The anti-apartheid militant Steve Biko used to say that the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor was the mind of the oppressed. One could add that the strength of an ideological system lies in the extent to which its presuppositions are shared by the people who think of themselves as its most radical critics. To allow construction of a more effective opposition to current wars it is necessary to distinguish, among arguments heard against those wars, which ones are solid and which ones are not, and combat the influence of the dominant discourse on the discourse with the opposition. Weak arguments are the those that are based, at least in part, on the suppositions of the dominant discourse.
An Italian friend once explained to me that when he was young he thought the revolution could be exported. Today, he no longer thinks so, and by the same token he does not think that democracy can be exported, either. As a result, he is opposed to the war in Iraq. This is a typical example of an extremely widespread line of argument that can be summed up as “it won’t work,” meaning war won’t succeed in installing democracy. It is obviously better to be against the war on those grounds than to be for it, but it’s a weak argument on which to base opposition. So let’s transpose that argument to other situations: let us imagine, to take an extreme example, that someone said he was against Nazi aggressions because they did not serve to defend Europe from Bolshevism. Or, to take a slightly less extreme case, that someone was against the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Afghanistan in 1981 because they did not serve to defend socialism. The weakness of the argument appears as soon as it is transposed. It consists in admitting from the outset two things that practically no one concedes in the case of the Nazis or the Soviets: 1) that the reasons proclaimed are the true reasons for going to war; and 2) that the agent who claims to pursue those objectives has the right to do so. And it is precisely this that must be challenged in the case of the United States’ wars.
Aside from its morally dubious side, the trouble with the pragmatic argument (“it won’t work”) is that sometimes it does work, at least in part. In that case, what becomes of the argument against the war? What would there be to say if the Iraqis got discouraged and gave up their resistance, and a stable pro-American government were installed in Baghdad? After all, that is more or less what happened in the case of the Kosovo war: the Albano-Kosovars welcomed NATO as liberators and the Serbs ended up by electing a government that suited their aggressors. To take another example, the U.S. wars of the 1980s in Central America, which cost tens of thousands of lives, did indeed work, in the sense that the populations ended up electing the “right” candidates and that the guerrilla movements were more or less brought to heel.
One can of course reply that the proclaimed objectives are not really achieved: for example, Kosovo is much less multiethnic today than before the war, whereas preserving multiethnicity was supposed to be an objective. But to that, the partisans of intervention will reply that nothing is perfect and it’s better to do things halfway than not at all.
Another argument frequently heard, though equally weak, consists in saying that the costs of war (in human life, for example) are too high. But what do you say when high-technology war limits casualties?
Let us consider three examples, two real and one imaginary, which suggest how to answer these questions. First, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia caused very few casualties; second, the annexation of the Sudeten region in that same country by Hitler in 1938 was welcomed by the inhabitants; and finally, let us imagine that the September 11 attacks had taken place in India, whereupon India, a democracy, invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to “liberate” their populations.1 In the two real cases, the circumstances mentioned certainly did not suffice to justify those aggressions in our eyes, and there is no doubt that, if the imaginary case actually happened, Western opposition to that “liberation” would be overwhelming. One can cite a real example that is comparable: the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia that overthrew the bloodthirsty regime of Pol Pot and was overwhelmingly condemned by the West. Moreover, a certain number of terrorist attacks have taken place in India, without anyone suggesting that India was thereby authorized to wage an endless war against terrorism in contempt of international law.
These examples indicate that the attitude adopted toward a war or an aggression does not depend solely on the particular situation involved but on more general principles. The first of these principles is international law, such as it exists today, and that can be the basis of strong arguments against recent U.S. wars, none of which was in accordance with international law.2 Moreover, the law itself is increasingly under attack, among other things precisely because it doesn’t provide enough opportunity for unilateral intervention.
As is very well explained by the Canadian professor of international law Michael Mandel, contemporary international law has as its aim, to cite the preamble of the United Nations Charter, to “preserve future generations from the scourge of war.” And to achieve that, the basic principle is that no country has the right to send its troops into another country without the consent of its government. The Nazis did so repeatedly, and the first crime for which they were condemned at Nuremberg was initiating a war of aggression, which, according to the 1945 Nuremberg Charter, “is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
The “government” whose consent is required does not need to be an “elected government” or one that “respects human rights” but simply has to be whoever “effectively controls the armed forces,” because that factor determines whether crossing the border leads to war. It is easy to criticize this basic principle, and the human rights defenders do not fail to do so. For one thing, it is often the case that the borders of states are arbitrary, having resulted from totally undemocratic processes that took place in the distant past, and are considered unsatisfactory by various ethnic minorities. Moreover, nothing ensures that the governments are democratic or even minimally concerned with the welfare of their populations. But international law never claimed to solve all problems. Like practically all law, it seeks simply to be a lesser evil compared to no law at all. And those who criticize international law would do well to explain by which principles they want to have it replaced. Can Iran occupy neighboring Afghanistan? Can Brazil, which is at least as democratic as the United States, invade Iraq in order to install a democracy? Can Congo attack Rwanda in self-defense? Can Bangladesh intervene in the internal affairs of the United States in order to impose a reduction of greenhouse gases so as to “prevent” the devastation with which it is threatened by global warming? If the “preventive” American attack on Iraq was legitimate, why wasn’t the Iraqi attack on Iran, or on Kuwait, also legitimate? Worse still, why wasn’t the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a legitimate preventive attack?3 When one asks such questions, it quickly becomes clear that the only realistic alternative to the existing law, other than widespread chaos, would be for the most powerful state in the world to intervene wherever it pleases, or else, in some cases, to authorize its allies to do so.
Now, all of liberal thinking since the seventeenth century is based on the idea that there are essentially three forms of life in society:
• the war of all against all
• an absolute sovereign who imposes peace by force
• a legal, democratic order as the lesser evil
Dictatorial regimes, denounced by human rights defenders, have the advantages of the absolute sovereign: ability to preserve order and avoid the war of all against all, which is illustrated today by the situation of so-called failed states. But the drawbacks of such a sovereign are well-known: he acts in accordance with his own interests, his authority is not accepted in the hearts and minds of his subjects, and this provokes an endless cycle of revolts and repression. This observation is the foundation of the argumentation in favor of the third solution.
All that is considered banal when it is a matter of the internal order of democratic states. But now let us turn to the international order. The sovereign, should we abandon the existing principles of international law, would inevitably be the United States. The United States is a great power that obviously pursues its own interests. Let us note that the advocates of humanitarian intervention do not always deny that fact, but then they argue, by recourse to a selective reading of history, that the rest of humanity gains more benefits than harm from that pursuit. I have already tried to explain why I do not share that conclusion, but however that may be, the backlash linked to the exercise of that absolute power is exactly what classic liberalism predicted.4
Examples are easy to find. Osama bin Laden is a product of the support provided to the mujahiddin in Afghanistan during the Soviet period. By selling weapons to Iraq, the West inadvertently provided a precious aid to the present Iraqi resistance.
In 1954, the United States overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala. For Washington, it took little effort and, apparently, involved little risk. However, the United States thereby also contributed to the political education of a young Argentine doctor who happened to be there and whose portrait today adorns millions of T-shirts throughout the world: Che Guevara.
After the First World War, a young Vietnamese came to the Versailles Conference to plead the cause of self-determination for his people to Robert Lansing, secretary of state of the president who presented himself as the champion of self-determination, Woodrow Wilson. He was shown the door; after all, he was harmless.5 He then left France for Moscow to complete his political education and became famous. His name was Ho Chi Minh.
Who knows what the hatred being produced today by the policies of the United States and Israel will give birth to tomorrow?
In the international order, the third solution, the liberal solution, would mean more democracy at the world level, through the United Nations. Bertrand Russell compared discussing who was responsible for the First World War to discussing who was responsible for a car accident in a country without traffic regulations. The mere awareness of the idea that international law should be respected and that it should be possible to control conflicts between states through an international entity is in itself a major step in human history, comparable to the abolition of the power of the monarchy and the aristocracy, the abolition of slavery, the development of freedom of expression, recognition of trade union and women’s rights, or the concept of social security. At present, it is obviously the United States, as well as those who support their actions in the name of human rights, who are opposed to strengthening that international order. And there is every reason to fear that the reforms of the United Nations that are currently under consideration will lead to a greater legitimization of unilateral actions. The problem with the idea of using human rights to undermine the international order is that, at every meeting of the nonaligned countries, and at every summit of Southern Hemisphere countries, which represent 70 percent of humanity, all forms of unilateral intervention, whether embargos, sanctions or wars, are condemned, and not only by “dictatorships.” The same thing occurs during votes in the U.N. General Assembly, concerning the U.S. embargo against Cuba, for example. The democracy argument, if what is meant by that is to take into account world public opinion, weighs massively against the right of unilateral intervention. In the last analysis, the liberal imperialists, that is, most of the U.S. Democrats and a large part of European social democrats and greens-who defend democracy on the domestic level but call for intervention, that is, the dictatorship of a sole country or small group of countries, on the international level—are perfectly incoherent.
The most frequently heard argument is that it is scandalous for the United Nations, and particularly its Human Rights Commission, to treat democratic and undemocratic countries as equals. But in democracy there is no morality test for voting, and citizens’ rights do not depend on the quality of their family life. Nations, like individuals, can change and improve their behavior, and need a certain amount of time and space to do so without violent intrusions. Besides, nothing proves that the most powerful state is best able to judge the internal virtues and vices of others, as it presumes to do-always giving the highest marks to itself. The fact that the United States can present itself as the universal arbiter of respect for human rights, at the same time it holds prisoners for years in Guantanamo without trial or even formal charges, shows that a government’s attitude toward human rights in the context of the Human Rights Commission may be disconnected from its own practice.
The Heads of State or Government reaffirmed the Movement’s commitment to enhance international co-operation to resolve international problems of a humanitarian character in full compliance with the Charter of the United Nations, and, in this regard, they reiterated the rejection by the Non-Aligned Movement of the so-called “right” of humanitarian intervention, which has no basis either in the Charter of the United Nations or in international law.6
Finally, when, as often happens, people complain of the United Nations’ lack of effectiveness, it is necessary to recall all the treaties and all the agreements on disarmament or on prohibition of weapons of mass destruction opposed primarily by the United States. It is the great powers who are most hostile to the idea that their trump card, recourse to force, might encounter legal opposition. But just as on the domestic level nobody suggests that gangsters’ hostility to the law is a good argument for abolishing it, the sabotage of the United Nations by the United States is not a valid argument for discrediting the world organization.
The Bush administration has withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol, opposed the International Plan for Cleaner Energy, withdrawn from the International Conference on Racism, refused to join 123 nations pledged to ban the use and production of anti-personnel bombs and mines, opposed the UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms, refused to accept the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, refused to join the International Court of Justice, withdrawn from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty, rejected the Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty, among other matters. It is developing more refined nuclear weapons for more practical use, is pursuing space-based weapons stations, and has announced a right to engage in preventive war at its own discretion.
—Edward S. Herman7
But there is one more argument in favor of international law, perhaps even more important than the others: it is the paper shield that the Third World believed could protect it from the West at the time of decolonization. People who use human rights to undermine international law in the name of the “right to intervene” forget that, all through the colonial period, no border and no dictator was there to prevent the West from making human rights prevail in the countries it had subjected. If that was the intention, the least one can say is that the colonialized peoples failed to notice. And this is probably one of the main reasons why the right to intervene is so strongly condemned by the countries of the South.
When, in December 1975, Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which had just gained its independence, the United Nations remained powerless, something for which it is bitterly reproached in other cases, for instance Bosnia. But why was it ineffective? The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, explained in his memoirs: “The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” A little further on, he explained that the invasion was responsible for the death of” 10 percent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War.”8 That same year Moynihan, who boasts of having collaborated with a massacre that he himself compares to those caused by Hitler’s aggression, was awarded the highest distinction of the International League of Human Rights. More recently, in 2002, he was one of the sixty signatories of a “Letter from America: The Reasons for a Combat” which argued in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan as a just war.9
On the occasion of the United Nations condemnation of the U.S. invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, President Reagan declared: “One hundred nations in the U.N. have not agreed with us on just about everything that’s come before them where we’re involved, and it didn’t upset my breakfast at all.”
Here is a small sampling of U.N. General Assembly resolutions; the figures indicate the number of states having voted in favor and those voting against, identified in parentheses:
• December 11, 1980: Israeli human rights practices in occupied territories: 118–2 (United States, Israel).
• December 12, 1980: Declaration of non-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states: 110–2 (United States, Albania).
• October 28, 1981: Antiracism; condemns apartheid in South Africa and Namibia: 145–1 (United States).
• December 9, 1981: Establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East 107–2 (United States, Israel).
• December 14, 1981: Declares that education, work, hearth care, proper nourishment national development etc., are human rights: 135–1 (United States).
• December 9, 1982: Promoting international mobilization against apartheid: 141–1 (United States).
• December 13, 1982: Necessity of a convention on the prohibition of chemical and bacteriological weapons: 95–1 (United States).
• November 22, 1983: The right of every state to choose its economic and social system in accord with the will of its people, without outside interference in whatever form it takes: 131–1 (United States).
In addition, year, after year resolutions adopted calling for an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba have been adopted by huge majorities, with only the United States and Israel voting against, on a few occasions joined by Albania, Paraguay, or Uzbekistan.10
An Argentinian friend said to me one day that without its foreign debt, his country would be “a paradise.” He may have been exaggerating, but I immediately asked him, “Why then do you continue to pay it?” Everyone in Argentina knows that the debt is largely illegitimate, at least the part inherited from the time of the dictators. He replied, “But they would laugh at us if we did not.” By “they” he obviously meant the United States and the U.S.-supported financial institutions. But what could those institutions do about it?
More generally, what would happen if a country put into practice the ideas of various anti-globalization or “global justice” movements? Not only measures such as the “Tobin tax” which, depending on how it was defined, might possibly be integrated into the system without too much trouble, but more radical measures such as widespread debt repudiation, reappropriation of natural resources, (re)construction of strong public services, significant taxation of profits, etc. I see no reason to believe that the reaction would be very different from what it was with Allende, Castro, Mossadegh, Lumumba, Arbenz, Goulart, and many others. The reaction would occur in stages: first of all, more or less spontaneous economic sabotage, in the form of capital flight, a stop to investments, credit, and “aid,” etc. Should that not suffice, there would be encouragement of internal subversion, provoked by social, ethnic, or religious groups with specific demands difficult to satisfy. Any repression of those groups, even if their activities were illegal and would be equally repressed anywhere else, would be condemned in the name of human rights. The economic or political complexity of the situation would be forgotten. All this would take place under constant threat of a military coup d’état, which could be welcomed by a part of the population tired of “chaos.” And, if all that should fail to do the trick, the United States or its allies would resort to direct military intervention. The point is that even if the last measure is not taken the moment each new crisis arises, it nevertheless looms in the background of all the others. If economic sanctions or internal destabilization measures don’t work, one can expect a new Bay of Pigs, a new Vietnam, or new Contras.
After the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979, which overthrew the U.S.-supported dictatorship of Somoza, the United States decreed an embargo against Nicaragua and organized guerrilla bands called Contras. They had no chance of winning a military victory, but they could weaken the new government especially by disrupting the economy. In 1990, the Sandinistas lost the elections, whereupon the United States lifted their embargo. The United States was condemned for its sabotage actions by the International Court of Justice in 1986. Despite a demand by the U.N. General Assembly for immediate payment of reparations, the United States refused to comply.
The United States can, however; count on its own lobby of European intellectuals. On March 21, 1985, the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, published a paid advertisement on page 6 calling on the U.S. Congress to aid “all sectors of the opposition” in Nicaragua, that is, the Contras in particular, against “a totalitarian party”—the Sandinistas.
This aid, according to the text was necessary for “strategic” reasons; “the Sandinista junta has never hidden its aim to integrate all of Central America into a single Marxist-Leninist entity.”11! If this should happen, the United States “would be obliged to disengage from one of their principal overseas treaties, and that is precisely the objective sought by Soviet strategy to force the United States to withdraw from regions of vital importance to both the USSR and the Free World.”
The alarmed signatories included some big names in French intellectual circles, among them Fernando Arrabal, playwright; Eugene lonesco, playwright; Bernard-Henri Levy, philosopher; Jean-François Revel, writer; Olivier Todd, journalist, writer; Emmanuel Le Roy-Ladurie, historian; Vladimir Bukovsky; Simon Wiesenthal.
Aside from their strategic acumen, these thinkers had a moral argument “The West must be consistent in its support to those who fight to benefit from the rights that your own Declaration of Independence proclaimed inalienable, and which therefore should belong to all.”
It may be noted that the Sandinistas overthrew a dictatorship, organized and won the first democratic elections in their country, lost the second elections, and left office. Hardly a model “totalitarian party”
On the other hand, a 1984 CIA “Psychological Operations” manual destined for “freedom fighters,” as Reagan called the Contras, included the following recommendations:
Kidnap all officials or agents of the Sandinista government…
It is possible to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges, mesta judges [justices of the peace], police and State Security officials, Sandinista Defense Committee chiefs, etc….
The notification of the police denouncing a target who does not want to join the guerrillas, can be carried out easily … through a letter with false statements of citizens who are not implicated in the movement…
If possible; professional criminals will be hired to carry out specific selected “jobs.”
A shorter manual in comic book form recommended “a series of useful sabotage techniques” to hasten “liberation”:
Stop up toilets with sponges… pull down power cables … put dirt into gas tanks … put nails on roads and highways … telephone to make false hotel reservations and false alarms of fires and crimes … hoard and steal food from the government … leave lights and water taps on … steal mail from mailboxes … rip up books … spread rumors.12
Thus was brought to an end an original and democratic attempt at social transformation, and to what Oxfam called “the threat of the good example.”
As a matter of fact, the electorate, especially the poor, understand these things quite well. That is why they are often more easily won over by “providential” leaders than by the political left. A populist demagogue may be able to bring about temporary improvements within the system without provoking the anger of those who hold real power on the world scale. In Third World countries, fundamental changes would be in the interest of a large majority of the population. But so long as the left fails to offer a credible explanation of how it would overcome the obstacles it would have to confront if it came to power by democratic means, it will have a lot of trouble getting there. To put it another way, all elections are distorted by a permanent and implicit blackmail: if you vote for an authentic left, you will have to take the consequences.
The key to the whole system, that which ensures the effectiveness of indirect interventions, or what can be called low-intensity interventions, is the immense military power of the United States and its allies. Moreover, they are the ones who arm and train numerous Third World armies, which often hang as a sword of Damocles over any attempt at social transformation. That is why the social justice movement in its opposition to neoliberal globalization cannot reasonably fail to adopt an anti-interventionist and anti-imperialist attitude. The process under way in Venezuela has already had to withstand economic sabotage and electoral destabilization in an attempted coup d’état. It has survived up to now, but who knows for how long. In any case, Hugo Chávez certainly understands the connection between social reforms and opposition to imperialism, since he organized an anti-imperialist tribunal during the world festival of youth and students in Caracas, in August 2005.
The inventors of chaos theory were poets, precisely because they were great mathematicians. Thus we owe to them the metaphor, which has become famous, according to which the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can provoke a hurricane at the other end of the earth. Behind that admirable comparison, the point is that complex causalities are at work in nature, in which apparently insignificant objects can, by their own force, if inserted in a devastating mechanism, have effects completely out of proportion to their initial importance….
In Latin America, we are currently on the eve of such a situation, but less poetic and more brutal metaphors come to mind to express the same catastrophe theory, for instance that the brusque crack of a primate’s jaw can provoke a volcanic eruption. The primate or gorilla, you’ll have recognized, is the apprentice dictator of Venezuela, Chavez; and the volcanic eruption is obviously a general confrontation embracing the whole continent, for the first time in its history, of which one possible consequence will be fresh tension on oil and commodity markets, and another, the most thorough preparation of an unprecedented geopolitical tension between China and the United States.13
In the last analysis, opposition to recent wars can be based not only on the idea that international law is the sole means of avoiding a state of war of all against all or the dictatorship of a single country, but also because the United States is systematically hostile to all serious social progress in the Third World and that, as a result, any such progress presupposes a weakening of U.S. power.