Bush’s hawkish policies making world more dangerous
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON: The hawkish, nationalistic, and unilateralist policies of Bush’s administration have raised tensions from Israel to Indonesia, and from Colombia to the Koreas. Whatever hopes existed in the late 1990s for a new era of global cooperation in combating poverty, disease, and threats to the environment seem to have evaporated.
Much of the foreign-policy establishment was stunned when, after six weeks in office, Bush ostentatiously pulled the plug on visiting South Korean President and Nobel Peace laureate Kim Dae Jung’s “sunshine policy” toward North Korea by announcing that Washington had no intention of continuing high-level talks with Pyongyang aimed at freezing the North’s ballistic missile programme. The move caught Powell, who had assured reporters of Bush’s full support for Kim just the day before, completely by surprise.
Two weeks later, Bush humiliated Ge. Colin Powell again - and angered visiting German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, as well as other European leaders - when he denounced the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in crudely nationalistic terms. “(W)e will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America; that’s my priority.”
Bush’s subsequent withdrawal from the Kyoto negotiations was simply the first among a whole series of moves that demonstrated his administration’s contempt for multilateral forums, particularly in the arms-control area.
It subsequently disavowed both the global ban on land mines and the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty (CTBT); sabotaged UN negotiations on limiting international commerce in small arms; and walked out of another conference on strengthening the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and later announced that the treaty was “dead” so far as Washington was concerned.
Taking advantage of popular fears created by the Sept 11 attacks and ignoring recent intelligence estimates that found that ballistic missiles were the least likely delivery vehicle to be used by terrorists or “rogue states” to attack the US with weapons of mass destruction, Bush capped the year in December by officially withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, viewed by Russia and most nuclear analysts as “the cornerstone” of international arms control, to accelerate development of NMD.
The unilateralist and surly attitudes behind these decisions should not have been surprising, given the administration’s overall make-up. At the Pentagon, in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, and on the National Security Council staff, the hawks and unilateralists - usually in combination - clearly dominate the administration.
Virtually all of them are men, and they have strong likes and dislikes. They see Israel as a strategic ally and are especially fond of right-wing Likud governments there. They consider China, Iraq and Iran to be especially dangerous to US interests in parts of the world where they believe Washington’s hegemony should be unchallenged.
As coined by one senior State Department official, the administration has opted for “multilateralism a la carte,” meaning that it will co-operate with other countries only to the extent that it serves the US interest and does not compromise Washington’s own freedom of action.
That point has been made crystal clear by the conduct of the war in Afghanistan in which the administration not only turned down offers of military help from virtually all of its closest allies except Britain, but deliberately held up the insertion of European-led peace-keeping troops precisely because, in the words of Britain’s top commander, that they might get in the way of Washington’s “high-tech, Wild West” military operations and ”single-minded” hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
While the US pursued its quarry, vast parts of Afghanistan remained inaccessible to relief convoys as starvation spread with the onset of winter and the country returned to the warlordism, banditry, and anarchy which helped give rise to the Taliban in the first place. Even now, the administration, just as it promised to its right-wing supporters, is resisting the use of US soldiers as peacekeepers to help stabilize the war-torn land and thus boost the authority of its new government, handpicked by the US.
Pentagon hawks have meanwhile been scanning the horizon for new theatres in the anti-terrorism struggle including the Philippines, Indonesia, Yemen, Somalia, the former Soviet Central Asia, Lebanon and, Iraq of course, and maybe even Iran. US involvement in global peacemaking has simply wilted on the vine. In addition to stopping Korean reconciliation virtually in its tracks last March, Bush - to Powell’s clear discomfort - has watched impassively as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was increasingly taken over by extremists on both sides over the past year and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon moved step by step to weaken, humiliate and dismantle Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Authority and thus pound the final nail in the coffin of the eight-year-old, US-led Oslo peace process.
The US was conspicuously absent in efforts to keep alive the three-year peace process in Colombia, where there are already several hundred US advisers and to which it is planning to increase aid apparently in anticipation of the collapse of peace efforts. —Dawn/InterPress Service.
