WITH the initiation of Anglo-American military action against Iraq, the world has entered a new phase of international relations marked by new rules of the game. This American war against Iraq would be recorded in the annals of human history as being most disastrous both in physical and symbolic terms. The way America has resorted to war in total disregard of international opinion has heralded a new era that seems to have changed the context and basis of interaction amongst the countries of the world. This happens to be the most unpopular war ever waged.

The mad rush to war by the America-led ‘coalition of the willing’ has shattered the long-held myth regarding the influence of morality as a policy plank to settle political disputes. It has underlined the fact that the principle of ‘might is right’ defines rules of the game and no moral pressure, howsoever strong, can prevent the war-mongers from going to war with other countries to achieve their purposes. They give little attention to the fact that their resort to use of force as a policy measure would risk the lives of millions of innocent people.

The war against Iraq signals the victory of unilateralism over multilateralism. The way America persisted with war option in spite of lack of authorization by the United Nations and tough resistance from France, Russia, Germany and China indicates that it had now opted for the use of force as an instrument to advance its foreign policy interests and goals in today’s globalization-driven world. The advent of globalization led to closing of ideological ranks among the countries of the world and focused on the need for making concerted efforts for the uplift of human beings irrespective of the difference of religion, ethnicity, culture and ideology.

Barring negative aspects of globalization, the movement promised to bring about change in the collective lot of humanity. But the start of American war in Iraq has damaged the spirit of globalization. It has proven that capitalist forces are least ready to surrender even an inch of ground on their undisputed hegemony over economic resources. The industrial-military combine in the Bush administration has tried to use globalization as another tool to colonize the rest of the world. The withdrawal of the second proposed resolution from the Security Council on March 17 exposed moral vacuity in the lofty claims of the US regarding its justification for war against Iraq.

Despite the global influence wielded by the US, with the World Bank, IMF and other monetary institutions ready to do the American bidding, it was not sure of winning even a simple majority of nine votes in UNSC. The result was the withdrawal of the resolution and resort to unilateralism.

American war against Iraq has also questioned the role and credibility of the United Nations. It looks that power-hungry hawks in the US are bent on seeing the death of the UN on the pattern of the League of Nations. The very principles on which the UN was established through the combined efforts of the American president, Roosevelt and the British prime minister, Churchill, stand completely eroded as their respective successors — Bush and Tony Blair — have proved by their actions that the UN is completely irrelevant. Thus suspicions of Third World countries regarding the UN serving as a tool to advance the interests of the US and its allies have been confirmed. The UN becomes relevant when there is no hindrance to the pursuit of the agendas of the powerful countries and it is rendered irrelevant when their designs are called in question.

The threatening statements issued by President Bush have put a question mark on the strength and capacity of the United Nations to act as a guardian and guarantor of the rights and interests of the weaker nations. The failure of the whole world to deter the US from taking recourse to the military option against Iraq has frightful implications for the peace of the world. Will the UN act to regain its lost credibility?

Every country of the world would be forced to undergo some strategic shifts in its foreign policies as a result of this unilateral action against Iraq. Since no security arrangement or collective mechanism guarantees the security and sovereignty of a nation, the race for acquiring state-of-the-art weaponry would gain momentum now. This will further weaken the already weak economies of the Third world countries. Depredation of social infrastructure and civil society would be among the casualties of the war. Secondly, the doctrine of pre-emptive strike and unilateral action for regime change would stand legitimized. Militarily and economically powerful countries like India and Israel would feel no qualms about invoking them to achieve policy goals in their own regions.

Thus, there is a fair possibility that given the records of human rights violations in Kashmir and Palestine, New Delhi and Tel Aviv would definitely like to step up their brutal suppression of the innocent people by taking a leaf out of the American book. They can further damage the cause of peace in South Asia and the Middle East by launching pre-emtive attacks on regions, which they regard to be hotbeds of ‘cross-border’ terrorism. Seen from these angles, interests of long-term peace have been seriously jeopardized.

This is perhaps the only war in recent history that has created worldwide revulsion. Starting from the rift in the Security Council, other security arrangements and collective mechanisms like European Union, Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), OIC, Arab League and NATO have risen in opposition to this immoral war. The consensus among them was that the US should have used diplomatic and political means for finding a solution to the Iraq crisis. In case resort to war became necessary, it should have been sanctioned by the UNSC.

Not to be left behind, the world opinion registered the most vocal protests over the American war plans when millions of people took to the streets across the world. Among the slogans that the placards carried was “Not in my Name” written in bold letters. This slogan indicated the distancing of the people from the actions of their respective governments in Washington, London, Madrid, Canberra and Rome. The coming out of people on the streets in such large numbers against what they termed a dangerous course of action their governments were following showed their consensus on peace. Now the military action of the US has negated the very spirit of the consensus. What does this foretell can be any body’s guess.

By embarking on unilateral military action, the US will end up spawning religious fundamentalism in the Middle East and Muslim countries generally. The appeals of the militant organizations would gain strength and potency against the injustices of the US inflicted on the Muslims. As this war prolongs, the ranks of the militants would swell and they would resurface with a vengeance and perhaps more determined to take revenge on the United States and its war allies.

Enhanced threats perceptions then lead to more stringent security measures to counter these threats and these would impinge on civil liberties and basic freedoms. Countries would become virtually police states controlled by the secret agencies. The room for civil society to speak for itself would be narrowed. The emergence of such a phenomenon would be hard to contain. Secondly, there is a real danger that moderate governments across the Islamic countries may be toppled by extremist organizations with their own obscurantist agendas. By its precipitate action the US has actually presented a recipe for disaster. The calculation of loss in men and material is another aspect that needs to be considered as part the fallout of the US adventure in Iraq.

IN the end, it wasn’t the wicked French and their veto that deprived the US and Britain of a second United Nations resolution authorising them to attack Iraq; the Bush administration couldn’t even come up with a majority of ‘yes’ votes that would trigger a French veto.

But it’s a safe bet. As the bombs fall on Iraq, the Security Council will not pass a resolution condemning the US attack either. The American veto will not be needed.

The long propaganda campaign to link Saddam Hussein to the Islamist terrorists of Al Qaeda has persuaded about half the American public that there must be some connection, but it has been a purely domestic campaign based on endless naked assertions by local pundits and authority figures (including President George W. Bush) whose credibility stops at the US border. Nowhere else on the planet is this alleged linkage widely believed, so Washington was bound to find it hard to get UN support for its Iraq adventure.

The anti-French hysteria that has been whipped up by sections of the US media helps to distract American public attention from the fact that there are strong popular majorities against this war in virtually every country in the world outside the United States. If you’re busy shaking your fist against the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and renaming French fries ‘liberty fries’, you’re less likely to notice that even the few governments that back the US attack on Iraq (Britain, Spain and Italy) do so in the teeth of their own public opinion.

The war in Iraq will duly end in an American victory, but how much damage will Mr Bush’s decision to go it alone do to the UN, to America’s alliances, and to international law? Had things been worked out as well as the White House serenely expected (and Tony Blair desperately hoped), then the damage may not be all that great.

Imagine that the fighting in Iraq ends in a week, with Saddam Hussein and perhaps 10,000 other Iraqis dead — and that little of the carnage is seen by the Arab public because Washington persuades Qatar to pull the plug on al-Jazeera for the duration. There are no eruptions of violence leading to Islamist take-overs in other Arab countries, and resistance to the US occupation of Iraq doesn’t start right away.

Pigs may fly, I hear you cry, but remember that the United States is the most powerful nation in world history, run by people who are quite competent at the operational level even if the strategic direction leaves something to be desired. With sufficient thrust, as a friend of mine frequently observes, pigs fly just fine. They have real problems with aerodynamic stability, and in the end they tend to crash and burn, but that could be several years down the road from here.

The United States could get away with the conquest of Iraq without big negative side-effects, at least in the short term, in which case it can return to the UN next month, magnanimously forgive all who doubted it, and get them to do much of the dirty work of post-war reconstruction. A post-facto Security Council resolution would legalise the conquest, France and Russia would sulk for a bit, and then normal service would be resumed. Happy ending, at least for a while.

But if the fighting in Iraq takes several weeks, and the death toll climbs into the tens of thousands, and al-Jazeera stays on the air, then there could be calamitous upheavals elsewhere in the Arab world and a much grimmer start to the US occupation of Iraq. As American casualties mount and the whole enterprise turns sour, the natural response of the Bush administration would be to blame it all on the perfidious foreigners who sabotaged the US crusade — which could have profoundly negative consequences for the UN and NATO.

Nobody would miss NATO all that much, but wrecking the UN would be a very different matter. For all its flaws, the United Nations is a serious attempt to substitute the rule of law for the age-old rule of the strong as a way of running the world. That attempt is now several generations old, and it has made as much progress as you could hope for in the first half-century.

However, it would not survive the defection of the United States, so Washington must be persuaded to remain an active UN member even if it spins out for a while. This doesn’t mean that everyone else must adopt the Bush administration’s view that the UN has ‘failed’ whenever it does not agree with current US policy — but if things go badly wrong for the US in Iraq, what will be needed is not scorn and recrimination but sympathy and understanding. Somehow or other, America must be kept in the system.— Copyright

THE cold war was any day better. It gave us peace for 60 years. Communist and non-communist blocs growled at each other. They barked but never bit.They did not stray beyond the line they had drawn between themselves.

What kept the two sides within their pen was their healthy respect for the opponent’s capability to retaliate. The end of the cold war or, for that matter, the break-up of the Soviet Union, not just ended the delicately poised international balance. It also left America all powerful and without any challenge. The multipolar world became unipolar.

The situation provided Washington the best of opportunities to cast off dictatorships for which it had worked and to build up democracies in favour of which it had preached. It could have meant an era where the big and the small, the strong and the weak, could have felt the glow of freedom and fraternity.

The passage of time has, however, shown that America’s sights were limited to demolishing the communist world, not so much for ideological reasons as for personal aggrandizement. Washington has not risen to the standard it was expected to attain. The talk of democracy has turned out to be only the means to remove the opposition, not to achieve the end of having a fully free world. One is the god that failed. The other has become the god itself.

It is wrong to assume that the attack by terrorists in New York and Washington in September 2001 hardened America’s tone and tenor. It was already acting as a tough and self-righteous country. The attack gave it a justification to suppress dissent, opposition or what it did not like in any part of the world. Increasingly, the US was seen trying to cure the symptom — terrorism — and not the disease — the grievance. Through economic, political and social ties it could have made nations more independent and more viable. But it was no do-gooder. It wanted the different countries to realize that America — America alone — counted in the world.

Never did one suspect that in its battle for supremacy America would one day supplant the United Nations itself. Whether other nations, including “his master’s voice” Britain, would allow Washington to “reform” the body is in the realm of conjecture. But America has struck the first blow — going to war without the backing of the international community. Sensing an opposition in he Security Council, not expecting to get even the majority of non-veto members on its side, America took the law into its own hands. It became the “arbiter,” without any UN sanctions and it decided to attack Iraq.

One does not have to go back to the example of the League of Nations, which collapsed after Japan’s aggression. The UN can go the same way. In the full gaze of publicity, America positioned troops long before the UN inspectors gave even their preliminary report on the possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein.

It became apparent that President Bush had decided to intervene whatever the reports. For him, the Security Council was meant only to endorse what he or, for that matter, America had demanded: the disarming of Iraq. If people are not too optimistic about the future of the UN it is understandable. Bush wants the US to be synonymous with the UN.

Still one grey lining in the dark clouds is the transparency with regard to America’s move. Nothing is hidden from the public. There is no hedging. There is no apology. The UN has been pushed into the background in broad daylight. Both the Congress and the Senate of America and the British parliament have endorsed the war. It is not only unfortunate but revolting. The two leading democracies have laid down the rules for settling international disputes in the future: if the UN does not toe the US line, ignore the UN.

There has never been any illusion about Saddam. He is a ruthless dictator who does not bother about human rights and democracy. That he has been able to bring Bush and Tony Blair to his level is not a mean achievement.

Like them, he too will go down in history as a person who created confusion among his accusers and made them equally irresponsible. Could they not wait even for a month for the UN inspectors’ categorical report? Why were Bush and Blair in such a hurry? Heavens would not have fallen if they had waited for the procedure of obtaining the UN sanctions to come to an end.

It is surmised that the Islamic world will be infuriated. Some Muslim leaders have the knack of giving a religious tinge to every problem concerning Muslims. The problem of war and peace affects the entire humanity. The credibility as well as the durability of the UN concerns all, not the Muslims alone. The world has to have an order which reflects consensus, not conflict. America and Britain have thrown the dictum to the wind. They have done worse: they have thrown down the gauntlet to all the democracies in the world. It is for them to pick it up.

New Delhi has done well to describe the war “unjustifiable” and “unavoidable.” This is in line with what Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has said in parliament that any unilateral action by America would be suspect. India cannot afford to stop at that. It should mobilize NAM countries to throw their weight behind the side for peace, along with Russia, Germany, France and China.

In fact, it is difficult to discern the reasons for lack of protest in India. A few, small meetings have taken place to criticize America but those too at the prodding of activists. The fervour and passion shown by the people in the West — they came on the streets in hundreds of thousands — is missing. Not raising their voice against injustice is not the ethos of our nation. Probably, this sums up the achievement of the BJP-led government that has completed five years in the saddle.

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.

FOR the past three centuries the basic unit of the world system has been the nation state. But this global system is itself changing. Of all the present members of the United Nations roughly a third are now threatened by significant rebel movements, dissidents or governments in exile.

While poets of present-day world write national anthems, poets and intellectuals of tomorrow have started singing the virtues of a borderless world. Would this clash of two different approaches provoke bloodshed in the years to come? Is it true that massive changes in society cannot occur without conflict?

The very concept of national security reflects an emphasis on peace and security at the level of nations, as distinct from peace within nations. The growing interdependence of the world mainly as a result of developments in transportation, communications, data processing and energy technology has opened great new opportunities for humanity, but it has also made the world more complex and vulnerable.

Today the world faces a threat of violence all around, including possibilities of war. Innocents of tomorrow will both kill and die for reasons they will not understand. Huge demonstrations throughout the world have given a clear verdict against war as a means to solve problems, including that of Iraq. President Bush however continues to dismiss anti-war sentiments and has opted to go to war with Iraq without the authorization of the United Nations. He was not prepared to accept the rejection of a draft resolution authorizing military action against Iraq in the Security Council. The US is, in fact, threatening to weaken the UN if it does not toe the US line.

In these circumstances, we need a world ruled by law with the UN as its cardinal pillar. But it should be so organized and empowered as to manage and resolve the prevailing conflicts and tensions satisfactorily. The United Nations more or less remained paralyzed during the cold war years. It is in a state of coma when the nation state is becoming less important in the global order.

The old tools of diplomacy are proving obsolete, along with the UN and many other international institutions. This is because the UN remains what it originally was, a club of nation states. Unless it is dramatically restructured in many ways, the UN will have little role to play in world affairs. If not restructured and strengthened, it will crumble into irrelevance. It is now clear that the US-Soviet nuclear stalemate actually served to stabilize the world after the 1950s. Now that the Soviet Union has become a shattered memory, the two-sided military structure imposed on the world has crumbled. The response to this break-up of the cold war framework was a bad case of ecstasy. This was not the first time that a runaway optimism resulted. The First World War was considered the war to end all wars. In 1928 Henry Ford announced that people were becoming too intelligent ever to have another big war.

Another American, Herbert Hoover, declared that this objective was that all tanks, chemical warfare weapons, all large mobile guns, all bombing planes should be abolished. Seven years later World War II, the most destructive war in history, erupted. It ended with the atomic horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United Nations was formed and once again the world basked briefly in the illusion that lasting peace was at hand.

The past and present organizations to enhance global security, like the League of Nations and the United Nations, came in the wake of the trauma of great wars. These organizations may have brought some improvements in international affairs, but they have not been able to fully guarantee a secure and just global order. It is therefore important to engage in a global dialogue about what further measures are required to ensure global peace and security. Strengthening and security. Strengthening and expanding the United Nations can only work with global agreement.

As it is, the UN General Assembly is currently limited to passing non-binding resolutions. Unless it develops into a legislative body with powers to pass universally binding laws, it will remain a debating club. For a starter, representation to the UN should be proportional to each member state’s population. This suggests the conversion of the into an organization consisting of representatives proportional to each member country’s population, with at least one seat guaranteed for each small country. It may be worthwhile to explore the creation of a specialized branch of the UN solely for seeking to resolve conflicts through mediation before they descend into armed hostilities.

The UN Security Council has the task of maintaining peace by hearing complaints from countries that have suffered aggression and, if deemed appropriate, by authorizing an international peace-keeping force to repel aggression. The Security Council should have equal representation from each country.

Let us now consider the role of the UN for peace-keeping. The cause of peace would be better served if the UN had its own, permanent, all-purpose military arm, rather than raising such a force as and when necessary. If a standing UN peace-keeping force was prepared to defend any country under attack, this could reduce the need for large national military forces at enormous costs. If a UN peace-keeping force consists of individually recruited members, rather than national contingents dispatched by governments on requests, their primary loyalty will be to the UN. It could help protect countries against aggression, maintain ceasefires in force and also help protect lives in case of natural disasters. Disaster relief organization of UN at present does not have its own standing operational units.

To prevent war, more effective and comprehensive international law is needed. One area where the extension of international law enforcement could prove immensely useful is terrorism through a special international tribunal to deal with the problem. No government officially advocates terrorism. As such, an agreement on the establishment of such a tribunal should be relatively easy.

However, to combat terrorism it is necessary to deal with the causes of terrorism and not with its symptoms only. This means tackling the underlying causes by redressing grievances that breed terrorism. It is important to explore the conditions that drive people to desperation. Where they have no option but to adopt violence as a mode of action or a form of protest.

All countries seek to protect their citizens. They need energy, food, capital and access to sea and air transport. But beyond these their needs diverge. The growing collective organism, no longer strongly tethered to a nation state, represents a crucial element in tomorrow’s global system. Maintaining peace requires more than being ready to defend in case of aggression. We must build fireproof structures, not only to fight fires but to reduce the need for fire-fighting.

The writer is a retired major-general of the Pakistan army

E-mail: genumar@yahoo.com