AN EMPTY VESSEL
British Prime Minister Tony Blair set out to underpin the Coalition Against Terror in a speech to his own Labour Party conference on Wednesday. Blair's speech was notable for its ambitious sweep. The Coalition was not only going to beat the terrorists, but it would also go on to rebuild Afghanistan, before solving the conflict in the Middle East, ending the war in the Congo, the problem of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and reversing global warming. British weekly the Spectator noted that since Blair had failed in his promises to reform Britain's schools and hospitals, his ambitions for the world seemed somewhat inflated.
The personally written speech was designed to reverse the judgement that Blair's 'Third Way' project lacked moral purpose. But in his enthusiasm to provide a vision, Blair merely substituted wishful thinking for a real programme of action. Though Blair's speech drew the cynics' fire, it is not absurd to think that most of the world's problems are susceptible to solutions. It is less plausible that Blair has those solutions.
British commentators have worried that Tony Blair was offering the American president a blank cheque made out to the Coalition Against Terror. But it is President Bush who will be studying the fine print of Blair's speech and asking himself when he signed up to a programme that begins with state-building in Afghanistan - already discounted by Secretary of State Powell - and culminates in the resurrection of the Kyoto summit on climate change - which Bush rejected on taking office. The Coalition on Terror is turning out to be all things to all people, and the real struggle is not against terror, but to shape the Coalition's aims.
WHAT CAUSED THE WORLD TRADE CENTER HIJACKING?
Western commentators continue to speculate on the causes of the World Trade Center/Pentagon hijacking. The question itself reveals a guilty self-loathing on the part of the West: it suggests that the hijack attack was a response to the West's policy in the Middle East. While visiting Iran, the British foreign secretary Jack Straw suggested that the conflict in Palestine was a source of anti-Western feeling. There is no doubt that America and its allies have a great deal to feel guilty about in the Middle East. In addition to the sustained oppression of the Palestinians, they have waged decades of low-intensity warfare against Lebanon and Iran, and tormented the people of Iraq. But the perception that the Arab and Islamic masses are on the verge of rising up against the West says more about the preoccupations of Western leaders than it does about the actual state of popular anti-Americanism in the Middle East.
The real background to the World Trade Center attack is not popular Arab nationalism, but its collapse. The assault on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War was the final nail in the coffin of Arab nationalism, which had been increasingly divided against itself since its highpoint in 1956. Islamic fundamentalism was largely a defensive response to the exhaustion of popular nationalism. Outside Iran, fundamentalism was even promoted by the West as a preferable alternative to nationalism. American, British and Israeli secret services trained and armed organisations like Hamas, and the 'Muhajideen' in Afghanistan and later Bosnia. The ascendance of Arab playboys like Osama bin Laden in the politics of Islamic militancy was possible because of the withdrawal of popular support for Arab nationalism, under the pressure of Western domination.
But Western policy has been influential not simply in the emergence of elitist Islamist organisations. The policy of humanitarian intervention pursued by America and Europe has set a dangerous precedent in international relations. The West separated military action from its accepted basis of national interest. Instead, from Somalia to Kosovo, Western military adventures were claimed to embody moral imperatives. Instead of relying on popular mandates, world leaders found their justification in the moral intuition that they were 'doing the right thing'. Obeying no principle higher than conscience, though, is a dangerous model. It justifies not only the aerial bombardment of Belgrade. It can just as readily inspire the attack on the World Trade Center.
EXTENSIVE GROWTH BELIES FINANCIAL PANIC
Gloomy predictions of world recession have accompanied the jittery financial markets since 11 September. The advanced Western economies have a strong bias to activity in these speculative financial markets and they are as a consequence very susceptible to their unstable mood swings. But the pessimistic analyses, taking their cue from the financial markets, are missing the sure foundations of continued growth. Victory in the Cold War opened up much of the world to capitalist penetration. Without the barrier posed by radical nationalist movements, capital has been free to create new points of production in East and South Asia, and Latin America. Characteristically growth is extensive more than it is intensive, drawing greater numbers of people into the circuit of capitalist reproduction, particularly in Asia, without requiring investment in new productive processes. It is the huge profits of this extensive growth which are feeding the frenetic stock market booms and busts. (For an analysis of these trends read the September 2000 article 'The Current Period' www.heartfield.demon.co.uk/report.htm)
ISRAEL: OUT IN THE COLD
Israeli premier Ariel Sharon's worst nightmare came true as the United States made it clear that the Jewish state would indeed be made to pay the price for building the Coalition Against Terror. Where very other Cold War ally from Saddam Hussein, through the Afghan muhajideen, to General Noriega in Panama and Suharto in Indonesia had been sacrificed to the New World Order, US pressure on Israel to give ground to the Palestinians was never very great and all but ceased after George Bush took office. But now Sharon is squealing.
Israel is learning that its role as regional policeman is not just redundant, but a barrier to America's new relationship with Arab leaders. The cautious American policy of gently nudging Israel has produced catastrophic results for Palestinians and Jews in Israel. With the new 'intifada' passing its first anniversary, the death toll has passed 700. The majority of those have been Palestinians, sacrificed to a bogus 'two-state' solution. But Jews, too, find themselves dying in camps behind barbed wire and gun towers, only this time they built them for themselves. -- James Heartfield