "today's(Saturday)" Guardian, where the least amount of people would see it, and yet the Guardian can say that they do print views that are contrary to their editorial board.
But I won't. :^)
Momentous events and decisions, each weighty in its own terms, are tripping over each other. There is a sense of history suddenly speeding up, of a loss of control; and that is not unreasonable.
I have felt this way since Bush's 9/20/01 speech.
When you see the "Observer" on FR, think "Guardian".
Regards, Ivan
I am astonished also by their editorial stances.
I know this may be petty, but why can't the Guardian call its Sunday edition, "The Sunday Guardian". Why the deception? If the name Guardian is good for 6/7th's of the week, why is it not good enough good enough for their biggest selling day, Sunday. Many people on this side of the pond think that the Guardian and Sunday Observer are independent of each other when in actuality they are not.
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