Asia Times OnLine By Henry C K Liu

* Part 1: Chaos, crime and incredulity

John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A Lovett professor of military and naval history at Yale University, recently published an article called "A Grand Strategy of Transformation" in which he described President George W Bush's national-security strategy as representing the most sweeping shift in US grand strategy since the beginning of the Cold War. But Gaddis warned that its success depends on the willingness of the rest of the world to welcome US power with open arms.

The importance of this article by Gaddis is in its analysis of the Bush world view, not that the Bush world view is necessarily valid. In a larger sense, no state can justify waging war on another on the basis of political morals, since no state is perfect. War is always about national interest, not morality, neo-liberal propaganda notwithstanding. The issue is whether the Bush Grand Strategy is in the United States' long-term national interest. There is strong argument that it falls very short on that measure.

Gaddis observes that Bush's report on National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSSUSA), released on September 17, 2002, is framed by the attacks of September 11, 2001. It echoes the president's speech at West Point on June 1, 2002, and sets out three tasks: "We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent."

Bush's equation of terrorists with tyrants as sources of danger, an obvious outgrowth of September 11, is highly problematic. Anarchists, assassins and saboteurs have always operated without clearly identifiable sponsors. Their actions have rarely shaken the stability of states or societies because the number of victims they targeted and the amount of physical damage they caused had been relatively small. September 11 showed that terrorists can now inflict levels of destruction that only states wielding military power used to be able to accomplish.

Weapons of mass destruction were the last resort for those possessing them during the Cold War, the NSSUSA points out. "Today, our enemies see weapons of mass destruction as weapons of choice." That elevates terrorists to the level of tyrants in Bush's thinking, and that prompts him to insist that preemption must be added to - though not necessarily in all situations replace - the tasks of containment and deterrence: "We cannot let our enemies strike first." That is the rationale for preemptive strikes. The doctrine of unilateralism is spelled out in the NSSUSA: "The United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community." But "we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country".

Preemption in turn requires hegemony. Although Bush speaks, in his letter of transmittal, of creating "a balance of power that favors human freedom" while forsaking "unilateral advantage", the body of the NSSUSA makes it clear that "our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States".

The West Point speech put it more bluntly: "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge." The president had at last approved, therefore, Paul Wolfowitz's controversial recommendation to this effect, made in a 1992 "Defense Planning Guidance" draft subsequently leaked to the press and then disavowed by the first Bush administration. It's no accident that Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense, has been at the center of the new Bush administration's strategic planning, Gaddis wrote.

The qualifying balance-of-power caveat is not at odds with maintaining military strength beyond challenge. Gaddis the historian points out that in practice and in history, other great powers prefer management of the international system by a single hegemon as long as it's a relatively benign one. When there's only one superpower, there's no point for anyone else to try to compete with it in military capability. International conflict shifts to trade rivalries and other relatively minor quarrels, none of them worth fighting a war about. Compared with what great powers have done to one another in the past, this state of affairs is no bad thing. Gaddis also argues that US hegemony is acceptable because it's linked with certain values that all states and cultures - if not all terrorists and tyrants - share.

As the NSSUSA puts it: "No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police." It's this association of power with universal principles, Bush argues, that will cause other great powers to go along with whatever the United States has to do to preempt terrorists and tyrants, even if it does so alone. For, as was the case through most of the Cold War, there's something worse out there than US hegemony.

The invasion of Iraq punctured the myth behind this theory. It showed the world that US hegemony spells arbitrary misapplication of moral values and selective US occupation in the name of liberation. The inescapable conclusion is that superpower hegemony breeds terrorism rather than suppresses it.

The final innovation in the Bush strategy deals with the longer-term issue of removing the causes of terrorism and tyranny. Here again, Gaddis observes that the president's thinking parallels an emerging consensus within the neo-conservative intellectual community. For it's becoming clear to neo-cons that poverty wasn't what caused a group of middle-class and reasonably well-educated Middle Easterners to fly three airplanes into buildings and another into the ground. It was, rather, resentments growing out of the absence of representative institutions in their own societies, so that the only outlet for political dissidence was religious fanaticism. Yes, there is oppression, but the oppression comes from the victims' own society and culture, not from the neo-liberal West, goes the argument.

This position of denial is widely held in the United States because of its own experience with domestic terrorism, which evidently had less to do with poverty than issues of liberty, but it is not at all obvious globally. Further, Americans take comfort in believing that poverty is the result of unfree systems, a belief that is verified by their own pride in America's riches. It never occurs to many Americans that their riches might have come from institutionalized and structural exploitation of other economies. Just as the race issue in the US is inseparable from the issue of poverty, the appeal of Islamic religious fundamentalism cannot be separated from poverty.

Hence, Bush insists, the ultimate goal of US strategy must be to spread democracy everywhere, particularly to regions deeply rooted in tribal and theocratic culture. "Democracy", a fashionable word that never appears in the US constitution nor the Declaration of Independence, is now a pretext for preemptive war to effectuate regime change everywhere, notwithstanding that the Declaration of Independence declares: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes ..."

The Bush NSSUSA declares that the United States must finish the job that Woodrow Wilson (president 1913-21) started. The world, quite literally, must be made safe for democracy, even those parts of it, like the Middle East, that have so far resisted that tendency. Terrorism - and by implication the authoritarianism that breeds it - must become as obsolete as slavery, piracy, or genocide: "behavior that no respectable government can condone or support and that all must oppose". And within weeks! But imperialism is exempt from this list of evils.

Still, the record of Wilsonian world order was less than sterling. Wilson's own election was the result of a scandalous split among his Republican opponents over the controversial issue of the creation of the Federal Reserve System, a development strongly opposed by Populists. His Fourteen Points proposal for the post-World War I world order was considered naive by seasoned European diplomats and the Treaty of Versailles was rejected by the US Congress. The League of Nations was violently attacked by Republicans led by senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Further, Wilsonian ideology was multilateral internationalism, a concept to which the Bush NSSUSA only pays lip service. Wilson's main legacy was the creation of the League of Nations, which was founded on the principle that all nations should settle disputes peacefully.

The Bush NSSUSA differs in several ways from its recent predecessors, according to Gaddis. Its proactive parts mostly interconnect, and Bush's analysis of how hegemony works and what causes terrorism is in tune with current neo-con academic thinking. And the Bush administration, unlike several of its predecessors, sees no contradiction between power and principles. It is, in this sense, thoroughly Wilsonian. Finally, the new strategy is candid. This administration speaks plainly, with no attempt to be polite or diplomatic or "nuanced". What you hear and what you read are pretty much what you can expect to get.

Coercive democracy becomes the justification for military preemption. And superpower hegemony is the means to achieve that end.

Gaddis thinks the Bush NSSUSA has a hidden agenda. It has to do with why the administration regards tyrants, in the post-September 11 world, to be at least as dangerous as terrorists.

Bush tried to explain the connection in his January 2002 State of the Union address when he warned of an "axis of evil" made up of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The phrase confused more than it clarified, though, since Saddam Hussein, the Iranian mullahs, and Kim Jong-il are hardly the only tyrants around, nor are their ties to one another evident. Nor was it clear why containment and deterrence would not work against these tyrants, since they were all more into survival than suicide.

Both the West Point speech and the NSSUSA are silent on the "axis of evil". Gaddis raises a more important question: Why is Bush still so keen on burying Saddam Hussein? Despite his comment that this is "a guy that tried to kill my daddy", George W Bush is no Hamlet, agonizing over how to meet a tormented parental ghost's demands for revenge. Gaddis the historian suggests that Shakespeare might still help, if you shift the analogy to Henry V. That English monarch understood the psychological value of victory - of defeating an adversary sufficiently thoroughly that you shatter the confidence of others, so that they'll roll over themselves before you have to roll over them.

For Henry V, the demonstration was Agincourt, the famous victory over the French in 1415. The Bush administration got a taste of Agincourt with its victory over the Taliban at the end of 2001. Suddenly, it seemed, American values were transportable, even to the remotest and most alien parts of the world. The vision that opened up was not one of the clash among civilizations, but rather, as the NSSUSA puts it, a clash "inside a civilization, a battle for the future of the Muslim world". In that battle, it is curious that it should start with Iraq, the most secular and modernized state in the region, and by far not the poorest, at least until US sanctions began a decade ago.

Yet, lest we forget, Agincourt was part of the Hundred Years' War. The battle demonstrated the effectiveness of longbow archers over heavily armored French knights. It marked the end of warfare appropriate for the age of chivalry. Prior to the battle, King Henry spoke to his troops from a little gray horse. French accounts state that in his speech he told his men that he and the dukes, earls and other nobles had little to worry about if the French won because they would be captured and ransomed for a good price. The common soldier, on the other hand, was worth little and so he told them that they had better fight hard.

Gaddis is right that historians view the Agincourt victory as having overshadowed English political and economic unrest. Yet for Bush, the overshadowing may turn out to be as short-lived as the war itself.

But Agincourt was a real battle and the victory was earned. The Iraq war was a no-show by the enemy. The victory is as bogus is the pretext for the war.

This bogus victory is in fact built on a pile of political defeats. This war did serious damage to multilateral internationalism, weakened the United Nations, and soiled the credibility of US values. US hegemony is built on economic power, which in turn is based on globalization, which in turn requires multilateral internationalism. Abandoning multilateral internationalism is to jeopardize US hegemony.

Far from providing conclusive demonstration of US invincibility and political resolve, the non-war leaves the vulnerability of US political will to sustain heavy war casualties untested, and turned a much-heralded holy war to spread democracy into a dirty scheme of petty bribery. It has won the United States a reputation of being as capable and eager to use the same evil devices as its condemned enemy. This war has not eliminated the axis of evil, it merely added the US to the axis. The war between good and evil is won by good turning evil.

How, Gaddis asks, to maintain the momentum, given that the Taliban are no more and that al-Qaeda isn't likely to present itself as a conspicuous target? Gaddis thinks this is where Saddam Hussein came in: Iraq was the most feasible place where the US could strike the next blow. If we can topple this tyrant, went the reasoning, if we can repeat the Afghan Agincourt on the banks of the Euphrates, then we can accomplish a great deal. We can complete the task the Gulf War left unfinished. We can destroy whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein may have accumulated since. We can end whatever support he's providing for terrorists elsewhere, notably those who act against Israel. We can liberate the Iraqi people. We can ensure an ample supply of inexpensive oil. We can set in motion a process that could undermine and ultimately remove reactionary regimes elsewhere in the Middle East, thereby eliminating the principal breeding ground for terrorism. And, as Bush did say publicly in a powerful speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, we can save that organization from the irrelevance into which it will otherwise descend if its resolutions continue to be contemptuously disregarded.

Gaddis views this as a truly grand strategy for transforming the entire Muslim Middle East: for bringing it, once and for all, into the modern world. There's been nothing like this in boldness, sweep, and vision since Americans took it upon themselves, more than half a century ago, to democratize Germany and Japan, thus setting in motion processes that stopped short of only a few places on Earth, one of which was the Muslim Middle East.

Gaddis acknowledges that these plans depend critically, however, on Americans' being welcomed in Baghdad if they invaded, as they were in Kabul. If they aren't, the whole strategy collapses, because it's premised on the belief that ordinary Iraqis will prefer a US occupation over the current conditions in which they live. There's no evidence that the Bush administration is planning the kind of military commitments the United States made in either of the two world wars, or even in Korea and Vietnam. This strategy relies on getting cheered, not shot at.

The trouble with Agincourts - even those that happen in Afghanistan - is the arrogance they can encourage, along with the illusion that victory itself is enough and that no follow-up is required. It's worth remembering that, despite Henry V, the French never became English. And the war went on for a hundred years. The United States has already lost the moral high ground by resorting to a coalition of the willing. Gaddis makes a perfect point: A nation that sets itself up as an example to the world in most things will not achieve that purpose by telling the rest of the world, in some things, to shove it.

Terrorists fully anticipated a hardening of reaction from the US to the horrors they perpetrated on September 11, 2001, as embodied in the NSSUSA, for it is this hardening of reaction that will produce more terrorists.

As Charles Clover of the Financial Times reported from Baghdad: "Over the next few months in Baghdad I will get to see 'nation-building': the curious process of international intervention I have witnessed throughout Eurasia in the past decade that seems to enrich about 10 percent of the population while the rest get 'civil society'. Iraq will be transformed from a pariah dictatorship into a normal dysfunctional, underdeveloped country with ethnic violence, IMF [International Monetary Fund] programs, and satellite dishes. Charlie Company patrolling the streets of Baghdad will give way to a weak and politicized local police force, then a rickety power-sharing arrangement, and finally a 'national army'. Will it be worth it?"

If a democratic election, reflecting the honest and freely expressed wishes of the Iraqi people, produces a leader deemed insufficiently committed to the goals set out by the NSSUSA, the Bush administration will be forced to affirm or reject its alleged attachment to the principle of democracy. Worse yet, if such a democratically elected leader should decide that Iraq need weapons of mass destruction for its own defense in response to WMD already present in the region, would the NSSUSA call for a re-invasion of Iraq, this time against a democratically elected government, or a Central Intelligence Agency-induced coup, as in Venezuela?

This was not a war. It was a spectacular reality-TV production that caused the death of thousands of extras. The only real war had been the verbal duel between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the inquisitive Pentagon press corps.

Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.

Asia Times OnLine By Henry C K Liu

Very few serious observers in the Middle East, if any, expect the United States to achieve its declared aims of establishing a democratic government in Iraq. Some are openly skeptical of US intent, while others give the US the benefit of the doubt, but consider its aim a hopeless fantasy.

Three days after US invasion forces officially announced the fall of the Iraqi government and proclaimed military control of the city of Baghdad, they allowed, if not encouraged, lawlessness to destroy a cradle of civilization on a scale thousands of times worse than that which the US accused the Saddam Hussein government of having done to the Iraqi nation and its people. The war itself has made a reality of harsh misery out of the abstract discontent of political oppression, the liberation from which had been the pretext for the war. Instead of saving the Iraqi people from alleged oppression, the war has brought them undeniable destruction. Liberation has come in the form of senseless killing, looting and burning. In the name of defending freedom, the United States has unilaterally denied the people of Iraq their freedom to live a normal life for years to come. The war has robbed the Iraqi people of freedom from lawlessness, freedom to preserve and enjoy their historical and cultural treasures, and freedom from foreign occupation.

The wartime suffering of millions has been aggravated by the postwar loss of even the essentials of life, such as clean water, electricity, medicine, food and personal safety. The Geneva Convention regarding responsibility of occupation powers toward the population in occupied territory has been ignored, resulting in a breakdown of security, anarchy, widespread looting and arson of public property and the proliferation of violent acts of revenge and lawless of settling personal and tribal scores.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld justified this crime of barbarism dismissively by telling the press that "democracy is untidy" and that "freedom includes freedom to commit crimes". While it may be debatable whether the definition of war crimes should include the killing of civilians by uniformed US soldiers as a standard tactic against urban guerrillas, there is no need to debate that peace crimes against civilization and humanity have become part of the collateral damage of the liberation imposed by US armed occupation of Iraq.

Overwhelming force to shock and awe had been available to military plans with ample reserve. But the world's sole superpower pleads powerlessness to protect civilians and national properties and treasures under its coercive military control. Despite total US control of Iraqi airspace, there is no around-the-clock airlift of humanitarian supplies as in the Berlin blockade, notwithstanding that the toppling of Saddam's statue in central Baghdad by a handful was eagerly compared with the fall of the Berlin Wall by the US media. Apparently, Arabs don't need food and water as much as Europeans do. The US military can summon hundred of cruise missiles and precision bombs to target Saddam on a few minutes' notice, yet this superpower that spends more on its military than all the world's other nations combined cannot provide law and order and basic sustenance for the people it has just conquered. This is a superpower only of destruction, and a paper tiger when it comes to humanitarian rescue.

Presidential palaces were precision-bombed as war targets despite the fact that common sense would surmise that Saddam would be stupid to stay in any of them once hostilities had begun. Television images of US marines trashing the palaces and the subsequent looting by lawless mobs waving to approving GIs were supplemented by embedded media commentary about popular rejoicing over the fall of tyranny. Yet these palaces were built with the resources of the Iraqi people, thus they belong to the people and should be returned to the Iraqi people for their popular enjoyment, rather than trashed by an invading horde. These palaces, albeit not examples of good taste, are nevertheless national assets that could have been turned into a Palace for Youth, Palace for Women, Palace of Science, Palace of Islam, Palace of Freedom, etc. Instead, they are now useless rubble that will constitute heavy added cleanup burdens for the war-battered people of Iraq.

The US Marine Corps in the past has earned well-deserved respect in the journals of military valor. In Iraq, its political officers failed to protect the honor of this once fine and proud military organization.

If this war is about spreading US values, it has scored only defeat by spreading barbarism. The destruction of the Iraqi network of presidential compounds, government and cultural institutions and facilities bring to mind the 19th-century burning and looting of the Summer Palace in Peking by barbaric Western imperialist plunderers.

Contrast that with the flawless protection of oilfields and the commercial records of the Ministry of Petroleum while truly priceless artifacts from the dawn of civilization were looted, some say by foreign professional thieves, with the theft masked by subsequent destruction from looting local mobs hailed as joyful expression of freedom from oppression. So much for the priorities of US freedom and values.

For weeks the world has been talking about the war on Iraq. But in reality, there was no war. There was no formal declaration of war by the invader and there was no formal surrender by a vanquished government. There was a largely unopposed foreign invasion preceded by massive precision hits from thousands of cruise missiles launched from distant warships and bombs dropped from high-altitude planes from distant carriers and air bases. Tens of thousands of precision cruise missiles and bunker-busting bombs added up to a slaughter by remote control. But one side of the conflict did not fight, for reasons that have yet to become clear. There were some minor skirmishes and paramilitary resistance in the initial phase in the south. But there was no war in the sense of major force-on-force battles and there was no decisive Battle of Baghdad.

Peter Maass wrote in the April 20 New York Times Magazine: "To get to Baghdad, the marines of the 3rd Battalion fought the old-fashioned way, by shooting as many of the enemy as they could. The victims weren't all soldiers." The enemy was Iraqi civilians whom the US had come to liberate. Maass reported that after a shooting spree that killed a dozen civilians, the marine squad leader shouted: "My men showed no mercy. Outstanding."

The Iraqi government was not vanquished; it merely vanished. After US forces took control of the capital, there was widespread looting that finally stopped only because there was nothing else left to loot, not because of orderly US postwar planning.

Most of the world's professional military experts had been misled about the prospect of urban warfare inside Baghdad, while the US high command apparently knew it was going to be a cakewalk into Baghdad. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney knew something that even uniformed officers in the field did not know, which was that no Iraqi resistance was going to materialize.

Was all the pre-invasion bombing merely a fireworks overture to augment the disinformation that the Iraqi military could be expected to be a lethal force of tenacious resistance? The invasion of an enemy capital defended by hundreds of thousands of elite troops was deftly accomplished by a small, fast-moving, light forward force. Is Cheney a military genius, or did he know something the rest of the world did not know when he confidently predicted that the "war" would be over in a matter of weeks?

The "victory" appeared to be less than honorable, achieved mainly through treason on the part of the enemy high command induced by bribes. The Battle of Baghdad was no Iwo Jima or Stalingrad. It appeared that the massive precision bombing did not destroy the Iraqi army as much as treason facilitated through the uninterrupted linkage between the Iraqi high command and its former handlers in the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon Special Section. If these conspiracy theories are valid, then the question arises whether the intensive bombings of Baghdad and other cities, with tragic collateral damage of sizable civilian casualty, were militarily necessary, and whether the chaos after the fall of Baghdad was part of the war plan.

With the military phase of the war in Iraq drawing to a close by the third week of conflict, General Tommy Franks, commander of the US forces, laid out in a CNN interview a timetable that could see his troops in Iraq for another year. "The Iraqi army has been destroyed. There's no regime command and control in existence right now, but we know there are pockets of anything from paramilitaries to death squads," he said. But the winding-up of the military campaign does not signal a quick US exit from Iraq. "We have simply bypassed villages and towns, and we will go to every single one of them to be clear that we don't have some last small stronghold," Franks said. He added that if the country remained fractious, the number of US troops required to stay on for a lengthy period would be significant.

Le Monde, the French daily, reported that Maher Sufyan, commander of the Republican Guard, reached an agreement to cease resistance in exchange for money and postwar protection for himself and his top officers. Maher Sufyan is not included in the infamous "deck of cards" identifying the most wanted officials in the Saddam Hussein government. Iraq's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Al Sahaf, its foreign minister, Naji Sabri, and the minister of health, Oumid Medhat Mubarak, are also not included on the list. Vladimir Titirenko, the Russian ambassador to Iraq, told NTV upon returning to Moscow: "I am confident that the Iraqi generals entered into secret deals with the Americans to refrain from resistance in exchange for sparing their lives."

The question then: Is the "victorious" Iraqi war plan based on treason applicable to other wars, such as the pending wars on Syria and Iran? Or have future targets of US preemptive invasion learned to adopt new strategies of asymmetrical and unconventional warfare of counter-preemption?

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman defines Saddamism as an entrenched Arab mindset, born of years of colonialism and humiliation that insists that upholding Arab dignity and nationalism by defying the West is more important than freedom, democracy and modernization. And he identifies Saddamism as the real enemy of the United States.

Saddamism will now form the new basis of pan-Arabism. No one knows for certain why Saddam did not put up a fight, as expected by everyone except Rumsfeld, Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Perhaps this is Saddam's new "unconventional" tactic, to turn the fight into a protracted guerrilla struggle, perhaps not. Either Saddam is dead or he merely failed to answer the call of history. Perhaps he was betrayed by the Republican Guard commanders. But if he did not intend to fight, he should have given up before the hostilities began. The entire Arab world is puzzled by his behavior to date and disappointed by the turn of military events in Iraq.

Whatever actually happened, there was no superpower victory. It was a fixed match in a superbowl in which one opponent took a fall. Or the real war has yet to start with a vanished opponent that has merged into the general population to fight a protracted unconventional war. Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress favored by the US Defense Department for a key role in postwar Iraq, told BBC radio on Monday that his group was tracking Saddam Hussein, who remains in Iraq and is moving around the country.

Either way, the potential of Saddamism is very much alive. Many in the Arab world insist that those Iraqis recorded by US television stamping and spitting on the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein were Kurds, not Arabs, or unprincipled paid hooligans, not freedom fighters. "Millions loved Saddam" was a common comment throughout the Arab world, and widely reported in the Arab press.

A Brookings Institution study by Christine Moss Helms in 1984 (before the official US demonization of Saddam) did not contain one single word about the Saddam regime torturing anyone. It characterized the Iraqi Ba'ath Party as a political organization of clandestinity and ubiquity. Iraqi Ba'athists might deviate from strict interpretation of Ba'athist ideology of Arab unity, freedom from foreign domination and tribal socialism, yet Ba'athist doctrine generally set guidelines for Iraqi policy formulation, such as geopolitical non-alignment, pan-Arabism and accommodation with diverse religious and ethnic groups, throughout its history. Leadership was not hereditary, setting it apart from other Arab regimes. Iraqi Ba'athist policies, as distinct from Ba'athism in the Arab world in general, were directed toward specific Iraqi needs and problems, keeping Iraq from extreme pan-Arabism.

Since the Iraqi Ba'athists took control of the country in 1968, the leader had to deal with practical problems of governance of a less-developed country, by devoting considerable resources to internal development, irrigation projects, upgrading of agriculture, industrialization, education and freedom for women. It also had to deal with problems facing any oil-producing nation: economic imperialism, globalized finance and US dollar hegemony.

Resistance by Arabs to foreign intervention and influence generally takes two forms that share diagnosis of the problem but are diametrically opposed in proposed solutions. The first is that Islam provides the raison d'etre for unity, despite a variety of beliefs such as Islamic modernism, reformism, conservatism and fundamentalism. Postmodernist foreign interference in the Muslim world poses increased and profound consequences that push many Islamic movements to adopt political goals, with a return to perceived purity of Islamic values.

The second response is Arab nationalism. While recognizing the importance of Islam, Arab nationalists feel that it, as an ideology, does not fully encompass the modern needs of the Middle East. The reasons are threefold: 1) the region includes non-Arabs and non-Muslims, 2) there are differences of interpretation within Islam and 3) Islamic fundamentalism cannot effectively adapt to changes facing the region. Arab nationalists are committed to modernization through secularization that would also facilitate pan-Arab unity. Nasirism has been generally accepted as the main representation of Arab nationalism. In contrast to Nasirism, as espoused in Egypt, which relied more on personality cult, Ba'athists attained a high level of organization. Although the leader is also inescapably tied to supremacy in the tradition of tribal culture, the Ba'ath Party is designed to function in the event of the leader's sudden death or ouster.

The Brookings study warned that it would be erroneous to assume that all non-Ba'athists opposed the Ba'athist central government, despite the radical and ruthless image with which the Ba'ath Party had been portrayed in the West and by opposition groups in exile. Many Iraqis benefited from the Ba'ath economic and social policies during the 1970s and valued the stability of continuous government since 1968. Many older Iraqis who were not Ba'athists were proud that their children were party members. And party membership did not particularly enhance advancement in the general economy outside of government. One of the Ba'ath Party's goals was to broaden the base of support from Iraq's heterogeneous society. The party launched a Literacy Campaign to reduce the 44 percent illiteracy rate to 20 percent. The party emphasized a policy that the wealth of the nation is in its youth and promoted education for women. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1970 gave women the right to own land on an equal basis as men, and equal wages for female farm-cooperative workers. Women were granted voting rights, and benefited from marriage reform. It was not until 1991, at the start of the first Gulf War, that US demonization of Saddam began in earnest.

Despite US media spin about pent-up Iraqi hatred for Saddam, looting is not political expression. It is mere US propaganda that the looting encouraged by the US military all over Iraq was the joyous expression of an oppressed people suddenly liberated. The New York Times reported isolated incidents of looting by some firemen in the collapsed World Trade Center towers in New York. Surely, New York firemen as a group are patriotic and honorable public servants. If massive bombing were to hit New York, with the sudden disappearance of the police force, and the absence of the National Guard, with indifferent foreign troops waving criminals on, there would also be widespread looting in New York. Rumsfeld acknowledged as much in his news conference by pointing out that riots also happened in US cities even when the government had not collapsed.

Political freedom is not about senseless destruction. The lootings of museums and libraries are crimes against civilization. If only US marines had also failed to protect the Ministry of Petroleum and the oilfields the way they failed to protect these cultural institutions that belong to the all humanity, the excuse of shortage of troops would be more credible. Rumsfeld's lame excuse of "catastrophic success" in war would be more credible if he had not been so confident, in defiance of common-sense expectation, that the military operation would be over within weeks, a confidence that even his own field commanders challenged as unfounded. A war plan that had taken into account all unforeseen contingencies, that had miraculously predicted that the war would end within weeks, had been caught off guard by "catastrophic success"? It is a no-win argument. You cannot have it both ways. Either unpreparedness for success is a poor excuse or predictive confidence in success has been a bluff.

• Next: The new Agincourt Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.

By <a href=www.newsday.com>newsday.com-The Associated Press April 24, 2003, 12:33 PM EDT

VIENNA, Austria -- OPEC members agreed to cut their current oil output by 2 million barrels a day, or 7 percent, in a move aimed at preventing a further decline in prices, the cartel announced Thursday.

At the same time, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries temporarily raised its official output target to 25.4 million barrels, up 900,000 barrels a day from its existing ceiling. The new quota would take effect June 1, OPEC President Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah told a news conference.

The delegates announced their decision after emergency talks in Vienna. Crude prices have tumbled in recent weeks, and OPEC feared a further decline if it didn’t rein in what it saw as an oversupply juist as crude demand reached a seasonal low.

The group based its decision largely on what it said was sluggish global demand exacerbated by the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, which Al-Attiyah said has dampened demand by 300,000 barrels a day.

OPEC plans to review its decision when it meets again June 11 in Doha, Qatar.

“We feel we may need another cut in June,” Al-Attiyah said.

OPEC also was ready to welcome Iraq back as a participating member, he added.

“I hope Iraq comes back tomorrow,” he said, adding later: “We will accommodate Iraq at the right time.”

Several OPEC members had boosted their production before the war, hoping to head off a supply shortage. The rapid end of the conflict left them facing what they see as a surplus of 2 million barrels a day.

“It is important to reduce oversupply,” Venezuelan oil minister Rafael Ramirez told reporters before the hastily arranged talks began. “We have to have more discipline, and it is important to take measures and remove that amount from the market.”

If not, OPEC, whose 11 members pump a third of the world’s crude output, wouldn’t be able to maintain its price target of $25 a barrel, he said.

OPEC representatives called Thursday’s meeting to reassess the group’s output levels as oil began flowing again in Iraq for the first time since the war.

Many energy analysts had expected OPEC to agree to curb production. The question was whether OPEC would try do so by lowering its official output target or by taking the much less drastic step of reining in the amount of oil its members were pumping above their respective quotas.

In the end, it took the unusual decision of slashing its actual production — which it calculated as 27.4 million barrels a day, including Iraq — while also raising the nominal ceiling for OPEC’s 10 members excluding Iraq. OPEC’s current target is 24.5 million barrels a day.

The decision means Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s most powerful member, would reduce its production by 1 million barrels a day, Al-Attiyah said.

In the days leading up to hostilities in Iraq, U.S. crude prices peaked at almost $40 a barrel. On Thursday, contracts of U.S. light, sweet crude for June delivery were trading in New York at $26.05 a barrel, down 60 cents from Wednesday’s close. In London, June contracts of North Sea Brent crude were trading at $23.62, off 6 cents a barrel.

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Thursday, April 24, 2003 By: Matthew Riemer

PINR commentarist Matthew Riemer writes: The current crisis gripping Venezuela is essentially one of socio-economic dimensions. It is social because of the class nature of many of the "ideological" lines that have been drawn between the various "camps"; this is true both in a rhetorical/propagandistic sense and in a more demonstrable sense -- one that examines the different outcomes for the status of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) following the resolution of the crisis. It is economic in that almost all of the controversy surrounds the economic themes of nationalization, privatization, free-markets, and globalization.

Of course, even to divide the two descriptions -- economic and social -- is sometimes hard to do as they are largely interwoven. Such is the case in the Venezuela of January, 2003.

On the one side there is the government of President Hugo Chavez Frias, former paratrooper and coup conspirer himself. He's supported by a handful of remaining bureaucrats and most of the military, as well as about 30% of the general populace.

Chavez was democratically elected in 1998, but since has lost much of that support due to the unchanged status of Venezuela's overwhelming poor majority and economic reforms that the business sector sees as "risky" if not foolhardy. Some of this lost support may come from those who once voted and backed Chavez but now have become disillusioned with his apparent inability to finally overcome the sizeable opposition movement.

The economy is also in recession, and, as the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports, "With both the oil and non-oil sectors of Venezuela's economy contracting in 2002, the country's real gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to fall by 6.7%, to $96 billion, for the year."

The opposition is generally recognized to be an amalgam of the Employers' Federation Fedecamaras, Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) and the bureaucracy of  PDVSA ... this largely business-led opposition coalition currently enjoys popular support from among the middle class and oil industry, especially from PDVSA workers.

Previously, Chavez was removed from power by these very same elements in a coup on April 11, 2002. His ouster lasted less than 48 hours as widespread protests and loyalists in the military overwhelmed the new government and reinstalled Chavez as president.

The chaos fomenting since this past December is a sign that the same social and political elements are still active in the country. However, when compared with the events of April, this time the efforts and protests have been marked by increased popular support and greater duration.

What do they want?

Chavez' tenure is one marked by inappropriate foreign policy gestures in the eyes of Washington and Venezuela's business community. He's friends with US arch-nemesis Fidel Castro and has visited both Libya and Iraq while publicly opposing both globalization and the US "war on terrorism."

He even tried to have Cuba admitted to the San Jose Accord in 2001, established in 1980 to help struggling Caribbean nations with oil imports. Under the accord, Venezuela and Mexico export oil at a discount to 11 regional nations -- Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama and the Dominican Republic. Mexico's President Vicente Fox rejected Chavez' expansion of the accord.

Furthermore, Chavez wants to retain control of PDVSA and sees its nationalization as vital to that control.

PDVSA, one of the world's largest oil companies, is Venezuela's largest business and employer ... the company was created in the mid-70s when the country's oil industry was nationalized. Again, it is this nationalization that is one of the major concerns of the opposition who desire the privatization of the company and the opening up to investment fueled by such a transition.

Chavez represents the largest hurdle in the attainment of that goal ... this is perhaps the greatest gripe of the opposition forces: Chavez' meddling in the affairs of the oil oligarchy and the threat to free-market expansion within the industry.

The EIA comments on some of this tension: "Over the past few years under President Chavez, cuts in PDVSA's budget (down 28% in 2002), combined with a lack of adequate foreign investment and a policy of strict adherence to OPEC quotas, has crimped the company's ambitious long-term expansion plans."

Chavez' adherence to OPEC quotas helps keep the price of oil advantageous for exporters while limiting the profit of foreign investment in PDVSA, whose investments already cannot exceed 49% of any given PDVSA venture.

If PDVSA were to become fully privatized, OPEC quotas may very well become a thing of the past with foreign investors then providing a majority of the company's capital. This scenario would allow for more Venezuelan oil to be controlled by outsiders and a climate more favorable to importers.

Whatever the workers who are involved with the various strikes and lockouts believe, this is the real heart of the matter. In fact, many see the business elite and union bosses as simply using the workers, who are willing to join them in hopes of higher pay or a better work environment, for temporary gain. Considering that the bulk of Venezuelan workers have remained in relative poverty for decades with little upward growth, even in the oil boom years of the '70s, such claims seem to be at least worth considering.

In a recent Washington Post editorial, Mark Weisbrot, having just returned from Venezuela, said "this is clearly an oil strike, not a general strike, as it is often described. At the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which controls the industry, management is leading the strike because it is at odds with the Chavez government."

The opposition is also calling for Chavez' immediate resignation, which would be ideal, or a more convincing referendum to expel him from office. A referendum as laid down by the constitution on Chavez' Presidency is due in August

The role of the US

Washington's approval of the original coup in April, along with their current silence now, is not being interpreted as a sign of disinterest but instead as support for the opposition forces. Enough so that in mid-December, several US Representatives sent a letter to President George W. Bush asking that the administration become more vocal in support of the democratic process in Venezuela ... a process they feel the US is undermining by not becoming more directly involved in the endorsement of the protocol set forth by the Venezuelan constitution.

The letter also obliquely references the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), who many believe ... and not without some considerable documentation ... played an indirect yet supportive role in the April coup: "The role of the United States government in the April 11 coup is not clear. We know that some United States officials met with the coup leaders in the months before the coup. Groups involved with the coup also received financing from the United States government. At the same time, the Bush administration openly expressed its hostility toward the government of President Chavez."

Moreover, considering the aforementioned penchant of Chavez to do things that rub Washington the wrong way, it's generally assumed that there's no love lost for his government in the corridors of the White House and State Department. Those sentiments are unlikely to change anytime soon given the fact that Venezuela is an important exporter of oil to the US, that those exports are now dwindling to a trickle, and the fact of the war with Iraq.

Conclusion

As the economic situation continues to deteriorate and tensions build, both sides face the accusation of ruining Venezuela by absolutely resisting the demands of the other, yet the battle has grown so bitter neither side can now dream of capitulation.

Chavez argues that the weight of his country's woes are on the opposition's shoulders because they are the ones who have instigated the lockouts and shut down the oil industry bringing the economy to its knees. He says they'll just have to wait until the time set forth by the Constitution for a referendum vote on his Presidency. In this respect, Chavez has the advantage of showing an outward display of respect for the rule of law ... a sign that surprisingly has gained him little praise in the democracies of the world.

The opposition blames Chavez for current ills by not giving into their demands. For them, a few months are too long to wait for the referendum -- they want it now.

In the end, both sides may lose, causing a considerably destabilized Venezuela -- an outcome the US and Europe are eager to avoid -- one where social and racial lines are distinctly drawn as an increasingly polarized society is unable to peacefully solve its problems. Such an environment will become extremely vulnerable to authoritarian rule.

Matthew Riemer drafted this report; Erich Marquardt contributed. Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an analysis-based publication that seeks to, as objectively as possible, provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe. Email him at: content@pinr.com

Our editorial statement reads: VHeadline.com Venezuela is a wholly independent e-publication promoting democracy in its fullest expression and the inalienable right of all Venezuelans to self-determination and the pursuit of sovereign independence without interference. We seek to shed light on nefarious practices and the corruption which for decades has strangled this South American nation's development and progress. Our declared editorial bias is pro-democracy and pro-Venezuela ... which some may wrongly interpret as anti-American. Roy S. Carson, Editor/Publisher Editor@VHeadline.com

news24.com 24/04/2003 10:29  - (SA)  

Puerto Ordaz - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez promised at a meeting here on Wednesday with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to increase border patrols to keep armed Colombian groups from entering Venezuela.

"Call them archangels or terrorists. The important thing is to capture them," Uribe told reporters at a joint press conference with Chavez in this far eastern Venezuelan city.

Right-wing paramilitaries as well as leftist rebels often cross Colombia's borders into neighbouring countries, sometimes building rest camps and bases in remote locations.

The two presidents discussed border security and trade issues in the one-day summit.

The meeting took place amid a tense period of relations, with Bogota accusing Caracas of ignoring leftist rebel camps in its territory, and Caracas blaming the Colombian government of leniency towards right-wing paramilitaries.

Chavez, a populist, is sympathetic towards the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's largest guerrilla group, and refuses to describe them as terrorists.

Some Colombians have even accused Chavez of protecting two of the FARC's top leaders in Venezuela.

"They've even said that Saddam Hussein was in Caracas, and that Bin Laden traveled here," Chavez when asked about the charges. "I'm not going to respond to that," he said.