– Dipankar Bhattacharya
After September 11, the world has changed beyond recognition. That’s what the American rulers and their propagandists and analysts are claiming ever since the tragedy of terror struck New York and Washington on that fateful September morning. September 11 or 9/11, as it is written in the American style, will go down in history as the day America discovered terrorism. And when America discovers something, even if it is an old secret the rest of the world has long been living with, the world has to acknowledge it with unmitigated awe. After all, that’s the prerogative of being the world’s sole superpower. And when it comes to the discovery of terror, the world must be made to feel terrified to remember America’s tryst with terror. And hence the first war of the new century.
Readers of Liberation will be able to remember kind of a parallel, which happened in India seventeen years ago. On October 31, 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by her own security guards. For the next few days the entire country had been plunged into a barbaric pogrom which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent Sikhs. Rajiv Gandhi who would go on to fall prey to a different variety of terrorism seven years later had then remarked matter-of-factly, “when a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake.” The earth-penetrating American bunker-busters in Afghanistan are just doing that. Making the earth shake.
However much the world may have changed since September 11, one thing remains constant: Washington’s pursuit of absolute hegemony. America’s discovery of terrorism thus ultimately amounts to the discovery of a new framework for seeking and securing Washington’s hegemony over the globe. In just one arrogant sentence, Bush has spelled his new doctrine of dominance. It is now America’s responsibility to save civilisation and create a ‘terror-free’ world, and any country that does not side with the US in this campaign will be treated as being in the enemy camp, there is simply no neutral ground left.
The civilisation versus terrorism argument is of course perilously close to the notorious clash of civilisations paradigm ‘predicted’ by the American foreign policy expert Samuel P Huntington. All that you have to do is to equate civilisation with the West, and identify terrorism with Islam, and the battle quickly transforms into one between the West versus Islam, if not the West versus the rest. From the main protagonists of the war – Bush repeatedly invokes God bless America and uses the historically loaded expression ‘crusade’ while Osama reciprocates it with his message to all Muslims to join this jihad – to the Generals of the propaganda war and the terrorists and racist thugs on the streets, the dangerous discourse can be heard being repeated in every corner.
The Return of Huntington?
From Seattle to Genoa, as anti-globalisation protests started taking the world by storm, Fukuyama and Huntington had almost been blown away. Now Huntington’s stocks seem to be rising again.
The man who gave this discourse of ‘civilisational determinism’ to the world of course says he was only interpreting the nature of post-Cold War international politics and highlighting the centrality of culture in contemporary world politics. In fact, he points out that the title of his original 1993 article, which was subsequently elaborated into a book in 1996, had a question mark tagged to it which the world never noticed. In any case, he says he never advocated, but only predicted, that geo-cultural friction, the clash of civilisations, would be the main source of global political conflict in the post-Cold war era.
Mark the difference between a Marx and a Huntington, between Marxist integrity and bourgeois deception. When Marx says the history of human society is a history of class struggle, he makes it abundantly clear that he is in fact an advocate of class struggle and he advocates it through to the end to the vision of a classless society. But when Huntington talks about the fault lines between civilisations becoming the battle lines of future politics, he would like to excuse himself from the onus of his own theory.
Be that as it may, Huntington’s ‘prediction’ of the ‘clash’ was clearly presented from the point of view of an ‘endangered West’ in which he spoke not only of external challenges from Islam and ‘Confucian authoritarianism’, but also of internal decay of Western liberalism. And this ‘internal decay’ was attributed to the decline of a competing cohesive ideology like Marxism-Leninism and to the rise of multiculturalism, which he said was “eating away at the whole set of ideas and philosophies which have been the binding cement of American society” (interview published in the New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3)!
Huntington holds forth against the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and like most prejudiced critics of Islam he would like us to treat fundamentalism or even terrorism as an inherent, organic feature of Islam. Like our own Advani and Thackeray, he too finds Islam ‘incompatible’ with other civilisations: Islam’s theocratic proclivity, he argues, makes it extraordinarily difficult for Islamic societies to accommodate non-Muslims just as it makes it very difficult for Muslims to easily fit into societies where the majority is non-Muslim.
If Islamic fundamentalism indeed emerged as a powerful political force in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it did not happen automatically or in a vacuum. By systematically destroying the communist and other Left and liberal political currents in countries like Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Afghanistan, had not the US cleared the ground for the rise of fundamentalist forces in the first place? As long as it suited American interests during the Cold War, the US went on fattening fundamentalism by pumping in billions of dollars and supplying all kinds of arms and ammunitions.
Even today, American strategic interests depend crucially on Islamic support. In fact, Islam is one civilisation that does not satisfy Huntington’s civilisational pattern in the sense that there is no one core Islamic state around which other Islamic countries can be said to be united however loosely. Today, the Islamic world is divided much more than the Western world and the US could not possibly have waged this war against Afghanistan but for the connivance and acquiescence of several Islamic countries. Yet American political pundits would continue to talk about a monolithic Islamic civilisation and demonise it by painting it with fanatical, terrorist colours.
Shopping for Demons and Villains
Imperialism means war. As the US wages what it calls the first war of the twenty-first century, Lenin’s teaching stands vindicated once again. The alacrity with which the US jumped at the ‘opportunity’ (President Bush’s most favourite word of candour) provided by September 11, it is not difficult to understand how central and necessary war continues to be for imperialist politics. Since the end of Cold War, the US had been looking for a credible framework for sustaining its war machine. The Gulf War did provide a major opportunity, but it could not provide a lasting framework for a protracted war. Once Kuwait was freed from Iraqi occupation, the US found it difficult to drum up enduring support for a continuing war even though that did not prevent the Clinton administration for periodic bombing missions to Sudan or Baghdad.
Following September 11, the US has now succeeded in creating a general framework for a protracted unconventional war against an elusive enemy. While the borderless, extra-territorial nature of this new enemy ‘terrorism’ suits the globalisation doctrine of decline of nation-states, the hi-tech nature of the terrorist strikes and the panic now being spread about bio-terrorism and all that will enable Washington to try out more sophisticated weapons and newer modes of unconventional warfare.
Till recently, American rulers were hard-pressed to find a credible justification for sustaining America’s extraordinary level of military expenditure. The National Missile Defense project of Bush had evoked strong protests not only in Europe but also within the United States. Now the American Congress and Senate, the Democrats and Republicans are all busy legislating massive increases in the US military budget. Ten years ago, General Colin Powell had apparently advocated cuts to US military budget, saying, “Think hard about it. I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains”. Now once again Washington has an assured and abundant supply of demons and villains.
The Over-stretched Lonely Superpower
As we go to press, the US has begun ground operations in Afghanistan. According to a Russian news agency, the first ground operation has been a failure. Meanwhile, American leaders are busy contradicting each other even as they try hard to sell their military campaign to the world and prepare the domestic opinion for what looks like a weary winter of war ahead. US Secretary of State Colin Powell says he expects Northern Alliance to capture Kabul within the next few weeks. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says the Northern Alliance is still too weak, it’s just not equal to the Taliban! Powell says the war will be over before winter. Vice-President Dick Cheney says, “the war may not be over in our life-time”! In an interview with the Washington Post, the Vice-President has said, “It is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime. I think it’s fair to say you can’t predict a straight line to victory. You know, there’ll be good days and bad days along the way.”
A scared America is discussing elaborate ‘Defense of Homeland’ plans that might reportedly cost $1.5 trillion over the next five years. Yet, the ordinary American has just begun to suspect that there may not be any greater sense of security at the end of all those extra dollars of taxes. As Dick Cheney warned fellow Americans, terrorism was now “normal”!
As the war drags on and America over-stretches itself in Afghanistan, international and domestic opinion can only turn increasingly against it. America will realise sooner rather than later that the worldwide fund of sympathy for the September 11 tragedy of terror was certainly not meant to be a blank cheque for an endless war even if it is codenamed Operation Enduring Freedom. Placards held by cultural artists in New York expressed it poignantly, “Our grief is not a cry for war”.
As panic spreads and insecurity deepens, more and more Americans are bound to question the war and America’s superpower politics which has been the root cause of all this trouble. The Cold War was quite distant except when the body bags started arriving from Vietnam. The Gulf War was Washington’s perverse way of celebrating what Huntington calls America’s brief unipolar moment after the Soviet collapse. But as the Senior Bush realised it the hard way, it wasn’t even good enough to earn him a second term at White House. How long will it take America to read the writings on the cave walls of Afghanistan?
It is of course futile to expect the arrogant war managers of Washington to learn from history. Those who delude themselves with the belief that they can make and unmake history with their missiles and bombs can only be condemned to suffer at the hands of history.
As imperialist America wages its endless non-stop war of aggression, let the peace-loving people of the world stand by the devastated people of Afghanistan. Let our mighty roar for peace and justice silence the booming guns.