The March of Folly

More than eighty years ago, a German chancellor warned the world that the iron dice are rolling as Europe marched blindly towards a war no European nation wanted. The First World War was a not a result of a diplomatic failure, but only became a reality when the European diplomats, regardless of their nationalities, capitulated to the infallible doctrine of military necessity. As the Prussian prophet of war, Karl von Clausewitz, reminded us, wars are an extension of politics and wars should be limited by their political aims, for whose attainment they are fought. According to Clausewitz, politics should justify the reasons for war and wars should not be used as an excuse to justify politics. Clausewitz also warned of the phenomena known as the “war of fog” arguing that wars are easy to start, but the end of wars rest solely on its own dynamics. Once a war is started, it creates its own logic and this logic of war, will create its own political consequences that will invariably hold political leaders hostage to its circumstances. Once a war is started, its intentions are impossible to control and instead of influencing its conduct, politics becomes reactive to, what the American historian Barbara Tuchman described as “the march of folly”.

The war against Iraq, when it happens, will be remembered more for its consequences than the reasons for its initiation. The military campaign against Iraq promises to be swift, devastating and decisive in its application of armed force, but as Napoleon Bonparte would remind us, no military strategy, no matter how immaculately created, will survive its first contact with reality. There is old adage that every new military strategy is designed to fight the last war and it hopes to improve on the flaws of the last war. Every military strategy accounts for, in minute details, the intentions of how to win the war, but no military strategy since the days of Hannibal has ever solved the question of how the adversary will react. The United States is doing itself a great disservice if it thinks that the Second Gulf War will mirror the results of the First Gulf War of 1991. The question of concern is not that it will, but what happens if it does not; has the United States factored this consideration into its war plans.

To plan a military campaign on the lessons of the last Gulf War and the performance of the Iraqi military is laudable, but it does ignore the levels of Iraqi political desperation and which marks the distinction between the First Gulf War and the Second Gulf War. In that that war, the United States’ political aim for fighting the war was liberation of Kuwait. The war ended, when Kuwait was liberated, and as such, the war was designed and executed to destroy the Iraqi military forces in order to attain this aim. The war was never designed to achieve “a regime change in Baghdad” and this lack of expression was clearly visible, when the United States refused to politically support the Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq. Hence, the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein was not politically threatened in the first war, but this time it is directly threatened by a second war. The sine qua non of fighting wars, and the reasons why wars are fought, is simply to break down the adversary’s will of resistance to the political demands being forced upon him. Like the Newtonian laws of physics, if the aim of a war is to force political conditions upon a nation, then the political imperatives of that particular nation demands that such a war be resisted militarily to protect its own political interests.

In this sense, the second gulf war threatens Saddam Hussein with a political and not a military defeat and this suggests that Saddam Hussein will bitterly resist such a war. The questions, which the Americans have to seriously ask, are what the political costs of this war, which they are willing to bear. The Americans must be under no illusion, because the economic realities of the United States’ corporate interests dictate that it has been incapable of weaning itself off from the Middle Eastern oil. The United States of America has a permanent interest in securing cheap, and reliable access to the oil supplies of the region, but it has been unable to answer how to secure those economic interests. This American inability does not stem from its overwhelming military and economic influence in the region, but in the perceptional differences of its policy towards the region. This has been the singularly glaring failure of the United States’ foreign policy in the region, because it has been incapable of understanding the basic political dichotomy in the Middle East, which shapes the region’s relations with Washington.

The United States’ failure, in this regard, results from the reality that the governments in the Middle East and their populations are themselves divided on the issue of their bilateral relations with the United States. The governments in the region appease, if not oppose, American intentions, because their own political survivability is linked with the American interests in the region. It is at this juncture that the United States fails to understand the reality that the governments in the region are democratically unrepresentative of their people and if it does, it opts to ignore this reality in face of perpetuating its economic interests in the region. The majority of the population in the region does not dislike the United States culturally, but for the heavy price they have to pay politically, in loss of their representative rights, in order to secure the United States’ economic interests. They hate the United States not for its democratic ideals or political freedoms, but because it denies them those very ideals and freedoms by supporting governments, which are basically fascist and repressive.

It is this political cost; the cost of political hypocrisy, which the United States has to consider before it embarks on the regime change in Baghdad. The other consideration, which complicates this political bargain is the perceptional reality, within the United States, which refuses to accept the equation that the issue of Palestinian rights is as dear to the Arabs and Muslims as the security of Israel is to the United States and that this is not a political issue, but a genuinely personal concern. The Muslim world’s humanitarian commitment towards the plight of the Palestinians is as deeply rooted and historic as the United States’ political commitment towards Tel Aviv. This American refusal to equate the two, further sparks political resentment against the United States, but this is only indirectly targeted against the United States. The real beneficiaries of this anger are the Arab governments in region, who in the eyes of their population have failed to raise this concern internationally and have, as a consequence discredited themselves politically in a domestic sense. Hence, the Arab/Muslim resentment against the United States is not so much as a result of its policy of a carte blanché, condoning Israeli actions against the Palestinians, but as disappointment in their own governments’ failure to respond to the perceived injustices.

The United States, by the virtue of its political power, military preponderance and economic strength, can easily ignore these concerns and there is not much, in a very realistic sense, which the international community can to do to counter its intentions. The international community may hate to disclose this fact, but the prevailing geo-political reality is that the international community is simply an extension of the United States’ policies of neo-imperialist, egocentric, political arrogance and pride. The United States may consider itself as the sole, self-proclaimed guardian of this globe and may wish to identify its own interests, globally, as being a mirror reflection of the international concerns. The United States has the right to think in such a manner, but it does not have the right to act unilaterally and impose such sentiments upon the world. The international community’s admiration for the United States springs from its perception for what the United States stands and believes in, and not for what the United States actually does. The United States has to realize that even Great Britain, at the height of its imperial power, only evoked the dream of “Britannia rule the waves” and had problems enforcing the reality a Pax Britannica.

The United States must remember the words of William Shakespeare, which warned in Julius Caesar, “the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power”. The United States’ cannot impose a Pax Americana on the world, because that does not depend on the United States’ political ability to do such, but on the international opinion’s political acceptance of such an idea. The United States is tragically mistaken if it thinks that the “war on terrorism” is an apocalyptic conflict between good and evil and can only be won by its asymmetrical military prowess. The war on terrorism is a conflict of such proportions, but in this conflict the forces of good are identified by issues of tolerance, peace, religious and ethnic harmony and economic equality and the respect of individual political freedoms and not by the destructive arsenals of Armageddon. The issues of poverty, hunger, denial of basic human rights and above all, the very denial of those universal rights, which are enshrined in the United States’ Declaration of Independence, as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, personify the forces of evil in this conflict.

The United States is embarking on the war against Iraq, with the stated aim of replacing the hated regime of Saddam Hussein with democracy. That may well be true, but then again, the people of Kuwait are still waiting for a democratic government twelve years since the last gulf war ended on similar American promises. This war, which the United States unthinkingly entered, and is waging on terrorism, cannot be won by military might or displays of a nihilistic capability wedded to its military-industrial-economic ideals of superiority. This war is about the right to be free; free from fear; free from deprivations and free from the insecurity of bigotry and prejudices of nationalism mutating itself into a self-proclaimed vision of imperialism. The United States has to seriously consider the means it has chosen to fight this war against terrorism, because terror is not a tangible enemy; terror is an ideal, which is the anti-thesis of hope, confidence and it cannot be defeated in a tangible sense, only in an ideological sense. It is ironic that the ideologues in the United States, who are keen on waging this war, based on their own infallible ideals of a world dominated by the United States, seem incapable of realizing that an idea cannot be defeated.

In this ideological war being fought, the best means to combat an idea is with an ideal itself and not through the asymmetry of tangible weaponry seeking to destroy an intangible reality. There is absolutely no reason, which justifies this United States’ desire to bring peace and stability, internationally, by waging this war and making the world, in words of another idealistic American president, safe for democracy. The Versailles Treaty of 1919, ending the First World War, did not make the world safe for democracy either; it gave birth to Adolf Hitler and a world destroyed and millions killed. No doubt, the United States’ purpose in this war is noble; to make the world a safer place for its interests and to protect those interests. The only question is - if the United States wishes to achieve this end, has it thought of the likely long-term consequences of its actions. The fact that it has not, speaks volumes about the naïveté of its hopes and intentions. This war will not make the world safe for democracy, but on the contrary, it will make the world unsafe for democracy. This war, when and if, it happens will have the opposite results than ones hoped by the United States, because in fighting this war, the United States will end up destroying the very ideals it claims to be fighting for and defending.

The world may be still end up as paying the ultimate price for this war, but the United States will pay, by far, the most costly political price for this war in its entire history. The United States claims that it is fighting a just war, but a “just war” according to Judeo-Christian and Islamic ethics can only be fought if the evil it prevents outweighs the evil it causes. This war does not pass this litmus test. The evil, which this war will cause, is simply not limited to the scores of millions who will be killed, but this war will result in the diminishing of democracy and the ideals, which nourish it. The greatest right in a free, politically representative, democratic society is the right to debate issues; more specifically, the right and responsibility to debates issues about war and peace. As the French premier Georges Clemenseau once said, “war is too important to be left to the generals”. It is equally too important to be left in the hands of politicians, who favor a course to war, because they cannot comprehend the simple fact that wars do not solve political problems, but only make them worse.

As Woodrow Wilson told the United States’ war congress in 1917, that it was a “terrible” thing to lead a democracy into war; this war if it is waged, shall cause problems, because it will be an unpopular war. The nations, in Europe, who oppose this war, are being simply aware to the existing political realities, because though the European governments may think of this war as necessary evil, their population is opposed to the idea of fighting a war, whose rationale is still ambiguous. This reality has been further confounded by President George Bush’s arrogant ultimatum that either “you are with us or against us”. The dilemma facing the nations of the world is crystal clear. If they support the war on Iraq in deference to the American imperium, against the wishes of their populations, they are not only being unrepresentative of their political constituencies, but they are under taking a political decision, without being debated first and hence, such governments risk losing their political legitimacies. If democratic nations undertake such actions, and start unpopular wars against the express wishes of their people, the question is what lessons does it teach those nations, which are struggling for democracy against oppressive governments? Even worse than that, does it inspire confidence in them to trust the United States as the promoter and defender of democracy or as its ultimate slayer?

It teaches them a lesson in political reality, which refutes all the arguments made by the United States in the last sixty years and suggests that democracy, is a virtue of the powerful and an ideal to oppress the poor. It is the final and ultimate sign of the hubris, which will befall the United States that, in wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001; it should have so arrogantly and blindly abused the goodwill and sympathy of the world. What manner of lesson will the United States leave for the world to ponder, when it could have emerged as a global leader in 2001, with a world willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with it and battle the evil, unleashed in that bright September morning. The world may never recover from the horrors of this war, but the United States will pay the excessive cost of its pride, because it has failed to heed the lessons of its own history.

During the Vietnam War, the United States military followed a policy that it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. In order to save Vietnam, the United States ended up destroying it. If the United States earnestly embarks on this war in order to save it from those who would cause it harm, it will end up destroying the American republic itself and along with it, the ideals of that republic and replace those ideals with an imperial presidency. In its eagerness to fight this war, the United States government has equated political dissent of its policies with acts of betrayal and treachery and already the United States has suffered more than the terrorists could have hoped to have achieved. The United States of today is no different than the nations of yesterday against whom the United States railed for their lack of freedoms and looked down upon.

A country that considers political dissent to be treason and as being unpatriotic and a government, which uses its power to suppress the rights of its citizens and arrogates to itself the right to life and death; war and peace; security and fear and accusation and justice stops being a representative government. Such a government, answerable to none, but beholden to itself can assume whatever rights it pleases, but it can no longer claim the right to moral ascendancy, because if it makes the Faustian bargain to gain the whole world, but lose its soul in the process, it stops being a great nation and instead becomes the mockery of all it had once foresworn. Such a government may own the world, but it does not have the right to ask of the world at large, “why do they hate us so much?”

The truthful answer is that the world hates it, because it hates itself and is bent upon a course of action, which will not only destroy the world, but itself in the process. This would be an incalculable tragedy. This is the political cost of winning this war on terrorism. Is the United States prepared to pay this price; win this war and in process destroy itself? What will the United States gain from winning a war, which will in the words of President John F. Kennedy, “turn the fruits of victory into ashes in our mouth”?

Whatever the United States shall do in the days to come and what whatever may happen, the indelible image left behind, for years to come, will be that the United States, at the moment of possessing the world, chose to rape it.