Words failed onlookers in the moments immediately following the attacks. Footage showed hundreds of stunned, mute and dust-covered New Yorkers. The scenes were disturbingly familiar — many eyewitnesses were reminded of a movie set, yet another Towering Inferno. While these disaster-film images were too easily absorbed, their implications defied immediate description.

This was remedied in typically blunderbuss style by President George W. Bush, who broke off a primary school lesson to announce that his government would investigate ‘to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.’ This statement suggested that the culprits were not merely a few disparate individuals, but ‘folks’, or even its homophonous ‘Volk’, implying a unified, coherent grouping of people. Significant elements of the American public took this as a cue for directing anger towards specific nationalities, ethnicities and religious affiliations. The days following 11 September saw an upsurge in attacks on Muslims and even Sikhs, compelling Bush to speak from a mosque calling for restraint.

Without being able to pinpoint a culprit or motive, Bush identified these events as attacks on freedom by advocates of evil and terror. The massively ambitious aim of this new war was to ‘rid the world of evil’. Bush quoted apocalyptically from Psalm 23, while former president Bill Clinton also identified ‘evil forces’ as the perpetrators. This Old Testament rhetoric was rapidly adopted by the international media. Immediately under its masthead, the Age dramatically proclaimed a scenario of ‘Good versus evil’. The military buildup around Afghanistan has been given the remarkably biblical name ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ (formerly the even less tolerable ‘Operation Infinite Justice’), both names betraying anxiety over the status of future retaliation. No location or method is suggested in these labels (as in ‘Desert Storm’). Instead, they gesture towards a precariousness of objective and uncertainty of duration.

In this rhetoric, evil is embodied by rogue individuals. Remove the villains and evil ceases to be. Osama bin Laden was quickly singled out, though persuasive evidence of this connection is yet to be made public, despite claims by Tony Blair and Alexander Downer of its existence. Bush seems to imagine himself as leading an oversized moral rabbiting expedition. ‘We will smoke Osama out’, he declared, ‘and get him running’. Another twist upon the same theme was Bush’s sheriff-like declaration that bin Laden was ‘wanted, dead or alive’. Bush is clearly more comfortable inhabiting the moral universe of the Wild West than the complex, demanding sphere of international diplomacy.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has contributed a vivid array of organic metaphors to this new verbal war. In the days following the attack we heard that terrorist networks needed to be uprooted and destroyed. The villains became unwanted weeds who should be removed forever from the garden of goodness. The terrorists operated in ‘cells’ that should be excised, like cancerous growths. Powell and his colleagues believe the coming conflict will be a dirty, muddy business. Soldiers will be struggling against other soldiers and inhospitable terrain. Despite repeated assertions of the novelty of the present situation, such possibilities sound disturbingly familiar.

Gone is the euphemistic high-tech military language of the last dozen years — of surgical strikes, smart bombs, pin-point accuracy and minimal collateral damage. Military campaigns in the Persian Gulf and Balkans saw the rise of a disembodied rhetoric of engagement, where precision technology took the place of messy hand-to-hand fighting. Talk of star wars missile defence shields has been replaced by Star Wars rhetoric of virtuous Jedi knight-figures taking on the dark side. Acknowledgements are being made that the billions spent on whizz-bang surveillance gadgets has been misdirected. Calls are being made for increased ‘human intelligence’ in the place of such solecisms as ‘digital intelligence’ and ‘military intelligence’.

In a stunning rhetorical move, Bush extended the threat to Muslims in general by announcing that the new war was a ‘crusade’, echoing the call of some Taliban extremists for a Jihad. To call this comment inflammatory is an understatement. A crusade, in this context, cannot be separated from the historical attempt by Christians to expel Muslims from the Holy Land. Not only has the language of Bush and his sidekicks often seemed ill-considered, but it has also been thoroughly unmemorable. We are yet to hear a ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech, or a phrase as pithy as Churchill’s claim that never ‘was so much owed by so many to so few’. Bush’s rhetoric has operated at the least demanding, most elementary possible level, entirely lacking substantial political ideas, such as anti-totalitarianism or a defence of egalitarian principles. It aims not to cohere a population around meaningful political goals, but instead functions as a child-like fantasy of eliminating baddies and banishing monsters. Tony Blair has contributed a mood of moral seriousness, repeatedly intoning upon the ‘utmost gravity’ of the situation, though his discourse too falls into reductive invocations of evil.

Formal political dissent in the United States has been almost entirely absent, with the single senator who called for restraint subsequently receiving death threats. Democratic processes fail when public exchange is discouraged and political leaders display unanimity. Informed, critical perspectives become invisible and discouraged when the United States asserts that the only options are being with us or against us. It is no coincidence that this contraction of public debate is being accompanied by previously unthinkable constraints on civil liberties. Independent thinking and genuine dialogue have been the first casualties in the new shadow fighting.

While Bush continues to conjure a sufficiently nefarious villain, missiles begin flying towards Afghan civilians. I suspect a chasm will gradually emerge between Bush’s condescending, simplistic political language, and the enormous suffering that such a frenzied demonisation will produce in Afghanistan. The hollowness of this political rhetoric is likely to fail over time, as the burden grows of drawn-out military action. I doubt that such B-movie language of good against evil can sustain the necessary force of persuasion as soldiers arrive back home in body bags.

At no other time has a war existed at such a crucially linguistic level. The precise shape of this rhetoric matters enormously, as it literally defines the otherwise unknown enemy. Unfortunately, the simplified and moralistic language of response has so far only stirred up anti-Muslim feeling and calls for immediate bombing. As the United States confronts the difficulties of military retaliation, the rhetoric of description needs to gesture towards deeper understanding. If a reasoned and appropriate response is to emerge to these horrific attacks, the first critical conflict is the war of words.

Douglas McQueen-Thomson is Assistant Editor of Arena Magazine.

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

William Empson, ‘Missing dates’ (1937) in Complete Poems (2000)

During the 2001 electoral campaign (as for years before) political journalists puzzled over the personality of Tony Blair. The American observer Joe Klein, for example, commented after a day on the campaign trail:

Blair does have a rather synthetic quality, ‘A man without a hinterland’ Roderick Nye, the policy director for the Tories, says. And there is an indescribable something missing from his public persona … He recently acknowledged enjoying The Simpsons. But he always leaves one wondering if moments like The Simpsons revelation are, somehow, tactical — the latest planned attempt at humanization. (New Yorker, 4 June 2001)

He compares Blair to President Clinton in this respect. However comparable in policy terms, he says, the two remain oceans apart as public personae. On election day itself the Guardian published another attempt by Klein at reading the oracle:

Even now, as he approaches a likely second landslide, no-one seems to know how Tony Blair feels as a person or, more to the point, who he is. This is both extraordinary and mystifying. He is about as familiar as a public figure can be. We know that he is religious … But there remains an ineffable something missing. There is an antiseptic, impenetrable, stainless-steel brightness to Blair. There are no rough edges, few edges of any sort …

These are very perceptive comments, but they may also be out of focus. The absence of a readable ‘hinterland’ and of ‘rough edges’, spontaneity somehow rendered contrived or deliberate, a somewhat super-human demeanour salted by affectations of impulse or immediacy: these are indeed enigmatic as individual traits. However, they are also perfect descriptions of Britishness. They seem to delineate a social, collective ethos rather than personal idiosyncracies.

The identity which they replicate is also rather out-dated: a ‘Britishness’ which was — rather than the confusion of the present. But there may be good reasons for this. Like Blair’s increasingly prominent religiosity, it may be felt as a necessary condition of acceptability. After all, we know political parties are among the most conservative of social bodies, and in this case they live in the most profoundly conservative of states. These frameworks compel the present to embody the past — however much ‘radicalism’ is spouted at the same time.

The effect is indeed that of a magician who has made a compact with a ghost — the haunting presence of a spirit, ‘elusive’ mainly in the sense of significantly detached from interlocutors and the contemporary public. Yet the detachment gives him a certain leverage over his audience. The mixture of phlegm and steeliness which Klein noted creates a space of surmise. Beholders are usually tempted to think that if they behave correctly, then he might still produce what they want out of the enigmatic hat. Blair never quite escapes the suspicion of not quite being himself — as distinct from pretending to be his own self. But this edgelessness can also be interpreted as a constantly moving promise. Liberal commentators who on 6 and 7 June ended up urging readers to vote New Labour after all (‘critically’, in spite of blatant failure, etc.) did so entirely in those terms: ‘He may yet still … ‘ (and so forth).

‘Identity’ in this sense is a fusion of the personal and the social, which also means ‘national’. Nobody ever doubted for a second that Mrs Thatcher or John Major were English, however loudly they orated in the name of Britain. No one would see Gordon Brown as other than Scottish, however hard he fights for the Union. The Welshness of former party leader Neil Kinnock was legendary, even though he opposed Welsh devolution as expensive parochialism. But Tony Blair? The absent or fog-shrouded hinterland means that he is somehow just ‘British’, or possibly English-British — enough of the former to reassure, but with the emphasis strongly on the latter. This is surely the source of that ‘synthetic’ dimension Klein identifies.

‘Britain’ is of course by definition a nationless identity. Different components of it tend to project on to it what they wish or need to see. Immigrants hope ‘nationless’ means (or can be made to mean) ‘multi-national’, or ‘multi-cultural’. Fascists hope it means ‘racial’, the figurative common blood of Aryanism. Middle-Englanders trust it will go on just meaning what it used to mean, ‘for all practical purposes’. The Scottish, Welsh and Ulster-Unionist servants of synthetic statehood want it to go on including them — which it can now do only if everybody is kept in line and forcibly restored to British belief and traditions.

No doubt much in Blair’s personal story contributed to today’s persona: the Scottish and North-Eastern background, formation at Fettes Public School, on the ‘outer ring’ of the old indoctrination system; an ideologically salient environment (Communism to Thatcherism); ‘finishing’ in Oxford, where with a rock band he underwent a famous Zeitgeist moment of adaptation; and then his legal training with Lord Irvine of Lairg. A leader persona is formed by the synthesis of such factors with institutional constraints — in this case, the ultra-Great-Brit Labour Party, which just as Blair joined up was discovering that it could lose its Socialism a lot more easily than its Britishness. It needed a figurehead shaped for the latter, and relatively uncontaminated by the former. And in Tony Blair, it found (so to speak) Dr Jekyll without Mr Hyde: a rare hybrid capable of ‘fronting’’the Movement’s transformation into the neo-liberal world bequeathed by Mrs Thatcher.

The factors making Blair ideal for ‘New Labour’ also help to dispel worry about what he may turn into. After the election, for example, we find one of Scotland’s finest political analysts still perplexed by the problem. ‘Will the Real Tony Blair Stand Up?’ Iain Macwhirter asked in the Sunday Herald (10 June 2001). ‘It is strange and a little scary, that we know so little about the Prime Minister’, he comments, even after electing him with two landslides:

In the past, Tony Blair perhaps felt that he had to be all things to all men — and women. That to make Labour electable it had to win Sun readers as well as the Guardian’s. But after Landslide 2 he has no longer any excuse for ideological evasion (and) … can no longer allow his party and personality to look as if they are a media creation. He now has to walk the walk. And this he intends to do.

Labour is going to get much tougher, he concludes. I’m sure this is right. But I doubt if it will be because the ‘real’ Blair finally emerges. What we have seen so far is what we are likely to get. No alter ego is waiting to pounce. But there is a seriously threatened Britishness, which New Labour’s leader is bound to take ‘personally’. Quite apart from the vexing dilemma of the Euro-currency referendum (which will have to be won in all four countries of the United Kingdom), there is the question of the Barnett Formula and winning the next elections in Scotland and Wales — while keeping the Northern Ireland Agreement alive. All these will require a sustained barrage of no-nonsense Union triumphalism from the Prime Minister and his watchdogs (primarily the Scottish contingent).

Tony Blair is essentially a vehicle of ‘transformism’ — trasformismo as it was once called in Italy — the mechanism of theft and adaptation by which Left becomes Right, or vice-versa, always in the name of the State. No longer possible without devolution, New Labourite transformation demanded in compensation an ultra-British accentuation of the dominant climate, and a corresponding change in popular attitudes — precisely what the aggravated, even hysterical, populism of the first New Labour government has been seeking to achieve. The Greenwich Dome was intended to be a mighty landmark for that direction in affairs — the enduring symbol of a United Kingdom reborn and ready for another century. As the whole world knows, it was a farce. There was nothing — or nothing suitable — to fill it with. Like ‘Britain’, its historic contents and purpose had been lost, and no amount of money and cultural striving could put them back again. So it turned almost at once into a poison sac, an abscess of miserable disputes and corrupt hand-outs which was miraculously kept more or less out of view during the recent electoral campaign. ‘Dr Britain’ was triumphantly reinstalled on a quarter of the votes. Now the poison will have at least four more years, and quite possibly nine or ten, to slowly fill the whole bloodstream of the British state-nation.

In retrospect one may also see the sense of the Blair-Brown conundrum more clearly. Whether or not, as was rumoured, they arrived at some kind of compact about leadership after John Smith’s death, the choice was never between ‘England’ and Scotland. Labour may indeed have been chary about another Scottish leader, but the quandary was in any case resolved by Blair’s Britishness. It is doubtful if many wanted an English captain in any emphatic or ethnic sense. Absence of ‘hinterland’ and cloudy religiosity were much safer, and made up for suspicions of shallowness or brashness.

What was safer then is probably even more necessary now. ‘England’ has become more politically salient since 1995, and the Scottish Parliament is likely to challenge the economic basis of the 1998 Scotland Act — the fiscal dependency of the block grant. However, these and other problems seem likely to underwrite Tony Blair’s leadership rather than demolish it. Who else in the ranks of New Labour can ‘speak for Britain’ in just his easy fashion? None of the Westminster Scots, for sure. Soon, they will all be preoccupied with ‘saving the Union’, a project even more hopeless than the Millennium Dome.

Tom Nairn is Professorial Fellow in Politics at Monash University

The horror is occasioned not by the disease itself of course, but by the decision of the Western pharmaceutical companies — Big Pharma — to resist any attempt by governments of the South to obtain cheap generic versions of the branded medicines which are effective in slowing or preventing the development of full-blown AIDS in those who are HIV-positive. Their use of international trade legislation to attack the South African government, which is attempting to buy generics from Brazil, has laid bare to many the ahuman character of the global neoliberal order. It was ever thus in everything from cash crops to infant formula of course, but the spectacle of snatching medicines from the mouths of the dying brings into clear focus the capacity of capital to turn something into its opposite, healing into killing.

The coincident publication of John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, in which he turns his attention from the cynicism and amorality of Cold War politics to the cynicism and amorality of one-world economics, only served to intensify the scrutiny of Big Pharma in the West. Faced with a public relations disaster, the explicit opposition of a number of Western governments, and the lack of enthusiasm of the Bush administration — the Clinton/Gore team had been happy to bully South Africa on their behalf — they would appear to be backing away from blanket prosecution of their global intellectual property ‘rights’.

Big Pharma argues that the prices they charge for their branded medicines — which push the price of drug-based AIDS treatments towards $20,000 a year per patient — are a measure of the extremely high costs of developing a new drug. Five-hundred-million dollars is the figure usually quoted but it is a fiction. The bulk of the costs are those created by the demands of intellectual property laws. Thousands of virtually identical compounds are tested because each can be copyrighted and used as a spoiler should a similar compound developed by a rival prove valuable. Similar treatments are created and then pseudo-differentiated for the same broad condition. An army of sales reps tours the GPs and specialists. When you add in the lavish conferences, the political lobbying and the lawyers to protect patent applications, $500 million is easy to rack up. Little wonder the ferocity with which markets are protected and forms of distribution which would undermine markets are crushed.

In light of this it has been suggested that Big Pharma should be asked to voluntarily suspend some of its patents in areas worst affected by the AIDS crisis. And so it should, but more important in the long run is to challenge the entire apparatus which maintains the notion of ‘intellectual property’.

The patent system which undergirds not only Big Pharma, but the whole biotechnology push was never developed with a view to being attached to the life sciences — to life itself. Originally established to facilitate the development of mechanical invention, this nineteenth-century knowledge industry was restricted to the visible and ‘invented’, and the notion that one could lay claim to the naturally occurring and ‘discovered’ was not entertained — otherwise the Curie family might have a claim to radium. The expansion of intellectual property to genes and chemical compounds occurred after the fact — when molecular biology had begun to develop the capacity for manipulating and transforming the material it studied. The establishment of this principle at the global level via the free-trade apparatus marks the single greatest transfer of common possession to private property in the history of the world. It’s the knowledge industry’s equivalent of the enclosures.

Yet though it is vaster in scale, its authority has come under assault in a more concerted and immediate fashion. The global and universal setting in which neoliberalism occurs makes a global and universal response more possible, and it is this enhanced capacity that has caught the corporate world by surprise. The biotechnology industry takes that process to the extreme. It is the primary agent of the ‘postmodern’ economy, in which nature itself is entirely dismembered for commodification and circulation.

Minor fiddling with the institution of patents only serves to legitimise it. The entire notion of ‘intellectual property’ as the given character of knowledge needs to be repudiated. Of course there is a need for a combination of licenses, royalties and public funding to maintain incentive and investment in knowledge development. But more importantly, nature and knowledge must be affirmed as a common and collective possession and practice. There is no need to look into the future to see what happens when this is not the case. It has already begun in Africa where one by one the hospitals are becoming hospices.

A decade later, US government intervention in Colombian internal affairs has escalated to an unprecedented level. In July, former US President Bill Clinton signed into law a massive two-year aid package for the Colombian government. Eighty per cent of the US$860 million has been allocated to Colombia’s security forces in the form of equipment and training, reinforcing Colombia’s status as the third in US military assistance after Israel and Egypt.

President Clinton had earlier criticised the Senate for jeopardising ‘national interests’ by delaying passage of the aid, but following its authorisation he lauded Congress for collaborating in the ‘war on drugs’.

Prior to the ratification by Clinton, a joint House-Senate committee reconciled the discrepancies in the packages approved by the two houses of Congress. The final aid legislation virtually abrogated the human rights stipulations included in the Senate version since the president was permitted to override these provisions on ‘national security’ grounds. Given the US government’s Orwellian definition of ‘national security’, its operative meaning referring to investment security for US corporations, Clinton was afforded ample discretion in heightening US support for Colombia’s terror state, and in August he predictably issued the waiver. In one of its final official acts prior to relinquishing power in January, the administration resorted to a dubious interpretation of the legislation in order to release the second portion of assistance without either certifying or again waiving the human rights conditions.

The legislation includes dozens of helicopters for US-trained army battalions, and although the number of US troops and civilian contractors allowed in Colombia at the same time are limited, the president can veto this restriction for ninety days if there is ‘imminent involvement’ of US personnel in conflict. In addition, according to the legislation, ‘tested, environmentally-safe myco-herbicides’ may be applied to eradicate coca fields. Despite research suggesting its capacity for destroying food crops and damaging ecosystems, US officials are seeking to experiment with the fungus fusarium oxysporum, a variant of which is classified as a biological warfare agent.

Both international and local human rights monitors have documented the involvement of the Colombian military in widespread atrocities perpetrated by paramilitary associates against noncombatants. According to a February publication from Human Rights Watch, half of the army’s brigade-level units are complicit in egregious paramilitary violence. Another recent HRW report revealed that the 1991 US-supervised restructuring of Colombia’s military intelligence incorporated the paramilitary apparatus to form ‘killer networks.’

Paramilitaries have murdered some twenty-five thousand Colombians since 1990, accounting for 75 per cent of politically motivated killings compared to 20 per cent attributed to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas. Peasants in particular have been selected for savage torture and murder by death squads but other victims include scores of trade unionists, human rights monitors, Church and indigenous activists, leftist politicians, university professors and independent journalists. Colombia’s largest labour confederation has documented the assassination of forty-five union leaders in the first nine months of 2000, confirming that Colombia is indisputably the world’s most hazardous country for unionists.

This military-paramilitary model is analogous to the approach employed in East Timor last year by the Indonesian army, which organised and then managed ‘pro-Jakarta militias’. The similarity is attributable to the US advisors who instructed both the Colombian and Indonesian armed forces in counter-insurgency strategies. An academy renowned for its alumni of Latin American dictators and brutal human rights violators, the US army’s infamous School of the Americas, has trained more officers from Colombia than any other country.

Scores of media commentators have entered into the debate on US military aid to Colombia. While many of the op-eds and editorials have expressed scepticism about assistance for the Colombian military, most of the apprehension is driven by concern over a Vietnam Syndrome recurrence featuring militant domestic and international popular opposition.

Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland illustrated this logic:

Humanitarian restrictions on US aid have to be designed and implemented to protect Americans, not Colombians or other potential targets of abuse … Americans need to be protected against the folly of unsustainable commitments abroad, which drain national treasure and credibility.

Once the aid bill was passed by Congress, the New York Times finally printed a piece regarding the military–paramilitary alliance. The article reported on the collaboration of a Colombian army unit in a massacre committed by paramilitary groups six months earlier.

US government and military spokespersons and the establishment media have deliberately misrepresented the crisis in Colombia as an armed conflict between drug-trafficking guerrillas — the so-called ‘narcoguerrillas’ — and a besieged yet incorruptible military. To the extent that the existence of paramilitaries is acknowledged, they are generally portrayed as an autonomous force attacking the civilian base of the guerrillas while the state struggles to protect innocent Colombians. Twenty years ago, US officials and the major media depicted Central America’s wars in the same duplicitous fashion.

Although the FARC and ELN finance insurgency through taxes collected on drug production in territories under their control, the paramilitary groups are ideologically and politically aligned with the narco-traffickers. They are united in defending the neo-liberal order from even minimal reform. The landowner–narco-trafficker–paramilitary nexus has resorted to unmitigated violence to preserve this ‘democratic’ system. Such repression is essential for the ruling class to maintain social control in a country where 40 per cent are indigent and a land-owning oligarchy monopolises the arable land.

Washington’s justification for the material backing is to combat the flow of illegal drugs from Colombia to the United States, but Colombia’s guerrilla insurgency and popular movement are the obvious targets. US policy may actually undermine the official counter-narcotics objective. US-devised ‘anti-drug’ operations are concentrated in areas of intense guerrilla activity in southern Colombia, while the paramilitaries are granted freedom of action in coca-producing regions.

Paramilitary leader Carlos Castano has publicly admitted that 70 per cent of the organisation’s funds are derived from drug trafficking. Several Colombian military officers have been implicated in drug smuggling and through military–paramilitary ties. Some of the US assistance may be diverted to fortifying rather than incapacitating the narcotics trade. Nor has the US government sought prosecution of the banking institutions mired in the laundering of drug money and the companies exporting the chemicals utilised in the production of cocaine.

To evaluate the international drug war, US policy toward Colombia must be considered in a regional context. US officials have expressed concern that the Colombian war could transcend national borders and destabilise the entire Andean region.

Colombia itself is a major ‘national security’ dilemma for US policymakers. Colombia’s guerrilla war has imperilled the considerable Colombian investments of US-based transnational corporations, notably oil companies whose pipelines and other facilities are routinely bombed by the armed rebels. A 1997 White House report indicated Washington’s intention to reduce reliance on Middle East petroleum by shifting to imports from Colombia and other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The US aid package is one component of Plan Colombia, a US$7.5 million strategy designed by the Colombian and US governments. Colombian President Pastrana has pledged US$4 million from his government and requested the US$3.5 million balance from foreign sources. The European Union (EU) and its member states, however, have rejected the plan’s military emphasis and the US agenda of bolstering Colombia’s counter-insurgency forces. In late October the EU and European donor governments announced a commitment of approximately US$400 million, only a fraction of the amount the Colombian government had intended to procure from the EU. The European Commission also determined that most assistance would be channelled to non-governmental organisations (NGOs), bypassing the Colombian government.

Plan Colombia’s economic policies represent an entrenching of the neo-liberal model imposed by the US government and US-dominated global financial institutions, namely the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The authors of the plan maintain that the measures will foster development and prosperity, providing the social conditions to facilitate the peace process. In reality, these policy prescriptions exacerbated poverty and inequality in both urban and rural Colombia throughout the 1990s, and an intensification of neo-liberalism will occasion the conditions for the guerrillas to recruit more members and a subsequent increase in the repression of the broad-based popular movement.

For Washington, the ‘democratically elected’ Pastrana is playing a similar role as José Napoleon Duarte in El Salvador and Vinicio Cerezo in Guatemala during the 1980s. In both these cases, the civilian presidents were victorious in aptly labelled ‘demonstration elections’ — borrowing a term from US foreign policy critic Edward Herman. After Duarte and Cerezo took office their respective militaries retained all de facto power and continued to rule, assassinating and massacring with impunity while the civilian heads-of-state loyally obeyed prescribed parameters which strictly circumscribed their actions. This democratic facade served a legitimising function for US policy and the Central American military forces. In contemporary Colombia, US foreign policymakers have pursued this arrangement in conjunction with Colombian authorities.

A key advisor to George W. Bush has publicly intimated that his incoming administration intends at minimum to maintain the counter-insurgency-oriented strategy for Colombia.

The architects and endorsers of the Colombia military package are on the verge of sponsoring state terrorism to a degree exceeding US support for El Salvador’s death-squad regime. If US-backed state terrorism in Central America and elsewhere is any indication, this US wherewithal will translate into more death and devastation for Colombians.

The pretext for US intervention in Latin America has shifted from Soviet-exported communism to narco-trafficking in accord with international political reconfigurations, but the motivations remain unaltered. Only an expanded and vibrant US-centred mobilisation in solidarity with the popular struggle in Colombia, rooted in the Central America solidarity movement of the 1980s, will deter US imperialism from further contributing to the ‘Central Americanision’ of Colombia.

Joseph Raso is a PhD candidate in Politics at Macquarie University in Sydney

What will arrive on the banks of the Yarra in September? What is the role of the WEF?

The WEF was born as a yearly ‘European Management Forum’ of Euro-corporates, held in Davos, Switzerland. It was funded by the European Commission until 1987, when it became the WEF and started to claim global reach. Its membership reflects its class orientation, and includes the most prominent transnational corporations, 1000 of which make up the WEF ‘Foundation Members’. In addition there is a club of ‘Global Growth Companies’, 300 ‘Industry Governors’, 300 Global Leaders of Tomorrow’, ‘World Economic Leaders’ from both politics and business, ‘World Media Leaders’ from 100 media groups, 100 ‘World Cultural Leaders’, and ‘Forum Fellows’ from academia and the heads of national economic research organisations.

The WEF aspires to be an agenda-setting Forum. It is, in its own modest opinion, ‘the foremost global partnership of business, political, intellectual and other leaders of society committed to improving the state of the world’. With the diffusion of neo-liberalism, and consequent advances in corporate globalisation from the 1980s, the WEF has taken on an unprecedented role as a rallying point for global elites, and as a vehicle for class power. Clearly the WEF can’t set the agenda and certainly can’t determine the outcomes – it is not a conspiratorial cabal standing over society. Rather, it is a class grouping fully embedded in social relations, that self-consciously takes on the role of planning for collective class interests. It seeks to influence the political agendas and respond to the prevailing challenges – and in this respect, as Kees van der Pijl argues, it is the first ‘true International of capital’.

The forum has been remarkably successful; since 1971 the ‘state of the world’ has dramatically improved for many of the participating corporations. WEF strategising drove the neo-liberal agenda in the 1980s, bringing together politicians from the ‘pretender’ states of the newly industrialising world, as well as from the OECD states, to map out an agenda with transnational corporation business executives. It offered a proactive forum, removed from the public gaze, and played a central role in diffusing neo-liberalism. The model was presented as the solution to crises of accumulation experienced in the 1970s and early 1980s, and was highly effective in extending the reign of the market.

This success has come at the price of built-in uncertainty and unstability. Globalised neo-liberalism had led to a dramatic redrawing of the boundaries of capitalism. Temporal boundaries have melted away with the speeding up of circulation; spatial boundaries have been superceded with the growing transnational reach of corporations; even socio-psychological boundaries have lifted, with the increased commodification of life. A newly empowered transnational capitalist class has emerged triumphant, presiding over the new landscapes of accumulation. But class hegemony is by no means assured – uncharted territory imposes incalculable risk. Speeding circulation compresses business cycles, confidence rests on ephemera, ideological symbols embody so-called ‘fundamentals’, speculation rules. Corporate transnationalism exhausts social and physical environments, and the fall-out becomes uncontainable as corporations are pincered by investor and consumer volativities. Deeper commodification disassembles social solidarity and generates powerful imperatives for cultural survival, often carried through the new modes of social communication.

As a result, since at least the mid-1990s, neo-liberal prescriptions have been widely discredited. Exponential rises in executive salaries, and in corporate accumulation, along with a dramatic concentration of economic power across all sectors, offer clear evidence of the success of neo-liberalism as a class strategy. But neo-liberal globalisation has also brought unprecedented levels of global inequality, and undreamed-of degrees of financial instability, environmental exhaustion and social dislocation. The neo-liberal triumph has created new sources of opposition, the impacts and responses have been unremitting, and advocates have been forced onto the defensive. The high water mark was 1995, when the OECD declared it was marking out a ‘global vision for the year 2020, a New Global Age’. But already a political revival, inspired by social democratic ideas, and expressed in a new form of social liberalism sometimes described as the ‘Third Way’, was sweeping the OECD.

As neo-liberal prescriptions have unravelled, there has been an urgent revision of the WEF’s neo-liberal project. The WEF has left behind its market fundamentalism, and now is charting a new agenda for corporate globalism, one that embraces rather than rejects ‘the social’. The massed ranks of analysts, consultants and advisers, from credit-ratings agencies, management consultancies, inter-governmental institutions and non-government organisations, have entered the fray, battling to define the new accumulation paradigm. There are continuing efforts to enhance ‘market discipline’, to suppress the advancing crises, to institutionalise transnational class power, and render neo-liberal globalism irreversible. Yet there is also deepening dissent amongst policy-making groups. There is a rethinking of neo-liberalism even amongst the most elite institutions: as Hans-Peter Martin and Herald Schuman demonstrate, many of the most powerful players in global capitalism are questioning the ‘dictatorship of the market’. Primary advocates and beneficiaries of neo-liberal globalism, such as George Soros and Ted Turner, both of whom had embarked on paternalist interventions – the imaginatively branded ‘Soros Foundation’ and ‘Turner Foundation’ – began expressing sincere regrets at the social costs of neo-liberalism. Other elements, as van der Pijl highlights, went further and increasingly have embarked on a rethinking explicitly ‘mobilised against yesterday’s prescriptions’. These have much wider ramifications, potentially enabling ‘a deepening of democracy, a reappropriation of the public sphere by the population, and eventually a more fundamental transformation away from class society’.

Recent developments have only strengthened the leverage of this dissenting segment. Institutional crises of legitimacy have accumulated, with the OECD shelving its ‘Multilateral Agreement on Investment’ in 1998, the temporary ditching of the World Trade Organisation’s ‘Millenium Round’ in 1999, and the advancing crisis in the International Monetary Fund’s global regime of ‘structural adjustment’. Add into the equation the continuing crisis in ‘transitional’ post-communist societies, especially Russia, and the severe jolt delivered to the ‘newly industrialising countries’ of East Asia by financial ‘contagion’ in 1997-98, and the impending bursting of the infotainment bubble, then the challenges to neo-liberalism begin to seem irresistable. Expressing this, there have been the dramatic public explosions against neo-liberal globalism: Geneva 1996, Cologne 1998, Seattle 1999, Washington 2000.

For the first time in many years, ‘anti-capitalist’ protest has returned to the capitalist heartland, and to the global stage. These protests open up the ideological space for the articulation of alternative guiding principles, putting on the agenda the possibility of transformation away from the current malaise. As the promotion of capitalist discipline is questioned, protest targetted at the agents of neo-liberal globalism gains remarkable political leverage. In this political climate WEF meetings start to take on a special significance. Since 1996 the WEF has attracted increasingly militant opposition, and it has responded by attempting to re-chart the neo-liberal project. The WEF response is to deliberately avoid the appearance of backroom strategising, and instead to seek a higher public profile, attempting to reground its legitimacy by being seen to engage with prominent advocates of the emerging alternatives. The WEF is thus placing itself at the centre of debates about the revision of neo-liberalism, asserting that Davos can play ‘important role in forging the new geometry’.

Reflecting this, the WEF has reached out to those ‘excluded’ by neo-liberal globalism – notably non-OECD governments, such as Mexico and South Africa, and critical Non-Government Organisations, such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). In 1998 Hillary Clinton argued the role of NGOs and other representatives of ‘civil society’ had to be enhanced, while John Sweeney, from the AFL-CIO, focused on issues of distribution, arguing markets had to ‘work for the majority and not simply for the few’. In 1999 Vice-President Al Gore appeared with Kofi Annan, who appealed for a ‘global compact’ between business and the United Nations founded on ‘core values in the areas of human rights, labour standards, and environmental practices’. In 2000 President Clinton shared the millennial limelight – somewhat blurred by Seattle – with Tony Blair. Davos policy debates are now couched in terms of ‘institutional accommodation’, ‘corporate responsibility’ and ‘global dialogue’, with sessions in 2000 on ‘responsible globality’, ‘inclusive prosperity’ and ‘sustainable development’. Perhaps most cynically, the WEF’s ‘World Competitiveness Scorecard’ – a yearly league-table of ‘how national environments are conducive or detrimental to the domestic and global competitiveness of enterprises’ – was supplemented by an ‘Environmental Sustainability Index’ at Davos 2000. At the same time, as Jane Kelsey highlights, a new ‘World Economic Community’ Internet link-up between 10,000 key economic decision-makers (an Internet ‘hotline’ for concertising corporate responses) is being constructed.

The contest is on to establish a revised normative and institutional framework for the global economy. The WEF is claiming a central role in shaping the agenda, and some, such as the ICFTU, are willing participants in the process, taking heart in the WEF’s apparent willingness to become an advocate of ‘globalisation with a human face’. But the key question is whether the WEF should be permitted to drive this agenda. Should a forum that is dominated by corporate interests be encouraged to take on the role of mapping out future frameworks for global governance? Should it be granted recognition and legitimacy in this agenda-setting process? Or, rather, should its role be challenged, and alternative sources of legitimacy be asserted?

There was a telling moment at Davos 2000 when the assembled executives refused to vacate the conference chamber to enable a security check before Clinton’s speech. The US President’s Security Service was forced to back down after a corporate ‘sit-in’. Clinton’s speech went ahead: even the President of the United States has to respect the wishes of the corporate club. Perhaps he should have joined the thousand protestors outside the conference venue, and joined the democratic movement against corporate power.

There will be similar protests outside the Melbourne regional summit of the WEF in September. In 1999 the summit lobbied for regional governments to back the coming WTO ‘Millennium Round’, arguing that trade liberalisation was inevitable and needed to be extended into ‘free and fair competition, protecting intellectual property and foreign investment’. In 2000 we can expect much rhetoric about inclusiveness and sustainability. Just as the Casino poses itself as a ‘family entertainment’ centre, so the Melbourne WEF meeting will be spinning the rhetoric of corporate responsibility. There will be plenty of ironic moments and opportunities to politicise globalised neo-liberalism and put up the alternatives. Perhaps this is what lies behind the comment, from Melbourne’s Lord Mayor, that the forum will be a ‘huge opportunity for the city’.

James Goodman works in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney

The present customers of the American political system, however, do not appear to have the strength of their forefathers. The US political system has evolved into a relentless and interminable machine for raising money and lowering expectations, and ultimately in the election of men to the Oval office who abide by the political maxim that leadership is about finding a parade and getting in front of it. In such a system, there is no respite, no hope for the republican ideal of freedom as ‘non-domination’. If this appears as a harsh assessment — which it deliberately is — one need only cast a not too critical gaze over the only two electable candidates left in the race: Vice-President Albert Arnold Gore Jnr, and the Governor of Texas, George Walker Bush, two men with a lot more in common than either would ever admit to. (Pat Buchanan, of the Reform Party, is not included in the ‘electable’ category.)

Gore and Bush, Democrat and Republican respectively, have two of the most outstanding political pedigrees in the country. Gore’s father and Bush’s grandfather were United States Senators. Bush’s father, beside serving one term as President, was also Vice-President and a one-time Director of the CIA, certainly the more impressive of the three positions. Bush’s younger brother Jeb, is also the Governor of Florida. Since 1976 every Republican presidential ticket has featured either a Bush or a Dole.

Gore also has interesting kin, being the cousin of the noted author and essayist Gore Vidal. Vidal’s grandfather, T.P. Gore, was a senator from Oklahoma. As Vidal tells it though, in his memoir Palimpsest, the current senator from Oklahoma told him that ‘when Albert was running for President in 1988, he came to Oklahoma, and to hear him tell it, old T.P. Gore was his grandfather’. And so ‘the web of kin goes on’, concluded Vidal of Gore’s re-climbing of the family tree, even if ‘the individual strands do not’. The power and influence of kin, the opportunities and recognition afforded by family connections in the 2000 presidential race can hardly go unmentioned in a republic supposedly dedicated and sustained in part by merit.

The ‘web of kin’ is not the only outstanding feature of the 2000 presidential election. So too is the trail of money. Gore and Bush have proved to be successful — to the point of vulgarity — at raising money. In the month after he announced that he might be a candidate, $7 million flooded into the Bush campaign. By September of last year $36 million had been raised, a record in American politics. By December Bush had raised $65 million and was in a position to refuse federal matching funds, which would have put a limit on the amount of money he could continue to raise. In the first half of 1999 the Republicans raised $29.4 million in ‘soft money’ or unlimited contributions that are given by companies and interest groups to ‘Political Action Committees’ and not, technically, to individual candidates. Individual donors are limited to one-thousand-dollar donations. The Democrats managed to raise $24.2 million in the same period. The figures for both parties represent an increase from four years ago of 45 per cent and 130 per cent respectively. What was once considered patronage is now called fundraising, and most public action, far from being for Paine’s res-publica is dependent upon ‘private energy and private funds’, which is how Wood characterised such actions in pre-revolutionary America.

The only candidate to suggest any real reform of campaign fundraising was Arizona Senator John McCain. During the primaries, McCain proved to be a problem for the Bush succession, with his image as a genuine war hero (which he is) and a ‘maverick’ senator (which he is not). McCain supported every item of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America and voted in the affirmative for every article of impeachment against Clinton. Garry Wills, perhaps America’s most astute political observer, has called McCain a ‘political troglodyte’. Nevertheless, a common response from voters was that McCain is the ‘last hero of American politics’ and ‘he tells the truth’.

There was little difference in policy terms between Bush and McCain until McCain became a heretic in the Republican Party by spurning and actively wanting to change the system that had put him and Bush where they were. McCain wanted to eliminate all ‘soft money’ contributions. During the Republican debates McCain asked Bush if he was in favour of eliminating ‘soft money’. The Bush response was that eliminating ‘soft money’ would hurt the Republican Party and he was not for anything that would hurt the Republican Party, which is good ol’ boy code for ‘are you insane John, I have millions and I want to be president’. There was a sense that McCain was not dancing with the people who had brought him to the party. Consequently, after McCain defeated Bush in the New Hampshire primaries there was a change in the strategy of the Bush campaign. McCain went from being ‘my friend John’ to ‘Chairman McCain’ overnight. (McCain is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.) This was Bush’s attempt at banishing McCain from the kingdom, back to Washington to continue on with ‘politics as usual.’

However, in 1987 and 1988 McCain voted against campaign finance reform. It took an epiphany, otherwise known as his inclusion in the ‘Keating Five’, to become an advocate of campaign finance reform. McCain and four other Senators (all Democrats) became involved with Charles Keating, a corrupt owner of a savings and loan enterprise. McCain had received $112,000 in campaign contributions from Keating, including $54,000 for his Senate campaign. The McCain family had also enjoyed the use of a vacation house owned by Keating. When Keating managed to lose the life savings of all of his investors and cost the US taxpayer $3 billion, he turned to McCain and the other four Senators for protection from federal banking regulators. Consequently McCain became the subject of an Ethics Committee investigation. The counsel to the Ethics Committee recommended that all charges against McCain should be dropped, and he only received a ‘mild rebuke’ for exercising ‘poor judgement’.

Despite beating Bush in New Hampshire, Arizona and Michigan, McCain could not sustain his challenge on a nation-wide, or a Republican-wide basis. The Republicans’ ‘big tent’ proved to be too big for McCain’s message to be sustained in order to gain the nomination. The ‘big tent’ also proved too small for McCain to gain the nomination, as party rules in many primary states including Delaware, Arizona (which McCain won), Connecticut, Maine, New York, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma and California are closed primaries where only registered republicans can vote. (California is slightly different, in that it is ostensibly open but when awarding delegates only the votes of registered Republicans are counted in the Republican contest.) Closed primaries made McCain’s vote-winning potential considerably smaller because he appealed to independent voters and Democrats. McCain has ‘suspended’ his campaign and decided, after some persuasion (coercion?) to endorse Bush.

The ever-present need for money, because of the ever-present campaign, creates networks of faithful party donors who have an insatiable need for influence. The money cycle — I mean the electoral cycle — re-infects the body politic with patronage and leads to a hierarchy of citizenship, where votes and influence can be bought and sold, a system where domination is not easily checked because, after all, it is ‘their’ money, a system in which the voter becomes the servant of the candidate, giving time and money in return for dubious favours; and, as should be obvious, the keeping of servants has always been considered ‘highly anti-republican.’

The campaign has now been whittled down to Gore and Bush, even though the party conventions are not held until late July for the Republicans, at Philadelphia’s First Union Centre, and August for the Democrats, in Los Angeles at the Staples Centre. The campaign is now completely devoid of issues, after campaign finance reform left the arena with McCain. The official campaign websites of Gore and Bush display long lists of campaign promises which amount to little more than a set of quibbles between the two. Should there be a $250 to $300 billion dollar tax cut (Gore) or a $1 trillion tax cut (Bush)? How much of the surplus should go on the debt, Medicare and Social Security? Both candidates are knocking themselves out to convince America’s newest political institution, ‘hard-working, middle-class families’, that their policies are ‘family friendly’. The campaign that invents a method for including the ‘family’ in military and foreign policy will surely win the election. And the only differences of any real substance to be found between Gore and Bush are in the areas of education and gun control. Gore supports the upgrade of public schools and Bush supports the introduction of school vouchers. Gore is in favour of putting child safety locks on guns, and Bush (and the very generous NRA) against such a measure.

The real difference between the two candidates may ultimately prove to be in name only — between a New Democrat and a Compassionate Conservative; to child-lock or not to child-lock? The ‘democratic adhesive’ sought after by the revolutionaries has emerged in the year 2000 as a chronic dependence on an increasingly false distinction between Democrats and Republicans. A dependence also in the sense of voters ‘conforming to the will’ and serving the presidential manufacturing machine. The 2000 presidential election is a disturbing reminder of the hierarchy, patronage and dependence that has overwhelmed the American republic. Perhaps the last word should be left to Tom Paine. ‘Virtue’, wrote Paine in Common Sense, ‘is not hereditary’.

Erin McKenna is a postgraduate student in politics at Monash University

Like a funhouse mirror, the brutal mass-bombing and shelling of Chechnya by Russian forces resembles a distorted version of NATO’s bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo. And while there are differences, as Clinton and Blair are keen to point out, the complicity of the West in the Chechnya situation is both real and multilevelled. Firstly, Russia has taken a leaf out of NATO’s manual on how to wage contemporary warfare. Secondly, the United States has long been a supporter of Russian attempts to dominate Chechnya. Finally, the muted response by the West to such overt barbarism has as much to do with investments in the global economy, natural resources, and ideological attempts to restrain perceived growth of fundamentalist Islam as it has to do with the issues of opposing a powerful and nuclear-capable nation.

Despite some coverage, the media response, in proportion to the amount of killing and terror that is evident in Chechnya, has been restrained. While Russia over the past six weeks has relentlessly bombed cities and villages, resulting in indiscriminate destruction, causing over two hundred thousand people to flee to neighbouring Ingushetia, there has been precious little coverage in the media of a crisis that equals, if not surpasses, the one in Kosovo. Whereas dozens of television cameras were able to convey the multifaceted scenes of terror in Kosovo, we are yet to see anything comparable in Chechnya. One can speculate on the reasons for this. One is that Russia has ensured that media contact is minimal – it is fighting its own version of an ‘information war’. Few reporters are willing to go to an area made so obviously dangerous by random bombing, combined with threats of kidnapping. Russian shelling has destroyed local media structures, along with everything else. The lack of television coverage means that Russia can deny much of what it is doing, the attack on Elistanzhi and the bombing of five Red Cross vehicles (killing two staff and twenty-five civilians) being two notorious early examples.

Another reason may be the effects of the new post-1989 division between so-called Central Europe and what remains of the East, a kind of replication of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘new poor’ at a national/regional level. In other words, if it is not in ‘Europe’ then it does not get priority – at some level it does not even exist. Perhaps it is all too much to cope with so soon after Kosovo. Here we have another example of forced movement, bombing from above, except that the same side is doing both the bombing and the forced emigration. Yet if Kosovo remains in limbo, with little in the way of positive results, if the ‘humanitarian’ values espoused as the reason for the high-altitude bombing in the Balkans have withered with time, is it not possible to find a degree of convergence between NATO-style abstract destruction in the name of humanitarianism, and the more obviously odious form destruction takes in Chechnya?

Since the breakup of the USSR, the republic of Chechnya has been a source of consternation for Russia. Claiming an independent heritage and a different ethnic composition (largely Muslim), Chechnya also contains much of the rich oil and gas deposits of the Caucasus. In 1994 Russia attempted to submit Chechnya to its will, first through what is known as the Russian ‘Bay of Pigs’ disaster, when Russian soldiers disguised as Chechens attempted to infiltrate the region, and were comprehensively routed. Six months later this was followed by open invasion. In the end Russia withdrew, having sustained large casualties in fighting a vicious ground war. There have been subsequent incidents of Chechen terrorism, including several bomb attacks in Moscow in ‘retaliation’.

This time, it is different. Russia has followed the model of the United States in Iraq and NATO in Kosovo and has conducted war at a distance. When the weather is clear Russian airplanes have made over 150 sorties a day. On 3 November the Russian airforce commander complained that his pilots had dropped so many precision-guided bombs that they were running short. At the time of writing the bombing has increased. Not that precision seems to have been of much importance. The city of Grozny is decimated, its central marketplace and hospital destroyed. It may even be that the airforce and army do not even know what they are hitting, with many Russian pilots having received minimal training. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent reports that the most common sound in Chechnya is that of the notoriously inaccurate Grad missile launcher.

There is no doubt that in the short term many in Russia are reaping the benefits of this new style of mediated destruction. The approval ratings of Prime Minister Putin have soared as he vows to teach a lesson to the ‘bandits, terrorists and gangsters’ in Chechnya. That this can be done without apparent risk of the humiliation and defeat of Russian soldiers, as in the first war, means that Putin’s military posturing has made him currently the most popular Russian politician. By conducting this ‘safer’ NATO-style war, Russia gains a double revenge – against Chechnya after the humiliations of the 1994-6 war, and against the West – as Russia reasserts itself after being largely left out of the negotiations in Kosovo. The assertion of national power also provides a useful deflection away from the recent money-laundering scandal that rocked Moscow.

There is also a more material gain. It seems that Russia is determined not only to liquidate Islamic rebels (an attempt which has largely failed), but also to regain control of the Caucasus via first gaining control of Chechnya – the gateway to the rich energy resources of the Caspian and Central Asia. Notably, Russia’s ‘recovery’ has been led by profits generated from oil and gas. Indeed Russia’s current account surplus may top 20 billion US dollars, thanks to oil and gas revenue, something that was no doubt made clear to the IMF on a recent visit.

The West has been slow to criticise Russia for conducting the form of abstract terrorism it is now engaged in. Reasons are easy enough to find. Firstly, the Clinton administration has been a long-time supporter of Russia’s attempt to dominate Chechnya. Indeed in the first campaign of 1994-6 President Clinton was highly vocal in his support for Russia, comparing Russia’s ‘struggle’ with Chechnya to America’s civil war, even going so far as to call Boris Yeltsin a Russian Abraham Lincoln. The fact that Chechnya is largely Muslim, and the fact that bombs had been planted in Moscow by Chechens has allowed the rhetoric of the ‘war on terrorism’ to flow freely. In December last year the New York Times declared that ‘Mr. Yeltsin is justified in using military force to suppress the [Chechnya] rebellion’. Only very recently, Madeline Allbright expressed US support for Russia against fundamentalist terrorism. Al Gore has said that he will be even tougher than Clinton on Muslim fundamentalist campaigns of violence. This general tenor has created a paradoxical effect upon the world stage. At the same time as President Clinton was ordering Indonesia to get out of East Timor (albeit without real commitment), his administration was supporting a savage invasion of Chechnya, in the name of a war on terrorism. While support has recently waned in the light of Russia’s open and ‘disproportionate’ campaign of terror, this complicity explains the West’s muted criticism, and both the United States’ and Britain’s affirmation at this point that they will not attempt to impose sanctions.

The relation between Russia and the global economy points toward a further level of complicity. Some commentators have called for the United States to stop financial assistance to Russia, as this is clearly, at some significant level, underwriting the war on Chechnya. Yet, while this may happen, the United State is reluctant because of the effect this might have on the global economy. As Rupert Cornwall writes, ‘Economic sanctions could backfire by triggering loan defaults or a repeat of Russia’s 1998 financial crisis that might destabilise international markets’ (Independent, 6 November 1999). For a number of reasons then, it would seem that the hands of the United States are tied. If Prime Minister Putin thumbs his nose at the West, gaining in popularity as he does so, it is perhaps this knowledge that the West simply cannot afford to risk another financial collapse that underscores his immunity to criticism.

After the disaster in Kosovo, and after the destruction of the Chechen republic, it is increasingly clear that the only solution to such racial and territorial aggression is a strengthened United Nations able to intervene on the ground and outside of regional or national interest. While this is a tall order, it is the only realistic possibility. In the last six months we have seen that neither the United States nor NATO is able to act as the world’s policeman. The style of intervention – abstract killing at a distance, the generation of genuine, if often fleeting, upwelling of humanitarian support via media concentration – has proven highly selective, as well as ultimately ineffective. Now Russia has used the methods of the West in a brutal parody of Kosovo-style intervention. The West is unwilling to act due to varying degrees of complicity, its media almost turning a blind eye to the problem.

Note: For the full version of this article, see issue 44 of Arena Magazine.