America gears up for a new kind of war
"'The threat we are now facing in
Europe and the US is the greatest threat to security and
economic interests in 60-70 years. There has been a realisation
in the US, and to a certain extent in Europe, that with the Cold
War over the threat is actually much more serious than it was
during the Cold War"
From Iraq to Colombia to the Philippines, the US will
open more fronts in the battle against terrorism
whether allies agree or not, writes Peter Beaumont,
foreign affairs editor .
Terrorism crisis - Observer special
Peter Beaumont
Sunday March 10, 2002
The Observer
Today the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, arrives in London at
the beginning of 11-nation tour taking in Europe and the Middle
East, on a mission to bolster support for America's 'war on
terror'. As the wheels of the vice-presidential Boeing 757 touch
down - and before he is whisked to Downing Street for his
meeting with Tony Blair by helicopter and a heavily guarded
convoy of limousines - the veteran of two Bush administrations
will have a few moments for reflection.
It will be Cheney's first visit outside of North America since 11
September. Then, in the immediate aftermath of the suicide
hijackings, he was rushed into hiding against the threat of any
fresh attack that killed the President and put Cheney in his
shoes. In those six months, he may well consider as he steps
on to the Tarmac, the world he is about to visit has been altered
beyond all recognition. Alliances have been forged and broken.
States have been forced to define their place in the world order
in relation to a sole remaining superpower - and an angry one at
that. International institutions such as Nato and the UN have
been forced to consider the point of their existence.
In those few months American isolationism has been reversed.
US forces are now fighting and deploying across the globe - in
Afghanistan, the Philippines, Iraq and Colombia and in the
former Soviet republics. American arms and money are flooding
elsewhere as its military takes up new bases across the globe.
If the transformation of the international stage that followed in the
immediate aftermath of 11 September has been less obvious
than the changes that took place in that other September - in
1939, when whole populations were rapidly mobilised for total
war - it has been no less profound.
This transformation was predicted by Steven E. Miller, director of
the international security programme at Harvard University, in
the immediate aftermath of 11 September. In an essay in The
Washington Quarterly, he warned: 'The terrorist attacks of 11
September will scythe through history, separating a naively
complacent past from a frighteningly vulnerable future.'
'The changes have been huge,' said one Foreign Office insider
last week. 'There has been a huge shift in the way that this
place sees the world, and the way it sees its allies and foes
alike. Not least among those shifts was the dramatic realisation
of the threat posed to international security by failing states like
Afghanistan, an issue we urgently have to tackle.'
European intelligence sources are even more brutal about the
way the world has altered: 'The threat we are now facing in
Europe and the US is the greatest threat to security and
economic interests in 60-70 years. There has been a realisation
in the US, and to a certain extent in Europe, that with the Cold
War over the threat is actually much more serious than it was
during the Cold War.
'The problem is that the memory of 9/11 is fading and people are
beginning to forget the seriousness of the threat that we are
facing. As that perceived threat fades it is natural that the
public's focus should be changing from prevention of terrorism to
the human rights issue involved in the war on terrorism.'
But how, precisely, to define those changes and the nature of
the new threat? Dan Plesch, senior research fellow at the Royal
United Services Institute, believes that the scale of the events in
New York and Washington last year - which the US estimates
cost $639 billion - may have presaged a global conflict of a kind
unseen before. It is a conflict, he believes, whose nature and
scope may still not be appreciated.
'The war on terrorism is analogous to civil war on a global scale,'
Plesch says, 'in that it is taking place in a world which
globalisation has shrunk and interconnected.'
If it is a 'global war', then it is a conflict in which players have
been called to choose their sides in the most emotive of ways. It
was a call to arms, articulated most clearly by Newt Gingrich,
former speaker of the House of Representatives, shortly after the
attack, a view endorsed by Bush and Washington's elite. 'There
are only two teams on the planet in this war,' said Gingrich.
'There's the team that represents civilisation and there's the
team that represents terrorism. Just tell us which. There are no
neutrals.'
Critically, argues Miller, the biggest change has been in the
ambitions of Bush's presidency - and US foreign policy in
general. It should now be understood, he believes, as solely
motivated by the desire to acquit itself favourably in its war on
global terrorism. On that Bush
believes he will be judged.
Everything else takes second place.
That global war is now taking place on many fronts, more and
less discreetly, discontinuous in its nature. On the side of the
terrorists, US and UK interrogation of prisoners at Camp X-Ray
in Cuba has revealed both the extent and continuing nature of
the al-Qaeda threat.
On the American side that global war is most visibly raging in
Afghanistan. But quietly President Bush is opening other fronts.
In the Philippines - the recipient of more than $90 million of
'excess' US arms, including utility helicopters and 30,000 rifles -
several hundred US military advisers helping with the war
against the Muslim secessionists of Abu Sayyaf have kept out
of the limelight. In Colombia too, where the 'war against drugs'
has been running in parallel to the 'war on terrorism', US
advisers helped plan the government's capture last month of the
rebel stronghold of San Vicente del Caguán in the country's
demilitarised zone. The US has also announced that it is
sending 200 advisers plus helicopters to the former Soviet
republic of Georgia to help fight al-Qaeda there and to beat back
Chechen rebels.
Most visible, outside of Afghanistan have been the escalating
preparations by the US to attack Iraq and depose Saddam
Hussein. Dissident groups both inside and outside Iraq are
already receiving increased funding and shipments of US arms,
while sources have told The Observer that some US intelligence
personnel already operating in northern Iraq with military training
of opposition groups.
On a wider front American assistance is being channelled to
'friendly' states - some of them with a questionable record on
human rights and democratic accountability. US military
sanctions against Pakistan and India - imposed after they
detonated nuclear weapons tests - have been lifted. Pakistan
has also been issued with a temporary waiver from the State
Department list of those countries banned from receiving US
military goods because democracy has not been restored after a
coup.
Turkey, Kenya and Azerbaijan are also in line for US military
assistance despite questions about how those weapons might
be used internally and regionally. If the policy seems familiar,
say critics, it is because it is returning the world to the lethal
policies that dominated the Cold War when the US and Soviet
Union built up their 'clients' to undermine their enemies.
The real casualty of this reordering - condemned earlier this
month by the French Foreign Minister, Hubert Védrine, as
'irresponsibly simplistic' - has been the weakening of key
international institutions like Nato and the UN, set up as
guarantors of world peace in the aftermath of the Second World
War. Plesch says: 'Even before 11 September there had been a
weakening of the UN and the international security system to
allow US-led actions through Nato and 'Coalitions of the Willing'.
What has happened since has simply speeded up that process.'
The UN, say critics, is now involved only when it suits the US.
Nato officials, for their part, concede that years of defence
under-spending by most European nations, save Britain, makes
them unlikely partners in a future high-intensity conflict and
therefore largely irrelevant to the US. America has taken a
pragmatic decision on Nato too, downgrading its importance in
an effort to Russia and Vladimir Putin on side.
The process is described in an analysis paper sent by the
think-tank Rand Europe to European defence ministries earlier
this month. It argued that in future the US was likely to call the
shots in military actions, choosing its partners - notably Britain
-according to circumstances.
Although this is rejected by the Foreign Office, another British
official working in foreign policy areas agrees with the analysis.
'The feeling is that the US is now prepared to cherry-pick on its
own terms its involvement in cooperative international institutions
and councils, and ignore them when it doesn't suit them. That
process was already happening before 9/11, with the US
rejecting the Kyoto process, weapons treaties and the World
Trade Organisation where it didn't suit them. That has clearly
been intensified since 9/11. And that has been a significant
change.
'What is driving this is a fundamental sense in America that it
was caught with its trousers down over al-Qaeda after the
embassy bombings in Africa and the USS Cole. They had plenty
of warning but Clinton's response was to bomb a few tents in
Afghanistan rather than deal with the root of the problem.
'Now they are determined to deal with any state - like Iraq - that
could pose a pre-emptive threat rather than wait. That goes for
Colombia, the Philippines, where they feel there could be a
threat to US citizens or interests.
'That is the thinking that underlies Bush's "axis of evil" speech,
fingering North Korea, Iraq and Iran. It is the concern that
although they might use weapons of mass destruction against
the US, that the technologies that they are developing might end
up in the wrong hands and pose a threat.'
But the difficulty with the present approach, as some British
officials acknowledge, is that America's 'partial' approach can
send out the wrong message. The lifting of US sanctions against
Pakistan which has been accused of both supporting terrorism -
not least in its Afghan and Kashmir policies - and nuclear
proliferation suggests, they say, to some nations that the new
hard line on terror and weapons and mass destruction applies
only when the US wants it to, encouraging others to 'borrow' the
US approach and undermining regional stability.
It has been most pronounced in the Middle East. In Israel, Prime
Minister, Ariel Sharon, has used his own 'war on terror' to justify
his increasingly disastrous security policies and reject
international criticism.
It is this, say some, that poses the greatest danger.'If you
reject principle in favour of case by case decisions based on
pragmatism and self-interest,' says one European official, ' then
you undermine the basis of all international agreement. It leaves
it open to any state to reject international conventions and
agreements when it sees fit because all of them have become
devalued. That is a recipe for potential anarchy in the future.'
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