Good article. Thanx for posting it.
MK
In a message dated 6/15/2003 4:29:26 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Gulf War Never Was About 'Civilising' Iraq
During the build-up to the Iraq war, both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush tried to justify their actions by constantly referring to Iraqis as people who desperately needed the coalition forces to liberate them from abject poverty, writes Special Correspondent RASNA WARAH
Throughout history, conquering armies have plundered, and then sought to "civilise" the nations that they have vanquished.
From the Ottoman to the British Empires, colonisers have used their military supremacy to wage a battle against the minds of the colonised, all in the name of civilisation, or modernity.
In many ways, the war against Iraq displayed all the characteristics of the development paradigm of modernisation.
Although this paradigm no longer enjoys the widespread theoretical endorsement that it did up until the mid 1960s, it continues to be influential at the political level and is shared by many governments, donor agencies, the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions.
Modernisation has often been associated with "Westernisation" in that it seeks to develop countries using the Western vision of growth and progress as its benchmark.
It relies on the moral force of the Enlightenment vision of a world that is constantly in the process of improvement and in which "no injustice was impossible to rectify, no technical problem impossible to solve, and no project of human betterment impossible to realise."
The modernisation paradigm supports the transfer of capital, ideology, technology and know-how from developed societies to so-called developing, or traditional societies.
It is based on the notion of evolution that is directional, cumulative, predetermined, irreversible, progressive and immanent with reference to the nation-state.
It is essentially ethnocentric and paternalistic, in contrast to the relatively new multiplicity paradigm, which emphasises cultural identity and multidimensionality and which recognises that there is no universal path to development; rather, development must be conceived as an integral, multidimensional and dialectic process which can differ from one society to another.
Modernisation, under the guise of humanitarianism (and colonialism), has also been used as a pretext to justify military intervention.
There is an attempt to "infantilise" conquered subjects, to portray them as people who are incapable of doing anything for themselves, and who desperately need foreign assistance.
For instance, during the build-up to the Iraq war, both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush tried to justify their actions by constantly referring to Iraqis as people who desperately needed the coalition forces to liberate them from abject poverty and to deliver democracy.
In all the rhetoric, there was an element of social engineering and the ambition to shape Iraq’s economy and "civilise" its society. (It is interesting to note that no such justifications were forthcoming for other countries in crisis, such as Rwanda during the genocide, or Sierra Leone, during its brutal civil war).
But does Iraq, one of the oldest civilisations on earth, need more civilising? The land where Iraq stands today gave birth to the world’s oldest civilisation 5,000 years ago. This was the Mesopotamia of the Old Testament. Here, the first wheeled chariot was invented and city-states prospered.
Today, Iraq is also potentially one of the richest nations on earth. The country has the second largest oil reserves in the world and the fertile banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers make it one of the most arable lands in the region. In fact, had it not been for the decade-long UN sanctions against this country, which used the "oil-for-food" development model, over 60 per cent of its population might not have been dependant on aid.
The problem, of course, is not Iraq, but Islam. Prior to the military campaign, the Bush administration tried to cast Iraq as a fundamentalist Islamic nation that harboured al Qaeda terrorists, even though Saddam Hussein had little tolerance for religious fundamentalism, and the country was one of the few secular nations in the region.
Meanwhile, Bush’s own agenda in Iraq took on the characteristics of Christian fundamentalism. This "Born Again Christian President" is reported to have told religious broadcasters that "the terrorists hate the fact that, "we can worship almighty God the way we see fit," and that the US was called to bring God’s gifts of liberty to "every human being in the world." Some analysts believe that Bush’s designs in the Arab world are intended to "christianise" the region. Even though he has gone to great lengths to reassure Muslims that he "admires" their religion, he has at the same time hosted some of the leading evangelists in his own country who make no bones about their desire to convert the world’s Muslims to Christianity.
Unfortunately, even leading scholars in the US seem to perpetuate the notion that Islam and its adherents are barbaric fanatics who need to be christianised and modernised for their own good.
Samuel P. Huntington, a professor at Harvard University and author of the doomsday book The Clash of Civilizations (1997), in a special edition of Newsweek (2002), decried Islam as inherently violent. "Muslims fight each other and fight non-Muslims far more often than do people of other civilisations," he wrote. "Muslim wars have replaced the cold war as the principal form of international conflict. These wars include wars of terrorism, guerrilla wars, civil wars and interstate conflicts." These instances of Muslim violence, he predicts, "could congeal into one major clash of civilisations between Islam and the West or between Islam and the Rest."
Huntington further argues that throughout the Muslim world (which he associates with the Arab world, even though Muslims are to be found in virtually every continent), there exists "a great sense of grievance, resentment, envy and hostility toward the West and its wealth, power and culture." although he concedes that this could be the result of Western imperialism and domination of the Muslim world for much of the 20th century and US policies towards Israel, he predicts that the "age of Muslim wars" will only end when its causes change or are changed. In other words, when Muslims are de-Islamised.
The decline of Islamic consciousness, he says, may happen when social, economic and political improvements occur in Islamic countries. (Like his contemporary Robert D. Kaplan, Huntington believes that "Islam’s very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden").
That is, when Islamic countries become as "modernised" as Turkey, and when the numbers of Muslims in the world are reduced. In the latter case, he says, the "demographic prospects are more optimistic." Why? Because, "birth rates in many Muslim countries have been going down" and by the 2020s, the Muslim youth bulge (who are more inclined to be militant) will be shrinking.
What these scholars fail to realise is that in order to be sustainable, modernisation and progress have to be home-grown. Afghanistan stands as a testament to what can go wrong when outsiders try to "liberate" and "democratise" a country. A recent Human Rights Watch investigation revealed that one year after the December 5, 2001 Bonn Agreement was signed, most regional warlords enjoyed greater power than before the US-led invasion, with the result that opium production (the key cash crop of the wardlords) has skyrocketed and in provinces such as Herat, women’s rights to get work and education have actually deteriorated.
Military intervention in the name of modernisation usually has economic motives. Modernisation doesn’t just imply the transfer of technology, capital, ideology and knowledge, but also the creation of economic opportunities for the modernisers – in the case of Iraq, its vast oil fields and the prospect of reconstructing the country after the war. These economic interests are often cloaked in the guise of "development" and "democracy."
For example, few caught the contradiction in US Vice President Dick Cheney’s remarks that Iraq’s oil reserves could be used to build democracy in the country. As Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria noted, the opposite is closer to the truth because with the exception of Norway, "virtually all the world’s oil states are dictatorships."
This, he says, is no accident because oil, like other natural resources, "does not produce capitalism, civil society, and thus democracy – it actually retards the process."
When Zakaria refers to democracy, he is, of course, referring to liberal democracy, a political system marked not only by free elections but also by the rule of law, the separation of church and state, basic human rights – which include the right to private property – free speech and religious tolerance, or what has been described as "middle-class democracy."
In fact, economic interests are driving the political agenda of several companies in Europe and the US. According to an article published in the International Herald Tribune (April 3, 2003), European companies are already positioning themselves in hopes of getting slices of post-war Iraq reconstruction contracts estimated at $100 billion.
"Companies in Britain," writes Joseph Fitchett, the author of the article, "like those in the United Stares, have deployed their corps of corporate scouts in military uniform – reserve officers, who accompany and assist combat forces and at the same time identify the business opportunities for civilian contractors that will emerge when the shooting stops and governments want to jump-start the return of normal life." (Kenya’s Daily Nation cartoonist Gado on April 13, 2003, highlighted this fight for Iraq’s loot by depicting a de-throned Saddam statue replaced by Macdonalds’ arches.)
Companies such as the construction giant Bechtel, the cell phone operator Vodaphone and Fiat of Italy are already eyeing the Iraqi market. The major losers may turn out to be those countries opposed to the war, particularly France and Russian, who were once the main suppliers of arms to Iraq.
While the US was prepared to spend billions of dollars a month on sustaining the war, it had by the end of March, offered only $65 million to provide Iraqi civilians with food, water and sanitation, which is barely enough to last a fortnight. Most importantly, more than a month after the fall of Baghdad, there is still no sign of the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein is supposed to have hidden, and which were cited as the main reason for the invasion of Iraq. No wonder the Western ambition to modernise, liberate and "develop" the Third World meets with so much cynicism.
Fortunately, the Iraqis are demanding that the US and British forces leave Iraq as soon as possible to enable the Iraqis to get on with the task of developing their own country. This is one reaction Bush and Blair did not expect from the people they supposedly liberated.
