[These arsonists should be mighty pleased with themselves then. They've kindled the fury not just of the Islamic world but of the entire globe. William Pfaff sums it up the implications well in his Guardian columnn today:]
... history says that use (or abuse) of hegemonic power inspires challenge. The resistance may arise hesitantly, but a crisis can provoke convergence or consolidation of the individual elements of resistance, so that each reinforces the others. This is what has happened.
Germany's initial rejection of the war was the act of a politician in electoral trouble, responding to public opinion. It probably would have been unimportant had the US not reacted as it did, and had Jacques Chirac not supported the Germans. Doing so, he catalysed international opposition to American unilateralism. France, moreover, offers the only coherent and relevant modern model of constructive resistance to US power: the Gaullist model. Articulated in the security council debate, this found overwhelming support in international opinion.
The result has been a basic shift in international relations, which will affect the future configuration and policies of the EU, no matter what happens in Iraq. Closer union and a common defence formerly seemed luxuries. This no longer seems the case.
A similar development, less advanced, is taking place in the Far East, caused by a US policy toward North Korea that does not have the support of South Korea, Japan or China.
Something has happened that might be compared with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Before the first world war, tensions existed inside that empire, but the aura of benevolent imperial authority was intact, and the troubles could be contained.
The war, and Woodrow Wilson's doctrine of universal national self-determination, destroyed the aura, and the authority, of the empire, with results that contributed heavily to the outbreak of a second world war.
The war in Iraq is intended to establish US authority over the Middle East. But Washington never imagined that it would be successfully challenged in Europe and the UN.
If the Bush administration's optimism about the course of the Iraq war proves correct, America's international authority will provisionally be re-established. But the aftermath, as the US tries to control Middle Eastern developments, will automatically generate new forces of resistance and hostility.
We will still find ourselves in post-imperial disorder. The American superpower has been the centre of a solar system. Centrifugal political forces now have been set loose. These will be extremely difficult for Washington to deal with, so long as it remains on its global course.
They may also prove more dangerous than Washington, or anyone else, now thinks.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,917693,00.html>
Carl
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