1958 coup in the light of British papers

THE British Papers — secret and confidential documents relating to the Ayub Khan era in Pakistan, 1958-69 — are now available in Pakistan. Thanks to Roedad Khan’s commendable labour of love, he has selected and complied them for publication. Dr Humayun Khan has contributed an admirable introduction to the volume.

Here I propose to discuss how the October, 1958, coup was seen and commented upon by the British government and its diplomatic representatives in Pakistan. President Iskander Mirza and General Ayub Khan did not take any clearance for their plan from the British as they did from the Americans.

In comparison with the American attitude to the 1958 coup, the British attitude was distinctly different. Actually, the high commissioner, in his despatch of August 23, after referring to his conversations with President Mirza, surmised: “I think it is fairly clear that he intends to let matters run on until the elections. But he told me frankly that if the elections returns showed that a post-elected govt was likely to be dominated by undesirable elements (he did not define ‘undesirability’ for this purpose and no doubt the term may include any persons who are unlikely to vote for Iskander Mirza as president), he would himself intervene...but whether by that time he would be in a position to assert himself decisively is, I think, another matter.”

This apprehension is based on his other remark: “One or two indications, which had reached me in the last few days tend to confirm my earlier impression that president’s standing with the army is not as high as it was.”

The high commissioner’s impression that the president would let matters run on until the elections turned out to be incorrect but the impression that the president’s standing with the army was no longer as high as before turned out to be correct because he was not in a position to assert himself even 20 days after the coup he had engineered in collaboration with Gen Ayub Khan, the army chief.

It was after “a long and very disturbing discussion” with the president on September 26 that the high commissioner changed his mind. In his despatch of September 27, he reports: “The president if he can help it will not allow elections to be held, and he has in mind a personal coup with army support.”

So it was on September 26, just 11 days before the coup, that President Mirza informed the British high commissioner of his intention. His collaborator Ayub Khan, under his instructions had secured American support for it some five months earlier.

In the same despatch the high commissioner quotes President Mirza as saying: “Democracy will not work in Pakistan at this stage — elections would do no good.... the constitution was really quite unworkable”, and adds that he could not debate with him on this subject but he “did point out to him the very widespread nature of the demand for elections. In the president’s eyes, this was irrelevant. He obviously sees himself as the saviour of Pakistan and he said that the question of his personal interests does not enter into it... In fact, this seems to me something rather less than truth...I suspect he ...equates the future welfare of Pakistan with the continuation and increase of his own personal power.

The illusion of being a ‘saviour’ has been a part of the mindset of all our military rulers. It is a kind of defence mechanism, which they evolve to sustain and perpetuate their rule.

In his despatch of September 29 the high commissioner refers to the president’s proposed action and says: “My own recommendation would be that we should give no, repeat no, indication nor should we offer him any advice one way or the other.” The Commonwealth Relations Office confirmed that the prime minister “entirely agrees” with his recommendation. So the British adopted a non-committal attitude to the coup proposed by President Mirza. They did not ‘deter’ him nor did they give him ‘green signal’ as did the Americans.

The British chancellor of exchequer who visited Pakistan and had a meeting with President Iskander Mirza on October 5 was the first British official to take a positive stand. When told by the president that “parliamentary democracy under the present constitution had failed”, he observed: “We should hope that in any action the president might find it necessary to take he would act as far as he could within the constitution and find a way of returning to some form of parliamentary government as soon as it could be done.”

In his despatch of October 7, the high commissioner mentions that President Mirza told him that he would declare martial law the following day and adds: “When I expressed hope that his proposed action will be within constitution he said bluntly that constitution would be scrapped.” At this stage the Commonwealth Relations Office also instructed the high commissioner that if he alone were to be sent for by the president he should use this “opportunity for urging more forcefully the desirability of keeping within the spirit and letter of the constitution if at all possible.”

In his despatch of October 8 the high commissioner, referring to his meeting with the president along with his other diplomatic colleagues, at which President Mirza outlined his proposed action, indicates that he did make the point as instructed by the CRO but adds: “It was clearly impossible for me to express any hope that he would act as far as possible within the constitution. The president told me afterwards that he understood and appreciated what he interpreted as the critical standpoint I had adopted towards his move. “

Call it what you will, whether it was for form’s sake or as Dr Humayun Khan says, their “lip service to democracy and constitutional propriety,” it is a matter of record that unlike the Americans who made no reference to it, the British until the last kept on telling the president to follow the constitution, which the President Mirza interpreted as their “critical standpoint”.

As indicated, the high commissioner in one of his earlier meetings had called the President’s attention the widespread demand for election which he thought was ‘irrelevant’. The Americans, on the other hand, according to Ayub Khan readily agreed to abandon the idea.

In his despatch of October 9 the high commissioner sums up the post-coup situation: “The President and Ayub: They appear to be working together well. But Ayub as supreme commander is in effective control of armed forces, which are the regime’s only sanction... at present he is finding his feet but when he does so and understands more clearly the power of his command and the opportunity before him, the strain on his loyalty to the president might be put to the test, especially if the two differed sharply on matters of importance.”

The strain on Ayub’s loyalty to President Mirza was put to the test in no more than 20 days after the coup when he decided to oust Mirza and become President himself.

About the martial law of 1958, Humayun Khan, in his introduction, correctly asserts: “There was no imminent crisis which necessitated such a drastic step. The claim that it was necessary to prevent the destruction of the country had no factual basis. It was in reality the implementation of a philosophy to which a handful of self-appointed guardians subscribed.” He also makes a perceptive assessment of Ayub Khan’s rule by pointing out his positive and negative contributions, the more serious among the latter being: “He injected into the political bloodstream the dangerous doctrine that the armed forces were the ultimate trustees of the nation’s destiny. That doctrine, which in its essence is mutinous, continues to hover over Pakistan to this day. Ayub Khan also sowed the seeds of iniquitous economic disparities. He failed to anticipate the complexities of unifying a country with two parts so culturally and geographically distant... he led Pakistan to a needless war”.

Humayun Khan could have justifiably added that in East Pakistan Ayub also sowed the seeds of alienation resulting eventually in separation first by abrogating the 1956 constitution which had been agreed upon by the leaders of East and West Pakistan and later by leading the country into a needless war, which, according to Dr Humayun Khan, gave East Pakistanis “convincing proof that West Pakistan was not in the least concerned with the security of their homeland.”

Humayun Khan goes on to state that Ayub’s “ultimate political bequest to the nation, unintended though it was, turned out to be Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he nurtured for eight years without detecting his flaws. It was only...in 1969 that in a private conversation, Ayub expressed the view that if Bhutto was not stopped, he would dismantle the country.”

Ayub’s real bequest was not Bhutto, but Yahya Khan, Commander-in-Chief of the army, whom he nominated as his successor in violation of his own constitution, calling upon him to fulfil his ‘constitutional responsibilities’ — a statement which the British high commissioner found “difficult to reconcile with the terms of the constitution”. Humayun Khan has called it an “astonishingly contradictory claim”. In any case, Yahya on assuming power abrogated the constitution and declared martial law.

Ayub had a high opinion of Yahya. In his despatch of April 9, 1969, the high commissioner reports: “Field Marshal Ayub earnestly commended President Yahya to us. He said that he was a sound and cautious man who could be trusted.”

As for Yahya being trustworthy, Ayub should have known better considering how he manoeuvred Ayub’s ouster as president and his treatment of him afterwards. Yahya did not prove to be either sound of judgment or cautious in action vis-a-vis the crisis situation in East Pakistan, where he resorted to army action, which eventually resulted in dismantling the country. Bhutto came to power afterwards, in the remaining Pakistan, as the elected leader of the single largest party.

Humayun Khan says Ayub nurtured Bhutto for eight years without detecting his flaws. Ayub did not detect Yahya’s flaws who had served with him as his junior in the army for many more years. It seems Ayub was neither a good judge of men nor of affairs considering his negative contributions as listed by Humayun Khan.

Focus on investment

THE people of Pakistan want the increasing macro-economic stability of the country reflected in positive improvements in the domestic economic sector. The officials accuse them of being too impatient; but the people have seen many a slip between the cup and the lip, particularly in the economic sector.

The promises and initial success of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto in this regard and what followed thereafter are bitter memories for them. And the increasing poverty in the country in the 1990s is a painful reminder.

The fact is that a plenty of money is coming into the country as stepped-up aid and debt relief. Overseas Pakistanis are also sending more and more money and the target for the current year has been raised from the one billion dollars to four billion dollars. Banks have plenty of money to lend to credible borrowers. Still the people find bank loans are not easy to get and the interest rates, through much reduced, are high to risk as investment capital.

Above all, employment has become too scarce. On one side hundreds or thousands of persons apply for each job available, and on the other too many young men kill themselves after prolonged periods of unemployment.

The country needs many large projects and far more small projects. It needs as many of the sick mills as possible to be revived and expanded. it needs thousands of micro-enterprises. Along with that all, the demand for the goods they produce has to be promoted by putting more money into the hands of people in a rational manner. Otherwise such small enterprises can fail.

In fact, the large projects are ready: they have been ready for a long time now and the country needs them. But the funds are not available or have not been provided to them because of our topsy turvy priorities. Foreign aid funds, too, are available if we have the right projects and reasonable matching local funds. What we need to do is get going with the right mix.

In such a context President Pervez Musharraf has appointed Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, a World Bank privatization specialist and former Sindh finance minister, as Advisor to the P.M. on investment and privatization. And he has set up a task force to promote domestic and foreign investment. The task force has been split into three groups with bases in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. The task force will make recommendations on four aspects of the problem. 1. Investment policies. 2. Facilitation, 3. Investment promotion 4. How to improve the country’s image in the world. They are to submit their reports by the first week of February.

After the receipt of the group’s reports differences in their recommendations would have to be reconciled and a uniform policy evolved. Thereafter the views of the ministries of finance economic affairs, industries and commerce will have to be obtained along with the comments of the Planning Commission and a final policy formulated.

The views of trade and industry, particularly the investors to come on the “concerted and solid ideas” to be proposed by the task force would also matter.

Meanwhile Mr Shaikh is not helping himself or the country by asserting that “we have done nothing in the past to attract domestic and foreign investment in the country.” He ought to be more realistic instead of following the tradition of debunking the predecessors.

The new ministers and others are, meanwhile, coming up with new, bold ideas for promoting investment and development. The most articulate among them, always ready with a new idea, is commerce minister Humayun Akhtar. He has welcomed the demand for no tax on imported machinery and import of second hand machinery which is abundant in the world.

He has now come up with the suggestion of Special Economic Zones in preference to Export Processing Zones which have become outdated and unpopular, he says. Ever since the days of Nawaz Sharif for the first time in the early 1990s, various moves have been made to develop such special zones for investment, but without notable success. Gadoon Amazai industrial estate set up in the Frontier in the days of Benazir Bhutto, too, has been more of a failure as the very liberal concessions promised could not be delivered. So what kind of headway can the new special economic zones make remains to be seen.

The State Bank of Pakistan is reported to be moving towards providing foreign exchange loans to investors from the large foreign exchange reserves of 9.5 billion dollars. Those loans will be cheap compared to rupee loans for investment. But they can be had largely for large-scale industries importing machinery and not for modest enterprises. A clear policy in this area is yet to emerge.

Mr Humayun Akhtar talks of developing abundant infrastructure and creation of a special infrastructure fund apart from the Pakistan Social Development Fund. He says plenty of external assistance can be available for such a fund, right upto 90 per cent of the project cost.

There is demand for cheaper loans instead of the current scramble among the banks, including foreign banks, for consumer banking. The investors want cheap long-term investment loans. And that has to carry a single digit interest rate instead of the current double digit interest rates.

Mr Akhtar wants the power and water used by the industries free of taxation. In fact, he wants the production and export sectors free of taxation altogether so that both can grow fast. None of them is a very new suggestions. In fact, over the years various good suggestions have been made, and sometimes accepted in principle by the government. Thereafter they had made little headway. Why?

Is that the result of bureaucratic obstructor? Or has the Central Board of Revenue and the finance ministry as a whole stood in the way? Or have the IMF and the World Bank always advocated a policy of slow progress, while the population went on exploding and demanded radical policies, including a check on the population growth?

Will Shaukat Aziz agree to the varied radical proposals of the commerce minister who is determined to make his mark on the economy? He is always preoccupied with the problem of balancing the budget. And the IMF is breathing down his neck all the time to make him do that, save minor concessions here and there.

The Asian Development Bank has come up with an aid package of 2.4 billion dollars spread over three years, and 800 million dollars in the current year. The people want to see visible change in their life as a result of such aid, which is matched by the World Bank as well. But the debt servicing and defence outlay are taking away most of the revenues of the government.

Shaukat Aziz would like to do something radical for the country after achieving substantial progress in the macro-economic sector. But his hands are tied as long as the country depends on more and more aid for development on one side and poverty reduction on the other, along with promoting social sector development in the middle.

So it may not be easy to make the kind of fiscal or monetary concessions which Mr Humayun Akhtar suggests. But without real relief and on an assured long-term basis, enough investment may not come. Through the old one-step-forward and one-step backward shuffle, we may make hardly any economic or social progress for all the happy noises we hear now.

Meanwhile what happened in Sui, the repeated blowing up of the gas mains, underscores the primitive conditions in which vital sectors of our political and economic system operate. Those who blew up the pipeline have done considerable damage to the industries in the north, particularly in Faisalabad and they have also lent credence to the Indian arguments that a gas pipeline from Iran passing through Pakistan to India is exposed to such hazards even if the Pakistan government is committed to protect the pipeline.

What was too unfortunate was the pipeline in the Sui region was blown up at a time when the Iranian President was visiting India and trying hurd to sell the project of the pipeline from Iran passing through Pakistan to India. Pakistanis have been talking glibly of a 500 million dollars rental for the pipeline. But the kind of developments which took place in Sui and the lasting tribal tensions in the region make such dreams rather vacuous. It is also an adverse signal to foreign investors who do take such factors into account before making investment decisions.

Meanwhile far more has to be done to promote small and medium enterprises. The micro-enterprises should also be promoted on a large scale instead of an excessive caution restraining that too much.

The fact is the conventional approach to investment will not do. It was one thing to make investment using imported machinery at Rs 5 or Rs 10 to a dollar and quite another to do the same at Rs 58 per dollar, after the rupee has come up from Rs. 67 to a dollar. The rupee cost of investment has also shot up due to sustained and prolonged inflation. A bag of cement now costs as much as ten times the Rs. 25 per bag it cost 20 years ago. And when to add to that there is taxation on the machinery imported and on the materials used for building the factories the burden on the investor is heavy. He borrows heavily from the banks and when the tide turns he defaults in repaying the bank.

The cost of production is made still higher by the high cost of the basic inputs, like water and power. Too many investors have to make additional investment to have their own power supply. And tanker water adds to the cost of the industries.

If to add to that the infrastructure is inadequate, and lawlessness is on the rise, the cost of production rises further. The security cost of the industries is constantly rising, while not always insuring the security sought.

It has by now become clear to the government that if the domestic investment does not come forward, foreign investment may not come in reasonable measure. Hence the task force is to give particular attention to domestic investment.

What matters is how much of a departure we make from past policies and make the path of investment easy and cheap. And how much the new policies make the genuine investors come forward to make large investments?

National security vs scoops

MORAL certitude aside, should a hard-nosed writer embrace as gospel truth what the American mainstream media oozes out about his country and announce it to much hoopla back home without commenting and analyzing it or should he challenge its contents to present a fair and balanced view? That there are always three sides to a story: your story, their story and the real story goes without saying.

Why then call the leaked exposes “investigative” that are revved up in screaming headlines anchored to the national security interests of, say, Pakistan, India or even America? Lately, The Los Angeles Times imploded with facts alleging Pakistan helping North Korea with its nuke programme and accusing Dr A.Q. Khan as the facilitator.

When the story broke, US-based Indian and Pakistani reporters routinely reported the contents back home while some South Asian Internet and E-mail discussion forums reflexively designated the Pakistani nuclear scientist as the punching bag. As was expected, the Indians salivated at such a ‘scoop’ dropping right in the middle of their laps giving grist to the Indian lobby on Capitol Hill to demand sanctions against Pakistan. Oddly, a New-York based Pakistani forum hosted by well-heeled but self-righteous liberals repeated the Indian encore by pouring yet more scorn on President Musharraf.

Pummelling the army properly, the forum moderator wryly commented: “I have no idea why “patriotism” and “nuclearized Pakistan” go together. In any case the whole concept of “patriotism”, which conservatives all over the world appear to hijack as their cause celebre (and we know whose last refuge that is) has an easy answer: The army remains the first cause of wrecking disaster on Pakistan.”

However, another New York-based think tank that executes strategies for engaging the American media and the US government in a more informed and educated view of Pakistan, known as the Association of Pakistani Professionals (AOPP) riposted to drown out the sanctimonious chatter eddying among Indians and Pakistanis, who wanted Pakistan’s national security compromised.

India was next on The Los Angeles Times hit list. The world woke up recently to the news of an Indian firm having sold chemicals to Iraq over the last four years to produce or deliver weapons of mass destruction. New Delhi’s abysmal failure in its export controls stood roundly exposed. But shielding India, the Bush administration’s go-soft approach was clearly evident despite, the State Department imposing sanctions against the company’s founder, Hans Raj Shiv, making him the first and only person cited under the Iran-Iraq Arms Nonproliferation Act of 1992. The soporific Pakistanis failed to seize this damning evidence, while the American media let it go, much to the relief of the Indians.

Is this not aiding and abetting terrorism at its starkest? Yet not a squeal from the self-appointed custodians of Pakistan here who are too busy flagellating their own army and its chief to take note of what mischief India has up its sleeve against Islamabad in the months to come.

Meanwhile, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who writes on the failure of US intelligence and American policy toward Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, has handed Indians a composite of newly invented body of evidence incriminating A.Q. Khan and Islamabad. In The New Yorker issue of January 27, Hersh quotes CIA sources on Pakistan “helping North Korea build the bomb.”

Interestingly, a heft of Hersh’s conclusions spring from his two Pakistani sources: an unnamed “former senior Pakistani official” and “a Web-based Pakistani-exile newspaper opposed to the Musharraf government”. Sums up Hersh, “Right now Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world” and “if we’re incinerated next week, it’ll be because of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) that was given to Al Qaeda by Pakistan.”

The Editor of Jane’s Intelligence Digest London, Eric Margolis has dismissed the story as “biased” and “not credible”. He says the CIA, because of its human intelligence resources, relies heavily on foreign intelligence services, particularly India’s RAW intelligence service and Israel’s Mossad. Was Seymour Hersh suborned by his Pakistani and CIA sources?

When it comes to America’s own security issues, its skittish mainstream media, renowned for journalistic high jinks, shuck off the sensitive bits and pound on the banal. Take the case of the intelligence machismo Scott Ritter, former UN arms inspector, who has proved to be a one-man demolition squad for Bush on Iraq. Well, finally the spooks have found a way to shut the loudmouth forever: they have dug up a two-year-old sexual misdemeanour charge against Ritter where he had solicited a sixteen-year old girl for sex over the Internet. Although the case was sealed off, it has now been leaked to the media and properly publicized to the world at large. Ritter’s face has fallen and his tongue is tied.

Russ Baker, an award-winning journalist covering media and politics, gives us a helicopter view of what the foreign journalists think of American media. Quoting Serbian journalists who had just returned from the United States where, on the invitation of the US government, they were able to observe ‘freedom of the press’ at work. To them it comprised the Bush administration’s stirring up of patriotic fervour around security issues which was “unpleasantly reminiscent of the way Slobodan Milosevic incited nationalist sentiment among the Serbs”.

The media here is manipulated by the establishment and it has to play by its rules. The leaks provided by the State Department or other powerful agencies on Pakistan and India appear alternately in their national press — more like a “media calendar” where various themes/concepts are rolled out to coral the two.

The problem begins when our press faithfully reproduces these leaks without reservation or comment. For all the negative reportage on Dr A.Q. Khan, did anyone consider the question: what would Pakistan’s position be today without a nuclear deterrent? When India had a million troops on our border, would they have tamely retreated as they have done?

E-mail: anjumniazusa@yahoo.com

The euro’s future

“I WANT the whole of Europe to have one currency,” said the Emperor Napoleon in 1807. “It will make trading much easier.” A year ago his dream came true, more or less, and it didn’t even take a conquest to make it happen. But where does the euro go from here?

The simple answer is out and up. It spreads outwards from the existing twelve countries that abandoned their old marks, francs and drachmas for the euro last year to one or more of the three hold-outs among the existing European Union members, Sweden, Denmark and the United Kingdom, and then on to the twelve new countries scheduled to join within the next five years. And it goes back up in value from the rock-bottom $US 0.90 it hit last year towards the $1.17 it was worth when it was launched. (It’s currently at $1.04.)

The euro is not yet much loved by those who use it. There is a widespread perception that retailers used the change-over in currencies as an excuse to hike their prices — and of course they did. The overall inflation rate in the euro countries doesn’t show a big jump, so the economists deny that it happened, but in a number of everyday consumer items from newspapers to beer there was a cynical ‘rounding up’ of prices that raised their cost between 3 and 8 percent.

The experts still promise that in the long run the new ‘transparency’ of prices across the euro-zone means that they will eventually converge towards the cheaper end of the spectrum. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but there’s no going back to the old currencies anyway.

The real question (which is almost never discussed in front of the children) is how long it will take the euro-zone countries to give up enough of their sovereign independence to ensure the euro’s long-term survival. As it is currently run, the euro would be unlikely to weather a really major international crisis, and most insiders know it.

The problem with any currency union is that you have to impose one-size-fits-all monetary policies on quite diverse economies. For example, Germany’s high unemployment and low growth call for low interest rates and deficit spending at the moment, to get its economy moving again. Ireland, with low unemployment and high inflation, needs exactly the opposite to cool its economy down. But the new European Central Bank must set the same interest rate for Ireland, Germany and all the other euro-zone countries.

Even deficit spending is strictly controlled by the European Stability and Growth Pact, which tries to safeguard the euro’s credibility by imposing heavy fines on any government whose budget deficit exceeds 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product. One size really does have to fit all — and that can be very hard on some.

To be fair, any federation has to cope with these regional differentials while maintaining a single finance policy at the national level. The resulting problems are usually smoothed out by internal migration from poor areas to flourishing ones, and perhaps also by direct transfers of funds. The EU’s problem is that internal migration is hampered by linguistic and cultural barriers, and the EU’s common budget is not nearly big enough to transfer resources between member countries on a meaningful scale.

So the problems of economic divergence fester even in good times, and threaten the survival of the currency in bad times. Currency unions that are not backed by a single, strong central authority tend to founder when the going gets rough, and it sometimes does. There were at least six events in 20th-century history — the First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression, the Russian and Nazi revolutions, and the ‘73 oil embargo — that the euro in its present form would be unlikely to survive.—Copyright

The real threat to world peace

TIME magazine Europe asked its readers what nation posed the greatest threat to world peace. Of the 268,000 respondents (as of this writing): 7.8 per cent replied North Korea; 8.9 per cent named Iraq; and a shocking 83.3 per cent said the United States. Good work President Bush.

The Time poll mirrors feeling around the globe, with the exception of Israel and Britain. American neo-conservatives, however, will dismiss this poll as just another example of European wimpiness, irrelevance, and anti-American prejudice. So will Bush and his hawkish entourage, who have made plain they don’t care what the rest of the world thinks so long as America and Israel get their way.

A few days ago, France’s able foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, warned his nation would delay, or might even veto, efforts by the Bush administration to strong-arm the Security Council into a rushed war vote against Iraq. Germany, China, and Russia backed France.

American right-wingers harbour particular venom for France. Americans expect their allies to be obedient. While Washington constantly hectors Europe to take more international responsibility, Europeans are not expected to disagree with American policy. To Americans, France often appears downright insubordinate. Ever since General De Gaulle, Paris has refused to take orders from, or accept being a junior ally of, the US.

Europeans see the Mideast very differently from North Americans, thanks to their long experience in the region, and their media, which provides far more accurate, balanced and diverse reporting on the region than North America’s.

Americans accuse the French of arrogance, rudeness and illusions of grandeur, which is often true. French rightly accuse American politicians — epitomized for Europeans by President George Bush — of being arrogant and ignorant, as well as loud, uncultured, impatient, and dreadfully lacking in those two fundamentals of civilized education, geography and history. French intellectuals warn US TV and movies are spreading ‘cretinization’ to Europe’s youth, a charge easily confirmed by an evening’s viewing of North American TV.

American neo-conservatives know Europeans sneer at them as dangerous ideological crackpots, the 2003 version of 1930s’ militant Marxists. The neo-conservatives’ riposte (oops, a French word) ‘we saved you in two world wars. Now we have to do it again. You’re no better than those wimpy, socialist Canadians.’

These chest-thumpers are unaware that without France’s military intervention in the War of Independence, there would be no United States. Or that Germany was effectively defeated in 1917 by Britain and France when the US foolishly intervened, thus preventing a fair, negotiated peace that would have prevented the evil Versailles Treaty, the Bolshevik Revolution, Adolf Hitler, and World War II.

Most Americans believe their nation alone defeated Germany in World War II. Not so. Stalin’s Soviet Union defeated the Third Reich, destroying 100 German divisions in titanic battles on the eastern front that made D-Day seem a minor battle. By the time US forces landed in Europe, Germany was almost defeated, without a navy, air force or oil.

Smirking Gallophobes love to revile French for being faint-hearted fighters in World War II. But France lost 210,000 dead fighting the mighty Germans. The Maginot Line worked as planned, contrary to popular belief. America’s great fortress, Corregidor, failed miserably .

America lost 292,000 dead in the war, including both European and Pacific Theatres, where the US totally and brilliantly defeated Japan. Poland lost more soldiers than America, 320,000; even unwarlike Romania lost 300,000 men.

Europe, including the USSR, lost at least 13 million soldiers and 25 million civilians killed in World War II. When Russia open its secret files, the numbers may soar. ‘Wimpish’ Europeans know something more than Americana about the cost of war. Take the damage of 9/11 and multiply it 1,500 times and you get a taste of the devastation caused by World War II.

Europeans still have fresh memories of their brutal, futile colonial wars. America, about to embark in Iraq on its first large-scale colonial adventure since it annexed Cuba and the Philippines in 1899, has forgotten, and seems fated to relearn, the cost of empire.

By and large, Europeans like and admire Americans, as do most people around the globe. There are some chronic America haters in Britain and France, to be sure, on both right and left, but in general Europeans are opposed to the unilateralist, aggressive policies of the Bush White House, not to America. But it is also plain, Bush’s thirst for war and oil are creating strong new strains of anti-Americanism.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration, obsessed to the point of psychosis with Iraq, refuses to heed the cautions of its old European friends, listening only to the exhortations of Israel’s far right wing, whose American supporters now dominate the Pentagon and National Security Council.

President Bush claims he is about to wage war for America’s security. But the rest of the world scoffs at this claim, knowing his true objective is oil. By generating ever increasing antipathy towards the US, the Goliath-like Bush administration is actually undermining the security of the United States and of Americans abroad.—Copyright Eric S. Margolis, 2003