Le monde dip. 2 items
MichaelP
Le Monde diplomatique November 2002
The social wars
by IGNACIO RAMONET
SINCE September 2001 and the war in Afghanistan people feel the world has
been dominated by political violence and terrorism. For over a year the
press has created an atmosphere of fear with images of bombings,
massacres, hostage-taking.
Hardly a week seems to pass without bloodshed in the world Israel, Bali,
Karachi, Moscow, Yemen, Palestine. It feels as if a hurricane of conflict
of a new kind is sweeping the planet, and as if we face the prospect of a
war against terrorism even more cruel than the wars that preceded it - a
war in which the American invasion of Iraq will be merely one episode.
This impression is false. In fact, political violence has never been at
such a low ebb. Politically motivated insurrections, wars and conflicts
have rarely been so few. Surprising though it may seem, and contrary to
the media impression, the world is actually a calm and largely pacified
place.
Look at the present geopolitical landscape and compare it with 25 or 30
years ago. Almost all the radical protest groups engaged in armed struggle
then have disappeared. And most of the high- and low-intensity conflicts
that each year caused tens of thousands of deaths across the world have
now passed into history.
Almost all the troubled zones fired by the Marxist project for creating a
better world have either been, or are on the way to being, extinguished.
There are now only a dozen or so focuses of violence worldwide: the whole
of the Middle East, Colombia, the Basque country, Chechnya, the Ivory
Coast, Sudan, Congo, Kashmir, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines.
Admittedly, radical Islam, devoted to the armed struggle, has appeared and
moved to centre stage. But even the spectacular actions of Islamic
fundamentalism cannot hide the fact that political armed struggle is far
less widespread.
There are obviously other forms of violence at work. We could begin with
the economic violence perpetrated against the world with free-market
globalisation: the violence of the rulers against the ruled. Inequality
is reaching extraordinary proportions. Half of humanity lives in poverty,
and a third in misery; 800m people suffer from malnutrition; almost a
billion are illiterate; a billion and a half have no access to safe water;
two billion do not have electricity.
And incredible as it may seem, these billions of wretched of the earth are
keeping politically quiet. This is a great paradox of our time: we have
more people in poverty but less people in revolt than ever before. Can
this continue? Probably not. Because Marxism is exhausted as an
international motor of social struggle, the world is in transition. We
are in a phase between two cycles of political revolution. Social
injustice is more outrageous than ever, and partly as a result of this
other kinds of violence are extreme. In particular the violence of the
poor against the poor, and primitive forms of revolt (1) expressed in
illegality, criminality and insecurity. Little by little, in one country
after another, these moments of violence and revolt are taking on the
characteristics of what we could call social war.
Thirty years ago in Latin America and other parts of the world, a young
man with a gun might have enrolled in a political organisation committed
to armed struggle as a way of bettering the lot of humanity. Today a young
man with a gun would think first of himself, and viewing himself as a
victim of the way that the ruling classes have reneged on the social
contract, he might decide to break that contract by robbing a bank or
shop. In Argentina the rate of criminality has quadrupled since the big
economic crisis began in December 2001 and pauperised the middle classes
In Brazil, one of the most inequitable countries in the world - where the
electorate has just voted massively to elect the candidate of the poor,
Inacio "Lula" Da Silva, to the presidency - the scale of this social war
is extraordinary. In Rio de Janeiro alone, more under-18-year-olds were
killed by bullets between 1987 and 2000 than in all the conflicts in
Colombia, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine put
together. During the past 13 years 1,000 young people have died in the
confrontation between the Israelis and the Palestinians; in the same
period 3,937 were murdered in Rio (2).
Faced with this rising tide of what the media calls insecurity, several
countries - including Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria and South Africa - now
spend more on fighting this social war than on national defence. Brazil
spends 2% of GDP on its armed forces and more than 10.6% on protecting the
rich against the despair of the poor.
The great lesson of the history of humanity is that in the long term
people will always revolt against worsening inequality. The present rise,
in North and South, of illegality and criminality, often primitive and
archaic manifestations of social agitation, is a clear sign that the
world's poorest have had enough of social injustice. It is not yet
political violence. But we all suspect that it might be a lull before a
storm. How long will it last?
_________________________________________________________________
(1) See Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in archaic forms of
social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, Praeger, New York 1959.
(2) El Pais, 11 September 2001.
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http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/11/02energy
Le Monde diplomatique November 2002
FROM WAR ON TERROR TO PLAIN WAR
United States: energy and strategy
_______________________________________________________
President Bush's attempts to bully the United Nations Security Council
into ratifying whatever Washington wants to do in Iraq have been resisted
by France and Russia, and by public opinion in Europe and much of the rest
of the world. This resistance is unlikely to prevent the threatened
campaign against Saddam Hussein, which is part of a global strategy
instituted by a small group of United States policy-makers who share an
arrogant vision of US strategic, military and economic interests.
by MICHAEL KLARE *
* Professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in
Amherst, Massachusetts, and the author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape
of Global Conflict (Metropolitan Books, New York, 2001)
_______________________________________________________
THE United States has been so involved in the war against terrorism for
the past year that it can seem that winning it is the Bush
administration's sole foreign policy objective - especially since the
president has often said that this campaign is his most important
responsibility. But though enormous effort is undoubtedly being devoted to
this campaign, anti-terrorism is not the only major foreign policy
concern.
Since taking office, Bush has devoted equal attention to two other
strategic priorities: the modernisation and expansion of US military
capabilities, and the procurement of more foreign oil. These two
priorities have independent roots, but have intertwined together, and with
the war on terrorism, to produce a unified strategic design. It is this
design, rather than any individual objective, that now governs US foreign
policy.
This design has neither a formal name nor a written declaration of
principles; no one in Washington has actually articulated the vision. But
there is no doubt that these intertwined priorities, have decisively
shifted US military behaviour.
To understand the nature of the change we need to look at recent US
actions, and we will start with Iraq and the Persian Gulf. There is no
longer any doubt that the Bush administration is planning an invasion of
Iraq, to remove Saddam Hussein and install a pro-US government in Baghdad.
In preparation, the US Department of Defence is expanding its already
large military presence in the Persian Gulf region. Supposedly, the sole
aim of the invasion is to destroy surviving Iraqi capabilities for the
production of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and prevent the
handover of them to terrorists. But Washington is clearly also worried
about the future availability of oil from the Gulf area and is determined
to eliminate any threat - such as that of Iraq - of interruption to the
flow. American strategists want to make sure that Iraq's vast oil reserves
will be accessible to US oil companies in the future and not be
exclusively controlled by Russian, Chinese and European firms.
Then there is Central Asia and the Caucasus. When US troops were deployed
there soon after 11 September, it was said their sole objective was to
support military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan. But with
the Taliban defeated, it seems they remain for other reasons. Given the US
interest in access to the vast energy supplies of the Caspian Sea basin,
it is likely that these will include protecting the flow of oil and
natural gas from the Caspian to markets in the West. The recent deployment
of US military instructors in Georgia, which is an important way-station
for pipelines connecting the Caspian with the Black Sea and the
Mediterranean, and the announcement of US plans to refurbish a military
airbase in Kazakhstan, on the edge of the Caspian Sea make this idea
credible.
And there is Colombia. Until recently the US said that its military
involvement there was only to combat the illegal trade in narcotics. But
lately the White House has identified two other objectives for the aid
programme: to combat political violence and terrorism by Colombia's
guerrilla organisations and to protect oil pipelines from the interior to
terminals and refineries on the coast. To finance these initiatives, the
Bush administration has asked Congress to approve increases in aid,
including $100m for pipeline protection.
In these developments, and others elsewhere, we can see the strands of US
foreign policy. It is their integration that is most significant. In
future, we will not be able to understand US foreign policy without taking
the integration into account.
So we will look at the strands, and their integration. The first,
enhancing US military capabilities, has been a main Bush priority since
his electoral campaign. In a speech at The Citadel (a military academy in
Charleston, South Carolina) in September 1999, Bush proposed the
transformation of the US military establishment. Claiming that the Clinton
administration had failed to re-adjust US military policy to the altered
realities of the post-cold war era, Bush promised comprehensively to
review US strategy and "begin creating the military of the next century",
The transformation of the US defence establishment is intended to achieve
two key strategic objectives: to ensure Washington's future
invulnerability by installing an effective anti-missile defence system and
preserving US superiority in hi-tech weaponry; and to enhance the US
capacity to invade and conquer hostile regional powers like Iran, Iraq and
North Korea.
THE 'REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS'
Bush affirmed his support for a national missile defence system (NMD) to
protect all 50 American states against attack. He also embraced the
"revolution in military affairs", using computers, advanced sensor
devices, stealth materials and hi-tech systems in future combat. These
efforts, he suggested, would ensure US superiority "into the far realm of
the future".
To achieve his second objective, Bush called for a substantial expansion
of power projection capabilities - the ability to deploy powerful US
forces in distant battle zones and win against any potential enemy. This
would mean new hi-tech devices, advanced sensors and pilotless aircraft,
and reducing the numbers of existing combat units to accelerate their
deployment. As Bush said: "Our forces in the next century must be agile,
lethal, readily deployable, and require a minimum of logistical support.
We must be able to project our power over long distances, in days or weeks
rather than months. On land, our heavy forces must be lighter. Our light
forces must be more lethal. All must be easier to deploy" (1).
Immediately after inauguration, Bush ordered the Department of Defence to
start implementing the proposals in that speech, and by early 2001, he
said that at his request, the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, had
begun the review. "I have given him a broad mandate to challenge the
status quo as we design a new architecture for the defence of America and
our allies." The architecture would rely on new technologies, and would
emphasise power projection. Bush repeated that the US ground forces would
be lighter and more lethal, the air forces "will be able to strike across
the world with pinpoint accuracy" and its sea forces would maximise "our
ability to project power over land" (2).
These objectives have now been embedded in the Pentagon's long-range
budget. Introducing the $379bn defence budget for fiscal year 2003 (an
increase of $45bn over 2002), Rumsfeld said: "We need rapidly deployable,
fully integrated joint forces, capable of reaching distant theatres
quickly and working with our air and sea forces to strike adversaries
swiftly, successfully, and with devastating effect" (3). Though additional
resources will go to missile defence and anti-terrorism, power projection
will dominate US military procurement and development.
After 11 September the administration added a new feature: the proposition
that the US must be able to employ force pre-emptively to prevent the
possible use of weapons of mass destruction. Such action may be necessary,
argued the White House, because of the great risk to American civilians
from the potential use of such weapons by rogue states undeterred by US
retaliatory capacity. This proposition, while rightly seen as significant
departure, is quite consistent with the administration's other two goals:
ensuring the invulnerability of the US to hostile military action and
enhancing its capacity to invade.
The intent to acquire more foreign oil supplies was first evident in the
report of the national energy policy development group in May 2001, known
as the "Cheney report" after its principal author, Vice President Dick
Cheney. The document is meant to be a comprehensive plan to supply the
US's growing energy needs over the next 25 years. It incorporates some
increased energy conservation, but most proposals are aimed at expanding
the supply of energy.
The report caused great controversy because it advocates oil drilling in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and because its authors
consulted regularly with officials of the now-disgraced Enron.
Unfortunately the controversy has deflected attention from its other
aspects, particularly those bearing on the international implications of
energy policy. Only in the final chapter is its true significance
apparent, when we are told of plans to solve the looming energy shortfall
in the US by substantially increasing foreign oil imports.
According to the report, US reliance on imported oil will rise from about
52% of total consumption in 2001 to an estimated 66% in 2020 (4). Because
oil use is also rising, the US will have to import 60% more oil in 2020
than it does today. This means that imports will have to rise from their
current rate of about 10.4m barrels a day to an estimated 16.7m barrels a
day in 2020 (5). The only way to do this is to persuade foreign suppliers
to increase their production and sell more of their output to the US.
MEETING OIL REQUIREMENTS
But many supplying countries lack the capital to make the necessary
investments in production infrastructure, and are reluctant to allow US
firms to dominate their energy sector. The report calls on the White House
to make the pursuit of increased oil imports "a priority of our trade and
foreign policy" (6). It calls on the president and other top officials to
try two ways to meet America's growing oil requirement.
The first is to increase imports from Persian Gulf countries, which
together own about two thirds of the world's known oil reserves.
Recognising that no other region can increase production as rapidly and
substantially, the report wants a US diplomatic effort to persuade the
governments of Saudi Arabia and other producers to allow US firms to
improve the infrastructure of their countries.
The second aim is to increase the geographic diversity of US imports, to
reduce the economic damage that would be caused by future supply
interruptions in the ever-turbulent Middle East. "Concentration of world
oil production in any one region is a potential contribution to market
instability," the report says, so "greater diversity remains important"
(7). To promote diversity, the report calls on the president and top
officials to work with US energy firms to increase oil imports from the
Caspian Sea basin (especially Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan), sub-Saharan
Africa (Angola and Nigeria), and Latin America (Colombia, Mexico, and
Venezuela).
The report does not say openly what will be obvious to any reader: almost
all areas identified as potential sources of increased oil supplies are
chronically unstable or harbour anti-American sentiments, or both. While
elites in these countries may favour increased economic co-operation with
the US, other sectors of the population often oppose such ties for
nationalistic, economic or ideological reasons. So US efforts to obtain
more oil from these countries is almost certain to provoke resistance,
including terrorism and other violence. There is an unacknowledged
security dimension to the Cheney energy plan, with considerable
significance for US military policy.
The parallels between the military strategy and energy policy are
striking. Without implying any conscious intent by the administration to
heighten this conjunction, it is clear that an energy policy favouring
increased US access to oil supplies in the Persian Gulf, the Caspian,
Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa would be more realistic if
accompanied by a strategy favouring a big increase in US capacity to
project military power.
Whether or not senior political figures have reached this conclusion, US
military officials have certainly done so. In the Quadrennial Defence
Review (QDR) report of September 2001, the Department of Defence
acknowledges that "The US and its allies will continue to depend on the
energy resources of the Middle East," and that access to this region could
be jeopardised by military threats (8). The QDR describes the weapons and
forces that the US will need to protect its interests in the Middle East
and other zones, listing the capabilities identified in the Bush
statements. American strategy "rests on the assumption that US forces have
the ability to project power worldwide," it declares (9).
The third priority, success in the war against terrorism, was spelled out
in Bush's address to Congress nine days after the attacks on New York and
Washington. This campaign would be not limited to punitive strikes or one
great battle but would entail a "lengthy campaign" in many theatres of
operation and continuing "until every terrorist group of global reach has
been found, stopped and defeated". Bush later extended this mandate to
encompass states like Iran and Iraq, said to threaten terrorism through
pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
This strategy needs both intelligence and law enforcement efforts to
locate and destroy hidden terrorist cells; and also a military effort to
destroy terrorist sanctuaries and punish states that offer them protection
or assistance. All these activities are thought crucial to the success of
the war on terrorism, but the military aspect has attracted most attention
from senior administration officials. It is this aspect that is most
closely associated with the other strands of US security policy.
Many aspects of the war in Afghanistan reflect the power projection model
that Bush delineated. In preparation for the campaign, the US airlifted
large amounts of weapons and equipment to friendly states in the area, and
deployed a powerful fleet in the Arabian Sea. Much of the fighting was
done by light infantry, supported by long-range bombers with
precision-guided weapons. A high premium was placed on battlefield
manoeuvre and advanced surveillance devices to pinpoint enemy locations
day and night.
A similar operation in Iraq will mean tens of thousands of US troops
quickly inserted in key locations across the country, with relentless air
and missile attacks. "We would not need to hold territory and protect our
flanks to the same extent [as in the Gulf war]," a senior officer told the
New York Times. "You would see a higher level of manoeuvre and airborne
assault, dropping in vertically and enveloping targets, less slogging mile
by mile through the desert" (10). The planned attack should mean wide use
of US Special Forces with armed dissident groups, as in Afghanistan.
The war on terrorism has merged with the US effort to safeguard access to
oil, especially in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea basin. The war in
Afghanistan can be seen as an extension of the shadow war in Saudi Arabia
between radical opponents of the Saudi monarchy and the US-backed royal
family. Ever since King Fahd decided, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, to
allow US troops to use his country as their base for attacks on Iraq,
Saudi extremists, led by Osama bin Laden, have fought an underground war
to topple the monarchy and drive the Americans out. US moves to destroy
al-Qaida and its support in Afghanistan can be seen as an effort to
protect the Saudi royal family and ensure access to oil (11).
SAFEGUARDING THE OIL FLOW
The war on terrorism has also merged with US efforts to safeguard the flow
of Caspian oil and natural gas to the West. These began modestly during
the Clinton administration, when the Department of Defence established
links with the forces of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and
Uzbekistan, and began to provide military aid and training (12). But since
11 September, these efforts have increased, and temporary US bases in
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are being made semi-permanent. There is US aid
"for the refurbishment of a strategically located air base" in Kazakhstan,
which, according to the State Department, is intended to "improve
US-Kazakh military cooperation while establishing a base along the
Caspian" (13). The US will also help Azerbaijan to begin to defend the
Caspian Sea, where there have been recent encounters between Azerbaijani
oil-exploration vessels and Iranian gunboats. These initiatives are said
to help countries' participation in the war against terrorism, but are
also linked to US efforts to provide a safe environment for the production
and transport of oil.
Whatever the intent of US policymakers, the three key strands of their
foreign security policy have now merged into a single strategy. Attempts
to analyse them as separate phenomena will become more difficult as they
increasingly intertwine. The only way to describe US security policy today
is to speak of a unified campaign - "the war for American supremacy" -
combining elements of all three. It is too early to gauge the significance
of this, but we can make some preliminary observations.
The combined campaign has more vigour and momentum than its parts; it is
hard to question or criticise a strategy that integrates so many key
aspects of security. When separated, it might be possible to impose limits
on one aspect - to constrain procurement levels or troop deployments in
oil regions. But when these are combined with anti-terrorism, it is almost
impossible to advocate limits. It is highly likely that the combined
campaign will very successfully gain and retain support from Congress and
the people.
But the enterprise has a significant risk of "mission creep" and
"overstretch": it could lead to open-ended overseas operations that become
more complex and dangerous and require ever-growing US resources and
personnel. This is the behaviour Bush warned against during his election
campaign, but now seems to have fully embraced. It appears to be the case
in the Gulf, Central Asia, and Colombia, where the combined impact of the
policy strands makes it difficult to establish limits.
The greatest test of the strategic design may well come in Iraq. Bush has
made no secret of his desire to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and the
Department of Defence is planning a US invasion. Many Arab leaders have
warned Bush that such an invasion will trigger disorder and violence
throughout the Middle East. Senior Pentagon officials have also pointed
out the costs and risks of maintaining a large US military presence in
Iraq, of necessity, after Saddam Hussein has been ousted. But none of
these warnings seems to have had any effect on the White House.
____________________________________________________
(1) See www.georgewbush.com/speeches/... on December 2, 1999.
(2)Remarks made at Norfolk Naval Air Station, Norfolk, Virginia, 13
February 2001, on 15 February 2001.
(3)National Defence University, Washington DC, 31 January 2002, on March
9, 2002.
(4)National Energy Policy Development Group (Washington DC, May 2001).
(5)International Energy Outlook 2002, US Department of Energy, Energy
Information Administration, Washington DC, 2002.
(6)National Energy Policy Development Group. Ibid.
(8)Quadrennial Defence Review Report, US Department of Defence,
Washington DC, 30 September 2001, p 4.
(9)Ibid, p 43.
(10)New York Times, 28 April 2002.
(11)See "The Geopolitics of War," The Nation, 5 November 2001; see also
"Line in the Sand: Saudi Role in Alliance Fuels Religious Tension in
Oil-Rich Kingdom," The Wall Street Journal, 4 October 2001.
(12)See Michael T Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global
Conflict, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, New York, 2001).
(13)Congressional Budget Justification: Foreign Operations, Fiscal Year
2003, US Department of State, Washington DC, 2002.
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