[1515] in peace2
An interesting view from Great Britain]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Francis Doughty)
Wed Feb 27 17:03:40 2002
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 17:00:49 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200202272200.RAA17352@eecs-ath-10.mit.edu>
From: Francis Doughty <doughty@MIT.EDU>
To: peace-announce@MIT.EDU
TIME TO STOP BEING AMERICA'S LAP-DOG
Tony Blair is faced with a stark choice - either to ally himself to the
increasingly conservative and intolerant US or be a fully engaged
European
Observer Worldview
The Europe pages - Observer special
Will Hutton
Sunday February 17, 2002
The Observer
The most important political story of our time is the rise of the
American Right and the near collapse of American liberalism. This has
transformed the political and cultural geography of the United States
and now it is set to transform the political and cultural geography of
the West. Britain's reflex reactions to an ally with whom we apparently
share so much and which has served us well are going to be tested as
never before.
The signals are all around. It takes extraordinary circumstances to
produce the kind of warnings voiced over the last week by Chris Patten,
EU commissioner for external affairs and former chairman of the
Conservative Party, but these circumstances are extraordinary. Patten
has damned the emerging US reliance on its fantastic military
superiority over all other nations to pursue what it wants as it wants
as an 'absolutist and simplistic' approach to the rest of the world that
is ultimately self- defeating. It is also intellectually and morally
wrong. He is the first ranking British politician to state so boldly
what has been a commonplace in France and Germany for weeks.
The most obvious flashpoint is the weight of evidence that after
Afghanistan George Bush intends a massive military intervention to
topple Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Dangerous dictator he may be, but the
unilateral decision to declare war upon another state without a casus
belli other than suspicion will upset the fabric of law on which
international relations rests, as well as destabilising the Middle East.
American loyalists shrug their shoulders; Tony Blair is reported to have
said privately that 'if we can get rid of Baghdad, we should', a
devastatingly naive remark which so far stands uncorrected. This is the
traditional British view that insists we stick close to the US. It
remains the same good America that has been on the right side of the
great conflicts of the last 100 years; worthwhile allies put up with the
bad decisions as well as the good.
But it's not the same good America. The postwar US that reconstructed
Europe and led an international liberal economic and social order has
disappeared completely. Its former leaders would no more volunteer the
scale of defence spending now contemplated in the US - a 12 per cent,
$48 billion increase on an already stunning military budget - while
offering the less developed countries close to nothing in increased aid
flows, debt relief and market access than fly to the Moon. Yet Bush has
only agreed to attend next month's crucial UN conference in Monterey on
global governance and Third World development strategies if it is
understood that the question of money is not be raised.
It is this essential stance, along with the tearing down of
international weapons treaties and last week's feeble move on global
warming that tells us how profoundly conservative the US has become.
Unilateralism, as Patten argues, is not in itself ignoble - states
pursue their self-interests - but US unilateralism is uncompromisingly
absolutist because it is ideological, which is what it makes so
dangerous.
American conservatism, following the teaching of the influential
conservative American political philosopher Leo Strauss, unites
patriotism, unilateralism, the celebration of inequality and the right
of a moral Elite to rule into a single unifying ideology. As Professor
Shadia Drury describes in Leo Strauss and the American Right (St
Martin's Press), Strauss's core idea that just states must be run by
moral, religious, patriotic individuals and that income redistribution,
multilateralism and any restraint on individual liberty are mortal
enemies of the development of such just Elites is the most influential
of our times.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of state for defence pushing for an
early invasion of Iraq, is a Straussian. So is John Ashcroft, the
attorney-general, who has legislated for military tribunals both to try
and execute suspected terrorists beyond the rule of law. Straussians
build up the military capacity of the nation while invoking the Bible
and the flag. This is not prejudice; this is a coherent ideological
position.
The emergence of the largely reactionary south and west of the US as its
new economic and political centres of gravity; the weakness of its rules
on campaign finance which allow rich, usually conservative, candidates
to buy elections; the inability of American liberals to fight back; the
embrace of Straussian ideas, laced with traditional anti-tax,
free-market nostrums - these ingredients make a deadly cocktail.
They have transformed American politics, so that even an essentially
progressive President like Clinton found himself behaving, as he
acknowledged, like an Eisenhower Republican, while being the object of a
co-ordinated conservative conspiracy in first the Whitewater
investigations and later the Starr inquiry. The Supreme Court's
suspension of the Florida recount in December 2000, to gift the
presidency to Bush, is part of the same story.
This destructive conservatism is contested fiercely, especially on the
liberal, internationalist seaboards. Many good Americans are as
bewildered by their current leaders and ideas as we are. But they are
not in control. What the world has to deal with is not just the Bush
administration, but the internal forces that put it there and will
continue to constrain the US even without it. Iraq, the continuing
defence build-up, disdain for international law and total uninterest in
the 'soft' aspects of security - - aid, trade, health, education and
debt - are now givens in US policy.
Before this challenge, Britain, in its own self-interest, has to play
the same balance-of-power politics it used to do in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Europe. That means siding with the EU and no longer
being US conservatism's lapdog. We cannot, for example, be part of the
US national missile defence system if its purpose is to destroy the
fabric of international law or join America's war against Iraq.
Mr Blair should beware. Trying to be both pro-European and pro-American
will no longer work. There is a choice and, if he does not make it,
ultimately it will wreck his premiership. In an era of globalisation, it
is international affairs that determine the fate of governments, because
party Whips cannot contain the consequent passions. The Tories broke
over Europe. Labour will break over too-slavish fealty to this US. This
is the new political drama. Watch out.
Guardian Unlimited =A9 Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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