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| Sunday, 8 February 2004 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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The WMD hoax: Iraq and deconstructing Democracy Observations by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA The deconstruction of Western-style democracy and the 'Free World' continues apace. The latest deconstructive step is the admission by both the United States of America and the supposed home of 'Westminster' style democracy, the United Kingdom, that the 'intelligence' they possessed concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was inaccurate. At the same time, their principal WMD investigator in Iraq has left his job claiming that his teams have found no trace of WMD worth speaking of. It is now officially being admitted that the original WMD argument was wrong on the basis of the finding that the intelligence data provided to the US and UK governments at the time regarding Iraq's WMD status was inadequate and was not sufficient to justify the invasion of Iraq. At the same time, successive WMD investigators have been claiming, not only before the invasion but, right now, in the half-year since the invasion, that they have failed to find any WMD in Iraq. In other words, the official and legal argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, which was the basis on which the US and UK led the war against Iraq, was wrong and false. According to any logic, whether it is European logic or Indian (and Buddhist) logic, if the reason for the invasion is found to be non-existent then the invasion itself wrong, terribly and tragically wrong. United States of America and the United Kingdom, the two world powers that led the war against Iraq on the basis of the WMD argument, in fact actually did not wait to go through all the procedure that might have made their intervention in Iraq legal and justifiable. That is, they failed to convince the United Nations about the Iraqi threat of WMD and thereby obtain UN backing for their intervention. Thus even if the WMD argument had been found to have been accurate, the invasion of Iraq is not strictly legal. However, the US and the UK have brazenly not bothered about procedures in the UN, the very world organisation they took the lead in founding for the purpose of ensuring 'world peace'. Now, they equally brazenly admit that their original argument regarding WMD is also wrong! They have been compelled to make this admission in the face of the persistent findings by their own WMD investigators that there is actually no trace of WMD in Iraq. The only 'traces' they have found are the remains of WMD production facilities that had long been dismantled or destroyed in numerous bombings before and during the Second Gulf War which was what last year's invasion of Iraq amounted to. I say "before" because for the whole decade between the first Gulf War of 1991 (led by the President George Bush Snr.) and the Second Gulf War, the US and UK air forces systematically bombed Iraq on the flimsiest of excuses the principal one being Iraqi military challenges to the Western allies' surveillance overflights. Thus Iraq has the dubious distinction of being the second worst bombed nation in human history after Vietnam (no prizes for the correct guess who bombed Vietnam). So the truth is out, it seems. But, for whom does it seem so? I really don't know. Because, one wonders as to who really believed the original US and British claim that Iraq indeed possessed significant quantities of WMD and had aggressive designs that posed a 'threat to world peace'. Did the people of the United States of America and the United Kingdom believe the WMD claim? Even if they did, enough public opinion polls in these two countries long before the second invasion of Iraq began and right up to this moment clearly indicated that both the American and British people were in favour of a Western military strike against Iraq even if there was no WMD. The latest polls in Britain, after the revelations of the Lord Hutton inquiry into the BBC News claims that the Labour Government manipulated British intelligence reports to bolster the WMD charge, indicate that a majority of Britons still favour the invasion even if there is no truth to the WMD charge. Long before, during, and in the bloody aftermath of the Western invasion of Iraq, US and UK public opinion has remained at over 55 per cent in favour of the military intervention. Sometimes this support for war climbed to over 70 per cent, but this was before the American and British death toll began to rise. And the reasons presented to justify such an intervention are many: a convenient basket of reasons, some of explicitly western self-interest and others vaguely of altruistic intentions. The leadership in Washington and London, as always, did not stop at the formal charge of WMD but added on whatever conducive argument they could connect to Iraq and the Gulf. So we have the claims of bringing 'democracy' to the Persian Gulf region, of helping clean up the world of 'terrorism', more specifically, ridding the world of Al-Qaeda, of ridding the Gulf of a 'dangerous' tyrant, of preventing nuclear proliferation. These, and any others they could think of (I really did not count ALL the numerous reasons trotted out) were and are the 'un-selfish' and supposedly altruistic claims. And there are frankly selfish reasons given as well. Time and again the US leadership in particular, has taken the position that, if not for any other reason, the US was justified in invading Iraq in order to remove the Saddam Hussein regime which was a threat to US national security. A less mentioned reason is the US and larger Western interest in ensuring control of Iraqi oil resources. Artfully, this is almost never mentioned officially, but contributed by the pet propagandists for Washington and London, in the form of 'analysts', scholars, newspaper columnists etc. (even East Timorean radical liberation hero Jose Ramos Horta had to write articles in support of the US invasion, perhaps due to his country's dependence on Western aid). There is also the argument for protecting 'civilisation' (implicitly Western civilisation) and the 'Free World' (often meant to be the rich capitalist democracies and their supporters). So for the majority of the people in the US and the UK, and also in the few other European states that have contributed troops for actual combat duty, such as Spain and Italy, war against Iraq remains justified even though the 'reasons' remain confused and multifarious. As I have argued in a previous column, the very populace of these Western powers are in support of the continued Western imperial project. That is the meaning of the Western public opinion in support of war against Iraq and any other 'rogue state' or 'terrorist' group such as Al-Qaeda. In fact I have argued that given the dynamics of bourgeois democracy, a major reason for Washington's and London's leaders' aggressively interventionist and militarist policies is electoral. If not George Bush (I doubt whether he really understands electoral politics given his dependence on electoral misadministration for his Presidential victory), at least Tony Blair has been war-mongering with a shrewd eye on the undecided Conservative vote bank. Thus the WMD argument by Washington and London was not really aimed at their national constituencies. It was the 'official' reason presented to the world. It was a desperate attempt to cloak their imperial intentions with some democratic garb. The very shallowness of the attempt is now revealed by the latest admissions of inaccuracy of WMD intelligence. The desperation and the crudity of this behaviour on the world stage by the Western powers is an indication of their self-assessment of the strength of their current global hegemony. The flimsiness of this hegemony has warranted the throwing of caution (and Democracy) to the winds. Thus, is 'Democracy', as presented by the West, deconstructed. I use the term 'deconstruction' in the sense of an ideological dynamic. The actual political structures of Democracy in the West yet remain and are impressive in their achievements for human and social well-being. And of course, there are all the inadequacies and contradictions of this form of Democracy. But my reference is to the Idea of Democracy as presented by the West to the world. Not only is this Idea offered to the rest of the world as the gift of Western civilisation (to an, as yet, uncivilised humanity) but the geo-strategic designs of the Western powers are also regularly justified by the moral strength of this Idea of Democracy. But the recent crude geopolitics of the Western powers and their failure to be convincing is now helping dismantle this Idea of Democracy. In fact the shallowness of the admission of the supposed intelligence 'failure' further reveals the continuing pretence and duplicity. Not only is no one fooled but this patent duplicity only helps convince the watching world about the hollowness of the Western Idea of Democracy. 'Democracy', as offered by the West, is not that special "God's Gift" to the world. It is no better and no worse than other ideas of social justice and humane, representative, participatory governance. Not that the rest of the world generally swallowed the WMD charge. The rest of the world is either yet recovering from a direct experience Western imperialism and colonialism or, as in China and Russia, is subjected to Western geopolitical pressures. The people of the world have seen over the past century that the very powers that claim to be leading the world towards peace and democracy have been the ones that have waged the most wars. To everyone outside the West (except for those whose interests are intimately linked to the West's hegemony) have seen the Gulf interventions as what they are: amoral geopolitics and crude, unintelligent politics at that. Furthermore, the non-Western societies have not really been schooled in the western Idea of Democracy anyway, at least not in the organic way that saw its emergence in the West. It is not that these other societies do not have their own ideas of democracy and just governance (such as prajaathanthra). Not only do many of these countries have their own traditions of just governance but they also have their theories of politics and power. To the rest of the world, the moves in the Gulf by the Western powers are seen as pure global power politics. Hsun Tzu and Kautilya can easily explain the geopolitics of the West. In short no one was fooled by the WMD propaganda, except, perhaps, the soldiers of the Western armies who, desperately, need every possible 'reason' to justify and rationalise their being in the midst of the terror and savagery of war. The very frailty of the WMD propaganda, is perhaps an unconscious acknowledgment by the Western powers that, "out there", no one is being fooled. The knowledge that the WMD argument will not ultimately be bought rendered their propaganda attempt a half-hearted one. Deep in their hearts, the imperialists are already unnerved by the fragility of their global domination and, are quailing before the prospect of an emasculated future. |
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