(fwd Ian Murray. Jonathan Freedland, 03/08/2003, The Guardian): ``..The old thinking, rooted in 1648's Treaty of Westphalia, held independent nations as masters of their own internal affairs. Crudely put, they could do whatever they liked within their own borders. There may have been violations of that principle, with strong countries barging their way into weaker ones. But that at least was the idea. In the 21st century, the principle itself is under attack...''
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Gee conquest of the New World and 19c imperialism put this fantasy to rest a long time ago.
In any event, such an idea manages to completely obscure the nature of post-WWII geo-political power policies conducted by the US and USSR through out the world, including Europe. Regime change was often the name of the game.
I wouldn't argue that the great powers considered sovereignty to be an absolute transparency everywhere at all times in the post war period, but they certainly did so in relation to the underdeveloped or third world. The concept of national sovereignty as some form of chastity was even more rare than altruism.
It is important to remember the virtually complete absence of such chastity was at the core of the re-construction of Europe and Asia in the immediate post-war period. The most obvious cases of Japan, Germany, China and Eastern Europe shouldn't require any elaboration---neither should Latin America for that matter. And in fact the entire cold war was conducted between East and West using a vast range of methods and strategies to manipulate theoretically sovereign countries including the detailed configurations of their internal political and economic institutions.
In geopolitical terms what has been at issue since the close of the cold war, has been what sorts of methods and to what purpose are whole regions of the globe to be manipulated. So in that sense, individual sovereignty has taken second place to regional considerations. Obviously this elevation of regionalism also isn't unique to the post-cold war period. But what has changed is the re-emergence of regional power constellations of quasi-independent status from their former cold war alliances.
It is only within the broad framework of great power manipulations that the US war on Iraq makes any sense at all. That of course is the stated aim by the US rightwing war party: to re-configure the Middle East. It is this vague goal that makes Iraq such a perfect target. Iraq is strategically located. It is politically and militarily weak, decimated by wars, ten years of international blockaids, daily air assaults, and its own internal depredations. With the exception of Israel the US has no client surrogate in the entire region. But with a conquered Iraq, the US will gain a bounty of land, people and economic resources with which to build a completely subservient regional power base. The US will then be freed from the conditioned leverage of oil that the Saudis can exercise with such duplicity and finesse as well as freed from the tortured antimony of Israel and Palestine. Once the US combines Iraq with its recent conquest of Afghanistan, the US will have filled the power vacuum that almost spans the Islamic world.
I wouldn't argue that Bush can conceive of such a grand strategy, but the gray organization men that surround him can. And, needless to say, it is a profound mistake that is very likely to have catastrophic consequences.
It was just this sort of vague but grand geo-political calculation that delivered Vietnam into the historical vocabulary of the very unhistorical US.
In addition to the aimlessness of US goals in both Indochina and the Middle East, there are other less obvious but related similarities. Most of these circle around the American's distinctly narrow comprehension of the languages, cultures, histories and people's aspirations. Americans are at least as foreign to the Islamic world as they were to Indochina peninsula thirty years ago. And so it would seem to follow that the deeper the US penetrates into the Islamic world, the greater and greater the chasm of incomprehension will yawn, with all the consequent grief and dismay such appalling arrogance implies.
Chuck Grimes