FLASH 28 (3/18/02): A US Attack on Iraq Could Create a New Anti-US Coalition (Updated 8/7/04)
Some people last autumn compared 9/11/01 with August 3, 1914. That comparison was overdrawn. But August 2002 and August 1914 may not be.
The autumn of 2002, according to an important article in the
London Observer, is when the hawks in Washington and London are planning war in Iraq. In this month of March, Cheney is touring the Middle East, hoping to drum up acceptance for an action which is clearly unpopular with Arab rulers uncertain of their domestic support. He is not bothering to visit Russia, Iraq's major backer (and creditor, still hoping that Saddam will repay some of the
$8 billion he owes).
Instead the US has inserted troops into Georgia, a nation lying between Russia and Iraq.
America's hawkish moves on Iraq have drawn harsh criticism from two respected financial journals. The Financial Times (London) warned on March 16, 2002 that
"President Bush's apparent determination to use force against Iraq risks triggering a big oil price rise that could stymie global economic recovery....It is likely that if the US attacked Iraq, the price of oil would soar. Any increased supply from other countries would take time to come on stream and speculation is bound to send oil higher in the short term at least. There will be fears, too, of more general disruption to supplies of oil from the Gulf.
"Even a fairly short-lived spike could have a serious economic impact. Some economists argue that the Fed might have been able to deliver the soft landing it sought for the US economy in 1989-90, had the crisis in the Gulf not intervened, sending oil over Dollars 40 a barrel. Mr Bush's ambition to overthrow Mr Saddam looks like determination to complete his father's unfinished business. His fear must be that he might reproduce the recession that led to his father's ejection from office."
The Australian Financial Review (3/16/02) published a much blunter criticism:
"The house is on fire in the Middle East, but the Bush Administration is preoccupied not with dousing it but with lighting another fire. All this has gone far beyond a response to terrorism.... The blueprint for Bush was written six years ago by a pair of influential US neo-conservatives. William Kristol and Robert Kagan posed the question of what the US role in the world should be, then answered their own question: "Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the 'evil empire', the US enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of US foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance."
"A 1996 Kristol and Kagan article in the journal Foreign Affairs noted that China's Jiang Zemin and Russia's Boris Yeltsin had issued a joint condemnation of US "hegemonism" in the post-Cold War world. The two Americans rejoiced in this reprimand: `They meant this as a complaint about the US. It should be taken as a compliment and a guide to action.'
"The Bush Administration is taking precisely this course. Neo-conservatives not only help guide the Bush policy, many of them staff the Administration, led by the super-hawkish Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defence....It does not occur to a neo-conservative that another country might have a legitimate basis for challenging US hegemony."
The AFR accused Bush of "doing his best" to achieve two goals. "One is maintaining the sense of threat against the US public" which has kept his popularity high. Another is using 9/11 "to embrace the pre-September 11 ambitions of the Republican party," such as getting "a rationale for building missile defence."
The AFR's passing reference to the Russian-Chinese response to "hegemonism" recalls their earlier warnings to the US from
Russia, China, and Iran this year against attacking Iraq.
The concurrent warnings from these three countries also recall
an earlier warning from Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy, Kemp being the Director of Regional Strategic Programs, Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom:
"A Sino-Russian alliance embracing Iran is the sort of nightmare few in the United States wish to think about but there is considerable speculation about this possibility in Russian writings, espcially if NATO expansion continues east to the Russian border" (Geoffrey Kemp and Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East [1997], xii).
Two years after that warning, China and Russia, together with
Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan "pledged to create a `multi-polar world' -- a Russian-inspired formula that basically meant opposition to U.S. hegemony" (Rashid, Jihad, 202-03). This resolution was adopted by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the so-called "Shanghai Five" which Pakistan and Iran have also expressed an interest in joining.
Jane's Intelligence Digest predicted in July 2001 that the SCO could expand to include "more than half the population of Eurasia, from the Baltic to the Pacific." It warned that "The losers will be the United States and Turkey, whose tepid regional policies have convinced the Central Asian leadership that their immediate security concerns are better met by Moscow and Beijing."
One can see in retrospect that the US response to 9/11, which was anything but tepid, has significantly increased US influence in Central Asia. One can even argue that it has enhanced opportunities for the peaceful economic development of Central Asia. An invasion of Iraq, however, would imperil all that.
Update, August 7, 2004: My Flash at one point ended with an appendix, "CIA Officer Says It Was Iranian Gas that Killed Kurds" [at Halabja].
I am now persuaded that this claim was based on false information. See the attribution of the Halabja atrocity to Iraq at
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Halabja_poison_gas_attack.