Why we still need to be anti-imperialists, by Jean Bricmont [fwd]

Why we still need to be anti-imperialists
by Jean Bricmont [Belgian philosopher]

Why we still need to be anti-imperialists... 

It seems evident, from the attitude of the capitalist world to Soviet 
Russia, of the Entente to the Central Empires, and of England to 
Ireland and India, that there is no depth of cruelty, perfidy or 
brutality from which the present holders of power will shrink when 
they feel themselves threatened. If, in order to oust them, nothing 
short of religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are the 
prime sources of the resultant evil?To make the transition with a 
minimum of bloodshed, with a maximum of preservation of whatever has 
value in our existing civilization is a difficult problem?I wish I 
could think that its solution would be facilitated by some slight 
degree of moderation and humane feeling on the part of those who 
enjoy unjust privileges in the world as it is. 

Bertrand Russell 


During recent years, there has been a rebirth of a global challenge 
to the existing socio-economic order, challenge that had almost 
completely disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This 
movement is still weak, both materially and ideologically. I want to 
argue here that one of its weaknesses is that insufficient attention 
is paid to the military aspects of the uneven relations that are 
criticized at the economic level. This weakness is itself in part due 
to the ideological framework within which the discourse about human 
rights takes place. 

I shall first review briefly an historical precedent to the 
present "war on terrorism", namely the Cold War. I shall argue that 
the way it is presented, also within most of the left, reflects the 
ideological prejudices of the dominant powers. Then, I'll discuss 
some frequent delusions in the left about power, war and human 
rights. Some of this part will be polemical; but it is a fact that 
the recent wars, specially the Kosovo one, were supported to a 
surprising extent by liberals and leftists and that the opposition to 
them by "revolutionaries" or "radicals" has been extraordinarily 
weak . In the concluding section, I shall try to make some 
constructive suggestions. 

1.The cold war as reality and as fiction. 

At the beginning of the Cold War, George Kennan, who was then heading 
the State Department policy planning staff, outlined what was to be 
the effective guidelines of U.S. policy in the coming years: 

We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its 
population... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of 
envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise 
a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this 
position of disparity... We need not deceive ourselves that we can 
afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction...We should 
cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human 
rights, the raising of living standards and democratization. The day 
is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power 
concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the 
better . 

The way this " pattern of relationships" has been set up was 
essentially to "kill hope", as William Blum puts it . Namely, destroy 
any hope of an independent development that would allow the Third 
World to "divert" its natural and human resources towards the need of 
the poor majority of its population. This can also be called 
the "rotten apple" theory . Any country, specially a poor one, that 
manages to escape from the global domination system poses the "threat 
of the good example": it might be imitated by others, more important 
countries. That is why countries that are by themselves economically 
marginal, like Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua or even tiny Grenada have to 
be dealt with in one of two ways: either by imposing, through 
subversion and warfare, a government favorable to Western interests 
or by destroying them sufficiently so that any alternative 
development path that they might follow will be too harsh to be 
attractive. 

It might be added that this has been the strategy of the powerful for 
a long time, including vis-à-vis the Paris Commune, the Russian 
revolution or the Spanish one. Neither the phenomenon of "Leninism" 
nor similar tendencies among Third World nationalists can possibly be 
understood if one fails to take into account the fact that their 
authoritarianism derives in large part from a desire to avoid the 
fate of the Paris Commune and of other more democratic attempts at 
social change or simply to try to preserve a minimal form of national 
independence in the face of formidable threats. That the Leninist 
path also led to failure does not imply that the problem it tried to 
solve does not exist. 

It would take too long to review here the long series of coups, 
invasions, support for brutal dictatorships, and boycotts/sanctions 
made by the United States during the so-called Cold War. But it is 
worthwhile to give some examples of what one may call the mentality 
of the planners, i.e. of intellectuals, bureaucrats, lawyers working 
for the US government or its allies or strongly supporting tem, 
especially when we hear that, at the beginning of its war against 
Afghanistan, the United States ordered Pakistan to close its borders 
with Afghanistan, through which most food aid was passing, or when we 
are told, in regard to the forthcoming war with Iraq, that defeat for 
the United States is not an option. 

Consider first the following advice, given during the Vietnam war, in 
1966, and which can be found in Pentagon Papers : 

Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create 
a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly 
to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet 
Union. 

Destruction of locks and dams, however -- if handled right -- might 
(perhaps after the next Pause) offer promise. It should be studied. 
Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding 
the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a 
million?) unless food is provided -- which we could offer "at the 
conference table". 

And the now universally famous Samuel Huntington wrote around that 
time that the Vietcong is "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged 
from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to 
exist." And to solve that problem, he was urging the "direct 
application of mechanical and conventional power... on such a massive 
scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city" . 
This idea was adopted as the "forced urbanization" policy. 

Turning to war in Afghanistan, we learn that: 

Indeed, the war has been a near-perfect laboratory, according to 
Michael Vickers, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and 
Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank. Vickers, a former Army 
officer and CIA operative, said the success came because the al Qaeda 
network and the Taliban government sheltering it were overmatched 
opponents. "When great powers fight smaller wars -- precursor wars in 
between the old military world and the new military world -- you can 
experiment more because there's no doubt you're going to win," he 
said. "You experiment, and there is real feedback. You don't get that 
very much in the military."?"This was a new way of war, a new 
operational concept," Vickers said. "And it was a pretty significant 
innovation, because we got fairly rapid regime change with it. This 
wasn't on the shelf. This was the way we planned to overthrow 
governments." 

In a recently released pamphlet of the British Foreign Policy Centre, 
Robert Cooper, an advisor of Tony Blair who represented the British 
government at the Bonn talks that produced the interim Hamid Karzai 
administration in Afghanistan, calls for a "defensive imperialism" 
and for Western countries to deal with "old-fashioned states outside 
the postmodern continent of Europe with the rougher methods of an 
earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is 
necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth 
century..." 

Finally, here is the advice about Palestine given by a prominent US 
lawyer: 

"Israel should announce an immediate unilateral cessation in 
retaliation against terrorist attacks. This moratorium would be in 
effect for a short period, say four or five days, to give the 
Palestinian leadership an opportunity to respond to the new policy. 
It would also make it clear to the world that Israel is taking an 
important step in ending what has become a cycle of violence. 

Following the end of the moratorium, Israel would institute the 
following new policy if Palestinian terrorism were to resume. It will 
announce precisely what it will do in response to the next act of 
terrorism. For example, it could announce the first act of terrorism 
following the moratorium will result in the destruction of a small 
village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations. The 
residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come 
in and bulldoze all of the buildings. 

The response will be automatic. The order will have been given in 
advance of the terrorist attacks and there will be no discretion. The 
point is to make the automatic destruction of the village the fault 
of the Palestinian terrorists who had advance warnings of the 
specific consequences of their action. The soldiers would simply be 
acting as the means for carrying out a previously announced policy of 
retaliation against a designated target. 

Further acts of terrorism would trigger further destruction of 
specifically named locations. The "waiting list" targets would be 
made public and circulated throughout the Palestinian-controlled 
areas." 

What is truly frightening about those cynical and aggressive 
statements (and the many similar ones that could be quoted) is that 
they come from people advising or praising governments that enjoy an 
almost complete monopoly of weapons of mass destruction, are 
supported by the major world news media and control fairly obedient 
domestic populations. 

It is also important to refute the standard excuse for support of 
regimes of terror given by pro-intervention intellectuals, namely 
that all this was the result of "excesses" in the otherwise noble 
pursuit of "fighting communism". Had this been the case, why not 
support reformist regimes as an effective bulwark against truly 
communist ones? Arbenz, Mossadegh, Lumumba, Allende or Goulart were 
in no sense communists. Nor were the Arab and African nationalists 
that the United States opposed either in their struggle against 
Zionism or against Apartheid. Also, why continue similar "excesses", 
such as years of bombing Iraq, long after the collapse of the Soviet 
Union? Observe also that, contrary to what is commonly said, the 
United States did not entirely "lose" the Vietnam War. It did indeed 
fail to achieve its maximal objective of imposing its own client 
regime in South Vietnam. But, through massive bombings and 
defoliation, it did manage to destroy the material basis of any 
successful alternative development able to serve as a model. 

However, the partial defeat in Vietnam and the horrors of that war 
led many people to question the legitimacy of U.S. domination over 
the world. A counteroffensive was needed to recover the initiative at 
the level of rhetoric and image. The instrument for this was the 
human rights ideology proclaimed by President Carter (1976-1980). The 
basic tenet of this ideology can be stated quite simply: since human 
and democratic rights are better respected, in general, in the West 
than in other countries, it is our right, indeed our duty, to 
intervene, if necessary by military means, in order to enforce the 
respect for those rights abroad. The basic fallacy of this ideology 
should be obvious: the fact that a particular society is internally 
democratic in no way implies that it will have an altruistic attitude 
towards the rest of the world. To take an extreme case, consider 
Israel; there is no doubt that it is internally more democratic 
towards its own citizens, at least the Jewish ones, than most Arab 
states. 

But that does not imply, to put it mildly, that it can be relied upon 
to defend the human rights of Arabs in Palestine, Lebanon or 
elsewhere. Likewise, the Greek cities were democratic for their 
citizens, and used slave labor. Similar remarks can be made about 
European colonialism, which, incidentally, was also often justified 
in the name of "human rights" . For the Vietnamese bombed by the 
United States or the Iraqis dying from the embargo, the fact that the 
United States is a "free country" with a "free press" does them 
little good so long as the press remains silent and the population 
reacts with simple patriotism or indifference. The U.S. press did 
finally criticize the Vietnam war when the elite concluded that the 
war had became too costly to the United States. That contrasts with 
the media silence over the slow extermination of the Iraqis, which 
costs nothing in terms of U.S. casualties or political protest at 
home. 

The human rights ideology, as used by the United States and its 
Western supporters, rests on an extremely selective reading of the 
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Only the sections on Civil and 
Political Rights are referred to, and even these are interpreted 
according to double standards . Take Article 14 that grants the right 
to seek asylum abroad from persecution. Its implementation is 
extraordinarily politicized by the United States: out of more that 
24,000 Haitians intercepted by U.S. forces from 1981 through 1990, 11 
were granted asylum, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans. 
Or consider Article 13, granting the right to leave any country, 
including one's own. During the Cold War, the United States refused 
to grant passports to U.S. citizens such as the famous singer Paul 
Robeson, who had the effrontery to be both black and communist. 

This right to leave was however constantly invoked with great passion 
against the refusal by the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate. 
But the end of Article 13, which adds "and to return to his country" 
is ignored. No wonder; the day after the Universal Declaration was 
ratified, the United Nations passed Resolution 194, which affirms the 
right of Palestinians to return to their homes (or to receive 
compensations). 

The declaration also contains Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 
including a right to health care, social security and adequate 
standard of living (Article 25). Whatever one thinks of those rights, 
they are part of the Declaration and have the same status for the 
signatories as any other part of the Universal Declaration. 
Nevertheless, the President Reagan's ambassador to the United 
Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, could call them a "letter to Santa Claus" 
without provoking much reaction. (This is in itself an interesting 
example of 'relativism' - just think of the reactions in the West if 
some Third World leader called the first part a "letter to Santa 
Claus"). 

In the West, the Civil Rights part of the Universal Declaration is 
held to have absolute priority over the Economic and Social parts. In 
case this seems an obvious priority, imagine being one of those two 
or three billion people (about half of mankind) who have to survive 
on more or less two dollars a day. How would you weigh Cuban efforts 
to maintain public health, education and availability of basic 
necessities for the poor in comparison to the limitations imposed on 
civil liberties? These efforts continued long after Cuba was no 
longer being 'subsidized' by the Soviet Union -- and while it was 
suffering from a very severe embargo as well as from numerous acts of 
sabotage caused by the single superpower, forcing the Cuban 
government to divert resources to defense, counter-spying, etc. 

Considering the relationship of forces, if Cuba introduced liberal 
democracy as demanded by the United States, one could expect the 
Cuban émigré lobby in the United States, backed by Washington, to 
bribe politicians, finance media and subvert the new "democratic 
process" to ensure the takeover by a pro-U.S. regime that would adopt 
neo-liberal "reforms" putting an end to the existing social benefits. 
This does not mean that socio-economic rights should be used to 
justify the abandonment of civil liberties. All such rights should be 
part of a just society. But given the world relationship of forces, 
the constant exclusive emphasis on political rights by the rich 
countries must be seen as self-serving and therefore not a valid 
promotion of universal values. 

The following comments, taken from the Jesuit Salvadorian 
journal 'Processo', illustrate nicely the double standards of the 
U.S. human rights discourse: If Lech Walesa had been doing his 
organizing work in El Salvador, he would have already entered into 
the ranks of the disappeared - at the hand of 'heavily armed men 
dressed in civilian clothes'; or have been blown to pieces in a 
dynamite attack on his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a 
politician in our country, he would have been assassinated like 
Héctor Oquelí [the social democratic leader assassinated in 
Guatemala, by Salvadorian death squads, according to the Guatemalan 
government]. If Andrei Sakharov had worked here in favour of human 
rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert Anaya [one of the 
many murdered leaders of the independent Salvadorian Human Rights 
Commission CDHES]. If Ota-Sik or Václav Havel had been carrying out 
their intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have been found 
one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a university campus with 
their heads destroyed by the bullets of an elite army battalion. 

Another striking example of double standards was attested by no less 
than Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recipient of the highest award bestowed 
by International League for the Rights of Man. In 1975, the newly 
independent ex-Portuguese colony of East Timor was invaded by 
Indonesia, a regional client of the United States, which supplied 
most of its weapons. The United Nations failed to come to the aid of 
the East Timorese, thanks to Moynihan, who was U.S. ambassador to the 
United Nations at the time and who proudly recalled in his memoirs: 

The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly 
ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to 
me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success. 

Moynihan even cited figures showing that the Indonesian invasion 
killed "10 percent of the population, almost the proportion of 
casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World 
War." Along with Huntington and several U.S. theologians, Moynihan is 
one of the 60 signers of the "letter from America" sent to European 
newspapers exalting the U.S. assault on Afghanistan as part of 
a "Just War". 

The human rights policy also signaled a change of operational 
tactics. During the Vietnam war period, there was much talk 
about "nation building", meaning building strong anticommunist states 
in the Third World. 

The United States drew the lesson from Vietnam that it was easier to 
destroy an unfriendly state that to build a friendly one. The Islamic 
fundamentalists in Afghanistan, the contras and the Miskitos Indians 
in Nicaragua, Savimbi in Angola, the UCK in Kosovo, most of the 
separatist forces in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (and probably 
now in China), have been supported by the United States in what one 
might call an enterprise of state deconstruction. This has the added 
advantage of provoking less opposition among liberals and leftists, 
given the latter's prejudice in favor of whoever appears to be the 
underdog, whether guerrillas versus a regular army, traditional 
societies versus a modern state, or ethnic minorities versus 
democratic majorities. 

In the end, the Cold War was quite similar to the present "war on 
terrorism": a continuation of centuries of domination by the advanced 
industrial powers of the rest of the world, ensuring popular support 
at home thanks to a clever and scary rhetoric. Of course, there was a 
real conflict, as there is now. But, then as now, the relationship of 
forces was enormously unequal, the response totally disproportionate 
to the actual dangers, and the real goals, although concealed, not 
hard to figure out. 

2. Good and Bad Arguments 

Perhaps the most striking success of our ideological system is the 
extent to which its assumptions are shared by critics on the left, 
even honest ones. To take one example, consider the widely shared 
expectation that a "peace dividend" would follow the demise of the 
Warsaw Pact. This was about as realistic as expecting Genghis Khan to 
stop half way through his conquests. In reality, the victors (NATO 
and the United States) immediately started to expand and seek fresh 
justifications for their aggressive military posture. This mirage, as 
well as similar confusions concerning later operations against Iraq, 
Yugoslavia or Afghanistan, show that we urgently need to clarify our 
thinking about the basis of our objections to Western aggression, and 
to its apologists. This is necessary even, or especially, when 
aggressive interventions are successful, and when the declared 
targets are individuals such as Saddam Hussein, Milosevic or bin 
Laden who, leftists are persuaded, are not "our kind of guys". 

The reincarnations of Hitler 

The main argument used by the pro-war party to intimidate its 
opponents is extraordinarily simple: we are always confronted by the 
latest form of fascism. Saddam is Hitler, Milosevic is Hitler, bin 
Laden is Hitler, as were Nasser or Arafat before them. We (the West) 
should therefore intervene to liberate poor and oppressed people -- 
Kosovar Albanians or Afghan women, considered more or less the 
present-day equivalent of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe . Left 
alone, our governments and public opinion are too selfish, uninformed 
and indifferent to human suffering. Therefore, the role of 
intellectuals is to arouse public opinion and to put pressure on the 
governments so that they dare commit themselves more actively to the 
defense of our values. Note in passing that, for many of those 
intellectuals, whom one might call the humanitarian warriors , doing 
business is morally dubious (it may lead to all kinds of compromises 
with dictatorships) while waging war, or at the very least imposing 
trade sanctions, is the really noble thing to do. For classical 
liberals, it was the other way around: wars were seen to strengthen 
states, their armies, police and bureaucracies, while commerce 
promoted human exchanges and better mutual understanding. Note also 
that the fact that the United States usually refuses to negotiate 
with its enemies (e.g., imposition of unacceptable conditions on the 
Serbs in Rambouillet, refusal even to consider legal extradition 
proceedings for bin Laden) is not an effective argument against such 
intellectuals. Their view is that we should seize every opportunity 
to wage wars that can topple dictatorships and brutal regimes, in 
order to spread democracy and respect for human rights. Nor is there 
any point in complaining about the "collateral damage" of Western 
aggressions. The humanitarian warriors can always cite the "greater 
good" obtained by imposing liberal regimes. For them, the great good 
fortune of our time is that overwhelming military force is in the 
hand of powers, like the United States, committed to the defense of 
liberal values. The only problem is the reluctance of the general 
public, sometimes influenced by the left, to let their governments 
commit themselves even more actively to that just struggle. That is 
why, as Christopher Hitchens put it, Osama bin Laden "saved us". By 
provoking the United States, he forced its leaders into a fight that, 
otherwise, they might not have had the guts to lead. We can be sure 
that whatever countries will be targeted by the United States in the 
future, the humanitarian warriors will applaud, even if no evidence 
whatsoever links them to "terrorism". Such countries are likely to 
qualify as brutal dictatorships, and such he main targets of the 
Western "defenders of human rights". 

Munich for ever 

The inevitable companion of the "new Hitlers" discourse is 
stigmatization of critics as the new Chamberlains and Daladiers 
playing into their hands. This is done without recalling 
what "Munich" was all about. There was a part of Czechoslovakia, the 
Sudetenland, with a predominantly German population that wanted to be 
part of Germany; its annexation by Germany was accepted at Munich by 
Britain and France. That sent a message to the main rising power of 
the time that international law didn't matter and that it could do as 
it pleased. And it is now understood, rightly, that this was sending 
the wrong signal to Hitler. But what about the right of self-
determination of the Sudeten? What would our pro-intervention left 
have said at that time? The case of Kosovo quickly comes to mind. 
There, a majority of the population wanted to be detached from 
Yugoslavia and become part of what one might call Natoland. And the 
major power of our time used that opportunity to brush aside 
international law. Future historians may well identify the aggression 
against Yugoslavia as a major turning point in a new form of imperial 
reconquest of the world. And who were the real Chamberlains at that 
time may have to be reevaluated. As noted above, the fact that the 
United States is not at all similar to Nazi Germany internally 
implies less than what is usually supposed for the fate of the people 
on the wrong side of the guns. 

Before indicating how I think one should respond to the apologists 
for "just" wars, I will discuss a certain number of arguments 
frequently used by people who oppose Western aggressions but that 
should be avoided as counterproductive. 

Bad arguments for the left 

One bad argument used against the war in Afghanistan, as against the 
war in Yugoslavia, is that "it won't work". Indeed, the question is, 
work for what? Towards what end? Those that are proclaimed? Or those 
that are probably the real ones? Consider first the latter. We heard 
warnings that war would only strengthen Milosevic, or bin Laden, and 
that the Taliban would resist for a long time (the so-called "Afghan 
trap") and that the war would be too costly (for "us" of course). It 
may be too soon to draw conclusions about Afghanistan, but in 
Yugoslavia, the war worked beautifully. It resulted in a Serbian 
government in Belgrade that is even eager to provide NATO with 
retrospective justifications for the bombing. What is more, this 
government was elected by the Serbs themselves. This was of course 
the result of a series of bribes, blackmail, and deceptions . But who 
ever did better? Certainly not the Russians, nor the Germans in World 
War II, nor even the British Empire. 

Of course, one could try to argue that "it does not work" in 
comparison with the proclaimed goals (defending human rights, peace 
and stability etc.). but even that is delicate; any intervention has 
many effects and almost always brings some "collateral benefits" 
(like the liberation of the Sudetes at the time of Munich). And, off 
course, the latter will be spotlighted by the media to encourage 
further interventions. But, I shall explain below, there are general 
arguments against interventions that avoid any detailed discussion of 
those local and temporary benefits. 

Moreover, portraying the Afghans, the Serbs or the Iraqis as stronger 
than they are, allows the humanitarian warriors to shout "victory" 
when victory comes: "see, I told you, it would not be so hard!" While 
if we put the issue in realistic terms, and ask whether the greatest 
military might of all times can succeed through months of the most 
intense bombing in history in subduing a small, poor and devastated 
country, whose level of development is more or less the one of Europe 
between the 8th and the 12th century, then the outcome does not look 
like such a miracle. It also explains why a large number of Afghans 
are ready to collaborate with the United States: even the Nazis found 
plenty of collaborators in all the countries they occupied. So, what 
is to be expected when an immensely rich country like the United 
States, particularly ready to bribe others, wishes to install a 
puppet government in Afghanistan? Making the victory look like a 
divine surprise also encourages the imperial power to go further: 
let's now tackle Somalia, Iraq, whatever. So, this line of argument 
should be avoided at all costs. 

Another bad argument is to say that the Northern Alliance is no 
better than the Talibans, or even that they are no better in their 
treatment of Afghan women. This may be the case, but it is again 
irrelevant. What are we to say if they do behave better? Given the 
record of the Talibans, that would not be very hard and, given time, 
they very well might. Then, the media will feed us with reports on 
how great the situation in Afghanistan is; what will the left say 
then? 

To understand why all this is irrelevant, just imagine that the World 
Trade Center events had occurred in Bombay and that the Indian 
government thereupon decided -- without providing publicly available 
proofs and rejecting all negotiations -- that the responsibility lay 
with the Afghans, invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Talibans. How 
would the West react? Not hard to guess . 

Now, if the condition of Afghan women was the overriding issue, why 
not have supported the Soviet regime (to which many leftists, 
including myself, were opposed), the best on that score that the 
Afghans ever had? At that time, the overriding issue in the West was 
certainly not the condition of women, but strategic concerns such as 
the access of the Russians to warm seas (a dream going back to the 
Tsars, as the Western media used to say). But now, the fact that the 
United States has obtained new strongholds both in the Balkans 
(Albania-Kosovo) and in Central Asia is totally irrelevant. 

Only the fate of women counts. 

The real issues: international law and imperialism 

Observing (and denouncing) these double standards gets us closer to 
the real arguments against the war. They are of two types. The first 
one is quite universal and is simply that nobody has yet found a 
better rule to avoid war than respect for international law. None of 
the recent wars launched by the West -- Iraq, Yugoslavia or 
Afghanistan -- were in accord with international law. The one that 
came closest to observing international law was the war against Iraq. 
But even there, the equivalent of the jury -- the Security Council -- 
was pressured and coerced by one of the parties, the United States . 
In the case of Yugoslavia, there was not even the pretense of NATO 
abiding by international law. Finally, for Afghanistan, one power 
invoked the right to respond to aggression. But, even assuming the 
existence of a direct link between the events of September 11 and bin 
Laden, there was never the sort of constant assault on the United 
States characteristic of a war and thus calling for self-defense . A 
spectacular crime was committed and was used as a pretext to launch a 
war, period. 

Many people will ask, what is so sacred about international law? 

And why respect national sovereignty? After all, most state 
boundaries are quite arbitrary and unnatural. They are the result of 
previous wars, not of any rational design. Besides, how can anybody 
in his or her right mind stand still while women and children are 
murdered or reduced to slavery accross the border? To answer those 
questions, we have to think globally and ask what the alternatives 
are. 

First, let us consider the internal level of political order. Since 
the 17th century, the liberal-democratic reflexion has led to the 
conclusion that there are basically three ways to organize life in 
society: (1) the war of all against all, (2) a Hobbesian sovereign 
that imposes order through force, or (3) respect for a democratically 
decided law as the lesser evil. The Talibans, like the Soviet 
communists before them, were playing the role of a Hobbesian 
sovereign. The arguments against that solution are well known. Such a 
sovereign may bring temporary benefits (Taliban order compared to the 
chaos reigning before and after them in large parts of Afghanistan -- 
the war of all against all), but inevitably acts according to its own 
interests, provoking a cycle of rebellion and repression without end, 
because its power, being undemocratic, cannot be accepted by those on 
which it is imposed. 

Now, consider the international order. The sovereign is the United 
States and the same arguments apply. Whatever benefits it may bring 
to targeted countries, the United States acts on the basis of self-
interest that inevitably undermines those benefits. The prime 
interest in control of world petroleum and other resources, in 
investment opportunities and in strategic positioning clearly takes 
precedence over the welfare of populations. In its striving for world 
domination, the United States has promoted drug dealers and Islamic 
fanatics in order to destroy the Soviet Union. To control the Middle 
East, the United States has unstintingly backed the transformation of 
Israel into a garrison state and relentlessly worked to destroy Iraq. 
As liberal theorists should expect, all this eventually backfires -- 
an intractable situation in Palestine, and the World Trade Center 
attack. Who knows what the future will bring? Right now, the 
humanitarian warriors are celebrating. But perhaps some orphaned 
Afghan child will grow up and decide to learn physics or biology 
instead of the Koran and inflict massive nuclear or bacteriological 
damage to the United States. Unlikely? Not more than a bin Laden 
emerging from the anti-communist maneuvres of the 1980's. No trillion 
dollar Pentagon budget can protect the United States from the 
unforeseeable backlash of its treatment of countries that today 
appear helpless. 

The third solution would be to bring more democracy to the world 
level, via the United Nations . But that is exactly what Western 
liberals, who support ever greater destruction of a legal 
international order, in the name of human rights, oppose. 
Contemporary liberals are, by and large, perfectly inconsistent. They 
have turned into liberal imperialists: liberal in the internal order 
(at least at times and in places where the powers that be aren't 
overly challenged), and autocratic on the international level . 

Another line of argument is likely to be more controversial, but is 
even more necessary, I think. In Europe, those of us who criticize 
U.S. war policy are often accused of being "anti-American". We might 
as well frankly acknowledge that, in some sense, we are. Not along 
the lines of the "cultural" critique adopted by many Europeans who 
are quick to denounce the oddities of American society -- its crass 
consumerism, its religious backwardness, its devotion both to the 
death penalty and to the absence of gun control, etc.-- while 
conveniently forgetting some not-so-pleasant facts about the material 
roots (the slave trade, colonial conquest, etc.) of our own 
supposedly great civilization. I mean being anti-American in the 
sense of good old anti-imperialism. The United States is now playing 
the role that Britain, France or Germany played in the past, only on 
a grander scale. What sometimes causes confusion is that the American 
empire relies far more on local collaborators than the old empires, 
leaving the countries it dominates nominally independent. The nature 
of this "independence" was illustrated recently when the new anti-
Taliban government of Afghanistan asked the Americans to stop bombing 
their country. Too many civilians were being killed. A naive believer 
in the right of self-determination might be excused for thinking that 
the Afghans themselves should have a say in such matters. But the 
United States flatly said no and, within 24 hours or so, 
the "independent" Afghan government had seen the light and approved 
the U.S. bombing. One can easily guess what will happen when some 
Afghans try to control a U.S. pipeline going through their country. 

Now, what is the main problem with U.S. imperialism? First consider 
all the horror of the U.S. wars: Indochina, Central America, the 
Middle East. Millions of people murdered. Then consider the crimes of 
their puppets: Suharto, Mobutu, Pinochet, the Argentine and Guatemala 
military dictatorships, the U.S.-backed rebels in Angola, Mozambique, 
Nicaragua, etc. Another few million people dead. But that only 
scratches the surface. 

The real problem is, to use a huge understatement, the loss of 
opportunity for the Third World. At Porto Alegre, a new movement has 
taken up the slogan: "another world is possible". If that is true, 
then probably another world has been possible all along, but has been 
beaten back and prevented from coming into being. Let us try to 
imagine what it might have looked like -- it strains the imagination, 
but let's try: a world where Congo, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, China, 
Brazil, Iraq, Guatemala, and countless other places would have been 
able to develop themselves without constant Western interference and 
sabotage. A world where the 19th century Arab enlightenment had been 
able to continue its modernization of the Middle East, instead of 
being crushed by Western-backed obscurantism, and turned into the 
besieged hinterland of U.S.-backed Zionism. A world where apartheid 
would have been defeated long ago and where southern Africa would 
have been spared both Western-instigated civil wars and the "debt 
trap". 

What would such a world look like? No closer to paradise on earth 
than Europe in the centuries before it got rich on the Conquest of 
the Americas, modernized its agriculture and industrialized. There 
might well have been wars and famines and atrocities. But the 
condition of the majority of people would almost surely have been 
better with leaders trying, as best they could, to achieve 
independence and popular well-being than with leaders devoted to 
Western powers and their own personal enrichment. Compare, in almost 
every situation, the indigeneous leaders and movements with those 
that the West favored against them: Lumumba and Mobutu, Somoza and 
the Sandinistas, Goulart and the Brazilian generals, Allende and 
Pinochet, Mandela and the apartheid regime, Mossadegh and the Shah, 
etc. 

Nothing is more cynical than the eagerness with which self-styled 
humanitarian intellectuals cite Cambodia under Pol Pot and Rwanda as 
proof of the need for Western intervention. In both those cases, 
enormous tragedy resulted precisely from massive outside 
interventions: from the United States bombing Cambodia as 
a "sideshow" to its war against Vietnam, and from Belgium exploiting 
and aggravating the ethnic differences in Rwanda, following the 
classic 'divide and rule' principle. The most decried "monsters" of 
the Third World have not been produced by those countries on their 
own but as a response to the distorting pressures of Western power. 
It takes a heavy dose of racism to believe that, without our constant 
interventions, Third World peoples could not find better paths of 
development than the present ones. Try to think of the mobilizing 
effect that a genuine autonomous but unimpeded development, 
undertaken somewhere in the poor countries, could have had elsewhere. 
For example, the excellent public health policies in Cuba would 
probably be emulated in the rest of Latin America (even to some 
extent in capitalist countries) if mere mention of Castro's Cuba was 
not anathema to the United States and to the elites they direct. If 
one thinks it through, one sees that the countless losses of 
opportunity suffered by the poor majority of the world translate into 
tens and even hundreds of millions of lost lives. To contemplate this 
seriously is heart-rending. 

Present day imperalism is even far less justifiable than its 
predecessor. Old-fashioned imperialism was more directly violent in 
its subjugation of peoples, but its "civilizing mission", 
hypocritical and self-serving as it was, brought some real 
advantages. Before the colonial era, the world was divided between 
vastly contrasting levels of development. However indirectly and 
often unintentionally, colonialism did make science and even 
enlightened ideas available to places where they had been previously 
unknown. But the situation is quite different now. In Asia and the 
Middle East in particular, the struggle against Western imperialism 
inspired strong movements aimed at appropriating the most progressive 
intellectual and political advantages of the Enlightenment for their 
own societies. The post-colonial policies of the United States have 
repeatedly aided obscurantist opposition to such movements. Worst of 
all, the more the West presents itself as both the champion of 
science and rationality and as a ruthless plunderer of all the 
world's resources -- not only natural resources, but also its cheap 
labour and even its grey matter -- and the more it squeezes poor 
countries through debt and uneven trade terms, making genuine 
development virtually impossible, the more it gives the Enlightenment 
a bad name, notably in the Muslim countries. By its short-sighted 
egotism, the West is stifling the very universalism it claims to 
promote. 

Let me now discuss some rhetorical tricks that are used to soften 
opposition to wars and that tend to be particularly effective within 
the left. 

Fake internationalism 

The human rights ideology is often defended within the left under the 
guise of "internationalism". We have, on that basis, to help victims 
of dictatorial governments in the Third World (like the Afghan 
women), possibly by supporting U.S. and European interventions. But, 
again, this is mostly a delusion. What about child labor in Pakistan? 
Should we go to war over that issue? Yet, we can be certain that, if 
a major conflict between the West and Pakistan arises (which seems 
unlikely), this will become the issue of the day. Let us also think 
about past "issues of the day". Who worries now about the situation 
of Indians in Nicaragua? About the drug trade in Panama? Or human 
rights in Kosovo? Yet, all those issues were picked by the powers 
that be, at a given time, as the most crucial issue to focus on, so 
as to justify their policies. A genuine internationalist position 
would at the very least lead us to think globally and democratically. 
And to get in closer touch with mass popular movements in the Third 
World (not small sects) and ask them what they think of the 
interventions of our governments. I suspect that a lot could be 
learned from such exchanges. 

A related issue is the one of "nationalism". The latter has become 
very unpopular in leftist circles and it is thus easy for the 
mainstream press to discredit any leader like Milosevic or Saddam 
Hussein by using that label. But this overlooks two factors: first, 
the extreme emotional reaction to the September 11 events in the US 
show that nationalism, in its most primitive and traditional form, is 
alive and well in that country. And, since the US is infinitely more 
powerful than Iraq or Yugoslavia, it is that nationalism which is the 
most dangerous. Moreover, and more importantly, the strategic 
orientation of capitalism today is very much anti-state. 
Multinational corporations are often far stronger economically than 
Third World states and are quite happy to see the powers of the 
state, at least some of them, be weakened or dismantled. Of course, 
nationalism per se is not a leftist value, but any condemnation of it 
in a particular instance must be done while keeping these factors in 
mind. 

The "neither-nor" position 

It has become fashionable, in leftists circles, especially in France, 
to adopt of position of "neither-nor" ("ni ni" in French). Neither 
NATO nor Milosevic; or neither the Talibans nor the United States. 
And, probably tomorrow, neither Saddam Hussein nor whatever alliance 
the United States manages to set up against Iraq. Like all slogans, 
this one has some merit, but also serious deficiencies. Obviously, 
nobody opposing the war in Afghanistan is for the Taliban or wishes 
anybody to live under such a regime. In that sense, the situation is 
quite different from the one at the time of Stalin, for example, 
where part of the left did consider his regime as some kind of ideal 
(and the long influence of Stalinism in France may explain why 
the "ni ni" attitude is so widespread there). For reasons explained 
here, opposing wars of aggression can be justified quite 
independently of one's views about the internal policies of the 
country being aggressed. 

However, the neither-nor position gives the impression that there is 
some kind of symmetry between the two positions being rejected; but 
this is simply not true. It is clear that "Islamic fascism", as the 
liberals call it, is a horrible movement (which harms Muslims most of 
all). But one cannot equate such movements to global U.S. 
imperialism. First of all, consider the relationship of forces and 
the extent of the damage done. The Talibans were an extremely weak 
military force whose existence depended almost entirely on outside 
support (from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, two staunch U.S. allies) and 
exhaustion of Afghan society from years of U.S.-sponsored war. By 
contrast, the United States is the greatest military power of all 
times. The harm done by the Talibans is direct and visible 
(floggings, destruction of artefacts) but not comparable to the 
destruction -- much of it indirect and hidden -- wrought by an 
imperial power that has killed millions of people in its 
counterrevolutionary wars, and extends its economic and military 
power over billions of people. Moreover, the Talibans, and more 
generally "Islamic fascism", must be seen in context as largely a 
byproduct of the relentless U.S. opposition to the unacceptable 
notion of Arab or other Middle Eastern nationalists that they might 
have the right to control their natural resources. 

Most of all, perhaps, is the asymmetry of our own position: we are 
not judging the world from some point situated outside of space and 
time. We pay taxes to the United States or to its allies. If we do 
military service, it will be in their armed forces. We vote here. The 
people we meet and discuss with are in general totally hostile to the 
Talibans, but often support the United States. In that sense, our 
primary responsibility is to limit the violence of our own 
governments, not to denounce those of others. 

Honest opponents of wars sometimes feel that they have the duty to 
denounce the other side to show that they don't have "double 
standards". But we need to keep in mind the actual consequences of 
what we say, especially for the victims of the violence of our 
states, not simply to show our purity or our absence of double 
standards. And whatever we say about the "enemy" is likely be to used 
to reinforce nationalist feelings of self-righteousness and other war-
like sentiments. For example, any denunciation of Saddam Hussein's 
policies, done in the Western press and under present circumstances, 
even if the statements made are factually correct, is likely to have 
as sole effect to strengthen the resolve of those who have inflicted 
and want to continue to inflict immense suffering on the Iraqi 
people . 

Related to this, is the rhetoric of "supporting X". In the dominant 
discourse, particularly in the media, opponents of wars are always 
accused of "supporting" the other side whether the other side is the 
German Emperor during WW1, Stalin during the Cold War, or Milosevic, 
Saddam or the Talibans today. This is absurd on two counts: one is 
that, if opposing a war against X means that one "supports X", then 
even the humanitarian warriors "support" many X's that do things that 
they don't really like, unless they are ready to wage war against 
Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey, etc.; indeed, most of the world, 
including Israel of course. The second problem is: how do the 
warmongers avoid the charge of supporting the US and his many 
unsavory proxies? Well, they simply declare that they don't 
approve "all US policies" (usually without saying which ones they 
don't like). But they do not give even a hint of how they would curb 
the very policies that they object to; and, given the relationship of 
forces in the world, that is indeed a very big open question . By 
contrast, if I was to declare (which I am happy to do) that I don't 
support "all of Saddam Hussein's policies", I doubt very much that it 
would clear people like me of the charge of "supporting Saddam". 

The European illusion 

Many leftists nurse the hope that Europe may distance itself from the 
United States and become a sort of counterweight to its global 
hegemony. But there are several problems with this hope. To discuss 
this, we need to have a clear view of what "Europe " is. Roughly 
speaking it is the global imperialist power of the past, which lost 
its place to the United States and would very much like to regain it. 
Of course, it wasn't unified in the past, and lost its dominant role 
largely because of its internal divisions. Both its past and its 
present roles are justified in the name of unique "European values", 
that are often contrasted, in the discourse of the European élites, 
with the rudeness and the commercialism of the Americans. But this, 
like the dedication of the United States to human rights, represents 
merely the usual ideological framework in which all powers operate 
and justify themselves. So, assuming Europe becomes more unified and 
more powerful militarily; what is to be expected? Either it remains a 
sort a of vacillating ally of the United States, sometimes agreeing, 
sometimes disagreeing, maneuvering to defend its own narrow interests 
in the Third World when they differ from those of the United States. 
Or else it becomes a more determined adversary of the United States, 
and we are back to a sort of a new Cold War, with Europe playing the 
role held by the Soviet Union. Arm races, increased military 
spending, the threat of global destruction, are not exactly what the 
left should hope for. 

The European political and military buildup should simply be none of 
our business. We should combat any effort to shift budget priorities 
from social services to European "defense". Europe is sufficiently 
armed already to defend itself against a hypothetical direct 
aggression by the United States, which can best be prevented by 
political means, by allying with the rest of the world in favor of 
fair commercial arrangements, international law and measures to 
counteract the current polarization of wealth and power. But it would 
totally foolish for the left to put its hope in the projection of 
European power abroad to play a progressive role. 

3. Some Modest Suggestions 

Although there are no quick answers to the question of what is to be 
done in the present world situation, one thing should be clear: 
Western intellectuals should stop spreading illusions about "our 
values". All expanding empires pursue atrocious policies in the name 
of "values", either the "white man's burden" or the "civilizing 
mission" or various Christian duties in the past. We should at the 
very least lucidly analyze and denounce the hypocrisy of those 
discourses. 

But, more fundamentally, we need to operate a genuine cultural 
revolution in our attitude with respect to the Third World. Once upon 
a time, many socialists and progressives of differing persuasions 
swallowed the edifying stories about the "civilizing mission" and 
believed that their main business was to educate the "inferior 
races". This produced the first version of liberal imperialism. 
Later, during the decolonisation period, many leftist groups 
projected their "revolutionary envy", so to speak, on the Third 
World, expecting to be saved by distant national liberation 
struggles. But if radical social changes are hard to achieve in the 
West, they may even be harder to achieve in the Third World. Dire 
poverty, cultural underdevelopment, and the heavy weight of feudal 
social relations are not exactly conditions propitious to 
the "development of socialism", whatever socialism may be. But the 
fact that the so-called "socialism" in the Third World did not 
fulfill the (wild) dreams of many Western leftists led a number of 
them to a reaction of burning their former idols. 

Resentful at being let down, they have joined the new wave of liberal 
imperialism, brandishing slogans such as the "right of humanitarian 
intervention", justified by the human rights ideology, or by a 
perverted "internationalism". 

What the world needs now, and what decent citizens of the West should 
demand of their governments, is to put a total end to Western foreign 
interventions and even to offer apologies accompanied by massive 
reparations for the pillage and exploitation that has drained the 
Third World for centuries. Do we feel altruistic and want to 
do "humanitarian work"? Let us cancel debts with no compensation, 
provide cheap medicines to cure AIDS in Africa, transfer technology 
free of charge, open our borders widely to refugees and immigrants. 
All this would do far more good than all the military interventions 
that the liberal imperialists can invent. And to the extent that we 
are not so altruistic -- which is human after all -- we should at 
least have the honesty to admit it, try to force our governments to 
keep their bloody hands out the affairs of the Third World and 
support efforts towards what people sometimes call a "second 
independence": after the decolonisation, elimination of the neo-
colonial regimes that have replaced the old world order. 

There are many organizations devoted to "watching" human rights 
violations among the former victims of colonial violence. What is 
needed, besides and sometimes against those groups, are organizations 
devoted to "watching" interventions and plots by the imperial powers. 

The jingoists à la Bush are making the United States extremely 
unpopular in the world. In places with few or no Muslims, such as 
Argentina, South Korea or El Salvador, there are reports of people 
expressing their sympathies for bin Laden. This reaction may be 
shocking, but not more than, say, the attitude of the crowds in New 
York enthusiastically "welcoming the troops" after the far greater 
slaughter of the Gulf War. The gap between North and South is growing 
and the admiration for bin Laden reflects this gap. The use of force 
by the United States will provoke resistance (as Hitler and the 
colonialists did in the past) and, since there are many weak spots in 
the West, one can expect that there will be other events like 
September 11. This spiral leads nowhere, or at least not towards what 
we would like, but rather towards more war and more repression. While 
leftist intellectuals congratulate themselves about "victories for 
human rights", the poverty, humiliation and despair of much of the 
world breeds fanaticism. It is urgent that the Western left build 
real bridges with popular organizations in the Third World; but, to 
achieve that, we have first to clarify our views about the real 
relations of forces that shape this world, to take into account, in 
all our actions, our actual position in it and to expose the 
illusions spread by the liberal imperialists. 

Jean Bricmont
 



------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Buy Stock for $4
and no minimums.
FREE Money 2002.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/orkH0C/n97DAA/ySSFAA/B140lB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and 
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

Community email addresses:
  Post message: marxist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Subscribe:    marxist-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  Unsubscribe:  marxist-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  List owner:   jplst15+@xxxxxxxx

Shortcut URL to this page:
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist

Also take our one-question survey at
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marxist/polls 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/