Iraq War’s collateral damage

Columnist M B NAQVI talks about the unspecified destruction in the on-going conflict.

This war is scarcely one week old as one writes. Not being a militarily trained person, it is pointless for one to formulate definite opinions on how long or how much more equipment and men will it take to enable the Americans to inflict a clear victory on Iraq and what course the war is likely to take in coming days is outside one’s capabilities. One can only observe what the war is going to do to the people and the world.
Ones wishes to distinguish two types of collateral damage that the war is inflicting. This is of course a euphemism for the murder of men, women and children by fire, concussion and shrapnel. They did not want to admit that they are killing civilians, old men, women and children and call it an ambiguous collateral damage. The second kind of collateral damage is that of the infrastructure that the Iraqi people have built with their labours and wealth. It is being systematically destroyed. That is always the basic strategy of a war and is still the name of the game. The destruction is on purpose. One reason is of course to weaken or destroy the resistance of the victim state. The second is more ugly, particularly this time: it is to destroy the infrastructure in order to rebuild it for the benefit of the private building companies which the aggressors favour. The total costs would thus be paid by the victims own resources and labours with enough returns.
Actually this is the silliest kind of military economics. It is in fact spitting on the grave of James Maynord Kyense: destroy and rebuild for the foreigners’ profits and the victim has to pay all the costs in the end. It is known that the American economy has not been in the pink of health in recent days. It has in fact been falling behind in the primary industrial fields to its rivals in Japan, Germany and East Asia’s Japan. It has specialised only in refining the science, arts and crafts of war. It therefore has the most efficient, or supposedly so, war machine in the world. It is expected to destroy everything in its path and once its juggernaut is on its way, it will conquer all. In any war the chances of working out of the presumed or calculated schemes of the aggressor are never very high. One is not in a position to say as to how much would the Americans destroy, how soon and how they propose to rebuild. All one knows by press reports is that the American government has already alerted America’s construction companies to elicit letters of interest in the work of rebuilding Iraq after its infrastructure has been more or less razed to the ground.
The Europeans are, there are indications, to be eliminated from this altogether. Even the Britishers are cribbling. The British government has already made contacts with the American authorities on the subject that some benefit should also accrue to British companies that have experience of Iraq and can help in the building and have the orientation for working in Iraq. They are scrambling for the spoils, the game for which has already begun – even before the crop is ready. Needless to repeat: who will pay the ultimate bill? Doubtless it would be Iraq’s own resources and Iraq’s own labours that pay the costs to the victors for all the expenditure that may have incurred plus all the interest and return that they would expect on this “investment”. The Americans are unashamedly using war as a business venture also.
Functionally, one distinguishes other kinds of collateral damage also. They are not qualitatively different. One sees them in two separate contexts. One is the clear purpose of a regime change and to redraw the map of the Middle East. No doubt it is a part of the larger American effort now to reshape the world in its own image and in accordance with its own interests. But it has confined itself for the moment to the Middle East.
Everyone knows that Iraq was, once upon a time without specific boundaries, Mesopotamia, an ancient land where civilisation flourished many millennia before. It is the land of the Saracens also. The specific modern Iraqi space was carved out between the victorious French and the British in 1921. The British conceded Syria and Lebanon to France and took Iraq and the rest of the Persian Gulf to themselves. The British part produced more oil and the British became more prosperous as a result of exploiting it. But they did not have enough time to become truly rich by the time the Second World War caught up with them. The Americans took over the British interests during the Second World War and shortly thereafter in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Similarly the Americans have taken over the task of managing South Asia from the British. Virtually most of it, minus smaller interests to British companies from the oil of Saudi Arabia (the world’s largest oil producer with the largest known reserves) and UAE. The British have tenaciously held on to a few other Persian Gulf areas by of course conceding shares to the American companies in ever larger amounts. This is the bedrock on which Anglo-American cooperation rests: it is the inter-penetration of the Anglo-American capital in the Middle East primarily as well as in some other places. That is the hard fact on which the special Anglo-American relationship is built on. It is recent, 1950’s, growth and might any day disappear should UK’s stance of permanent servility to the US change.
Remember that the Americans preferred the outright isolationism in 1920s to any involvement in Europe; they did not wish to go beyond the two America’s. They did not even remain interested in the League of Nations that was founded on the rhetoric of President Woodrow Wilson which of course later proved to be more ephemeral than substantive. This Isolationism is another name for Unilateralism. It is indeed the other side of the same coin. The Americans always believed in what one of their Presidents has said: “talk softly but carry a long staff”. Unilateralism is inherent to Isolationism whether idealistically expressed or otherwise. And the two hang together. That was because of Americans stage of development then; they felt they had their hands full in managing Latin America with profit and thus left much to the British and the French after First World War. Not so now. They need more and more – and now. But the same isolationism-produced Unilateralism is now being extended from Latin America to Asia.
No one should be surprised by America’s Unilateralism today. Now the facts are that while the approaching Second World War made the League of Nations fade away. The League of Nations had failed because it could not contain the rivalry among all old established powers as well as the new rising ones. The old established ones for the League were France and Britain which had in early 1920s carved up most of the Middle East after having divided all the Africans in the Nineteenth Century. The regimes imposed in early 1920s by France and Britain over majority of Middle East have lasted, technically, up to now. It is true that the Americans have insinuated their way into almost every part of the Middle East and rest of the Third World with clear intent to elbow out Britain and France. This was of course easily done in areas of real interest to America, though Franco-phone Africa has remained tenuously attached to France and the latter enjoys privileges there. The point here is to assign in what damage has been done to all this evolving international system and international law by the current American War.
One has to be concerned with the international system and international law. Insofar as international law is concerned, it has evolved over the last 500 or 600 years mainly in Europe. It is an inescapable need if people of different parts of globe visit one another or trade, they need firm rules – law – to assist and provide common protection to all. Why in Europe? because Europe was the first to experience the rejuvenation or the Renaissance as a result of which its rising capitalist class took the road of colonisation of other Continents through the international trade. Originally there was no laws. Any exporter with strength on hand in the ship or in supporting ships of the flotilla would go and unload its cargo, charge what price it might command and take in what goods it took and at what price. It was a highly unpredictable and unequal exchange. Eventually, they evolved a system of colonisation including the colonisation of America itself by eliminating the Red Indians and also later the Spaniards and Portuguese from North America. After pushing the Spaniards and Portuguese outside, the British, French and German occupied most of the North America. There was no international system to speak of and international law depended upon specific treaties between specific Italian city states and some notional understandings with what were to become colonies of European colonial powers. That is how law among nations or international law has gradually evolved. The need for a codified international law was felt. Indeed the need was felt for an international organisation that would perform the functions that earlier treaties among various Chambers of Commerces did among states and so forth. But a codified international law to be enforced by an international organisation was an idea that continued to gain respect in the days leading up to the First World War. Such an organisation was set up at American intervention and rhetoric. It was the League of Nations that lasted most of the 1920s and even 1930s but faded away in later 1930s and few remember when it died. Only its archives at Geneva might show the date. The main story of an international law enforced by an international organisation is all about what happened after First World War and what has been happening since the Second World War – a period of over 80 years.
The League of Nations faded away because it could not manage the rivalry between the rising powers of Japan, Italy and Germany and the entrenched French and British power in the 1930s. In the early 1930s Japan invaded Mauchuria – and what are now the two Koreas. In 1935 the Italians invaded Abbysinia which is now Ethiopia. Mussolini of Italy made other moves in Africa also. These virtually killed the League of Nations and people had stopped talking about it as far back as 1937 and 1938 when specific Anglo-French efforts were being noted by the world press and there was no mention of League of Nations in the newspapers of those days. After the Second World War the new United Nations Organisation (UNO) reflected the realities of the age, with some concession to what had gone on before. Thus the United Nations tried to be a distinct improvement on the League of Nations in matters of certain issues between states, creating a Security Council for the security of all states. But a big concession to powerful states too was inserted. Five great powers were given the right of veto in the Security Council. It meant that whenever the supreme national interest of any of these great powers required protection, their negative vote in the Security Council will be a veto on all the actions of Security Council. The giving of veto power to China, which was more or less postrate, and France and Britain, which had been weakened immeasurably, was a concession to past history and the impressions of the day. They were the technical victors. The real victory had belonged to Soviet Union and the US. We can skip the details and can see that the world quickly became a bipolar world in which the two powers, the US and the Soviets, quarrelled and carried on a long cold war. The whole world was polarised between the two. In the end the Americans won and the Soviets lost. In fact the Soviets died in 1989 and the ceremony was solemnised in 1990 the Paris Treaty. The world has been truly unipolar since. The UN now requires adjustments at the very best. The only power that matters today is United States. Others matter growingly less. The Americans have reverted to their Isolationism and have felt free to use the garb of Unilateralism. This means that they really want to rule the world and reshape it to serve their own interests. That is the challenge that the UN was required to face in the days coming right up to 9/11. The 9/11 provided an occasion for pent up American Unilateralist pressure to unleash itself. It quickly began reshaping the Middle East. It dusted off all the files from the Pentagon shelves. It went in straight to Afghanistan and occupied it. It has established bases in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and have arrangements in Kazakhastan, not to mention Georgia which has also given military bases to the US. The US has already pushed out the influence of China and Russia from Central Asia. Clearly America means to be the supreme power in Central Asia also and make all the big decisions of all the key resources of the area just it has become able to do in Middle East. The US will dispose of more power by winning this second Iraq War.
The collateral damage to be most feared for is that the UN is dead or may soon be fading away. Efforts are on to hold a session of Security Council to consider the effects of the current American War on Iraq, if it remains current by the time these lines appear. The fact of the matter is that the UN, particularly the Security Council, was not designed to cope with the unipolar world. It still thought that there would be more than one power and the management function will remain attached to the UN. That function is now not there. Americans can do without the UN and they have never cared much for it anyway in all these recent decades. They have treated it with contempt and condensation. They have made it dance to its own tune, particularly in the last 13 years. But the UN need not have the same fate as that of League of Nations. One’s apprehension is that it may. There is nothing to prevent it except America’s own conveniences and diplomatic requirement to give a collective colour to their own decisions in the shape of UN resolutions. For that purpose they might retain the UN as a decorative piece but without any teeth. Not that it ever had any real teeth, thanks to the vetoes.
Let it be remembered that the UN can be reformed – but only if some countervailing power is able to restrain America. Is there one? States have not (yet?) proved to be able to do hold back US decisions. Can global public opinion, so roused today, do that? How will it translate itself into decisive international action? It seems difficult. Maybe this 1945 UNO will fade away. Let’s hope a new and better one will some day appear.
But what of international law? It is so much the worse for years of its misuse because it has been specifically abused by the Americans over the last 13-14 years. Can it recover its dynamism and essential vitality? One has already conceded that it may do so, because it is the need of America too – to an extent. But that is not enough for international law as such. The Americans will have to do some superficial restructuring of the UN, if they want their will to prevail while retaining a pretence of some international organisation enforcing international law. Will that do?