When this is questioned, ministers have said that the Defence Department has been directed to undertake ‘a substantial program of reform, efficiencies and savings’ which are expected to yield $22.7 billion of savings during the next decade. However, that only allows internal changes of priority: these so called savings will simply be used for building up other areas of military activity, whereas other areas of government which are subject to an ‘efficiency dividend’, like the CSIRO and the National Library, lose funds every year.

Supporters could also argue that the promised increases are not likely to substantially increase the proportion of military spending in national income and that would be true. Real national income may well grow by an average of around 3 per cent a year and inflation is unlikely to be less than 2 per cent a year. But that is not the point. Guaranteeing military spending each year for the next 20 involves abandoning careful analysis of requirements. It assumes that the international military situation will steadily deteriorate and that purchases of more weapons and employment of more military personnel will be essential. This is a doctrine of despair, and is consistent with weakness of discussion about means which could contribute to strengthening security.

An early expression of the White Paper’s plans was the Defence budget for 2010–11, in which spending was increased by $1.57 billion to $26.8 billion. In the same budget the allocation for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was $1.1 billion. So the increase in Australian military spending in 2010–11 is 50 per cent greater than the total allocation for diplomacy. This is simply irresponsible at a time when we have 18 per cent fewer diplomats posted overseas than in 1996 (due to the depredations of the Howard government). Australia has fewer overseas diplomatic missions than any other member of the G20. Yet diplomacy is the prime means of avoiding conflict as well as of representing Australian interests overseas.

This is happening at a time when the government’s principal commitment is to achieving a balanced budget by 2013. Such fiscal austerity requires spending cuts in many high priority activities, and constraints are being imposed on most. Why should defence be immune from those? It is also happening at a time when all other developed countries are searching for ways of reducing their military spending and many have already announced major cuts. The United States announced plans in January 2011 to slash $78 billion from the Pentagon’s budget during the next five years including by cancelling orders for new weapons. The British conservative government announced in October 2010 that defence spending would fall by 8 per cent over the next four years. ‘Harrier jump jets, the Navy’s flagship HMS Ark Royal and planned Nimrod spy planes are to be axed and 42,000 MoD and armed forces jobs cut by 2015’, reports the BBC.

The Australian increases are also happening at a time when there is no electoral pressure for increased military spending. Public opinion does not support the White Paper’s plans. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Special Report on Public Opinion in Australia towards Defence, Security and Terrorism, Issue 16 concludes that ‘support for more defence spending has dropped to its lowest level since the end of the Cold War’. The reason is that ‘The proportion of voters seeing a security threat to Australia has declined consistently since the late 1960s’. Most voters are far more concerned with employment and living standards, health services and education than with defence. The Medicare card is of greater importance to the security of most Australians than increased military spending.

Why then have these perverse and sectorally skewed plans been made? Governments are necessarily in the business of prediction and no more so than on issues of defence and national security. So they turn to ‘defence planners’, who predict the future in order to enable governments to decide on defence policy. Those people, by training and environment, are pessimistic about what is going to happen. Their task is to warn of possible threats to national security, and when they sit down to think up threats and spend their professional lives discussing threats with their colleagues they end up with a long list of things that might just conceivably happen.

From a theoretical point of view, their starting point is the nation-state, and the assumption that nation-states are armed against each other in a global anarchy: best, therefore, to arm one’s own state to the teeth lest some other state invade. Never mind that the end of the Cold War, the emergence of globalisation and the development of new international norms about peacemaking and peacekeeping render such a view simplistic.

Unlike an earlier generation of Labor ministers in the Hawke and Keating governments, the Rudd government did not resist demands from the Defence Department, the weapons manufacturers, and the other members of military-industrial complex. In place of a focus on ‘defensive defence’, low-level threats and regional peacekeeping, they opted for ‘offensive defence’. The 2009 White Paper intensified key elements of Howard government defence policy, that is, forward projection of forces, strike capability, and high technology weapons systems, and, like the Coalition, promised increased real spending on defence every year.

In detail, the White Paper proposes buying: twelve submarines, which would be Australia’s largest ever single defence project; air-warfare destroyers and a new class of frigates to replace the ANZAC class ships; maritime-based land-attack cruise missiles; naval combat helicopters; 100 F-35 joint strike fighters; Wedgetail early warning and control aircraft; maritime surveillance and response aircraft; and around 1100 armoured combat vehicles. The period of acquisition is long, twenty years, but the costs are unprecedented in Australian peacetime defence spending.

The Military Silo

The White Paper discusses Australian defence as if it is in a silo, which enables defence to be planned in isolation from other dimensions of global affairs. The isolation of military strategy prevents discussion of the relative priority and weight given to other aspects of foreign policy such as comprehensive reviews of bilateral, regional and multilateral relations and alliances; political contact and discussions; diplomatic activity; multilateral engagement; peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, especially negotiation, mediation and conciliation; development policy including official development assistance; international economic, financial, social (including human rights) and environmental relations; and global governance including its economic, social and environmental dimensions. Although the White Paper does mention some of these, they are not incorporated into the analysis.

A more holistic approach to national security would reflect a qualitative improvement in strategic thinking. Such a change would require a creative re-evaluation of Australia’s security requirements for a new Asia-Pacific century. This would entail the recognition that conventional military forces are commonly ill-suited to achieving desirable international outcomes. This in turn would require a considerable reallocation of human and financial resources to increase the capabilities of other national departments and national and multilateral agencies. The White Paper even acknowledges that many ‘argue that Defence should be considered in a whole-of-government security context that includes aid programs and diplomacy and contributions to non-government organisations’ (WP: 18) but explicitly chooses not to do this, instead treating military spending as if it is a closed world which can be considered in isolation from other factors which determine the degree of co-operation or hostility between countries.

In the wider world, political and social attention has turned to issues such as humanitarian emergencies, mass human rights abuses, intra-state conflict, state failure, terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Militaries are frequently required to play a key role in responding to potential conflict and its consequences and to natural disasters. So the range of activities that the military may be required to undertake has expanded substantially. This security-centred paradigm requires a reinvention of the roles for which the military prepare.

The largest single deployment of Australian troops in recent times has not been to our northern borders to protect the country from invasion or even to Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather to East Timor at the head of INTERFET, a coalition of the willing with UN authority. The interventions in East Timor and the Solomon Islands brought together the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Federal Police in joint projects for restoring law and order while building the state. The determining consideration in Australia’s defence planning should be likely contingencies of this and other kinds, not the remote possibility of international conflict or invasion.

Misjudging Threats

The Minister’s preface to the White Paper begins ‘There is no greater responsibility for a national government than the defence of the nation, its people and their interests’. This familiar claim for the pre-eminence of defence needs to be put in context. Protection from external threats is certainly one aspect of national and personal security but so are economic stability, opportunities for employment, environmental sustainability, high quality health and education services, safety on the streets and much more. The Minister’s claim exaggerates the importance of defence in peacetime and lays a foundation for the misleadingly narrow analysis. National security is only one aspect of national wellbeing.

The White Paper asserts that the ‘primary obligation [of defence] is to deter and defeat attack on Australia’ and moves straight on to address force structure, rather than discussing whether resisting a threat of invasion is currently or foreseeably the highest realistic priority. So the principal issue which the comment raises is neglected. It also works against the White Paper’s own assessment that there is neither currently nor foreseeably any power in the region capable of mounting such operations. The fear of invasion is close to fantasy: there is no credible interest anywhere in attacking this country nor has there been for two thirds of a century. As Kim Beazley said when tabling a committee report on threats to Australia over three decades ago, only one country has the capacity to invade Australia, the United States, and it is able to obtain all it wants from Australia without such action!

The White Paper points out that China will become the strongest Asian military power ‘by a considerable margin’ and that the Chinese military modernisation which is under way ‘appears potentially to be beyond the scope of what would be required for a conflict over Taiwan’. The implication is that Australia needs to prepare for Chinese aggression. China may or may not become a military threat as it expands economically, but to posture against it before evidence justifying this emerges risks encouraging aggressive Chinese preparation in return. Allan Behm writes: ‘Quite simply, in the timeframes considered by this White Paper, China will have neither the intention nor the power to mount a direct attack against Australia. The chapter’s key judgement is breathtaking in its naivety and lack of nuance’.

The White Paper recognises that ‘The enduring reality of our strategic outlook is that Australia will most likely remain, by virtue of our geostrategic location, a secure country over the period to 2030’ yet it fails to plan on that reasonable conclusion. Geoff Miller, the former Director-General of the Office of National Assessments, concludes that ‘the White Paper only makes the case for the huge expenditure it projects by focusing on the stated principal task of deterring and defeating attacks on Australia without relying on the combat or combat support forces of other countries, while ignoring its own conclusions about the limits to self-reliance and about the likelihood of Australia having to defend against a major power adversary on its own’.

The White Paper makes the case for the extraordinary increases in military spending by exaggerating the threat to Australia—which has been the normal tactic of governments for the last sixty years. The effect of exaggerating military threats has been to justify current expenditure which is already far larger than is necessary, $73 million a day. Australia does not need military spending per person more than twice that of Japan or Russia or 50 per cent more than Canada.

The Benefits of Seeking Peace

The world is less threatening than the drafters of the White Paper claim. Most states now prefer to avoid inter-state conflict, and military activity is constrained by national economic and political interest and as well by rules, norms and conflict resolution processes. The traditional concept of state-based military power utilised to pursue national interest is being supplanted by the view that war is a threat to national interests. A recent example is the Report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), which argues that ‘The downside risks of waging aggressive war in a globalized interdependent world are seen today as outweighing almost any conceivable benefit’.

Military power is no longer regarded by most nations and policy makers as the only basis of security. Alliances enable countries to strengthen their security. Multilateral rules, norms and conflict resolution processes constrain aggression. National economic goals are overwhelmingly achieved through commercial and political activity. And countries which act aggressively face penalties. The global order of the early 21st century is one in which great net benefits flow from co-operating with the international community.

The White Paper offers little explanation about what might cause conflict or war and nothing at all about peaceful means of attempting to resolve potential conflict. Australia’s interest is as much in peaceful conflict resolution as is that of all United Nations member states, yet this top priority is neither mentioned nor discussed. Nor is the value of regional political and economic bodies in strengthening integration and stability acknowledged.

The White Paper mentions the formative role of the UN Charter in establishing a rule-based international system and recognises that the maintenance of this multilateral system is a key consideration for Australia’s security. It does not, though, go on to discuss how to participate so as to act in ways consistent with the commitments of member states or to contribute to enabling the United Nations to do its work more effectively.

The UN Charter is the foundational document of postwar multilateral relations. Article 1 of the Charter describes the first purpose of the United Nations as being:

To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and the removal of threats, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.

Article 2 requires that Member States act in accordance with stated principles, the third of which is that:

All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

That is, membership of the United Nations requires countries to attempt by all reasonable means to avoid the threat or use of force and to seek non-violent means of minimising and resolving conflict. There have been many resolutions in the Security Council and General Assembly elaborating the theme of peaceful conflict resolution. For Australia to effectively fulfill this responsibility would involve taking the following steps.

First, defence planning should be more thoroughly integrated with other aspects of foreign policy. Recognition of the complementarities of foreign and defence policy would create the basis for a public and governmental discourse in which a range of perspectives and possibilities could be included. Australian security would be strengthened if defence is liberated from the silo within which it is imprisoned so that the framework for foreign and defence policy could be addressed holistically.

Second, for all these reasons and to conserve scarce funds for other higher priority international and domestic programs, proposed defence expenditure should be rigorously reviewed and some proposed weapons purchasers cut or cancelled – as the US has just announced it will do. This would limit competition for finance for services which voters regard as of far greater importance. Good public policy should not treat one kind of public outlay differently from all others by conferring on defence the unique privilege of announced real increases until 2030. The quarantining of defence spending discriminates against every other area of public service, introduces rigidity, and eliminates a financial incentive to strengthen the efficiency with which defence is provided.

Third, funding for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) must be substantially improved. Why should diplomacy, the instrument supposed to sustain a global and regional web of relationships and co-operative arrangements favouring Australia, receive one twenty-sixth of the funds allocated to defence? The Lowy Institute argues carefully for reversal of these trends, opening of new missions, increased appointment and training of qualified diplomats and expansion of other vital supporting activities. Swift implementation of those recommendations is vital. Steadily improved funding would allow DFAT to build up its capacity for engagement in peaceful conflict resolution through bilateral and multilateral analysis, consultation, mediation, negotiation and the other means listed in the UN Charter.

Fourth, continued expansion of the Australian aid program as promised by the Rudd Government is vital so that Australia can make a fairer and more effective contribution to economic, social and environmentally sustainable development, achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and reduction of despair, alienation and poverty. Seeking peace with justice is a more effective and constructive way of making Australia more secure than is militarism.

Bio:

John Langmore is a Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He was the federal MP for Fraser for twelve years and a Director in the United Nations for seven. These arguments are elaborated in John Langmore, Calum Logan and Stewart Firth, The 2009 Australian Defence White Paper: Analysis and Alternatives, Austral Policy forum 10-01A, 15 September 2010

On reflection many will realise that this overall orientation masks a deep-seated ambiguity. To grasp how this works requires an appreciation of the role played by cultural blindness in the way people usually think about social conflicts.

In Afghanistan (and Iraq before it) Australians have exhibited a blindness not dissimilar to that involved in the interventions by Australia and other Western colonial countries in the Middle East after the break-up of the Ottoman empire (Gallipoli included). Today, though, there is something new: the culture we take for granted and wish others to adopt is now far more clearly a poisoned chalice (if left unexamined its assumptions will lead to consequences far beyond the legacy of colonialism).

Typically, the role of social, ethnic and religious bonding grounded in the deep history of other cultures is absent in the thinking of the West and its agents. The people being opposed can then be regarded as no more than troublesome social atoms or alien evil gangs who need to be ‘dealt with’. They are beyond being understood. Often they are thought to be sub-human and not worth being understood, unless, that is, they agree with us. Even then those who do accept our ways are usually regarded as the flotsam of war and conquest, grist for the mill of Western cultural superiority. These populations may even be considered ungrateful, not appreciating our helping them to enter the democratic world. Certainly it is beyond most Westerners to understand today how offers of democracy are really much more than this: there is a widespread incapacity to grasp the social assumptions that are embedded in our ‘gifts’.

With this in mind, the debate in the Australian parliament has been morbidly interesting. With the Greens’ welcome insistence that this debate be held, we can now see why there was no earlier one. Rather than dig into the meanings of the cultures we are seeking to transform, or clarify our strategies and consider opposing ones, our parliamentary leaders and their supporters think debate requires no more than a presentation, a performance that dazzles. In this they reflect other expressions of a widespread incapacity to genuinely reflect on our actions and values.

Media debates and media celebrity are key examples of this incapacity. Even more disturbingly, media-style performance resonates with changes in the academy, where the process of listening, thinking and mutual exchange around core assumptions that may be interrogated and defended at face-to-face conferences has been displaced by personal performances, which are the end of the story. The assumption that ideas need to be challenged and worked out in social interchange is now in default. University media campaigns like Melbourne University’s, to ‘Dream Large’ within the spirit of entrenched assumptions, stands in place of philosophically searching inquiry concerning the changing institutional arrangements of social life.

Increasingly, parliamentary discussion is marked by narrow, self-referential thinking. At the heart of this crisis of debate, speakers and listeners seem to have nothing to learn from each other. This is a self-defeating approach for any culture and polity seeking to renew itself while confronting a deep-seated crisis.

Instead of a searching discussion of Australia’s forces in Afghanistan, we circulate and re-circulate narratives that simply drive the ‘need’ to be there. The primary rationale, which framed both leaders’ and just about everyone else’s speeches, is the need to defeat terrorism, even though it does not take much thought to understand that terror is never defeated head on. After all, terror usually has an underlying context. And if the same background issues that generate terror remain, terror will return in one form or another. The Western strategy to transform that background is to promote democracy and other Western institutions, including the neoliberal market.

Yet it is clear enough that in Afghanistan and other places in the Middle East the West is the background issue for many people. As a few commentators have pointed out, far from providing security in Afghanistan the presence of Western forces ensures its absence, as was the case in Iraq and the emergence of the insurgency, and with decades of uncritical US support for the state of Israel, giving rise to the intifada. Given the history of Western relations with Arab and Muslim peoples for the last half-century, and of course for much longer, such attitudes are not going to change for at least a generation. For any prudent Western leader this should in itself be enough to lead them to look for ways other than warfare to achieve their ends, or to reassess the ends themselves.

Instead we soldier on; we do not give up easily; resilience is the name of the game. Of course resilience is to be valued, but without the capacity to take on board how others see their place in the world and then make in-depth judgements, it can become a tragic flaw and be utterly counter-productive. It does not say much to observe that the West’s grand conceit is beginning to falter. Even commentators from the Right such as Greg Sheridan in The Australian are now realising that it will not work; that the West should pull back (in his argument, to preserve some possibility of the United States staying in Asia to balance the rise of China). For Sheridan it is Pakistan that has made Afghanistan unworkable. There is no doubt that even before the recent floods Pakistan was a powder keg, but that is only one element in the West’s failed strategy. These issues, however, do not seem to have an impact on the political warriors in Canberra: they will corral their vision to focus on ‘terrorism in one country’, as if the West has nothing to do with the insecurity besetting the world.

To penetrate this closed circle of ideas it is necessary to dig into the core project of the United States in the Middle East. This is no longer spoken of directly, not since the demise of the Iraq occupation, but it remains an underlying preoccupation. The aim is to create ‘jewels’ of freedom and democratic process throughout the Middle East, with the view of transforming Islam into a member and supporter of the West. We—Australia accepts its role in this massive campaign—will assist Islam to modernise on our terms. This is the grand strategy—not merely to fight terrorism but to remake Islam in our image. Afghanistan cannot be understood outside this broader range of reference points, points no one wants to discuss any more. Why talk when ingrained assumptions provide the answers? Above all, this mindset ignores the main forces producing world insecurity. The West carries gifts of a more gentle culture and democratic interchange in social affairs, which key thinkers like Adam Smith associated with the rise of the market. But whatever the truth of that in Smith’s own time, today cultural assumptions largely left unquestioned in his day contribute to an emerging, worldwide crisis. When things go wrong that shock us—be it to do with war, as in Afghanistan, or the economy, as in the GFC—we tend to attribute such events to individuals and surface forces. We find it hard to see that they are a consequence of institutional change. And not being able to see allows us our aura of ‘innocence’.

Our way of living has radically moved on from the world of Adam Smith. If his was the world of capitalism, ours is of a different order. It is capitalism radically enhanced by a revolution in technology, set in train by the techno-sciences in the new academy. This revolution makes possible a whole range of developments that seem unrelated: a new individuality, radically distanced from family and community; the rise of global markets; an assault on the limits of nature; the genius of the pilot-less weapon now striking Pakistan and Afghanistan and producing such contradictory results. In this more abstracted world, community no longer requires face-to-face interaction, bank loans are no longer sourced to knowable people, biotechnology celebrates the possibilities of an endlessly malleable self, warfare is universalised with the prospect of displacing face-to-face combat.

This is a radical culture that takes nothing for granted except the means of its own techno-transformation. This is the true background to ‘democratisation’ and it is not only blind to cultures constituted in very different social relationships, where the face to face remains a primary cultural form, it is actively hostile towards them. It is here, in this change, that we can source the true core of the insecurity that typifies our world. It is this gift, with its attendant social assumptions, that we carry in ‘innocence’ to the peoples of the non-Western world, and we are shocked when they do not take the opportunity to accept it. Rather than persisting with this futile quest the West needs to turn its attention to the reconstruction of its own way of living before it overwhelms us all.

John Hinkson

None could be more important than the momentum now gained for the behind-the-scenes decisions of families across Iraq to re-settle within religious enclaves. Long-standing minority living arrangements where Shia and Sunni have co-existed are now increasingly implicated in tragedy. If ethnic-cleansing cannot be quite the appropriate word to describe what is happening, it is clear that communal suspicion and hatred characterise what is left of the nation. At an everyday level families are preparing for the worst by withdrawing into base communities.

This new reality at the local level has its equivalent at the political level. The helplessness of the government to quell the militias and stem the violence — a helplessness that is in part a consequence of its own implication in the violence — is mirrored by a parliament so demoralised that members do not attend. Increasingly it is rare for the parliament to achieve a quorum for the passing of laws.

Regionally, there is also a momentum towards a new stage. On the one hand the Shia ascendancy in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon. On the other hand, the threat — now made explicit — that the Saudi’s are poised to lift their support for the Sunni resistance if there is any weakening of the resolve of the United States. Meanwhile Israel and Turkey stand ready to ‘defend their interests’.

This growing sense that the invasion of Iraq by the Anglo-speaking coalition has moved into a demoralising and unmanageable new phase is mirrored in the United States by the mounting struggle of Congress against the war strategy of George W. Bush, who can only assume that failure demands escalation. There are still few signs of any developed insights about the profound wrongs perpetrated upon the people of Iraq or the Middle East more generally. Rather, self-interest drives the debate — the explicit fear of a growing tide of military deaths. Further, a non-explicit expression of self-interest is also at work. Framing the debate is a more elemental fear: an incoherent yet powerful belief that the West has blundered into a situation of unknown and threatening proportions. Indeed the question could well become: Can failure be followed by dissolution as it did for the Soviets in Afghanistan?

There will be no insights into this elemental fear until the special nature of this conflict is lifted into view. It is here that one finds an explanation of the multifaceted failure that now confronts the US coalition. Contrary to those neo-conservatives who also see the conflict as an elemental one — in primal terms of the struggle between Good and Evil — such insights will only be possible if the cultural nature of the conflict becomes a focus. This requires that we engage, rather than take for granted, some of the underlying processes that drive the conflict in definite directions.

Of course the invasion of Iraq is not usually seen in cultural terms except in the very straight-forward sense of a clash of civilisations between the (Christian) West versus the Muslim East. This is certainly the way that Al-Qaeda views the matter; a conflict where Islam is invaded by infidels and as such justifies terror, amongst other things. While it is not being suggested that this view carries no weight, there is a more profound range of practical matters than these that deserve the description ‘cultural’— and arguably better define the conflict while also giving it broader meanings than ‘just’ another war. These also point to a significance that has hardly been touched upon as failure comes to confront the West.

Any account of these cultural matters must start with the significance of high technology in today’s world and how high-tech has re-constructed all of the social institutions of the West to the point that the word ‘capitalism’ is no longer a sufficient perspective upon the nature of the West. This technology has some obvious implications for weaponry in terms of destructive power and the new possibilities of striking at a distance. Typically such changes are conventionalised in terms of seeing them merely as yet another new weapon. In this view, military weapons are always developing! But weapons and the ways in which weapons allow a definite strategy also reflect cultural themes and practices typically ignored in reflections upon war. For example, the capacity to strike at a distance is itself cultural and also has cultural implications in that it makes possible warfare at a distance. There is a different relation between combatants when they can avoid face-to-face struggle. Action at a distance can have stunningly destructive effects — one need only reflect for a moment on weapons of mass destruction or the hype around Rumsfeld’s ‘shock and awe’ that was the first stage of the Iraqi campaign.

But action at a distance has other consequences as well. It is these that have contributed to the unraveling of the present campaign. This can be seen in several ways.

One is simply the impossibility of maintaining the distinction between combatant and non-combatant when war at a distance is pursued. For all the hype about the precision of high-tech weaponry, the concept of war at a distance undermines the notion of the combatant. As such it undermines the ethics of warfare. In Iraq the distinction has completely broken down and the society is now almost completely at war. Even though the notion of ‘Total War’ arose in the 20th century it can now be seen that high-tech war and Total War are companion concepts, for war at a distance targets the base conditions of life.

Another consequence of war at a distance can be seen in the strategy that assumed that the campaign could be pursued with troop levels that are historically low. Indeed troop levels in the US military generally are extremely low. They are based on the new possibilities of high-tech that did not seem to require on the ground forces on the same scale as was taken for granted in earlier campaigns. And not unlike the situation in industrial production, where physical labour that assumes social arrangements with human presence have become too expensive, military strategy shifts from the face-to-face to action at a distance. In part, this is a solution to solve the budget problem. For the truth is that a substantially larger force was not really an option because the way of life chosen in the West, with its attendant wage rates and costs, makes such ground forces unaffordable even for the richest nation on earth. But it is also much more than a budget problem. It is a cultural choice.

Cultural choices are not preferences. While they are strictly speaking ‘options’, for those who live the assumptions of the culture such choices do not feel like options at all. From within the culture they are obvious — even elemental — to the point of cultural members being blinded to other possibilities. This is the reality of action at a distance in the world of the West. It is not predominantly a military matter, it is the dominant principle now characterising all of the social institutions of our society. While it can never displace entirely social relations that value the face-to-face, it is the distance society — in the form of what is often called globalisation — that comes to dominate social processes in the West. It is especially prominent in the university, the workplace and the media through the extended possibilities of high technology. And of special significance via the media and media advertising even the family is significantly recomposed around strategies that assume action at a distance. All of this is socially organised around that pre-eminent institution that composes the distance society in its practical arrangements, the high-tech market. For markets, inconceivable except as institutions that allow action at a distance, are the ‘natural’ institutions of a high-tech order made possible by the intellectual work of the high sciences.

In other words, the distance society represents a set of cultural choices and assumptions that, amongst many other things, dictate how we go to war. As such it propels our Western society into fighting wars in definite ways and seeking to organise after the war in definite ways. In Iraq, the United States has performed ‘shock and awe’, has declared victory, and has then found the victory to be completely hollow. While it is clear that Iraqi society cannot fight on the terms of shock and awe, they can fall back onto their own social resources that are, largely, not based in action at a distance. Certainly they rely on the efficacy of the printed word based in the integrative and rallying possibilities of the Koran, a longstanding early form of action at a distance. But however that may be, the multiplicity of high-tech institutions common to the West represent something of a parallel cultural universe for Iraqis.

From the elitist standpoint of the neo-conservatives these institutions are beyond the range of the Iraqis. They need to have high-tech institutions imposed upon them. From a cultural standpoint the Iraqis are constituted in a radically different composition of social levels than is the West, a composition that gives the meaning to true difference as opposed to the lifestyle difference offered in consumption societies. In other words, without a reflexive grasp of these issues there is no basis for proper respect between the societies and only a strategy based in respect could overcome that history that has spawned the word ‘infidel’.

In the nitty-gritty circumstances of on the ground reconstruction of Iraqi society, high-tech ‘shock and awe’ is worse than useless. It can ‘win’ by destroying the society — a strategy Bush, via trial and error, is now moving towards — but reconstruction requires security and a certain cultural affinity. There is little cultural affinity between the West and the Middle East. It is a core matter that the United States can only think about reconstruction in terms of the distance society — and so proposes various institutions based on the high-tech global market that is, in turn, a core element of its definition of democracy. It has no capacity to even realise the significance of dealing with a society composed more forthrightly through face-to-face institutions.

We can look at the contrast between two types of society and reflect on why one is not receptive to the institutions of another. This can give some understanding of why the coalition strategy is doomed to failure. For failure is not merely a matter of incompetence. It is a consequence of the assumption that Iraqi culture, given a little ‘help’, is simply commensurable with that of the West.

But these matters are only half the story when it comes to the Iraq war. For they ignore how the high-tech institutions of the West are not only failing in Iraq and the Middle East but also face multiple contradictions at home. Those of us in the West need to bear in mind that we would not be the first society to go to war in order to externalise crises. Could this process lie at the heart of why the West is insisting on ‘victory’ in Iraq?

This is a very large question but bear in mind that no society before the 1980s has ever been composed so completely around action at a distance. Action at a distance does not only generate problems for warfare. For the social relations of distance support expressions of the abstract individual which are satisfied through one core strategy: the enhancement of the consumption of commodities (including lifestyles) that substitute for tangible relations with others. If this produces meaning for some individuals — it is certainly attractive to many in the first instance — it creates many difficulties for others. On its other side, the distance society, adding exponentially to the impacts of industrial society, places demands upon the earth and its resources, such that we now have good reason to doubt the continuity of what has been ‘our world’ for the last 10,000 years. Climate change, seen socially, is an elemental challenge especially directed at the general assumption of the distance society that expansion — of population and economy — is the road to meaning.

Advocating a drawing back from the Armageddon that promises to unfold in the Middle East is one thing. To see that strategy as fully implicated in any serious attempt to tackle the crisis in our own way of life is a project of another order. Only the latter carries hope for a way past the elemental blindness that now possesses the West.
John Hinkson is an Arena publications editor.

When that switch will take place remains to be seen. Despite being a quarter the size by population of its rivals, the US has a GDP of $11 trillion — China is currently running at over $2 trillion, having recently passed the UK, and is closing in on Japan (at $4.3 trillion). Until recently, it could be presumed that the process would take until the mid-century or beyond. It is to the anti-credit of the George W. Bush government that they may have almost single-handedly knocked down this process by decades. The Iraq war has been a supreme economic disaster — economist Jeremy Steiglitz estimates that it may eventually cost $2 trillion — and it has coincided with a range of tax cuts that have raised the US deficit to 8 per cent of GDP. With much of the debt being held by China, any shudder in the global economic system may well have amplified knock-on effects.

Of course Iraq has also been a supreme strategic disaster (quite aside from the catastrophe the occupation has been for the Iraqi people). It has created a university for urban guerrillas/terrorists at the heart of the Arab world, prompted the Iranian people to choose the most hardline leader the mullahs offered them, and exposed the dithering and mediocre nature of the American leadership — an impression underscored by the tragical–farcical indifference with which it responded to the destruction of one of its own cities by Hurricane Katrina.

There is simply no good result now possible for the US in Iraq — it will either stay and bleed, or exit quickly in ignominy. The militaristic themes and obsessions of its mass culture have misled it to believe that it is a martial society. In fact, it is a media society, with war as a spectator sport — hence the military cannot even begin to meet its recruitment targets. Never mind opening a second front in Darfur or elsewhere — it lacks the human resources to maintain a single mid-size occupation.

Yet American’s inability to wage conventional war is no cause for rejoicing, since it has now prompted its military–political complex to move forward a strategy it always knew it would get to — the rebranding of the ‘war on terror’ as the ‘long war’. What differentiates the two is that the former was predicated, both in reality and for PR purposes, as a low-intensity smart war waged against political despots on behalf of grateful populations, while the latter is an uncompromising commitment to high-intensity asymmetrical war waged against civilian populations. As Donald Rumsfeld intimated prior to the Iraq war, the US will not rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons in battlefield situations. The most likely first use of such weapons will be Iran — if the US and Israel decide to blow out of the ground that country’s nuclear facilities. Such an attack could result in killings in the hundreds of thousands. In the heightened temperature — contributed to by the Iranian president’s urging to wipe Israel off the map (with the intimation that its Jewish population might like to go to Alaska or otherwise take their chances) — the Israeli defence minister has threatened to ‘end Iranian civilisation’, and it is certainly capable of such a genocidal act.

What has always held the US back from the ‘long war’ has been the public reaction. Only the anti-war movement stood between Nixon and the use of nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War — yet the degree to which a mass movement could be mobilised against a distant ‘long war’ is unknowable. Just in case it would present a threat, however, the ideological champions of the ‘long war’ have undertaken a massive project of what one might call ‘civilisational chauvinism’. This is an attempt to go beyond arguments about ‘clashes of civilisations’ — which has a trace of relativism about it — and champion a notion that Christianity represents a superior form of human civilisation and the unique precursor of enlightenment values. From Niall Ferguson to Keith Windschuttle, Pope Benedict XVI to the leader writers of the Murdoch press, some of the champions of this attitude seem to actually believe it, while for others it is simply a way of branding the global extension of the market and corporate power. On Melbourne’s Jon Faine radio program, Alan Howe, the new executive editor of News Ltd, called the US policy a war against ‘misogynistic goatherders’ that inevitably resulted in ‘collateral damage’ (he was speaking after the killing of ten civilians in a missile strike in Pakistan aimed at taking out yet another of al-Qaeda’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of seconds-in-command). One could not hope for a clearer statement that the targets in this war are millions of ordinary Muslims (however one chooses to characterise their beliefs and ways of life) rather than the modernised terrorist leaders who deploy Western-originated strategies and rhetoric. They have dared to fail to modernise in an approved fashion — that is, to provide new areas for the global market to expand into.

But civilisational chauvinism looks both ways. As the nihilism of that market becomes more visible, and as its anomic effect on Western life is shown up by the levels of solidarity and meaning visible in cultures — Islamic, Hindu and others — that retain a religious dimension (whatever else they may lack) there is an ever-shriller attempt to impose a Christian god on a culture that is economic-ally dependent on the unbounded manufacture and pursuit of desire — however violent, pornographic and exploitative that desire may be. Hence the increasingly divided nature of Western societies, between an essentially pagan celebration not only of sex and the body but of violence, cruelty and amoralism, and a prim and life-denying form of Christianity that increasingly deploys irrationalism — creationism, climate change denial — in a desperate attempt to shore up a closed system of Christian belief.

This will move from the ideological — the late stage of the ‘culture wars’ — to the nakedly repressive, with a struggle over curriculums and the ever-narrowing limits of free speech. It will fail — as Mussolini found, creating a martial culture out of a louche and modernised one is like putting the toothpaste back in the tube — but not before it has made a march through the institutions.

The movement against the ‘long war’ has already begun — it began with the movement against the Iraq war, when millions of people rejected the notion of military humanitarianism and imperial emancipation to oppose the war, even with the knowledge of the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime. It may well be the largest civil movement in history — but it will only succeed if it is grounded not in the calculus of foreign policy or history with a capital ‘H’, but in a position that is unashamedly ethical — not pacifist in the commonly accepted sense, but recognising the fact that the very existence of the apparatuses that make the ‘long war’ possible are inherently evil.

Guy Rundle is an Arena Publications Editor.

With the public being continually prepared by governments for the prospect of a new war, whether it be with Iran or China against Taiwan, it is necessary to reflect on our inching towards a warring society. Two years into the war in Iraq, it is now time to review its effects in the Middle East, how it conditions future conflicts elsewhere in the world and the extent to which it sets us in train for continuous conflict.

Those who supported the invasion should now ask themselves how comfortable they feel about expansion of the war into Iran. The invasion of Afghanistan was easily justified by the September 11 attacks and provided a kind of slipstream impetus for the war in Iraq. Now, with the ‘success’ of the Iraqi elections, the US can surely call on those supporters again in the effort to spread freedom further still. Then there is the signal state of unfreedom in North Korea. Does the threat of global war deter the supporters of the present war from conflict in North Korea or Taiwan? And if Venezuela should threaten the supply of oil, on which the march of freedom depends, then a military excursion into Latin America would, of course, be justifiable for those who love freedom …

While the supporters of the war are considering the prospect of continuous conflict elsewhere, they might look to changes at home. The calm public discussion of the fine legal points regarding detention without trial, the occasions for torture and the extension of state powers of surveillance and coercion are signs of the inverted relation to the good life characteristic of a warring society. Pro-war liberals should consider the contradictions of exporting liberal democracy as domestic freedoms are dismantled. Rather than leaving freedom as a nebulous and all-purpose justification, it is time to examine the difficult relation between war and freedom.

A moment’s reflection was sufficient — or should have been sufficient — to see that the WMD threat, the September 11 connection and the threats posed by ‘failed states’ were always hopelessly feeble reasons for war. The only defensible reason for waging a war like that in Iraq was the liberation of Saddam Hussein’s victims, the Iraqi people. And, one ought to admit, there are conditions under which war could be justified. This is to distance oneself from the absolutist pacifist position, which holds that there are no conditions under which war is permissible. In a circumstance where a people is at risk of annihilation — as was the case of the Jews in the late 1930s or Cambodia’s killing fields — to do nothing would be morally indefensible. Granted the other reasons for war — access to oil and geo-strategic advantage — the question arises: can the war be justified on the grounds that it leads to the liberation of a people from a dictatorship?

On these grounds, Iraq doesn’t bear up under close scrutiny. The only group that came close to this situation in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were the Kurds, and, as has been pointed out by more than one commentator, the current ‘liberators’ of Iraq were content to abandon them when they were most at risk.

Freedom remains the single compelling justification for war. But what is freedom in Iraq? Certainly, for a country like the United States, which proclaims itself a republic, one might have expected republican notions of freedom to have some sway. Republicanism, after all, is founded on the idea of freedom as non-domination, which, according to republican thinkers, differs from liberal notions of freedom. Where liberals tend to see freedom as the absence of interference from others, republicans hold that intervention is permissible so long as it is not arbitrary and does not lead to a situation where the target of such intervention is deprived of acting otherwise or has no avenues of recourse.

While Saddam’s Iraq called itself a republic and comprehensively failed to come anywhere near republican standards of freedom, the freedom now being pushed out across Iraq is hardly an exemplary case either. As John Hinkson writes in this issue, this form of freedom is conceived within the logic of the postodern market, a freedom that admits of no legitimate constraints, even those that underpin communal life. Complementing this analysis, Andrew Lowenthal shows the role of Australian companies in this market. To have any credibility, proponents of the war need to put some daylight between their own espousal of freedom of the Iraqi people and the crass opportunism that is being perpetrated in their name.

Beyond Iraq, in the region, a ripple of freedom and democracy is represented as an effect of the war. The approach of a Lebanon free of Syrian control, a Palestine inching towards its state and peace with Israel, the promise of fair elections in Egypt, the beginnings of pro-women reforms in Saudi Arabia … all these desirable prospects are being sheeted home to the invasion of Iraq. Of course, these events had their own more local catalysts, particularly the deaths of Yassar Arafat and Rafik al-Hariri. But even if it is only true in part that the war in Iraq is the agent of freedom, then those of us who opposed the war need to clarify the basis of our opposition.

Beyond the gloating of the supporters of the war, who think themselves vindicated, we need to consider the rapid dissipation of the anti-war groundswell. Is it only the implacable fact of the war — the US, British and Australian governments’ undaunted enthusiasm for it — that has foundered this peace movement? Or did the unaddressed questions of what justifies war, engulfed by our proper revulsion at the thought of war, weaken the movement? These questions need to be debated so that the open-ended state of war that stretches before us can be opposed.

Rather than attempting to expose the muddied motives of the US, a starting point in a clarification of the anti-war position would be a consideration of the arguments of the pro-war Left. Albert Langer has argued that the war in Iraq is justifiable as a genuine ‘revolutionary war of liberation’, an anti-medievalist fight that a real Left would get behind but the ‘pseudo-Left’ recoiled from.

If we can step past the cavalier rhetoric — ‘Bush knows that modernity grows out of the barrel of a gun’ — then we might consider this position. The pro-war Left welcomed Bush’s move away from the policy of containment, which saw stability in the Middle East as the key goal. Where stability is at best authoritarianism and at worst dictatorship, there is something to be said for not maintaining the status quo. Liberal democracy is desirable in place of dictatorship and, presumably for Left supporters of the war, a stepping-stone to a more radical liberation. If it takes a war initiated by a superpower in neo-conservative mode to get there, then so be it.

The move from ‘failed state’ to ‘client state’ is not a justification for war argued from the notion of freedom. It is a pragmatic geopolitical argument, which is a closer fit with the aspirations of a neo-liberal empire. The ‘failed state’ argument should be answered with a truly international intervention, rather than with an occupying power. If the UN has failed in this role in the past, then the project should be to enable that flawed organisation rather than side with an expansionist adventure. For the US, it seems that a functioning state, rather than a free one, is enough, as the list of those it includes amongst its friends — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia — shows.

The problem with the analysis offered by the pro-war Left — aside from the whiff of ‘the worse it gets, the better it is’ — is that it places its hopes in the establishment of liberal democratic forms, which have proven fairly impervious to radical transformation. Why would a US-installed electoral system, functioning in an oil-rich country administered by a re-established and extensive middle class, go on to produce a socialist democracy? Why would the US allow this to happen after expending so much of itself? It is more likely that the invasion of Iraq was carried out to ensure a post-Saddam Iraq was directed away from the type of society that would reject both its local travesty of republicanism and the neo-liberal version of freedom.

For examples of more radical democratic experiments, set into action without the assistance of a modernising invader, the pro-war Left might look to Latin America. No marines helped Paraguay to depose Stroessner. In Brazil and Argentina, Lula and Kirschner are attempting to roll back the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 90s. Venezuela is now an apt counter-image to Iraq, where Chavez is using oil wealth to achieve some autonomy in the global arena and to dismantle internal racial and class divisions. Condaleeza Rice has called Chavez a ‘negative force’ in Latin America. This ominous comment should draw the attention of the pro-war Left to the broad spectrum of those the US considers the enemies of freedom.

Some supporters of the war still cling to the possibility of WMDs, or the machinery for producing them, being hidden in Iraq or having been recently removed. Others have already distanced themselves from the WMD argument with the rationale of fragmentary or faulty intelligence. The rest of us accept that soldiers and Iraqi civilians were put in harm’s way in the cause of lies. Aside from the affront to the basic liberal value of the individual freely choosing their fate on the basis of clear information, such mendacity causes wider damage in the democracies of the nations who profess to be exporting a purer form of the idea. Those liberals who argued for the war, like Pamela Bone, should be troubled by this betrayal. It has normalised war and diminished the value of freedom. The warring society takes us further still from imagining alternative ways of living that would have co-operation as the primary principle rather than the market. The war in Iraq is the deadly meeting point of ‘freedom’ as market primacy and ‘freedom’ as a pure abstraction, only invoked when it needs defending.

Neither liberal nor republican freedoms can be developed in a democracy that is geared towards war. To dismantle the warring society, the anti-war movement must widen its scope and be ready to restore freedom and truth by setting out when it is right to kill or die for them. To put war in its place, so that no-one will be condemned to live in its state.

I doubt that corruption is more common in democratic countries than it used to be — rather, in an information society it is more visible than it used to be. The emergence of a global information society is a powerful democratising force.

Yet one can’t help feeling that the opposite is in fact more likely — that corruption is more common, that it is symptomatic of neo-liberal forms of government (not merely more visible), and that rather than being a democratic force the information society creates a widespread culture of cynicism where individuals customise their information-worlds as much as they do other parts of their life. The fact that Giddens is advisor to the Blair Government — the master of political ‘spin’ — is perhaps itself enough to invite cynicism.

There’s always been a link between trust, knowledge and civil society. What we regard as ‘truth’ depends on a degree of trust, as it is impossible to personally verify all that we come to ‘know’. Furthermore, social cohesion is predicated upon a degree of faith in others. Wittgenstein remarked that ‘scepticism can only be carried so far before it collapses in the face of our commitment to a shared way of acting’. The more we inhabit an information society, however, the less tangible are our relations to the others that provide knowledge. In the absence of face-to-face encounters we need to rely upon the credibility of public authorities and institutions in order to know and engage with the world. However, in the wake of recent events, our trust in those who generate such knowledge is fast disappearing.

Information released into the public realm seems increasingly tainted by commercial or political interests. In the past few weeks we have seen the return of the ‘cash for comment’ affair — the fawning letters written to Alan Jones by David Flint and Dana Vale indicate the uncomfortably close relationship between broadcasters, politicians, big business and the bodies supposed to regulate their behaviour. Elsewhere, intelligence agencies are under fire after their blunders over Iraq, yet the response by governments seems incredibly cynical. The complaints made by Lt Colonel Lance Collins about the politicisation of Australia’s intelligence services have generated multiple inquiries, their opposing findings selectively used by the Federal Government. In the UK Tony Blair has done nothing to allay fears about the manipulation of intelligence by appointing John Scarlett, the man held responsible for the notorious ‘Iraq WMD Dossier’, as the next head of MI6.

Yet the idea of a ‘conflict of interest’, the disclosure of which ought to make us wary of the credibility of any information proffered, has itself undergone a transformation. Traditionally, it didn’t matter how honest an individual might be, the mere possibility of conflict was enough to prevent one from occupying certain public or financial positions. Increasingly today we judge whether there is a conflict of interest by examining whether the individual seems capable of rising above the conflict. Thus David Flint is able (up to a point) to escape charges of a conflict of interest as ABA chairman simply by the claim that he is an ethical individual who can remain unbiased despite being close to figures such as Jones and the PM. The same can be said for Australia’s chief scientist Robin Batterham, who is apparently able to be the chief technologist for Rio Tinto and advise the government on environmental policy (which is, coincidently, pro fossil fuels). More generally, the act of ‘disclosure’, — whether by journalists on a publicity junket, or scientists announcing the results of commercially funded research — may satisfy the minimum standard of ethics for those in the knowledge industry, but hardly allows us to trust the information provided.

Why has this transformation become largely acceptable? One reason may lie in the fact that increasingly we are all called upon to manage contradictory elements in our own lives.

Contemporary work increasingly relies on the production of the ‘entrepreneurial personality’, a self that is able to shift identities and postures in order to deal with the rapidly changing contexts of work and life. Leisure time is increasingly generated through the shifting signs of media and information culture — the result being the adoption of a flexible and transient identity. The modern integral personality is replaced by a set of multiple and fleeting subject-positions suited to the rapidly changing contexts of work and life. Contradiction no longer results in a violent assault upon one’s being. Instead it is a temporary problem to be managed. Thus when individuals with a clear conflict of interest claim that they are able to radically compartmentalise different aspects of their being in order to ‘do the job’, this resonates in some way with common experience.

Certainly, the ‘unmasking’ of commercial and/or political interests no longer seems to carry the force of outrage that it did in modernity. If social theory has argued for the ‘interested’ nature of much knowledge, social life has revealed the partisan quality of information in cruder ways. This ‘loss of innocence’ has occurred so rapidly that it is difficult to register the scope of the shift. The transformation of much of what constituted ‘hard news’ into lifestyle information has been accompanied by the sponsorship of such information — reports on travel, dining and health issues are increasingly commercially funded. Public sphere debates over education, science policy or free-trade are often carried out by privately funded think-tanks whose shadowy financial backers are enough to make one ask whether their agendas are entirely commensurate with the quest for truth. At a more fundamental level, the notion of disinterested inquiry or the pursuit of knowledge in the public’s interest has all but disappeared, as ‘pure’ research within universities disappears in the quest for profits.

If no longer a surprise, the corruption of knowledge by politics or commerce may be more significant than we think. It impacts upon how we come to manage the ‘risk society’ in terms of making decisions about health and safety for example, but also generates a culture-shift with respect to that society more generally. The first is illustrated by the example of medical research, where almost every sphere of activity has been co-opted by commercial interests.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Richard Houghton observes that:

Scientific journals … are owned by publishers and scientific societies that derive and demand huge earnings from advertising from drug companies and from the sale of commercially valuable content … I have attended medical conferences at which I have been urged to publish more favourable views of the pharmaceutical industry.

Houghton notes that many conferences have airfares, registration fees, entertainment and accommodation paid for by corporate sponsors, in return for being able to display promotional material. Houghton notes that:

In order for science to be reported and discussed among a professional society’s membership, sponsors will be given free rein to market their products to attending physicians … any claim that science and the practice of medicine are disinterested is utterly groundless.

Indeed the New England Journal of Medicine has revealed that scientists who argue in favour of a particular product are more likely to have a financial stake in the company funding research into that product than colleagues who have no interest.

The commercialisation of research transforms scientific practice in other ways, too. New findings become commercial property and are withheld from other researchers. Not only does this reduce the advancement of science by limiting the possibility of collaboration, it also means that findings are often not subject to sufficient scrutiny, as trial data is not released to the wider scientific community for further tests. The now-famous example of Nancy Olivieri serves as a case in point. Olivieri’s research on a drug for blood disorders was partly sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. When she discovered that the drug had potentially dangerous side effects, she wanted to publish her findings and warn patients using the drug, only to be threatened by legal action by the company, fired from the hospital she worked at, and ignored by her university (which was at the time lobbying the same company for a large cash donation to the campus).

Just as ‘spin’ seems not merely an aberration, but endemic to neo-liberal politics, so too the corruption of science lies at the heart of the commercial process, not merely at the hands of a few unethical individuals. The commercialisation of such information is clearly a public-safety issue when considering medicine, the environment or genetic engineering; but equally importantly we need to ask what the cultural effect is of a society where less and less information we receive seems credible. If the crucial problem (most prominent in the 60s) of cultural and aesthetic ‘alienation’ has been partly ameliorated by the rise of the media/information society, one consequence has been a further alienation from the political process. It is worth noting that many examples of deception, manipulation, fragmentary truths and spin have occurred in the generation of intense but transient spectacles — from Clinton’s sexual exploits, to ‘children overboard’ right through Iraq and WMD. Such spectacles may engage and divide people, but they help mask the fact that the major political parties have become virtually indistinguishable and the neo-liberal project continues unabated.

The decline of trust in the public institutions of knowledge — science, journalism, government — can only make us seek solace in more private and consumerist forms of information. The sheer range of information choices means that we can generate a meaningful life-world outside of the public sphere. A widespread cynicism about information results in a ‘knowing’ customisation of what information is suitable for us. Any shared sense of what we know (along with the capacity for public debate to challenge and change us) fragments and culture generally starts to resemble a giant ‘blogosphere’ — intense groups of like-minded interest — with all the intolerance that can occur within that sphere. The solution doesn’t lie with naive connections between information and democracy à la Giddens. Nor does it simply involve the project of ‘unmasking’ the partisan interests behind knowledge. Rather, it involves understanding the multi-faceted way in which the corruption of public knowledge lies at the heart of market societies rather than being a distortion of them.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications editor.

It appears to have been forgotten that Blair’s staffers had already been caught playing fast and loose in mounting the case for war prior to the claim that Iraq had WMDs capable of deployment within forty-five minutes — with the famous Master’s thesis found on the internet, whose speculations on Iraq’s military capacity were relabelled as secret intelligence.

Had the Blair government presented the case as it was presented to them — that there was some evidence and testimony that might indicate that Iraq had WMDs and an equally compelling case that it did not — he would never have gained the support necessary from the British public, much less the Labor party. A significant section of the general public would have made the same assessment of intelligence reports as do most astute politicians — that they are no more reliable than is a ‘we do not accept stolen goods’ sign in a pawn shop. It is the professed universal belief in such a claim that makes the necessary universal disregard of it manageable.

In the debate about the culpability or otherwise of Coalition governments, there has been an implicit assumption that elected representatives should feel free to regard the information supplied to them by intelligence agencies as impartial and objective assessments of the world situation. But testing the truthfulness of their information comes down to assessing not the ‘what’ of things said, but the ‘who’.

If a civil service can be said to have its own interests — overwhelmingly in the smooth reproduction of the civil service — then that goes double and more for intelligence services, whose raison d’etre is a world of perpetual conflict and crisis, requiring the constant and ever expanding attentions of more intelligence services. Yet it would be wrong to see these narrow interests as the most important factor in the manufacture of a casus belli. More important is the increas-ingly autonomous character of institutions such as intelligence services in a world dominated by a desire to control challenges.

Prior to the Second World War and the creation of the SOE, Britain’s secret services could fit comfortably into one floor of a building. Even after the defeat of the Axis, the US OSS staff numbered in the double figures. The network of US intelligence services — comprising not only the CIA, NSA, FBI, but also more obscure but extensive organisations such as the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) and their sometime allies such as MI5 and MI6 — has expanded so much in size that these agencies have long since changed their character. They are now a territory-less state, with their own private sectors and powers of lethal force.

The CIA has been not only murderous but, like the FBI, dysfunctional for decades — the corruption and uselessness of the enterprise for its stated purpose made obvious by the career of Aldrich Ames, the head of the Agency’s Soviet Counter-Intelligence section and an alcoholic who lived openly in a $2 million house on a $150,000 salary.

The FBI was both negligent of, and complicit in, the development of American and hence global, organised crime. And, of course, the whole complex of agencies has used this porous interconnection of politics, corruption and crime to create a mirror twin — Al Qaeda, a gangster theocratic outfit, partly funded through heroin and deeply intertwined with the extended Saudi royal family. An intelligence service that was genuinely grounded in the public interest would be located wholly within a government department, with some form of ‘intelligence ombudsman’ having authority to investigate breaches of its charter.
Fat chance, of course. The times suit undemocratic, autonomous institutions of power. As global inequality widens, a culture of fear pervades social life, particularly in the US — a barely stated trepidation that ‘people will come and steal our stuff’.

Added to this is the fact that global terror is what one might call a ‘Daily Telegraph truth’, after Orwell’s observation that some things are true even though the Daily Telegraph says they’re true.

Since the era of the European empires, militant Islam has been the religion of the global poor. In recent years, sections of it have fused with fundamentalist Islam, a quite different phenomenon, and the new formation — the legions of the suicide bombers — now square off against the new fundamentalism of significant sections of the United States, manifest destiny read into the Book of Revelation. If the latter are less of a direct threat to us, they outreach Al Qaeda in their capacity to inflict collateral damage. Their growth is a response to the conditions that spawn the intelligence leviathans — a global system in which the local is utterly undermined, and power and life are felt to be elsewhere. In the wilderness of mirrors, the faces of Osama Bin Laden, Donald Rumsfeld, Timothy McVeigh and Mohammad Atta reflect each other, and finding our way out will be no easy task.

This will not be an isolated war. It is the beginning of an extended process of world domination and if the war cannot be stopped the process must still be confronted. The war will come to be viewed as the first of many actions confirming the birth of a new and disturbing world. It will also in all probability issue in World War III. How has the world come to the brink in this manner?

Nelson Mandela put it best. George Bush has no ethical foresight. He is unable to grasp the implications of his actions and thus ‘does not know how to think’. But US attitudes are larger than one man or the present generation. In his speech on the matter Mandela referred back to the end of World War II when the first weapons of mass destruction were callously used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States does ‘not care for human beings’. And now Bush is about ‘to plunge the world into a holocaust’?

These are strong words, for many people extreme or even counter-intuitive. They contrast with the benign democratic friendliness that is often how ordinary Americans are experienced. But this experience blinds us to new realities of the American Behemoth which lie at the level of systems, the cultural and institutional changes that took hold in the United States when it developed the first weapons of mass destruction. At that time it started down a road it is still on. It centred itself upon a techno-scientific revolution that has tragically transformed the old America (and much of the world to a lesser degree). Not only did this allow the development of weapons of mass destruction. It also promoted the consumer-oriented society together with the transformation of the economy and the mass media. These various strands formed, by the 1980s, that process now called globalisation.

Mandela knows that there is another America besides that of easy-going friendliness. Of course that benign view of everyday life in the United States can be challenged by reference to its darker side: where between 20 and 30 per cent of the population is marginalised, poverty-stricken and socially excluded, with the largest prison population in the world. Even so it is the fundamental changes to institutions and their structures that now mark off the United States from what it was. These have gradually allowed the development of a polity and sections of a society drunk on power and completely self-referential. It has become, by its own criteria, a rogue state. In short, it will not submit itself to international norms. This is particularly blatant in the present, but it is not new. With regard to high-tech weaponry it is a rogue to end all rogues.

Since World War II it has promoted the development of norms and institutional constraints on warfare and weaponry but they apply only to states other than itself. With regard to war crimes or weaponry there is to be no scrutiny by others. Its path-breaking development at Nuremberg of basic principles relating to war crimes was applied to its enemies. But once it found that these principles also made it vulnerable it has resisted them. Refusing to accord the Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners basic rights under the Geneva conventions is the tip of the iceberg.

At the end of World War II the US attitude towards weapons of mass destruction was to secretly remove scientific personnel to the United States. Certainly the abominable work of biological and chemical warfare pursued by the Japanese largely escaped assessment as a War Crime. That work of the devil became grist for further development in the United States. And its refusal to take seriously the well-established war crime of targeting innocent people to achieve a military end is indisputable. It denounces, as it should, such behaviour by terrorists, while engaging in the same behaviour: Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Cambodia — to name well-known cases.

These attitudes are not productions of the religious Right. They are not the occasional errors of an unwieldy state. Nor are they the practices of state terror that realists tell us must be expected. They are defence mechanisms arising out of a tie to a cultural bias: the use of weapons that pursue warfare at a distance. A war at a distance pursued with weapons that target the general conditions of life is no longer logically tied to combatants. It necessarily targets innocents, it is terror masquerading as war.

This bias is embedded in the core of the techno-sciences. It easily supports a culture of terror. It is not an occasional bias, one due to human error. It is a structural bias, socially formed, and intimately tied to that other social principle so strongly supported by the techno-sciences: surveillance. Leading-edge social institutions developed in the United States have these principles at their core — the neo-liberal market, the computerised bureaucracy, the global corporations, the mass media, the military and media-driven ‘democratic’ politics. These principles of action at a distance and surveillance have captured the very meaning of the development process. They do so at the expense of social institutions and cultures that value and embody direct relations between people.

A high-tech society structured around distance relations easily supports what Mandela calls a callous attitude towards people. It is certainly callous towards societies not so ‘developed’. By and large individual Americans are not callous. It is the institutions that generate a systematically callous attitude.

If the development and use of weapons of mass destruction in World War II has brought the United States to this sorry state of affairs, the problems of those weapons continue to haunt it. It is true that the desperate US interest in oil in the Middle East is a crucial factor in its policy on Iraq. But this does not mean that its public focus on weapons of mass destruction is hot air. It knows about weapons of mass destruction. It is the only state to have used them. It knows they are to be feared.

Even so, the centring of the invasion of Iraq on these weapons has no ethical credibility. The United States is pathetically selective in its wish to ban them. Even Richard Butler, long regarded as willing to do the work of US policy on Iraq, now denounces its hypocrisy. It not only ignores such weapons when they are in the hands of ‘good’ states such as Israel and Pakistan, but it insists on removing such weapons from Iraq while planning to use them in its Iraqi campaign.

This is the pursuit of power well beyond the line of sanity. At no point has the United States faced the real gravity of weapons of mass destruction. It is this lack of foresight — not only that of George Bush — that allows them to enact a war that makes their use likely. It is unable to give an ethical lead to the world. It can only view them as an issue of power. Butler is quite right: there is no place for weapons of mass destruction anywhere. Their use will scar the world and humanity forever.

After this exercise of sheer unconstrained power, legitimated childishly and innocently as a sacred act blessed by the Christian God, nihilism beckons to the world. Is resistance possible? Finding the human energies to do three things is crucial. First there is the obvious need to expose US actions, to make them difficult and to hold them to account. Second there is the much more complex process of assessing what this invasion means for the future — culturally and politically. Third, there is the need to regenerate ethical action and cooperative relations between cultures. After this invasion real development will have to proceed without the involvement of the United States for at least a generation.

Anyone who relies on [this kind of evidence] finds it almost impossible to escape from the load with which they are charge’.

Historians, on the other hand, should allow a ‘detached and scholarly’ examination of the evidence to direct them to conclusions rather than taking a stand and then, retrospectively, seeking documents to support their case.

As Washington and London produce their ‘dossiers’ on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) for public persuasion, it is worth recalling Taylor’s warning about ‘loaded’ documents. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are scraping together a case to support a decision they have already taken for other reasons. They are not interested in a judicious evaluation of the evidence, but they are worried about public opinion.

We shouldn’t be surprised by the lengths governments will go to in order to convince their populations to support a war. The enormous resources of the state and a compliant private media are at their disposal. In this heady mix, facts and truth are early casualties in the war for the public mind. As Mark Twain warned in 1917:

The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

The next crucial question in the Iraq drama may not be heard above the clamour of spin and opinion management by Western states. Would conclusive evidence of Iraq’s possession of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons mean that Baghdad is likely to use them against the US and its allies?

President George W. Bush says yes. However, there are good reasons for thinking this is highly unlikely.

First, many states, including the US, the UK and Israel, use these weapons for deterrence against external attack. Why can’t Iraq legitimately use them for this purpose? We are discouraged from seeing things from Iraq’s point of view, but in many ways WMD make sense for vulnerable states. As neo-realist Kenneth Waltz argues:

North Korea, Iraq, Iran and others know that the United States can be held at bay only by deterrence. Weapons of mass destruction are the only means by which they can hope to deter the United States. They cannot hope to do so by relying on conventional weapons.

Secondly, Iraq had chemical and biological weapons during the Gulf War in 1991 and chose not to use them. Why would Saddam Hussein be more inclined to use them now, knowing the horrendous consequences (as they were explained to him by Brent Scowcroft in 1991), unless his personal survival was at stake and he had nothing left to lose?

Thirdly, it is true that Saddam Hussein has used these weapons before, against Iranian soldiers and perhaps most infamously on 17 March 1988 against ‘his own people’ in the Kurdish city of Halabja. Within half an hour of this attack over 5000 men, women and children were dead from chemical weapons containing a range of pathogens which were dropped upon them.

Having used them before, is he more likely to use them again? This is presumed, implied and stated in Western capitals, but the logic of the argument would suggest that the US is likely to use nuclear weapons because it is the only state to have previously dropped them upon civilians. Is this credible?

Fourthly, if Washington and London are genuinely concerned about Iraq’s WMD, why did they continue to supply him with the means to acquire them for eighteen months after the attack on Halabja?

Initially, the US blamed Iran for the Halabja attack, a particularly cynical ploy given that Saddam had also used chemical weapons against Teheran’s forces during their nine-year conflict in the 1980s. In fact Washington continued to treat Saddam as a favoured ally and trading partner long after the attack on Halabja was exposed as his handiwork. At the time, the Reagan Administration tried to prevent criticism in the Congress of Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurds, and in December 1989 George Bush Sr authorised new loans to Saddam in order to achieve the ‘goal of increasing US exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record’. Surprisingly, the goal was never reached. In February 1989, eleven months after Halabja, John Kelly, US Assistant Secretary of State, flew to Baghdad to tell Saddam Hussein that ‘you are a source for moderation in the region, and the United States wants to broaden her relationship with Iraq’.

According to the reports of a Senate Committee, the US Department of Commerce licensed the export of biological materials — including a range of pathogenic agents — as well as plans for chemical and biological warfare production facilities and chemical-warhead filling equipment — to Iraq until December 1989,twenty months after Halabja. According to William Blum a ‘veritable witch’s brew of biological materials were exported to Iraq by private American suppliers’, including Bacillus anthracis (causes anthrax), Clostridium botulinum (a source of botulinum toxin), Histoplasma capsulatam (causes disease which attacks lungs, brain, spinal chord and heart), Brucella melitensis (bacteria which attack vital organs) and other toxic agents. The US Senate Committee said ‘these biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction’ and it was later discovered that ‘these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program’.

Historian Gabriel Kolko claims that:

The United States supplied Iraq with intelligence throughout the war [with Iran] and provided it with more than US$5 billion in food credits, technology, and industrial products, most coming after it began to use mustard, cyanide and nerve gases against both Iranians and dissident Iraqi Kurds.

Finally, the West was supporting Saddam when he committed the worst of his crimes at the zenith of his power and influence. In terms of international support — especially Western and Soviet backing — the strength of his armed forces and the state of his industry and equipment, Saddam was much more dangerous then than he is now under harsh UN sanctions, no-fly zones in the north (since 1991) and south (since 1993) of the country, political isolation and a degraded civilian infrastructure. Why are Saddam’s attempts to develop WMD a concern now if they weren’t when he actually used them?

It should be noted that there is no serious US interest in a democratic transition in Iraq, because this could ultimately encourage the Shi’ite majority in the country to pursue a closer relationship with Shi’ite Iran. It is more likely that a dissident former General, possibly involved in war crimes against Iraq’s Kurdish or Shi’ite communities, will be returned from exile and presented as the ‘democratic opposition’ to Saddam Hussein. The US is interested in compliance rather than democracy. A pro-Western, anti-Iranian, secular ‘iron fist’ would do.

The spectacle of governments in Washington, London, Canberra and elsewhere trying to persuade their doubtful populations about the need to attack Iraq is a concession that they have already lost the first battle. The ‘proof’ they produce will need to be much more substantive and convincing than the circumstantial al-Qaeda dossier which the Blair Government released to the House of Commons last year to justify an attack on Afghanistan.

Pre-emption

According to leading American neo-realist Kenneth Waltz, ‘a country disposing of greater power than others cannot long be expected to behave with decency and moderation’. It becomes greedy, dangerous and threatening, especially to those states which don’t axiomatically acknowledge their subordination to its power. Preponderant states are always tempted to lead with their strongest suit — force and violence. This is what has traditionally allowed them to impose their will on others in the international system. As Charles Tilly has argued:

The central tragic fact is simple: coercion … works; those who apply substantial force to their fellows get compliance, and from that compliance draw the multiple advantages of money, goods, deference, access to pleasures denied to less powerful people.

Often the dominant power will become arrogant enough to define itself as ‘the international community’ and claim to set the standards others should follow. This can be just as dangerous. As Australia’s leading international theorist Hedley Bull warned:

Particular states or groups of states that set themselves up as the authoritative judges of the world common good, in disregard of the views of others, are in fact a menace to international order.

This is the context in which Washington’s push towards strategic pre-emption can be understood. Technological fetishism and doctrinal changes are traditional Washington responses to challenges with economic, political and social bases.

According to international law specialist Michael Byers, ‘there is almost no support for a right of anticipatory self-defence as such in present-day customary international law’. To the extent that pre-emptive action is permissible under Article 51 of the UN Charter, it requires very strong evidence and there is a heavy burden of justification. The United States would have to be facing a specific, grave and imminent threat from Iraq which could only be averted by the use of force. Otherwise a unilateral strike not authorised by the UN Security Council would be an act of aggression and a breach of international law.

Christine Gray, author of a seminal modern text on the use of force under international law, argues that the reluctance of states ‘to invoke anticipatory self-defence is in itself a clear indication of the doubtful status of this jurisdiction for the use of force’. According to Gray, in cases where Israel (Beirut 1968, Tunis 1985) and the US (Libya 1986, Iraq 1993, Sudan and Afghanistan 1998) have invoked anticipatory self-defence under Article 51 to justify attacks on their enemies, ‘the actions look more like reprisals, because they were punitive rather than defensive’. The problem for the US and Israel, she argues, ‘is that all states agree that in principle forcible reprisals are unlawful’.

By definition, pre-emptive strikes depend on conclusive intelligence. If the intelligence is wrong — as it was on 20 August 1998 when the Clinton Administration attacked the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, mistakenly believing it was an al-Qaeda chemical weapons factory, the results can be catastrophic for the innocent — self-defence becomes aggression.

Interestingly, the US has not always supported the ‘doctrine’ of anticipatory self-defence, even when its closest allies invoked it. On 7 June 1981 unmarked American-built F-16 aircraft of the Israeli airforce attacked and destroyed a nuclear reactor at Osirak in Iraq. The raid was authorised by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but had been internally opposed by Yitzhak Hofi, the director of Mossad, and Major-General Yehoshua Saguy, chief of military intelligence, because there was no evidence that Iraq was capable of building a nuclear bomb. This was also the view of the International Atomic Energy Authority. At the time of the attack, Israel itself had been developing and accumulating nuclear weapons for thirteen years, mostly at its nuclear facility at Dimona.

In response to Israel’s unprovoked pre-emptive strike, US Vice-President George Bush Sr argued that sanctions had to be imposed on Israel. The US State Department condemned the bombing for its destabilising impact ‘which cannot but seriously add to the already tense situation in the area’. The basis of Washington’s concern, it must be said, was not its opposition to anticipatory self-defence per se but that Israel had violated the UN Charter by not exhausting all peaceful means for the resolution of the conflict — in truth no peaceful resolution had been sought. A few days after the raid, Ronald Reagan’s White House announced that the planned delivery of four additional F-16s to Israel would be suspended in protest against the attack. The suspension was discreetly lifted soon after.

In the current climate when pre-emptive attacks are being invoked as just responses to terrorism, it is worth recalling the comments of Princeton University historian Arno Mayer in Le Monde shortly after the September 11 attacks:

Since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of ‘pre-emptive’ state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely disassembled. Besides the unexceptional subversion and overthrow of governments in competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Washington has resorted to political assassinations, surrogate death squads, and unseemly freedom fighters (e.g. Bin Laden). It masterminded the killing of Lumumba and Allende; and it unsuccessfully tried to put to death Castro, Khadafi, and Saddam Hussein … and vetoed all efforts to rein in not only Israel’s violation of international agreements and UN resolutions but also its practice of pre-emptive state terror.

Oil

From the middle of last century Washington’s foreign policy priority in the Middle East was to establish US control over what the State Department described as ‘a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the great material prizes in world history’, namely the region’s vast reserves of crude oil. Middle Eastern oil was regarded in Washington as ‘probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment’, in what President Eisenhower described as the most ‘strategically important area in the world’.

Control could be most easily maintained via a number of despotic feudal oligarchies in the Gulf which ensured that the extraordinary wealth of the region would be shared between a small number of ruling families and US oil companies, rather than European commercial competitors or the population of these states. Until recently the US has not needed the oil for itself though it needed to ensure that the oil price stayed within a desirable range — not too low or too high. A side benefit of this control over such a vital industrial resource is the influence it gives the US over economic development in rival countries such as Japan.

The greatest threat to this control has always been independent economic nationalism, especially nationalist politicians within the oil-producing region who, unlike the feudal oligarchies of the Gulf states, would channel wealth into endogenous development priorities rather than to US transnationals.

The US wants to secure reliable access to the world’s second largest oil reserves, 112 billion barrels already with possibly double that figure still to be mapped and claimed, thus depriving France and Russia of commercial advantages they have developed in Iraq over the last decade when US companies have been excluded. Just as importantly, access to Iraqi oil would also make the US less reliant upon — and therefore less supportive of — the regime in Saudi Arabia. The geo-political dynamics of the Middle East would be transformed.

If Russia and France maintain their inside track on Iraqi oil, then US corporations will be partially shut out from an enormous resource prize. No US administration is likely to accept that scenario. Meanwhile, Iraqi dissidents close to Washington have promised to cancel all existing oil contracts awarded to firms which do not assist the US to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Regime change in Baghdad could therefore be a bonanza for US oil companies and a disaster for Russian and French companies which have painstakingly built up their relations with the Iraqi dictator since the Gulf war. When Iraq’s oil comes fully back on stream, as many as 5 million barrels of oil (or 6.5 per cent) could be added to the world’s daily supply. The implications of this for existing suppliers, the global spot price, economic growth, OPEC and the world’s consumers are enormous.

This is not primarily an issue of dependence. The US was just as concerned about controlling Middle East oil-producing regions when it didn’t depend on them at all. Until about thirty years ago, North America was the largest producer and the US scarcely used Middle East oil at all. Since then Venezuela has normally been the largest oil exporter to the United States. US intelligence projections suggest that in coming years the US will rely primarily on Western Hemisphere resources: Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, probably Colombia, and possibly Canada, which has huge potential reserves if they become economically competitive. Imported supplies accounted for 50 per cent of US oil consumption in 2000 and by 2020 the figure is expected to rise to 66 per cent.

Control over the world’s greatest concentration of energy resources has two goals: (1) economic: huge profits for energy corporations, construction firms, arms producers, as well as petrodollars recycled to US treasury, etc; and (2) it is a lever of global geo-political control. For those trying to understand the motives behind US behaviour towards Iraq, it is impossible to overestimate the importance which oil has in the minds of Washington’s strategic planners.

Australian responses

On 9 September John Howard said that ‘we can’t be certain either way’ whether there are any links between Iraq and September 11. Excuse me Prime Minister? The absence of any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda leaves us uncertain about the relationship? Reversing the onus of proof in this way sets an interesting precedent for rules of evidence. By this standard ‘we can’t be certain either way’ whether Harold Holt was picked up off Portsea by a Chinese submarine or if Sir John Kerr was a CIA operative.

By Tuesday the Iraq-September 11 nexus became, in the Prime Minister’s words, a ‘potential threat link’ and later ‘a generic link,’ a concession that no evidence exists connecting Saddam with Bin Laden despite extraordinary efforts to find some. The ‘new dimension in international affairs’ since last September, said the PM, ‘is the reality that rogue states or groups of terrorists can successfully assault the citadels of economic and military power’. True enough. Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama and Serbia, to name only four countries attacked by a rogue state in recent times, hardly qualify as ‘citadels of economic and military power’. Atrocities of the September 11 kind are supposed to happen elsewhere, and then elicit little excitement in the West.

The Iraq issue in Australia suddenly centred on the honour and integrity of the UN, a subject not previously thought to have concerned the Howard Government. The international community ‘can’t afford’ to have its authority ‘brushed aside’, says foreign minister Downer; otherwise it will ‘look meaningless and weak, completely ineffectual’. According to the Prime Minister, ‘if the United Nations Security Council doesn’t rise to its responsibilities on this occasion it will badly weaken its credibility’.

Former chief weapons inspector and Australian Ambassador to the UN, Richard Butler, argues that the Security Council faces the ‘challenge of its life’ and that its future will be ‘terminal’ if it doesn’t hold Iraq to account this time. His predecessor at the UN, Michael Costello, agrees. ‘If the UN Security Council won’t enforce its own resolutions against Iraq, the whole UN collective security system will be badly wounded, perhaps fatally.’

One might have thought that the credibility of the UN Security Council had been badly weakened before now, say in Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994 or in East Timor in 1999, to cite only three recent cases when it failed to protect defenceless civilians from slaughter. Palestinians might wonder why the organisation’s authority hasn’t been ‘brushed aside’ by Israel’s consistent non-compliance with numerous Security Council resolutions calling for its withdrawal from occupied territories, from resolution 242 in 1967 to resolution 1402 last March.

Washington clearly has an idiosyncratic view about states complying with UN Security Council resolutions. If the US objects to non-compliance, the country is attacked. If the US favors non-compliance it either vetoes the resolution or disregards it, in which case it is as good as vetoed. Since the early 1970s, for example, the US has vetoed twenty-two draft Security Council resolutions on Palestine alone — this figure doesn’t include seven vetoes relating to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s.

At the National Press Club, and later on commercial talkback radio, Mr Howard seemed to think that because Israel was a democracy it shouldn’t be judged by the same standards as Iraq. The future of the UN Security Council is not apparently terminal when its resolutions regarding Palestine and Israel are flouted. He should be reminded that democracies are just as obliged to observe international law as authoritarian dictatorships — there is no exemption. In fact we should expect a higher commitment to the rule of law from countries which assert their democratic credentials.

Despite rhetoric which portrays the UN as a foreign body at its moment of truth, it is nothing more than the states which comprise it — including Australia and the US. If it has become dysfunctional, it is those member states which manipulate it for their own individual purposes which are to blame. Those who think the credibility of the UN is suddenly at risk over the question of Iraq might like to explain why non-compliance now is suddenly a pretext for an imminent attack on Iraq, when Baghdad has been in violation of UN Security Council resolutions for four years.

The Prime Minister asks if Iraq has ‘nothing to hide and nothing to conceal from the world community, why has it repeatedly refused to comply with the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council?’

Perhaps it is for the same reason that he restricts the UN from entering Australia’s refugee detention centres. Or for the same reason that Israel would not allow the UN to inspect its research institute at Nes Ziona near Tel Aviv, which produces chemical and biological weapons, a stockpile of chemical agents Mr Howard claims he is ‘not aware’ of. If he had bothered to inquire, Mr Howard would have found that ‘there is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapons … which is not manufactured at the institute’, according to a biologist who held a senior post in Israeli intelligence. Nes Ziona does not work on defensive and protective devices, but only biological weapons for attack, claims the British Foreign Report.

The Prime Minister believes that Iraq’s ‘aspiration to develop a nuclear capacity’ might be a sufficient pretext for war. He has repeatedly claimed that ‘there is already a mountain of evidence in the public domain’, though he didn’t say what any of it actually proved beyond the existing public record, or how it established that the United States faces a specific, grave and imminent threat from Iraq which can only be averted by the use of force — under international law, the only justification for a pre-emptive attack.

According to the Prime Minister, the mountain of evidence includes a recently released IISS report which actually found Saddam was much less dangerous now than in the past when he was backed by the West. Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, described the IISS report as little more than conjecture. ‘It’s absurd. It has zero factual basis. It’s all rhetoric … speculative and meaningless.’ There was a similar response to President Bush’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 12 September, which outlined Iraq’s breaches of international law. According to Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman, Bush’s speech was ‘clumsy and shallow’ and little more than ‘a glorified press release’. It offered little, if anything, that wasn’t already on the public record. More a trough than a mountain.

At the UN on 13 September, Foreign Minister Downer claimed that ‘Iraq’s flagrant and persistent defiance is a direct challenge to the United Nations, to the authority of the Security Council, to international law, and to the will of the international community’. Four days later in the Australian Parliament Mr Downer repeated the charges that Iraq ‘directly challenges the authority of the United Nations and international law’, that it poses ‘a grave threat’ to the world, that it ‘has flouted and frustrated UN resolutions … persistently defied legally binding obligations’ and is therefore ‘a serial transgressor’. Every one of these comments could also have been made about Israel. However, for reasons not explained there are to be no dossiers presented to the Parliament outlining its breaches of UN resolutions, it won’t be called ‘a serial transgressor’ of international law, nor has its long history of defying Security Council resolutions ever meant that ‘the authority of the United Nations was at stake’.

Neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Minister has answered the key question: where is the new evidence that makes military action against Iraq more urgent now than it has been since December 1998 when Richard Butler withdrew UNSCOM from Iraq?

This could be 1990. If either the Government or the Opposition had bothered to consult the region as both had promised, they would find it almost uniformly opposed to a US-led attack on Iraq: Canberra is again out of step with the neighbours. As Bob Hawke proved twelve years ago and John Howard demonstrates today, at moments of global crisis Canberra defaults to its Pacific alliance, and regional engagement is exposed as skin deep. If that. At this point in time the ALP wants a UN-based multilateral solution to the crisis but isn’t expected to hold to its principles if Washington proceeds with a unilateral strike against Iraq which the Howard Government supports.

If Washington bypasses the Security Council or cannot get UN authorisation for a strike against Iraq, but unilaterally attacks Iraq regardless, it will have done great damage to the UN’s credibility. The Prime Minister will then need more than ‘loaded’ evidence to convince an increasingly sceptical public to support a clear breach of international law.

Scott Burchill lectures in International Relations at Deakin University.

While Dick Cheney was still in the Middle East recently, Arab heads of state and foreign ministers were meeting in Beirut to discuss the Saudi peace ‘initiative’. This contained nothing that had not been said, sought or demanded over the past three decades; but was interesting because it came from the Saudis whose last high-profile peace initiative (the Fahd plan) was put forward while the Israelis were attacking Lebanon in 1982. As was the case then, the Saudis now feel directly threatened by the tempest beginning to blow up over Palestine. The Beirut Arab summit was typically acrimonious. It was characterised by non-attendances, boycotts and walkouts, but at the end all those present endorsed the Saudi plan. It offered Israel recognition and normalisation in return for the withdrawal from all territory seized in the 1967 war and acknowledgement of the Palestinian right of return. This is not the same as demanding that all Palestinians be allowed to return to their homeland, but recognising the right would at least be a starting point for negotiations.

The very next day the Arabs had Sharon’s answer — a column of tanks and troop carriers rolling into Ramallah where they broke through the walls of Arafat’s presidential compound. Loudhailers were used to summon all males between fourteen and fifty to the nearest mosque or school for interrogation and whatever else might follow. The victims of the soldiers roaming through the streets included men, women and children and Palestinian policemen who in no way can be said to be part of Sharon’s ‘terrorist infrastructure’, but then neither were the civilians massacred at Sabra and Shatila in the name of hunting down terrorists. In Arafat’s compound the bodies of five men were seen strewn in one room. They had been executed with a single bullet to the head, according to the Palestinians. The morgues in Palestinian towns across the West Bank filled with bodies. Others could not be retrieved because of the fighting and the wounded could not be taken to hospital because the Israelis blocked the passage of ambulances. Arafat remained alive but Colin Powell had to ask Sharon not to kill him. That Sharon would prefer him dead he himself had made clear, and with fighting going on in the next room it remained possible that the Palestinian leader would be killed accidentally or while ‘resisting arrest’. Sharon’s offer of a one-way ticket into exile was contemptuously rejected. Having dealt with Ramallah first, hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers were sent into other cities. In Bethlehem hundreds of people sheltered in churches — not just suspected ‘militants’, but terrified men, women and children. The destruction of the Palestinian Authority, the suppression of the people and the reoccupation of the land, all of which Sharon had been working on since he became Prime Minister, was soon well underway. When the Security Council called on Israel to withdraw it simply broadened its operation. George Bush criticised the Israelis, but said he understood why they were doing what they had to do. In other words Israel was free to stay in the territories as long as it liked.

In all of this there is more than a whiff of the 1930s. A more ominous parallel for Israel is Algeria, liberated from the French forty years ago this year. Against French military might the Algerians fought tooth and nail. Terrible reprisals were taken against French civilians. Like the Algerians the Palestinians are now using every weapon to defend themselves and strike back at settlers and the civilian population of the country whose government is responsible for the killing of their civilians. It was the suicide bomber vs the tank, the sniper and the Apache helicopter. Sharon’s attempt to humiliate Arafat backfired immediately. Under the Israeli onslaught his people rallied behind him as never before.

In Arab eyes this was vintage Israel. The ‘Palestinian problem’ is still with us and here again was Israel trying to solve it in the time honoured fashion. It is long past time to stop calling it the ‘Palestinian problem’. There was no problem until the British came along and created it, and since 1948 the central problem in the Middle East has been Israel’s refusal to comply with international law. There is not one war between itself and the Arabs that it has not started directly or indirectly. The ‘declaration of independence’ of 1948 was the uprising of a settler minority against the indigenous land-owning majority. In 1956 it was the ‘tripartite conspiracy’ with Britain and France against Egypt. In 1967 it was the attack on Egypt and Syria. It was sold to the world as a ‘pre-emptive strike’, but in fact was a war of aggression planned by Moshe Dayan with the intention of bringing down Nasser, destroying Arab military capacity and acquiring more land. In 1973 it was Israel’s refusal to withdraw from occupied Sinai that brought on the October War. In 1978 it was the invasion of Lebanon and in 1982 an even bigger attack on Lebanon. In between these events there have been assassinations and military strikes resulting in the deaths of large numbers of civilians. No attempt has ever been to punish Israel for its violent behavior. As a result the problem has simply worsened year by year and decade by decade. Is it any wonder that Sharon thinks he can get away with murder again?

Yet since the 1970s Israel could have had peace simply by holding out its hand and agreeing to comply with a minimalist interpretation of international law. The Arabs never wanted Israel amongst them, but since the 1970s at the latest they had resigned themselves to its existence. Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties and have stuck to them ever since, despite the most egregious Israeli provocations in Lebanon and elsewhere. It was the Palestinians and not Israel or the United States who began working towards a two-state solution nearly thirty years ago. In the early 1990s they and the Israelis finally entered into a formal peace process which ended up in the junkyard of lost opportunities because Israel used it to demand even more from the Palestinians than they had already conceded. Behind the rhetoric of peace every Israeli prime minister maintained the tempo of land expropriation and settlement expansion. Ehud Barak was as bad as any of them. There was no withdrawal, but redeployment, with Israeli tanks and troops surrounding the Palestinians in their autonomous scraps of territory. There were not fewer settlers after the ‘peace process’ began but more. The ‘core issues’ were all put off until Barak needed something to take to the people ahead of prime ministerial elections in 2000 that he seemed bound to lose. The argument that he and Arafat were an inch away from a settlement during talks brokered by Bill Clinton at Camp David is a complete self-serving delusion. They were nowhere near the finishing line. If the talks had not broken down over Jerusalem they would have broken down over Israel’s refusal to take legal and moral responsibility for the plight of the refugees. They were certainly going to break down. Yet the line that ‘we made a generous offer which those ingrates refused’ has been transformed into another weapon in the armory of the Israeli propagandist.

Through this period the Israeli peace movement refused to draw the logical conclusions from the facts being created on the ground before also grasping at the generous offer-ungrateful response interpretation. The peace process was being rorted because no Israeli government was prepared to concede what was necessary for peace — a halt to settlement activity and a commitment to full withdrawal from the occupied territories that would have still left Israel with 78 per cent of Palestine. Abba Eban, the Israeli Foreign Minister of the 1960s and 1970s, was fond of saying that the Palestinians never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity. It is a line that is still used against the Palestinians; but in reality it was Israel that squandered all the opportunities placed before it. Now it is the Saudi peace initiative that has been contemptuously tossed aside in favor of a crushing assault on the Palestinians which will break the people and enable Israel to remain in possession of the bulk if not all of the West Bank. To many Israelis reoccupation makes no sense. To Sharon and the settlers it does. Retention of the land is the real point of this fresh stage of the historical, territorial and ideological war waged against the Palestinians for the last century.

It was under the slogan of ‘a land without people for a people without land’ that Zionism first took root. It was no more true than it was true that Palestine was a desert which the Zionists made bloom. Large parts of it were very fertile. The oranges of Jaffa were famous around the world. Palestinian barley went into the making of Scotch whiskey. Wheat fields stretched along the coastal littoral as far south as Gaza. The peasant population had no intention of moving off the land and for the most part the owners had no intention of selling it. By the 1940s the Zionist colonial agencies had been able to acquire by legal purchase no more than 6 or 7 per cent. Clearly the land could only be acquired by taking it. The people were another problem. The idea of ‘transfer’ was there from the start. What would be necessary to establish a Jewish state in a land that was not Jewish was rarely talked about openly, but some did not mince words. Vladimir Jabotinsky was one of them. The founding figure of ‘revisionist’ Zionism, which still holds that the Land of Israel falls on both sides of the River Jordan, Jabotinsky wrote of the need to set up an ‘iron wall’ between the Zionist settlers and the Palestinians. He knew that they would never agree to the implantation of a Jewish state on their land. It would have to be created over their heads. Asher Ginsburg — writing under the pen name of Ahad Ha’am — was someone else who was free of delusions but reached different conclusions. Early in the twentieth century he travelled to Palestine and saw for himself that the land was already occupied. For him the road taken by the Zionists was leading not to an iron wall but a grievous injustice. Others talked of a bi-national state; but Zionism was all about a Jewish state and that was not a project for the squeamish.

With the help of the British and the Americans the state came into existence. The Palestinians fled or were expelled. There was no need for a central order. The Zionist leadership did not want them there and many commanders in the field accurately picked up the signals. Having driven out the Palestinians in a bout of what would now be called ethnic cleansing, and having acquired three quarters of Palestine by 1949, David Ben Gurion — Israel’s first prime minister — waited for the opportunity to take the rest. That came in 1967. From the moment of its creation Israel lived under the necessity of obliterating the Palestinians as a military and historical presence. Their rights could not be acknowledged or redressed. Yet they had not disappeared. They were living over the borders of neighboring countries (where Theodor Herzl wanted them to be) and because Palestine was an Arab cause, war had to follow war. The Palestinians were the living reminder of a sin that could not be admitted.

Thus the Israelis are stuck in a trap of their own making. Unable to let go and release themselves as well as the Palestinians they have continued on a path which can only raise questions about Israel’s capacity to survive in the Middle East. It has made itself intolerable by the violence of its actions over the past five decades. These have largely been smothered by the Western media, but the facts are all there for anyone who wants to take a close look at the record. The current brutal campaign against the Palestinians, borne of a wave of terrorism provoked by Ariel Sharon so that he would have the pretext to do what he is now doing, reads only like the latest instalment. Even Jewish writers acknowledge that Israel has become an engine of death and destruction in the Middle East. Not a year has passed without Israel giving free rein to its aggressive impulses. It has humiliated the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza for the past thirty-five years. It was not until the intifada of 1987 that they finally rose up against occupation. Few weapons were used. This was an uprising of young men — the shabab — throwing stones at heavily armed troops and tanks, but many of them were killed nevertheless. In the early 1990s Palestinians welcomed the onset of the ‘peace process’. Most of them accepted Arafat’s word that it would result in the end of the Israeli presence in the territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. He was wrong; and with 1500 people being killed in the territories since the beginning of the Aqsa intifada two years ago the Palestinians have finally reached a point of nihilistic desperation. The suicide bombings are shocking, but they cannot be separated from more than three decades of occupation and the murderous policies pursued by the state at the direction of Ariel Sharon. He has deliberately set out to provoke violence in the territories. He has killed and assassinated even in times of quiet. He has done this knowing that suicide bombings would follow. Yet even now it is the Palestinians who are being singled out for blame. The delusion now being fed into the American media by Thomas Friedman and others is that the suicide bombers are a threat to civilisation and that they are acting not out of desperation but strategic choice. Well, perhaps it is a strategic choice borne out of desperation. The ancillary delusion is our superior morality and purity of arms versus their barbarism. Against the facts, again, this is nonsense — another delusion. To advance such arguments is to advance the notion that Palestinians are outside the pale of humanity. This is a line admirably suited to an American administration (at least the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz clique within it ) that seems bent on going to war.

The climate across the Arab world has plunged back four decades. Having watched the battering of Lebanon and the killing of young stone-throwers in the intifada of the 1980s the people of the Arab world are now seeing a fresh cycle of brutal images being transmitted from Palestine by Al Jazeera television station twenty-four hours a day. There is fury with Israel. There have been massive demonstrations in every capital and demands for action of some sort — a severance of relations with both Israel and the United States — and it is surely only a matter of time before their demands have to be met unless Arab governments are themselves to fall.

Israel’s long-term capacity to survive in the Middle East has never been more in doubt. Its government is in the hands of extremists. They may yet set off the war that Israel cannot win. It is now up to Israelis and Jews in the diaspora who are horrified by what is going on to take collective action. Some of them are already doing just this. They need full support. If they cannot launch a revolt that deflects Israel from the path Sharon has chosen and puts the country on a path that leads unambiguously to peace, another deadly collision between Israel and the Arabs seems inevitable. The chance is still there. The Arab states do not want war. Israel’s military might alarms them. They are not ready yet to embrace Israel. They are still ready to accept it but time is running out.

04.04.02

Jeremy Salt is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University, Ankara.