SPEAKING FREELY
Traps on the road towards barbarism By Nicholas A Biniaris
"Which is the plan, which is the appropriate shoe for the road?" - Aristophanes: The Birds
Yet another military strike is being debated against another country
of the much-aggrieved Middle East. There are arguments for and against
this new adventure into the unknown. This time, the analysts are
reluctant to declare victory as they did in Iraq or to plot a democratic
Syria free of President Bashar al-Assad.
This is just one episode in the long and bloody saga of a Muslim world
in transformation, and at the same time torn between acceptance and
denial of the world. This episode is also another trap for the West, which is only bound to lose money,
influence and its cohesion to the glee of fanatics, Russians, Chinese
and assorted satraps all over the world.
This trap opened with the Iranian Revolution and
continued with the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That
historical event contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union but
created a psychological trap for the West, that of invincibility. That
led to the first Gulf War and insidiously and cumulatively developed
into a direct threat to the West slowly dragging us into a vortex of
barbarity, self-deception and degradation of political life.
Pro-strike arguments range from moral obligation to the
loss of credibility of the US and its president. Shocked viewers of
horrific images are totally justified to express their indignation.
However, indignation, as Spinoza remarked, must turn to understanding,
and this I suggest should lead to a rational plan to redress the
cause of indignation.
Do governments have such a plan? It may be argued
that perhaps President Barack Obama had a plan. His view was correct
as long as he stuck with it: stop the fearful satraps from spreading
pernicious Salafism; come to terms with Iran; cease to condone
Israel's conflictual plans for the area and address only its legitimate
security problems; curtail the rampant megalomaniac aspirations of
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism and last
but not least, recognize that Russia has legitimate interests and
influence in the area.
Indeed, these were a tall order to fulfill.
What skeptics and students of history think, is that
moral arguments in the midst of a civil war are dubious. In
post-modern rich liberal states, politicians actually lead by stealth
and leaks through the press. These elected executives try to sell
cheap moralism, not morality in any way, while they know that when the
going gets tough the state will break every rule and use any means to
survive. Terrorism brought about an ad hoc abrogation of our rights
to privacy and circumvented legality for the sake of a great good,
notional security.
The pro-strike side also argues that the West has a
legal right to launch a punitive assault against the perpetrators of
the crime. They base this on the Kosovo's intervention in 1999, the
case which Diane Johnstone in her book Fools' Crusade debunked as a totally illegal one.
The strike on Syria is illegal even if the US
Congress give its approval for the strike. In this case at least Obama
tried to conform to the American form of government. He should be
commended for this. However, according to international law the right
to protect does not offer a legal framework to attack another country
without a mandate from the Security Council.
The arguments against the attack range from the
hypocrisy of the West to the possible dire consequences of a strike.
The hypocrisy view examines all the previous behavior
of the West in similar cases. None complained against Saddam
Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Iran. Israel has developed
nuclear weapons and so did Pakistan and North Korea. Egypt most
probably has chemical weapons. Another question arises about the
providers of these lethal weapons and it seems that Western firms and
governments have fulfilled this role.
The dire consequences arguments spin various
scenarios about possible failures if the wrong targets are hit,
civilians are killed or even if Assad continues to use chemicals since
he is punished but still survives. Should the protectors strike again
and again?
What if Assad and Hezbollah retaliates against
Israel? They have no chance of success but they have the chance to
turn the Arab street in their favor. What if Iran gives him a helping
hand to attack Western hardware? What if Iran decides that this attack
is a preamble against it? In that case it may be more than willing to
punish in several ways the protectors.
There are more considerations to be countenanced.
Russia may become more committed in an anti-western stand. China may
similarly decide to go for a more assertive foreign policy if it
observes the West committed to ad hoc policies of use of hard power.
Is seems that the pro arguments have won and as all
predict the strike will go on. Is it the morality argument, or the
credibility and interest's argument which would sway the leaders for a
pro-strike decision? These interests though must be made visible and
explicit to the citizens so that at least an act of war can be
justified in their eyes. Nothing of this sort has happened up to now.
We know that chemical weapons were used repeatedly
but we don't know who gassed whom. However, if Assad reveals tomorrow
that he possesses two nuclear bombs and he plans to drop one on Tel
Aviv and the other on Ankara, then the West would have to start
negotiations as it is with North-Korea.
The gist of this argument is that entertaining moral
arguments for war independently of power is irrelevant since war is a
function of power and interests. The West is, relatively speaking,
all-powerful and hence it tries by subterfuge to present power as
moral responsibility to protect. The punitive expedition against Syria
is war. War though presupposes rules and conditions about prisoners,
non-combatants and most importantly a tenable purpose, and finally a
treaty of capitulation which enforces the will of the victor. It seems
that even war in our times has lost its character!
The optimistic plan is that after this strike the two
warring sides will be forced to find a political solution and stop
destroying Syria and its people. This is perhaps what is hidden behind
Obama's move to ask Congress to authorize the strike.
Why didn't the "Great Powers" twist the arms of the
combatants just after the armed struggle started? What actually
happened was that the West, Turkey, Russia, Iran and China were
playing criminal games on the back of the Syrian people.
It is more than obvious that neighboring governments
didn't care for the thousands killed and tortured, of all creeds,
ethnicities and political views as they tried to implement their
agendas. Three developments to be noticed: Israel's acceptance of the
strike, Egypt's refusal to condone it and Turkey's insistence of
toppling Assad.
Israel is ideologically pressed to strike because
chemicals awaken a horrible past; Egypt because Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has
actually an Assad-type agenda, and Turkey because it wants to shape
the area and exclude any Kurdish aspiration for statehood.
The future hides in the past's shadows
Self-deception has ruled the West for over 20 years
since the demise of the Soviet Union. That historical change filled
the minds and hearts of our leaders and citizens of a fool's euphoria
about the West's historical mission for the future of mankind. This
triumphalist spirit seemed to realize the march of geist to
freedom. Old Hegel was back with a smirk on his face. Freedom is not a
given. It is historically reinvented by us with new vocabularies, as
the late Richard Rorty would have said.
The Cold War left a host of legacies and traumas:
NATO, mutual destruction assurance, a reflexive hostility for Russia
which has sidetracked effective and multilateral policies in the
Middle East and an epiphany that the atheists and communists were
struck down by God's scimitar. This last legacy left also a spirit of
triumphalism to the side of the victorious mujahideen.
The old issue of the role of religion in politics
came back on the world stage by default. The West may not be atheistic
but it is immersed in the meta-modern culture of the individual's
self-realization and combined with its dominance in shaping political
processes globally symbolized immorality and oppression.
These facts create new causes of conflict for both
victors; the fundamentalists of nostalgia and the fundamentalists of
the future. The Muslim ideology is under the spell of faith as a tool
for reshaping the world; the West under the spell of invincibility and
moral superiority and the thrust of globalization.
All the above plus more tangible problems: poverty,
inequality, suppression, demographics, democracy as a given, pressed
the Muslim world towards a dramatic transformation. At the same time,
as the late Marshall McLuhan had observed, restructuring of social
groups and processes go on as our science and technology adventure is
incessantly producing new extensions of our nervous system and
translates the world in different vocabularies.
I would add that these changes are not yet
comprehensible to the slow thinkers called politicians or for that
matter to interest bound analysts and academics. If McLuhan has
touched part of the truth, this historical Gordian Knot becomes even
more difficult to untie for both contestants.
A civil war plus a religious sectarian war is the
most barbaric of all wars. If external powers take sides because of
interests or ideology it is a conflict without resolution in the minds
of the warring factions in the spirit of vengeance for the defeated
and triumphalism for the victor. No defeated side will acknowledge its
defeat since it will ascribe it to the other's Protectors. Immanuel
Kant in his book Perpetual Peace argued convincingly that outside powers should never take part in a civil war.
In the midst of a clear political revolution the ugly
sectarianism raised its venomous head: Shiites, Sunnis, Alawites,
Christians, Jihadists, Salafists, Moslem Brothers go hand in hand with
different ethnicities: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Hellenes, Armenians,
and more. What do we know about all of these conflicts, historical
animosities and political power struggles? Very little and actually
they don't seem to be part of any coherent plan of ours.
A possible punitive attack against Syria in the
immediate future is just a chapter of the historical transformation of
the area, more or less a minor one since the tectonic plates of
sectarianism, nationalism, fanaticism emergent new ways of life and
energy resources, the blood of the economy are colliding with
unpredictable force and cataclysmic repercussions for all of us.
The first is the millions of refugees seeking shelter
in a Europe already saturated by refugees of other wars. The
opposition in Syria, if it topples Assad and this may be realized
sooner than later after the strike, will be less than willing to
accommodate western interests lest it is branded as stooges of the
West. No entity in the Moslem world is at the present moment friendly
to the West.
It is not "politically correct" to be pro-Western in
these countries. Even in Turkey, a member of NATO and a "Westernized"
country for 70 of so years, America and Israel are considered the most
dangerous countries for Turkey. The day after in Syria will be no
better than the day after in Iraq. It may even be worse for Christians
and Alawites. Look at Egypt; it is the Copts who are suffering the
unintended consequence of Sisi's coup.
The 9/11 attacks opened a huge trap for the
international security system since we were foolish enough to accept
security as a given (Europe is a consumer of security) or as a simple
task since we possessed the most advanced weapons ever devised by man.
This trap has ensnared us in the most chaotic way with something we
believe we can manage as we managed the Cold War.
We cannot. All other important problems of our
societies , employment, education, Medicare, loss of competitiveness
and problems about the environment, the disarmament from nuclear
weapons, the economic cycles of boom or bust are sidelined in the
effort to deal with this historical phenomenon which neither our
sociologists, or social scientists or historians comprehend in full.
It seems foolish to believe that solely with projection
of air-power and action at a distance we can manipulate the social
forces of history. Our encounter with such a historical development,
actually a hot magma, creates conditions of osmosis with barbarism and
contempt for civilized behavior which prompts us also into similar
actions and psychology.
We resort to barbarism (drones, production of new
lethal weapons, torture, Guantanamo); illegality (the NSA scandal);
loss of cohesion (the British vote in the House of Commons, Germany's
abstention from hard-power projection, Russia's strong opposite
views); stealth undeclared wars and last but not least economic decline
and bankruptcy. We are writing history all right, but to our expense.
Nicholas A Biniaris has taught philosophy and political theory at NYC in Athens. His historical novel The Call of the Desert
was recently published in Hellas and shall be published in English.
He is a columnist and an economic and foreign policy analyst.
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(Copyright 2013 Nicholas A Biniaris) http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-060913.html
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