PEOPLE AND POLITICS

America Vs Iraq: have toys, will play

Mohammed Haruna

Late last month, the Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN) held its annual conference for this year in Lokoja, the capital of Kogi State. For three days from August 22, delegates to the conference listened to various papers by speakers on the obviously well-chosen theme of Islam and Globalization. This writer considered it a privilege to have been invited to speak on the rather nebulous topic of the concept of globalization and what it meant for Islam.

Is globalization inevitably in conflict with Islam? Not necessarily I said, in so far as globalisation is not synonymous with Weternisation. The problem is that the two are all too often assumed to mean the same thing because of the obvious reason that of all the world’s civilizations, the West is by far the most powerful and its ways are widely regarded as the most modern and efficient. My position was that even though the West is by far the most powerful, and is widely regarded as the most modern and efficient civilization, it is not about to conquer the rest of the world for at least three reasons.

First, as Professor Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has pointed out in an article in The Economist of March 23, power in a global information age is like a three dimensional chess-game and “you will lose if you focus only on the top board and fail to notice the other boards and the vertical connections”. The three dimensions, he says, are military, economic and information technology. The trouble with the West, America in particular, is that it has focused too much on the military dimension, which, admittedly, is the top chessboard, at the expense of the rest.

Second, it is pretty obvious, at least from the experience of the Japanese, that a people can adopt the West’s efficient techniques and technology without necessarily losing its essential character. Third, in the particular case of Islam as the only civilization that has refused to delink politics from religion, this unique character appears to make it largely immune from the Western civilization’s undue emphasis on materialism.

For those beating the drums of war against Iraq in Washington and London, however, it seems the only thing that matters is military might. They seem to be so much intoxicated by the disparity between the military might of the United States and that of the rest of the world they cannot see how anything can stand between them and the conquest of the world.

At question time after my paper, a lady asked the interesting question on why Washington is insisting on attacking Iraq inspite of the fact that literally the rest of the world is against such an attack. Although I said the question ought to be directed at President George W. Bush, I thought the answer was pretty obvious; if you have toys, you will play.

Since the end of World War II, America has managed to build an unmatched military arsenal – military toys if you will – that it needed to test at least some of them in order for the mind boggling expenditure on the “toys” to make any sense. And to test those toys, it obviously needed to invent an enemy or enemies even where none existed.

The old Soviet Union happily obliged by building a rival but hardly equal military-industrial complex. For example, of the world’s nuclear weapons stockpile of nearly 50,000, the United States possessed over half, specifically, 29,000, as against 17,400 possessed by the old Soviet Union. Among the remaining three nuclear powers, not counting Israel, Pakistan and India, i.e. France, China and Britain, only China is America’s enemy of sorts. But then China’s nuclear arsenal is a miniscule 304.

Then a little over a decade ago, the Soviet Union collapsed because it simply could not match the ability of America’s economy to sustain its military-industrial complex. Logically the collapse of Soviet Union should have spelled the end of the arms race, but then the captains of the American military-industrial complex decided apparently to defy logic. More than five years after the Soviets ungamely collapsed, these captains increased defence spending from an average of 200 billion dollars during the Reagan years and a little after to an average of 260 billion dollars from the mid-1990s. This is more than the defence spending of Russia, China, and all the states America has described as rogue nations, combined.

Then came September 11. More conveniently than consequently, American defence spending for the year after went up to an incredible 329 billion dollars. According to some defence experts, the hawkish American defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, plans to ask for an increase of 48 billion dollars from the Congress next year. The result of all this is a mighty military force the kind of which the world has never seen and possibly will never see.

The question may be asked, why spend so much on such horrendously destructive toys in a world where there is so much poverty and misery and inequality? Remember the American doctrine of “Better bad than dead” which I wrote about on these pages on August 7? Remember the words of one Harry Rositzke, a CIA chief who argued that because our world is an immoral one, its nations “are invariably committed to the motto: Better bad than dead”? This probably answers the question.

It certainly explains why President George W. Bush has made up his mind that he must invade Iraq whatever the rest of the world thinks. This, after all, is the logic of better bad than dead. However, to justify the invasion of Iraq, Bush must first blame and demonise the potential victim. The regime in Iraq must be portrayed as a monstrosity that threatens the rest of the world. And in so doing no mention must ever be made of one’s past role in creating such a monstrosity in the first place.

Once in a while, someone does issue such a reminder. Someone like Norman Macrae, a former editor of The Economist who wrote an article in the London Sunday Times of January 20, 1991 in which he said “Over spending on an over-weaning military is today’s curse across Islam; from Pakistan in the east through the area now in bloody conflict to Africa. Most of them don’t have an arms industry, except Iraq, whose local arms industry should be destroyed this week. The arms industry of the great Christian nations pour in their profit making wares to every local dictator and to anarchist Beirut, creating gun-toting societies where the most mob-rousing election platform is to promise holy war against Jewry and Christendom”.

Note, however, that even such an honest (?) admission as that of Macrae on the role of “Christendom” in creating “monstrosities” like the Iraqi regime, sees nothing wrong with the very notion of gun-toting in itself. Even for the few Macraes of the Western world who think the West must share in the blame of Islam’s dislike of the West, gun-toting is alright as long as it is the West that totes the gun and not its perceived enemies. This is why he would say in the same article that Israel should be “the only fully armed country in the region”.

It is incredible how the Americans want the world to believe the Iraqis pose the greatest to its neighbours in the Middle and to West. The Arab League says it sees no such threat and even America’s Western friends say even if the Iraqis pose such a threat, America’s unilateral invasion of the country is not the solution. But America’s single-minded pursuit of military hegemony has blinded it to the fact that the Iraqi leadership is a far lesser threat to Americans than domestic crime. For, as Ruth Legerd Sivard said in the 1983 edition of “World Military and Social Expenditure, “The U.S. now devotes over 200 billion dollars a year to military defence against foreign enemies but 45% of Americans are afraid to go out alone at night within one mile of their homes”. Since 1983 crime on and off the country’s streets have gone up not down.

Again, as a correspondent of Time magazine said even more recently in its edition of August 5, “The FBI and all the politicians may be warning against attacks from Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but the real enemy is corporate America – Enron, WorldCom and other companies that steal from their employees, and investors, robbing them of their pensions and future. Bin Laden at least has a political agenda, but corporate America has only greed, greed, greed.”

Apparently to divert attention away from such domestic problems as greed in which both Bush and his vice, Dick Chenny, were seriously implicated, the hawks in Washington and London and their mouthpieces have been harping on Iraq’s military capability. The Economist magazine, for example, has argued that the irrefutable case for taking out the current Iraqi leadership is that the “country’s advanced technology and potential oil wealth” could give its “aggressive, cruel and reckless” leadership an atomic bomb.

Yet by the magazine’s own account elsewhere, Iraq can hardly be described as technologically advanced. In it 2002 edition of Pocket World in Figures, the magazine lists the countries that possess the highest of what it called the Economic Creativity Index (ECI) in the world. The ECI, it said, is an average of the Technological Index, which measures the innovative and technological capability of a country, and the Startup Index, which measures the ease with which a country can start new enterprises.

This list has the United States as the No. 1 country with an Economic Creativity Index of 2.0. Israel comes sixth with 1.4 and Britain 9^th with 1.2. Iraq, which The Economist claims is technologically advanced, is not on the list which contains the top 45 countries. Similarly, it is interesting that Iraq is also not among the top 45 countries with the highest expenditure on Research and Development as a percentage of their Gross Domestic product.

How such a country with a Gross Domestic Product of under 20 billion dollars, a population of just a little over 22 million and an army of about 420,000 men can be described as technologically advanced enough and strong enough to threaten a mighty America with a GDP of over nearly 11 trillion dollars, a population of about 273 million and an army of about 1.4 million men deployed right round the globe on land and sea and in the air, with awesome armaments, is something that one finds difficult to understand.

But then when you have toys, you must play, mustn’t you?