Teror Tarihi
...ith thousands of terrorist operations, with kidnappings, hijackings and bomb explosions and with thousands dead civilians. The Black September, the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades were as famous as al-Qaeda is today. For the Europeans, September 11 does not imply a major change. And more important, a majority of the Europeans (55%) believe that US policy in the Middle East contributed to and indirectly is responsible for the September 11 attack. US policy with billion dollar support to Israel and, in the 1980s, to Osama bin Laden and his mujahideen have created a strong terrorist force nurtured by US military presence in Saudi Arabia and by the US war in Iraq. Several Muslim countries view the USA as more dangerous to peace and stability than al-Qaeda. In Jordan 71% hold this view and 83% have an unfavourable view of the USA. These anti-US feelings are representative for several other Muslim countries. In Pakistan, in October 2001, 82% considered Osama bin Laden a Mujahid [fighter] not a terrorist and 83% were siding with the Taliban against the USA. In Indonesia 83% are unfavourable to the USA and 66% consider the USA as more dangerous to world peace than al-Qaeda. In a European Commission poll made in October 2003, a majority of the Europeans viewed Israel as the biggest threat to world peace (59%) followed by the United States and countries like Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq. A majority of the Europeans seem to believe that the US policy rather provokes terrorist reactions, while the Americans focus on the destruction of terrorist training camps and the destruction of regimes that harbour terrorist groups. Europeans and Americans are, to quote Kagan, living on different planets. The US ‘9.11’ appears as a major event that has transformed the American mind and created a US-European mental split. And there is little doubt that the ‘neo-conservative’ rise to power was facilitated by this incident. September 11 became the instrument used by the ‘neo-conservatives’ to implement their strategy for a Pax Americana and for global counter-terrorism. 3. The Road to Pax Americana After September 11, Paul Wolfowitz and his people got the upper hand, but his policy for a Pax Americana cannot be described as a result of September 11. Already in May 1990 did Paul Wolfowitz present some of these ideas to the Defense Secretary Richard Cheney. In a draft Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) document from early 1992, many of today’s strategic ideas were already present. It was drafted for Cheney under the supervision of Wolfowitz. Two prominent members of the Wolfowitz team that crafted the original document, Lewis Libby and Eric Edelman, received positions in 2001 in the staff of Vice-President Richard Cheney: as chief of staff and as top foreign policy adviser. The 1992 draft DPG document argues firstly that US defence strategy should ‘prevent the re-emergence of a new rival’ and ‘prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power’. The control of the Persian Gulf is vital to guarantee the oil flow to China, Europe and Japan, and US control of these resources will prevent the latter from developing into rival powers to the USA. Secondly, the USA should use pre-emptive [or preventive] military strikes to head off a nuclear, chemical or biological attack, or to punish an aggressor ‘including strikes against weapons manufacturing facilities’. Possible use of weapons of mass destruction seemed to presuppose US strikes to neutralize such a threat. This strategy focused on Iraq, and on possible terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction. Thirdly, the USA had to maintain a substantial ‘nuclear arsenal while discouraging the development of nuclear programs in other countries [like Iraq]. It depicted a “US led system of collective security” that implicitly precluded the need for rearmament of any kind of countries like Germany and Japan. And it called for the “early introduction” of a global missile defense system’. The USA should remain the world’s dominant military power. Fourthly, the USA should act unilaterally ‘when collective action cannot be orchestrated’ and expect future alliances to be US run as ‘ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted’ to create a ‘sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the US’. In this manner the USA would defend ‘access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, [and] threats to US citizens from terrorism’. This 1992 document focused on terrorism, Iraq and the control of the Persian Gulf, and Wolfowitz et al. pushed for a war with Iraq through the 1990s and, from early 2001, a war with Afghanistan was recommended. To Wolfowitz, Iraq was unfinished business, and immediately after the attack on September 11, ‘Wolfowitz and Libby began calling for unilateral military action against Iraq, on the shaky premise that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network could not have pulled off the assaults without Saddam Hussein’s assistance’. The US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and US unilateralism, military build-up and focus on ‘pre-emptive’ or rather preventive strikes were not primarily a product of 9.11. 9.11 was the catastrophic and traumatic event that facilitated the introduction of an already declared policy. And there was certainly a political awareness that a catastrophic event would be able to justify a military build-up necessary to guarantee a US hegemony. In a major document from 2000, Rebuilding of America’s Defenses, Wolfowitz et al. argues that radically increased defence investments are necessary to preserve a US unipolar world order, a ‘Pax Americana’, that will deter the rise of rival great powers, while the present reduced spending and slow technological change are ‘likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’. This document argues that US defences still profits from the ‘investments of the Reagan years’ and that America [under Clinton] has taken a ‘procurement holiday’. Wolfowitz et al indicated that a catastrophic event similar to Pearl Harbor would be necessary to change this mentality and to get support for increased defence spending and military transformation. In the ‘Space Commission Report’ from January 2001, Rumsfeld et al described a new Pearl Harbor as ‘the only event able to galvanise the nation and cause the US Government to act’. In July 2001, Wolfowitz made a similar comparison and Robert Kagan and William Kristol wrote an article in The Weekly Standard strongly supporting him. Two months later, on September 11, hours after the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Robert Kagan wrote in Washington Post: One can only hope that America can respond to today’s monstrous attack on American soil – an attack far more awful than Pearl Harbor – with the same moral clarity and courage as our grandfathers did … by doing the only thing we now can do: go to war…. We are at war now. We have suffered the first, devastating strike…. It will become apparent that those [terrorist] organisations could not have operated without the assistance of some governments, governments with long record of hostility to the United States and equally long record of support for terrorism. We should now immediately begin building up our conventional military forces to prepare for what will inevitably and rapidly escalate into confrontation. Also on September 11, Henry Kissinger made the same reference to Pearl Harbor and the necessary consequences of the attack as mentioned by Kagan. A few hours after the attack on the World Trade Center the strategy for the War on Terror was already present: unilateral preventive strikes against any nation that may harbour terrorists (read Afghanistan), and against nations with a long record of hostility to the USA (read Iraq) combined with demands for radically build-up of the conventional military forces to prepare for a major confrontation. ‘The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today’, President Bush dictated for his diary. Already from the very first hours, a US military response, supported by a global ‘coalition of the willing’ was considered necessary. Rumsfeld said: ‘wars can benefit from coalitions of the willing, to be sure, but they should not be fought by committee [by NATO]. The mission must determine the coalition, the coalition must not determine the mission’. The ‘neo-conservatives’ warned the President from falling into ‘the UN-trap’ or ‘the coalition trap’. They preferred a US led war, a ‘coalition of the willing’ that accepts US premises. The European ambition to put restraint on the use of force according to international law had been sidestepped. The Europeans were forced to accept a militarily defined world order, which certainly means a US unipolar order. 4. European vs. US World Order In the post-Cold War Europe, it was no longer the political-military divide that defined the European order. After the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9.11 1989, European states focused on economic development, political and economic integration and access to the EU decision-making bodies. Military force was used to keep order in a chaotic periphery – in the Balkans – making Europe into a ‘metaphoric Empire’ to quote Ole Wæver. Europe was a ‘cosmos’ that was confronted by a ‘chaotic’ periphery. The Central and East European states tried to enter this ‘cosmos’ and sought for centrality even at the expense of territory. A Prague weekly illustrated this tendency in one sentence: ‘Alone to Europe or together to the Balkans’. In other words, the Czechs chose to take the Slovak quest for independence seriously and ‘cut off’ its more nationalist and relatively backward Slovakia. Hungary as well as Germany ignored demands for regaining their backward provinces in the east, while Slovenia and Croatia preferred to ‘cut off’ its more militarized and backward Serbia-Montenegro to enter ‘Europe’, to present themselves as more Western, in an attempt to be accepted by the EU and NATO. Brussels and Washington were centres, two poles in a multipolar world order governed by international law. Military force did no longer seem to be the defining element in the civilized ‘cosmos’. 9.11. 2001 did not necessarily have to threaten this multipolarity, and the Europeans mobilized NATO and Article 5 in support of the USA. The Bush Administration, however, ignored the European offer and used this event to re-organize the world order. The USA launched a preventive attack against a ‘rogue state’ and a state harbouring terrorists, and ongoing terrorist attacks forced various states to adapt to US counter-terrorism operations penetrating their own states. The CIA was given access to one country after the other, because the local security services have not the relevant capacity. The USA enters the scene to weed out regimes harbouring terrorists and to protect its allies against an evasive terrorist enemy that threatens the civilian order. One state after the other is made into a US ‘protectorate’. This means that a new pattern is about to emerge. US superior military strength and intelligence hegemony can only be transformed into power and real global strength if there are ongoing conflicts – wars and terrorist attacks – that threaten the multipolar power structure of the economic-political world order. A unipolar Pax Americana, expressed already in the draft DPG 1992 and later in the Wolfowitz report from 2000, presupposes ongoing military conflicts or terrorist attacks that are able to define the global system in primarily military-political terms. While the economic-political power structure with the USA, the EU, Japan and China has no single leader, the military-political structure has, and by presenting a world in terms of terrorism and military threat, the USA has been able to profit from its military-intelligence hegemony and transform the global system into a unipolar world order. The ‘neo-conservative’ ambition to establish a Pax Americana has certainly been facilitated by the appearance of a global terrorist threat, and, logically speaking, the return to the Cold War ‘Strategy of Tension’ is most appropriate to reach this goal. The ‘neo-conservative’ presentation of September 11 as a ‘new Pearl Harbor’, an ‘emergency’ that limits the range of the democratic discourse and justifies US interventions wherever problems might arise, is parallel to the US Cold War ‘fine-tuning of democracy’ in order to discipline European politics. In October 2001, Rumsfeldt said that the World Trade Center attack and ‘the missile’ that damaged Pentagon made America ready to take ‘the battle to the terrorists wherever they are’. The US ‘security state’ (or security side of the ‘dual state’, to quote Hans Morgenthau) seemingly used innovative action to ‘fine-tune’ the ‘democratic state’ to prepare for a new enemy. This US strategy is certainly creative, but the ‘neo-conservative’ focus on military strength and use of force rather than on permanent institutions able to guarantee legitimacy, like NATO and the UN, have provoked tension to several European states as well as to major power elites in the USA. In his latest book Zbigniew Brzezinski argues that US has to choose between ‘global domination’ and global leadership’. Leadership cannot be reduced to military initiatives, and the ‘neo-conservative’ policy has lost credibility as a consequence of US less successful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Brzezinski’s former military adviser, General William Odom, speaks about the ‘America’s Inadvertent Empire’ with the US political-military leadership playing the role of ‘a substitute for [a] supranational political-military authority’. But, according to Odom, the ‘neo-conservative’ ignorance for real leadership and legitimacy rather weakens the ‘American Empire’. The present US debate isn’t about whether to accept a Pax Americana or not but about whether common institutions like NATO are vital to legitimize the new world order. To Odom, the ‘neo-conservative’ policy has been counter-productive. 5. The Deep Structure of a US vs. European World Order What we have described as a result of September 11 and the ‘neo-conservative power grab’ may have deeper roots. The collapse of the Soviet Union dissolved the bipolar structure, and leading Americans are not only describing the USA as the ‘only superpower’ with responsibilities around the globe and with interests around the globe, but also as a global political-military authority for a unipolar world, a Pax Americana. The Revolution in Military Affairs has made this percept...