Lessons of the Iraq war
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The new world order: moving towards barbarity
Kroesus, the last king of Lydia, was so immensely rich that his name is proverbial even today, two and a half millennia later. When this immeasurably rich Kroesus was about to go to war against Persians, he asked the Oracle of Delphi for opinion. The answer was: "If you cross the river Halys, you will destroy a great kingdom." Kroesus understood the point the wrong way - because it applied to him: he went to war and was crushingly defeated by the Persian king Kyros II. The great kingdom, that Kroesus destroyed, was his own.
With their war against the Iraq Americans crossed Halys. They will win this war, but will lose the peace. The organized crime against the criminal in Baghdad and his subjects does not mean the end of the American superpower. However, it afflicts damages itself: it loses world-wide attention, respect, authority and following. And it destroys the kingdom, it created - the international system, which it helped to create and which was based on trust into the USA: The United States helped create the UN and NATO. Now, however, they feel contempt for the UN, NATO has been discredited and the transatlantic friendship is in low esteem. They threw the world public the tatters of the UN Charter before its feet and with the Iraq war declared the feud on the world opinion.
After 11 September 2001 it dawned: nothing will be like it used to be any more. Above all the US policies have made sure that this sentence is factually correct. After this day, on which the world power had to face its vulnerability, it began to act, as if it were immortal, invulnerable and not dependent on other nations. In its defense of freedom and law it pushed the freedom and law aside. America was subject, so the psychoanalytic Hans Jürgen Wirth, to "collective narcissistic megalomanic fantasy", for which it sacrificed its own values. The Bush government proved it is ready to break the law if it feels the call to do so.
Tore up the old book
"...this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years", said the old democratic senator Robert C Byrd, Nestor of the US senate, in his speech against the Iraq war. In this war he sees a turning point of world history. The old gentleman is probably in a similar mood as the young Edward Gibbon, who in an elegiac mood, while sitting in the ruins of the Roman Capitol, decided to write history of the "decline and fall of the Roman empire". Gibbon had looked for the eternal Rome and had found it was short-lived - he realized, how "Greeks and Romans have climbed out of the barbarity and then sank back into it" (so Alexander Demandt, in: The end of empires). The bombs against Baghdad mean the world power is getting closer to barbarity.
Turning point of world history? That may be correct for two reasons. First of all: The American state, the father of international law, behaves towards this international law and the United Nations in an unbelievable way. It acts like like titan Kronos, who ate his own children, out of fear, they could become dangerous. Second: The Bush war accelerates world-wide the arms spiral into new record revolutions. All the threshold countries, particularly those, which feel threatened by USA, will now concentrate on nuclear weapons - only then they will feel safe, with a certain justification, before the Americans. It is not like USA attacked the Iraq, because Saddam Hussein has WMD. The USA are rather attacking, as the globalization critic Harald Schumann correctly assessed, because Iraq does not yet have such weapons. Were it different, see North Korea, one would not dare to. The lessons, learnt in Karachi or Jakarta, are simple and plausible: they start with A, B and C. The Iraq war makes disarmament a ridiculous word.
Historical turning point: When, next to the order of the world power, a legal order began to step in and it started to feel unpleasant, the USA hit the legal order. And now they are trying to hammer it in to the world, that power and law are one and the same thing. For the justification of this doctrine they describe international law as law, where everything is on the move, as law, which consists only of question marks. They do this, because they must protect themselves against the fact that the standards, which they themselves helped create once, could be used against them. Robert Jackson, the US chief prosecutor during the Nurnberg war crimes trials, said on 20 November 1945 in his inaugural address: "we should never forget that tomorrow history may judge us by the same measure, that we use today to judge the accused ."
International law, a law with question marks? The prohibition of force, located at the center of the UN Charter, is the most important imperative of the newer history. It is pretty much correct that one can set a question mark behind the Security Council, because of. its arbitrary composition. And it is also correct that many times hypocrisy prevails in the United Nations. That, however, does not in the least change the fact that in the international law the war of aggression takes the same place as the crimes against the humanity and genocide. It is also correct that there's today no effective instrumentation to intervene against a war of aggression. However that does not make the war of aggression legal. The criminal, who is at large and not yet punished, is still a criminal. And the justified criticism of the United Nations changes finally nothing in the fact that they are the instance, that offers an orderly procedure for the pacification of international conflicts. The USA excite themselves about the UN not just because of their weaknesses, but because of their strengths - because the world-wide organization contradicts the world power. For this reason the Ex-Pentagon advisor Richard Perle has already declared United Nations to be insignificant and redundant. That is much like Bundeskanzler suggesting one should dissolve Bundestag, because it is opposing the plans of the Federal Government.
The prosecutors and judge of Nuremberg did not adhere to the principles of their sentence, as Telford Taylor, one of the closest Jackson's aids, said in 1970: "We did not succeed to learn the lessons which we wanted to teach in Nuremberg". The sentence applies to the intervention of the USA in Viet Nam, it applies to the war of the Soviets in Afghanistan - and so on. In the mean time the point, however, is not any longer just that the lessons were not learned. The point is Americans want to tear up the old book and write a new one with the title: Power defines the law.
A world power has power to make errors. A world power has also power to correct again its errors . In the sense of this definition one can doubt, how powerful the USA still are - because the errors committed through the Iraq war have by now consequences, which are already irreversible. Whatever the beautiful postwar order for the Iraq (and it will not turn out that beautiful) it will not stop the new global race for WMD. And however beautiful reconstruction program for the Iraq will be, it will not allay the hate of the Arab world against the USA. Also it will not remain a secret for long, when the US government lets the expropriated Iraqi billions of foreign assets flow to US companies to repair roads destroyed by the US army. That's how the investment programs for the beautiful new world look like.
The world power as tartar. The story of Kronos, the antic Titan, ended as follows: his son Zeus forced the father to gurgle up his brothers and sisters - and made him, after a certain expiatory pause, the ruler over the island of the blessed. At present there's no such Zeus on the horizon.
Süddeutsche 29/30 March
HERIBERT PRANTL
transl DJ |
