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Between The Monster And The Mission:American Foreign Policy on The Horns of A Dilemma
The two countries in the world which symbolize the return of the Diaspora to ancestry are Israel, on one side, and Liberia, on the other. Indeed, long before the political Zionist movement of Theodor Hertzel was born in Europe, there was a back-to-Africa movement among dispersed Blacks in the Americas. This latter movement back to Africa has sometimes been called "BLACK ZIONISM". On balance, the United States has a much more direct obligation to the survival of Liberia than it has to the survival of Israel.
Between The Monster And The Mission:American Foreign Policy on The Horns of A Dilemma
by
Prof. Ali A. Mazrui, Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies
and
Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities,
Binghamton University
State University of New York at
Binghamton, New York USA
Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large,
University of Jos, Jos, Nigeria
Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large Emeritus
and Senior Scholar in Africana Studies
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
Chair, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy Washington, D.C.
Presentation in the series "The USA: As Others See Us - A Dialogue", June 24, 2002, University Theater, Yale University, as part of the Seventh International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut. [The festival lasted from June 13 to June 30, 2002]
A major historic transformation which is needed in American foreign policy is a shift from a monster- driven foreign policy to a mission-driven foreign policy. There has been a dichotomizing quality in U.S. policy-formation which has tended to divide the world between believers (on the side of the United States) and unbelievers (usually associated with either evil personified like Saddan Hussein or Fidel Castro or evil ideologised like communism or so-called Islamic fundamentalism).
It is not clear whether this dichotomizing tendency in American foreign policy goes back to the frontier culture between friends and foes, or between cowboys and Indians. But the tendency has been obstinate in American foreign policy for at least a century. George W. Bush re-articulated it afresh in his first State of the Union Address when he declared to the world: "You are either with us or against us." For George W. Bush there was no neutral ground.
Monster driven foreign policy is inspired by the pursuit of a dragon - the need for an enemy as an organizing principle. Mission-driven foreign policy seeks to improve the human condition, however defined. Since the United States emerged from its policy of isolationism - and especially since World War I - American foreign policy has been primarily monster-driven.
There was World War I, and the United States' belated involvement in it. There was the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 when the United States was at first profoundly ambivalent between retreating back to isolationism or take on the communist monster.
There was also Pearl Harbor and the Nazis - Monsters of the East and of the West in World War II. There was the Cold War from the late 1940s to almost the end of the 20th century - the "Monsterous" Warsaw Pact pitted against the "freedom-loving" North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
And now there is Usama bin Laden, Al- Qaeda and the War on terrorism. Once again the Enemy, the Dragon, the Monster outside has become the organizing principle of American Foreign Policy.
Of course some American Presidents have had mission-driven domestic policies even if they had at the same time monster-driven foreign policies. Lyndon Johnson had a superb mission of civil rights domestically - but in foreign policy he escalated the Vietnam War even when he knew it was a war the United States could not win. From his telephone tapes we now know how early Johnson realized that Vietnam was a lost cause.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was an outstanding and historic domestic mission - but Roosevelt was so obsessed with external monsters that he locked up Japanese Americans ostensibly as a security measure against the outer monsters.
The only U.S. President since World War II who was more mission-driven than monster-driven was Jimmy Carter. He was a decent man trying to do the right thing under the pressures of the most powerful office on earth. He tried to make Human Rights a real foreign policy platform. However, he was too decent a man to be re-elected President of the United States.
Israeliphilia and Americophobia
It is possible to argue that the only genuine mission of the United States' foreign policy is the American commitment to the State of Israel since the second half of the twentieth century. That commitment has often gone against the national interest of the United States. For example, it often makes the politics of oil supplies more militarized than they need be.
American commitment to Israel is the greatest single source of anti-Americanism in the Arab world and in much of the Muslim world. About a billion Muslims in the world - who might otherwise be mesmerized by the United States - are either ambivalent or passionately anti-American.
Uncritical Israeliphilia in the United States creates uncompromising Americophobia in much of the rest of the world. Excessive American tolerance of Israeli international arrogance earns the United States considerable hostility to itself.
The government of Israel as an occupying power has become the most unpopular regime in the world since the days of apartheid in South Africa. This is evident not just in newspapers in developing countries, but also in the media in Western Europe.
The military cost of uncritical defense of Israel is not just what the American taxpayer donates to the Israeli budget every year. From now on the military cost of uncritical support of Israel will continue to be our vulnerability to international terrorism - and the billions of dollars we are going to pay to protect ourselves from the consequences of being hated so passionately.
The national interest of the United States and the national interest of the State of Israel are diverging more and more. Israeli sadism against others is generating new "monsters" against the United States.
This is quite apart from the impact of uncritical Israeliphilia on American democracy. If the atrocities of September 11 are partly the consequence of despair and rage generated by the Arab-Israeli conflict, our civil liberties are now being curtailed domestically as a consequence of September 11.
I: Hundreds of people under American jurisdiction are in prison without trial or access to attorneys
II: Ethnic and religious profiling is practiced with impunity, especially at the expense of Arab Americans and American Muslims
III: Out of the hundreds in detention, less than a dozen show any evidence of knowing any particular terrorist suspect or being associated with any movement or charity accused of terrorism.
IV: Out of the millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, and those whose visas have expired, the people chosen for detention without trial are disproportionately those with Muslim names or who come from the Middle East.
V: The United States is actually planning to have military tribunals and has considered secret trials for those suspected of terrorism. Even the leaders of Nazi Germany were given a public trial at Nuremberg after World War II with access to counsel and proper representation. Some of those tried at Nuremberg had been responsible for the death of millions of people.
VI: Israel continues to look for old Nazi militants so that they can be tried today in a court of law in Israel. Yet Israel feels free to kill Palestinian militants instead of capturing them for trial. Israel tried Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and protected him at the trial with a bulletproof glass cage so that he would not be assassinated. Yet both the USA and Israel in 2001 openly talked about killing terrorist suspects instead of capturing them ("targeted killings") . And even when Israel has illegally captured Palestinian or Lebanese suspects from across its own borders, the purpose has almost never been to give them fair trial (Adolf Eichmann-style) but to detain those suspects indefinitely without trial.
VII: U. S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is about to empower the FBI to spy on churches, mosques, and other sacred places to an extent not envisaged in the country for a long time. Places of prayer were once protected from close police scrutiny. However, mosques especially may soon be fair game for police raids in American cities, while Synagogues may probably enjoy de facto protection even if there is militant Zionism or fundamentalist Judaism being preached inside.
VIII: Attorney-General Ashcroft wants to breach attorney-client confidentiality if the client is suspected of terrorism. The Attorney General and President Bush repeatedly talk as if those suspected of terrorism were already proven terrorists. What happened to the U.S. principle that a person was innocent until proven guilty?
IX: The CNN and other major TV networks in the United States were summoned to the White House and warned against giving Usama bin Laden propaganda advantage with his videos. Whatever happened to editorial independence and freedom of the Press?
X: The Patriot Act and what Americans read in their libraries. Big Brother is watching you in the library.
But even before September 11 the American media routinely censored themselves on the State of Israel. Relatively little which was negative was to be said about the policies, actions, or even atrocities perpetrated by the State of Israel.
The United States may be the only country in the world in which criticizing the national government is much safer than criticizing a third country actually subsidized by the national government. It is much safer in the United States to criticize Uncle Sam than to criticize the government of Israel.
I know of nobody at an American university who has been denied tenure for criticizing the American government, but people have lost their jobs or their promotions in the United States for criticizing the State of Israel.
In Search of Solutions
What is the solution? Israel is the only aspect of U.S. foreign policy which is truly mission-driven, but the mission is creating anti-American monsters. Clearly this is counter productive. How could we save the positive aspects of the Israeliphilia mission and not incur the cost?
There are two balances which need to be struck. The more obvious one is greater even-handedness in balancing the rights of Palestinians with the rights of Israelis. Anything short of that is both inhumane and totally un-American in the democratic sense.
But there is another balance which needs to be struck. The two countries in the world which symbolize the return of the Diaspora to ancestry are Israel, on one side, and Liberia, on the other. Dispersed people returned home and created new nations. Indeed, long before the political Zionist movement of Theodor Hertzel was born in Europe, there was a back-to-Africa movement among dispersed Blacks in the Americas.
Long before Jews returned to the Middle East to create the new state of Israel, Black Americans had returned to Africa and created the state of Liberia. This latter movement back to Africa has sometimes been called "BLACK ZIONISM". On balance, the United States has a much more direct obligation to the survival of Liberia than it has to the survival of Israel.
The sense of mission to defend the state of Israel can become a virtue if it is combined with a concern for the just rights of the Palestinians. But this equilibrium in the Middle East needs to be combined with a new sense of mission in Africa. The place to start is Liberia, but extending outward to the rest of the continent.
Just as the United States has spent billions every year to help Israel, it is time for the United States to consider spending a billion a year on Liberia for a decade as part of a wider Marshall Plan for the African continent.
One more change is needed in the United States' orientation towards the outside world. Americans should stop preferring and eulogizing warrior presidents.
Every American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has engaged in some act of war or another. Roosevelt was inevitably embroiled in World War II; Harry Truman helped to initiate the Korean War; Dwight Eisenhower ended the Korean War but started planning for the Bay of Pigs operation on Cuba; John F. Kennedy unleashed the Bay of Pigs operation and helped to initiate the Vietnam War; Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam war; Richard Nixon bombed Cambodia; Gerald Ford sent the Marines in a disagreement with Cambodia over a U.S. cargo-ship, the Mayaguez; Jimmy Carter attempted to thwart the Iranian revolution and paid heavily for it; Ronald Reagan perpetrated acts of war in Lebanon, the Caribbean, Libya and in shooting down a civilian airline in the Persian Gulf; George Bush Senior invaded Panama and is most famous for Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf; Bill Clinton led military action against Yugoslavia over Kosovo and bombed Sudan and Afghanistan; George W. Bush has already inherited a decade of bombing Baghdad and subsidizing half a century of Israeli militarism against Palestinians. Now this younger Bush has embarked on what he once called a "crusade against terrorism." This could be a war without end. When are we likely to have a victory parade to celebrate the end of the war against terrorism? We may kill Usama bin Laden, but when will the war end?
Every American president since Franklin Roosevelt has regarded an act of war as the equivalent of a rite of passage. The Commander-in-Chief has to "act presidential". And yet the United States hardly ever calls these engagements "acts of war". Even the war in Vietnam which cost nearly sixty thousand American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives, was never officially declared by the United States. America needs to find more humane rites of passage for its leaders.
Terrorism is getting globalized, but the definition of an "act of war" is not. Such a definition is still highly selective, depending upon the power of the perpetrator or the status of the victim. For the immediate future it may also depend upon making sure that Usamaphobia does not degenerate into Islamophobia.
The blood of the innocent cries out not just for a coalition against terrorism but for a coalition in search of genuine peace.
CONCLUSION
I grew up in a Kenya engulfed in a war of liberation, which the British called "terrorist" -- the Mau Mau war of the 1950s. I have personally met people like Nelson Mandela and Yassir Arafat, men once denounced as terrorists, but who lived to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. Some of their acts of war were in the past localized and regional. But now it is not just terrorists "who can run but cannot hide." Such a situation has become the human condition itself.
Only one country can really help to change the global political climate - the United States of America. But Americans should learn to admire humane qualities more often in presidents like Jimmy Carter, and salute martial qualities less often in presidents like George W. Bush. American foreign policy should be weaned away from the pursuit of monsters - and taught to appreciate at long last the pursuit of worthy global missions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘There are simply too many people adversely affected by American policy. You cannot use force to make vast numbers of people submit, unless you are prepared to impose idenfinitely the kind of terror Stalin or Hitler imposed on society. And you cannot maintain a fortres society in a globalized world’, John Chuckman, Canada.
‘The story is finally out that we helped Saddam Hussain use chemical attack against Iran in the mid 80’s and we remember our government’s "deafening silence" to his use of deadly gas against Iraqi Kurds, even though our news media reported it extensively. We danced with the worst of the devils when it suited our purpose. After fourteen years Mr. Bush has suddenly discovered it. The condemnation at this stage reeks of self-righteous hypocrisy, unless he condemns Reagan’s and Bush the elder’s administrations for the inhuman callousness. Mr. Bush who has never been accused of intellectual heft, ignored the problem at the most crucial time after taking office, then after 9/11 threw his weight completely behind Mr. Sharon, whom he called a man of peace (One suspects Mr. Sharon may have almost died of shock). Nobody, even in Israel has ever accused him, of being a man of peace. The proponents of Israeli lobby have completely taken over and isolated the State Department,’ Mirza Akhtar Beg.
Ever since Communism's collapse left the United States in position of unchallenged power, there had been much discussion of how this power should properly be used, or how it could be abused. Articles and books have described the situation in terms of "global hegemony," and have recommended that the United States take advantage of its extraordinary position.
This ordinarily was accompanied by the disclaimer that American interests nonetheless serve the world's interest because of the high ideals of the United States. Bush put this in his own way recently when he called the United States "the single surviving model of human progress."
The administration's problem is that a war against Iraq does not comfortably fit into the model of progressive and essentially benevolent national policy. Now there is an effort to supply a remedy. A part of the neoconservative and pro-Israeli community influencing Bush administration policy argues that a war against Saddam Hussein should be seen in the context of a long-term American policy for transforming the Muslim Middle East. William Pfaff, Paris.
Israel has been rewarded with billions of dollars worth of aid and armaments, principally by the United States, which has helped it develop nuclear weapons and other so-called weapons of mass destruction. John Pilger
Prof. Ali A. Mazrui
Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies and
Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities,
Binghamton University
State University of New York at
Binghamton, New York USA
Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large,
University of Jos, Jos, Nigeria
Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large Emeritus
and Senior Scholar in Africana Studies
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
Chair, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy Washington, D.C.
Presentation in the series "The USA: As Others See Us - A Dialogue", June 24, 2002, University Theater, Yale University, as part of the Seventh International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut. [The festival lasted from June 13 to June 30, 2002]
http://bangladesh-web.com/news/sep/26/f26092002.htm#A1
by
Prof. Ali A. Mazrui, Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies
and
Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities,
Binghamton University
State University of New York at
Binghamton, New York USA
Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large,
University of Jos, Jos, Nigeria
Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large Emeritus
and Senior Scholar in Africana Studies
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
Chair, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy Washington, D.C.
Presentation in the series "The USA: As Others See Us - A Dialogue", June 24, 2002, University Theater, Yale University, as part of the Seventh International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut. [The festival lasted from June 13 to June 30, 2002]
A major historic transformation which is needed in American foreign policy is a shift from a monster- driven foreign policy to a mission-driven foreign policy. There has been a dichotomizing quality in U.S. policy-formation which has tended to divide the world between believers (on the side of the United States) and unbelievers (usually associated with either evil personified like Saddan Hussein or Fidel Castro or evil ideologised like communism or so-called Islamic fundamentalism).
It is not clear whether this dichotomizing tendency in American foreign policy goes back to the frontier culture between friends and foes, or between cowboys and Indians. But the tendency has been obstinate in American foreign policy for at least a century. George W. Bush re-articulated it afresh in his first State of the Union Address when he declared to the world: "You are either with us or against us." For George W. Bush there was no neutral ground.
Monster driven foreign policy is inspired by the pursuit of a dragon - the need for an enemy as an organizing principle. Mission-driven foreign policy seeks to improve the human condition, however defined. Since the United States emerged from its policy of isolationism - and especially since World War I - American foreign policy has been primarily monster-driven.
There was World War I, and the United States' belated involvement in it. There was the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 when the United States was at first profoundly ambivalent between retreating back to isolationism or take on the communist monster.
There was also Pearl Harbor and the Nazis - Monsters of the East and of the West in World War II. There was the Cold War from the late 1940s to almost the end of the 20th century - the "Monsterous" Warsaw Pact pitted against the "freedom-loving" North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
And now there is Usama bin Laden, Al- Qaeda and the War on terrorism. Once again the Enemy, the Dragon, the Monster outside has become the organizing principle of American Foreign Policy.
Of course some American Presidents have had mission-driven domestic policies even if they had at the same time monster-driven foreign policies. Lyndon Johnson had a superb mission of civil rights domestically - but in foreign policy he escalated the Vietnam War even when he knew it was a war the United States could not win. From his telephone tapes we now know how early Johnson realized that Vietnam was a lost cause.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was an outstanding and historic domestic mission - but Roosevelt was so obsessed with external monsters that he locked up Japanese Americans ostensibly as a security measure against the outer monsters.
The only U.S. President since World War II who was more mission-driven than monster-driven was Jimmy Carter. He was a decent man trying to do the right thing under the pressures of the most powerful office on earth. He tried to make Human Rights a real foreign policy platform. However, he was too decent a man to be re-elected President of the United States.
Israeliphilia and Americophobia
It is possible to argue that the only genuine mission of the United States' foreign policy is the American commitment to the State of Israel since the second half of the twentieth century. That commitment has often gone against the national interest of the United States. For example, it often makes the politics of oil supplies more militarized than they need be.
American commitment to Israel is the greatest single source of anti-Americanism in the Arab world and in much of the Muslim world. About a billion Muslims in the world - who might otherwise be mesmerized by the United States - are either ambivalent or passionately anti-American.
Uncritical Israeliphilia in the United States creates uncompromising Americophobia in much of the rest of the world. Excessive American tolerance of Israeli international arrogance earns the United States considerable hostility to itself.
The government of Israel as an occupying power has become the most unpopular regime in the world since the days of apartheid in South Africa. This is evident not just in newspapers in developing countries, but also in the media in Western Europe.
The military cost of uncritical defense of Israel is not just what the American taxpayer donates to the Israeli budget every year. From now on the military cost of uncritical support of Israel will continue to be our vulnerability to international terrorism - and the billions of dollars we are going to pay to protect ourselves from the consequences of being hated so passionately.
The national interest of the United States and the national interest of the State of Israel are diverging more and more. Israeli sadism against others is generating new "monsters" against the United States.
This is quite apart from the impact of uncritical Israeliphilia on American democracy. If the atrocities of September 11 are partly the consequence of despair and rage generated by the Arab-Israeli conflict, our civil liberties are now being curtailed domestically as a consequence of September 11.
I: Hundreds of people under American jurisdiction are in prison without trial or access to attorneys
II: Ethnic and religious profiling is practiced with impunity, especially at the expense of Arab Americans and American Muslims
III: Out of the hundreds in detention, less than a dozen show any evidence of knowing any particular terrorist suspect or being associated with any movement or charity accused of terrorism.
IV: Out of the millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, and those whose visas have expired, the people chosen for detention without trial are disproportionately those with Muslim names or who come from the Middle East.
V: The United States is actually planning to have military tribunals and has considered secret trials for those suspected of terrorism. Even the leaders of Nazi Germany were given a public trial at Nuremberg after World War II with access to counsel and proper representation. Some of those tried at Nuremberg had been responsible for the death of millions of people.
VI: Israel continues to look for old Nazi militants so that they can be tried today in a court of law in Israel. Yet Israel feels free to kill Palestinian militants instead of capturing them for trial. Israel tried Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and protected him at the trial with a bulletproof glass cage so that he would not be assassinated. Yet both the USA and Israel in 2001 openly talked about killing terrorist suspects instead of capturing them ("targeted killings") . And even when Israel has illegally captured Palestinian or Lebanese suspects from across its own borders, the purpose has almost never been to give them fair trial (Adolf Eichmann-style) but to detain those suspects indefinitely without trial.
VII: U. S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is about to empower the FBI to spy on churches, mosques, and other sacred places to an extent not envisaged in the country for a long time. Places of prayer were once protected from close police scrutiny. However, mosques especially may soon be fair game for police raids in American cities, while Synagogues may probably enjoy de facto protection even if there is militant Zionism or fundamentalist Judaism being preached inside.
VIII: Attorney-General Ashcroft wants to breach attorney-client confidentiality if the client is suspected of terrorism. The Attorney General and President Bush repeatedly talk as if those suspected of terrorism were already proven terrorists. What happened to the U.S. principle that a person was innocent until proven guilty?
IX: The CNN and other major TV networks in the United States were summoned to the White House and warned against giving Usama bin Laden propaganda advantage with his videos. Whatever happened to editorial independence and freedom of the Press?
X: The Patriot Act and what Americans read in their libraries. Big Brother is watching you in the library.
But even before September 11 the American media routinely censored themselves on the State of Israel. Relatively little which was negative was to be said about the policies, actions, or even atrocities perpetrated by the State of Israel.
The United States may be the only country in the world in which criticizing the national government is much safer than criticizing a third country actually subsidized by the national government. It is much safer in the United States to criticize Uncle Sam than to criticize the government of Israel.
I know of nobody at an American university who has been denied tenure for criticizing the American government, but people have lost their jobs or their promotions in the United States for criticizing the State of Israel.
In Search of Solutions
What is the solution? Israel is the only aspect of U.S. foreign policy which is truly mission-driven, but the mission is creating anti-American monsters. Clearly this is counter productive. How could we save the positive aspects of the Israeliphilia mission and not incur the cost?
There are two balances which need to be struck. The more obvious one is greater even-handedness in balancing the rights of Palestinians with the rights of Israelis. Anything short of that is both inhumane and totally un-American in the democratic sense.
But there is another balance which needs to be struck. The two countries in the world which symbolize the return of the Diaspora to ancestry are Israel, on one side, and Liberia, on the other. Dispersed people returned home and created new nations. Indeed, long before the political Zionist movement of Theodor Hertzel was born in Europe, there was a back-to-Africa movement among dispersed Blacks in the Americas.
Long before Jews returned to the Middle East to create the new state of Israel, Black Americans had returned to Africa and created the state of Liberia. This latter movement back to Africa has sometimes been called "BLACK ZIONISM". On balance, the United States has a much more direct obligation to the survival of Liberia than it has to the survival of Israel.
The sense of mission to defend the state of Israel can become a virtue if it is combined with a concern for the just rights of the Palestinians. But this equilibrium in the Middle East needs to be combined with a new sense of mission in Africa. The place to start is Liberia, but extending outward to the rest of the continent.
Just as the United States has spent billions every year to help Israel, it is time for the United States to consider spending a billion a year on Liberia for a decade as part of a wider Marshall Plan for the African continent.
One more change is needed in the United States' orientation towards the outside world. Americans should stop preferring and eulogizing warrior presidents.
Every American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has engaged in some act of war or another. Roosevelt was inevitably embroiled in World War II; Harry Truman helped to initiate the Korean War; Dwight Eisenhower ended the Korean War but started planning for the Bay of Pigs operation on Cuba; John F. Kennedy unleashed the Bay of Pigs operation and helped to initiate the Vietnam War; Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam war; Richard Nixon bombed Cambodia; Gerald Ford sent the Marines in a disagreement with Cambodia over a U.S. cargo-ship, the Mayaguez; Jimmy Carter attempted to thwart the Iranian revolution and paid heavily for it; Ronald Reagan perpetrated acts of war in Lebanon, the Caribbean, Libya and in shooting down a civilian airline in the Persian Gulf; George Bush Senior invaded Panama and is most famous for Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf; Bill Clinton led military action against Yugoslavia over Kosovo and bombed Sudan and Afghanistan; George W. Bush has already inherited a decade of bombing Baghdad and subsidizing half a century of Israeli militarism against Palestinians. Now this younger Bush has embarked on what he once called a "crusade against terrorism." This could be a war without end. When are we likely to have a victory parade to celebrate the end of the war against terrorism? We may kill Usama bin Laden, but when will the war end?
Every American president since Franklin Roosevelt has regarded an act of war as the equivalent of a rite of passage. The Commander-in-Chief has to "act presidential". And yet the United States hardly ever calls these engagements "acts of war". Even the war in Vietnam which cost nearly sixty thousand American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives, was never officially declared by the United States. America needs to find more humane rites of passage for its leaders.
Terrorism is getting globalized, but the definition of an "act of war" is not. Such a definition is still highly selective, depending upon the power of the perpetrator or the status of the victim. For the immediate future it may also depend upon making sure that Usamaphobia does not degenerate into Islamophobia.
The blood of the innocent cries out not just for a coalition against terrorism but for a coalition in search of genuine peace.
CONCLUSION
I grew up in a Kenya engulfed in a war of liberation, which the British called "terrorist" -- the Mau Mau war of the 1950s. I have personally met people like Nelson Mandela and Yassir Arafat, men once denounced as terrorists, but who lived to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. Some of their acts of war were in the past localized and regional. But now it is not just terrorists "who can run but cannot hide." Such a situation has become the human condition itself.
Only one country can really help to change the global political climate - the United States of America. But Americans should learn to admire humane qualities more often in presidents like Jimmy Carter, and salute martial qualities less often in presidents like George W. Bush. American foreign policy should be weaned away from the pursuit of monsters - and taught to appreciate at long last the pursuit of worthy global missions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘There are simply too many people adversely affected by American policy. You cannot use force to make vast numbers of people submit, unless you are prepared to impose idenfinitely the kind of terror Stalin or Hitler imposed on society. And you cannot maintain a fortres society in a globalized world’, John Chuckman, Canada.
‘The story is finally out that we helped Saddam Hussain use chemical attack against Iran in the mid 80’s and we remember our government’s "deafening silence" to his use of deadly gas against Iraqi Kurds, even though our news media reported it extensively. We danced with the worst of the devils when it suited our purpose. After fourteen years Mr. Bush has suddenly discovered it. The condemnation at this stage reeks of self-righteous hypocrisy, unless he condemns Reagan’s and Bush the elder’s administrations for the inhuman callousness. Mr. Bush who has never been accused of intellectual heft, ignored the problem at the most crucial time after taking office, then after 9/11 threw his weight completely behind Mr. Sharon, whom he called a man of peace (One suspects Mr. Sharon may have almost died of shock). Nobody, even in Israel has ever accused him, of being a man of peace. The proponents of Israeli lobby have completely taken over and isolated the State Department,’ Mirza Akhtar Beg.
Ever since Communism's collapse left the United States in position of unchallenged power, there had been much discussion of how this power should properly be used, or how it could be abused. Articles and books have described the situation in terms of "global hegemony," and have recommended that the United States take advantage of its extraordinary position.
This ordinarily was accompanied by the disclaimer that American interests nonetheless serve the world's interest because of the high ideals of the United States. Bush put this in his own way recently when he called the United States "the single surviving model of human progress."
The administration's problem is that a war against Iraq does not comfortably fit into the model of progressive and essentially benevolent national policy. Now there is an effort to supply a remedy. A part of the neoconservative and pro-Israeli community influencing Bush administration policy argues that a war against Saddam Hussein should be seen in the context of a long-term American policy for transforming the Muslim Middle East. William Pfaff, Paris.
Israel has been rewarded with billions of dollars worth of aid and armaments, principally by the United States, which has helped it develop nuclear weapons and other so-called weapons of mass destruction. John Pilger
Prof. Ali A. Mazrui
Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies and
Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities,
Binghamton University
State University of New York at
Binghamton, New York USA
Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large,
University of Jos, Jos, Nigeria
Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large Emeritus
and Senior Scholar in Africana Studies
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
Chair, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy Washington, D.C.
Presentation in the series "The USA: As Others See Us - A Dialogue", June 24, 2002, University Theater, Yale University, as part of the Seventh International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut. [The festival lasted from June 13 to June 30, 2002]
http://bangladesh-web.com/news/sep/26/f26092002.htm#A1
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