Copyright © 2002 The International
Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
In the current issue of the same magazine, two former officials of the Clinton administration, Ronald Asmus and Kenneth Pollack, disagree, insisting that continuing European-American cooperation is essential to deal with the "new scourges" of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and rogue and failed states. A distinction was once made in American literary criticism between Palefaces (Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and the other New Englanders) and Redskins, the literary frontiersmen following from Mark Twain. The same distinction can be made in the foreign policy debate. Policy Palefaces are looking for alternatives to war in the Middle East. (They actually would probably have Mark Twain on their side, as he was a great enemy of whatever passed as the conventional wisdom). But the Redskins are in charge, planning to reinstall and extend that New World Order that the first President George Bush proclaimed but then "put back on the shelf," his aides said, as too complicated and too dangerous. No Redskin he. But his son, albeit another Skull and Bones man from Yale, has dug up the hatchet, influenced by a neoconservative set of policy theorists. (These might be called Redskin wannabes, since their enthusiasm for war has come only since the Vietnam War, which they all managed to avoid.) However, supporters of the "new" New World Order include Clintonian liberals, since what this policy comes down to is an armed version of the Wilsonian ideas with which the United States attempted, and disastrously failed, to reorder international society in 1919. Foreign critics are inclined to see Bush administration policy as imperialist. It is widely assumed in Western Europe (and unanimously in the Arab world) that George W. Bush wants to invade Iraq in order to take control of Iraq's high-quality and easily extracted oil. This would end Saudi Arabia's domination of the international oil market. For this administration, control of Iraq's oil would seem merely the by-product of a much vaster regional transformation, recently set out in several versions in Washington, its latest formulation that of Asmus and Pollack. They argue that the "Greater Middle East," which for them extends from North Africa to Afghanistan and Pakistan, must be rescued from its indigenous crisis of development and its extremism. America and Europe together, they say, can do it. It is not really a military problem, even though Israel's security is a primordial Bush administration concern. "[We] need to change the dynamics" responsible for the region's problems, they say, by providing it with "a new form of democracy ... a new economic system ... helping Middle Eastern societies come to grips with modernity and create new civil societies that will allow them to compete in and integrate into the modern world without losing their sense of cultural uniqueness." They modestly add that "this is a tall order" but express confidence that it can be done, beginning in Afghanistan. Then must come Arab-Israeli settlement, on which they have nothing more to suggest than "a common approach" by Europeans and Americans - which actually would be most unwelcome in Israel. Needed next is NATO cooperation to remove Saddam Hussein. (NATO involvement is an unwelcome idea in Washington, which is having enough trouble getting agreement among Americans.) Then will come European and American "help" for "the process of regime change" elsewhere in the region. To critics who suggest that such a program to remake Islamic Middle Eastern and Central Asian society partakes of utopian fantasy, the authors reply that it was no less utopian in 1949 to suggest that all of Europe could be reconstructed and freed from Communist control. They are mistaken and should consult George Kennan's April 1951 Foreign Affairs article called "America and the Russian Future," written four years after his article setting out the policy of containment. Kennan calmly and confidently proposed in 1951 exactly how Europe's, and Russia's, liberation could be accomplished, as it was. There was nothing utopian about planning Western Europe's economic reconstruction. In 1940, Europe had been an economically and technologically more advanced society than the United States. All the decisive wartime technical innovations, including radar, rockets, jet aircraft and the atomic bomb, were originated by Europeans. In 1949, Europe only needed money. America had plenty of it. It is irresponsible to draw an analogy between Europe's reconstruction and the cultural and religious crisis today afflicting the region from Afghanistan to Algeria. Cultural and religious crises are solved by the people involved - if they are solved at all. International Herald Tribune Los Angeles Times Syndicate International Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune |