Sovereignty under threat

The only thing that will keep the single superpower in check is the emergence of another bipolar world or a coalition of powers that will not be hostile to but certainly will not endorse all that the U.S. may want to do.

PRESIDENT George W. Bush in his cowboy hat and Prime Minister Tony Blair at his persuasive best told the world repeatedly that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - presumably nuclear, chemical and biological - which he could deploy within 45 minutes. Therefore, for the good of mankind, and especially the Iraqi people, they sent in bombers and missiles, troops and tanks and heavy artillery and tore the country apart. Thousands of Iraqis, who were ordinary traders, shop owners, professionals doing their job, were killed or maimed; so were many women and children.

Both leaders `regretted' the loss of life, for which the Americans have that admirable phrase `collateral damage', but they looked into the cameras as if they were seeing a much-sought-after goal, a free Iraq - as Charlton Heston looked into the camera as Moses in The Ten Commandments.

Now, over 78 days after the destruction of that country, the U.S. forces are still not able to find any WMD. They found two trailers that were declared to be laboratories where biological WMD were being prepared. A white paper was published on it and Bush proclaimed triumphantly that two trailers had been found; he even mentioned them to Russian President Vladimir Putin as proof that Iraq did indeed have WMD.

Alas, even these have now been rejected as WMD; some U.S. experts have refused to believe that they could produce deadly germs. In a story in The New York Times Judith Miller and William J. Broad , quoted one of these experts, who quite understandably did not want to be identified, as saying, "Everyone has wanted to find the `smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion." And he added, "I am very upset with the process."

These experts point out that elements essential for the production of deadly germs just did not exist in these trailers, among them steam sterilising gear. And a former senior official of the U.S' germ warfare programme, which was abandoned in 1969, William C. Patrick III, told these correspondents that the absence of steam sterilisation "was a huge minus. I don't see how you can clean those tanks chemically."

Of course, the official version, that the trailers were meant to produce deadly germs is being stoutly defended; but there is, as Miller and Broad point out, clearly a bitter debate within the intelligence community on this matter. And it is, remember, all about two trailers; not about huge laboratories, two trailers possibly the size of the kind we see carrying containers from the docks, pulled by a truck.

A day earlier another columnist with The New York Times , Nicholas Kristof, quoted one of his contacts in the Defence Intelligence Agency as saying, "As an employee of the Defence Intelligence Agency I know how this administration lied to the public to get support for its attack on Iraq."

Kristof also quotes Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - "The President is a very powerful guy." "When you sense what he wants, it is very difficult not to go out and find it."

So, slowly, the nature of the charade is being uncovered. Sovereignty was never something these protectors of democracy and freedom took too seriously; one has only to examine what they did in Kosovo, where the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) attacked a country in spite of having no United Nations (U.N.) mandate of any kind. They clearly placed a greater premium on other issues - such as atrocities on minorities, which are terrible enough, but not always issues that provoke the same reactions. After all, Saddam Hussein was what he was even earlier, when he was an ally of the U.S.; and far worse atrocities were committed in some South American dictatorships, which never brought their sovereignty into any sort of danger.

One has therefore to realise that these great defenders of values such as freedom, democracy, equality and all the rest consider only their own sovereignty - and those of the West - as inviolate, as Martin Jacques, visiting fellow at the Asian Research Centre of the London School of Economics, has pointed out.

Elsewhere, sovereignty is something that can be swept aside at will. Today it is Iraq; tomorrow it may well be one of those named as the `axis of evil', and the day after it may be some other country. "That is how imperial powers behave when they try to bend the world to their own will and interest," Jacques said (The Guardian, May 26, 2003).

But he hastens to clarify that he is no blind defender of sovereignty, pointing out that if ever there was a case for intervention it was in Rwanda where millions were slaughtered. He is not, he argues, condoning the behaviour of Saddam, or Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, or North Korean President Kim Jong-Il or anyone else. What he points out is that "Western intervention that violates sovereignty is the wrong way to solve these problems". For a very simple reason. Intervention, as in Iraq, "is never simply or mainly an altruistic enterprise. It is about might and interest".

This is a logical outcome of the world becoming unipolar, and of the single superpower realising that there is literally nothing it cannot do, without any reason other than its own self-interest. The circumspection that it had to have when the Soviet Union was a superpower too has now vanished. We may now expect more Iraqs in the years to come.

Clearly, the only thing that will keep the single superpower in check is the emergence of another bipolar world; of a coalition of powers that will not be hostile to but certainly will not endorse all that the U.S. may want to do. In that context, the kind of coalition (of Russia, China and India) mooted a few years ago by Russia - and greeted with derision in many quarters - may not be quite as funny as some seem to think it is.

Certainly it will not come about in the next few years, or even in the next decade; but if it is something towards which the three countries work, and are perceived by others as working towards, then in the fullness of time it might just happen that it serves as a check on the imperial attitudes the U.S. is now adopting.

Today, all three countries are economically dependent on the U.S.; but that dependence can be gradually reduced if the three work out ways of doing so. It may mean hardships, for it is more than likely that the U.S. will crack the whip, and use its economic power to try to break any idea of a coalition. But there have been worse times that India, at least, has withstood; and the U.S., too, will hopefully realise that it cannot go very far along that line. Its relations with some major European countries are cool, and it will set about ensuring that they do not drift further away.

At any rate, that is about the only way open to think of a time in the future when the ways of the superpower can be kept under some check. Until then all one can hope for is that the saner elements in the U.S. - which exist in pretty large numbers - will take their own steps to bring the Rumsfelds and the Cheneys of their country to heel.